Author: Imperium Romanum

We all know how Spec Ops: The Line works by now, because I’m like half a decade late to this conversation. Part of the reason I’m writing about it now is because MrBTongue recently released a video about it in which he presumed that a significant chunk of his audience would be unfamiliar with its plot, which seems weird to me even from the perspective of someone who just woke up from having been napping since November of 2016.

Spec Ops is clearly a criticism of genre conventions revolving around the portrayal of US military action in FPS games. It’s often described as additionally being a criticism of the player for continuing to do terrible things just because they can’t progress in the game otherwise. That first one is fair enough. Deconstructing genre conventions is usually interesting on its own (especially for genres whose conventions were established by mindlessly aping the style of one particularly successful work while most or all of its substance is lost in a game of telephone), and often makes the genre stronger by pushing later creators to respond with reconstructions that remove the weak spots exploited by the deconstruction in the first place.

The second one has always bugged the Hell out of me, because it only works when it happens to land in front of someone to whom its criticisms apply. Undertale is a judgmental game to the point where there is a specific hall of judgment where one of the characters judges your actions, but it bases that judgment on the player’s choices. It’s not always fully accurate, but it comes across as characters in the world making mostly fair judgments to the best of the information available to them, and uses a fourth wall breaking narrative so that it can judge a Doylist entity – the player – by their Watsonian actions, by making them part of the Watsonian narrative.

Continue reading “Spec Ops: The Line Can’t Keep Doylist And Watsonian Actions Straight” →

Crimzon Clover: World Ignition is a bullet Hell game I usually play while listening to podcasts. I can’t really get any work done while listening to podcasts, but CGP Grey’s Hello Internet and especially Cortex have been really helpful in sorting out my workflow and actually getting things done, so I listen to those as they release even when I’m otherwise really busy. This means that I only play the game for a couple of hours once every week or two, but I do still play it regularly. Now, Crimzon Clover is a very well designed bullet Hell game whose difficulty reaches up to extreme levels, so when I say that I’ve gotten pretty good at the game, bear in mind that what that means is that I can almost beat the game without continues on the lower (of two) difficulty. I’ve actually made it a rule not to play with continues on any difficulty setting, because the game is actually quite trivial if you do. You can just hold the attack button down and you will eventually overcome everything, because there is no limit to the number of continues. You’d be limited by quarters if you went to Japan and found this game in an arcade, but I got it on Steam as part of a Humble Bundle so I can, technically, beat the game on any difficulty by taping down the z-key and going out to lunch. That’s not sporting, though, so single continue playthrough it is.

Now, the game is a respectably difficult bullet Hell by the time you reach level two out of five. Even someone who’s reasonably good at bullet Hell games in general is probably not making it past level three or four on their first playthrough, or even their first couple playthroughs. There are lots of different enemy types with lots of different attack patterns and learning them takes time (although none of them are cheap insta-gibs and it is theoretically possible to beat the game on a blind playthrough, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if super hardcore bullet Hell players have managed it on the lower difficulty). What this means is that even after what Steam tells me is 38 hours play, I still hadn’t beaten the game.

So when I showed up to the start of the final level with five extra lives (that’s extras, so a total of six deaths before it’s game over), I thought I was in a pretty good place. I had gotten the final boss halfway dead with just one extra life before. If I could get to the final confrontation with two, I’d have a real chance of making this my victory run.

Continue reading “Crimzon Clover” →

Monster Hunter World released lately, and I’m doing that thing I often do where I commiserate about not being able to afford the new thing by instead playing the old thing, specifically, Monster Hunter Tri. Monster Hunter, for those unaware, is a series where you hunt dinosaurs in order to wear their hides as a hit that will give you bonuses to hunting other monsters. Every game has the same plot: Go and hunt some monsters. Like, Tri does have some stuff about how there’s been some earthquakes near an island lately, and that’s caused some flooding, and also driven this giant leviathan up near the surface, and it’s pretty heavily implied that it’s left its deeper hunting grounds because something even bigger chased it out. Probably other Monster Hunter games have some kind of similar paper-thin plot, but they’re about as important as the framing story for a Mario game.

The aptonoth is a vaguely iguanadon-esque beasty that you encounter very early in the game. Here’s a gameplay shot so you can get a size comparison:

And here’s a more zoomed out shot so you can get a look at that thing’s tail:

Continue reading “Aptonoths: Weirdly Non-Threatening” →

It’s Imbolc. Celebrate the coming of spring by cleaning up the house and setting something on fire. Candles are traditional, but your neighbor’s car will also work.

Continue reading “Imbolc Update: Approaching the End of the Endless” →

So I still play about 30 minutes of Ace Combat Zero on a daily basis, maybe an hour if I’m towards the end of the campaign and completing two missions takes longer than normal (or sometimes I finish more than two because I’m towards the end and want to wrap it up). At this point I’m going back to get S-ranks on every mission, and I have discovered two things.

Continue reading “Ace Combat Zero: Lasers Solve Everything” →

I’ll admit (again) to a bit of clickbaitiness in this title, in that both these games have a fair amount of depth and I haven’t explored either deeply enough to know where that depth taps out. It’s possible that Alpha Centauri is a better game at high-level play that I’m not aware of.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not gonna find out. I don’t care if Alpha Centauri is really great at high level play, because it’s a boring slog on Specialist (difficulty 2/6) and so far as I can tell there’s no particularly good counter to the Human Hive infini-base strategy except to rush them down before they can get it going, which absolutely requires you to start within easy attack distance of them. The game has a bunch of weird, fiddly micromanagement with unit equipment that I’ve always ignored as much as possible because I’m creating dozens of units and don’t want to futz with exactly which gun each of them is holding. The differences in behavior between AI factions vanishes even on Talent (difficulty 3/6) as they all become obsessed with killing Player One even if their faction is supposed to be angled towards a diplomatic victory.

Continue reading “Beyond Earth Is A Better Game Than Alpha Centauri” →

I’ve written before about how every build outside of human has become an afterthought to Outside, to the point where many players who only own the Anthropocene Expansion don’t even know you can play as an animal. As a tiger main, this is kind of distressing to me, and today I’m going to talk about a related concept: The human meteor.

Continue reading “Outside: The Human Meteor” →

At this point, I have played most of the Assassin’s Creed series. I never buy these games unless they’re discounted to about $20 or less, and even then only if I have nothing else to spend the money on. Money has been particularly tight recently, which means I still haven’t bought Syndicate or Origins, and I still haven’t gotten around to Unity. I think I’ve played enough of this series to offer a retrospective on where exactly things went wrong, as it is generally agreed that things went wrong. Also, rambling about video games is relatively easy content, so here we go.

Continue reading “An Assassin’s Creed Retrospective” →