PixlBit

The last time I blogged was a good 2 months ago as the holiday season started hitting, so I certainly have some catching up to do. Even though I was out of the blogging game for a while I was still running a guerrilla campaign in the shadows reading lots of good articles on Pixlbit, Polygon, reading blogs, leaving comments occasionally, and listening to gaming podcasts. Over at Pixlbit, editor and writer Julian Titus put together quite a passionate Final Fantasy retrospective for the 25th anniversary which he worked on for several months. If you are of the Final Fantasy persuasion you should certainly check it out, but if you're not it's still a worthwhile adventure.

The Famicom Years

The Super Famicom Years

The Playstation Years

The Playstation 2 Years

The Seventh Generation Years

Since there's a bit to catch up on I'm going to break it into two blogs that should hopefully be easier to digest. This will be about the holidays, and the next blog will be all about the games I'm playing currently, post-holiday.

On Black Friday I was able to buy both Dishonored and Skyrim new for $25 a piece which was a great deal I couldn't pass up. I played through Dishonored and really loved what I found in the design. The story and characters didn't grab me much, and the final 3 levels of the game became pretty boring for me because everything I wanted to do in the game I was able to do plenty of in the previous 5 levels excluding the escape from prison tutorial, and it was amazing. Dishonored has some issues to improve upon whenever Harvey and the team begin work on the next game, but overall it's an amazing game that I can't recommend enough. I'm a fan of stealth action and my 3 favorite stealth games are now Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Deus Ex HR, and Dishonored. I love the level design, there's always several paths to get to targets. Think about it like going from point A to E with points B, C, and D in between. And there are always at least two ways to deal with the assassinations. The non-lethal methods are the most fun to do and they are often quite creative and compelling. There were times in the game where I realized that being non-lethal doesn't automatically make you good and allow you to stand on moral high ground. I played the game non-lethal and I still made a lot of choices I wasn't proud of. I felt flawed, I felt human despite all these supernatural powers and weapons I had. Quite the achievement, Arkane.

Skyrim has been great. I'm playing on 360 and it's been solid, only 2 minor bugs in dozens and dozens of hours. If I could play on PC I'd prefer that because I'd like to have access to the mod community. It's the Nordic viking fantasy I always wanted and it's improved a great deal of the creative-direction problems Morrowind and especially Oblivion had. Morrowind was all about being huge, but the quests themselves were way too MMO and text-box conversations didn't help. Oblivion and Skyrim have some of the same qualities, but they are striking better balances and learning to execute better. Oblivion reduced the amount of content but made the side quests and guilds richer. With the use of the Radiant Questing system, Skyrim has been able to provide a natural progression to the previous systems and kill all the birds with one stone. The story driven side quests and guild quests are quite rich and fun but for the people that want to keep on going, the radiant quests as well as the miscellaneous quests will set up random adventures for you that aren't driven by story but are opportunities to quest, level, loot, etc. Oh, and there's two main quests outside of all that involving the dragons and the civil war that finally work and are much more interesting than the awful one Oblivion had going on.

Oblivion's biggest problems were the worst kind of problems, not bugs but creative design. The leveling, the interface, the character creation, exploring Oblivion, and the weapon/armor system that made only Glass and Deadric armors useful as well as easy to come across. Skyrim's systems-design is finally hitting all the right notes. Creating a character isn't a pain in the ass anymore, most of the enemies don't level up with you, and you can just play the game how you want and the skills you use increase. The perks you choose when you level are great and can change the combat pretty dramatically. Sneaking and using the bow is a blast. Melee combat is much slower, weightier, and bloodier than Oblivion. My favorite addition is now you can now craft all of your own armor, weapons, jewellery and enchant them with magic, and upgrade them through smithing so that every type of armor can be useful and cool for much longer. Since the beginning of the game I've only ever used equipment that I forged myself, so it gives you a sense of ownership and self-reliance. Jesus the system in Oblivion blew, Skyrim is a breath of fresh air and some good ideas finally.

I feel like a Nordic warrior living off the land, independent of the Empire, forging all my own goods, putting my sword through any Elf that tells me I can't worship Talos, and sneaking around the gorgeous aspen tree forests, tundra, and hot spring geysers hunting Elk as I hear a distant dragon's roar echo across the landscape while she flies miles away in the snowy mountain tops razing a Legion camp all before the sun sets and the aurora become visible. I love emergent gameplay and Skyrim is pretty great at making systems that can interact with one another in unscripted and fascinating ways making your experience feel sophisticated and polished yet completely chaotic and random.

So I bought myself Dishonored and Skyrim and I've enjoyed them both, but for Christmas my Dad bought me Halo 4. I've been a huge Halo universe fan since the beginning and some of the guys at Bungie are what made me interested in being a level designer. I love Halo campaigns, the Halo sandbox, co-op, Firefight, I've read 5 of the novels so far, I love the anime, I love making things in Forge. Halo 4 was a really fun game, but there's a lot to work on. Halo looks better than ever, it feels better than ever, it sounds better than ever. The guns literally roar, crack, and thunder in ways that make the previous games sound like muddy water by comparison. 343 is doing so many things right with Halo, but if I want to get into Halo talk it'll get down to why the level designers made a particular encounter space in a certain level a snowflake-ish shape and why it was confusing and had really bad flow of movement. When you come across the cartographer room there's some raised side edges on ramps when there shouldn't be because it requires me to either jump over or only run up from the front, disrupting flow.

There's unnecessary floor gaps in the Foreunner gondola architecture that led to some confusion and cheap deaths while I was in combat. Some of the level design is really great and provides a great Halo sandbox, but some other areas of the game feel awkward. I know for a fact this game was playtested to high heaven so I wonder how many others had the complaints I do, or maybe it's just me. I can understand the creative logic of why there's no huge Forge World map but several small ones instead (more variety), but I still don't like it. It's very difficult to absorb narrative in the campaign in many sequences because things are very chaotic and Cortana is yelling. Compounding the narrative absorption problem is the fact that she uses long-winded hard-science fiction terminology in the heat of battle to direct you when all you have to do is kill some Covies and go press a button at the end. When the pace is fast and combat is occurring you should keep it simple and "dumb" for lack of a better term. But when the pace slows down that's the right time to turn into Star Fleet Technical Manual. The Halo universe is dense and smart, and I understand the logic of why it's good to make a smart game with smart objectives giving purpose to the action, but the specific way it was done made it hard to absorb the majority of the time. Therefore for most of the campaign I had little idea what the hell was happening. It was gorgeous and action packed, but I didn't know what was happening until I consulted the wiki to get a clear idea. Oh, and there's no Firefight, that's bullshit. Huge shit right out of a bull. Halo 4 is really good and when I beat it I went straight back for a 2nd playthrough, but there's a lot of buts.

So those are the games I played back over holidays. In the next blog I'll do a gaming update showing you the games I've been playing currently, and I'll even tell you what my most anticipated game of 2013 is. Before I go I'll leave some amazing music that I've been listening to a lot.