No Man's Sky

 

It's been three years since my last game post, and it feels oddly appropriate that my last review was for The Last of Us, a game which seemingly everyone but me liked.  So what brings me out of retirement?  Well, the game that seemingly everyone but me wants to hate: No Man's Sky.

Also since this is going to be a loooong one, I'm going to bold the important bits for a tl;dr version.

A primer (scroll down if you don't care about the game's history...but you should):

No Man's Sky has been in development since I last left this blog three years ago.  What must be understood is that the hype machine began immediately.  We were promised an entire universe, filled with creatures and planets and ships and space stations all waiting to be discovered by you.  We were promised seamless transition from planet to space, space to planet, something that had never really been done before.  And so imaginations went wild as we tried to process the immensity of such a game.

Fast forward to four months ago. Everything we've seen building up to this release has been incredible.  The planets move on an axis around the sun.  There are giant space battles, and different alien factions you can join depending on what you want to focus on.  There is a detailed crafting system.  The starships not only look cool but all fly differently depending on if they're built for combat or exploration.  And possibly the biggest promise to leave Sean Murray's (the creative director of the game) mouth?  We could do it all with other people.

Now fast forward to release.  It's finally in people's hands, the reviews start pouring in...and they're overwhelmingly negative or average.  So what happened?  I think the biggest culprit is the hype machine that would be literally impossible to fulfill after three years of building to insane levels.  However, there are some legitimate gripes as well.  Somehow the game we were shown four months ago has been severely gutted.  Almost everything I described above, that we could see on screen four months ago, are completely gone.  We can all hypothesize about why they're missing, but instead I'd like to focus on the game we got.

So without further ado...the actual review!

No Man's Sky starts you off on a random planet on the edge of the galaxy.  Your ship has crashed and broken and objective #1 is to find the resources you need to repair it, leave the planet, and get out to the rest of the universe.  There is also a strange pod next to where you landed, with a pulsating red sphere in it purporting to be something called "Atlas" that promises to show you the way, though you can refuse it and explore freely.

"Tutorial sphere?" I thought.  "Sure, I'll bite."  And then...nothing.  No tutorial.  I scratched my head, and continued on.

Depending on what planet you're plopped down on first, you may have to deal with any number of things.  You may get a ton of interesting flora to identify, or it could be barren.  You may encounter peaceful wildlife, or vicious creatures that charge and bite you, or no creatures at all.  You may get a planet rich with gold deposits, or nothing but the Heridium you need to rebuild your engine.  However, the one thing for certain about whatever planet you end up on first...it will draw you in.  It will feel like exploring a completely new world for the first time.  A world that no other person may ever see but you.  Everything looks and feels completely unique and alien.

And when you finally rebuild your ship and launch for the first time into space, seamlessly leaving that planet behind and looking back at the small and almost insignificant area you covered compared to the size of an entire planet...no other game has inspired the awe that I and I think many others felt at that moment.  As you look in space around you and see other planets with obviously different environments, and pull up the galactic map to see just how many different star systems there are, it's hard not to think...the hype machine was right.  They did it.

Unfortunately, you then have to land on your second planet.  And this is where the magic starts to fade.

You quickly realize that all those alien and unique plants you saw...aren't so unique.  You see some repeated textures, some repeated structures, repeated plants that have the exact same shape but a slightly different color palette, animals with similar pieces put together in randomized ways.  And this I think was, in the end, No Man's Sky's biggest downfall:

Yes, they made a universe.  But they didn't limit what showed up where, and they didn't have enough pieces to make exploration beyond a couple planets significantly different.

But what about that Atlas thing that seemed like the tutorial but wasn't?  Well, it turns out Atlas in essence is the "plot".  If you accept the path of Atlas, when you bring up your galactic map it'll point you towards an "Atlas interference".  When you arrive, a new massive space station greets you, and on the inside you get a tiny bit of text description/plot, and can choose to either abandon the path, or continue.  If you continue, you'll get an Atlas Stone and be on your way.  DO NOT SELL THE ATLAS STONES if you intend to go on this path.  I, and many others made this mistake and managed to cut ourselves off from the end of the storyline.

But what about the things you can find on each planet?  Abandoned warehouses growing over with this strange slime.  Beacons that point you towards alien obelisks, colonial outposts, shelters, crashed ships you can salvage or repair and make yours.  Buildings with new recipes or blueprints hidden behind sealed doors you have to blast open to get to.  Large trading posts where alien ships come and go that you can trade with.  Alien artifacts scattered across the landscape, each one teaching you a piece of the language of whichever race rules that system.

Once again, there's a lot to do, but it's the same on every planet.

So if the planets don't feel unique, and you do pretty much the same thing on every planet, and I didn't even get to see the final bit of the plot, why did I actually like this game?

The short answer is, because I personally still found the drive to explore and see all the different combinations of things interesting.  Despite the fact that it's repetitive, despite the fact that you'll see a lot of the same plants sticking out of the ground on each planet, despite the fact that so many things we saw just four months ago are completely stripped from the game, it's still an interesting exploration sim.

The alien races all feel unique, despite being completely the same gameplay-wise.  In fact, each race gets a fascinating backstory told through these alien obelisks you find scattered around the planets.  You get a massive amount of credits for discovering every animal species on a planet, which drives exploration and to see just what weird combination of legs, head, tail, and arms you'll find next, but credits are ultimately pretty useless except to buy suit upgrades (which add a slot to your too-cramped inventory) or new ships (which cost millions and aren't worth it).

It is by no means perfect.  The gripes against it are completely well-founded.  But I put so...many...hours into this game, and liked it enough to make it the third game I've ever platinum trophied (meaning you got every single trophy, which in this case means you get every single milestone: walking a certain distance, hyperspace jumping a certain amount of times, surviving for a certain amount of hours in extreme environmental conditions, etc.).  Basically even though I could see the inner working of its randomization early on, I still found the results of that randomization worth exploring for HOURS.

As you might be able to tell, this game is NOT FOR EVERYONE.  I personally felt like I got the $60 worth out of my experience, but I think more will find the price point acceptable at the $40 or even $30 mark.

There's so much more to get into, both in praise and criticism, that I haven't even touched, but the fact is, this is a solid foundation. They have made some giant strides in game design, but for now it's still just that, a foundation.  Whether they will filter back in all of the missing features that were promised, or just wait until the inevitable sequel remains to be seen, but for now, I do recommend at least renting it, and making your own little dent into the universe they've created.

No Man's Sky gets a 7/10.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us, from the makers of the Uncharted series (Naughty Dog), came out to almost universal acclaim.  It has a solid 95 metacritic score, with 10/10s running rampant across both critic and user reviews.  People praise the graphics, the gameplay, and most of all, the story.  We all know the situation here.  Whenever a game gets such amazing praise like this, I'm basically sure to follow suit.  Here's the thing:

I hated it.

That's right.  Hated.  So let me tell you what went wrong for me, and why I simply cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this tedious, poorly executed, poorly written game.

First up, let's summarize what this game is about.  The Last of Us takes place 20 years after an outbreak of a mutated cordyceps fungi turns people into, essentially, zombies.  The story mostly follows Joel, a grizzled survivor who lost his daughter in the initial outbreak, not to zombies, but to a soldier who was ordered to shoot them in case they were infected.  After an initial mission that reveals Joel has gotten into some shady dealings in the past 20 years (and introduces you to the essential gameplay mechanics) you are introduced to Ellie, a young girl who you are asked to escort to a rebel group calling themselves Fireflies.  It's quickly revealed that this girl is immune to the fungus, and must make it to the Fireflies so that a vaccine can hopefully be made and thusly the world saved.  The rest of the game is their journey through various dilapadated cities and sewers, fending off bandits and infected all along the way.

So let's look at that zombie survival horror checklist shall we?
-Grizzled male anti-hero (check)
-Damsel in distress (check) that is also the...
-Golden child that could save the world (check)
-Humanity often worse than zombies (check)
-Abandoned and/or infected cities (check)

Along with many other familiar tropes that unfortunately reveal too much for those looking to avoid spoilers.  But you get my drift.  Original it isn't.

This could be made up for if the characters had any degree of a unique personality to them, but they don't.  Joel is a take-no-prisoners, survive-at-all-costs stock character.  I was frankly astonished he wasn't also a drunkard (especially with the aiming system...I'll get to that later).  Ellie is your stock headstrong, foul-mouthed, scared-but-doesn't-want-to-show-it girl who starts off hating our chisel-jawed protagonist but then grows to love him.  There are a couple refreshing characters who show up, but they're only refreshing in the sense that they break up the monotony of Joel and Ellie's utterly predictable banter and relationship.  Even these side characters are stock characters.  The woman who could never replace his wife, the crazy guy who has his own town, a friendly black guy and his kid.  They're all just so horribly generic.  I will give them that at the very least they're well-acted and voiced, and believable for what they were.  But the script here truly let them down.

And since I've said one nice thing, let me say the only other nice thing I have to say.  Everybody is praising the graphics, and they're right to.  It's a very pretty game, and the environments, while never truly unique, also never feel repetitive despite practically every other scene being in a sewer.

So, the setting and characters are overused, uninteresting cliches, but at least it's pretty to look at!

My true gripes with The Last of Us come in its gameplay.  Even with it's cliches, the story does manage to pull out some truly gripping moments.  But when each redeeming point of the story leads back into this truly awful gameplay, there's no saving it.  Here's the problem, and if this entire review is to be summed up in one quote, this is it:

The Last of Us tries to do too many things at once, and fails not only because of that, but also because each of those things has already been done better in other games.

This game can never decide whether it's a stealth game, an action game, a survival horror game, a puzzle game, an open-ended choose-your-own-path game or a straightforward narrative-driven game.  It tries to put them all together and it doesn't...work.  It tries to do what Deus Ex did with each encounter, where you can stealth or fight your way through.  But it fails because it also tries to do what Uncharted and the new Tomb Raider did in terms of cover-based shooting, where stealth is only a means to get rid of one or two enemies before the rest converge.  But it fails again because it also tries to do survival horror in terms of limited ammo and a drunken aiming system that only gets steadier with upgrades.  But it fails again because the purposefully survival horror sections are more like stealth puzzle games in that the infected all follow circular routes and you must take them out or avoid them in a certain order to advance, and if you make one wrong move, you die and restart at a convenient checkpoint, meaning the stakes for each encounter are ridiculously low (also meaning the ammo restrictions and wavy aiming become more annoyances than anything).  And, you guessed it, it fails again as a puzzle game because unlike I Am Alive or Splinter Cell which have very specific solutions to each enounter, they try to keep each situation open to either stealth or combat like in Deus Ex and oh look here we are back at the beginning of the fail cycle.

There were so many times I wanted to scream at the screen because it would literally force me into combat despite my having stealthed through an entire section.  I got to a door at the end and it wouldn't let me open it until I had killed every enemy on screen.  When you penalize combat so much by making each and every weapon slow-firing and slow to reload with a wavy aiming system on top of it, combat no longer becomes enjoyable unless you like severe handicaps.  It becomes a game of chance of whether you happen to get off a lucky headshot, or run out of ammo and resort to punching everything and hoping you have enough supplies to make more medpacks.

The crafting system I didn't actually have a problem with.  Basically you collect various types of ingredients throughout the game, and each type of ingredient is usually required for 2 or more recipes.  Do you want to make a medpack, or a molotov?  A shiv which allows you to stealth kill Clickers (one-hit-kills-you infected), or a bomb that can take out multiple enemies but makes a lot of noise?  You're limited to only three of each item, but I almost always had enough ingredients that I never found it that difficult to decide what I needed to craft.

This leads us into exploration.  When you're not dealing with an enemy encounter, you're free to wander whatever area you're in looking for supplies.  That said, these areas are often extremely linear, and even when there is a little nook or cranny that in practically any other game like this you would find something...all you find is more rubble.  Supplies tend to just be in side rooms, or down a side path, which makes the people like me who want to explore every little corner feel like it's a constant waste of time to do so.
I should also mention the upgrade system here, since it relates to gathering ingredients.  Often you'll find these pill bottles alongside ingredients, which you can then use to upgrade things like the drunken aiming, your listening mode distance (which let's you see through walls when enemies make noise), your health, and the time it takes to craft.  As far as I could tell there's nowhere near enough to max out everything, so you do have to choose carefully what you upgrade, but I personally found it to be an easy choice: health, and aiming.  The rest are barely useful.  You can also upgrade each weapon, and here is where you're faced with harder choices.  Each and every weapon has roughly 3-5 different categories of things you can upgrade (reload speed, clip size, etc.), but each and every upgrade costs anywhere from 20-70 spare parts and for me, at least, whenever I found a workbench to upgrade at I never had more than, say, 130.  This means you really need to choose carefully about which weapons you upgrade.  Unfortunately, the system once again gets frustrating here, because you often have NO IDEA which weapons will be available in the next section.  There was one weapon that literally showed up for a single section and then never showed up again.  Still had it in my inventory, but never got more ammo.

Speaking of ammo, the ammo drop rate from enemies is wildly inconsistent.  There was one section where I was forced to kill off something like 8 bandits, practically all of whom had a gun.  Does that mean I got to take their ammo after they died?  Nope.  I think I got 6 bullets for one gun from that encounter.  Yet in another section, practically every other enemy was dropping something for me.  When ammo is a forcibly limited commodity, it's going to break immersion when you see a gun lying right in front of you and can't do anything to it.

Oh immersion.  Probably the worst victim of this game.  This is where I truly cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this game.  Practically every single thing in this game breaks immersion.  Lurking through an area full of infected where one wrong move or audible sound means your death?  Here's Ellie running directly into a zombie with no reaction.  The partner AI is just plain stupid.  I get that you need to make them invisible to enemies, but when their first instinct is to literally run ahead of you or into you or into other enemies, there's a problem.  Especially after the exceptional partner AI in Bioshock Infinite.  How about with that ammo situation?  Turns out if you run low/out, the game pops in more where none existed before.  Found that out during an enclosed-quarters boss battle where I was truly starting to get pissed because they had already sent three waves of infected at me and I was out of ammo, and then more was there.  So I used it.  And then there was more that spawned in.  I rolled my eyes and finished the battle, all urgency having been wiped clean.  Speaking of spawns, there was one section in particular that was teeeerrible about random enemy spawns (the sniper).  You're being shot at by a sniper and have several options for cover: the ruined buildings on one side, random cars down the middle, and intact houses that might have supplies on the right.  But here's the thing.  If you go into the houses, you have this handy listening mode that lets you see enemies through walls.  You can scout and scout and see no one's there, until you pass a certain point and then WHAM enemies are on you.

Truly the biggest breaker of immersion though is from its puzzle-game tendency to have very generous checkpoints with almost no loading time after you die.  All agency, all stakes, are removed from practically every situation because there's no real consequence for getting things wrong.  Run into those random spawns and get killed?  No worries, let's put you back to right before you entered the house so you can deal with them now that you know they're going to be there.  Did you try to go Rambo on all these enemies but kept missing thanks to crappy aiming until you had no ammo and then you died?  No worries, here's a handy checkpoint with all your ammo back and you can try that again and maybe get luckier with the aiming.

So, let's summarize.  Stock characters in a familiar post-apocalyptic zombie world.  Crappy gameplay that tries too much and fails.  Linear environments masquerading as open.  And immersion-breaking elements around every corner.

But you know, none of this, NONE, got me as riled up as the ending.

****THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD.  YE BE WARNED.****

The final section sees Joel and Ellie finally making it to the Fireflies.  But it turns out that in order to make the vaccine, they have to kill Ellie because the fungus grows on the brain.  Joel then has to shoot his way through an entire hospital of soldiers to get to Ellie and save her.  But then...there's this pivotal moment.  Joel grabs her from the doctors, he's about to escape through the parking garage, and he runs into the leader of the Fireflies, the same woman who sent him on this mad quest in the first place.  And she gives him the choice.  Leave Ellie, save the world.  Or be selfish, take her, and doom it.  The scene then shifts to Joel driving away, no sign of Ellie.  He has this haggard, depressed look on his face, and I was just like OH THANK GOD, IT ENDS ON A LEGITIMATE QUESTION.  Did he give her up, even after all they've been through?  Or is she in the back seat, and they're on their way back to his brother and the relatively safe town that had been set up on a hydroelectric dam?  What a beautiful way to end it, I thought.  What a wonderful question to ask.  Sure, if you've paid any attention thus far you know she's probably in the back, but the question is still a powerful one...

And then it kept going.  It didn't go black.  And I literally sat there saying "No...don't...don't you dare...."

And then the camera shifted to Ellie lying down in the back.

The rage...I felt...was incomparable.  They had the perfect opportunity to save what little they could of this game with a powerful question of an ending...and they ruined it.  They just straight up ruined it.  What followed was a brief and utterly inconsequential scene where Joel and Ellie approach the town.  Joel lies to Ellie in the car, saying dozens of immune people like her had been found to no consequence, and they had given up finding a cure.  Ellie talks about her first friend to fall from the infection, Joel tells her it's important to find something to fight for to survive, she questions him about his assertions about the Fireflies, he promises he's telling the truth, she says "Okay."  And that's the end.  They end on the questions of "Why did Joel save Ellie, and why did he lie to her?" instead of "Did he try to save the world, or has he doomed it?"  See the difference?  One question deals with internal character motivations from a one-dimensional character and is easily answered.  The other quesiton deals with character motivation AND larger ethical issues and ramifications for the world and doesn't have a clear answer.

They could've redeemed themselves with the ending...and in one more thing, they failed.

****END OF SPOILERS BE HERE****

The Last of Us is a tragedy on almost every front.  The story, the gameplay, the characters, damn near everything is a shadow of other better games.  I am honestly baffled how so many people played this and thought, "This is the greatest game ever!"  It's not.  It just mimicks the greatest games by smashing them all together and praying it works out.

It doesn't.

The Last of Us gets a 4/10.

Beyond: Two Souls

I return to the blogging medium after many many months because my thoughts and feelings on Beyond: Two Souls cannot be contained in a mere facebook post.  So here we go.

Beyond: Two Souls is the spiritual successor to Heavy Rain, which since it's release has become a prime example of cinematic storytelling in video games.  It had its issues, from sometimes unintuitive controls to story relics that were once significant but were then thrown to the wayside, but overall I found it to be a superb game where your choices truly did matter to the story because if you mess up, you have to just keep going.

The same applies to B:TS.  Make your choice, good or bad, and live with the consequences until the very end.

For those unfamiliar, B:TS tells the story of Jodie, who ever since she was a child has been linked to a ghostly entity named Aiden who, for the most part, seems to be there to protect her.  The story is told in a non-linear fashion, starting at the end and jumping around different times in Jodie's life.  From her time as a child being kept in a lab and studied, to a young woman being recruited by the CIA, to escaping their clutches and living homeless and on the run, to her final role...which I won't spoil.  Throughout the story you play as both her and Aiden, who can assist her in all manner of paranormal ways that I'll detail in a bit.  Their unique relationship, and the larger implications of Aiden's existence, are the main thrust of the narrative, and boy what a fascinating narrative it is.

First, though, let's talk gameplay.  Just as in Heavy Rain, almost all the action is controlled by this unique variation on quick-time events.  Push buttons in a certain order, flick the right stick in a certain direction, mash a button enough before time runs out, etc.  However, it felt simpler here.  The button commands were not nearly as strenuous as some of the ones found in Heavy Rain.  In one sense, that's good, it means things flow more smoothly.  In another sense, I found it took away a layer of difficulty that I thought added to the experience.  Even with something as simple as cooking a meal.  In Heavy Rain if you wanted to cook something, it took some careful moves.  In B:TS, however, despite not being a cook Jodie manages to fix up Asian Beef with a couple simple swipes of the right stick.  The most difficult part of that sequence was actually deciding whether I wanted to add ginger since it wasn't in the recipe.  I know it sounds ridiculously nitpicky, but immersion is the key in a game like this, and Heavy Rain's slightly more complicated controls actually made me feel more invested in the outcome of each action.

What's new here, gameplay-wise, is Aiden.  With a push of the triangle button, you pop into Aiden's floating, tethered perspective.  As a ghost, you can do basically everything you would think a ghost could do.  Wander through walls (though your tether only stretches so far), move objects, possess people, as well as the non-obvious powers of healing wounds, creating a telekinetic shield that reflects bullets, and allowing Jodie to commune with certain objects and/or corpses to see how they ended up where they are.  As you might imagine, this lends a kind of puzzle element to certain sections where you use Aiden's various powers to assist Jodie through.  And once again, it feels a bit simpler than I'd have liked, but still adds some nice variation.

So the controls may be a bit dumbed down from Heavy Rain, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it means the whole narrative experience can flow more smoothly.  And what about that story?  Does it help for things to be smoother?

In Heavy Rain the story suffered for various reasons, from relics of discarded storylines (the whole blacking out/waking up elsewhere plot) to the often disjointed nature of tracking 4 different protagonists in a branching choose-your-own-adventure style game.  In B:TS, unfortunately, some of the same problems persist.  Despite only having one protagonist now, the story is told in a non-linear fashion, meaning there's still some fragmenting issues, especially concerning the possible romance with your CIA partner Ryan Clayton (which is a whole nother can of worms about feminism I will likely need a separate post for).  The entire section where you're homeless also feels strangely out of place, **SLIGHT SPOILERS** with some unwarranted moments of contemplating suicide as well as a completely random baby birth and escape from a burning building. **END SPOILERS**

I feel I should also mention that B:TS has a recurring problem in that Jodie+Aiden = practically invincible.  In Heavy Rain, if you messed up, you could lose a main protagonist. In B:TS, you're (eventually) a trained CIA agent tied to a supernatural being that can protect her from all harm, or heal any harm done.  Basically the stakes are a bit lowered.  So while the game does do a good job convincing you in the moment that you could die at any moment, when you get the chance to take a step back you're reminded that, once again, things seem easier than they should.

That being said, despite it's troublesome moments, Beyond has one of the most compelling, fascinating, and emotionally-investing narratives ever assembled for a game.  I laughed, I cried, I got so scared I wanted to crawl out of my skin and run away, and a couple times I'm fairly sure I forgot how to breathe the action was so intense.  It has sci-fi, action, suspense, horror, drama, everything you could ask for.  It takes you from science labs to a crumbling middle-eartern city, a suburban home to a desert ranch, even from a horror-filled hospital to an underwater sci-fi base.  And somehow, through it all, it never loses its humanity or its emotional core.

What truly helps this is the ASTOUNDING leap in graphics made here.  If this is a glimpse of the next gen, sign me up.  Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe deserve Oscars for their portrayals here, because each truly do deliver a movie-worthy performance.  Every minutiae in their facial expressions can be seen.  Every line is delivered with emotional weight behind it.  They are the reason this story is as effective as it is.  Unfortunately this also means that weaker acting also shows through, like from Kadeem Hardison as Willem Dafoe's assistant Cole, who is supposed to essentially be a father figure (along with Dafoe) for Jodie but simply didn't deliver a strong enough performance for me to have cared about him.

What brave new world is this, where we're not just talking about how a voice actor does syncing their voice to a game, but the actual full performance of an actor?  Crazy stuff.

To sum up, Beyond: Two Souls is not perfect, but when you're in the midst of it boy does it play like it is.  Yes, it's missing some of the complexity in its controls and has lower stakes for messing up than in Heavy Rain which reduces immersion somewhat.  But it also delivers, in my opinion, a better narrative experience that makes up for what it lost.  I cannot wait to delve back into the world and see how different choices will effect the story.

Beyond: Two Souls gets a 10/10.

Far Cry 3

**Another one of them posts I wrote and then never actually posted...enjoy!**

First things first, I have discovered in my time playing video games that straight first person shooters are not really my thing.  They get pretty boring to me when all it comes down to is shooting people with various weapons that really all do the same thing just with different firing rates/sights/etc.  Point is, most of the time I'm not a fan.  Which also means that while I went into Far Cry 3 with open arms, it had that bias running against it.  Did the game shine through despite it?  Read on.

What really got me hyped for Far Cry 3, having never played the other two, were the story trailers with your main nemesis Vaas.  It looked to combine psychadelic, surreal story elements with the versatility of combat and strategy that Far Cry is known for, along with a villain that was creepy in the most sinister kind of way.  And on those fronts, it (mostly) delivered.  The story is an unfortunately predictable but nevertheless engaging look at Jason Brody, a man who went on an island getaway with his brothers, girlfriend, and other friends only to get captured by Vaas and his pirates to be sold for ransom.  After an intense initial tutorial, you escape and find yourself in league with a resistance force of island natives, trying to rescue your friends and family no matter the cost to your own sanity and identity.  Unfortunately the overall plot wanders quite often, as it is wont to do in first person shooters, with many missions serving as simple excuses to give you more to do or take you to different parts of the island.  However, in its meandering it does also come across some quite emotional and gripping moments, as well as some missions that are just plain fun (aka the flame thrower vs. marijuana fields mission) and these moments tend to make you forget the rather boring things they were just having you do.  I guess this is where my bias against first-person shooters shows itself.  To FPS fans, all of these missions may be quite engaging, especially when left to your own devices about how to infiltrate a stronghold and eliminate a target without setting off any alarms.  To me, though, it all just came down to shoot this, shoot that, go here, do this, then shoot this guy, which means my enjoyment of it rested on the plot, and with the plot being so inconsistent it was hard to fully enjoy the experience.

In all other aspects Far Cry 3 is a solid game.  It cleverly introduces some RPG progression in the form of tattoos which boost various abilities in three skill trees (Heron for long-range and movement, Shark for combat, Spider for stealth), there's a crapton of collectibles (though with sadly very minimal rewards), the hunting system is very well-implemented with significant rewards in the form of more holsters, better wallet size, etc., and travel (eventually) becomes tons of fun once you get a flight suit and parachute and can traverse practically everywhere with ease.  The shooting mechanics are spot on, enemy AI is often a challenge (including rogue beasts) but never feels unbeatable.  The quicktime event boss fights are a major disappointment, but otherwise practically every aspect of this game is well designed and lots of fun.

I nonetheless walked away from this one feeling rather..."meh" about it.  It is perfectly serviceable in a rather empty market of big sandbox first-person shooters, but the problem with making an FPS so big is that no matter how much variation you try to throw in there eventually it becomes rather repetitive.  That could be fixed by a solid narrative driving the thing, but that is simply lacking here despite the presence of one of the most crazy yet loveable villains I've ever seen in a game in the form of Vaas.  Is it still fun?  Absolutely.  But for the story-driven, completionist I MUST FILL IN THAT MARK ON THE MAP gamer like me, there's simply not enough there to warrant anything more than a single playthrough.

Far Cry 3 gets a 7.5/10.

The Trial preshow

I think I have finally decompressed from seeing this show, and can now form at least somewhat coherent sentences about my opinion of it.  But honestly, most of it comes down to the preshow.

The Trial was put on by the New Century Theater Company who has my favorite actor Darragh Kennan (sorry Todd Jefferson Moore, you're close!) as artistic director.  They performed in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service Building, which essentially used to serve as Seattle's Ellis Island.  In fact, the room they performed in was the very room where new immigrants were processed.

It was also where we, as an audience, were processed.  The following is my best attempt to try and describe my own experience with it.

The Trial truly began in the lobby.  We naturally waited as the house remained closed, though we could see brief glimpses of actors going to and fro past the hanging plastic slats.  We could also hear some prerecorded messages playing over a loudspeaker, saying mostly inane things like "Josef K. will be played by Darragh Kennan," or "Please turn off your cellphones."  Finally the time was at hand, and an actress led a group of us past the slats and to a door.  She separated out 5 of us (I was in the first group), knocked on the door, and another actor led us inside to a rather disconcerting scene.  It was obviously normally the box office station, a kind of anteroom with a windowed box and closed double doors leading to (at that point, assumingly) the theater.  However, instead of a friendly box office person in the windowed box there were two men in suits, one of whom disconcertingly made eye contact and smiled the entire time.  Meanwhile the actor who led us in asked us to stand against a wall to record our height, and then assigned us to one of three lines.  I was the only one in the middle line.  He then named each line, and while the original names escape me because, well, I was disoriented and creeped the fuck out, they were something along the lines of Alpha, Beta, and Zeta.  He then knocked on the door three times.

And BOOM.  All of a sudden the doors open to reveal three stunningly gorgeous women in lab coats directly in our faces smiling at us.  The first took Alpha and went one direction past the doors.  The second took Beta and went a separate direction.  You cannot imagine the rising...well...terror, as I was left alone.  Finally the third told me to follow her, then suddenly turned back around and gave me one simple instruction...

"Please do not touch the red curtain."

As we finally entered the space, I discovered we were in a room with audience sections on 3 sides, and the stage completely blocked off on every side by a red curtain.  And here was the trick...it was nearly impossible to walk down the path to each section without touching the curtain.  There was maybe 6 inches of space between the railing on the side and that curtain.  The woman somehow magically skirted through without touching it, and I tried my damndest not to, sucking in my breath while she stared, smiling, at me.  She then gestured towards an aisle, the second row on the right side of my section, and calmly told me, "This is your seat."  I moved past her, instinctively smiling at her in that animal way that says "Please don't hurt me," and took my seat.

Because of the curtain I could only see a portion of the other sections, but it was enough to see the other 4 people I had entered with had made it safely, which, in my state, I was glad of.  I then watched as the 3 women made their way back to the door just in time for the three knocks to come and for the process to begin again.

The theater was sweltering.  Probably 100 degrees.  And I sat there, nervous, anxious, uncertain as to what would happen next, nearly sweating in my t-shirt and shorts.  I sat there for half an hour while the process continued and the seats slowly began to fill with more and more people.  This was perhaps the most fascinating part of the show for me; watching people's reactions to their situation.

Whenever someone touched the red curtain (which was often), the curtain itself made a lot of noise on its rollers, which then prompted whichever woman was around to yank back the curtain and very curtly say "Please do not touch the red curtain."  Some laughed it off.  One woman in the front row of the section to my right purposefully touched the curtain when the women weren't looking.  Some barged through and were straight-up rebellious.

At one point, three college-age men were put into my section and asked if they could have different seats.  A chill went down my spine as the woman replied, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed."  She seated a couple other people then whipped back around to them and said even more menacingly, angrily, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed.  The door is that way."  Then whipped back around and left.  The three left, and I was honestly relieved just to see them 5 minutes later when they were escorted to the back row of the section on my left.

Some might not have gotten the full experience of that preshow like I did.  Honestly I was glad I saw it alone because it simply heightened all the tension and terror, and got me in the perfect place to witness the rest of that play.  I think to most of the people there, this was like any other play, just with a weird introduction.  But to me...I was there.  The setting was oppressive, the heat was oppressive, everything screamed oppression...and I was, frankly, scared.

That carried me into the opening scene, when the curtains were drawn back to reveal Josef K. in his underwear in front of the same two men in suits we had seen in the windowed box, a clothing rack full of suits, and a lamp, which the two men turned on.  And from there...it was one long descent into metaphor and symbolism about ignorance, innocence, repression, choice, sex, power, and ambiguity all rolled up into one.  It was masterful acting, masterful direction, masterful choreography (there was a bit where the three women, who turn out to be Josef's secretaries at the bank where he works, hand Josef papers to sign and take them away faster and faster and faster in this almost machine-like way until finally they just fling them everywhere), masterful lighting design for such a small space (including scenes where just a lamp, or in one scene these bright lights attached to the landlord's glasses, was the only source of illumination).  Just...masterful overall.

I walked out thoughtful, shaken, sweating, and thoroughly entertained.  Easily one of the best (if not the best) plays I've seen this year.

2012 in Gaming (updated)

I obviously haven't been doing my best in keeping up reviews on here, so I thought I'd smush it all together in one big recap of the year.  There are, unfortunately still some big (and small) titles that I haven't played yet and so can't give my 2 cents on, but nonetheless I figured I'd give a rundown on what I've been playing, and what you should be playing too.  For me, this was a big year for indie titles (thanks to the amazing Humble Indie Bundle), so I shall split things up into the Big AAA titles, and the indies.

As for what I can't cover:
BIG TITLES I DIDN'T PLAY
The Darkness 2
Twisted Metal
Max Payne 3
Dragon's Dogma
Lollipop Chainsaw
Sleeping Dogs
Guild Wars 2
Resident Evil 6
XCOM: Enemy Unknown

INDIE TITLES I DIDN'T PLAY
Shank 2
Stacking
I Am Alive
Binding of Isaac
Mark of the Ninja
FTL: Faster Than Light
Unfinished Swan

So with that, let's get on to the important stuff!

INDIE TITLES

Stacking
This puzzler from Double Fine (makers of Psychonauts, Brtual Legend) puts you in the shoes of a tiny russian nesting doll who loses his family to an evil Baron and must set about rescuing them by nesting inside of other dolls and using their unique abilities to solve puzzles.  It's incredibly unique, and has a rather charming and distinct steampunkish aesthetic, but Double Fine's humor unfortunately dips into the very childish here with dolls that fart and throw up as their special abilities, and even their good humor falls flat since it's delivered via text cards like a silent movie.  The puzzles are quite inventive, but the story and humor simply don't hold them up as they should.

Binding of Isaac
This rather twisted gem is reminiscent of old Zelda top-down adventures except that the main protagonist is an abused child who uses his tears as weapons against the deadly denizens hiding in his basement.  From the same maker of Super Meat Boy, this game relishes in its difficulty and randomly generated dungeons.  You will die, a lot, and you will discover many twisted things lurking in this game, but for its fast-paced arcade quality it's actually quite enjoyable as long as you're not averse to grotesque imagery.

FTL: Faster Than Light
Beware this game, oh my brothers and sisters.  You think it is simple.  It lures you in with promises of new weapons and spare parts at every little dot you advance, but that's all just to lead you to that one unsuspecting dot you jump to where you get ambushed by a heavy cruiser that beams 4 enemies aboard while blasting you with missles and forcing you to put out fires and try to attack the enemies on board and on the other ship at the same time and before you know it BOOM.  Sorry, try again from the very beginning.  FTL is an addictive little bugger that uses the principle of variable reinforcement better than most other games to keep you constantly coming back for more despite it slapping you in the face with its difficulty over and over again.  It's highly strategic while relying on a heavy amount of randomization and luck.  It's a deadly combination that makes FTL a truly infuriatingly satisfying game.

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery LP
This rather strange pixellated title tells the story of a young warrior and his dog who travel to the top of a mountain, accidentally awaken a looming shadow creature, and then set about to make things right.  The game is unique in that several plot-essential parts depend on what day of the month you're playing it on.  There are workarounds both in and out of game (yes, it will know you cheated if you adjust your computer's clock but it won't penalize you for it), but it's certainly an interesting way to approach things.  The entire game has a very unique, surreal, dreamlike quality to it, and while it may not be for everyone I enjoyed my time with it.

Torchlight 2
As you will see further down, I didn't have a good experience with Diablo 3.  Which is why I feel supremely confidant saying that Torchlight 2 kicks Diablo 3's ass.  Torchlight 2 is what Diablo 3 should've been.  Is it basically a Diablo 2 clone?  Yes.  Does that matter?  No.  It improves on many things in Diablo 2 while keeping the core elements the same.  If you were disappointed by Diablo 3, get this game and realize what you were missing.

Journey
I already posted a review of Journey so I'll sum it up here.

Journey is a magical piece of art, and is an easy contender for my game of the year.  If you haven't played it, go buy it now and do so.  Thank me later.

The Walking Dead: Episodes 1-5
This game at the very least ties with, if not slightly surpasses, Journey as my favorite game this year.  Placed in the Walking Dead universe but having nothing to do with the TV show, this game is the best possible example of a choose-your-own-adventure style game where your choices actually do really matter.  The gameplay is simple, consisting really of nothing more than dialogue choices and quick-time events, but what makes this game truly unique is the story.  I don't think I have ever been so invested in the characters in a game.  It pulls no punches, and makes you feel for better or worse the impact of every single choice you make, each person you choose to trust.  By the end I was in tears, and wanting to go back and immediately replay it again with different choices.  It also somehow manages to have a cliffhanger ending that at once resolves the story arc of this first "season", while setting up and leaving you in desperate anticipation for the second.  Just as with Journey, if you haven't played this game yet, do yourself a favor and buy it now.

BIG TITLES

Sleeping Dogs
In case you were wondering, this was what GTA IV should've been.  Originally part of the True Crime series before that developer went under, Sleeping Dogs was picked up by Square Enix and released to understandably great acclaim.  This game actually mostly does away with guns in favor of a martial arts style of combat that, while difficult to master (especially with the PC control scheme), eventually becomes a lot of fun.  The story is quite gripping, as an undercover cop balancing abiding by the questionable orders of your superiors with sticking by your Triad family.  Unfortunately, there are some gaps in the story where it seems fairly obvious a mission was supposed to be that was simply never made because of the shift in developers, but nonetheless Sleeping Dogs remains a suprisingly well-built title that easily stands with among its GTA-style brethren.

Guild Wars 2

As with any MMO, it's hard to boil everything down as there's just so damn much in it.  Especially with Guild Wars 2 for me in particular because I can't for the life of me explain why it is that this is the greatest and most addictive MMO I've played.  Is it the combat?  While it is certainly more responsive than the typical swing-until-it-dies WoW approach, it's still got a hotbar of skills and for the most part you are still just swinging at something until it dies, you just move around it a bit more and can dodge.  Well is it the story then?  I've only gotten part-way into the Norn Guardian storyline but it's certainly nothing special.  The graphics and locales?  Admittedly these are GORGEOUS and full of interesting nooks and crannies with collectables hidden away.  Is it the group events that you can stumble across and join in?  The movesets based on what type of weapon you have equipped?  The insane amounts of collectables?  I DON'T KNOW.  What I can tell you is that it all adds up to a supremely engaging experience that I won't be putting down anytime soon.

Final Fantasy XIII-2
Final Fantasy XIII was a...divisive title to say the least.  A 25 hour tutorial, constant linear hallways, a complicated and somewhat non-sensical story, and the best/most open part of the game is a ripoff of the hunting system from FFXII.  And then there were people who liked it.  I admit, despite my ragings against it, I have played through it twice and while it is a bore most of the way through I still found myself somewhat enjoying it.

So when they announced that they would address everyone's complaints with FFXIII-2, I was optimistic.  Bigger maps, no more linearity, a tighter battle system, and even a Pokemon-esque capture-then-use monster system all sounded pretty damn cool.  And it turns out...it is.  For the most part.  There's still a non-sensical story on top (made even more non-sensical by introducing time travel as a main mechanic), but they did what they promised.  The battle system is faster and more responsive, the maps are lovely and wide open (sometimes even verging on too big), and the monster capture/leveling system is actually pretty cool.  That isn't to say it's a great game, it still has its issues, but to me it was far more enjoyable than XIII.  It actually reminded me a lot of X-2 in how it certainly isn't for everyone, but if you give it the chance you can have a lot of fun with it.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
The game that could've been.  In what was certainly one of the biggest controversies in gaming this year, new developer 38 Studios put a lot of money and effort into this game (and planning a follow-up MMO), only to lose everything by not being able to pay back its employees or their outstanding loans.  From what I understand the state of Rhode Island now actually owns this IP.  As for the game itself...

Reckoning suffers from being built as an MMO, and then turned into a single-player experience.  It plays out almost exactly like World of Warcraft.  Same style, colors, quest system, etc.  What Amalur did differently, and by all accounts did well, was the combat.  Oh boy was combat fun.  Not only that, but if you didn't like the way you were playing, it was a simple trip to a "Fateweaver" and you could change all your skills to something more to your liking, encouraging massive amount of experimentation in finding the right play style for you.  Unfortunately, with the mass of generic enemies in front of you, there was never much incentive to play with a ton of skills because CHAKRAMS ARE AWESOME AND DEVASTATE EVERYTHING.  It was also supposed to be this world and story built by R. A. Salvatore, but unfortunately the dialogue and story are so boring you will quickly find yourself skipping almost everything every character has to say.

In short, with time and a refocus on not trying to be an MMO, the sequel might have been an amazing experience.  Unfortunately, it appears that will never happen.

Alan Wake
An interesting take on the survival horror genre, Alan Wake is about Stephan King...*ahem*...excuse me, a horror writer named Alan Wake who has the misfortune of starting to live through the book he is writing.  He gets attacked by these shadow-possessed people who can only be damaged once they've been exposed to enough light and makes his way through a very Twin Peaks-like town battling them and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

It's actually a pretty solid suspense/horror game, though the combat can often leave you frustrated.  The ending too is a big disappointment in that it basically just screams "What really happened?  Find out in the sequel!"  The rest of the game, though, exudes a crazy creepy atmosphere and tells its story in a very interesting way that will make you want to play through all the way to the very end just to figure out what's in store for poor Alan next.

Mass Effect 3
Considering I've already written a great deal about this one, I'll sum things up here and you can check out my full review for more.

THE ENDING SUCKED.  Then people complained so they added to the ending.  Then it was better and made more sense.  However, it still didn't address the issue that you spend this entire game being told it's vitally important to build up this ambiguous point total that in the end only determines what happens in a portion of a cutscene.  Nonetheless, the rest of the game is amazing.

Prototype 2
The first Prototype had its issues.  A strange story layered on top of brutal violence with some of the best traversal in an open world game that had been seen to date.  Combat was finnicky, but nonetheless it was a fun game despite its flaws.

So the sequel came along with a new protagonist in the form of James Heller, new powers, etc.  Once again the story was strange and a bit incoherent, but once again the rest of the game made up for its flaws.  It's fun.  Most of the joy of it comes in just leaping around smashing stuff like you're the Incredible Hulk (which makes sense because this studio designed an open world Hulk game).  The combat has issues (especially with targeting), but when it works, it really works.

Diablo 3
I've been dreading writing about Diablo 3, likely because I payed $60 for it and have barely touched it past the first couple weeks it came out.  By far my biggest gaming disappointment of 2012, Diablo 3 took everything I loved about 2, threw it out the window, and then redesigned it for the loot-hoarding/reselling hardcore player.  The story is by far the weakest of the 3, which is saying something considering most of 1 there isn't much of a story to speak of.  Second, it's short.  Dreadfully short.  Third, progression means practically nothing anymore.  You get access to new skills, but you never get the sense that your character is progressing that much except for having a bigger level number.  By making stat allocation dependent on the gear you're wearing and limiting your skill choices, they took away nearly all personalization of your character.  Diablo 3 managed to make me feel something I've never felt before in a Diablo game: the grind.  It was all about grinding through the enemies and bosses for loot, instead of actually enjoying the experience of smashing through monsters.  And finally, the always-online requirement.  I have only one thing to say to this effect: my single player game should not lag.  The giant money-grabbing hand of Activistion could be felt everywhere throughout this long-awaited travesty.

Darksiders 2
I played this on PC, which I could immediately tell was the wrong thing to do.  Darksiders 2 is a game meant for consoles, and should be played that way.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed the crap out of this game.  I loved the original Darksiders despite it's unoriginality and tricky controls, and the sequel addressed my concerns.  While you can still feel the heavy influence of Zelda and God of War, Death plays so much more slickly than War that he really stands more on his own as a legitimate 3rd person action hack-and-slasher.  You'll still have your tricky/buggy platforming moments, and targeting is still a chore, but by speeding up combat, introducing loot and RPG mechanics, and expanding the world what feels like tenfold they managed to make a thoroughly enjoyable experience from start to finish.  It does seem like as the game goes on the areas get smaller and smaller (aka rushed to finish on time) which is a shame, but for the most part I couldn't help but enjoy this game.

Borderlands 2
How do you top the original Borderlands?  Interesting monsters, tons of guns, great characters and humor, and amazing post-game launch support with hours worth of DLC content?  Well, you give more of the same and impressively make it better.  There's little more to be said of Borderlands 2.  If you loved the first (and who didn't), the second will give you more of the same plus just plain more.  More monsters, more guns, more classes, more customizability, bigger bosses, a better storyline, and more laugh-out-loud moments than you can count.  In every way Borderlands 2 is an improvement on the first, and while you still get the sense that single-player wasn't that highly emphasized, it's still a joy to play through with each of the new classes.

Dishonored
In my E3 discussions I labeled this as one of my most anticipated games of the year.  Did it live up to the hype?  Yes and no.

The world they built is frankly amazing.  Not only are you incentivized to explore every little nook and cranny with items hidden away, but the detail in this world is so incredible I wanted to explore just for the sake of exploring.  This is a brand new realm that feels so wonderfully different from anything that comes before it it's hard not to love the game just for that.  In a very rare way I actually wished there was more exposition.  I wanted more than just excerpts from books.  I wanted a freaking whale-boat level damnit.

Which actually leads me to the rest of the story.  It was crap.  Pure crap.  Especially the ending.  They really had a chance to do some narratively interesting/challeging things with this game, and they just threw that all out the window.  You're framed for an assassination, so to solve it you go around assassinating people.  Oh, and the whole time there's this mysterious supernatural "Outsider" who gave you powers just to see what you'd do with them, and then literally plays no part in the story except to show up creepily every so often and to narrate the ending.  WHAT.  I honestly felt cheated that the originality of the story didn't match the originality of the world.

Then there's the stealth vs. combat.  They give you 5 powers that you can gain/level up along with some supplementary abilities, but only about 3 of them are any use to you in a stealth playthrough, which is what the game pushes you towards by telling you things get harder the more people you kill.  You also get a ton of weapons, but again, you'll really only need one of them if you're stealthing.  If you're not, well then you better be inventive because you're also not that strong and will often be rushed by a group of guards trying to sword fight you up front and shoot you from the back.

What it comes down to is that, yes, it's a really fun game.  But it also needs some improvement in the story department and a greater balance between powers for stealth and powers for combat.  In short, I cannot wait for the sequel.

Assassin's Creed 3
I have such a love/hate relationship with the Assassin's Creed series.  This time last year I was deriding the yearly iterations for providing me with the mess that was Revelations, yet hopeful for AC3 which was from separate teams that had been working on it since 2.  And it shows, in both good and bad ways.

The story is back to being good again with Connor, and provides an interesting look into the Revolutionary War.  The story is also bad in the modern day Desmond sections, including the horrifyingly space magic-filled, "no we're not going to answer any questions" ending that leaves a giant gaping hole for the inevitable future expansions.

The setting is lackluster.  It was a good idea to include the frontier as well as the problematically smaller-than-normal cities of Boston and New York, but it's so big and often so difficult to traverse that its glamour quickly fades.  Viewpoints are a joke, revealing such a small part of the map that they're hardly worthwhile.  And the underground sections which unlock fast travel points around the city, while initially interesting, quickly become tiresome when you have to track down every single one just in order to make getting around the cities easier.

Assassin recruits are highly improved, and have their own distinct personalities!  They are also almost completely unneccessary and often forgotten.  There is also the issue that once you've done enough sidequests to get the recruit on your side, they move to a different location than where they normally are, which won't show up on your map if you haven't uncovered that area yet.  This gets very frustrating when literally the only way to uncover parts of the map is to directly walk through the pixel containing where that person is standing.  Which brings me to the cumbersome map that doesn't show nearly enough and is a chore to navigate through.

Combat took a few steps back.  Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make targeting dependent on a zoomed reticle should be shot.  It's imprecise, and in the middle of combat entirely impractical.  Combat has also reverted to 2's state of waiting for an enemy to attack, counter, next enemy attacks, counter, etc.  All the speed and innovation made in Brotherhood and Revelations is gone.  Also gone, one hit kills with the assassin's blade.  Why do I have an assassin's blade if I can't make assassinations with it?  In trailers it looked like it would be a blade that could become a knife.  Instead, it's just a knife, and an ineffective one at that.

Stealth is laughable, finnicky (especially when crouching in bushes), and has reverted to 1's awful system of basically every guard being alerted to you (even if you're not doing anything you can suddenly find yourself being chased).  Except here, there's no option to press a button to stealth yourself.  You can still hide between people, sit on benches, etc., but it's all so much more spread out than it was in previous games that it becomes an easier option to just kill any guard alerted to you than to run and try to hide.

Speaking of running, the staple of the AC series is its freerunning component, which many people have complained about for one reason or another over the years.  In response they simplified the controls and added tree-running and rock climbing.  While this may satisfy most, I actually found that by simplifying the controls it also took away a good deal of my control over what I wanted Connor to do.  This would leave me with inevitable situations where Connor would get stuck on a part of the building, and if I had been able to tell him to jump up it would've been fine, but with the simplified controls it simply wouldn't read it right and I'd have to approach from a different angle or figure out a workaround that I previously wouldn't have had to in other games.  Tree-running is awesome...when you can do it.  However, once you're on the ground it's pretty damn hard to find those trees that the developers decided were the ones they want you to climb instead of just normal trees.  As such it's often faster to just run.  Oh, and forget about trying to use a horse.  They're completely useless unless you're on a clear road, which won't happen very often.

As for the inevitable, and often dreaded, new addition to the series (Da Vinci's weapons in Brotherhood, tower defense in Revelations), naval warfare is a surprisingly amazing addition to the game.  It's far more fun than you think it would be to captain a ship and take on enemies on the high seas.  I, and others, would argue that there wasn't nearly enough of it.  Others complained about the Homestead side missions, where you find people in the cities that you can recruit into your own little town and then help them out to watch your town grow.  I, however, found the change of pace and the story contained within this long string of missions to be quite welcome.  It is unfortunate that the main benefits from doing these missions comes in the form of new crafting equipment, which is for the most part utterly useless, but I thought the story was really its own reward.

I know I've ragged on this game, more so than I think I did for Revelations, but yet I still had fun with it.  At its heart it's still an Assassin's Creed game, and the core of what makes those games great is still there.  You just feel the absence of the progress made in Brotherhood and Revelations, and the disparity that comes from 20 different studios trying to come together to make one game.  Here, I actually do hope for a Brotherhood-type spinoff where they can improve, because it feels like everything that you need for an amazing game is there, they just didn't tie all of it together very well.

And since this basically turned into a full fledged review:

Assassin's Creed 3 gets a 7.5/10.

Far Cry 3
See new post for review.

And that's my 2012 in games!  If you like awards here's a few:

Biggest Disappointment: Diablo 3
   -runner up: Assassin's Creed 3
Best Flawed Masterpiece: Dishonored
   -runner up: Prototype 2
Best Sequel: Borderlands 2
   -runner up: Darksiders 2
Best Original (not based off anything) Game: Journey
   -runner up: Dishonored
GAME OF THE YEAR: The Walking Dead
   -runner up: Journey
   -Best Big Title:  Borderlands 2
Most Anticipated in 2013: Bioshock Infinite
   -runner up: Dead Space 3

Antony and Cleopatra

**Whoops, never posted this.  Enjoy it now!**

The first play of Seattle Shakes' new season, and hopes were running high.  The cast is full of stars and regulars.  Darragh Kennan, who was the best Hamlet I've seen.  Mike Dooly, who was brilliant as his Horatio.  Charles Leggett, who among other things was the best Shylock I've seen.  John Bogar, who despite a poor turn in Threepenny Opera gave one of my favorite performances ever in Turn of the Screw.  And to top it all off, Hans Altwies and his wife Amy Thone, two giants of the Seattle acting community, in the titular roles.  What could go wrong?

So much.  So...so much.

Maybe the first clue something was wrong was the set itself.  A giant Egyptian-looking symbol hung suspended in the middle of the stage, and before it, a sand pit surrounded by poles with more Egyptian symbols atop them.  But alright, I can forgive you having a budget and wanting to set a certain style.

Maybe then it was the second clue, when the play began with an oddly choreographed, ritualistic, sexualized-yet-somehow-not-sexy dance in the sand with all the Egyptians (eventually including Antony and Cleo) which basically said "Welcome to Egypt!  We're all sluts!"

Maybe it was in the first time Antony and Cleopatra spoke to/made out with each other, and despite them being husband and wife in real life, there was no passion between them.

Maybe it was when Darragh Kennan as Octavius Caesar came on in modernish attire, spent his entire first scene doing a workout routine while speaking to his counselors, and I realized that even though I had enjoyed the scene I had no idea what anyone had just said.

The point is, I'm not sure quite when it struck me that what I was watching was not a good play, as there were far too many points it could've happened for me to pick it out.  Granted, Antony and Cleopatra isn't one of Shakespeare's greatest plays.  Much like his other lesser performed works it has its issues.  But what I watched was no fault of the play.  What I watched was an amalgamation of poor directing, poor acting, and poor design.

The greatest offender was Amy Thone.  After seeing her in Titus Andronicus and now this, I feel obligated to shoot down anyone who calls her a good actress and wants to do her Shakespeare intensive.  She's perfect for Lady Macbeth (which she did very well several years ago with her husband as Macbeth), but her style of acting is so...well...British.  It's cold, proper, feigned passion.  And it does not work.  Cleopatra is supposed to be this flighty, completely bipolar creature that is at once a whim to her passions and controlling of them to suit her needs.  Thone was practically one-note the entire show, and all her flights from one emotion to the next looked just plain fake.  There was no joy to the character.  What finally struck me about her performance, though, was at the end when the Cleopatra wig came off and I realized...she's not Cleopatra.  She's General Dramatic Shakespearean Woman.  Once that wig came off there was quite literally nothing recognizable about her character.  And possibly worse still, this meant that all the passionate romance she and her real life husband were supposed to have on stage was pure surface and faked.  I seriously worried that if that's how those two express passion in real life they might need a marriage counselor.  Altwies at least struck some good points in the play, though he phoned in the rest.  By the end, when he tries to kill himself and fails, it became a comedy because we simply didn't care what happened to him.  By the end the audience needs to feel like this man has been through so much he deserves a quick hero's death, and when he can't even have that it should be heartbreaking.

However, a play can still move on with a bad lead.  Unless of course it's hampered by everything else on top of it.  The budget for this play was extreme.  Or if it wasn't, they thought it would be and went way over.  There were so many extraneous parts it was hard to find any cohesive theme or see anything more than someone saying "Oh, this thing would be cool!" without anyone on the side going "Maybe, but do we need it?"  A ship battle involving aerial stunts?  A giant egyptian medallion that hangs from the ceiling yet only appears in like 3 scenes?  The loudest, most distracting lift you will ever hear being lowered from the ceiling to be Cleo's bed, then swaying precariously and once again assaulting your ears as it carries her and her 2 maids up into the air for her temple/balcony?  All of it screamed a lack of vision and discretion.

Props must be given to Darragh Kennan and Charles Leggett, who, by measure of actually caring about the play and their performances, completely stole the show and became its sole redeeming qualities.  Want to see the history of acting?  Look to Thone.  Want to see the improved direction where acting is going?  Look to Kennan.  As I said of his Hamlet, you can look to the classics like Olivier and enjoy them, but Kennan's soulful performance was the epitome of a modern Hamlet.  He continues it here, and even though his part is fairly small compared to some others, he still manages to bring a depth of character that is sorely lacking in the leads.  Leggett brought out an honesty on stage that was so very refreshing after all the dull fakery of the rest of the play, and had a couple tear-jerking moments that reminded us we were in fact watching a tragedy.

As always with Seattle Shakes, you never know what you're going to get.  Sometimes a masterpiece, sometimes an overstyled dud.  Antony and Cleopatra, unfortunately, falls squarely in the latter.

Antony and Cleopatra gets a 4/10.