The more things stay the same

Master Rahool would look good in a Hawaiian Shirt

Some people think Video Games have come a long way over the few decades they've been around, and its irrefutable, games have gotten more imaginative and clever as time has come and gone. Some things, though, simply remain the same and you don't notice it until you look a bit deeper.

Take Battle Hunter. Its an extremely simple game, literally a board game for your console with a handful of plot points to serve as motivators.  It was fun, if a little tedious and dished out a poor serving of ass whooping unless you were particularly levelled and equipped, but fun none the less.  The gameplay was straight forward, bringing player from Battlefield to Hub and back again for no more reason than to find better gear and earn some dosh along the way.

Doesn't that sound familiar to a Space Shooter that was released about a year ago?  Funny that.

So here I am looking at it and wondering what the bloody difference there is between Destiny and some of the games of the '90s and early '00s and I'm finding it difficult to nail it down aside from the obvious things of "It's 3D and HD."

Frankly, Destiny could easily be recreated as an Indie game.  Get some Pixel Art in there and make it a side-scrolling shooter.  Keep all the same aspects to it and let the players go hogwild.  Then just add Flavour to taste and you're good as gold.

You can keep the Tower, just drop it down to a series of Menu options.  Frankly, it'd make the game more personable, making you feel like you actually have some sort of relationship with the NPCs of the Tower.  Because right now, Zavala is the Head of the FBI from Fringe, Cayde and Ikora are Captain and First Mate of the Firefly Serenity, and Banshee was great in Gears of War and Adventure Time.

To be fair, the DLC's have taken steps in that direction.  Cayde is still... well Nathan Fillon, but hey, I like him.  I'll keep him.

Destiny however, is getting pretty stale.  The marketing is, and probably always will be, a flagrant method of extortion, while the game may expand out and up it still comes back to being a repetitive grind for new gear in the end.

Still Talking Aesthetics

Please wait; Shader loading

The more I play games, the more I find superfluous features.  Take my latest obsession, Destiny.  There are more Aesthetics than there really needs to be in a Halo MMO that focuses on grinding out your equipment, and the developers saw that.

They looked at it all and said "why dont we actually do something about this junk and give it purpose?"  Or, more likely, the players said that and Bungie said "Oh, yeah, alright."

Ghosts will be getting a bunch of Shelłs that will provide subtle bonuses, for example.  Thats pretty huge on its own, especially if youre getting a bit more dosh as you pound your way through the cut and past characters you repeatedly mow down day after day.

Same witth Class Marks, usually only having the purpose of looking pretty, or showing your faction allegiance as you gain reputation with them.

But what will never change is shaders.  They will always be as simple as they sound, only changing by being removed as an Inventory Item and placed in a Kiosk for you to select at your choice.  What would be cool though is having a random option.  I mean that every time your character loads into a game, they are wearing a different shader.  One stroll through Venus will have you working for the Future War Cult, and then when you reach Mars you'll be Dead Orbit's personal mascot.

But why stop there?  That's not the only thing you have that serves little purpose no matter how different it is.  You also have your Ships and Sparrows!  So why not throw them in the random mix?!

I don't know if they'll be removed as an inventory Item like the Shaders, but damnit I don't see why they shouldn't be.  One doesn't find any difference in Ships, and sparrows have little differences in them in any case, so shove them all in the Kiosk, I say!  Let the shit sort itself out, and let me transmat onto any vehicle that the vendor decides!

Just like the Matrix it's all digital anyway, right?

Additional: I found that there is a new function called Emotes in Destiny.  Tack that on the list of random things when triggered. 

I fixed Destiny

There are many things i would like to see more of in Destiny 2. But I got to thinking today as I was playing the demo on my PS4 (Still debating on getting The Taken King) was how I would have liked things different.

And I don't just mean like minor differences, I mean a completely different game. Destiny: the Playstation/Xbox Editions. Have their similarities, like fighting on Earth and Chad (Commonly known as Moon) and Mars and Venus, Etc etc, but have completely different locations. The Cabal Landed on Venus in the Playstation version; the Hive have an entire fortress hidden on Mars for the Xbox Version; The Vex and Fallen have been fighting at another Space Station on one or the other. Either way, really mix up the different games.

Then there's the classes. You have 3 classes, so why not give them unique stories? A different set of missions you can play exclusively for them? And the only way you can have others play with you is if you're leading the Fireteam! You can have the same team three times, hopping between Fireteam leaders, and have differing experiences altogether. Or better yet, those who have all three classes can go around and play through whatever story missions on their own! That adds story to the game by threefold! Each character doing their own thing and all culminating into Strikes that anyone can attend!

And then double that again for the differing consoles!

I fixed Destiny. Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Self Blindness

What has been seen cannot be unseen

I was looking at a Kotaku post about the ideal shooter and it struck me as pretty true.  The points of being a shooter were spot on, and the biggest thing I agreed with was the lack of verticality that Valve apparently implored other developers in past interviews.

The thing that stuck with me was the point about Feedback, where shooting something did more than just an arbitrary "You hit" notice.  You had a visual impact, whether it was the shattering of a pane of glass, to the flinch and limp of an enemy on their last legs.  And it got me thinking about another post about Number Games.

I've been playing Half Life 2 and I've gotten back to actually tracking how much ammunition it takes to drop an enemy.  It's something I've done for ages, all the way back to playing Doom.  It made the difference between knowing I have the right weapon and having to back pedal out of dodge.

Some other games I've played don't have to worry about that because of Health Bars and Digits.  You get to know if you've clocked someone in the head and how much that should impede them.  If you get one lucky sniper shot into someone's head and it only takes off 25% of that bar, you already know you're in for a bad time.

So how much of a difference would it make to just drop the bar entirely?

Borderlands The Pre-Sequel is my latest game to have this.  They've always had the digits jump out on a successful hit and it's bothered me a little because it would get in the way of what I was aiming for, especially if I had a bee line for someone's head.

On top of that, it provided the information of what I could use to counter it. Red Bars required Fire.  Blue required Shock.  Yellow required Corrosive.  After that, you could explode them or freeze them.  Sometimes it was pretty obvious what was required to take down whatever behemoth or minion was throwing themselves at you, but occasionally it didn't.  That was what make me think.  If I had to figure out what I had to use, then that'd make the game very different.

Sure, the game provides those visual effects to show that "Hey, they've lost shield" or "this element is super effective against such and such", but it's a bit overshadowed by the cacophony of digits jumping out from the guy like hordes of rats from a sinking ship.  The only thing that doesn't is when the enemy is on about 15% health and is limping their way towards you.

I look back at Xcom: Enemy Unknown.  There's an option that I'm going to use on it's next expansion which removes the Health Bar from enemies, so you have to guess how hard you have to hit something before you move on.  It's a little thing that can change how you play.

Do I want that for other games?  Not necessarily.  But I would like the option.

Struggle Town, Destiny

Please fill in the Blanks

It's been irking me for weeks, this game.  I jump on there every day, fulfill a few bounties, and then log off to do whatever.  The game has become a chore, with seemingly superfluous goals.  Levelling up faction scores just to make better gear available.

But what really bothers me is that the game is so shallow.  Like, immensely shallow.  I know the four zones inside and out.  I know how to blitz a story mission from the get go.  It's just the same thing over and over again.

But I can only say that it's my fault.  I continue to look at it at a glance and think "it's an MMO", but then my second thoughts say "No, they never said it was an MMO."  Then my third thoughts say "It fucking well should be an MMO."

When I think MMO, I think of games like World of Warcraft, and Wildstar.  They have IMMENSE worlds which can take days to full explore.  Not to mention it takes about the same time to reach the maximum level.

Destiny as a single player game feels much like a Halo game, where you can finish the game in a matter of hours, and to top it off you'll be at maximum level.  Then after that, you're just repeating the same missions, regularly doing the same thing twice in a row.

The story itself is incredulously shallow too.  There's little definition in anything.  The Traveller lost to the darkness, and now uses Guardians to fight them off.  You as a Guardian find a Russian Warmind, travel to other planets to get more information and pieces to access the secret realm where you end up fighting what's considered a God.

And Bob's your mothers brother, that's the story.  Not "In a nutshell".  The nutshell is the story.  I know it's a template to develop other stories within the game, but goddamn it you could've started off with a better starting story.

All in all, I can't look at it as an MMO.  I struggle to call it anything more than a Template.  The potential is too large for it as a start, and I am getting very tired of playing the game only to complete some daily missions for little return.

I want this game to succeed and fulfill all that potential, and I'm annoyed to say that I will be investing more into the game, just because of that fact.  I just hope that by my investment, I won't regret it.

Fraternising with the Locals

"You refuse to play Crucible?  I don't date cowards."
- Lord Aaron D

So part of destiny is that it is a Social Game.  You'll always see other players roaming about, farming materials, shooting enemies of the Traveller, or just dancing on Venus to the Guardians of the Galaxy Soundtrack.

Occasionally, you'll join a fireteam, whether through matchmaking or just someone randomly inviting you at the tower, and, just as meeting them in the bar, they'll always be a character.

One time during a Strike mission, I was matched up with these two guys and we took down a Fallen Devil Walker, a massive spider tank that I'm a bit of a fan of.

Then I got a message in Xbox live.

"Asshole".

Well fuck you too buddy, I first thought.  Nobody should just be called an asshole from nowhere.  I've had strangers in cars drive by and call me a racist cunt before, and I just let them drive on and wish them a fiery and gruesome car crash for wasting two seconds of my time.

But this cropped out of nowhere.  I didn't do anything against him, we were all in this together.  We were fighting the good fight.  Brothers in arms.  So I just sent him the most complicated question in the world. "Why?"

"He needed to kill that Walker."

Fair cop.  I thought kills of this nature were shared between the team,  it apparently is not.  That is the surprise of Destiny.  I apologised and said that he can find the same Walker in Patrol missions, but that just wasn't enough apparently.  But we finished the mission, and parted ways, but it stuck with me.

Like a guy I met the other day.  We began talking, I told him my history and he was like "Yeah... We have a lot of blacks."

My face scrunched up, much to his obliviousness, and said the only thing I could scrounge up. "Okaaaaayyyyy..."

"Yeah, there's a few good ones, like they're smart and stuff, but... They're mostly pretty dumb."

"... Right."

I just couldn't believe this topic just cropped up, literally out of nothing. I did my best and turned it back to killing shit in Destiny, but it continued to niggle in my mind that this random guy just immediately began ragging on the local African American Community for no apparent reason.  It just threw me off the bus and made me walk the rest of the way to school.

I haven't spoken to him since, but he'll still be in the back of my mind when I get a fireteam request, because there's always a chance someone will just be weirdly offensive.

Destiny-ville

Do not adjust your television set.

Destiny has an equipment setup that mimics an old saying back home: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  They've got a limited set of space, and you can disassemble it for materials to improve on other weapons.  It's a great system.

In turn, there'll always be someone who will take the time to find a way to maximise on that, collecting items and equipment, occasionally getting very special pieces of equipment, and repeating the process to their hearts content.

Introducing the Loot Cave.  You shoot into a dark cave from across the map and repeat until you run out of ammo or someone else runs into the cave.  Then you go in, pick up your engrams and refresh your ammo, and the repeat the entire process.  With the system Destiny has in place, you can essentially repeat this until you're filled out with Blue and Purple Uncoded Engrams (which would regularly turn into green engrams or other materials).

This is an oversight from the Bungie crew who should have picked up on this in the testing phase.  Because that shit is not in the spirit of gaming.  Sure, equipment can be hard to come by.  You could spend a week trying to fill in some slots with better gear, but you'll end up with everything but.  That's annoying, but it encourages you to keep playing different missions.  The downside to that is that there is a good chance you'll repeat it very quickly.

But I still admire the system.  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  And with the shared Vault, if you get something not for your main's class, you can fob it off to your alts.  That's just giggity.

RAID?!

I walked into the bathroom the other day and saw probably the hairiest bug I'd ever seen here.  Turns out it was a centipede, barely two inches long, just enjoying itself and waiting for food to toddle out.  I killed it and dropped it off at the pool with some kids, because other kids would have landed in a ditch if Jenny saw it.

But it put me in perspective of what the Raids are like.  If you were a Dungeon Master, looking down on the puny Guardians, blindly walking through the maze that is Destiny's Raid, it would be like watching ants searching for the other end.  Only with more gunfire.

That was what interested me about the raid though.  You get six players, from your friends list or your clan, and you all get thrown into this arena.  Then you figure it out as you go along.  Not solve how to plough through it, but figure out what to do in the friggin first place.  It's a maze that you throw yourself into, and you're on your own.  Abandoned.  Nothing but your friends to help search.

I'm not entirely sure of what goals there are to complete, whether there's a "defend this spot" or "kill this boss".  I'm actually trying my best to avoid spoilers about it so that when I have my moment of jumping in there, I can really enjoy it.

Though, I can only hope it doesn't take 8 hours.

Destined Tuesdays

Rockin out with my Rifle out

With Destiny now out and the regular changes it makes, I can really start talking about it. And I must say, I'm a little disillusioned with it. It's advertised as an enormous game, like no other before... But it's not that big?

Yes, there are several Zones to the game, and they're very big and intricate, knitted together like your mums crochet blankets, and a seemless transition of instances that can only be noted by the loading or disappearance of other characters. But...

My friend Scotty explained it best. "For a shooter, it's pretty big. For an MMO, it's tiny." And it's true. Though I may be a little spoilt by Borderlands, which I think might be a little bigger in area.

The there's the range of enemies which feel a little limited, and certain ones are very limited. Like Devil Walkers, a fat spider tank that the Jacka- Fallen use. It's pretty badass. But I know of three instances where I can fight one. I would very much so like to fight these mo' fuggas more often. Otherwise, there's about four or five variations of enemies within each of the four factions, not including Elite Units.

But, I shouldn't hold that against them. What I should hold against them is the annoying fucking snipers. Fallen will have Vandals that'll park themselves in the most convenient of places for themselves and while Im busy taking on all the Dregs, and suddenly get clocked in the side of the dial. Same goes with friggin Hobgoblins. Sure I can dick punch them with some counter sniping, but then I have Goblins and Minotaur encroaching and while they may act like Imperial Battle Droids, they're still a bad day in Kalamazoo.

The most fun I've had have been taking down the Bouncy Space Mar- The Cabal. They're big, they're only a little dopey, and seeing their helmets explode off like a Texas Tea Fountain when you Crit-kill them never gets old.

Actually, I lie. The most fun I've had is the Sword of Crota mission, on the moon. Becuase for just a small part of the mission, you run around with a mo' fuggin Sword, kicking Floo- Hive arse and taking names. The sudden change of weapon changes is seemless, because you're still using all the same buttons, but now you're slicing and dicing like a Barbaric Gordon Ramsay at the local Butchers.

I had such a blast, and I'm happy to do that again with friends.

But that's the problem. I'm still in the dark age, so to speak, roaming through the solar system on my Gho- Sparrow all on my lonesome because my friends have the Playstation 4 version. They've even made a clan that I can't join because I don't have a Playstation copy of the game.

But good thing though, the game has been pretty good in terms of friendly players. They've been as determined as I have in completing goals and turning bosses Swiss. I've even friended a couple because we had this awesome rampage going on doing Strike Playlists.

I should really complete one of those soon.

With this though, along with a 10 year commitment, I do hope they severely expand out the game. Not only with more enemies and environments, but more interesting encounters. That's the most important thing. Because as much as slogging through enemies after enemies can be fun, it's still limited in how much fun can be yanked out. The raids being made available this week should be a nice change of pace, I hope, but I don't know when or how I'll be able to play one of those.

Her name is AN053, and she's a Robot Tank

Firepower comes separately

I've been waiting patiently for a chance at Destiny for a long time now, especially in the week Scott Hyped it up for me while he played the Playstation Beta. It got to the point where I publicly declared on Facebook that I would do anything to get a Beta key for the 360, my one and only console.

Sadly, my cries were ignored. But that doesn't matter since the game became publicly open.

What luck! All I had to do was wait for the download and go on with it, making my characters and classes that I had planned out and testing every inch of the game until it ended on Sunday.

I danced around in excitement as it downloaded, all the while Jenny laughing at me and my giddiness.

But at 11pm, while Jenny was fast asleep, it was done. I put on the headphones and got myself comfortable for the long haul to level up at least 3 characters to the Beta Limit before it ends. And hopefully, they'll rollover if and/or when I get the full game.

So I run through the tutorial and start analysing it. Everything is so very clean and clinical when it comes to the User Interface. Icons and frames with soft colours and clean sillouettes. The rest of the world looks more detailed, the Tower being much more Science Fiction than Old Russia, the playable PvE field in the Beta.

It uses a cursor when interacting with menus, rather than something like a D-pad. It's a very clever move, because there's a heap of stuff to go through. If I were to make a suggestion with the menus, it would be to lose the shaded background when viewing the character. Just use the environment as the background, and the model would just be the toon as it is at the time.

The one thing that has Irked me the most is the Blip-dar. I say Blip-dar because it's not so much a Radar as you would think from a Bungie Developer. It's got a different method of execution than what Halo does. Halo has a Motion Tracker, meaning if anything moves within the radius of your radar, you get a dot of them showing up.

This takes 17 different pieces to show you there are enemies nearby. Friendlies pop up as little triangles as normal, so you know where they actually are. But enemies? Forget about it. They're in one of 8 directions, or on top of you. But be sure to spend a moment spinning around trying to find those last ones.

Otherwise, the game plays very much like Halo. Jumping, hiding, dodging; Needlers are chasing you between dodging light rifle fire; you speed along the terrain on your own personal ghost; and your own sexy robot intelligence is talking to you constantly. The comparisons are very literally endless.

The RPG factor, now that's a corker. Everything levels up. You're gaining experience for your weapons and armour so you can take advantage of their special features down the track, features of which are rarely the same between two weapons. I imagine that'll get tiresome after a while, having to restart levelling your equipment each time you get a new pair of shoes, but it would pay off, surely.

I mean, I have Automatic Rifles that deal additional damage on the second half of the clip. I have Sniper Rifles that have a near-instant reload if I kill with the final round. I have Rocket Launchers that fire three projectiles at the cost of 1 ammunition. Each weapon will always be different, and I can't wait to see higher level weapon shenanigans.

For the time of the Open Beta, I flogged the shit out of Old Russia's Cosmodrome. I played all three classes and though I didn't fully level up their abilities, I had so much fun. Especially the Hunter. The THUNK of his knife backhanding everything (And I mean EVERYTHING) in the face before just chucking it at the next sod in line had me giggling in my sleep deprived state at 3am.

But though I had fun with the Hunter I'm going to stick with my Android, with her busted open forehead and the splash of red paint over her eye. Her and I circled around the Cosmodrome and mowed our way through encounters with Fallen, Hive, and Spider Tanks, laughing our way around town. And I hope to continue doing so when I get the full game.

Cross Generation Gaming

And the lesson here is not to force the issue.
Especially Poo jokes.

We are in an age of technology where everything is thought ahead.  Gaming consoles have done exactly that with the current and last generations of consoles, namely with online communication.

I can happily sign into my Xbox 360 and start talking with my Xbox One friends, simply because it was thought ahead when the 360 was made.  The same goes with Playstation 3 and 4.

Because of that, I look forward to games that will play across Generations.

I've always liked the idea of Cross Platform gameplay, because I look at most consoles and see them as the same turd rolled in different glitter.  But because of that glitter they can't communicate, putting an immodium on the plan of cross platform gaming regardless of whether it's the same piece of corn in the captains log.

Cross Generation seems much more capable feature.  One turd might be smoother, but given what's essentially the same cob of corn, the glitter would make little to no difference.

But to stop myself from getting a haemorrhoid, because I'm straining the analogy, I want to get into what brought this up.

Destiny, an MMO-esque shooter coming out for current and last gen consoles.  It was said that they wanted to implement Cross Generation gameplay, but just recently announced that it wasn't going to happen.

The way it began was poor.  One of the reps said that the reason was, and I'm paraphrasing, "current generation consoles have the advantage when sniping, because they can see the target clearer than someone with a last generation console, due to resolution limits."

Essentially, a previous generation console can see two pixels, and the next gen can see four.  And that is entirely unfair.

I flew into a rage.  It was the most pathetic reason I had ever heard.  Two fucking pixels?  You PC Cultured Knob Jockeys.  You make a game and balance the entire system to give a player the same experience across four consoles, and you nullify half the fucking point by cancelling it over TWO FUCKING PIXELS?!

It was something from a culture of PC gamers who can't go a week without having to buy a new graphics card in case they fell behind on their Battlefield Ranks.

Then came another article.  An article that didn't sound so petty, though they still defended the Pixels.  But more significantly, there is actually a technological problem.  Lag times between consoles, and comparable hardware processing.

Yes, the excuses are still a little thin, but it's better than Two Fucking Pixels.  Either way, I do have to be picky with what consoles I get it for.  I'll be getting it for PS4, there's no doubt about that as my Australian friends will have it in that time.  Would it be worth it to buy it on Xbox 360?  If I convince my 'Murican friends to get it, then sure thing.  Even more so if I convince my Australia friends to get it too.

Then there are other games I would like to play Cross-Generation.  Like Skylanders: Trap Team.  If I get mum to bring over some select figures from the enormous collection I left there for the Niece and Nephew to play with when they visit Grandma, then I could be well prepared with Trap Team.  And playing with my Pseudo-Nephew Alex would be fantastic.  I could set aside a morning to let him tell me all of his new favourite skills and abilities while playing missions.

What about Mass Effect?  They're bringing a new series into the current Generation (and possibly remaking the first trilogy too) and there's always the possibility it'll have some sort of multiplayer.  Given that they might make versions for the last gen, there's a chance for Cross Gen again.

Turning the tables, Xbox 360 might get a chip into the next Gears of War series.  Both Scotts I know have Xbones, and if they both get it I'll get excluded if they want to be technologically superior to me.

There's game after game that I want to have a piece of, and two generations of consoles that I have to think about.  I don't want to have four consoles to play.  I hardly want two, but I can live with that.

Maybe next generation, possibly 10 years from now, everything will be more considerate.  Yes the consoles will be 10 years old, which is like comparing the culture of 1788 to now, but it's still something they should consider when the time comes.