Dragonchasers

So I’ve mentioned a few times that we’re needing to tighten our belts here at chez Dragonchasers. Lots of vet bills and just that generally the cost of living is going up way faster than my salary is means the years of easy living are behind us, at least for now.

So when I noticed my PlayStation Plus Premium membership was coming up for renewal in July, I had a moment of panic. The Premium tier is roughly $160/year, the Extra tier $135 and the Essential tier is $80.

I’m currently on the Premium tier and would not renew it. The difference between Extra and Premium is that the latter offers some game trials, access to old-ass PS1 and PS2 games, and game streaming. I’ve never used any of these perks.

The Extra tier has a Game Pass-like library of games you can play for free while you are subscribed. I do use this quite a bit. While Sony isn’t nearly as good as Microsoft when it comes to putting their own games in the library (and particularly not on Day 1), there are still a lot of good games in the there.

The Essential tier is in fact essential if you want to play games with other people. It is basically the “old” PS+: you get a couple of ‘free’ games every month, cloud saves, and the ability to play games online with other people.

I was looking at $135 for the Extra tier, which is a lot right now, and to add salt to that wound Sony is currently running a 30% discount on subscriptions…but only to people who aren’t subscribed. That just feels bad.

So I initially resigned myself to scraping up $80 for Essential but then I thought about the last time I’d played anything online with anyone and… couldn’t remember when that was. Cloud Saves are nice but I can live without them. And the ‘free’ games that give out these days are generally either very old or not great. The good stuff they save for the Extra tier.

In the end I decided to cancel and see how it felt to be an ‘offline’ PlayStation gamer. First thing I did was go through all the games I had installed and started deleting PS+ Extra titles that I knew I’d have no time to play between now and mid-July. A few of them that I hadn’t tried, I dipped into to see if they were worth adding to my Wishlist in case they ever went on a deep discount.

What was strange about this process was that with every game I deleted, I felt a little bit ‘lighter’. I didn’t realize how much I was feeling “obligated” to take advantage of the PS+ Extra library in order to get my money’s worth. I mean I was vaguely aware of the fact that I have a lot of games on PlayStation that I own but never get around to because I wanted to play the PS+ Extra games first. Thing is, there’s always new PS+ Extra games landing so I can never get ahead of that.

So now, once PS+ Extra is gone, I can go back and play all the games that I was interested enough in to open my wallet for. And I’m actually looking forward to that and I have enough games to keep me busy for a year, easily. Maybe more. You know how slow I am and the PS shares time with the Xbox and PC.

Come November and Black Friday, if they offer another big discount to ‘new’ subs I might go back; I’ll see if I am missing the service by then. I kind of doubt it.

It probably helps that I also have Xbox Game Pass so I get new/random games to play there, too. I don’t feel the same sense of obligation on Xbox. I’m guessing this is partially because I am paid up through 2027, partially because I mostly pay for it via Microsoft Rewards points, and partially because I don’t own a ton of Xbox games that I never get the time to play.

So yeah, I guess that’s it. I went from feeling bad about losing this service to feeling better. I’ve kind of felt a little bit of the same feeling as I’ve canceled streaming services, too. Too much of a good thing, I guess. Having fewer choices is actually making me a little bit happier (and a little bit less broke).

[Image at the top of the post generated by a couple of AI tools. Sora was used initially with the prompt “Can you create a playful illustration of a dump truck labeled “PS +” dumping a bunch of games into an overflowing vat labeled “Backlog”? Please create it in a landscape orientation.” That resulted in the image to the left: Sora does not like making landscape images, apparently. So I fed the original image into Google’s AI Studio and asked it to expand the picture with the prompt “Can you take this image and remake it in a 16:9 ratio? I need it to be wider than it is tall, but otherwise I really like this image.”]

 

I remember looking forward to Ascendant Studios’ Immortals of Aveum when it came out, though I have to admit I didn’t buy it at launch. (I buy very few games at launch since almost every game that comes out gets patched post-launch, and of course quickly comes down in price). When it hit Playstation Plus a year or so ago I jumped in and played for maybe 5 hours before I got distracted. I can’t in all honesty say exactly why I quit playing back then.

But recently I decided to give it another go. This time I played about a dozen hours before bouncing off it, and this time I deleted it from my hard drive. It’s the only way I’ve found to give myself ‘closure’ on a game I’m not enjoying. If it is still installed I’ll constantly go back to give it ‘1 more try’ and then wind up frustrated/disappointed again.

Lately I’ve been struggling with forcing myself to finish games I’m not enjoying all that much, just to say I’ve finished them. Frankly, life is too damned short, and the supply of good games too plentiful, for that kind of behavior. So this is me trying to be better about making gaming enjoyable for myself.

I doubt I’ll ever go back to Immortals of Aveum even though I am kind of interested in how the story eneded. My reasons for stopping break down into two broad categories: Me problems, and Game problems.

First the Me problems. Immortals of Aveum is basically a first person shooter, only with magic spells rather than guns and bullets. I’ve kind of lost my love for FPS in general, though honestly for a while the game was interesting enough to overcome that. What I really liked were the game’s environments which felt organic and fully realized, at least as fully realized as a world fractured by magic can be. But the wilderness felt like wilderness and cities and towns felt like real places that people actually lived in. The game rewards exploration too as there are crates and puzzles to find all over the place. Combat was actually pretty fun though they do throw a lot of techniques at you. If you play the game straight through it’ll be fine as they give you a tool, give you some time to use it and get used to it, then give you your next tool. But coming back to it after a year away? I was totally lost and had to start over. But these days run and gun FPS start giving me headaches after I play for a while, and this one was no exception (oddly I can play something like Skyrim and not have any issues… I think it is the speed of your typical FPS that causes me issues, and this was never a problem when I was younger).

The second Me problem was the protagonist, Jak (pictured at the top of this post). He was a sarcastic, wise-cracking kid who went from street thief to a major player in a war due to his sudden manifestation of magical powers (the world of Aveum is divided into folks who can use magic and folk who can’t. Jak goes from “no magic” to “I can use ALL the magic” which makes him special). The character doesn’t have a shred of humility and arrogance always rubs me the wrong way, so I really did not like the character I was playing. When you meet a woman who is philosophically opposed to your way of life and she says something like “Too bad you’re on the wrong side; you’re kind of hot.” I was just done with this game. This asshole does NOT need to have his ego fed! This is obviously 100% subjective, and you might really like Jak.

Now on to the Game problems.

I was playing on PlayStation with a controller and I just could not get the controls tweaked to a point where they felt good. Early on you can mostly spray and pray and there’re even spells that have ‘homing shots’ to make this even more viable. But as you get further in there are puzzles that require precise aiming at different targets with a very short time window to hit them all, and constantly missing because the controls feel either too touchy or too sluggish just felt frustrating. If you decide to play this on PC with mouse and keyboard, this may not be an issue for you (and there’s a demo on Steam if you want to test that out). I thought I could acclimate but when I hadn’t after 12 hours, I figured I never would.

Worse than that, after about 10 hours into my game I started getting errors popping up on screen when I’d changed zones. I could fix these by leaving the game, doing a force quit, and re-loading, but each time it happened I’d stress out that my save had become corrupted or something. In the end I decided I didn’t like the game enough to keep putting up with these errors, and since Ascendant Studios is all but gone, if it isn’t completely gone, there’s very little hope that this issue will ever get patched. When I had this issue like 3 times in one play session I decided the universe was sending me a message and that it was time to move on to something I’d enjoy without a bunch of caveats.

So that was it for Immortals of Aveum, for me. Time is too precious to spend too much of it on games that are “OK except for…”. When I find myself with nothing else to play I’ll go back and re-visit some of these “OK” games, though I honestly doubt I’ll ever get to that point because new really good games are coming out all the time. I am glad I tried it, and if you’re at all interested I’d again point you at the demo on Steam to see if it is more up your alley. I know I’m not the only one who had error issues on PlayStation but I’m not sure how widespread they are, but I would caution folks against buying on PS. I’m not sure how well the Xbox version performs.

Anyway, on to the next game. I’m going to give another somewhat maligned game, Saints Row (the most recent one) a go next. [It’s another PlayStation Plus Extra game that has been on the service for a while so I would expect it to be pulled soon.] We’ll see how that goes. Basically I’m killing time waiting for Death Stranding 2 to come out in about a month, so I don’t want to get involved in anything epic right now!

[Little update on this. I found a great YouTube channel called Gamer’s Little Playground. This channel takes games and boils them down into movies, basically. They have a video for Immortals of Aveum that’s 4.5 hours long and it includes all the dialog and cut scenes but none of the travel and very little of the combat. I’ve been watching it (well, the 2nd half of it as I was about half-way through the game when I quit) and while I’m still not done, I’m pretty content with no having continued playing as Jak continues to be a huge jerk IMO. Anyway it’s a great way to soothe my curiosity without having to slog through the 2nd half of the game. Huzzah!]

Once again super late to the party, but Planet of Lana is really good. And I say that as someone who generally doesn’t play side scrollers.

Every day I do a bunch of things for Microsoft Rewards points, which I then use to pay for Game Pass. One particular task is to play a game on PC, the catch being it only ‘counts’ if it is something you run from the Xbox app. Because of this I’m always looking for games that seem easy to get into and that don’t take a huge amount of disk space. A while back I downloaded Planet of Lana, not because I expected to like it, but because it was small and seemed simple.

The fact that I find myself really enjoying the game probably gives some merit to Microsoft nudging us towards playing games every day.

Here’s the thing: I’m really not a big fan of side scrollers. To me they’re ‘retro’ and I’m pretty retro-averse since I lived through the retro days and generally have no interest in going back to those times. But Planet of Lana is a different kind of side-scroller. There’s no combat and so far at least, there are no sections that require fast reflexes and perfect timing. As a senior citizen anything that requires precise timing is kind of beyond me. My brain and fingers aren’t as well acquainted as they once were, you see.

Instead Planet of Lana is mostly a puzzle game. You play a little girl named Lana whose planet has been invaded and you’re looking for your people, or something? I dunno, the narrative is all pretty vague. You’re accompanied by a little vaguely cat-like critter (I think of cats because of the way it twitches its tail before making a big jump) who you can give basic orders to. Go here, follow me, stay put, activate that thing. The little critter can jump higher than you and can crawl through spaces you cannot and you need to use these abilities to make your way across levels.

Lana doesn’t speak any recognizable language but after a while you start to identify certain words like follow/stay etc. Not that it really matters but if just lends a little layer of satisfaction to the overall gameplay.

The puzzles are along the lines of moving crates, climbing ropes, turning on/off contraptions and so forth. Sometimes you need to solve these to get past physical obstacles and other times to get past aliens that’ll kill you. There’s a decent amount of playing around with lights, as some creatures are light-averse, and other times you’ll be moving through levels that are completely dark until you find a light and a way to turn it on and keep it on (usually by getting your companion critter to sit on a switch).

There’s no leveling or skills or anything like that; it’s a pretty pure game in respect.

It’s also quite a lovely game. The graphics are fairly simple but really pleasing, with most of the levels I’ve gone through having you pass through forests and small villages.

All in all, this was a just a pleasant surprise and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t demand hardcore difficulty from their platforming games. My only caution is that (according to the Internet… I haven’t finished it yet) it’s a fairly short game and is currently $20 on Steam, so this might be one to add to the old Wishlist and wait for a sale. I played it on PC Game Pass so cost didn’t really figure into things for me. If you happen to have Game Pass I’d recommend it even more strongly!

 

After over 100 hours of stomping around in Thedas, I finally finished Dragon Age:The Veilguard last night. Going in, I knew that this title had been in the center of some controversy about being too ‘woke’ and because of that it got a lot of hate from certain parts of the gaming public. Professional reviewers placed it somewhere around an 80/100, (based on Open Critic and Meta Critic) which seems pretty decent to me. I was curious to learn how much of the negativity around it being “woke” was justified, and to see if some of the hate was because of the actual gameplay.

What I ended up finding was a decent game that was marred, in my personal opinion, just by being too long. My completionist playthrough clocked in at a hefty 105-110 hours, with all quests finished, my main character hitting the level cap, and my companions achieving Champion status (though not all reached their maximum Companion level). Basically I did everything except track down every hidden chest or secret. Perhaps part of it being too long was self-inflicted, but I did have this sense that the difficulty of the ending was going to be predicated on the strength of your companions and their associated factions. I was right about that, and that led to the final boss battle being challenging but not frustratingly so.

Difficulty was “Just Right”

Overall the difficulty was just about right for me, and the action combat was fun though often felt a little sloppy. In particular my character (a Mage) had an ‘ultimate’ that had such a long wind-up that enemies would often have wandered out of the target area by the time she cast it. I also had some lock-on issues and in general the combat didn’t feel quite as crisp as it should have. Then again, this wasn’t a souls-like and the challenge level wasn’t huge on Normal difficulty, so the combat issues weren’t game breaking.

In addition to yourself you can bring two of your Companions with you. They’ll fight on their own or you can give them basic directions like “Attack my Target” or “Use Spell/Skill X now.” Some skills are what are called “Primers” and others are “Detonators”. If you pair these you can do big damage to the baddies, but they generally won’t happen unless you direct your companions to use the right skills.

The story was OK, though honestly some of the companion storylines were more interesting to me than the main one. My overall problem with the narrative was that the main storyline was apocalyptic: we’re trying to save the world from a pair of rampaging evil gods. So, y’know, somewhat urgent.

But then before we go and take that on, we need to sit around and discuss our feelings and every character has to take care of their unfinished business so their head can be in the game. It just felt like a pretty low-effort way to weave in the Companion storylines. It’d be like, I dunno, during the London Blitz if the RAF pilots said “We have to get up there and defend the civilian population from the German bombers… but first let’s work through our daddy issues so our head is in the game.”

I mean this is often an issue in games, right? The narrative is all “GO GO GO world is ending!” but the gameplay is “Oh but first let’s figure out how to get past this puzzle to see what’s in that chest tucked away in a secret room. And while we’re at it, there’s some crafting materials that might come in handy later; we’d better collect those. The bad guys will wait!”

Thedas isn’t very big

The game isn’t open world; instead there are 7 or 8 zones of various sizes, and you’ll revisit these again and again as you play. I got kind of sick of them and found myself really missing the sprawling world of Dragon Age Inquisition. In particular the more urban zones feel very game-y with you having to constantly climb up or down ladders or use ziplines to cross gaps. How do the people who live in these cities get their groceries home if they have to use a zip line to get there?

Each zone has a faction associated with it. For example one is where the Grey Wardens hang out. By doing quests in their area, as well as shopping at their merchants, you can increase the strength of that faction. In certain big battles these factions may come to aid you and the stronger they are, the easier the game will be for you.

Phat Loot

The loot/gear system is kind of interesting. Gear has both a rarity and a level. For example a common staff that is +2, or a legendary helmet that is +5. Finding/buying a duplicate piece of gear ranks up its rarity (it uses the typical color scheme, green to blue to purple to gold, etc). To increase its ‘plus’ level you have to find items that level up what is essentially a crafting station in your headquarters, and then you can spend resources to increase the level of your items. Later you can also add enchantments which also get unlocked as you level up the crafting station.

This system rewards exploration to find both the materials you’ll need and the gee-gaws that level up the crafting station. You’ll also be rewarded for visting vendors to see what they have on offer, and they too can be leveled up by buying/selling with them. Right up until the end of the game I was swapping out gear as older stuff got a better rarity or something.

There are also skill points to spend, and these can be refunded for free at any time, so you can play around with different builds to your heart’s content, which was nice. No more anxiety about ‘gimping’ your character by spending points wrong.

Was it too Woke?

As to the complaints about the game being too woke, I’m surprised to find myself saying that yeah, I think it was a little bit too woke. Let me explain before you get out the torches and pitchforks.

There is one character who is non-binary and part of their story is coming to grips with that. My beef is that this is a fantasy game with fantasy-dialog except for this one character constantly talking about being non-binary. I can’t think of a better term to use, but it’s such a modern phrase that I found it jarring. I had no problem with the character coming to grips with who they are, it was more the words they used to discuss it that kind of broke the immersion for me.

This was the one Companion who had an issue that couldn’t be solved through combat missions. Instead this character had a 2nd plotline to work through that gave them a quest line they could solve via combat, while the non-binary topic was relegated to dialog choices and cut-scenes. The character also was born into one culture and raised in another, and had to deal with their mother disapproving that the character wasn’t being true to their cultural roots (an issue aside from the gender one). On top of all that, they had a physical property that set them apart from others of their race. So they had PLENTY going on even without the non-binary issue. In the end it just felt like the non-binary aspect was bolted on late in development, almost as a marketing strategy, and it didn’t have anything to do with this particular character’s race or culture. It could’ve been anyone.

So to me, it just felt a little contrived and a little immersion breaking. All that said, it wasn’t a big deal and if someone out there felt like they were represented due to this characters’ issues, then it’s a good thing that they put it in there. Just for me personally, their dialog felt a little out of place and dealing with their many issues felt like it took a lot of time and slowed the pace of the game down.

So in Summary…

A few last odds and ends.

Your character is named Rook but beyond the name you can customize them. There’s even a magic mirror where you can change their appearance. I played a female elf mage and spent some time customizing her and yet I still met a few other characters that looked VERY similar to her, which was disconcerting. In fact a lot of the characters feel oddly generic. Even body type feels a bit unisex, almost? It’s the armor that gives that characters most of their definition.

What else… OK so there’re romance options but they are pretty darned bare bones. You pick the “heart” choice in dialog trees and suddenly, bing! you’re a couple and some of the other characters mention it here and there but I don’t think much else changes. Hard to say without a second play through and no way I’m doing that.

There were a few returning characters from the earlier games including Morrigan, still voiced by Claudia Black and any game that includes her gets a free pass anyway.

All in all, I’m glad I finished it. There was literally nothing to do when I was done unless it would’ve been to go hunt for chests, but I had no quests or major enemies to fight. I got the ‘good’ ending and no deaths due to my choices. [Spoiler: One of your team will die and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from happening.] So I’m done. The only thing I could do would be to play through it again and it was definitely NOT good enough to devote another 100 hours to a second playthrough.

I got the game via PlayStation Plus Extra so it was “free” and at that price, I’d suggest giving it a go. Or if you find it on sale for $20 or something and you like fantasy action-RPGs. Had I bought it at $60 or $70 when it first came out, I think I would’ve been disappointed.

 

For random reasons I won’t bore you with, I started Playdead’s 2016 game Inside last night. Tonight I finished it. Yeah, it’s a short game.

But holy smokes is it ever good. Since the game is almost 10 years old I won’t worry too much about spoilers, but first a bit of spoiler-free setup. I’ll warn you before I start on the specifics.

So at its most basic Inside is a combat-free side scroller. You play a young boy who is running (generally) left to right across the screen, avoiding being detected by enemies and solving some environmental puzzles to proceed. The puzzles were perfect for me (I am NOT a puzzle person). Difficult enough to make me feel satisfied at figuring them out, but not so difficult that I got frustrated.

As far as the story goes, not much is explained. There are men and dogs hunting for this boy though you’re never told why. But these same men are rounding up other people and turning them into mindless automatons, again for unknown reasons. Although there is no out-going combat (ie, you have no weapons or combat moves) your pursuers will kill you viciously. It can be quite disturbing when you get caught; seeing this little boy getting torn up by dogs, choked to death by men, or just getting blown into little bits. It’s a lot.

You start in the woods but soon enter some kind of complex where they seem to be doing experiments on the people they’ve rounded up.

OK let’s start getting into spoiler territory but I kind of rather you stop reading and go play it if you haven’t. It only takes 3-4 hours to play through.

Assuming that’s not your thing, let’s continue.

So I was having fun figuring out how to sneak past spotlights and fool guard dogs. Then something attacked me in the water; something not-natural. This aquatic humanoid thing. It was tough to get away from that thing. Then I found a ‘cap’ that would let me control these mindless human drones, assuming I could set them free. Basically they copy whatever you do. So maybe there’s a door too heavy to life until you have a few zombie friends who will help. You can also trick them into walking off a high ledge, and then you can jump down on them using them as an organic cushion to break your fall. Or get them to throw you over gaps you can’t jump across.

That’s how things sat for a while. Weird but, y’know, manageable. You’re climbing, swimming through water, jumping, throwing switches, dragging crates etc. At the top of the post is you near the start of the game. Walk in the woods. Totally normal.

And then you come into areas where water flows across the ceiling rather than across the floor and sometimes you have to climb up and jump up into the water and swim over obstacles. OK, I can adapt to that, but it’s pretty out there. And then you get to the heart of the experiment which seems to be some plan to merge people into a ball of biomass, maybe to power something? Again it isn’t clear. You try to shut this down, but you get sucked into this mass, and for the last part of the game you’re this large flesh bubble with legs and arms sticking out all over the place. And that, my friends, was a trip. That was some WEIRD shit as first thing I had to do was learn how to move all over again. (You kind of roll-walk and you can squeeze through small opening, or just use your bulk to smash through some obstacles.)

I mean it was cool and fun, but also gross and just so damned weird…

My only real complaint is the ending, because there kind of isn’t one. You finally escape, as a big bag of flesh, and roll down a mountainside, coming to rest near a body of water. And you can’t move for a few minutes. Then the credits roll. I guess we’re meant to interpret this in our own way. But aside from that, as someone who SUCKs at side-scrollers, I’d still recommend this. 9 years after launch. Me with my finger on the pulse of modern gaming!

[Not sure why my images came out so grainy… these are both taken on the Xbox in HDR mode. For some reason the Xbox wouldn’t sync to my OneDrive so I uploaded them to Google Photos from my phone. But then they were super dark. So I let google “adjust” them and I guess that’s where the grain comes from. The actual game is very clear. Simply graphics, but effective, and the character animations are top notch.]