The Year in Review 2021: Computer Gaming - A Wealth of Embarrassment and Retrogaming Joy

 Normally I do a top five list for each end-of-year subject, but this time around I'm going to do a "year in review" instead because I think it might be hard to generate a proper top 5 list, when so much of 2021 was janky and weird at best. 2020 had excuses.....but 2021 felt like 2020 threw everything off and this was the year the toll came due.

For gaming this year, the world of computer and video gaming is essentially dominated by bad ideas, scandals and a mess of games that somehow failed to hit the mark (even when they still landed on the target). Examples:

Ubisoft and Activision - how not to allow abusive corporate culture to ruin your businesses.

Ubisoft and NFTs - as Penny Arcade states, even shitty ideas must have their start. I am disappointed that this appears to be the trend now, and NFTs are a prime example of how federal regulation and oversight is failing us. 

Halo Infinite - amazing single-player game, excellent multiplayer, but a complete mess when it comes to the execution of a season pass with XP gain. The story has been how hard it is to earn the XP to gain the gear, but the real story of course should be why the industry now assumes every game must of necessity have a Skinner Box season pass to begin with. 

Battlefield 2042 - I bought a used physical copy on the PS5 since I suspected I'd probably end up wanting to trade it in. My experience thus far has been that this game clearly suffered from a sense of direction (it was initially supposed to be a battle royale, I have read) and ended up being retooled into a half-assed experience which seems to displease everyone. I've played about 10 hours and am already done with it. The problem isn't even bugs....it's just not very fun. 128 player events are simply too much, and organizing even within a 4 man squad means nothing if you're watching the raw chaos unfold. Things get twice as bad if you're on the side with nothing but inexperienced players and the other team is loaded with old Battlefield pros. At that point? You're not there to be entertained, you're just there for someone else's entertainment. I've only seen one other game as messy as BF2042, and that was CoD: Black Ops IIII, which also suffered from late game design changes leading to an identity crisis.

Call of Duty Vanguard - I won't say anything bad about this, it's actually pretty fun and the renovations on their zombie mode are cool. Vanguard works because it dials the formula back to the familiar, then innovates in small but meaningful ways (such as cover not being invulnerable and some being destructible, maps being built to encourage use of cover, and the controls feeling more natural....something Cold War somehow got wrong). But for many, Call of Duty Vanguard is too mundane this time around, and it is admittedly still not as impressive perhaps as the latest Modern Warfare was.

Rogue Company - I got in to this one when it released last year, hoping it would break the Fortnite spell. It's gameplay options, while fun, were too anemic to substitute, but the game has slowly built up and is still enjoyable to jump in to. Like the others it has a season pass, which is especially grindy, but playing it on double XP weekends helps. If you're wondering what it is: it's a short-match team-based PVP experience where you essentially hold territory, defuse/set bombs, and most recently some straight team deathmatching is also an option. Diverse characters with lots of distinct abilities and styles mixed with very smooth third person-view gameplay makes for a very nice game, its just a pity it doesn't offer more modes or even larger maps with some sort of battle royale. Like Apex Legends, its characters are designed to work in teams, however, so I don't think they wan to compete in the BR space even though it would be a good fit (with some adjustment to character abulities).

Fortnite - They got through their Chapter 2 seasons and started a third season. My son still plays, I still play, but I also desperately want to not play this game anymore. I know this is exactly where I sat with it last year, too. The only difference is....this time, with their new chapter, I feel less and less of the pull to experience the content, and no more desire to spend money on stupid virtual skins. Maybe I'll try quitting it again as a new year's resolution; this game has nothing new to offer at this point. But....it's a fun game to play with my son, so maybe that is unrealistic. 

Returnal and other Roguelites - This year was a year for roguelites. Hades was popular; I had trouble getting in to it, but my wife loved it. Dead Cells which came out....last year?...remains fun in short bursts but hard to get in to since it starts you over as is common for the genre. The one roguelite I most enjoyed (but still couldn't get far in was Returnal on PS5. Amazing game! I just wish it was not a roguelite, it would be so much better if it were a more conventional game that offered some hope of advancement for those who have actual lives and can't keep playing through entire levels to die 27 times to the first boss.  

Playstation 5 - speaking of losers, Playstation 5, despite being my favorite overall console so far in terms of what it can do feels like the loser of 2021. It only generated a smidgeon of console exclusives, such as Returnal, and all of its prospects lie in the future, yet to be realized. I did grab Deathloop on it, only to discover that was not really an exclusive after all. PS5 continues to be the hardest console to actually find, and the sheer frustration of securing a new console this year has been a very bad look. People aren't just being thwarted by scalpers, they are being thwarted by the online retailers who continue to maintain shoddy, exploitable storefronts or set up expensive membership exclusive programs. Its fucking embarrassing.

Xbox Series S - who knew the diminutive lesser cousin to Xbox Series X would be the winner of this year's console sales? A year ago everyone felt that the Series S might be a mistake, but it turns out Microsoft knew what they were doing, The distinctively cheaper console still runs the newer games, looks good, and provides the most important feature a console could ever want: accessibility, as in its something you can probably find somewhere on store shelves right now. I bought another one just for my back room, and find myself playing on it more than my Xbox Series X, if only because I think my Series X has some issues (wifi drops and controller connectivity which randomly cuts out, none of which the Series S has issues with). The Series X is awesome, sure, but I now realize I would have not noticed much if any difference had I only been able to find a Series S.

Bottom line, though: Xbox has a clear advantage over PS5 right now with its Game Pass, PC integration, streaming options, and the simple fact that the Series S is a $300 box you can actually find and buy on shelves. What a concept!

Switch OLED - this is another one I can't really say anything bad about. Should you trade up for one? Absolutely yes if you want the best handheld experience out there. The OLED screen is noticeably better as an experience in handheld mode. The minor improvements are all worth it. But if you're fine with your current Switch? You are okay, you don't need to upgrade right now. For me, I bought three, one for myself, my wife and my kid...we all benefitted from an upgrade and it was well worth it. Had I been less affluent (and impulsive) though I would have been just fine sticking with the old Switch. 

The only embarrassing part of the OLED was how obsessed the entire vlog and game news industry was with obsessing over a mythical Switch Pro, and their inevitable outrage and disappointment that imagining something based on flimsy rumors from unreliable sources and then deciding it must be gospel is, as usual, bad journalism. 

So! What games have I actually spent time with this year, though?

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint - I played this over the last 18 months and finally finished it earlier this year. I was briefly interested in the new campaign they announced, but that interest was shattered when I realized the timing was likely deliberate to lure suckers back in for their new NFT offerings. 

I liked Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and wish that Ubisoft's desire to shy away from all controversy didn't push them to create Breakpoint as a fictitious island populated by tech mogul bad guys. It was the easy way out. They released the game 18 months earlier than they should have, and populated the DLC with what amounted to quality of life patches. But it was still fun to play, to a point. The idea that they expect someone to play the game for 600 hours (60 is quite enough) to earn an NFT is insane.

Crysis and other older FPS Shooters - I actually finished the "remastered" version on Switch, and it was somehow both as fun and less buggy than my experience playing and finishing it on PC many years ago. I've also divested more time in older shooters that I had finished ages ago, but enjoyed returning to: Singularity, Rage and Bulletstorm specifically, though all three on Steam. Rage is especially interesting, as this game apparently used a unique approach to its environments which actually looks better in meaningful ways on contemporary GPUs. 

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne - still playing this old classic, re-released on Switch, and anjoying it despite the at times bizarre and insane approaches it takes to story. With SMT games you either see the bizarre elements as selling points or you bail. I feel that is one of their charms. 

Playstation 2 - Way back in 2019 I got this idea of jumping in to the retrogame collector's field (watching too much Metal Jesus I think!) and secured a used PS2 slim, a console I hadn't owned since around 2005. The PS2 is unique in many ways, one of the largest console bases out there, and many of the games that came out for it are still exclusive to the system. Back when PS2 was current I actually spent more time playing on the Xbox, but there were a lot of specific titles I enjoyed, and a few I missed. As I have slowly rebuilt the "core" collection of games I wished to replay or play for the first time on PS2 I've managed to secure gems like Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill Origin, Resident Evil Outbreak File 1 (working on getting #2), Armored Core 2, Armored Core 3 (other AC games are a bit pricey), Splinter Cell and so forth. Two real gems, being the SMT fan I am: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 I somehow found on Ebay in new condition, still in packaging. These are great games, weird and atmospheric with interesting difficulty curves according to some. Getting to play them on the originally intended system is well worth it. 

Retro Arcade Gaming - Beyond the PS2.....it's been collecting arcade games, either on Xbox or Switch, as many classics can be found out there to let me recreate my own version of the arcade from Shady Grove Truckstop in 1986 that I used to spend way too many quarters on. Pac-Man 99 is literally Pac-Man with a battle royale element. Remakes of Asteroids and Centipede can be found. Evercade handheld (and the soon to come VS) let you replay many obscure console and arcade versions of these games. Oddly I can only find Defender and Joust in a Midway collection on the Xbox 360, luckily retro-compatible on the Series X/S. I am finding a quick bout of Pac-man or Asteroids is much more satisfying than a game that requires a minimum 2-4 hours time commitment to feel like you got somewhere, these days. 

I assume the retro gaming interest I have is a byproduct of age. The arcade titles stem back to the eighties when much of my gaming experience centered on a truck stop (Shady Grove) which had an amazing arcade room with about forty arcade machines. The PS2 stems back to the "golden age" of really interesting games that looked impressive for the time, but still relied heavily on story, atmosphere, and making the best of the processing power at hand to create an engaging experience, in an era before DLC, games as service that never end, and constant monetization was implicit in design.

So what has fallen to the wayside? Destiny 2, for one. I will probably get the upcoming Witch Queen expansion, but I haven't played it for a while now, finding that the game's unfocused approach to storytelling in which it mixed solid single player story moments that lead to hideous and mindless grinds to migrate to the next story bit are simply not worth it. Now that Halo Infinite is out, I feel even less compelled to subject myself to Destiny except on a whim. Their pricing scheme on the upcoming expansion doesn't help. My inability to get any value out of their insanely grindy season passes does not help, either. 

I also have a laundry list of games I keep wanting to play but can never find the proper time to do so. All of the Dark Pictures Anthology of games, for example. The Outer Worlds looks like an obvious choice for me, but I keep pushing it off, waiting for "the right time" which I am forgetting was 10-12 years ago, before I had so many more time responsibilities as a business owner and father. If I am to pay the Outer Worlds it must be in smaller chunks, now, or never.....and so it also is for games like Greedfall, Dying Light (which I am playing on Switch, and can't believe it looks and plays so well in the OLED at least), and even finishing Cyberpunk 2077, which I stalled out on midway through due to the fact that I figured it might be best to just give it time and see what lots of patches might end up doing for it. 

2021 was a bad year for new games, in many ways, but a great year for games in general, and exploring the "Steam back catalogue" phenomenon. I think a lot of people have this issue. When the digital market exploded, it was with the notion that publishers could at last deal a blow to the used game aftermarket. What they did not predict was that they had created a much greater nemesis: the back-catalogue, in which every contemporary game must now compete with its predecessors. The efforts spent on games-as-service is of course a new way to combat this, by making games which keep people playing and paying, and also making games which, when the time is right, can be shut down and ended and just go away, to no longer remain competitive. Even as they do this, the interest in retrogaming explodes, as people realize the value of tangible hardcopies that cannot be shut down. 

Well, 2022 will hopefully bear fruit for the new console generation. Here's to high hopes for the future, and a stocking full of 15-20 year old games! Ho ho ho!!!!

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint - the Buggiest Mess of Fun I've Had in a While

I make no secret of the fact that I've enjoyed the heck out of Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands....the former king of "overly long attributive names" now replaced by Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, which is essentially a direct game engine sequel and an indirect "story sequel" for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

For sanity's sake I'll just call this Breakpoint for the remainder of the discussion. Breakpoint is a direct sequel to Wildlands insofar as it is the same game engine and technically the same universe as the prior Ghost Recon titles...if you're in to following what those themes are, anyway. Unlike it's predecessor Wildlands, it tries to have a more directly involved story about your Ghost Recon character, focusing on a web of betrayal while being trapped on a high tech island paradise gone horribly wrong. Very much like Wildlands, it's really about your Special Ops character beign dumped into a hostile environment with limited resources and a veritable army of enemies surrounding him (or her) and a series of escalating plot points you must complete to progress the game.

Both Wildlands and Breakpoint function under a broad open-world engine designed to allow the most flexibility you can get Ubisoft style, with vast open world environments, vehicles and regions to explore, and lots of side quests and collectible missions to pad your time out while playing. Unlike Wildlands Breakpoint dives heavily in to the microtransactions, but I have found them completely ignorable so far.

Also unlike Wildlands, Breakpoint has some interesting bugs. My guess is that they took a variant build of Wildlands, probably before that game was even fully completed and patched, and started designing for Breakpoint. Then...a few things happened, in no particular order as follows.

First, Ubisoft got flack from the Bolivian government for using Bolivia as the setting for Wildlands. They were chastised by some groups at the time for depicting a real world country, even if it was a fictionalized account of such, intermixed with a somewhat fictitious but nonetheless inspired depiction of Mexican and South American drug cartels. For better or worse it actually made the game feel more interesting a bit "authentic" in the way that so many other modern shooters tend to fail at, and I very much enjoyed the game's attempts at ambient action, adventure and exploration in a faux Bolivia against faux Mexican cartels.

Second, Ubisoft had lots of bugs early on but they worked through them, and in similar fashion to The Division around a year in Wildlands was a very polished experience. Unfortunately, for better or worse Ubisoft pushed hard on getting people to not only enjoy the game's single player (and co-op) campaign, but they really wanted people to participate in the Ghost War multiplayer. Fair disclosure: I never even tried Ghost War and only played co-op with family, so consider that my appreciation for Wildlands was 100% about the PvE element of the game.

The net result of these events resulted, perhaps, in the reason Breakpoint is a bit of an odd duck. What Breakpoint does strangely may be entirely a result of Ubisoft's efforts, visible in almost all recent games, to clean up any politically contentious content in favor of something less offensive to all....and in the process making a product which ends up feeling like it has no backbone and stands for nothing. Here's how:

Breakpoint, in contrast with Wildlands and other Ghost Recon titles of the past, takes place in a fictional series of islands in a difficult to identify region of the world where an Elon Musk-like tech genius had decided to forge a new utopian society. He brings a PMC group in, the Sentinels, to serve as a temporary (?) military force, but in short order the PMCs take over and turn the production of good technology to bad. The island goes black....and the Ghosts are sent in. Within the span of the first cutscene the entire ghost operation is wiped out and only your character and a handful of survivors are left to regroup.

The villain in this game is technology; corporatism; militia-themed mercenaries (?); and the island is populated by what come across as random Silicon Valley people out picnicking and unsure of what to do in the midst of all the chaos, while extremely well funded and armed mercs hunt you with exactly as much skill as the difficulty level you decide to play at. To add some gravitas, one of the mercs is an ex-ghost who you previously trusted, so we have the "payback" plot bit mixed in, too.

Contrast this with how Wildlands handled it: the ghosts were meddlers, sent with deniability by the US to support a black op run in Bolivia to take out a dangerous collective of cartels which had siezed control of Bolivia and were turning the drug empire into a true international threat. The story was about the local agents you assisted, the rebels fighting both corruption in their government and the new cartels, and you had at least three factions to deal with, one of which was friendly to you. You also had ally NPCs you could default to playing with, and that made for some hilarious fun if you don't have anyone else to play this kind of game with.

In the end, with Wildlands, you learn a great deal about the malevolent, misguided and sometimes tragic personalities behind the cartel, while the government that lets it all unfold remains an oddly faceless aggressor in the background. Your character's stake is personal in that he/she gets the job done, no matter the cost...and you see the local dramas unfold. It was interesting, and a brave approach to storytelling for this kind of game.

Breakpoint, in contrast, manages an interesting story of personal grudges that makes the event very personal to your character, but in the course of doing so it removed most of the visceral level of story immersion Wildlands provided by making far too much of the fictional islands you are trapped on feel like "Video Game Land Gone Wrong," rather than a real place. They could have set this in Disneyworld and come up with some bizarre explanation for why you can't leave until everyone who's wronged you is dead and it would have made as much sense, in other words.

Examples of what I mean: travel in Wildlands for a while and you encounters towns, villages, graveyards, travelers who you must avoid killing because you're here to help, occasional narco patrols and occasional government troops. In Breakpoint you get evenly spaced random gangs of mercenaries with poor far-sightedness, occasional rare weird ruins of a mystery civilization, and small groups of what look like techies who were out on a picnic when the mercs took over and aren't sure what to do.

Despite all this, I am enjoying Breakpoint a lot. The personal story is good, the side quests are interesting enough, and so far the "busy work" collectible stuff seems to exist but I haven't yet felt compelled to pursue it. There's some sort of season pass nonsense buried in the game but like the microtransaction store I am simply ignoring it; none of that stuff matters if you play this for single-player or casual co-op.

Now, that said, one thing this game has a ton of and your tolerance may vary on is bugs. Playing Breakpoint right now feels like reading a really fun but poorly edited book, filled with typos and sometimes egregious grammatical errors. You keep thinking, "This book is great, but the author really needs to get a real editor!" --Yeah, Breakpoint is exactly like that. "This game is great, but man they really need like 100 patches!"

Some of the errors are just comical. If I don't see a load screen where my character is tightly gripping empty air where a gun should be then I just don't feel like I'm playing Breakpoint, you know? If  I don't see trees swaying in the wind, down to the trunk bases embedded in the earth, then how would I know I'm in a buggy early Ubisoft release? What would this game be like if my character's context-sensitive commands didn't get confused with some items being too close to one another (such as motorcycles)? If my character's climbing, swimming and running animations don't occasionally get jiggy....you get the idea.

My theory is that they started work on Breakpoint before they were finished cleaning and perfecting Wildlands. My second theory is that they started work on Breakpoint after Wildlands released, and had to scramble to build the content, overlooking lots of these visual and action issues to pump out the product. So either they worked on a build that deviated from an early Wildlands code, or they worked on a post-Wildlands code under a tight deadline. Either way....Breakpoint is the result.

For some, the bugs are sheer insanity and induce levels of hatred best expressed by a guy like Angry Joe. I haven't experienced all the bugs he has (and his problems may stem from the multiplayer aspect in ways I can't see in single player as easily), but I have seen some of them and they really stand out when encountered. For others like myself, these are not game breakers, but I trust Ubisoft to patch as much as they can. Some though....I have a theory here about some of these bugs, and it goes like this:

Wildlands let you run up and down mountains with no visible windedness, and sometimes with terrain that defied the logic of your movement (try running up a steep stream on a mountainside in real life to contrast with how you can do that in Wildlands). My theory is that a programmer at Ubisoft really didn't like this, and had a brilliant idea for more nuanced terrain movement in Wildlands, but he was shot down because it caused implementation issues, and they needed to get a working product out over a more nuanced, realistic product.

Cut to Breakpoint; that developer has more say and points out with Breakpoint there is time to implement this system of movement with terrain. They green light it, and we end up getting a context-sensitive movement system where your character slogs through marshes, struggles up steep slopes, can slide and fall, has great swimming animations when the water is deep enough, and can demonstrate fatigue over time. Other things, such as resting at bivouacs to get perks toward movement and tweaking of the stealth/hunched movement are implemented. Someone, very specifically the person who likes these, is extremely pleased with the result. Then the game is exposed to everyone else.

Now we have a game system which simultaneously feels more realistic in its movements while also leading to a constant series of fringe cases in which your character's movements can be mildly to severely annoying, especially if they start gyrating when you least want them to, the best example being when too many items you can interact with are too close to one another. Terrain that is "right on the edge" can cause strange actions such as swimming for a second down a shallow stream, or unexpectedly plunging down cliffs that you had seconds before seemed okay with hurdling.

To me....the fringe cases have been amusing and mildly annoying, but easily overlooked; I kind of like this context-sensitive movement...when it works well. But for others, especially the "angry video game reviewer" crowd? Yeah, they hate this stuff. And by hate, I mean....love to make videos showing their hate. They are not wrong, though. I think a cleaner movement system like Wildlands is less cumbersome in the long run; but Breakpoint may be the "test bed" for Ubisoft's next game which gets this nuanced movement right. Hey....it happened with Assassin's Creed, it can happen here!

Another random gripe: why can't I recreate or port over my Wildland's character to Breakpoint? Why are the character models in Breakpoint less interesting and universally uglier than the ones from Wildlands? Why does blood on my character like look strawberry jam? Did they not see the flak Moderrn Warfare 2 got for the "strawberry jam = blood" effect?

Finally: here's my weird pet peeve. What ancient culture resided on the island, leaving behind all these strange monuments that look like the love child a Viking and a Hawaiian? Seriously; mor than anything, their ambiguous unidentifiable imaginary indigenous culture drive me nuts. It better be reptilians is all I can say.

Anyway.....I just wanted to ramble for a while about this game. I feel Ubisoft waffled in making "big tech company + PMCs" the villain, and they experimented with an open world that led to new bugs, but still made a fun game. Right now I'm going to rate this game a B- or maybe C+, but we'll see where it's at in a few months with patches, and whether or not their future content releases are worth investigating. Time will tell....

2018 Computer Gaming in Review

Like the tabletop RPG gaming post, I find myself amused by the fact that far less of what I did this year with computer gaming was actually from 2018. Even worse, I have indulged in plenty of 2018 releases, but to be honest....not too many were all that impressive. This is not a great year for gaming, to be honest....especially not AAA gaming.

So without further delay: here's the Realms of Chirak Household Gaming Top Six List for "Things we Played and Liked" in 2018:

#6: Vampyr
 
   I think this came out a year ago, but it is notable for being the only 3PS role playing game I have bought this year that is not a distinctive Sony exclusive. It's a great story about Victorian London during a rash of sickness and plague and the physician who finds himself an unwitting vampire. Very much enjoying this one, check it out!

#5: Fortnite

   As a family we have played a lot of Fortnite in the last year. It's ironic because back in 2017 (or was it 2016?) I bought the zombie-killing fortress building retail version of this game for my son and I to play together. We weren't so excited about that mode it turns out, but Battle Royale ended up getting us back in to it.
   This game has the following features going for it:
--it's basically family friendly as shooters go (if you mute the snotty kids in squads)
--you can group up in the game as a team (great for mom, son and dad to play together)
--it's Battle Royale mode is free (but yes you will end up wanting to spend money on v-bucks Just Because)
--just when you get tired of it, a new season starts; also, if you give up the idea of actually being good at it you can instead play the "challenges and achievements minigame" which is honestly the only way to get anywhere in Fortnite anyway unless you are aged 15-25 and stream on Twitch.

#4: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

   Did I review this game last year? I played a lot of it, but I kept on playing in 2018 and finished the full campaign then dived right in to the weird DLC. I don't know if this game is ultimately a "reccommend to all" sort of deal, but Ghost Recon: Wildlands uniquely exotic and fun version of fictional Bolivia is a pleasure to explore, and filled with interesting open world content. I continue to revisit the game even months after completing the content.

#3: Watch Dogs 2

   Yeah, over two years since it was released and I finally finished this game, but continue to love it. The theme of millennial hackers vs. the evil cyphers for Google and Facebook is a fantastic open world experience, and I really appreciate that the game let me play a non-lethal character for 95% of the experience. The multiplayer component is singularly unique and digital San Francisco was loads of fun to explore. I am done with it now, but I spent a lot of time getting to this point in 2018.

#2: Diablo III Eternal Collection

   Speaking of family games, Diablo III Eternal Collection on the Switch has also proven to be a household hit. Remember, the family that slays demons together stays together! We all have copies, and have engaged in lengthy demon-slaying sessions. I think my wife and son are way ahead of me, however. Once again, though....this game is several years old, but thanks to a new release of a very good port to a dedicated handheld-optional game console, it's well worth playing again.

#1: The Switch

   This location gets reserved for the portable hybrid console which Nintendo has championed. The Switch is loaded with content that just works for fun entertainment, as only the Switch can deliver. There are games on the Switch (such as Dead Cells, Bayonetta and Octopath Traveller) that I will happily engage with on the small screen in the comfort of bed or on a lawn chair that I would never bother with on a big screen with a regular console. And when I want to play the Switch on the big screen, or on co-op with the family? Piece of cake. I started with one months ago, and now we have three Switch consoles in the house, one for each of us.

Dishonorable Mention:

A lot of new and ongoing franchises just crapped the bed this year. In no particular order I feel that AAA gaming did itself little justice....at least for me. Here's the list of shame:

Call of Duty Black Ops IIII: buggy, crashes often, and needs lots of tweaking to make the Blackout mode ultimately worth my time as a filthy casual who can't compete with the hardcore leets. I load it up periodically and think about how cool it would be if they had a single player campaign I could enjoy, but then remember that they decided I am not their target demographic (solo player who likes a story with his FPS game). I need to make sure not to buy CoD anymore, it's like the game dumped me, but will still take my money.

Destiny 2: well, the problems with Destiny 2 are many, and I think they stem from the fact that Bungie doesn't know how to do a living world MMORPG. The fact that Destiny 1 content is gated off from the new game is an example of how they fail to do this right. The newer game has too much hardcore content and not enough stuff for filthy casuals who just want to do missions, have fun and NOT grind for armor and weapons. It has too many locations on odd worlds, asteroids and moons that are singular in their lack of interesting details (contrast with the much more interesting locales in the first game), and a restructured questing format that is just not at interesting as it used to be. I'm still playing, but only barely.

Star Wars Battlefront 2: As this game chugs on it continues to avoid re-introducing loot crates after the debacle last year, but they have added more content. Unfortunately most of the content is just not as good, and often leads less to strategic and interesting experiences on the map and instead leads to confusion and random nonsense. I am sure, if I had the energy, I could find the sweet spot for this one and get it to click, but I find it interesting that I found Battlefront 1 so accessible and fun, and the sequel is just so.....painful and random. I may delete it entirely (although my son might object so maybe not).

The Future:

There are a few games I look forward very much to playing in 2019, but I haven't gone far enough in to these games in 2018  to be able to speak on them much yet. These include:

Pathfinder: Kingmaker -- a computer game in Golarion, with Pathfinder rules!
Numenera: Tides of Torment -- I have it, and my interest in the RPG will get me to try this at last
Assassin's Creed: Origins and Odyssey -- yeah I'm two games behind on this now, still trying to finish Syndicate, but both of the new games I would like to visit in 2019.
Anthem: please EA don't let me down here.
Resident Evil 2 Remake: I can't stress how much I desperately want this game.
Division 2: absolutely looking forward to this one.

Light Post Week: A Very late Comparison of the Playstation 4 Pro to the Xbox One X

This week I upgraded to both the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X (don't ask; I just couldn't make up my mind to upgrade to one). Here is what I have noticed, for the tiny portion of you in the Venn Diagram who are both in to tabletop RPGs and also own consoles with enough interest to read this!

For those wondering why I bothered: last year I moved the household to 4K HDR-capable smart  televisions, and the only device I have which can utilize this resolution at all is the Xbox One  S right now.

Initial Upgrade Experience:

PS4 Pro upgraded by having me connect the new PS4 Pro to the old PS4, and it proceeded to copy over all the relevant files on to the new system, which took about 2.5 hours (the old PS4 was a 500GB HDD edition). Contrary to information online, I was able to detach my external hard drive and plug it in to the new one (once it finished the transfer) with no issues. 

Xbox One X  basically required some OS updating and then moved my account over while online. I took about an hour to migrate all games off of my old Xbox's internal hard drive to my 2TB external drive, but once that was done it was plug-and-play.

So both experiences were not bad to perform the account/game migration, but Xbox One X was a little faster and easier.

The 4K Movie Experience:

Ps4 Pro is apparently not designed with UHD Blu Rays in mind so I didn't even bother. Xbox One X is specifically designed so you can watch UHD Blu Rays as intended. It works...when I insert one of the few UHDs I've shelled out money for, it plays, and looks good. Not like "holy cow" good....all those people talking about how shocking the upscaling effects are, or the UHD quality or the HDR and so forth are all apparently gifted with more precise vision than I am (or only recently discovered this high def phenomenon), but the resolution feels "right." One thing for sure...anything less than a 1080p Blu Ray feels like an awful viewing experience these days. I need to upgrade my Star Trek film DVD collection some day!!!

The 4K Gaming Experience:

PS4 Pro is more like a "PS4 1.5" incremental upgrade. It has more power, and can render and process the games better, but everything I've read indicates that the console balances between graphical performance and framerate for the best experience. The result is games which you can (usually) tell are more enhanced than 1080p resolution, and often with smoother running experiences. I found this most notable in Destiny 2 and Watchdogs 2, and Horizon: Zero Dawn continued to look great, but some other games (such as Star Wars Battlefront 2) didn't look all that improved. Overall my experience so far has been, "Hmmmm....yeah, I think this looks a bit better. Wait, what did I pay for again???"

Xbox One X is not an incremental improvement, it's a hot new blazing machine and it's not bashful about showing this power off. Every game I've looked at so far which is on the "Enhanced for XB1X" list isn't just noticeably better, they're all shockingly better....running at a smooth framerate at 4K resolution. Games like Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War 4, and Halo 5: Guardians are simply amazing to look at. Halo 5 in particular is so sharp that playing it at the higher resolution is a huge contrast graphically to  my prior experience.

The enhancements for 3PP games on XB1X are a bit dicier so far, but there's no denying the performance improvements. Most notable is all of Ubisoft's titles: I have not seen Ghost Recon: Wildlands like this before, with 4K native resolution, smooth framerates and all the graphical bells and whistles turned on (that game still vexes and tantalizes me at the  same time, though). I could not achieve this on my PC (and to ugprade my PC to get this would cost a lot more than the Xbox One X did!) Titanfall 2 also looks amazing at 4K. 

So: if you only need one console to provide a 4K experience, Xbox One X is it. Hand's down, it's the better overall experience for the "current gen" console systems. PS4 still has a lot of love, but for the foreseeable future, until Sony catches up, Xbox One X has effectively become my new top dog in terms of gameplay power and performance. 

Death Bat's Top 5 Computer Games of 2017

Here it is! As the year come to a close, once again we review the year. I didn't get as much game time in this year as I'd have liked, but still somehow managed to squeeze some good ones in. So without further delay....

5. Game We Love to Hate to Love: Star Wars Battlefront II

Despite the negative press due to the ridiculous Loot Box issue spurred on by EA's bottomless pit of greed, Battlefront II remains a fun game to play and has a fantastic single player campaign. It contains split-screen co-op and competitive as well, which means my son and I can have fun together. It's the best Star Wars video game experience you can get right now. Despite the loot box controversy. Just....don't buy the loot boxes, m'kay? They turned that option off for now, but the consensus is that EA will retool it and turn it back on as soon as they think no one is looking.

Runner Up: Call of Duty WWII. Impressive multiplayer and a painful single player experience!

4. Best MMORPG Expansion: Morrowind for The Elder Scrolls Online

This robust entry into the DLC content for TESO was well worth exploring and added many hours of additional story-based content to what is arguably the only significant remaining innovative MMORPG on the market right now, in a market that is growing cobwebs otherwise.

Runner Up: Ummmm. Yeah.....I haven't bought any other new expansions for any MMOs this year.

3. Best new RPG+++: NIER: Automata

Look, Nier: Automata is a lot more than just an RPG, and it's also a lot more than just a JRPG. If you are a traditional RPG gamer with poor motor control skills this game is going to suck in many ways, but if you want to see how an RPG can genre-bend into a pretzel and remain a powerful RPG at the same time, then you really need to try N:A out. It's worth the experience, trust me.

Runner Up: Star Ocean: Faithlessness and Integrity, which actually came out in 2016 but I only just discovered it so....yeah. But a ton of fun!

2. Best new Shooter: Destiny 2

I loved the first Destiny and am very much enjoying the continuing story and evolving world of Destiny 2. I don't know if I can talk much about this game as a multiplayer experience, since I approach Destiny 2 like a single-player story-driven shooter experience, but if you play it that way then the game will be amazing....and anything else will just be a happy side perk.

Runner Up: Prey, which was also well worth getting for those who prefer single-player story driven experiences.

1. Best Adventure Game and Overall Game of the Year: Horizon: Zero Dawn

Alas this is only available on the PS4, but it's a good enough reason to actually buy a PS4 if you don't have one. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a better post-apocalyptic experience than you will find in just about any other RPG, as well as providing a distinct blend of open-world and story driven experience that does not get tiring with repetition and manages to impart a sense of urgency even as it tickles your need to explore in random directions. Best game I have played this year, hands down. A new expansion (The Frozen Wilds) recently released as well, and I have much more to play in this game.

Runner Up: Ghost Recon: Wildlands. This game has kept me playing in the post-apocalyptic wilds of Bolivia for months now and while it can get repetitive at times, the game does play best when you pay attention and strive for perfection.

Ghost Recon: Predator

I admit, I've spent a lot of time playing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands, thinking about how the engine for this game is really amazing, and hoping like hell that the bonus costume, the "wasteland warrior" suit, isn't just a fun oddity, but a suggestion that Ubisoft realizes that their "terrorize Bolivia" simulator would be even cooler as a post-apocalypse simulator, or a zombie survival sim, or even....wait for it....a Predator sim:



Well, looks like I got one of the three! Looking forward to trying this new mode out.....Wildlands was made to be a Predator sim.

Confession: I might be an Ubisoft fanboy

It just dawned on me last night, as I was wondering when my Gold Edition Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands key was going to show up from Green Man Gaming, while playing The Crew Completed Edition and Tom Clancy's The Division that I might....just might!.....be an Ubisoft fanboy. Or Drone. Or slave. Whatever works.

I'm not sure how it happened.....somehow, Ubisoft managed to produce a lengthy series of games that all, without exception, have grabbed me in a way where I just happen to enjoy playing them pretty much in to perpetuity. My PC and PS4 are littered with Ubisoft titles: Rainbow 6: Siege, Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal, and Assassins' Creed Syndicate on the PS4. The Division Gold Edition on both the PC and Xbox One. The Crew, Watch Dogs, Watch Dogs 2 and For Honor on the PC.

I've finished EVERY Assassin's Creed game released except for the 2D scrollers which annoy me and Syndicate, which I am plowing through.

I watched the AC movie unironically.

I love The Division so much that I have plowed through three character levelings in that game.

I'm currently playing The Crew and thinking about how it's more fun than World of Warcraft, and how it's basically like WoW if you could drive in to an auction house and knock everyone over. (Secret: it's not really that much like WoW, I just like the idea).



What the hell happened to me?!?!?!?

My theory is this: while many, many other games focus on a range of fantastical elements, the fantastical bits in Ubisoft games are tempered by an effort to ground the action in some version of "reality," and for some reason this approach really appeals to me. The Division, for example, is proving to be deeply more satisfying to me than poor Fallout 4, which while I enjoy it, the visceral "in the moment, this could happen in the near future" feel of The Division is much more immersive to me than the logic-straining alternate retro 50's future of Fallout. The Crew is am amusing nonsensical car adventure, and it's probably the least realistic of all the Ubisoft titles, but it still manages to be an open world adventure in a way no other car game has come close to (except Horizon 3, which is a whole other level of awesome).



Every Assassin's Creed game, assuming you buy in to the play mechanics, style of game, and "hidden weird history" themes, is a way to have a swashbuckling adventure that doesn't have to involve unrealistic magic and anime swords. Compare For Honor's fighting mechanics to....say....any Final Fantasy title. Nuff said.

Given that every Ubisoft title can take dozens or hundreds of hours to finish, I could technically just buy Ubisoft at this point and never lack for good gaming. I mean....even the Ubisoft Uplay app has been dramatically improved over the last few years. It used to be genuinely awful....these days it's just a mild annoyance, another Steam-wannabe that at least is slightly more functional than Origin.

Well, that was my revelation for the day.....