Author: Nimgimli

Why Fortnite’s new quests have me seeing red

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today Epic Games announced new quests coming to Fortnite, but there’s a catch. In order to get these quests you have to watch someone streaming the game on Twitch. OK technically you have to be logged into a device that has Fortnite streaming…no one is forcing you to stare at it.

This is a little irritating to me. The Fortnite devs have been replying to MANY criticisms of the game with some variation on the theme of “This is Early Access, there are a lot of things we need to improve or build but it’s going to take time.” So they don’t have time to add proper tutorials or overhaul the clunky UI, but they do have time to develop quests for Twitch users. Their priorities are a little irritating.

But what has me seeing red is a nuance of these Twitch quests. There are two tiers of these “Viewer Quests.” The first one, anyone can get as long as they’ve linked their Twitch account to their Epic account. But the quests with better rewards are limited to people who subscribe to a Twitch streamer. This pisses me off.

Here’s why. First, there’s a lot of noise, now that people have been playing for a few days, about how Fortnite is Pay-To-Win. See there’re two kinds of loot in Fortnite. You can jump into a mission and open chests and find traps and guns. That’s great and all but traps are one use and guns wear out (pretty quickly). The better loot is Schematics that let you craft as many traps and guns as you like.

With me so far?

You only get schematics from Loot Boxes (called Llamas in Fortnite). You can earn some “mini-Llamas” by doing Shield Defense Quests, but for the most part you have to buy Llamas, either with V-Coins (which you can purchase with real money) or Founders Coins, which you generally get from Llamas. Early in your Fortnite career you can earn V-Coins by doing “Challenges” but those cap out early enough that plenty of people have now done them all. Once they’re finished, the only way you can get Llamas, and from Llamas better schematics (you hope…it’s all a gambling system), is through purchasing V-Coins with real money or somehow getting Founders Coins.

And there’s 1 way to earn Founder’s Coins that I know of. By doing the Twitch Subscriber quests.

So here’s Epic’s gameplan for you. Spend $40 to get into Early Access of the game. Play for a while and earn V-Coins to buy your first full llamas. Then when you’ve exhausted that system, pay some streamer $5/month to subscribe to his/her channel, leave your account sitting on the channel and hope that you are randomly selected to get the quest that you can do in-game to earn Founder’s Coin.

THAT is the system they’re working on while you’re sitting there frustrated that you can’t even view your inventory without starting up a mission.

Really screwed up priorities and a big middle finger directed at early supporters who don’t choose to spend money to watch some stranger play a game on Twitch. (Oh and if you prefer to stream on YouTube or Mixer or somewhere else? You too are getting the middle finger.)

I’m not rage-quitting Fortnite over this; I’ve already spent $60 on the game. But I won’t be spending any more money until they demonstrate that they value all their customers equally. If I get to where I can’t progress without spending money I’ll just play something else.

I’m done supporting the game, though, and won’t be blogging about it any more. And I suggest that if you’re interested in it, you wait a while to see what kind of company Epic is going to be, because right now that whole Free-To-Play model (which of course isn’t even free yet) is looking pretty ugly, and the company doesn’t care about you as a customer unless you’re promoting their game by streaming it.

Fortnite: Trying to explain survivor squads

Posted on by Nimgimli

Fortnite throws some terms around that can get confusing. Survivors and Squads both seem to have multiple meanings and initially I’d get kind of lost in all the survivor types and squad types.

Today I want to talk about Survivor Squads. Since Fortnite is down I’m going to try to do this without visual aids and from memory!

[Update: Added some images at the bottom!]

When I say Survivor Squads, I’m talking about Squads like the EMT Squad. In the Squads page, the left most pane leads you to these Squads.

The best analogy I could come up with is that these squads are to Fortnite what Runes are to a fantasy RPG. You know you’re playing a game and you get a weapon that has 2 rune slots so you put in a +Attack Rune and a +Speed Rune, or something like that? These squads do the same thing.

Every time you slot a survivor into these squads you’ll get an increase to one of a number of stats like Fortitude or Tech. The better the survivors (runes) you slot, the better the stats. These stats apply to whatever hero you’re running as. The “Squads” never leave this menu screen. They’re just buffs. These buffs also contribute to your overall power level (the number by the lightning bolt at the top left corner of the screen).

To maximize the buffs you get, you can in theory pick the ideal survivors (in your early days you’ll probably have to pick whatever you have). Each Survivor has a Job, a Personality and some Effects. Matching the Job to the Squad type enhances the buff. So slotting a Doctor into the EMT Squad, for example.

Also if your survivors have matching personalities it’ll increase the potency of the squad. Personality will be something like “Aggressive” for example. And then each Survivor will have 1 or more effects like +1 Trap Damage. If you slot in a few survivors with the same effect you’ll get a bonus to that effect.

I hope this at least gives you enough that you can figure out the rest in-game. You can slot, unslot and re-slot survivors at no cost so you should feel free to experiment. Also you can level up survivors which of course also increases the buff.

You unlock more of these squads, and more slots in these squads, via the skill tree.

There are also Defender Squads and Expedition Squads, but those are a completely different system.

Visual Aids!

Here is a low level Tank Penny with nothing slotted in Squads. You can see my overall Commander/Power Rating is pretty low with her like this. I should only go out on low level missions like this. My F.O.R.T. stats are 15-15-6-6 and those are all coming from the skill tree.

Penny with all Squads Empty

Here is Sidewinder Ramirez with no Squad. Even though she’s much higher level than Penny, my overall power score is still only 4. Ramirez has a higher Health & Shield values, partly due to her class (she’s a soldier) and partly due to her being level 21.

Ramirez with no squad

OK let’s slot some squads, starting with EMT which is the first squad you unlock. I had a Doctor to slot in here which is a job match. That circle with a cross in it was a little misleading to me because it just looked like a generic “add” button. But the icon inside the circle is indicating the job required for a job match, the cross meaning Doctor. Fortitude has jumped 10 points to 25 and Health has jump 54 points to 681 (hard to see in that green font). I haven’t sussed out the exact math here; I believe it is based on percentage and I’m not sure exactly how much of a boost the Job Ability Match gives. [Update: Matching the job doubles the FORT value increase.]

First Slot

Here’s Penny again, just showing that the Health, Shield and F.O.R.T. stats are the same on the Hero page as on the Squad page.

Penny with the Doctor Slotted into the EMT Squad

OK I’ve given the Doctor some help. These two cowboys brought Fortitude up to 54 and Health up to 839 (EMT Squad is all about Fortitude). These guys also Personality Match with the Doctor; everyone in this squad so far is Adventurous. And look, my overall power level crept up to 6. Again, I don’t know the exact math going on here. One of the new minions comes with Trap Durability and one comes with Shield Regeneration. I’m not sure that Personality or the two abilities do any good without being full. [Update: The abilities, at least, do not. I finally got a 3/3 for ranged damage increase and it gave me a 15% buff. Nothing until it was completed.
I’m going to guess 5% per point, so if I were to complete a 2/2 ability it would be a 10% buff. Not confirmed though.] In other words does having a personality match of 2/7 help or does it not kick in until you get 7/7. Same for the Trap and Shield abilities. Always more questions!

Filling up the EMT Squad

OK and now I’m jumping to where I’ve filled out all the squad slots that are unlocked. All the F.O.R.T. stats are improved and her Shield has been buffed up (Health goes up from Fortitude, Shield goes up from Resistance, I believe) and now my Commander Power Level is 11. So I’ve gone from Level 4 to Level 11 just based on slotting Survivor Squads. Same Penny hero, almost 3 times as powerful. And I can’t say for sure I have optimized my squads. I have a lot of survivors and optimizing squads is almost a game in itself. It’s a little like Deck Building in a CCG I guess.

All my Squad Slots (so far) full

Anyway, hope this helps!

Stuffing a Fortnite into a weekend

Posted on by Nimgimli

See Epic, I can do punny titles too!

So I’m going to try not to write a wall of text here but instead break my Fortnite thoughts into a series of posts. Let’s see how I do.

Fortnite is a co-operative harvesting/building/tower-defense game from Epic. It’s about fighting what are essentially zombies but rather that go gritty and grotesque, Fortnite has a whimsical, funny aesthetic. It is in a paid Early Access phase now and is expected to go free-to-play in 2018. Cheapest buy-in right now is $40 which I thought was a bit steep for an Early Access title, but then I liked it so much I spent another $20 to upgrade to the next tier and get more stuff.

I bought in on the PS4 and was delighted to find that by linking my PS4 account to my Epic account, I could play on PC too. I’m not sure if the reverse is true or if the same applies to Xbox and PC. My data is cross-platform for the most part so I can work on my fort on PC or PS4. Swanky.

So what do you do in Fortnite? The basic game loop is that you go out and smash things to gather resources, then you build a fort around some focus point, and finally you trigger the husks (we don’t use the Z-word in Fortnite) to attack and you fend them off. Rinse and repeat.

This sounds simple but there are a lot of systems within systems going on.

You play as the Commander, an unseen uber-boss of your little outpost of people. When you run a mission you pick from one of your Heroes to play as. Heroes come in the form of Hero cards that vary in class, rarity and abilities. There’s a strong CCG current running under the surface of Fortnite.

My current collection of heroes
My current ‘main’ hero

The downside of Hero cards is that you can’t customize them. I would be very surprised if that doesn’t change. Offering ‘skins’ for Heroes seems like an obvious money-maker somewhere down the road. Sidewinder Ramirez up there is wearing a special Playstation skin so the system already exists in some form.

You can play solo, with friends or match-make into a random group. I spent the weekend doing about 50-50 solo/random missions.

There are two kinds of building missions I’ve discovered so far: first there are homebase missions. These take place in your persistent homebase. You can pop into here whenever you want and tweak your defenses and eventually you’ll get a mission to expand. When you do this the horde comes and you (and possibly some friends) hold them off. The other kind of build mission happens on a randomly generated map. Your team enters, first has to find the whatzit that needs to be activated, then you spend some time building defenses around it, and finally you turn on the whatzit and the horde comes.

Home fort, core area
Home fort, first expansion. Not yet tested against the horde

There’s also at least one kind of non-building mission: one where you have to rescue survivors before time runs out. In all these random maps you’ll find hidden treasures and little events like survivors: people who’re trapped or under attack and need your help.

There’s also one little icon on your map for a “Help others” mission. If you enter this one you’ll be matchmade with someone else who needs some extra firepower. Often these end up being homebase support missions though not always. I really enjoyed doing these because I knew someone had gotten in over their heads and needed help. Sometimes I like to be the good guy helping others.

At the end of a mission you get both experience for your commander (every time you level up you get a skill point to use in a skill tree that I won’t go into today) as well as different kinds of experience that can be used to level up heroes, schematics and survivors. Also things I’ll go into in more depth another day.

So would you like Fortnite? Here’s the thing: you spend a LOT of time scavenging resources. I think over the weekend probably 60-70% of my time playing was running around destroying things to get materials. I actually find that kind of soothing; I’m not sure what that says about me. But running through a building searching cabinets and smashing TVs to get nuts and bolts is kind of a zen thing, and the game does reward exploration in several ways. My favorite example was when I came upon a graveyard with a mausoleum that was built over an old catacomb. I gleefully searched and smashed each crypt I found, and at the end there was a hidden treasure. Grave robbing! Always a good time.

Anyway for some people all this scavenging is going to feel REALLY tedious and there’s no good way to get around it. If you play Minecraft and sometimes level a hilltop just for the fun of leveling a hilltop, you’ll probably enjoy scavenging in Fortnite.

I think both the building and fighting the husks aspects of Fortnite are going to be a much easier sell than the scavenging phases. There’re a bunch of weapons (guns & melee) plus heroes get special abilities to help smoosh husks. That’s all good fun.

What I tended to do over the weekend is enter a mission solo, scavenge like crazy and craft plenty of ammo (ammo is the reason why you need to scavenge so much) and then I’d just leave the mission; you get to keep everything you found. Then, now that I had plenty of ammo, I’d join a multiplayer mission to actually try to complete the mission.

Finished Assassin’s Creed III

Posted on by Nimgimli

My Assassin’s Creed obsession continues; I finally finished AC3. This is the Revolutionary War game that most folks didn’t seem to like very much. I played the Xbox 360 version via backwards compatibility on the Xbox One and it was a little glitchy. I’m not sure if that was due to the game itself or the backwards compatibility factor.

Still, I enjoyed it. You might hear people complain about the game having a 5 hour tutorial or some such madness. It’s not true but it does have an odd structure. The main character is Conner in this one (outside the animus it’s still Desmond) but for the first few hours you play as another character. It’s not tutorial but nor is it as open as most AC games. Still I thought it set things up nicely and I didn’t mind it at all.

Assassin’s Creed III

Conner ends up being a Forrest Gump-like character for the middle of the game. He’s defending the colonists as they dump tea in Boston Harbor, he’s riding through the night with Paul Revere, he’s at Bunker Hill. I loved these bits. In fact I loved the setting of this game. I have to admit I didn’t love Conner himself. He’s kind of a tragic figure; he’s been raised as Native American (his mother was Native American, his father was British) and he’s trying to protect his people, but he’s also helping the colonists drive out the British. We of course know that things won’t end well for his people but even now I’m not sure he was fighting on the right side. My issue with him was that he always seemed naive and/or pig-headed. He never stopped to question the motives of the colonists, and he’d barge into ridiculous situations and get himself captured.

Conner and George Washington chewing the fat (AC3)

Gamewise my only real gripe was the progression thing I was talking about when discussing Breath of the Wild the other day. It’s an AC game so your character doesn’t level up or anything, but he never really geared up either. There’re some interesting side-systems like producing goods and selling them via convoys, and there are naval missions and missions to improve your “Homestead” but in the end the income you made from all of this was kind of pointless since there wasn’t much to buy. I upgraded Conner’s sword once, and crafted a 2nd pistol holster and that was about it.

Assassin’s Creed III

Outside the animus, this is the end of an arc. The assassins have been trying to stop the calamity that was going to purge the earth for the second time (in December 2012…remember when that was a thing) and they succeeded, but not without paying a heavy price. We actually learn a lot about Those Who Came Before in this game, or at least a lot about what happened to them.

You might think after playing 4 Assassin’s Creed games in a row (AC2, AC Brotherhood, AC Revelations, AC III) I might have had enough. I thought I’d had enough. Every time I get close to the end of one of these games I think “Whew, finally done with AC for a while.” but then the endings always hook me. Same thing here. I rolled right into Assassin’s Creed Rogue.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue

And OMG I’m glad I did. So far Rogue is VERY similar to Black Flag in a lot of ways, and I loved Black Flag. Rather than playing a pirate you’re in the North Atlantic, prior to the Revolutionary War. In fact AC3, AC Black Flag and AC Rogue weave together really nicely. Your home base (at least early on) is the Davenport Homestead…which was the Homestead you had to rebuild in AC 3. Achilles, the old man who is your mentor in AC 3, is your mentor here too, but he’s a young man and his wife and son are still alive at the start of the game. Early on Ad�wal�, who was Kenway’s quartermaster in Black Flag, comes to visit. He’s older; this takes place after AC 4 and after the Ad�wal� side-story game.

So putting the pieces togeher, Rogue ties together Black Flag and AC III chronologically. Oh and it also tells us what we heavily suspected: that Conner in AC 3 is Edward Kenway’s (main character of AC Black Flag) grandson!

The more I play these games, the more sad I am that this fall’s AC Origins looks like it might be a kind of reboot. At the very least it won’t have historical events that we’re familiar with, given that it takes place in ancient Egypt. Leave it to me to get hooked on a game series just as it pivots. Though I’m going to take my time with Rogue and savor it, and then I have Unity and Syndicate still waiting (Unity got a bad wrap for being really buggy but I’m told it was patched eventually and that the PS4 Pro’s “Boost Mode” helps with framerate issues so I’m hoping it’ll be OK to play).

Assassin’s Creed Rogue

Why isn’t Breath of the Wild hooking me?

Posted on by Nimgimli

When Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out a few months ago, it got rave reviews from both the critical press and from my friends. Everyone seems to LOVE Breath of the Wild and people are still talking about it. By any objective measure I can think of, it is a great game. I couldn’t wait to finally try it.

But a week after it arrived on my doorstep, I’m still not hooked. I’m not saying it’s a bad game for me. It’s certainly pleasant to play, but after an hour or so I’m happy to put it away and move on to something else and it can be days before I pick it up again. I haven’t played very far into it because of this and maybe I just haven’t given it enough time yet.

Still being so much ‘the odd man out’ on this topic has led me to do a lot of introspection on why it isn’t hooking me, and I think it boils down to one thing: in my heart I’m an RPG guy. I crave a sense of progression and so far BotW isn’t giving me that; it’s very much an action-adventure rather than an action-rpg. Now to be fair Link does progress in some ways: you can increase his pool of hit points and stamina by solving the 120 Shrines that litter the landscape. For every 4 of these you can bump up either HP or Stamina by a unit.

But (so far) that’s the extent of the character’s progression. I had to find some runes very early on but I feel like I have all of those that there are (but maybe not…I hope not). It’s not the kind of game where killing monsters earns you exp or helps you unlock skills in a skill tree. Link is Link.

You can improve his armor and his weapons, but weapons in this game are completely temporary. It feels like spinning my wheels to attack a monster camp, break a weapon in the fight, and my reward is a chest that just replaces the weapon I broke. The idea is that you fight the monsters because it’s fun to do so, but so far I don’t find the combat system that compelling. Again, the combat is fine but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of depth to it. Often I just kite things while dropping the (unlimited) bombs I can conjure up.

But what about the world? The world is beautiful, yes. But Link is an ideal citizen (in real-life terms) in that he leaves nothing behind. He doesn’t impact the world he passes through. If he was a camper on the Appalachian Trail this would be a good thing. In video game terms I’m not so sure. He passes through an area, maybe takes out some mobs which will respawn at the next blood moon but otherwise once he’s gone, he’s gone. There is no sense of taming an area or unlocking stuff or making a difference, at least not locally. (Globally he’s going to save the world, of course.)

In my brief time of playing I’ve explored the plateau, then headed to a stables (kind of a truck stop for a world without trucks) and from there headed to a village where I was told to head to another village. I’ve talked to a bunch of NPCs and met a handful who needed my help but so far the side quests have been literally forgettable. The only one that I remember is a quest where a woman asked me to light 5 torches that stood in a pond. I used fire arrows to light them. My quest reward was 20 Rupees which I used to purchase fire arrows to replace the ones I used…from the woman who gave me the quest. Yeah that worked out pretty well for her, not so much for me. In another game I could think “Well at least I gained some exp or increased faction or…something.” Here it was a zero-sum activity.

I don’t like adventure games. Never have. For example the Telltale games that everyone loves? I can’t abide them. No progression. I need numbers to go up to make me happy. I think that’s the core of my issue with Breath of the Wild. Not enough numbers going up. And I’m NOT saying that’s a bad thing. Clearly it doesn’t matter to the majority of people who’re loving this game. But for me personally, yeah it’s not ideal. I’m also not really a sight-seer.

In contrast, the game I have been playing is Assassin’s Creed III which is not one of the better loved games in the franchise, nor do the AC games have levels or skill trees. Plus I’m playing via Backwards Compatibility which introduces some wonkiness (or the game was wonky on 360). It is a MUCH worse game than BotW and a game that is sometimes really frustrating, so why do I keep picking it up instead?

I think it’s because even though Conner (the assassin in this game) doesn’t have levels or anything, he does have an impact on the world. He works to wrest control of Boston and New York from the Templars. He builds up his homestead which leads to simple but memorable side-quests: helping a couple find love and eventually marriage. Helping a woman and her child get away from an abusive husband. Helping another couple to put down roots and finally have the child they’ve always wanted. I can look around the game world and think “I did that.” and it makes me smile. Conner can train assassins and he can amass wealth by sending out convoys. I’m constantly unlocking/changing something in the world and that makes up for the fact that Conner himself doesn’t ‘level up’ and even his gear is fairly static. (And when I’m not unlocking things I’m Forrest Gump-ing my way through the American Revolution. Protecting the rebels while they dump tea in Boston Harbor. Riding along with Paul Revere as he lets everyone know the Regulars are coming. Chilling with George Washington. None of these things have to do with progression but I guess they just prove the some ‘adventure-ish’ things can grab my attention because these did.)

I’m going to keep poking out Breath of the Wild and I hope eventually I get swept up in the current of events and feel more engaged with the world. I KNOW it is a great game. I’m just having trouble finding that greatness hidden within.

How to use free will to improve your open world game experience

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I landed on an article at Polygon, What Zelda: Breath of the Wild gets so right, explained in 20 minutes. It was basically promoting a video on why Zelda: Breath of the Wild is “The Best Game Ever” (though apparently that’s the name of a series of videos so it isn’t meant literally). Ben Kuchera, who wrote the post, said:

The game gets a lot of mileage out of having its own map be an item that�s part of the world itself. This helps Breath of the Wild neatly avoid that open-world trope of maps that are filled with noisy icons, which make the game feel more like a homework assignment than something people play for fun.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’ll embed the video below but it boils down to the assertion that BotW is a better game than all other open world games because there aren’t as many icons on the map. Further the creator of the video (who admits to not having played BotW all that much) illustrates his point by comparing an early-game version of the map with late game maps from Horizon Zero Dawn and Far Cry 4, which seems pretty shady to me. I mean the longer you play the more things you uncover, right? He also says mini-maps are bad (but BotW has one) and waypoints that show up in the gameworld are bad too.

Anyway, the whole video comes across to me as someone who first came up with a topic (“Why BotW is better than other open world games.”) and then carefully cherry-picked data points to support it. For example he never mentions the huge amount of time you spend screwing with your inventory in BotW.

But this post isn’t really about the video, it’s about Kuchera’s homework assignment comment. I’ve been hearing that a lot from gaming journalists and “influencers.” That the open world systems that they used to love are now the devil because there is too much to do.

Think about that. These people are complaining that the developers are giving you too many choices of how to have fun in their games. It’s a ridiculous argument.

I have a counter-hypothesis. Kids who grew up on video games forget that they have free will. My first ‘gamer’ years were spent with paper and cardboard. If I didn’t like a rule, I changed it. If part of a game wasn’t fun, I eliminated it. If I thought something was missing, I added it. If you were raised on video games you never got the chance to change the rules. You just did what the game told you to do. It may never have dawned on you that you have free will and can do whatever the heck you want!

In other words when I’m playing an open world game that has 10 different kinds of side-quests or collectibles and I find that some of them aren’t fun for me, I simply don’t do them. It’s a crazy idea, right? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ALL THE THINGS! You are in control of your video game experience! I firmly believe that the developers never expect every player to do every activity, but I also imagine they realize what is fun for player A is a drag for player B, and vice versa. So they offer a selection of things to do and let the player choose. PLAYER CHOICE IS A GOOD THING.

I’ve been playing and finishing a lot of open world games recently and never have I been prevented from getting to the end credits because I opted out of a side-quest or side-activity that I didn’t enjoy. If you go back far enough there may be games that behave differently but all the relatively modern open world games I’ve played don’t force you to do everything. You may have to do something to earn cash or level up or something, but they give you a menu of options and you can pick the one(s) you enjoy.

Anyway I think we can test my hypothesis because there are still plenty of gamers who play board games and do pen & paper RPGing. So I’m asking them, do you feel compelled to do every side-task in an open world game just because there’s an icon on the map for it?

Complaining about open world games having too many activities is like saying you don’t want to go to a bookstore because you don’t have time to read every book in it, or not going to a restaurant because the menu has too many choices. Exercise your free will. Play games to have fun, not to remove icons on a map.

Anyway, here’s this dude’s video. I find it all pretty sketchy and biased. For example he says in BotW there is no urgency to get to the end, you can do whatever you want. But literally one of the first things you learn is that Zelda has been fighting Ganon alone for 100 years and needs your help. If that doesn’t instill a sense of urgency, what will? I mean no open world game I’ve played has a literal timer ticking down. You can take your time in all of them, the only urgency comes from the narrative and BotW is no better or worse than any other open world game in those terms. But once again, the dude couldn’t let unbiased facts get in the way of his point.

Finished up Wolfenstein: The New Order

Posted on by Nimgimli

I bought Wolfenstein: The New Order a long time ago but didn’t play it much because it made me motion sick. That was before I upgraded the TV and the PS4. I’m not sure if it’s the lower input lag on the new TV or the ‘boost mode’ of the PS4 Pro but for whatever reason motion sickness isn’t the issue for me that it used to be, so a few weeks ago I gave Wolfenstein another try and found I could play it without any discomfort.

And what a treat it was. If you’re as unfamiliar as I, the story starts towards the end of World War 2. During an operation William “BJ” Blazkowicz takes a piece of shrapnel in the head and is left for dead. He is found by civilians who either don’t realize he’s an American soldier or don’t care, and is treated, but the shrapnel can’t be removed and it leaves him in a vegetative state. He is cared for in an asylum for 16 years before he finally wakes up in 1960.

While he was away, the Nazis won the war and basically conquered the world, and their technology is way ahead of where it was for us in 1960. They’ve got a moon base already! It doesn’t take long for Blazkowicz to join up with the resistance to try to overthrow the Nazi regime via a series of ever more outrageous missions.

Wolfenstein has 5 difficulty levels and I played at #3 for about half the game. My FPS skills aren’t what they used to be and there was some difficult passages but I was having fun and didn’t mind re-playing chunks of the game over and over. But somewhere along the way, the story and characters really got their hooks in me.

Yeah, Wolfenstein: The New Order has a for-real story. I mean it’s not very realistic (as is typical of shooter stories, one man basically replaces an army), but it’s a kind of Saturday matinee plot with lots of spectacle, and I came to care about the characters that Blazkowicz encountered. It’s not always a happy story, either.

Anyway I got so engrossed in the story that I turned the difficulty down to 2, and eventually to 1, just because I wanted to see what happened next. And oddly I think I had MORE fun playing that way. Truth is, I like feeling like a bad-ass and mowing down enemies. I think I prefer the fun of being super-powerful to the satisfaction of beating a difficult section of the game. /shrug

Anyway, it was a great ride and I’m really glad I gave it a second chance. I expected this to be a bro-dude romp, and at times it was, but Blazkowicz had a love interest and he lost people he cared about along the way and he didn’t just shrug that off. I mean yeah he still has the jarhead tough-guy exterior but there’s more nuance here. And hell, he got to trip with Jimi Hendrix. How often do you get to do that in a game? There’s also a ton of “alternate history” lore strewn about in the form of newspaper clippings and such, and I love alternate history stories so I was really in my element.

Good times. Now I’m really looking forward to the new game coming out this fall.

The Nintendo Switch as a handheld

Posted on by Nimgimli

Quick post this morning before work.

Last night I decided to head upstairs early, taking the Switch with me to play in ‘handheld mode.’ As a handheld, the Switch is awesome. It feels really good in the hands and all my concerns with the graphics quality vanish on the small screen. If I had to pick one thing to complain about, it’s that the tiny – and + buttons are hard to see/find in a dark room, but that’s just a muscle memory thing that will be cured via familiarity.

It is also a pretty cool feeling to be playing on the TV, then slip the Switch out of the dock and pick up right where you left off. I’ve done the ‘cross-play’ thing between the Playstation and the Vita and that was neat but it always required some kind of manual syncing. Since with the Switch it’s the same hardware, the transition is of course instant.

One last thing before I go. The Switch has a capture button like the PS4. For now it only captures screenshots (though if I remember correctly the intent is for it to eventually capture clips) and the only way to get them off the Switch is to share them to Twitter, Facebook, or save them on a MicroSD card on the Switch and then remove that card and pop it into a PC. Be nice if there was an easier way but what can you do.

What I didn’t discover until last night is that you can quickly add text to a screenshot. It’s super easy to do. You type your message, then you can scale it, color it, position it and rotate it. The only thing missing, I guess, is being able to choose a font. Still, I thought it was a really neat little bonus feature. Here’s an example (the shot is through Link’s “scope,” just for context. That’s why the colors are kind of muted — that is NOT a result of adding the text).

A weekend with the Switch, which you need to think of as a handheld gaming system

Posted on by Nimgimli

After playing around with the Switch Friday evening, the thing sat dormant for all of Saturday and it was then that I realized I’d need either a Joycon Charging Stand or a Pro Controller. The heights of my laziness are such that if I’m sitting on the couch and have the choice of grabbing an Xbox controller, grabbing a PS4 controller, or getting up, walking over to the TV, detaching the Joycons from the Switch (they need to be attached to charge), then attaching their caps or attaching them to that holder gizmo, I was almost ALWAYS going to play something on the Xbox or Playstation. I’m all about the path of least resistance!

That led to my second Switch revelation. The Switch is a portable console that happens to be able to attach to a TV and that’s how you need to think about it. I used to have a cable that let me attach my PSP to the TV, and the Switch is a modern interpretation of that idea. That’s important to keep in mind if you’re thinking about a Switch. Do you do a lot of handheld gaming? Do you often have to ‘fight for’ TV time? Then the Switch might be ideal for you. If you’re mostly going to use it as a handheld, the fact that the Joycons are always attached to it for charging is a non-issue.

I don’t do much portable gaming. I have a Vita and a 3DS, neither of which gets used much. I don’t travel often and don’t commute. When I do travel I’m generally driving. I’ve taken my handhelds with me when I do travel but rarely get around to using them. Usually I pack them before I leave and unpack them, untouched, when I get home.

I also don’t fight for TV time. Angela and I watch a couple hours of TV together during dinner, but otherwise the TV is “hers” during the day and “mine” at night. She’s more apt to watch the TV in the office (we have 3 TVs) while she does something on her computer rather than sitting in the living room and focusing exclusively on the TV anyway. So every evening the 60″ 4K TV in the living room is there for me to use.

One of the biggest Switch advocates I know responded (on Facebook) to my last Switch post with “I love mine. I just played it for the last four hours on a flight from St. Louis to Las Vegas. I can’t do that on my PlayStation Pro.” Clearly this person was in the market for a handheld gaming device so for him the Switch is ideal. For me, the portable-ness is a more or less a non-feature. It’s unlikely our Switch will ever leave our house. I might take it and play in bed once in a great while; we’ll see. It seemed odd to me to compare the Switch to the PS4 Pro, but hey if we’re going to go that route, I’d take the PS4 Pro any day.

Which brings me to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It got delivered Sunday afternoon and I guess I put 3-4 hours into it. I just got off the starting plateau, though I puttered around some before getting to that point.

Gameplay-wise. Zelda is fine so far. I like a lot of the systems in it, but so far combat is pretty simple and it’s missing some obvious quality of life features. For instance one of the first things you’re taught is how to cook stuff. Combining stuff to make a tasty dish is fun once, and trial & error-ing your way to discovering new recipes is fun too. But cooking a stack of 10 things, one batch at a time? Not fun.

Then there’s eating food (which heals you). OMG what were they thinking? To eat food you open your main menu, then your inventory, then you scroll over to the Food category, then you scroll to the food you want to eat, then you open the context menu for that food item and finally choose EAT. Seriously? Thank goodness time stops while you do this but I sure wish there was some kind of quick menu to access food.

But having other things kind of just work was cool. You can chop down trees to cross chasms, you can shoot ropes to lower bridges (and the ropes don’t have a big sparkly “SHOOT ME” effect, you just have to think “Well logically I should be able to shoot them” and you can). You can roll bombs into enemy camps to blow them up. You can quickly kill sleeping enemies. All this stuff kind of ‘just works’ and even the illogical stuff, like powering a raft by waving a palm frond to create a breeze to push the sails…well that kind of thing works the way you WISH it would in real life.

I’m hoping, though, that once I get off this plateau the world feels a little more alive. So far it’s been me, some old dude, and small camps of cannon fodder enemies to practice combat on. And Link himself is a blank slate so the world feels very quiet.

But my one big issue is the graphics. The art-style of the game is very nice and was chosen, I think, to cast the Switch in its best light. I’m sure the game looks great on the Switch’s small 720P screen. But blown up to 60″ I can’t help but think how much nicer the game would look if the Switch had more horsepower. I’m not even talking about pushing it past 1080P, but if there were more processing cycles to enhance the anti-aliasing it would be very welcome.

As you move through the game world there’s a lot of noticeable ‘movement’ along edges. Shimmering or creeping as the jaggies migrate along a line as the world draws in. Here’s a still image of what I’m taling about. It’s hard to see in the small embedded image, but click for full size to see what I mean, then imagine that image at 60″.

There are also a lot of textures, particularly bare earth and rock faces, that look very flat. Again, you probably don’t notice on the small screen but they actually made the game feel incomplete on the big screen, like something hadn’t drawn in properly and I was still seeing the lower resolution “distance” textures.

Anyway, point being it’s clear the target experience is playing on the Switch screen, so keep that in mind. Luckily I’ve been playing some old 360 and PS3 games so I’m in a mood to forgive low-res textures and jaggies.

By Sunday night I had purchased a Pro Controller for the Switch and OMG what a difference that made. Playing Zelda went from being this kind of awkward “why am I running in a circle when I’m trying to turn?” experience to controlling like a dream (aside from the fact that Nintendo and Sony use reversed “Action” and “Back” buttons so I keep hitting Back and I mean to be hitting the “Do it” button, but that’s on me). I do suggest turning off the motion controls and I switched jump to be on the B (I think?) button. The one at 6 o’clock. The Pro just feels much more familiar, if you’re a Playstation or Xbox gamer and in my experience it’s an integral part of the “Switch on the TV” experience; it’s just a shame that it adds $70 to the price of the console. I’d give a lot to be able to reverse the Action and Back buttons, though.

Regrets? Maybe a little bit. In a way I’m asking the impossible of Zelda: I’m asking it to be a game that’s worth spending $430 to play (Switch = $300, Zelda = $60, Pro Controller = $70). What game is worth that much!? But I AM looking forward to playing more, and I’m looking forward to some other Switch exclusives coming down the pike, so I don’t have the kind of regrets I have for the Wii U. That was a BAD decision. Switch is never going to be my main gaming platform but I think it’s popular enough that it’ll get the support it needs to be an auxiliary device. Heck I downloaded a demo-thingie for Splatoon 2 and I might end up getting that!