"I'm trying to undo it, remember?"

[This entire post discusses the story and endings of Bastion at length and in depth.  Consider this a spoiler warning.]

The revelations all came from Zia; she was my key to understanding Bastion.

Inferior Quality: Not for Structural Use!

[The following post begins with and contains a number of huge spoilers about L.A. Noire and in particular its last act, and so is behind the jump for those who wish to avoid such things.]

The Honest Gamer's Lament

So in the last month I've finally been polishing off Divinity II.  I hit my stride and, thanks to playing the patched, newer version, no longer got mired down in game-breaking bugs.  In short, I was able to reach the stretch of game that was fun, and I enjoyed mindlessly tearing through Rivellon, discovering nooks and crannies and one-shotting monsters.

The first time I tried to play Ego Draconis I encountered a huge bug on my way into the Hall of Echoes (the final boss area).  It's a dragon-form only, no-land, flight-only zone but I got stuck in my human form  and was therefore physically unable to advance.  This time, though, I was able to complete that section of the game with only mild swearing, and to advance to the "Flames of Vengeance" expansion content.  I enjoyed Aleroth (and how it's changed since the early days of the Divine who, no matter what the canon says, is a lady), and enjoyed maxing out my armor, skills, and stats.  In short, I was a completely overpowered badass covered in pointy bits, but sometimes that's fun.

Seriously, look at how pointy armor gets in this game. You'll put your eye out, Rhode!

I advanced to the final mission, bearing fully charmed and enchanted armor, a deliciously deadly sword, and with all my skills and regenerative potions (as if I needed mere potions anymore) neatly arranged on my hotbar.  And lo, the final mission is: a zeppelin escort in dragon form.

It's a dirty job, and no-one should have to do it.

Dragon form, despite being the selling point of Divinity II that's meant to set it apart from other, similar RPGs, really sucks.  It's hard to master, and all of the time that you've put into upgrading armor and skills no longer matters.  For this mission the game hands you a full set of maxed-out, top-level dragon skills and it still... doesn't really matter.

In short, I spent 35 hours of game time creating a really top-notch, unbeatable character who then doesn't feature at all in the finale.

I expressed rather vocal frustration with this turn of events, employing a number of unprintable words.  My husband shrugged and suggested from across the room: "So... install a trainer."

I paused.  "Um,"  I responded tentatively,  "do they even have those for this game?"

He gave me a withering look, perhaps pitying my naivete.  "Of course they have them."  He typed something into his laptop and within 20 seconds was reciting me a list of options.

What I realized the next morning (in the shower, of course, because that's where epiphanies happen) is that I've been playing so honest for so long that I literally can no longer remember how to cheat.  Oh, I know where to get mods for Fallout games and I know how to create and edit maps for a bunch of classic titles, and I'll admit that in fifth grade I used to stack the Uno deck before dealing to my (not very bright) classmates.  I lay no claims to having been eternally honest.  I just realized that it's been a long, long time.  In no small part I suspect this is because these days I often game on the PS3 and on my Droid, but also it's because games now have things like "difficulty settings" and "actual learning curves."

So, Divinity II awaited.  Obviously, the answer was Google and in five minutes I'd sorted the problem by myself in a way that seemed at least 60% likely not to include malware.  I installed the trainer and it all worked, without putting anything else on my PC (nasty or otherwise), and so I cheerfully booted up the game and got ready to move past this horrible section of doom.

Except trainers only work in human form -- which I had already neatly overpowered (and how) just through thorough gameplay.  Dragon form is still exceptionally vulnerable.  And this mission is the only time in the entire Flames of Vengeance content expansion that you use it!

So the hell with it: the last section of Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance is going to remain unfinished.  You know what happens at the end?  Good triumphs over evil, because it's a Generic RPG.  And because the main game ends with evil triumphing over good, which is a trick they seem unlikely to repeat in the "satisfying conclusion."

I'm out.  "Fun" certainly isn't everything, as I've recently been discussing with another writer.  (Aside: I think he and I will both be blogging on the topic in the not-too-distant future.)  But consistency, satisfaction, and playability are pretty damn important to a game and Divinity II just fell right down on its ass there.  I don't need this brick wall to bang my head against when the world is full of others.

Larian, I am disappoint.  You're capable of really good, if quirk-filled and derivative, game design.  I'm still recommending Divine Divinity to anyone who just wants to sit down at the PC and suddenly look up, 6 hours later, amazed how long they spent hacking at orcs.  But if I'm going to spend hours trying and retrying the last section of a game, I need to have a reason.  I need it to have tactics I can learn, skills I can improve, methods I can change, and a motivation for me to keep going.  Divinity II is giving me none of the above, so back onto the virtual shelf it goes, 70 hours of my total time (I had to play the main game twice, after switching from disc to Steam) ending without conclusion.

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The current playlist here at home includes Fallout: New Vegas - Honest Hearts, L.A. Noire, and Chrono Cross.  I've / We've only just begun the latter two so despite me having two "finished" games in one week to complain about, it'll be a while before there are any new ones. ;)

Into the West?

A few months ago I was casting about for suggestions on what game I should try next, and several folks suggested Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.  It showed up for just over $15 on Amazon not long afterward so I grabbed it.  We decided it was an "us" game (one that my husband and I play together -- we regularly have an us game running, as well as each having our own) and last weekend we finished playing it.

The rest is behind the jump, for plot spoilers and strong, lengthy opinions from Your Critic.

The Ego of the Gamer: Reputation

No matter how I try not to, I care what people think of me.  Deeply.

But I don't mean my writing, or even my actual self.  (That would be the Ego of the Blogger... and that's a separate problem!)  When confronted with moral, ethical, or straight-up narrative choice in gaming, I tend to want the maximum number of people to like me.  I want to do the right thing for the many, and occasionally to intimidate or even scare the crap out of the unpleasant few.

This is how my Courier and Lone Wanderer end up maxing out their positive Karma fairly early on.  This is how Shepard ends up 4-5 times as Paragon as she is Renegade.  This is how I end up saving every Little Sister in Rapture.

What I've been realizing over the past weekend, though, is the extent to which I've been trained by reputation systems to expect some kind of external reward for behavior that benefits someone other than the player character.  Reward in coin (or caps) and experience always follows for objectives completed, of course, but I've grown deeply accustomed to some kind of system that traces my actions and allows my reputation to precede me through the game world after a certain point.

Larian's Divine Divinity had such a reputation system, aptly called "reputation."  Good deeds earned you points and evil deeds cost you points.  With high enough points, more quest and dialogue options opened up to you.

Over the last few days, I've been having another go at their late-2009 follow-up, Divinity II: Ego Draconis.  Actually, I'm now playing the expanded version, The Dragon Knight Saga.  With the expansion and the major patch that accompanied it, Larian removed many of the game-breaking obstacles and brought some of the fun back to the title.

It's not my screenshot, but that player character on the right does look just like my Ellin does.  Eerie.

In the Flames of Vengeance content, the game has suddenly developed a deep and pressing need to force the player into moral choices.  Nearly every quest I am offered has an alternative quest along with it: do I collect this necklace for the possibly-shady man who first asked me to retrieve it, or do I collect it for the possibly-shady mage who needs it for a spell?  Who gets to keep the house, in a fight: the man who legally owns it but has swindled hundreds of others, or the group who claimed it from him but who otherwise have left everyone else alone?

These are the kind of decisions I have made in games for two decades now.  We've been presented with choice, or at least the illusion of choice, since we first read that exits are north, south, and up.  And yet here I sit, in 2011, seemingly paralyzed when a game asks me to make a decision about a quest.  I hover over my dialogue options, unsure.  I stand adrift.

In short, finding myself in a game that doesn't tell me which is the paragon or renegade option, a game that doesn't tell me I will gain or lose karma for acting in a certain way, has left me at a loss, momentarily unable to make a simple decision for myself.

Perhaps we shouldn't have visible meters of Shepard's Paragon or Renegade status, or know how we stand with the White Glove Society, the Powder Gangers, and the NCR.  Maybe Little Sisters shouldn't come forth and reward us quite so often.  Or maybe I'm the only one who has apparently been rendered temporarily too lazy and stupid to tell right from wrong.

For what it's worth, in the revamped Dragon Knight Saga version, I can recommend the game to anyone who just wants some brainless RPG fluff.  It's not deep, and it's not innovative.  The same half-dozen voice actors populate the entire fictional nation.  The quests are skin-deep, the dragon mechanics are pastede-on-yey, and the story and art are as generic as a High Fantasy world gets.

But what the game does understand is a sense of fun and exploration.  Just as its predecessor did back in 2003, Divinity II compels me to look in every nook and cranny, to open every box, and to explore right up to the edge of every map, looking for hidden quests and treasures.  I like that in a game, and I also like its absence of class structure.  You can pick and choose the skills that suit you best and play a dragon knight of your own choosing.

What I really recommend, though, is spending the $6 on GOG and picking up Divine Divinity.  It's old and probably still has some comical translation errors, but I had fun 12 hours at a time exploring its map and part of me enjoys it still.

Mass Effect 2, Values-Driven Gaming, and Me

Aside from the "Lair of the Shadow Broker" and "Arrival" DLC missions, I finished Mass Effect 2 on Saturday night.  And I have to admit, despite how much I dragged my feet starting the series to begin with, how much I didn't enjoy the first few hours, and how I initially only played it as a promise to my spouse -- I loved it.

I'm a tiny bit in love with Kate Shepard's life and story, the same way I was a little bit in love with Lord of the Rings in 2001-2004 and with Star Wars in the mid-1990s.  I keep wanting more.  I genuinely felt the adrenaline pumping as I chose my final team and I noticed after we finished that I'd actually been biting my nails at one point.  Now, the Christmas gift isn't that I paid for this household's copy of Mass Effect 3 (I pre-ordered it last December as a gift for him), it's that he gets to play it first, with his Shepard, no questions asked.

But I actually had a moment, along the way, where I walked away from the PC in frustration and anger, ranting, and considered walking away from the game entirely.  (This discussion will have some big spoilers, as you might expect.)

A Combustible Lemon - This is That Post

This is my Portal 2 post. ;)  I'm going to put most of it behind a cut for the sake of avoiding spoilers, particularly of the single-player campaign.  I'm nice like that.  Orange wouldn't do that for you, and Blue and I both know it.

PAX East: Post-Mortem

Holy crap, what a jam-packed weekend.  Welcome, new readers and viewers from Twitter.  This is going to be a very long post, with loads of photos, so I'm availing myself of the seldom-used jump function.  Also, for those who are interested in a more coherent perspective, I recommend Maddy Myers's Boston Phoenix series, particularly her Sunday overview.

Also, as it turns out... this happened, haha.  In truth I am pretty certain that Lesley and Dennis (and others) out-tweeted us, but apparently we're just the best and most consistent users of the #paxeast hashtag. ;)  If you want to get a real feel for what I was thinking as the convention happened, Twitter's the place.

April Ryan: we meet at last!

The Longest Journey came out in 2000, and since roughly 2001 I've had a veritable cacophony of friends telling me I need to play it.  I'd started once before in 2006, but the copy (not even mine *cringe*) got stolen before I could progress.

There are two main venues of discussion available with The Longest Journey.  The first is of it as a game: its artistic, technical, and narrative merits.  The second is of it as different from other games: how Ragnar Tornquist and company appear to be at least 20 years ahead of everyone else [it's a 10-year-old game and others still aren't there yet] on diversity in gaming.

I'm learning to be better about jumps for post length: 

Not-so-weekly Playlist

Quick post-mortems on the games I've been playing lately:

1.) Puzzle Quest 2 (DS): Either they made this game way too easy, or I am the best Puzzle Quest player ever to be born.  And I don't flatter myself to think it's the latter.  I set the game to "hard" and on my first storyline playthrough, didn't lose a single fight.  Not a one.  Admittedly, this may be because I picked Barbarian, and because I knew how best to combo some spells from a long-in-remission addiction to the first game, but...

I did create a second character, Assassin class, and she's lost two fights in the under-10 game, so there's something to it.  Maybe it's just horribly unbalanced?  Other than that, though, I've enjoyed it.  I miss some of the features of the first (sacking cities, money from cities, consistent foes after completing the story) but overall it's not a bad game.

2.) Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (PC): When the acting makes you long to have Tim Curry's southern accent back, or when every. single. sentence out of any character's mouth is instant MST3K fodder... well.  I love me some old-school adventure games and this is a definite great example of the FMV era of the mid and late 1990s, but it's a profoundly silly game and it wants to be serious.  As I said, accurately, on Twitter... #gaygermanoperawerewolfvoodooking

 3.) Divinity II: Ego Draconis (PC): I wrote before about how much this game hooked me.  And it did.  Except the end-game stage is flat-out awful.  Just like in the first game, an 80% awesome title falls flat when you cross the Line Of No Return.  Also, it's the buggiest thing I've bought in 15 years.  Twice I had to go back to an hours-old save to recoup after game-halting bugs, and once I had to send my save file to Larian for them to fix it for me.  Not.  Cool.  Even worse?  I hear they have a patch ready to go for most of these bugs but have been withholding it in North America until their DLC launches in October.  Their excuse is that they're not allowed to release too many patches for a 360 product (and this was a dual-platform release).  I'm actually quite pissed off at Larian over this one.  Translation errors and small bugs I can handle.  But game-stopping errors?  Multiple times in multiple locations across the game?  Lrn 2 QA, dammit.

Bioshock

I finally finished Bioshock.  Only, what, three years late?  I've got some thoughts about it, but if you, like me, are a slowpoke, do yourself a favor and do not look below the jump.  There are spoilers galore and I find the game is very much enhanced on the first play by not knowing the twist(s).  I managed to stay unspoiled for those three years (I don't know how), and I recommend you do the same.

So seriously, if you haven't finished it, walk away now.

Otherwise...