Articles tagged with: Videogames

LOTR Vol. I

I played and finished J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I. I must confess I had to use a guide, because the game a) has an archaic UI with commands and text inputs and b) contains quite a few bugs and game-over triggers (some of them not immediate), so I went the "safe enjoyment" route.

It's been so long since I read the books, and I've watched so many times the movies, that I feel I must read the original materials again to see if the game departs a bit in certain areas, or if it is correct and were Peter Jackson's movies the ones reordering certain events. But in general it felt an interesting adventure, with lots of text (thankfully!) and attempts to provide multiple choices and some kind of open-world mechanics, although sometimes it also meant that you do things wrong and don't know until later that you've effectively screwed up the game and should start over. In any case, I will soon play Vol. II, The Two Towers and see how much did it improved (if anything).

Final Fantasy VII Remake

I recently finished Final Fantasy VII Remake, and my general feeling is of sadness. The graphics are amazing, the music is amazing, the new combat system is action-packed and probably the best in the series, the bosses look incredible, some fragments of the game are really good... But despite really trying to, I couldn't get to love this "remake". It contains so much filler content, so many dull conversations, boring and repetitive secondary quests and all kinds of tricks to increase the length of a playthrough, that I really wish they instead just rebuilt the engine and left everything like in the original FFVII but with new Graphics and sound (and if anything, the new battles). There are also story changes, some of them extensions (way more secondary characters lore and interactions and conversations), some of them not bad (Shinra is more evil, or the whispers of fate are two good examples), but some... make me be aware of the next title.

I put the nostalgia glasses on (as a friend of me says), but precisely because of that I enjoyed it even less, because I had began playing the original last year and stopped at the precise same moment this title ends, and comparisons are bad, but sometimes inevitable. Or maybe I've also grown and are no longer a hyped teenager experiencing his first Final Fantasy title on a quite decent PC port (2x the PSX resolution and enhanced 3D effects!). I'm not sure exactly what the combination is, but what I really think is that this title is an attempt to move the fans into a new game, instead of representing a tribute to the old one. We'll see with the second title.

Elden Ring

I tried to avoid the hype, but it caught me. I am not a fan of the Dark Souls games mostly because I don't have enough spare time to endure the slow training the games require, so I cannot say that my time so far with Elden Ring has been amazing. But it hasn't been bad either, I clearly see that it is a really good game, just quite punishing and forcing you to learn the hard way (by dying a lot). I get the feeling that the story is half open to your imagination half "We didn't care much about it" (no matter who they say collaborated in the lore and/or script), and similarly it is an open world "without borders" but also sometimes feeling chaotic or at least far from being as polished as Zelda: Breath of the Wild's world.

I am around 30 hours in, still exploring mostly on my own, but I began taking small hints from a guide (for now just a map marking a recommended order of exploring the various game areas), because sometimes frustrates to be exploring for hours and then you realize you are in a high level zone and simply trying to escape you die, and then have to decide between spending +1h on recovering the gold runes versus doing anything else (in the game or in real life). I appreciate the openness but it is often too much for my taste, I would have loved some extra guidance, again as Zelda or a GTA or an Assassin's Creed do.

I will finish the game but I am surely not going to go hunt all the secrets, of which there seem to be many. I'll focus my knight on levelling enough to kill the bosses and do all main quests, while exploring from time to time but keeping in check the limits. Time is lately my most valuable and scarce asset.

Posted on 2022-04-28

Tags: Videogames

As I'm having some disappointment with Final Fantasy VII remake, which I am playing but far from enjoying as much as I expected (and sometimes even dreading "yet another tiring crappy quest to fill hours of content"), I decided to recap other games that I have played recently or that I am currently playing that relate somehow with RPGs. To be specific, with two sub-genres that keep getting better and better the more titles that appear.

Looter-Shooters

Looter-shooters are a curious genre. Derived from "lite RPGs" like Diablo, translate the same loop mechanics of "kill kill kill, and upgrade your equipment and hunt for better loot" to first or third-person shooters. The first game that I can remember did this was Borderlands (I have only played and finished the 1st, now it's a series), but there have been quite a few titles with varied success. In my case, I've played the main campaign of Outriders, and recently finished all the main and secondary missions of The Division, the later featuring an early slow game, but picking up the pace and becoming quite interesting near the end. Too bad I'm not often in the mood of endless gear grinding, not even in the Diablo games (I've done some in Diablo 3, but I get tired), and thus the "end-game" becomes more boring as the random missions you can repeat get less interesting, and PvP is not my thing.

Anyway, an interesting subgroup, especially now that I have FPS-fatigue after so many years playing so many games. And I have The Division 2 awaiting some other games that go first, so more fun incoming.

Adventure-RPGs

This is my own personal classification for the genre of games that combine adventure, action and lite-RPG items: quests, a few stats or "things to improve" and loot seeking. In the past my beloved Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave me now more than 200 hours of entertainment, but other titles that have slowly moved and even advanced further towards that trend are the Assassin's Creed videogame series. AC Origins was incredible to me as I love the pyramids, and after some years of pausing playing the series, was a breath of fresh air to have such a rich, incredibly detailed and awesome Egyptian open world. Then, last year I played AC Odyssey, and while I exhausted my patience with the (literally) hundreds of secondary quests before finishing the expansions/DLCs, again the rich Greek world depicted was extraordinary, plus finally you could play a female character in the series, and the tiny bits of humour in some conversations derived of playing a Spartan woman were priceless.

And now, I also recently purchased AC Valhalla to enjoy some nordic landscapes and classic culture. I'm just beginning the game, but clearly Ubi Soft are one of the best in creating virtual worlds... the scenarios go from spectacular to breathtaking, the weather effects are almost real, and details like watching Northen Lights (Aurora Borealis) or the intricate nordic designs and lore (viking women were probably more dangerous than spartans!) are signs that I will spend a great amount of time roaming the snowy lands and admiring the landscapes.

Posted on 2022-01-24

Tags: Videogames

I love the Diablo videogame series. I've easily poured in hundreds of hours on each title, both when they came out and afterwards, as I'm now using DevilutionX to play the original Diablo under Linux, Diablo 2 Resurrected on PC/Windows, and Diablo 3 on Nintendo Switch. Each of them has its unique flavour, but I've come to the conclusion that Diablo 3 is the most varied and entertaining one, and visually also the one not only most pleasing but also richer in dungeon and monster themes.

At a bit above 200 pages, The Art of Diablo III was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting an average art book, with a mixture of some cool but other mundane drawings, and instead the book contains an amazing selection. The videogame graphicsare excellent, and it looks gorgeous despite being in 3D, zoomed out and already more than 10 years old. But then, you see the sketches and coloured drawings of the cultists, the beastmen, the demons, even the money goblins... and it is a new level of quality. I'd like to print some of the pictures, if that serves as a measure. There are a few 3D screenshots, and small paragraphs of explanatory text, but mostly you get what you'd expect: drawings, concepts and sketches.

I know I'm biased, but to see different concept sketches of Diablo, the characters and even some of the backgrounds, is just great. Pretty much everything is around the quality of The Art of Blizzard Entertainment. If you like the game as much as I do, this is a great piece of art to collect.

Posted on 2022-01-09

Tags: Books Videogames

I recently read The Art of Tom Clancy's The Division because I'm playing the game from time to time; I got it for free a while ago and, despite initially discarding it, the truth is that, reality aside (even the most basic enemies are bullet-sponges), it is an entertaining shooter-looter (with tiny bits of RPG elements) and the setting and visuals is really great (and yes, the virus outbreak and "fighting against it" idea is one way for me to cope with our still ongoing pandemic).

And that's why I decided to grab the art book. A bit below 200 pages, with heavy graphical content and not much text (sometimes with terrible contrast, making it hard to read!), it is an amazing gallery of not only the final game locations, enemies and player clothing (there are tons of customization options), but also shows sketches, different iterations and discarded ideas both for characters and scenarios.

I am biased as I tend to love these kind of books, even for games that initially you'd think are not such a big deal, but one thing that Ubi Soft does really well is crafting incredibly detailed and ultra-realistic settings for their games. So much that they feel "more real than reality". The game is so full of details that I often stop to appreciate them before getting back into action. And with this book, you can get a bunch of nice examples without fear of getting killed by an enemy 😆

Posted on 2022-01-01

Tags: Books Videogames

Lately I'm a bit bored of just playing games, I miss a bit doing something more creative. I also miss my miniatures. So when I learned about a new game, Talespire, that allowed you to setup and play "boardgame" scenarios as if you had real painted miniatures (with amazing graphics), I wanted to give it a try.

I learned about the game by a blog post, once it was already available at Steam (it's in Early Access), but researching for this post I found that it comes from a successful Kickstarter. Both sources are a good starting point, but check the Steam early access trailer to see why I fell in love with it:

You easily add tiles, walls, props (furniture, decoration) and entities (human-controllable miniatures, NPCs and monsters), save it (everything works online), and then can play, alone or with friends (no AI, though), in a turn-based fashion. It struck me both as how simple it appeared, and really is, you decide how far you want to go adding detail. But the visuals are incredible, it really looks as if you had real high-quality painted miniatures. The die roll realistically, music and sound effects help immerse, and special effects and "atmospheric controls" (time of day, weather, and other visual and lighting conditions) allow to create the perfect setting no matter if you are exploring dark sewers, a dungeon or a mountain on a sunny day.

I encourage anyone interested to read the terminology guide and the player's guide to properly understand what you can (and can't) do. For example, the combat system is as good as many normal computer RPGs, with 4 stats, combat resolution, initiative-based turns and other tweaks, but it is not Dungeons & Dragons. I find it a great balance between a not-totally-freeform game engine (like Vassal) and Baldur's Gate.

Oh, and remember what I mentioned before about the Kickstarter campaign? You should check it out as it hints of things to come later, like character editing (at minimum changing the colors), or a Cyberpunk/sci-fi setting which looks as amazing as the main medieval one (and exactly what I thought, "I'd love to have a Cyberpunk 2020 equivalent!").

This is an example screenshot I took exploring an amazing castle uphill I downloaded from the community:

This was my first experiment, a small tavern made in a few minutes just after finishing the (in-game) tutorials:

And my last screenshot is a work in progress of a bigger experiment, a HeroQuest board. Need to learn to play with tile sizes to see if I can keep corridors same size as the original, while having cool walls and room dispositions, but still I think end up quite similar:

Of course the game is meant to be played with other people, but for now, to me it is a great way to relax assembling maps. I can pick any map from an adventure, or even cool randomly generated maps. Having your friends purchase the game to be able to play the campaigns can be a handicap, but the game is cheap, way less than any boardgame these days.

Before I finish, I wanted to also share a few great resources for inspiration and maps:

• Tales Tavern: Official website, acting both as a hub of player-created content, news, and tutorials (see next point)
• Tales Tavern Training Grounds: An official list of resources
• TaleSpire reddit: All things related with the game, from news to newest creations by people.

Posted on 2021-05-01

Tags: Boardgames RPG Tools Videogames