As the pandemic lingers on and I get used to life after FFVII Remake, I have to get my gaming back on track. I still hang out with friends almost daily with Overwatch and Apex Legends, the former of which is littered with smurf accounts.
I've been plowing away at The Witcher (3), though not as much as Geralt on the ladies. Boy, ol Geralt likes the ladies and the ladies like him. It's so refreshing to have this layer of character in a game. Games are loaded with so many good looking people that it makes sense for them to be attracted to each other. I knew I would play this game after Skyrim because it just improves upon every single thing about it. Magic is completely underwhelming in Skyrim, yet the Witcher distills it down to a handful of spells that you can improve in different ways. Also, by removing the name-your-character convention, the characters actually talk to Geralt and the voice acting can inflect better. Geralt himself takes the time to empathize with characters, some of which have some morally-questionable behavior that you can pity or punish. The dialogue options occasionally lead to markedly different results, but the gestures and facial expressions are great. I ended up killing a friend because I wasn't paying attention and chose a certain option. Oops!
Looting is streamlined but crafting is mildly painful. I hate crafting in games, so the simpler the better. I wouldn't mind foraging if there weren't 100 damn recipes to forage for. You can pin one recipe and its associated ingredients at a time, meaning you could halt your progress for hours just to go pick flowers at any time. Combat is fun because it's animated so well. I will say that heavy attacks do similar damage to fast attacks while taking longer to execute. Another thing I don't like is how much of a chore it is to mount Roach, your horse. The movement in this game is very fluid, but occasionally you get caught on stuff.
The Last of Us Remastered. A friend is going to loan the second game to me, so I gave this an Easy playthrough, and experienced Left Behind, the DLC for the first time. As usual, Naughty Dog delivers an interesting story that is made 1000% better by the meticulously captured and animated, top-tier voice acting and hardware-pushing graphics. Even on a low difficulty, there's a lot of sneaking around, as being loud and confrontational only works with certain weapons. This gameplay tension keeps up the story tension and it's a great play. The DLC mixes things up: Ellie is just as violent as Joel, but the episode is completely character development driven, as there are just as many minigames as their are violent encounters. I was also delightfully surprised that this 6-year-old game still has an active multiplayer community. I spent a good 2 hours there before realizing that I won't platinum this game, which was a bit of a relief.
I also shelled out $5 to get the Dead Cells DLC, which adds maybe 20% more content. I'm not as obsessed with the game as I was for a solid year after its release, but there have been milestone patches every 3 months or so that shake up the balance. I am definitely not as good at it as I was, but the game still gave me hundreds of hours of enjoyment and buying the DLC was more support than expecting to get loads more playtime out of it. Still good but harder than I remember.
In the middle of July, to celebrate the Far Cry 6 trailer, Far Cry 3 Remastered went on sale for three measly dollars. After Primal and Blood Dragon, I knew what to expect: sandbox, dumb AI and loads of guns that are almost the same. I was surprised with how good the graphics were in the remaster vs the small price tag. At least FC3 was more of a mainstream title with the interesting-if-psychopath villain (this one by Breaking Bad's Michael Mando) and the way-too-first-person cutscenes that verge on corny.
Far Cry 3 tries to map its plot to Alice in Wonderland and some people might think that's clever. I think playing as a run-of-the-mill white guy slaughtering natives to save his white friends is pretty trite. He starts off super reluctant to violence and ends up just sounding like an appropriating wuss. I think you're supposed to walk away from it thinking he's transformed into a violence-loving badass by the end, but he just comes off as a colonizing douche. The gameplay is pretty fun, though this game subscribes to the Bad Vehicle Physics Club, like every other game created ever. Liberating bases is pretty fun, and none of the trophies were tied to difficulty, so the whole thing was a breeze. Worth $3 for sure.
On the Switch, I just started Celeste, a platforming game with a dope soundtrack. It's one of those games where you die 1-10 times every screen as you figure out what jumps work and test reaction time. It's all very fun and my new go to when I have a few minutes to burn and don't want to sit through story or loading times.
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