Good Bad and Ugly

I want to tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly. No, not the Clint Eastwood western, but a trio of disaster movies I watched with my wife last Friday evening.

The good was San Andreas (2015) starring Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in the lead. It's all about the San Andreas fault wrecking California. This is the best disaster movie I've ever seen, no contest. It absolutely has it's cheesy moments, no question about it, but it's very well made and the acting is good. It also contains some events I've never seen before, so that was cool. If you hate disaster films, you won't like it, but otherwise I really recommend it.

Now for the bad: San Andreas Quake (2015). If you're wondering about the similarity of the titles here, it's not a coincidence. It's Asylum Films doing their usual “homage” to a more popular movie. A more cynical person than myself would call it a ripoff, but since they almost always are so much worse than the originals, it's actually more of a spoof. Surprisingly this film, bad as it is, had a couple of moments that weren't all horrible, though most of it is really lousy. The saving grace here is that they tried. They really did. The end result may not be good, but the makers put some effort into it unlike:

The ugly, or Fire Twister (2015) starring Casper Van Dien of Starship Troopers fame. This movie is abysmal on every plane and in every way. Somehow it has a higher IMDB score than San Andreas Quake, which is unbelievable since these guys just phoned it in, and lost connection half way through. We have a semi sentient fire tornado that changes size all the time, chases people and apparently teleports at will. We have ex-CIA killers who can't hit anything they try shooting at. The only thing they effectively manage to destroy are a couple of mobile phones. Even if you like ultra cheesy movies, I'd say leave this one alone. It's terrible in every way and I could go on describing the horror, but I won't.

So in conclusion, watch San Andreas, consider giving San Andreas Quake a shot if you are in the mood for some terrible cheese, and burn Fire Twister on sight.

That's all folks, so until next time, have a disaster free week!

Syndicate

Hello my Eccentric Spheres, today we'll be taking a look at Assassins Creed Syndicate.

Long time readers no doubt know that I love the Victorian era and this, the latest installment in the Assassins Creed franchise is set in 1868, so that is gold right there.

Now to be fair, I haven't played most of the games in the franchise, only 1, 2 and 2.1 so I'm not burned out on them. Most say that Assassins Creed 3 was kind of lousy but that the fourth game, Black Flag, was good. There are a couple of “mini-games” or in between games that aren't nearly full size, but I haven't played them either. It's not that I don't want to, it's rather that I harbored a silly thought that I'd play them all in order, and then I kind of didn't.

Anyway, this is why I'm not burned out on the Assassins Creed games and why I'm able to really enjoy Syndicate.

A couple of months ago, I got Syndicate on Steam at 50% so done deal right there! But due to some other things getting in the way, I didn't get to fire up this game until a few days ago.

Is it good? Yes it is. Is it perfect? No, it really isn't.

The first thing that sets Syndicate apart from it's predecessors is the fact that you get to choose between two assassins this time. The siblings Jacob and Evie Frye are essentially the same early on, but the game has an rpg element and you choose which abilities to unlock as the game progresses. In this way you can design them to do different things, should you choose to.

The second thing Syndicate does is add a stealth system. I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe it's the first game in the series that actually has a proper mechanic for this. It used to drive me insane in the previous games when you have to shadow a target, by walking upright in a flamboyant outfit. Luckily all your targets seem to have bad eyesight and can't spot you beyond a certain distance. Still, here it's a very welcome addition and it works well.

Finally, you get a grappling-hook-cable-shooter-magic-devise. I know, it's not magic, but considering you can use it to traverse miles and miles and never run out of cable, it seems pretty magical to me. Anyway, it's a great tool, and saves you a ton of bother. Instead of being forced to climb tall buildings you get to just zip on up there, should you choose to. You still can climb if you want. Some critics have called the cable gun game breaking, but considering it only helps you move around easier and escape pursuit faster, it's more of a convenience thing than anything else. It really is fun though.

So what are the bad things? Well, let's start with the money. Syndicate's money system is horrendously out of sync. A color change for your outfit costs £1000. That's $188.000 in today's money. Since all your equipment is considerably more expensive, like a single action navy colt that comes with a price tag of £2500 or a quarter of a million dollars, the silliness adds up fast. A thug in Whitechapel, one of the most poverty ridden hell-holes of the time, drops £3 when you kill him. That's more than $300 by today's standard. Why is he out making trouble, when he's obviously well off? And this is not taking into account how much stronger the buying power of money was back in the day. I really wish Ubisoft would have toned down the money, since it's pretty jarring.

My other big complaint is the proliferation of guns. Sure there were lots of guns around in those days, but people didn't carry them around all that much. Even criminals frowned on guns, since a simple burglary would become a hanging offense if even one member of your crew had a gun in his pocket. Clubs and knives were the order of the day, but in Syndicate, lot's of street thugs have guns. The worst offenders here are the police. In the late 1800's, parliament considered whether the police should have any access to firearms at all! Let alone give them to the ordinary bobby. Even today, most police officers in Britain do not carry guns. So this is very jarring to me. Add to this the fact that the police are willing to shoot you dead for stealing a carriage, and blissfully ignore when NPC's attempt murder right in front of them, makes them the worst part of the game, in my opinion.

I have encountered a couple of bugs, most of them minor glitches, like a carriage spazzing out uncontrollably and a book floating in the air, but the only bothersome bug is when your map marker goes off to the side. That makes it hard to navigate, but a simple restart fixes this handily.

Apart from these issues, Syndicate is a wonderful game. It's technically great, sound, visuals, voice work and so on, are all good. I haven't finished the story yet, but it seems fine.

Bottom line: if you want to leap from carriage to carriage, run across trains, climb Big Ben, zip-line across the Thames and rub shoulders with luminaries like Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale, and murder lots and lots of bad guys, this is definitely a game for you!

That's what I have for you this week, now I'm off to 1868. Until next time, have a great week!

Stellaris

Last week, I got the latest game from Paradox Interactive; Stellaris.

I have played it a bit, but not enough to do a proper review, so consider this more of an impression of the early game.

Stellaris, in case you don't know, is a mix between the Grand Strategy genre Paradox is so famous for, and a 4X game in space. 4X stands for explore, expand, exploit & exterminate.

So in Stellaris, you create a race that has recently become space faring, and it's your job to establish a proper empire for your people. Unlike other Paradox titles that takes place in Europe at some point in history, you have both time and elbow room in Stellaris, which lets you get a handle on things before the action starts. There are no neighbors breathing down your neck as soon as you fire up the game. Since the maps are randomly generated, you can be pretty screwed from the start, even if you don't know it yet, but this holds true for every game with a random map. Usually though, you're going to be fine.

Stellaris is a very well made game, and it's not just about war either. When you create your race, you choose between a lot of options like species, starting technology, political system and ethics. You even choose what kind of planetary type your species thrives on. These options come seamlessly together to create a lot of options and replay value.

As an example, you could create a race of fascist space penguins that are brilliant engineers, or perhaps you'd prefer a race of theocratic mushrooms that believe in enslaving the galaxy. My point is that you will find a race you want to play, of that I am fairly certain.

As the game progresses, you research new technologies and expand your borders. You will encounter hostile beings floating around in the galaxy as well as space pirates and other blossoming nations like your own. Then there are the fallen empires, old civilizations that have stagnated and become corrupt. If I understand them correctly, they don't advance anymore, but they are ridiculously powerful in the beginning so tread carefully. Piracy is luckily not that much of a bother, and you can usually deal with them pretty easily, but the giant space amoebas are nasty. They can easily outmatch your initial fleet six times over.

I've had starts that were absolutely impossible, but overall I think Stellaris is a pretty fair game. It's fun and atmospheric, and not too hard to understand or get a grip on. Oh yes, one thing I forgot to mention, the game explains things to you in different ways depending on how you civilization sees things. Example: if you are xenophobic, first contact with another species is explained as something horrible, but if you are a xenophile, it's a wondrous event, worth celebrating. It's the small details like that which really sells the game as a title worth getting.

When I get further into the game, I can speak with authority on what it's like, but until then, you are going to have to be patient. Or go look it up on Youtube, it's your decision.

So, until we see each other again, have a great week.

Gaming Manifesto, part 3

Two weeks ago, I talked about approachability and fairness in games and today we'll complete the list by talking about Depth vs. Complexity.

In a nutshell, depth represents the different possibilities and actions the player can use in a game. Complexity is how hard it is to do and understand said actions.

Chess is a high depth, low complexity game. The rules are simple, and there are only six different pieces to figure out. It takes minutes to learn how to play chess, but a lifetime to master.

The concept of elegant design creates vast amounts of depth for you to play around with, and sometimes, you need a bit of complexity to fuel that, but a super complex game becomes almost impossible to play for the majority of players. Ideally a game is always deep but not complex. Some people say they love complex games, but most of them are actually talking about depth. The two can easily be confused for each other. Having tons of options and different ways of solving problems don't mean the game is complex. If all those options are hidden amongst dozens of menus and unlocked by rarely explained actions, the game is frustratingly complex.

I like strategy games, but I'm not too fond of complexity and once upon a time, I was looking at Victoria, a grand strategy game set in the (you guessed it) Victorian Age. I love that era, but then I was told that a friend of mine who lives and breathes strategy games on a level of skill I can't ever hope to match, thought that Victoria was a bit too difficult to get a good grasp on. I quickly walked away. This reeked of high complexity.

Victoria is made by Paradox, and they are famous for their intricate grand strategy games. In my post two weeks ago, I mentioned another of their games, Crusader Kings II, and my trouble there. Today, in a few hours, Stellaris will be released also by Paradox. This is a grand strategy 4X game in space, and I was hesitant, but here they seem to have reduced the initial complexity and made Stellaris a lot more approachable than their previous titles. Time will tell if I made a mistake in buying this game, but I think I'll be OK.

Finally, complexity is by no means confined to strategy games, it exists in all genres and it always fights with depth. Something as simple as a games user interface, or UI can create needless complexity if it is badly designed.

The subject is wider than I can go into here, be on the lookout for this topic when you play, it's pretty interesting.

Until next time, have a great week!

Plot holes

I'm very pressed for time today, so I'll have to keep this short and sweet.

Have you ever bee annoyed at a plothole in a movie? Have you ever thought to yourself (or shouted at the screen) Why are you doing that? Don't go in there! You idiot!

Well here's how it would be without stupid decisions:




Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olEbwhWDYwM

Until next time, have a safe, sane week!