Remnant: From The Ashes

Remnant: From The Ashes is a game from 2019 that I have just finished in 2024 thanks to the Epic Games Store giving it to me for free.  I remember when it came out and it had a bit of a buzz around it for being essentially "Dark Souls with Guns" but while also having a solid multiplayer com.  Well I didn't try the multiplayer component and let me tell you, Remnant: From The Ashes is the worse than bad, it's fucking boring.

The game is set in some kind of post apocolypse where you are tasked with getting to some island that's protected by a big storm in order to stop The Root, tree people that seem to enjoy human murder.  What follows is, a shameless Dark Souls clone with the twist being that the game focuses on ranged combat which, at first, starts out somewhat interesting.  For the first few areas of the game there's some degree of intensity to the gameplay.  The enemies are dangerous and resources are scarce so exploring the environments for healing items and ammo boxes so that you can free up your currency for upgrades is fun.  But then, after a boss or two, things start to go downhill extremely quickly.

As you kill enemies and gain experience you gain "trait points" which you can put into a variety of skills in your menu.  The most obvious thing to do is max out HP and stamina because having more numbers to get hit and dodge with in a game where damage values are so high is pretty valuable.  Once you do this, however, and max those values a lot of things in the game become trivial and when the challenge starts to die in a game like this, it's the beginning of the end.

What then makes things even worse is that after the initial area of levels set on Earth, you are transported to different, alien worlds on your quest to stop the Root and it's when you get to these areas that a lot of shit in Remnant is re-used.  In the desert area known as Rhom I think I went through the same dilapidated set of corridors about 6 times.  Not as backtracking during exploration, I mean that on the foward path, en route to new areas, the same indoor environment had been copy pasted that many times but just with the enemies shifted around slightly.  It was in this world, the second of 4, that I basically vowed to stop exploring anything because having to endure the same area over and over again was just mind numbing.  

Not that the vow I made meant anything in the end because not only is area re-use up the wazoo but after the first area things get extremely linear.  Like, Final Fantasy 13 levels of linear.  By the end of the game I was rushing through every zone just so I could get to the final boss as fast as possible and I STILL managed to find a ton of rings and trinkets that I basically had no use for because there are two very good rings and then a bunch of trash which will just take up space in your inventory.  

What makes the game completely unbearable though is how, after a certain boss in the second world, the game becomes COMPLETELY braindead.  One of the bosses grants you a beam rifle weapon that is so significantly better than every other weapon that you get your hands on that regular enemies won't even have a chance to get near you, let alone hit you with anything.  It also makes bosses a completely joke because you just aim and hold down fire which allows you to dedicate 100% of your brainpower to dodging the incredibly easy to avoid and heavily broadcasted attacks that they do.  By the end of the game, between trait points making everything a joke, overpowered weapons and boss design that felt like the devs just gave up, you're playing Remnant in a sort of mindless haze that fails to engage or entertain in any way at all.

There is a heavily emphasized multiplayer component that I didn't touch because who the fuck is playing Remnant: From the Ashes in 2024, really? but I can't image that having an extra person in my game would make things any more fun.  It would just be a second drone to mindlessly beam down all the enemies with and, if anything, would make procedings even easier.

So in closing, I fucking hate Remnant.  I always say that bad games have value because at least in getting mad about them or finding them funny in some way you are getting something out of it.  But Remnant is boring.  A game that you will play, finish, feel nothing while playing it and then never think about it again after the credits roll and that is way, WAY worse.  A truly miserable game made by truly soulless people to ride an action RPG wave they didn't understand.  Sad and embarassing

Windjammers

If you follow the site/twitter/twitch much you'll know that I have an absolutely massive backlog of games to get through and because the list is so huge, it's not very often I allow myself to just sit and enjoy more simple games that don't really have an "ending" as such.  Sure, there's a single player mode in Windjammers where you beat all the characters but in a "sports" game like this or a fighting game, finishing it isn't really the focus so titles like that tend to fall by the wayside for me.

That said though, I recently sat down at a friends place and just enjoyed some good old fashioned arcade action and one of the games we spent a pretty significant amount of time on was Windjammers and good Lord is it amazing.

Windjammers is an extremely simple game since essentially it's just a supped up version of Pong.  There are 6 characters to chose from that each have a different power and speed stat and then you play up to 3 sets of 30 seconds each (by default) trying to throw a frisbee into the goals at the end of your opponents side of the court.  There are 3 point zones and 5 point zones and you can also score some cheeky points by making your opponent fail to catch the frisbee.  Each character also has a sort of special move where they will charge their throw and then launch the frisbee in some kind of physics defying way.

That's basically it, there's some other things like being able to throw the frisbee crazy fast and a couple of times me and my buddy got the frisbee to sort of curve in a weird way but we weren't playing long enough to really figure the specifics of those moves but for the most part that's the entire game.  Like Pong, Windjammers, especially when played with a friend, is the kind of game you can just kick back and play for a good few hours without it getting boring.  It's easy to play and understand too which means that it also makes for a pretty good party game.  Matches are short so there won't be much sitting around, it's fast paced and occasionally some crazy stuff can start happening once both players start launching supers all over the place, it's an all around solid experience.

My only real criticism of the game is the price tag.  It's available for PS4 with a price tag of $15 which is a little steep considering how bare bones it is but if you're the kind who has guests around a lot to play games, this is a great one to break out and it's something that even the less experienced members of the group can enjoy right away.  Also considering it was originally released as an old arcade game, the price tag won't be an issue for....certain users.

It doesn't look like much at first glance but Windjammers is easily some of the most fun I've had with a multiplayer game in a long time.  Grab a copy, grab some friends and go have yourself a grand old time.

My First 12 Hours With Death Stranding

At time of writing this post I've just finished a mini marathon session of Death Stranding that was 12 hours over the course of Saturday/Sunday and I'm going to share a few of my thoughts while it's fresh in my mind.  I'm only going to scratch the surface with what I'm saying though since 1) I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible and 2) There is A LOT going on and talking about all of it in one written post would take way longer than I'm willing to sit in front of my computer for at this time.

If you read the back of the box for Death Stranding it'll tell you it's "a new genre of game, the Strand game" and even after an extended session I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this.  If you go on Twitter you'll see a number of people complaining it's a walking simulator which also isn't fair or accurate.  What Hideo Kojima has done with Death Stranding is ask an extremely important question within gaming which is "What if we took Euro Truck Simulator 2, filled it with enemies and gave it a bonkers plot?" which is a question I'm glad he asked because the result is REALLY good.

At it's core, Death Stranding is about delivering the mail.  You are treated with a pretty dramatic opening sequence and then once it dumps a bunch of intrigue in your lap you are free to collect cargo and deliver them, mainly on foot, around various locations on the map.  As you deliver cargo you connect people to the "Chiral Network" which is the games 1st main objective.  The main premise of the game is that an apocalyptic event known as the Death Stranding took place some time in the games past and after that an expedition went out in order to reconnect the people of North America.  The woman in charge of the expedition has sort of being "kidnapped" by a militant group known as the homo-demons and it's your job as Norman Reedus to reconnect the country and get your sister back, the games second objective.

After you get people on the network, you can do jobs for them or find their lost cargo and deliver it which nets you "likes" and the more likes you get, the more tools and resources are available to you in order to make your courier life easier.  Standing between you and your deliveries though are two groups, the BTs and the MULES.  BTs are basically spooky ghosts and I have no idea what they do to you if they catch you because it's not happened yet and the MULES hang out in little pockets of the map and if you try to go through they will hunt you down, beat you up and steal your shit.  While the gameplay can be a little repetitive, the game is constantly dangling the mystery of what actually is going on in the plot in front of you and finishing a delivery for another tidbit of story is a surprisingly satisfying reward.

The multiplayer aspect is sort of similar to Dark Souls in a way but you can't invade other people and steal their cargo unfortunately.  Once you get an area on the Chiral Network you are connected to other players and you can see the structures they have placed down on the map.  These include ropes, ladders and bridges for easier traversal or things like generators and watch towers along with other things for utility.  There's a ton of other multiplayer systems going on as well though such as entrusting lost cargo from depots or finding other cargo that a more careless player has dropped so you can claim the likes of yourself but I've not really been engaging with it too much.  My gripe with the multiplayer is that it makes things a bit too easy.  Clearly the game wants you to carry ladders, ropes and the building item in order to help yourself get around but player have already put shit in the best places so you don't NEED to do any of that yourself because it's already been done for you.

When I finish it I'm going to be sure to finish it and write a spoilerific post about my thoughts on the plot and other things but for now I'll leave it there.  There is A LOT I've not mentioned but all I can say is that if you were on the fence about Death Stranding, you should absolutely try it out.  I'd not disagree with you if you said on paper it sounds a bit dull but there's something about it that just grabs you and doesn't let go, it's sort of hard to put down really.

Fortnite

Every so often a game will come along that completely dominates the landscape for a while and Fortnite is one of those games.  Created by Epic Games and originally showcased WAY back in 2011, Fortnite is the current big-hitter in the now popular Battle Royale genre and it's basically impossible to have at least not heard of it given all the publicity it's been getting.

Fortnite is actually some kind of zombie survival game that I've ever played.  I think it involves a team of people scavenging and building a fort in order to survive against waves of zombies that get progressively harder.  I think it has characters that have unique abilities and you're supposed to work together to save the world, or at least that's what it says in the menu.

However following the popularity of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds they added a battle royale mode where 100 players skydive into an island to kill each other until there is only one player remaining.  You start the game with no gear save for a pick axe that you can use to gather materials and from there it's up to you to find guns and supplies in order to kill everyone else.  As you play there's a storm that encroaches on the play area every couple of minutes forcing the survivors to get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.

Games of Fortnite are very quick too despite how many people are involved in each match.  Landing in popular areas where all the sick loot is will get you murdered quickly and if you are lucky enough to survive then the deadly storm which shrinks on you every 2 minutes or so will ensure that you're in someones face sooner rather than later.  The quick nature of the game prevents it from being overly frustrating on a loss since you can pretty much instantly get into another game with very small amounts of downtime which means you can enjoy it in quick bursts or for extended periods depending on your mood and schedule which is rather nice.

The big gimmick that sets it apart from PUBG though is the building.  You can an interesting situation where when the circle starts to get really small players are forced to sort of just build upwards since a more horizontal approach to combat is out of the question.  I'm bad it at at time of writing but seeing the speed and skill with which players build these forts at each other to try and get the upper hand is absolutely mesmerizing and it gives quite an interesting spin on the late game combat.

It's also weirdly addicting, invoking that "just one more game" mentality that I've personally not experienced from a title since I used to play League of Legends back with my university buddies.  Not only that but there's a certain thrill that comes from being within the last 5-10 survivors on the map and then getting into a fire fight which could either mean victory or a painful reset to the lobby menu.

The game also has a ton of style with it's cartoony graphics and a "battle pass" feature, bought for about £10, which allows the player to unlock a metric fuckton of cosmetics.  I never usually drop money on a free game for something as inconsequential as cosmetic items but even I couldn't resist the allure of Fortnites battle pass.

If you're on the fence about it, I'd say give it a go.  It's free, it's fast and it's fun and even if it doesn't hook you like it completely hooked me you'll still have a good time with it.

Friday the 13th

God I remember all the buildup for this game.  Every other day on Facebook one of those videos from some weird baity gaming page would post a trailer or some game play footage like "erh muh gerd looks so good" and then the game actually came out and it sort of just vanished from existence.  Anyway thanks to a friend I've finally had a chance to give it a go.

The short version of this post is that if you followed the hype train then you'll probably be disappointing by how the game turned out but for me, I thought it looked a bit shit to begin with so I was actually pleasantly surprised.  Nothing special but a fun little game that you could happily kill a few hours with.

The game itself is pretty simple.  You join an online lobby with a bunch of people and everyone chooses a camp counselor and a Jason.  Which characters are available is dependent on your level which seems a little bullshitty to me since each character does seem to be a little bit different but whatever, you get EXP pretty quickly.  Once the game starts, one player is assigned to be the Jason and everyone else has to run away.  The goal is to escape or survive until the end of the timer for the counselors and to murder everyone for Jason.

On each map there are a number of objectives which involve things like repairing a car or calling the police and doing this will help speed up your escape but the items required for this are placed randomly throughout the map so if you want to get it done, working with other players might be a good idea although I'm playing the game in a busy bar with no voice control so for me that's pretty much impossible.  For Jason it's just a case of kill as many people as you can but you're a slow bulky piece of shit so you have a few powers to help you out like the ability to sense players or teleport around the map.  Once everyone is dead or has escaped the game ends and you're given experience with which you unlock characters and perks and whatnot.  Then you do it all again till the end of time.

I have two major problems with what limited time I've had with the game.  The first being that Jason just isn't fun to play AT ALL.  Maybe it's because I'm bad but he's super unwieldy and just sort of needlessly hard to use.  It's hard to articulate but maybe if you try the game you'll know what I mean but generally the counselors are just a lot more fun to play.  My other problem is that the game is buggy to fuck.  The worst bug I saw was when another friend of mine was playing Jason and I don't quite know what happened but the HUD vanished and he was completely locked out of using his powers and couldn't smash doors and stuff properly.  Eventually he got lucky an someone clocked him in the face with a frying pan and when he came out of the stun all his shit came back.  One other minor annoyance is that if the player controlling Jason drops from the game then the game just instantly fucking ends.  I get why but couldn't thay have maybe just let a bot Jason take over or something?

Either way, while Friday the 13th is nothing special it's at least a bit of mindless fun for a few hours.  I imagine if you get a team of good counselors and a Jason that actually knows what he's doing it could be pretty intense but unfortunately every game I've played/witnessed up to now seems to be populated with dribbling children but that isn't exactly the games fault.  Not something I'd pay full price for but put that shit on a Steam sale and I'll pick up my own copy eventually.

Maybe Call of Duty Should Stop Making So Many Sequels

Call of Duty was a series that got its start in 2003, which I bet a whole bunch of the embryos that populate modern CoD servers weren't aware of and it's a series that I didn't have much interest in for the longest time.  A younger me would have looked at something like Call of Duty which was set during World War 2 and then I'd look at something like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem or Unreal and I think I'd much rather play a game like that over something all gritty and realistic. 

But then 2007 rolled along and out came Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and at the time it really did blow me away.  People had liked CoD in the past but no one in my circle of friends had ever raved about a game in the series as much as they were with Modern Warfare so of course I end up trying it and really enjoying it.  The game was just generally really fun and the multiplayer really helped give it some sticking power.  I remember thinking at the time that this was easily the best console FPS multiplayer experience I ever had but my expectations were particularly low after trying out F.EA.R and Prey's multiplayer modes.

Fast forward to 2016 and I had to do a google search to find out what Call of Duty is up to now.  I had no idea what the fuck Infinite Warfare is but I think the series has gone all spacy and science fiction with multiplayer looking more like a slowed down, shit version of Unreal or something (in Black Ops 3 at least) rather than an actual Call of Duty.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this, it just seems that since I dropped off the series has taken a weird direction.  That doesn't mean however that the game has lost any traction by the sounds of things, there always seems to be some degree of hype for the latest installment and the multiplayer modes always seem well populated.

However a week ago I stumbled across an article on GameSpot that said "There will always be Call of Duty games", here's the link

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-ceo-there-will-always-be-call-of-duty-g/1100-6443574/


I'd be upset by this if I was a fan of the series.  Every time there is a new Call of Duty game you have to shell out full price and these games come out yearly.  Sure, you can linger around on the old games for a while but if you're into the multiplayer, which most are, you WILL have to move to the next game or else be completely left behind.  Every goddamn year another full priced game with the inevitable DLC map packs that you'll have to buy a couple of months down the line.  The sheer blatancy of the money grubbing here is astounding and I'm actually baffled as to why there aren't huge numbers of fans just putting their foot down and saying "no".

Just look at Counter Strike as a great counter example of this.  Counter Strike Source was bundled with Half Life 2, a game that every man and his dog had, back in 2004 and then Global Offensive came out in 2012.  That's an 8 year gap and the game is consistently populated with a large number of players

To top that off the game is only like £12 and you don't have to worry about another one coming out in the next 6 months.  Sure, you can shell out extra cash for a few maps or to get some skins for your guns but this shit is all optional and you won't have trouble finding matches without the extras because despite having not played for a long time I'm sure DE_Dust2 is still a thing.

The fast sequel thing really turns me off to the series.  The game doesn't look shit by any means, it looks well polished and fun to play but the fact that I know Infinite Warfare will be perma-shelved in 2017 for the next one makes me not want to buy it.  I wish they could just give us ONE game that they update constantly with lots of cool shit rather than this yearly release stuff.  It's not like you couldn't have WW2, Modern Day and Sci-Fi War shit all in one game and just release it as a stand alone multiplayer experience at this point.  Still, if they did stop they might lose their license to print money so I guess the sequels will never end.

I've Fallen Out With The MMO

I used to like MMORPGs a hell of a lot.  I had a pretty good group of buddies and we'd always play things like World of Warcraft (up to Lich King) and Guild Wars and we have some pretty fond memories of those days adventuring together.  Even now as I walk around some of these Japanese stores or peruse certain websites on the internet I see shit like Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 and I get all tempted to play one again but something keeps holding me back.

I've fallen out with MMOs pretty hard which is a shame because I do like playing them.  Not too long ago I was streaming Path of Exile with my co worker and we were having a good time but we gave up before too long mainly because I just wanted to play other things.  One of the main reasons I find it hard to give time to MMOs anymore is because of my backlog.  The thing is a couple of hundred titles long so the idea of sitting down and sinking a few hours into a genre of games that essentially don't end feels like a bad idea when I have so much on my plate already.

That's the other thing too, purely multiplayer games that don't end just don't sit well with me personally.  I like to play something alone, with a self contained story that has an ending and a credits roll at the end.  I don't want to have people waiting on me to do a dungeon or have to rely on player run market places to help get ahead.  I play games to chill and having that extra pressure from other players waiting for me to do shit or hold me to some kind of standard that I don't care about (gear score for example)

The one other big turn off with MMOs for me, especially new ones are subscriptions.  For the longest time Free to Play MMOs have existed, tons of them so the idea of paying for a MMO seems silly now.  MAYBE back in the day you could justify it because most F2P MMORPGs sucked massive amount of dick but now things like Guild Wars 2 are free to download and play.  That might be a bad example because there's never been a monthly subscription for those games but you see what I mean?  Why pay for it when  nowadays you can get a good quality online adventure for exactly no money,

MMOs aren't a genre I dislike by any stretch but I just find it difficult to justify sinking so many hours into that genre.  It's a shame because there's a lot of cool looking shit out there and yet I just can't bring myself to download them and give them a try.  Maybe one day when I clear some of this backlog off my list my opinion will change, I can only hope.

Time Crisis 5

Holy crap this series is STILL going?!  I thought the genre of light gun based rail shooters had gone almost completely out of fashion with the exception of a few sit down cabinet games but guess I was fucking wrong.  Granted this appeared in my local arcade quite a while ago but I only just got around to playing it .

Just in case there is anyone stumbling on this blog who has never played or heard of this game, let me give you a quick primer.

Time Crisis is a long running series of rail shooters that has been going since 1995.  Most games in this genre usually just put you on a straight rail and had you fend of a bunch of enemies and not taking damage was based on knowing where they are coming from and picking and choosing the right targets.

Time Crisis was a little different in this regard because the machine (and the later console releases) used a pedal to duck in and out of cover.  That's right motherfuckers, before we had all this 3rd person Gears of War cover based shooting crap, it was done in the arcade with a pedal and a light gun.  However, in order to stop people cheesing out the game by just hiding behind cover and waiting for the opportune moment, each screen had a time limit (of 40 seconds if I remember correctly), meaning that you had to take a few risks if you wanted a chance to survive the timer.

It was an interesting title and the sequels only went on to build on the concept.

Time Crisis 2 and up were essentially the same game but what made them interesting was the multiplayer component.  Usually in these games 2 players would work together on one screen but in Time Crisis each player had their own screen.  This meant that each player was seeing each screen from a different angle and that they could help each other pick off enemies from the other screen.

So that's old school Time Crisis, so how's the new one?  Well it's OK and while it introduces some cool stuff it's kind of short and a little bullshit.

The big new thing with TC5 is a dual pedal system.  Up to now, every Time Crisis has had 1 pedal but this one has an L and R pedal.  All this means is that each character has 2 vantage points per screen from which they can shoot from but using the pedals effectively is paramount to winning some battles and boss fights.  There's also a couple of QTE's and a number of slow motion "shoot the targets" sequences that are used to award bonus points or to take a life off if you fuck up.  It also utilities the Aime/Banana Passport stat cards to track high scores and achievements if you're into that kind of thing.

The game pisses me off a little because it's too short and it cops out at the end with "ANOTHER CHAPTER COMING SOON!".  This wouldn't piss me off it was normal priced but the cost for entry into this thing is fucking 200 yen with 100 more to continue if you die!  Almost every game ever in a game centre is 100 yen per play but this huge fucking thing wants 200!?  There is less content here than most 100 yen rail shooters too so I don't know why the fuck the price is double what it should be.

Still, as much as that pisses me off it's nice to see that the old school stand up rail shooter games are clinging on for dear life in the modern age.  If you get the chance to try it then you absolutely should, but I can't imagine it seeing the light of day in the west because the cabinet is HUGE and the western coin-op scene sucks.

Please let me know if anyone finds one though, especially in the UK!

Silent Bomber Bonus Episode

Me and my buddy fight each other in the multiplayer mode of Silent Bomber, enjoy!

Saturn Month: Die Hard Arcade Showcase

Well it happened, my good friend finally came to Nagoya and we got to record ourselves playing Die Hard Arcade! 

Although things didn't go to well.....Not only were we dealing with semi-hangovers from the night before, but we had taken up the bottle again just before playing, so our skills probably weren't all there for this one.  On top of that, my friend has very few natural survival instincts so we ate through our credits quite quickly.

That said, it was a ton of fun to record and hopefully you'll get a kick out of watching it too.  We've promised ourselves to come back and record this when we're not being awful and show the world what the end of the game looks like!

VIDEO TIME!