I wanted to see 2015 out with a bang. Just Cause 3 more than delivered.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Thoughts: Legacy Of The Void
The saga of Starcraft 2 has been quite a ride. If you look at the three “episodes” of SC2 as a single entity it’s something that’s been in development for nigh on a decade; when Blizzard announced they were splitting the game out into three race-specific releases I don’t think anyone anticipated it would take them five years from the release of Wings of Liberty to get this last installment out the door. Even for Blizzard, that’s slow. As it transpired, what they put in each box was easily worthy of the status of a full-fat game, which is probably why it took so long; however it also meant that the gaming landscape shifted dangerously under Blizzard’s feet while they were locked into their development process. When they first announced SC2 in 2007 the real-time strategy genre was showing serious signs of senescence, but there was still a huge appetite for it that afforded plenty of room for an old classic like SC2 to come roaring back onto the scene.
Thoughts: Fallout 4
Yes, we’ve made it to the fourth main outing of the inexplicably-populist post-apocalyptic open world RPG. Ever since Oblivion it seems that Bethesda have been incapable of doing anything wrong; each game they release experiences a couple of million more copies sold than the last one, and Fallout 4 doesn’t look like it’s in any danger of being an exception to that rule. That they salvaged the Fallout IP from the Interplay debacle and turned it into one of the most successful franchises in gaming is laudable; that their approach to Fallout 3 was to simply paste that IP over the top of Oblivion is less so. Don’t get me wrong, Fallout 3 achieved great success in splicing some of the core Fallout concepts together with the stock Bethesda open-world gameplay (guns, VATS), but this came at the cost of it being a noticeably shallower game than its predecessors in terms of actual RPG-ness. Even at the time I remember thinking that it was fine for a first outing, but that any follow-up should make better use of the setting and include such radical features as “an actual plot” instead of stunt-casting Liam Neeson and hoping nobody would notice it wasn’t there.
Thoughts: Big Pharma
16/11 – I made the mistake of buying Fallout 4, which is devouring an astonishing quantity of my free time. I’m getting close to the end (I think), but the review will have to wait until next week. I might throw up something short in the meantime.
Big Pharma, then. Looks a bit like Theme Hospital, tries the same thing Theme Hospital did of balancing the figuring-out-a-cure side of medicine with the more ruthless business bottom line of balancing books and crushing your competitors, but ultimately ends up doing neither of these things particularly well.
Thoughts: Vermintide
Well, if you want to try making a version of Left 4 Dead using the Warhammer IP, I suppose replacing all of the zombies with Skaven and the guns with actual giant warhammers is one way of doing it.
Thoughts: Tales From The Borderlands
You might be wondering why, after the relatively superlative review of episodes 1 & 2 of The Walking Dead on here three years ago, you never saw a followup review of episodes 3 through 5. Or, indeed, any other Telltale adventure game. The answer is pretty simple: after doing a pretty stellar job of implementing a genuinely branching plotline and choices that felt like they really mattered, episode 3 of The Walking Dead revealed it all to be a sham as it hammered the reset button by killing off most of the characters who had been introduced in the previous two episodes. After the various choices I’d made were revealed to be ultimately meaningless, and since TWD compromised pretty heavily on being an actual adventure game in order to try and maintain the illusion of those choices, this left a pretty bad taste in my mouth – I never played episodes 4 or 5 as I didn’t want to play it as a game, and once you took away the “choice” I didn’t think it was too hot narratively speaking either. There was nothing left to hook me in.