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I finished up the Modern Warfare Remastered campaign last night. It turns out that this is still a really good game. I didn't remember too much of the story except for a few major plot points from playing the original back in 2007. What I did remember perfectly were some of the missions and set pieces. I think I'll always remember the excellent "All Ghillied Up" sniping/stealth and escape sequence.

One thing that surprised me is that the game didn't feel dated at all to me. There aren't things like wall running, sliding and shooting, or double jumping that have taken over the last several games in the franchise but it's still the same great COD shooting the series is famous for. I also appreciated playing a more grounded COD campaign again. The stuff you do in this game feels like the kind of things the military might actually do in the Middle East/Russia. I'm not trying to say it's all realistic but it was a nice change of pass from all the recent, futuristic games.

When I finished the campaign around 9:00 last night I was surprised to see that multiplayer was already live even though I didn't think it was supposed to unlock until midnight. I played a few matches and it felt instantly familiar. I have played so many hours of every COD multiplayer game since Modern Warfare came out in 2007 that I didn't really even know what maps would be in this game. They have all run together over the years. I immediately recognized every map I played in last night though.

Next I take on Jon Snow in Infinite Warfare.

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Just finished Titanfall 2's campaign mode. Wow. They really did a good job. Will post a full video review later but all you need to know is that yes, it is worth your time. One of the best single player campaigns I've had in a while. Unfortunately it is rather short, but I'd rather be left wanting more than wanting it to end.
 
yourbeliefs said:
Just finished Titanfall 2's campaign mode. Wow. They really did a good job. Will post a full video review later but all you need to know is that yes, it is worth your time. One of the best single player campaigns I've had in a while. Unfortunately it is rather short, but I'd rather be left wanting more than wanting it to end.
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Everyone says it's awesome. Looks like I'll have to find a way to play it before the end of the year.
 
I finished the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare campaign over the weekend and I think it's probably my favorite COD campaign yet. I should point out that while I have purchased every COD since 2 with the exception of COD 3 I haven't played significant portions of most of the campaigns. Modern Warfare and Black Ops are the two that everyone points to as the best campaigns in the series. I finished MW (and MW Remastered) but not Black Ops.

After COD 4: Modern Warfare I really started buying these games just to play multiplayer with my friends. It turns out I'm not alone in this. According to the PSN Trophy data only 7.8% of people who have played IW have finished the final mission. Hell, only 33.7% even finished the first mission. If I go back to Black Ops 3 only 11% of people finished that game so it's not just a matter of people not having enough time to complete it yet. The reason I'm rambling about all of this is that the vast majority of people who buy COD completely ignore the campaign. I think that would be a mistake with Infinite Warfare.

It has the same great shooter feel as all the other COD games but moving into the far future and space warfare was a nice change of pace from all the near future COD games we have been getting lately. They took advantage of this setting to make an actual sci-fi game instead of just changing out the desert textures of the middle east for some moon textures too. They added spaceship fighter combat and it's actually fun. There are some interesting zero gravity fights, especially one of the side missions that takes place in an asteroid field.

That's right, a COD game has optional side missions. They clearly took some inspiration from Mass Effect here. You are the commander of your ship and you stand at a star map that looks a lot like the interface from the Mass Effect games and pick which mission you want to do next. I recommend doing at least all of the ship boarding (on foot) side missions because some of them are pretty interesting and a couple of them feel pretty different than anything you do in the main story missions. The asteroid field mission I mentioned before was really cool and I also really liked another side mission that required basic stealth mechanics in order to destroy some WMDs and rescue the engineer hostages. I also did all of the ship combat side missions just because I liked doing them but these aren't as varied or interesting as the on foot side missions.

I will say that I was a little disappointed in the enemy motivations and the villain. He is played by Kit Harrington, who is Jon Snow on Game of Thrones. Since he is one of my favorite characters on my favorite show I was excited at the idea of him being the villain. He doesn't do a straight up bad job like Peter Dinklage ( My other favorite GOT charter Tyrion) does in Destiny but he certainly doesn't stand out either. Just about every crew member of your ship easily outshines him including a robot and minor supporting characters.

The plot is basically that he is the leader of a mining colony on another planet who decides he hates Earth and wants to kill everyone there. They don't really bother to tell us why or flesh out his character beyond the point of evil guy. He comes no where close to Kevin Spacey's villain in Advanced Warfare but I think this has more to do with the writing and directing than the performance.

Luckily the members of the good guy crew are likable enough characters that the story still feels engaging even if the reasoning for why this is all happening is never really explained. If you bought the game for multiplayer, do yourself a favor and check out the campaign. If you don't like COD multiplayer but the idea of a well done, AAA sci-fi shooter sounds good to you grab Infinite Warfare when it goes on sale. In Jeff Gerstmann's review over at Giant Bomb he says that at times this feels more like a prequel to Halo than a COD game. I think that is a pretty good way to sum it up.
 
A few days ago I finished Odin Sphere HD on PS4, and I have to say I never thought that I'd be so invested in what is basically a 40-hour fantasy beat-em-up/hack and slash game. I'll do a full review video in a few days.

As far as other games go, I'm not sure what it is but I'm TOTALLY not in a FPS mood, which isn't ideal timing given that BF1, TF2, and CoD13 are the "hot" things right now. I think I'm going to start going through my MASSIVE archive of untouched games and just start playing things and see what tickles my fancy. I also do have Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian coming in the next few weeks.

First up: Assassin's Creed: Rogue
 
yourbeliefs said:
A few days ago I finished Odin Sphere HD on PS4, and I have to say I never thought that I'd be so invested in what is basically a 40-hour fantasy beat-em-up/hack and slash game. I'll do a full review video in a few days.

As far as other games go, I'm not sure what it is but I'm TOTALLY not in a FPS mood, which isn't ideal timing given that BF1, TF2, and CoD13 are the "hot" things right now. I think I'm going to start going through my MASSIVE archive of untouched games and just start playing things and see what tickles my fancy. I also do have Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian coming in the next few weeks.

First up: Assassin's Creed: Rogue
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The FPS fatigue is hitting me too. I still want to finish Doom and Titanfall 2 before the end of the year but right now I find myself wanting to play just about anything else. I have been trying random backlog games on Steam and some backwards compatible titles on my Xbox One. Right now Inside has my attention though.
 
I'm delving into my must-play PS Plus game backlog before my subscription expires. I finished Everybody Has Gone to the Rapture two weeks ago. It was an enjoyable experience, but not enjoyable enough to put together a 100%-complete collectible run to get the platinum trophy. The walking around is really slow, and it's a fairly large map with no fast travel or manual saving ability.

I'm finally delving into Letter Quest on PS Vita after still having never launched the Android app on my tablet or phone several months after installing it. Like any mobile game, it gets repetitive, but being a word nerd, I have trouble putting it down when I should be doing something more productive. Part of the reason I've waited for the Vita version is because you get every bit of add-on content (no in-game purchases).

Lastly, I'm hoping to finally take a whirl through Journey at some point this holiday season.
 
Zookster said:
Lastly, I'm hoping to finally take a whirl through Journey at some point this holiday season.
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I finally played through Journey for the first time after it became free on PS4 too. I highly recommend waiting until you have 2-2.5 hours of free time to play it in one sitting if possible. Not that it hasn't already been hyped up enough over the last several years but I think you'll like it.
 
king3pj said:
I finally played through Journey for the first time after it became free on PS4 too. I highly recommend waiting until you have 2-2.5 hours of free time to play it in one sitting if possible. Not that it hasn't already been hyped up enough over the last several years but I think you'll like it.
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I'll definitely try to do it that way. Thanks!
 
I played through Inside last week. Part of the reason I hadn't already come here to write up what I thought of it was because I didn't know what to say. The game is very abstract and because of that it would be hard to spoil even if I wanted to but at the same time I think you will enjoy the game more if you see and hear as little about it before playing it for yourself as possible.

It is easy to look at the art style of Inside and immediately compare it to their previous game, Limbo. You wouldn't be completely off base if you did that since both games revolve around a boy trying to make it through a mostly black and white environment that is trying to kill him but I will say that Inside is not Limbo 2.

Inside is better than Limbo in every way. The art style is amazing and the puzzles have a lot more depth to them. The things you do to solve the puzzles are much more varied and so are the environments you are doing them in. You aren't just wandering through an environment waiting for a cheap, hidden trap to kill the boy in a gruesome way. I also think the story is much more compelling, while still being very abstract. There was one moment where I actually got goosebumps on my arms even though I wasn't fully sure what was happening. That isn't the type of thing that typically happens to me when I'm playing games.

I have heard a few people in the games media say that Inside is their game of the year. It probably won't be mine but it will definitely make the list.
 
I played through Superhot and Firewatch this weekend. I have a pretty different opinion of these two games. I'll talk about Superhot first since I have less to say about it. There isn't much in terms of story but the gameplay is really innovative and it feels great. It's a FPS game with one hit kills for both you and the enemies.

The game throws you into rooms where you are surrounded by red guys and you have to kill them all to move on. The innovative part of the game is that time only moves when you do. That means you have plenty of time to look at your surroundings and see what to do. Going into a room unarmed, picking up an ash tray, throwing it at an enemy, catching his gun in mid air, and killing 6 guys while dodging bullets in slow motion feels great. At the end of each level the game shows you a replay of everything you just did at full speed and some of those are really cool to watch too. I definitely recommend checking out this game but you might want to wait for a sale since it only takes about 2 hours to complete.
 
I decided to break Firewatch into a second post so it would be easier to read. The game started off by making me absolutely hate the main character. I don't believe this is a spoiler since the developers talked about it in their pre-release interviews and it happens in the first 5 minutes of the game but if you want to go in completely blind skip the spoiler paragraph.

The main character finds out that his wife has early onset dementia. As her dementia gets worse he decides it would be a good idea to abandon her with her parents and go live and work in a firewatch tower for the entire summer. Maybe this just hit home for me because my dad also got early onset dementia and I know just how much he depends on his family to get through every day but the game just made think the main character was a worthless piece of sh*t right from the start. The thing is that his wife's dementia and the reason he is out there has almost nothing to do with the rest of the story. Not only that but the main character is written as a likeable, normal person so I can't understand why the writers thought it was a good idea to start the game the way they did.

Okay, that's the end of my rant. Now I can get to what happens after the first 5 minutes of the game. The art style and world building is great. The voice acting is really good with the main character being played by Rich Sommer from Mad Men. The characters are actually even good and pretty relatable besides the inexplicable opening I already ranted about.

The game is a walking simulator similar to Gone Home only it takes place in the middle of some very remote woods. Exploring the woods was cool because they looked great and there was interesting stuff to discover. The problem is that unlike Gone Home I don't think the actual story was any good. The moment to moment exploration and the radio conversations with the woman in the other watchtower was worth it but the actual plot was not. The ending was telegraphed and the payoff just wasn't there.

There are things about Firewatch I really liked but when I finished it last night I couldn't help but feel disapointed more than anything else. It feels like the writers really wanted to match the emotional impact of Gone Home and that might explain why they started it in the unnecessarily dark way that they did. Unfortunately they didn't get anywhere close to that target.
 
Finished up Assassin's Creed Rogue. Very good game. It's a shame that Ubisoft didn't promote it well and instead put all their eggs in Unity's awful basket. Video review coming in a few days.

In other news, haven't had enough time with FF XV to form an opinion (and there's a good chance that'll have to wait until 2017) and The Last Guardian is doing more bad than good with its significant gameplay issues. And of course we have the Overwatch Holiday Update coming on Tuesday, so that'll likely take up quite a bit of time.

Also need to compile footage and do some writing for GOTY awards.
 
Finally getting back to Gone Home (free Plus game on PS4) after losing my progress on PC when I upgraded to Windows 10 last year. I wasn't enjoying the experience on my laptop anyways due to performance issues, so it's nice relaxing in my recliner while playing this on the big screen. I keep thinking I've reached the end when a whole new part of the house gets unlocked. Depending on what January brings, that just leaves Journey as my last must-play-before-Plus-membership-expires game. I tried the remastered Resident Evil game on PS4 last weekend, but was quickly reminded why these older games are virtually unplayable for me (I didn't start gaming until the current era of excessive handholding in games).

In other news: I'm generally not particularly interested in watching video game live streams for any length of time, but one of my favorite fantasy authors, N.K. Jemisin (who won the 2016 Hugo Award for best novel), started live streaming her playthrough of Mafia 3 on Twitch (I get Twitter notifications whenever she starts the stream). It's really cool being able to interact with her in this way (she verbally answers my questions that I post in the chat) and being able to see a woman in my age demo (who can't shoot worth sh*t either) cuss her way through a violent video game. lol She's rumored to be the author of the first prequel book in the forthcoming Mass Effect Andromeda series. A page on Goodreads for the book has her name attached to it, based on a listing in the publisher's catalogue of forthcoming titles (see page 12). Of course the book series, which is considered canonical, was pushed back along with the game. It's reassuring to know that at least one of the authors in the series is a gamer.
 
I'm pushing through Assassins Creed 2 once again. Looking to see if it still holds up after all these years. So far it is still quite good. Hoping to finish it up by the end of the year. Hopefully my upcoming days off will help facilitate that.
 
yourbeliefs said:
I'm pushing through Assassins Creed 2 once again. Looking to see if it still holds up after all these years. So far it is still quite good. Hoping to finish it up by the end of the year. Hopefully my upcoming days off will help facilitate that.
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Are you playing the original version or The Ezio Collection? I haven't seen any of the Xbox One/PS4 version myself but people in the Amazon reviews seem to be pretty happy with the updates in in the remastered version.
 
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