PixlBit

My second playthrough is a Faith build but I use a sword and shield as well. I have the Priest's Chime +10 in order to cast my Great Lightning Spear. I also use two Bastard Swords, one is a Fire BS +10 and the other is a Lightning BS +10, and the shield I've been using is the Drangleic Shield you can grab with the rest of the Drangleic set near the Pursuer in the Forest of the Fallen Giants.

The Faith build is way easier I've found, you can do so much damage it's bonkers.

Glad you're not dead, Ben. The only thing more dangerous than dry chicken is dry turkey, which is almost always super dry. Dry foods in general are a real gamble to try and eat. Mechanically you either have to hope you have enough saliva to lubricate whatever the food is, or actually drink it with a mouthful of water but that doesn't sound very appetizing. As a kid I learned early that I didn't like eating peanut butter sandwhiches much because the bread and peanut butter dried my mouth out almost instantly on the first bite and it was a close call trying to swallow a mouthful of a sandwhich like those sometimes.

Tecmo Super Bowl

Great game, but back in my sophmore year of high school I use to get high all the time with my friend Justin, and I fell asleep every time I got high, so the list of games I dozed off during would be a long list. The only one I remember clearly was Tecmo Super Bowl.

E3 is sneaking up a lot faster than people probably realize.

I'd really like to see some teasers from the next Fallout (which certainly exists but miraculously hasn't been leaked yet after all this time) and maybe the next Souls game. With DS2 behind me I need more Fallout way more than I do Souls, but in the end I need both no matter what. It's way too early for more Souls, I haven't had any time to miss it, but a simple announcement that the next game exists and is 2 or so years away would be fine.

Great review, I had pretty much the exact same thoughts overall, same praises and criticisms that you fleshed out in your review.

I'm enjoying the game mechanically even more on the second playthrough I'm doing now. My first time through with a pure melee build was fine, but now I'm doing a faith build and it's fantastic. First time I've used magic in a Souls game and it's pretty great so far.

Back to the review topics, the geographical inconsistencies get to me all the time when I play. So much of the world feels in-cohesive. There are parts that do make some sense, like when you're in Majula and you see the huge Roman style aqueduct leading towards Drangleic Castle, you can eventually pass right under that aquedect when you're somewhere around the Shaded Woods sections. When you're in Majula you can see Heide's Tower also, and from No Man's Wharf I think you can see Lost Bastille though the cave opening, but other than that most of the game doesn't make any sense.

Once you get up to Drangleic Castle and you look out onto where Majula should be you don't see anything familiar. You don't see the aqeduct, don't see Majula, and even the coastline looks totally different. From Drangleic Castle the ocean looks more like a lake or sea, and there's a ridge line of mountains wrapping around the coast in a way that doesn't make sense. And all of that says nothing about how weird a place like Iron Keep is, which you mentioned in your review. I love the diversity of colors and environments compared to Dark Souls, but the downside is that the world in DS2 isn't cohesive. There's so many places in DS2 where you come to a vista and you think, "This is the perfect place for a rad vista, I should be able to see the rest of the world from here. Or, I should be to see where I previously came from, at least." That doesn't happen in DS2, once you get to Drangleic Castle you're hoping for some rad scenery and it's ugly, unfamiliar, and as uninspiring as can be.

One of the things I constantly think about when I play DS2 is that despite how robust and well crafted it is in many ways, I always get the feeling that they didn't take the world-building nearly as seriously as we did. They obviously worked hard and made a really good game, but when it comes to the lore, to the world-building, and level design they must have not had the time or maybe the vision for what they wanted. Maybe both, development is always way more complex than people usually think and rarely ever has anything to do with laziness. Even the shittiest most broken games have people busting their asses day and night on them. Sometimes when I come across mysteries in DS2 and want to know something about the lore, for the first time in a Souls game I've been telling myself, "Maybe there's actually no lore in this particular situation over here. They didn't flesh it out."

In DS1 there were certainly some inconsistencies and parts that didn't contribute to the greater spider web, but the majority of the lore in Dark Souls 1 was masterfully crafted. Once you started digging into each item description, where you found it, and what the story of the characters and areas might be, you started to realize that you could build epic, dramatic, and even very intimate and personal tales off of the connection of just a few notes. Not just based on pure imagination, but using scraps of evidence to connect ideas and then using your imagination to illustrate what it meant. There was so many times when you could be piecing together theories and think to yourself, "There isn't a single thing about this game that is random once you look closer, these items were exactly where From wanted them, and the descriptions were written in just the perfect way to make my imagination go wild."

There was literally the perfect balance of solid text information, vague text information, and mysterious geographical information. As a loser like me who's obsessed with Dark Souls lore and others like me, we could use the things we found in those three story-telling devices to weave cool theories, and then back them up with evidence that could sometimes be interpreted in a couple different ways.

In DS2 it seems like there's definitely not that perfect balance of devices. There are things that feel too on the nose, there's places that feel like dead-ends, places that simply aren't that interesting, and some of the things that are vague seem like they might be accidental or unfinished. So that's why when I come across some of the things I see in DS2 I'm forced to say to myself now, "Maybe there's just nothing here, maybe they didn't think about it as hard as we do."

I honestly love the story of the game. In some ways it's a simply story. The tale in DS2 is an old fashioned fantasy about an evil queen that weeds her way into power and sews darkness into a kingdom much like the evil queen in Snow White fables does. I believe that the reason I love it is because it's an old fashioned fairy tale, except told through the dark, depressing, and mysterious flavor of the Soul's world. But there's nowhere near as many interesting side-stories. It's not lazy, but it's sloppy.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

A ghost girl rapes you and gets herself pregnant

It all depends on the weapon you give us, Chris.

If you give us a shotgun we'd take the hundred little godzillas anyday. Need a big laser for the giant godzilla.

That's really cool you saw some wild turkeys, Tami. Since I have a little while to prep and take classes at our community college before I apply to DigiPen Institute for university, I have time to think about random game ideas I'd want to prototype for projects once I get there. One idea I have is for a 2D stealth puzzle platformer called Sneaky Turkey. The rough idea being to avoid predators. When or if I start prototyping that specific idea I would want to study turkeys more. Not to make it a simulation but just to get ideas for how they behave, what kind of defense mechanisms they have, and the environments they like, and what they eat. For example I don't even know how intelligent or social turkeys are, that's basic stuff I'd need to learn about.

I'd like to make a game about orcas as well but I'm not sure what the point of it would be or what mechanics you'd use. When I watched the documentary The Whale about the orca Luna in Canada that was socializing with people, I thought it would be worth the effort to try and make a game that attempted to capture that feeling of connection, intimacy, empathy, bonding, and mystery I guess.

Often when I come up with ideas for systems, mechanics, or stories I usually start from some kind of strong emotional moment, some catharsis, realization, something that inspired me in real life, or any kind of moment that can stir a strong feeling within me personally, and then I try to think about how to replicate that in a game to share with other people. How to build a game and story around that to build up to it and give it context.

The turkey idea I have is more straight forward, the reason why I was attracted to it was just for the mechanics of it. From what I know, turkeys can't fly very far, only for small sprints to avoid something. That's one thing that sounds like game mechanics waiting to happen. The orca ideas are much more nebulous and without any form whatsoever because the thing that makes them attractive are the emotions and complexity, so I don't know where to start with mechanics for those yet.

It's an ice cream cone. Or a sack of drugs.

Are you into drug traffiking now, Alex? Lol

I think the VR tech is amazing and has incredible potential, but for me the excitement is mostly in the context of educational material for people, as well as for medical purposes. I'm a visual and hands-on learner, it's not a unique thing nowadays because most people say that anymore, and most college, grade-schools, and educational institutions in general try to tout a curriculum that is hands-on. Nobody is out there saying, "We'll teach the old fashioned way by making you sit down in a class and only read a textbook."

Having VR you could design 3D models of the solar system that kids can look at, move around in, and interact with (especially if you had Kinect or Move tech instead of a traditional controller). You could take abstract or complex mathematical, physiological, and astronomical concepts and topics that are terrible and sometimes impossible for kids to imagine when they're simply reading text, and use VR as visual and interactive tools to help get complex ideas across. For some kids, planetary accretion may sound like nonsense on paper, but if they can see simulations of it in 3D, then play around with various sizes of matter from dust particles to planets and everything in-between during the process of accretion. If people are having trouble understanding elasticity in pyshics, Hooke's law, and orbits you could show them the equations as well as visual models.

You could take biology and chemistry and let kids play with models and sims of atoms, cell structure and replication, mitosis, meiosis, show how muscles get built, how fat is burned, how photosynthesis in plants works. These topics are usually a nightmare or at least a bore in most classes for kids. VR could be a cool tool to augment a curriculum and get kids to look at the material in a new way, possibly get their brains to absorb it better or wrap their minds around something new that might've otherwise just been a one-off memorization cram before a test, an info-dump during the test, and then a huge loss of the info after the short-term memorization is no longer important. Gaming in general can be huge for education, and VR is just one facet of an approach that could add digital simulations and interactions to learning.

On the medical side I think it would be really neat for people who are sick or impaired in some way to be able to enjoy VR while they're at the hospital, at home, or in need of a certain kind of stress relief, escapism, or entertainment that games could offer. With VR, somebody who is paralyzed from the waist down could still climb Kilimanjaro or McKinley. Right now there's already foundations that donate gaming consoles to hospitals and institutions to help give their kids the benefits that normal gaming can give to some people. VR and certain styles of sims could reach out to a much broader audience of patients (especially the elderly) and offer more passive interactions, relaxation, and stress relief. Stress kills healthy people and has a huge affect on biology and psychology, let alone what it can do to cancer patients and other people in similar situations. Any avenue for stimulating your mind and relieving stress is huge and can keep people positive, which has been proven to increase chances of survival and treatment effectiveness.

Onto the personal front and actually related to the type of gaming I do, I would be scared to have an Oculus or any VR as they are right now, because of the lack of awareness and complete immersion. I'm a naturally cautious person that likes to be aware. When I'm in my car I don't turn my music up very loud, and when I come to stops at lights I turn it down even further so I don't attract too much attention and so I can hear better. When I listen to music with ear buds in a public place I always only use one bud, a variety of those kinds of things. I don't really like to be 100% immersed into any one thing or have my senses of sight or sound be dedicated to one thing, it brings up tons of instinctual anxiety and paranoia that totally are counter to what you want in entertainment and escapism.

You could make some super amazing experiences on VR, action-y or not, but I don't think I'd want to have one in my home and do it by myself. You'd need like a spotter, somebody who can literally babysit you while you're zoned-out and your senses are hijacked, which seems kind of weird. However, I'm definitely excited by the educational and medical reaches VR could have in the future, which are huge. In those contexts people are rarely alone and you have teachers, nurses, and peers around you to keep you safe, help you, or share the experience with.