Up late talking games & writing? You're...

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BIG NEWS!!! So, in case you haven’t heard, NISA announced that they’re picking up the third Danganronpa game for US release this fall. Called Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls, it’s a third-person puzzle/action game… 

People who’ve played it tell me it’s awesome, and the past two titles have been pure greatness. GET HYPE!!!

If you’re in the mood for a little linkage, I got you covered.  

For starters, I guest on the @JoshAndJayShow podcast, and we chat about MH4U, Dying Light, Peter Molyneux, and a bunch of other random stuff. These guys put on one of my favorite pods, so give it a shot if you’re not already a fan.

In terms of new reviews, @Gamecritics ran a bunch over the last few days…

>Grow Home by @MikeSuskie

>Citizens of Earth by @JimB_85

>Kalimba by @GC_Danny

>Grey Goo by @Unangbangkay

>Gauntlet by @TayoGC

>Super Mega Baseball by Paul Stuart

>Fantasy Life by @TheGayGamer

>Criminal Girls: Invite Only by @KayinAmoh

>Guilty Gear Xrd –Sign- also by @KayinAmoh

>Rollers of the Realm by…. Me!  ^_^

Moving on to meatier topics, I talked about this on Twitter this morning, but I made a bit of an error… At least, an error in terms of how I usually like to play games.

In general, I don't like to take on more than one "big" thing at a time, and for me right now that's Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (which is awesome, so go buy it.) However, I also had a copy of Dying Light (also really great) and after talking to some people, it seemed like I could buzz through the critical path and get it knocked out. BUT, I ended up liking DL a lot more than I thought I would, and I've been doing all the side quests and, uh, greatly increasing my playtime.

In other games news, I want to give a shout-out to Hand of Fate, currently on PS4, Xbox One and PC and handcrafted by Defiant Development in Australia. My full review is coming soonish, but basically the game reminds me a lot of playing Dungeons & Dragons in real life.

As it begins, the player is sitting across from a sinister fortuneteller, and he invites you to play his game. If you agree (and are you really going to say no? I mean, you just dropped $20 on the download…) he deals fancy cards and lays them in various shapes – these cards on the table in front of you make the "dungeon" that you go through.

Each card represents an enemy encounter, a friendly character, a shop, or some other random situation. The player chooses where to go and resolves each one as they come. Some non-combat cards have you relying on luck to choose a correct outcome (do you give the priest 5 food, or not?) and the combat cards transport the player to a small arena to actually fight things out, Arkham Asylum style.

There's a full campaign mode with the ultimate goal of eliminating the fortuneteller’s army before taking on the fortuneteller himself, but there's also an endless mode that works well with the randomized nature of the design. One notable feature is that the player can actually add or take cards away from the deck, customizing what kind of experience is had.

It's not the kind of thing that I binge for hours at a time, but I've been playing a couple of rounds a night, and I think it's pretty fantastic. Also, everyone I've recommended it to has fallen in love with it, but it seems like there are still a number of people out there who haven't heard about this little gem. If playing a card-based semi-roguelike Dungeons & Dragons simulator seems like a thing that might be of interest to you, it comes with my highest possible recommendation. 

Having nothing but a great time with it so far.

******************PR/NEWS/INFO******************

This Dying Light CE is MADNESS.

From NISA:

We are happy to announce that there is a localized logo and new trailer available for Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, which will be available physically and digitally in North America and Europe in Fall 2015! To view the new trailer, please use the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v3OIa6teUE 

Second, we are also very happy to announce that the sadistically sinister Monokuma is back with Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, which will be making its way to North America and Europe in Fall 2015. This PlayStation®Vita exclusive will . This title will be available as both a physical and digital release. Unlike the first two games, players will take on the role of two heroines, Komaru Naegi and Toko Fukawa, in this action adventure game as they are thrust into a despair-ridden Towa City with one goal—escape. To view the new trailer, please use the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEVxS__Kjkk 

VIDEO: A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMM9IMV7f0A&feature=youtu.be

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VIDEO: Not A Hero

http://goo.gl/1mfoCg

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VIDEO: The Charnel House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaxVGEdpzc8

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CI Games today announced the official launch date of Lords of the Fallen: Ancient Labyrinth, the long-awaited DLC expansion that builds upon the existing lore, characters, and storyline of action-RPG hit Lords of the Fallen. Check out the video trailer.

Ancient Labyrinth incorporates an all-new storyline set in a long-forgotten library that exists somewhere between the human and demonic realms. With the DLC, players can explore the uncharted wilds of the Labyrinth, discover hidden secrets, and fight never-before-seen enemies with new weapons, shields, and armor, all in the name of destroying the evil that has shattered civilization.  Players can expect the same challenging gameplay as fan-favorite Lords of the Fallen, but with more rewards for playing through multiple times and exploring every dark corner of the Ancient Labyrinth.

Lords of the Fallen: Ancient Labyrinth DLC launches on Steam, Xbox One and PSN Europe on March 3rd and PlayStation 4 in the U.S. on March 4th.

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 Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital have announced that the much-anticipated sequel to the award-winning top-down shooter Hotline Miami will release March 10 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number and the Digital Special Edition are both available for pre-order now on Steam, GOG, and Humble (http://store.steampowered.com/app/27417).

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is the brutal conclusion to the Hotline Miami saga, set against a backdrop of escalating violence and retribution over spilled blood in the original game. Follow the paths of several distinct factions – each with their own questionable methods and uncertain motivations – as unforeseen consequences intersect and reality once again slips back into a brilliant haze of neon and bloodshed.

Hotline Miami fans can now pre-order to receive 10% off Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number and the Digital Special Edition that includes the exclusive Hotline Miami 2: Remix EP featuring six select music tracks remixed by M|O|O|N, Scattle and Carpenter Brut.

Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital have also partnered with Overkill Software to introduce exclusive new Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number masks and a “Jacket” character pack for PAYDAY 2 free to owners of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number and the Digital Special Edition (www.overkillsoftware.com/hotlinemiami2.)

For more information, please visit www.devolverdigital.com or follow @HotlineMiami and @DevolverDigital on Twitter. 

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Random thought -- I've been a collector of physical games (meaning discs, cartridges, and so on) for quite a while, but I've noticed over the last year or two that I haven't really been going after it like I used to. Part of it is that more and more of the games that I like (usually smaller, experimental or niche titles) only exist in an electronic download format, but another part of it is the changing nature of the games themselves.

Before I began, I was a little dismayed to see so many mediocre or indifferent reviews, and my Twitter feed was full of writers who were not shy about mentioning how bored they were, or how brown the game was. I took note of those criticisms, but at the same time, Dead Island (from the same developers) was a game that I deeply, deeply enjoyed and the critical sphere took great joy in crapping all over that, despite the fact that it went on to become a huge success with fans and spawned several offshoots. 

Suffice it to say, I expected that the same pattern might repeat here and I'm glad I didn't listen to the naysaying because I've been enjoying the hell out of it.

Apart from that, I've been finding the sidequests to be fascinating. Lots of unusual situations and interesting characters have been popping up, not to mention more than a little comedy. Although I'm usually the type of person who goes down the critical path in most games, I've been having a great deal of fun going from quest to quest and seeing what they have to offer. 

Some of them are simple fetches (and I skip most of those) but a surprising number have a lot of dialogue, and it's great to see some of the same characters popping up over and over again. One guy who gets his arm cut off by the main villain pops up later, he remembers that I was there, and he references past events before engaging me in what he's doing now. It’s kind of awesome. By following these quests I get loads of story mini-arcs, and it’s satisfying to see how these characters are faring.

I’d never seen this one before and I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world of the X-Men, but he was always a character that I enjoyed so it was great to see him again. Seems like he's got some nifty powers coming too. 

Speaking of which, my Luke Cage is almost maxed, and although I wasn't sure about him at first, he's become a recent favorite. If you play the game, my build for him is 5/3/5 because he hits like a wrecking ball in yellow and black, and I’d rather have that high offensive output rather than the little bits of defense over time that his red provides.

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Only four-ish more days until Monster Hunter 4: Ultimate comes out.

My full review will go up on February 10 when the embargo drops, so look for that soon. However, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that I'm not the kind of person who puts 100 hours into a bad game, so take that as you will…

With such a huge amount of time poured into Monster Hunter, I haven't had much time for anything else, but I took a break from hunting tonight to dip into Life Is Strange from DONTNOD Entertainment.

(Side note: Are these guys intentionally jinxing themselves with the names they come up with? DONTNOD, as in, don’t nod off while playing and fall asleep! And their last game was Remember Me, as in, please don’t find it too forgettable! Come on folks, this is all so awkward…)

Anyway, the general consensus on Twitter was that it was something worth dipping into, and since it's episodic in nature, I figured investing two hours and $5 in the first episode wasn't too much of a risk.

Essentially it's a Telltale-style adventure (Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, etc.) where the player walks around the world, exploring things and talking to people. No QTEs at all, though. Besides that, the most notable thing about it for me is that the protagonist is an average 18yo girl, and the people she meets pretty normal and realistic. Of course, videogame realistic, but realistic all the same. 

Clearly the developers want to add things for the player to interact and experiment with, but it was hard for me to do because it felt like I was doing illogical things given the level of realism, as opposed to the gamey artificiality of JRPGs where villagers don’t care if you steal every damn thing they own.  I mean, I'm playing an 18-year-old girl who’s reserved and pretty quiet… Why would I be poking my nose in places where it didn't belong?

Incidentally, the game shows your choices at the end of the episode, just like Telltale does. This time, they’re broken up into major story beats and a bunch of minor actions you can take, and I noticed that I did almost none of the small ones. Not surprising given how I felt like I shouldn’t be disturbing things or screwing around as I went.

One random thing I meant to blog about earlier, but forgot until just now: If you caught the @Gamecritics GOTY show, then you know that “we” picked Mario Kart 8 as our game of the year. Personally, I wouldn't have guessed that as our winner in a million years, but the votes were the votes, so what can you do?

Anyway, I hadn’t played it by the time we recorded that show, so I figured I should give it a spin. Gamefly sent it shortly after, so my son and I put a little of time in. Honestly, it seemed to me like standard Mario Kart -- not terrible by any means, but nothing really outstanding, either.

By sheer chance, Gamefly sent Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed (dat title!) just a couple of days later, and my son and I thought that was a more exciting, more entertaining game by a large margin. 

(It was brought to my attention by @TwinHumanities, so a shout-out to them!) 

Although the two games are essentially the same at the core, Sonic’s mechanic of transforming from a car to a plane to a boat (and back again) was pretty neat, the sense of speed was great, and the tracks were quite impressive with lots to look at, plenty of callouts for Sega fans, and frequent changes in topography. For example, during the first lap of a race, the player would have to go through in car mode. Coming around on the second lap, the track would fall away, requiring a quick transformation into aerial mode… Stuff like that.

Anyway, I don't remember many people talking about this game (because Sonic I’m guessing) but despite the fact that most of the games in that series have been pure crap lately, this one was a great time, and it easily eclipsed Mario Kart in our household.

If you haven't given it a try, it's worth a look!

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This post has been a long time coming.

Back when Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate was still going strong, I was convinced to write words about my history with the series and why I enjoy it so much… but I just never got around to it.

Mea culpa.

Now that we’re literally days away from Monster Hunter 4: Ultimate, there's no possible excuse for procrastinating any further.

To anyone who’s been waiting, my apologies for the delay. Also, this piece is dedicated to @J_Monster, who can take down an Azure Rathalos in approximately 42 seconds.

…So, Monster Hunter.

My history with the series has been a strange one, although I suppose that's fair since the series is somewhat strange itself.

A very rough start.

Although it wasn’t clear at the time how much was gameplay and how much was staged for show, the concepts were outstanding. Seeing hunters run through a forest with enormous weapons while fighting huge monsters? That was absolutely up my alley. And the suggestions of multiplayer? At the time I wasn't sure how it could possibly work given the limits of the PS2 technology, but I had already been a huge fan of Capcom for years by this point, so I was more than ready to see what they were going to deliver.

When the game actually came out… Well, let's just say that ‘disappointment’ doesn’t even begin to capture those feelings.

Although it wasn’t quite the all-out action I expected, the balance of going into town to craft items and take care of inventory before going out to kill monsters in the wild was fine. However, in this first iteration, attacking was controlled by moving the analog sticks. As anyone might guess, it was a pretty insane system. Worse, the game explained absolutely nothing about how it worked, or what was expected of me. I struggled through blindly until I made it to a desert area where the sand-swimming Cephadrome whupped my ass with impunity, so I threw up my hands in frustration and called it quits.

I didn't pay any attention to the various PSP versions that came later, but at some point on Twitter, I recall Dakota Grabowski running a contest and offering Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii as one of the prizes. I was lucky enough to win, so I figured trying a free copy to see how far the game had come was no great loss.

(So ultimately, getting back into the game was all his fault.)

Anyhow, it turned out that Tri was a huge improvement over the PS2 original, and good enough to get me to play to the end of the singleplayer campaign. However, I still walked away from it unsatisfied. Despite rolling credits, I didn't quite understand all the systems, and I didn't feel as though I got the experience that I was after. This “Big Monsters+Big Weapons” formula in Tri was missing something, so I turned to the most recent PSP version hoping that it would score where the others didn’t.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite was considered to be quite good in certain circles, so I tracked down a copy of that, and to be frank, Freedom Unite was absolutely amazing – it was just miles and miles better than what Tri delivered. This little UMD (remember those?) came packed with hundreds of hours of content, a vast menagerie of deadly creatures, and systems that were deeper than pretty much anything else I had seen at the time. It made Tri look shallow and dull, and I finally started to get a taste of what I was after.  

Of course, it’s worth noting that to play effectively on the PSP, a person had to master "The Claw" -- a ridiculous hand contortion needed to move the d-pad and analog nub at the same time. It is an absolute testament to the quality of that game that I put up with doing The Claw for over 300 hours, and I doubt there are any other games that I’d ever do it for again.

So, to sum up my Monster Hunter journey: I saw a really cool trailer ten-ish years ago, tried different versions of the game and was let down with all of them, and then finally came across a technically deficient handheld version that sucked me in and never let go.



But what exactly was it that sold me so hard once I got in?

Well, I think what I like most about the series is that there’s such a strong vision that connects the art design, the combat, and the world. It was clear to see in the original trailer, and it’s the sort of thing that I haven’t commonly seen in games over the last thirty years.

Hey, quit eating that honey, you slob! I need that!

It was also amazing to see that the artists and designers at Capcom took so much time to incorporate this idea of the natural world being such a factor into the player’s weaponry and armor. Rather than spending gold on an arbitrary piece of gear, every single thing the player wears or uses in battle is a trophy of previous successes. Very often, it's visually obvious to see where gear comes from just by looking at it – The scales and clawtips on a Rathalos helmet could only have come from the flying dragon itself, Khezu armor is just as pale and flabby as the cave-dweller is, and in general, the numerous bits and bobs from slain beasts are interwoven in all the designs. This expression of being a hunter speaks volumes about reinforcing the idea of the player’s role in a natural world.

Taking this same idea further, it’s over-the-top impressive that the developers crafted so many non-essential details to observe, and even made a whole library of cutscenes to flesh out the game’s ecology. Hang back in the shadows, and a Volvidon will use its long tongue to grab insects. The Barroth hangs out in mud pits, and the right bait on a beach will catch a Plesioth. As far as the videos I mentioned, most don't even appear during the game at all, but are instead found in an extras menu! This scene of the Qurupeco fishing is a favorite. That so much time and energy was devoted to creating these clips of the animals stalking their prey or having a goofy moment in their home territory show that the devs went the extra mile when approaching world creation, considering how it might really be if this nature existed, and imagining what if.

That same level of care and detail extends to the game’s technical side. For example, each weapon type has an amazing amount of depth. People coming to the series without taking the time to understand how it works often complain about how slow it feels, or how they can't get the same kind of ‘action-y’ feeling they might get from a God of War, or something similar – and that’s correct. Monster Hunter is not that game. However, each weapon is incredibly rich and strategic, and they must be understood to be appreciated.

Even Snake loves the Greatsword!

This massive blade is the signature weapon of the Monster Hunter series, and rightfully so. It's immense, intimidating, and absolutely effective when wielded properly, but like the other weapons, it requires work. Instead of swinging it around like a barbarian entering the fray, it's best used when the hunter knows where the prey is going to be, and even then, only to deal one or two massive slices before being sheathed as the hunter dodges away. This sort of "sniping" tactic isn’t what people expect, and is much more nuanced than one would assume at first glance.

The same goes for all the other weapons, from the way the Longsword encourages aggressive play in order to activate its special buffing power, or the way the Light Bowgunner needs to learn the elemental weaknesses of the monsters he's hunting in order to maximize the gun’s lower firepower, but greater flexibility. Each weapon is a complete experience unto itself, and the combat amply rewards people who find a favorite and fully engage.

Be afraid.

Working out team strategies about how to tackle a big monster adds yet another layer on top of an already-deep game, and going into battle with each player having their own specialty is amazing. Who’s in charge of traps? Did you bring a paintball? Distract the beast over there while I sharpen my blade. There's just so much opportunity for different dynamics, and so many ways to see the battles play out based on how many people are in the party, what weapons they're using, what resources are available, and what environment the battle is in.

The best thing is that little moments of emergent gameplay constantly pop up, and everyone who's ever played for any length of time inevitably has their own stories – that time a companion Felyne knocked a monster down at just the right moment and saved their ass, when they pulled off an incredible hit that knocked a dragon out of the skies, or when a split-second dodge escaped a crushing blow.

Some people describe Monster Hunter as quasi-MMO -- and perhaps that's true -- but the roots of the experience are squarely centered in Capcom’s action game history. The series has never lost sight of the exciting, visceral thrill of going up against a massive monster and emerging victorious, and I’m glad.

Of course, grinding out items to get better gear is absolutely important, but even more important is the player’s skill. Having a big sword is great, but the game demands mastery of a split-second sort. Without intimate familiarity with the prey and the knowledge of how to play the game, the kind of gear one has doesn't matter at all. I’ve seen some incredible players achieve incredible victories while their characters are nearly naked, proving that skill is absolutely integral to a successful hunt.

So, why do I love Monster Hunter so much?

I hope this brief writeup has gone some way towards explaining my love of the series. It really is a unique, monumental title that not only created its own genre, but continually outdoes itself with every new iteration. It keeps getting bigger, deeper, more nuanced and more complex, and unlike so many others, remains engaging on nearly every level.

I really can't think of many other games out there that come together in such a perfect package, so when all is said and done, I guess that’s why you could say I'm a fan.

And I am.

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