My gaming habits are very erratic and maybe even a little contradictory. I find it hard to only play one game at a time, often jumping around a lot from day to day throughout an average week. Except for when I really get into a game, then I’ll only play that for however long it takes to work it out of my system. Sometimes a week or so, sometimes I stay on it for maybe a month; then I won’t touch it again for like half a month…or maybe months, I don’t think to question the inner workings of my mind like that. It’s not even influenced by whether I like the game or not, as sometimes I don’t even have to like a game to drop dozens of hours into it, while maybe only spending a few hours at first on something I enjoy until the time becomes right for me to play it. Aka, ‘when my brain ****ing work good’.
Am I weird? I blame 90’s Canadian kids television for these attention issues, honestly. That **** was a fever dream. Remember Yvon of the Yukon? What the **** was that?
Anyways, I figured I’d revive my little rant series here with a non-review article on games I’ve been playing lately, to try and make some entertainment out of my horribly scatterbrained gaming habits and to hopefully get me back into the writing mindset; I’ve been slacking on my reviews lately. We got mostly some retro stuff on here but also something modern I wanted to squeeze in a rant about. These won’t be reviews really outside of some of my general impressions and comments about them, so just take this as a lighter kind of article then I usually do.
Diablo
What else needs to be said? It’s only a game that essentially spawned and defined an entire genre, and a series that sadly ended after the second game. Yep, there was nothing else after Diablo 2. Sad, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Better to go out on top than become a pathetic shadow of its former self, a corpse kept alive through horrible business practices and low effort releases. Thank god that never happened to this series, and thank god Blizzard isn't the worst game company or something like that now.Anyways. I haven’t played the original Diablo in over five years at least, so I decided to remedy that and descend into the nightmare depths of the Tristram cathedral again. Luckily the vanilla game is still largely compatible with modern systems, but there’s also some fantastic source ports should you choose to go down that route. For my playthrough this time, I’m using DevilutionX which is just such a source port; it keeps the actual experience as vanilla as possible outside of a few small QoL changes, with some toggleable options should you want to change the game up. The only chocolate I’ve put into the mix is having alt highlight all items on the ground which wasn’t in the first Diablo until the Hellfire expansion (and even then, it was a spell and not just a control function).
The essential strategy of dumping Fire Wall on a room then closing the door; it never fails.
Diablo is a masterpiece of atmosphere and vibe, and a great example of how a game can be almost entirely carried by them. The game underneath the gothic-ness isn’t bad by any means of course, but when people reminisce about the first Diablo it’s not really over the three classes or the quests; it’s about the spookiness, the je nais se quoi. The vibe.
You have your three iconic character archetypes to choose from that have defined the genre since; the ranged, fast female rogue; the physically weak but powerful late-game wizard; and the all-rounder warrior tough guy if you want to play on easy mode. What are their special abilities? Why, nothing of course, save for the rogue having a pretty much useless disarm trap ability. This game has no real builds or intricate layers of abilities and mechanics; this game is just that primordial. The three characters are defined by their stats, and what weapons they can use instead. There are ‘abilities’ to learn sort of, but they are all magic spells every class can learn and cast, assuming they have enough magic stat to learn the spell. The spells are pretty important to how easy of a time you’re going to have with the game, and runs can easily be made or broken depending on how the RNG has blessed you with tome drops in the first few dungeon levels.
Luckily, this run has been pretty kind to me. Town Portal, Fire Wall and Holy Bolt? Let’s ****ing go.
There is one aspect of the actual gameplay that the game is remembered for; the randomization. Was Diablo the first non-text based rogue-like that wasn’t, well, Rogue? I don’t know, but I can’t think of another mid-90’s game that had this level of randomly generated map tiles and gameplay elements. The Tristram cathedral is randomly generated every new game, around a few set-in stone pillars of course. Even the quests you encounter are random; of the maybe dozen or so quests in the game, each run you’ll only be given maybe five or six randomly plucked from the list. This lack of control isn’t detrimental luckily since most of the quests aren’t really overly important to the game save for a choice few that have really good rewards, and they don’t even give you XP for completing them as that’s just how ancient this game is in its design. Most of the time, I would just ignore them and nothing would really change. It’s kinda funny, everyone remembers the famous terrifying early enemy in this game of The Butcher; the iconic monster that has to be responsible for the most amount of heart attacks and **** pants of any game character. Because of the randomized nature of the game, he may not even appear to horribly annihilate you and murder your hopes and dreams. But you’ll still feel his presence somehow, a creeping sense of foreboding when you take your first staircase down to level two...
The game is also famously such a simple set-up; the whole game takes place in one very long dungeon, and the town next to it. Tristram is barely more than five buildings and a well, yet holds such a horrific nightmare descent into the abyss in its cathedral. Something I don’t hear that much praise about is the game's great world-building. You’ll learn bits and pieces about Tristram and the greater world through talking with the poor souls still living in town, and it's all of course fantastic and ominous dark fantasy ****. It adds appreciable details to the games simple setting to make it all the more memorable, learning about the ill-fated descent of Leoric into the dungeon before you arrived or about the really on-the-nose Lazarus. I wonder what his deal is.
It's with this singular focus that it’s able to saturate so much vibe. Every time I went down a level in this labyrinthian dungeon, another step closer into literal hell, I still pucker up a little bit still to this day, over twenty years after first playing Diablo. It's this that the game is remembered for, that sense of simmering dread that builds up as you slowly trudge through darkened catacombs, the ambient soundtrack consisting of distant screams and dripping water surrounding you, and in a game where a single elite enemy and like maybe five of his mini-clones could stand a good chance of ruining you. Even in town the soundtrack doesn’t spare you; the Tristram town theme is so ****ing iconic and unnerving that I swear I hear it in my sleep sometimes, and it’s only made me a little spooked over decades.
There’s something to be said of this game's simplicity, is what you should be gathering from this whole thing. It makes real tension through great atmosphere, and challenging gameplay not through having boss enemies spawn in with eighteen different prefixes and random bull**** abilities going off in a constant wail of particle effects but just through them being spooky and having strong attack routines. I cannot stress enough how even a single cluster of enemies can be a formidable obstacle in this game, compared to how the series can be now where there’s approximately five dozen fodder enemies running at you designed to die in singular hits- oh right, sorry, there was no game after Diablo 2. My bad.
It’s been refreshing a little bit to go back to this kind of simple beginning of one of my most beloved genres, honestly; you have a weapon, maybe some spells, go into that spooky dungeon and kill everything until it is done. There’s no fussing with abilities, or planning out what passives you have to get in order to unlock more passives ten levels from now. I think the genre has lost its way a little bit in that regard nowadays, becoming more frequently about the spreadsheet build game and stacking percentages from seven different layers of gear than what it was originally all about; clicking things until they die, and great atmosphere.
Shock Troopers
This is a NeoGeo arcade classic that I often come back to time and time again when I want to just run around and explode pixels, which I want to do very frequently. It’s one of the best run-and-guns in my opinion, up there with Sunset Riders, Contra: Hard Corps and even the eternal goat of Metal Slug 3, blessed be its name.I love how much vibe the characters have given no actual dialogue just from their stage clearing and entry poses, and it’s pace is just that perfect balance of ‘never stop shooting, I’m the grim ****ing reaper’ followed immediately by ‘oh ****, oh god, run’ when the next screen filling boss shows up. It’s also I think a fair but challenging game in the genre, not quite getting to the absurdity of a Gunstar Heroes or the Metal Slug series but still giving you some obstacles to explode your way through.
It’s got the limited use pick-up weapons of the usual arsenal, it has the sense of humour, and what I really enjoy is the simple touch of each of the different selectable characters having a unique special ‘bomb’ weapon. My personal favourite is probably Rio with his explosive crossbow bolts, or Milky with her napalm fire wall grenade. Why's she called Milky? Don't ask. They also have different stats from one another as well which I like, with some being slower but more durable, the other way around or somewhere in between. Big Mama is the slowest character but an absolute unit of pure beef, death incarnate with her big ****ing RPG special.
Don’t **** with Big Mama.
There’s something to be said about just how good the environments are here too. They’re really varied, have some great pixelated scenery and vibe to them, and there’s always something going on in the background of them to attempt to distract you from the armada of shells flying at you.
Something integral to the experience I have to bring up; the tactical roll. Why doesn't every run-and-gun have a sweet ass tactical roll? One of your buttons is a dedicated roll, complete with some generous invincibility during it. It’s essential given how the constant bullet hell you'll find yourself navigating, but it’s also not entirely foolproof; it has some recovery where you can get shot after standing back up, and it’s also balanced by the fact that you’re not attacking when you’re dodging. With the amount of **** flying at you during this game, any second not spent shooting can easily be a mistake.
And the soundtrack; oh yeah, the soundtrack. It’s a hectic assortment of upbeat drums, some almost electronic influences in some of the levels mixed with samples of I think artillery cannons and fuzzy power chords and even some voice samples here and there. Each level has its own vibe, and every level absolutely nails it. If you’re going to check out some of the tracks, I recommend Breakbeat Silence and Nu Era of Technology; those drums have no right to be that ****ing dirty.
Honestly, I don’t really have much else to say about this one other than play it right ****ing now. This was just a quick and breezy little entry for a simple fun game. It’s absolutely fantastic, and again something I’m always coming back to drop half a dozen runs into.
Baldur’s Gate 3
It’s only taken me over two odd years to make it through this game, given my numerous restarts and changing characters as the opening of this article should explain away, but I’m finally almost done with this goddamn game. I know, ‘it’s not as good as the originals, Octopus!’ which is entirely correct, but it ain’t that bad all the same. Sort of. I won’t say I have a ‘love-hate’ relationship with the game as both of those words are far too strong to apply here, but it’s like a ‘good-meh’ relationship. It’s really not that bad, and anyone who says this game is objectively bad I think is being a little silly and a little dramatic.The OG’s adopted second edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the Dark Alliance games were loosely based on third edition, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on the current juggernaut of the TTRPG zeitgeist that is fifth edition (5E). It’s not a positive that it’s based on 5E, as my opinion on this particular system isn’t necessarily the best, but something I like about BG3 is that they actually changed things up when turning the ruleset into a video game. Some of these ‘OC’ changes they’ve done were essential moves to turn it into a video game, like limiting the amount of short rests you can do, while others range from extra little additions to the rules here and there or even entire subclass reworks. The majority of them work. I really like what they’ve done to the ranger class for example, as the corebook pen-and-paper class is objectively terrible and boring; here, they actually are pretty fun and dynamic. They made the Four Elements monk subclass actually a playable subclass. They made it playable. It’s a ****ing miracle, and all it took was mostly changing how much Ki points the funky abilities cost and throwing some more fun stuff into their kit.
Changing jumping in combat to a bonus action is a small change that adds a lot, the new weapon based abilities are can be pretty fun (even if I think they would be better being ‘once per fight’ instead of ‘once per short rest’), the addition of elixir potions that give lasting effects until your next long rest is great, and I also enjoy how they handle misbehaving paladins who don’t respect their oath this time around. You could still piss off your god in BG1 and 2 and lose your holy paladin powers of course, but it was tied largely to those game’s reputation system meaning you’d only trigger the slap on the wrist at a certain amount of low reputation; this made it so you could still get away with some real heinous **** as long as you did good stuff in between. In BG3, it’s immediate upon a single misbehaviour. Punishing, but it honestly should be. I think the one greatest aspect of the 5E ruleset is in its class design, with each class feeling like a distinct and unique creature and having an easy enough to spot niche or role, even with the weirdos like the warlock and the bard. That carries over to this game of course, and is something I feel like deserves some praise; playing around with your four-man party composition feels great, and I’ve probably paid old Withers the lich a small fortune to respec in this one playthrough alone.
Divine Smite goblins with level two spell slots. Abuse Pack Tactics advantage on goblins. Action Surge goblins with level five fighters. Rakish Sneak Attack lone goblins until they die.
Sure, there’s some stuff they had to leave behind when making the game (like half the spells), but I would say the game is still a great adaptation of a TTRPG system. They took what worked, changed what didn’t, and added things in to make it more interesting, but didn’t go nuts and make really overpowered stuff like 75% of the homebrew TTRPG community does. Cringe OP **** is left for the mod community, of course.
The negatives? This game is far too long. There is absolutely such a thing as too much content in a video game, and this is a great example. There’s simply too much **** in it, and it makes the game feel bloated once you leave the second act. I’m not going to lie to you; there were numerous times upon reaching the titular city of Baldur’s Gate where I just wanted the damn thing to finally end. I’d complete something that felt like a major milestone and go ‘alright, this has to be the final story beat’ only to have more quests get added to my journal, more bloated flesh revealed before my gaze. I walk into a new area; more side quests, more characters. It’s a little much, and I think it’s also a major contributor to the game’s atrocious final act performance issues and the multitude of glitches and malfunctioning quests considering the sheer density of overlapping characters and triggers.
The story is also a victim of its content bloat. There’s far too many moving parts going on in the narrative, and far too many characters for what is at its core something really basic. There’s also some really lazy feeling exposition drops throughout, which makes sense given how much content is shoved inside it and the fact the game was an early access title for like three years. By the time I was in the thick of the Underdark in act two, I was pretty lost in what the overarching threat was or who was doing what behind the scenes. Its also not sure if it wants to be a more meandering adventure kind of story or a linear epic I think, and both sides of that vibe suffer. Two of the main villains in particular appear almost out of nowhere, then just as quickly leave and you hardly see them again until you’re on their doorstep to kill them approximately 38 hours later. It’s just a little odd feeling. One of these villains fares a little better than the other, with her appearing fairly frequently across the city in act three. She’s also primarily the only way the game actually connects to the previous storyline of the original games, and even though she is sort of an over-written ‘aren’t I so insane?’ trope, she’s at least present in the game unlike her coworker.
Sadomasochistic psychopath murder cultist? I can fix her.
There’s also what I think is some really uneven encounter designs. There’s some really fun ones like the goblin encampment early in the game, some that are maybe a little uninspired, but there’s almost an equal amount of either very frustrating ones or even some that I would call ‘that DM’ levels of bull**** on. The worst offenders to me are ones where the enemies break the rules of the game in some manner like specific fights where the enemies have some really silly OC ability specifically designed around a gimmick, and/or inexplicably don’t follow the same rules as you do. My pick for worst fight is easily when you fight an entire temple of evil clerics underneath the city for one of your more story integral companions; you don’t have to do the fight of course given the open ended nature of the game, but I think it’s probably the most common outcome given the popularity of that specific companion. Five specific enemies in it flat out cheat, spamming Darkness spells as a bonus action somehow, also ignoring darkness rules themselves considering they can still see and attack through it which means they have true sight somehow, and also still having two attacks a turn that deal an absurd amount of bonus damage per hit when you’re in darkness. It’s ****ing stupid, and if this was in the tabletop game I’d absolutely mean mug the DM for dropping that kind of tomfoolery on us. I’d inflict the greatest punishment possible at a gaming session upon them; they’d be banned from any more chips and pizza.
There’s far more I could go on about, like the game’s uneven implementation of things like the spell Speak With Dead or the also uneven companions, but I think that’s enough to convey my opinion. While I’m glad a single-player RPG blew up like it has in pop culture (specifically a D&D based one), I think it’s a little over hyped at the same time; I really don’t think it’s the single greatest PC game of all time, like it held the records for pretty quickly after it came out. Is it as good as the original games? Of course not, but it’s also almost an entirely different kind of game than they are; I feel like comparing them on a non-narrative level is mostly pointless. The OG’s are very slow and purposeful CRPG’s of constant buff refreshing, this is more of an open world-esque experience befitting 5E’s more ‘super hero’ type of fantasy. I think they can co-exist.
Overall, I think the game is good but I wouldn’t quite describe it as a genre-shattering masterpiece like it’s at least critically held as. If I were to give it a score, I think I’d give it like a solid 75%; perfectly acceptable and good, but with some issues here and there. Oh, and **** the House of Grief temple fight.
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
This is something I’ve always been somewhat curious about but never got around to playing until just recently. It’s a Snowblind engine game, and do I ever like those games (behold!), and it’s also the only one I haven’t played. It's the last one Interplay put out, but the third last game using the engine; Justice League: Heroes came out a little after this, then Champions: Return to Arms I think a year later. I can’t remember specifically who it was, I think it was our illustrious Waffles here on RGT who reminded me of it, and so I finally decided to get down with it.This is going to be a very early game summation of the game for me, as I haven’t put much time into it yet honestly. It’s something I may actually do as an article down the road, and **** I just broke my ‘never again foreshadow an article before it’s done’ thing. Oops.
Despite all my rage I’m still just bashing rats with a mace.
As you can hopefully tell, the game is a Fallout spin-off. It’s a faster paced isometric action-RPG as befitting its engine. More than that though, it's different in its tone. It's just a little crass maybe at times, and its humour trades the usual propaganda and mismatched imagery of the main series and replaces it with a particularly sharp punk edge to it. Fallout hasn’t necessarily shied away from that kind of stuff, but I can guarantee you never had a quest in Fallout 2 to find a prostitute’s cat named Mr. *****; I’ll let you fill that in yourself. Right from the get go, there’s F-bombs and ****ies and industrial metal battle music and the ghoul playable character talking about shooting his noxious goo all over the previously mentioned prostitute. It's a little strange to see in a Fallout game all the same. It's not just that it's pushing the envelope more than the relatively tamer mainline games, just that it's doing it in such a kitschy 2000s ‘in your face' kinda way. I can see why the game pushed some of the usually higher brow Fallout crowd away.
Very classy.
It’s also different from the Snowblind engine entries like the Dark Alliance and Champions games. You get three playable characters this time around, and I’ve been told you get more as you play; you start with a big guy, a deranged ghoul, and a weaker but faster tough lady in some truly groundbreaking character choices. The game plays almost identically to something like Dark Alliance 2 believe it or not, but with less focus on character skills this time around. You still level up and spend your points to get abilities, but this time around they’re almost all passive from what I’ve seen and there’s far less difference between characters skill-wise, and even less active abilities this time around. The characters do each have some little thing they can do, like the Terminator 2 Linda Hamilton stand-in being able to use dual wielded pistols I have yet to see, but they’re seemingly very minor.
To compensate, there’s a whole arsenal list of weapons compared to the usual fantasy weapons of Dark Alliance, including Desert Eagles and rifles and shotguns along with zany Fallout staples like laser blasters and the classic barbed wire fists. I could see that being kind of fun and carrying the Fallout spirit, scrounging around for bullets in grimy industrial ruins while fighting rad scorpions off with your bolt action rifle before bashing a never ending supply of jet-addicted bandits with a spiked baseball bat. Time will tell if having more tools to explode mutants will help the game in the long run, but by looking through the skill lists on all the characters I can already sense some tedium setting in at some point in the future. Time will tell.
There are some other gameplay additions, such as a lock-on system given the games’ bigger focus on guns and even a lock-on sensitive dodge roll button. Wait, lock-ons and dodge spam; was this the first Demon’s Souls? Was this game truly ahead of its time in the roll-slop genre?
Demon’s Souls, only with a Slipknot soundtrack and against mutated scorpions basically.
It may sound like I’m being a little harsh on the game, but being something I’m thinking of reviewing I’m looking at this one with more of a critical eye than a ‘I just want to have fun’ gaze like I am with other stuff. It’s my curse, honestly; I’m often unable to just play something without picking it apart, especially now that I've started writing articles on things here.
If I do an article on this game later on, will I reuse these same screenshots? Time will tell.
But likely.
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Good to know Im not alone in my Gaming Attention Deficit Disorder.
