Saturday 8th June
LEGO
Marvel Super Heroes 2 - The end is in sight now, with only three levels
to go and the last of the random “complete them in any order” fetch-quests
finished. (I didn’t actually dislike them, except for the fact that they kept
making the trophies ping out of sequence, which was making me paranoid that they
weren’t loading properly, as happened to me repeatedly with the last LEGO
Marvel game, Avengers.) Anyway, now we’re just about ready to get
the whole gang together at Avengers Mansion and start the end-game - and, after
the satisfying-but-heartbreaking conclusion to the actual Avengers: Endgame,
I’m looking forward to something a bit more bright and cheery from this
alternate take on the characters.
Heaven’s Vault - We’ve reached the garden from
the demo! This is going to be so pretty. We’re saving it for next time because
we have the feeling that we’re going to spend ages there…
Sunday 9th June
A rare and treasured lazy Sunday spent in good health,
mostly trying to convince a clumsy small boy and a disobedient giant cat-bird
to do what I wanted. Yes, nearly two years on, I’m still making my way through The
Last Guardian, but today things really turned a corner: I hit the last
quarter of the game - which is the part where the plot kicks in - and suddenly
I am 100% more invested than I have been up until this point. It helps that I’m
finally starting to get a grip on the weirdly unintuitive controls that feel
like they ought to be way more intuitive (and which sometimes manage to
feel like a bad port despite the game being a PS4 exclusive). Part of my lack of
investment is clearly my own fault - it’s taken me 21 months to reach the 9
hour mark of the game, so clearly I’ve been neglecting this one, sometimes
going months without playing it. Part of it is that, for reasons unknown, the
Guard enemies freak the absolute shit out of me: I originally thought this was
because I hadn’t played many combat-oriented games for a while when I began
playing this one, and wasn’t expecting there to be an evasion-based fighting
element in this seemingly gentle puzzle platformer; but nearly two years and a
lot of action RPGs later, I’m genuinely and unpleasantly panicked when
those guys come after me. For some reason I’ve found using a walkthrough helps:
it’s sad in a way, because I miss out on a few surprises this way, but since it
stops me from having a panic attack trying to find my way out as those clanky
stone bastards chase me around a tiny arena with a literal death door in it,
I’m willing to sacrifice my childlike wonder on this occasion.
So I’m onto the last quarter or so of the game now, and have
just been graced with the lore dump cutscene. The first 75% of this narrative
happened (figuratively speaking) in the dark, and then seemingly out of
nowhere, you suddenly get the whole story all at once. If I could change one thing
about the story in this game, it would be to have split that cutscene so that
the first half took place at the beginning of the game. [Beware SPOILERS
from here to the end of the paragraph.] It’s obvious from the start that
the Boy was kidnapped in some way, and there’s no benefit to the mystery in
keeping back that revelation for so long; but doing it my way around would have
added a lot more weight to the unveiling of Trico’s role in said kidnapping,
since from the start s/he has seemed solely like your fellow victim and
trustworthy protector in what you’re enduring. Learning that Trico is in fact
your attacker-turned-ally, who may or may not be returning to their old ways as
their strength returns, would work way better as a twist if you had any time to
absorb the details of the kidnapping in the first place. With literally no time
dedicated to building up the only actual mysterious element in the Boy’s
central “mystery”, it loses some of its power to inspire some doubts in your
previously trusting relationship with Trico just before the grand finale.
You can’t
spend all day hanging out with giant cat-bird-griffin-dragons; sometimes you
have to solve some more earthbound mysteries, at least if you ever want to
platinum all the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes games. Sherlock
Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is probably my least favourite of the
eight titles currently in the series; but, replaying it, I’m realising that my
worst day playing a Frogwares game is still way more fun than my best day
playing something else. Crimes & Punishments may be the game where
Frogwares started to take things a little too seriously, but there’s still
plenty of silly fun to be had, and I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to
platinum a game from my favourite series.
Heaven’s
Vault - We’ve finally reached the section from the demo we played at
EGX last year, an eerily beautiful garden with a palatial greenhouse inside
that seems to be a graveyard for Ancient Emperors. Revisiting the scene with
context was really interesting - to be honest, I’m quite surprised that the
demo showed details from so late in the game, past the halfway mark by my
reckoning. I was loving this game already, but this was the part that convinced
me I’d like to live in the game world: a next-level aspect of fandom that’s
bound to generate some combination of bad fanfic and attempting to recreate the
whole thing in The Sims sooner or later…
Tuesday 11th June
A few impressions from today’s session of LEGO Marvel
Super Heroes 2:
- The
companion AI is so mercifully more helpful than from previous
installments. If I need to be in two places at once, my inactive
characters will recognise this and stay where I put them without me
having to resort to fooling the game by switching on a second controller.
I’ve been playing LEGO adaptation games for nearly a decade now, and this
is so refreshing.
- The
three-part character missions from the first game have been combined with
the Deadpool bonus levels, so that you actually unlock the character and then
get a short optional Gwenpool level to finish off their sub-plot. I like
this innovation.
- OH
MY GOD there are Howling Commandos of SHIELD characters in this
game! I unlocked Hit Monkey as a playable character! I know the Marvel and
DC LEGO games get laughed at for including extremely niche characters from
the comics that movie/TV fans have never heard of, but it turns out I’m
very OK with this when it’s my niche preferences that are being
catered to! Isn’t that great?!
Wednesday 12th June
The
Sims 4 - Since I’ve barely scratched the surface with the add-ons I’ve
bought, I took a closer look at the three main professions introduced in Get
to Work. I’ve usually been less enthusiastic than some other players about
the opportunity to control my Sims during their work day, but for the first
time in the franchise I think I’m starting to get the appeal. Maybe it’s
because the dev team have finally found a manageable balance between varied
workday activities and giving enough time to complete them in (without
exhausting your Sim into the process); or perhaps it’s just because they had
the foresight to hold back three of the series’ staple careers - Law
Enforcement, Medicine, and Science - and make them the basis of the active
careers this time around, as well as making this the first expansion of the
generation rather than a later addition.
Also,
possibly due to interest in the game being drummed up by EA’s E3 conference
that featured The Sims quite heavily, there’s an Origin sale on! 40% off
everything Sims: an especially appealing prospect if you’re a Game Pack
fan like me, since they tend to only get 25% discounts during the seasonal
sales. I don’t mind admitting that I finally treated myself to StrangerVille
- I’ve been hyped for it ever since it came out in February, but with its
rumoured lack of replayability I was reluctant to pay the full £18; but the
wait paid off, and I got it for something like £10.50, which I find much more
acceptable. I can’t wait to get my Night Vale on. (Like I hadn’t already… I
have to admit at this point that my Get to Work active characters for
the Detective, Doctor, and Scientist careers might bear something of a total
resemblance to a certain Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, and Carlos the Handsome
Scientist, because I am an incurable fangirl and this has always been what I
come to this franchise for.)
Heaven’s
Vault - We are now whizzing from one desolate moonlet to the other as
the plot picks up speed; though to be honest, I prefer the game when it
presents you with an environment so big you need at least an hour to explore it
in proper detail. One moment in this session stood out for me: Aliya,
discovering what to the player is obviously an abandoned theatre, reacts with
confusion and assumes that it’s some sort of church. Which is (a) a really interesting
reminder that the characters in the game are from a fantasy alternate (or
possibly post-apocalyptic future) reality from our own, and as such don’t share
all of our cultural touch-stones, nor should they; and (b) that archaeologists
need to stop attributing everything they don’t immediately recognise as
practical to some vague religious ritual. Having spent literal years
making this argument to my archaeologist friends, it’s nice of this game about
archaeologists to give me some back-up.
Sunday 16th June
Father’s Day, and finishing up Valerie Porter and the
Scarlet Scandal, a hidden object game from a collection I bought for my
Dad a few years ago that we started playing while I was home over Christmas. As
these things go Valerie Porter is pretty engaging: an obvious Laura Bow export
with the serial numbers filed off, but I’m a sucker for vintage ’20s and ’30s
murder mysteries, and most importantly my Dad enjoyed it. I also took the
opportunity to thank him for introducing me to video gaming when I was a
toddler and always keeping me up-to-date with a random and eclectic selection
of the latest video games; I likely couldn’t have been on the career path I am
today without him.
Tuesday 18th June
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 - With only two levels
left to go to the end of the main story, I’ve started dabbling in the Gwenpool
bonus levels, which are steadily unlocked by completing character missions on
the map. I was so happy when I got to the Howard the Duck level and it used the
same environment as the Howard the Duck level from the first LEGO Marvel
Super Heroes game. I have no idea why it made me so happy to see Marvel HQ
re-imagined as the convention centre, but there we go. It did.
I also completed a couple more character missions (Aunt May
is super demanding, yeesh…) and played the penultimate level of the main story
mode. Final showdown with Kang, here I come! Only once I’ve wandered all over
the map for another couple of hours, though.
Wednesday 19th June
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments -
The second of six cases on this platinum run is now in the bag. I enjoyed
replaying “The Riddle on the Rails” more than the first case (“The Case of
Black Peter”); it benefits, I think, from not being based on a Conan Doyle
story, which allows for more fun with the locations (even though, as someone
who lived in Nottingham for years, the bit where they visited the beach was a bit
of a stretch…); and more snark between Holmes and Watson, which is always
appreciated. Although I’m kicking myself for not having my recording equipment
to hand when I ended up ad-libbing some dialogue between Holmes and the villain
(“How did you guess I was Mexican?” “Racism!”)
The
Sims 4 - I had a bit of a noodle with the June 2019 update for an hour,
which included some Pride-themed cosmetics as a free add-on. I’ll admit I
wasn’t bowled over by the new clothes: the best thing about them are the It
Gets Better tie-in promotion t-shirts, which to be honest don’t look that great
either but are at least promoting a good cause. (Maybe I’m just bitter because
my SimSelf suffers from the same problem I do in real life, in that her massive
boobs tend to warp the design on a t-shirt so that it’s basically unreadable.)
But I was super impressed by the variety of Pride flags available in build/buy
mode: it seems the creators really did their homework, though presumably for
the sake of design simplicity they shied away from including anything outside
of the standard geometric stripes arrangement, so intersex and polyamorous were
neglected (along with a few others). My SimSelf is now happily living in her
apartment in San Myshuno (The Sims 4’s equivalent of San Francisco
blended with Tokyo), flying her rainbow and bi pride flags high, and rocking a
slightly-warped LGBT+ charity t-shirt; so she’s doing OK, basically.
Thursday 20th June
Heaven’s Vault - Holy shit, is this a
horror game? Because once you reach the Withering Palace, it starts to feel
quite a bit like a horror game. I don’t wish to give spoilers because this is a
story-heavy game that’s only two months old and that I hope more people get to
experience for themselves; but I’m getting the strong sense that some major
shit went down in the Ancient Empire involving ghosts and/or sentient robots,
or some sort of Get Out / Doctor Who Cyberman bullshit that
combines the two.
Also, my
partner (with my full support) has decided to play the character of Aliya to
the hilt and never return to Iox to present her findings to Professor Myari.
Which means that we’re still getting prompts from early on in the game every
time we travel, even though by my reckoning we’re maybe about ¾ of the way
through by now. I hope we won’t end up going back to the university at the end
only to discover we’ve broken the game...
No comments:
Post a Comment