Game Log Archive
Game Log is dedicated to the games I've been playing recently that encourage some degree of thought that I'd like to share. I cover games by their mechanics, narrative, and all other manner in which a game evokes emotion and engagement from the player.
Chris and Shamus experience technical difficulties all so Resident Evil 5 can prolong their suffering in this final entry of their streaming series.
Resident Evil 5 was not satisfied with its boss-rush conclusion we would be forced to endure. It had to throw in A.I. glitches and broken net code to prolong our suffering.
Though in our final write-ups, both Shamus and I reflected generally positively on the experience. On Shamus’ part, his is ultimately more positive though less in-depth due to his lacking history on the franchise. He does, however, include one of his wonderful Stolen Pixels strips and its impeccable comedic writing.
My write-up, on the other hand, was far more in-depth and still captures many of my thoughts on the game. Even looking back and rewatching, there’s a lot of elements to the final fight that leave me confused. “Wait, I remember there were a lot of steps, but… which steps did I need to follow and in what order…?” The boss design is poor in that it requires very specific rail-roading without clear sign-posting.
Still, it’s a fun game, and I’ve even found a new source of joy.
The secret to brain-washing is to apply it to the chest. That's where the brain is.
The fifth is also the shortest episode Shamus and I recorded for our Resident Evil 5stream series. He hadn’t been feeling well and, in hindsight, it is quite obvious he was having a more miserable time than usual as a result. It’s good we cut the stream short.
While his write-up on the episode was quite short and focused primarily on recovering long-lost files of his Stolen Pixels comic series (of which he shared one of his best in said post), I feel like this sixty minutes is also a nice vertical slice of the game’s problems. The environmental inconsistency, where you’ll go from high-tech laboratory to old ruins in an instant without any sense of continuity. It’s almost as if they randomly shuffled environments and set-pieces during development after they’d already styled and textured them rather than before. The pointless and clumsy cover mechanics compared to the superior Gears of War cover system. The absolutely terrible dialogue and story.
One element that only occurred to me watching this time was the Licker horde, however. I recall playing the first Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS and thinking the limited enemy types in a single level was in part due to the limitations of being a handheld. One level had nothing but Hunters, for example, only for another to exclusively pit you against wolves. Later levels would better mix said enemies up, however. Here, the only time you ever face Lickers is when there’s a whole crowd of them.
Perhaps on my next playthrough I’ll try and observe the dynamics within the human opponents that feel natural and appropriate while waves of Lickers feel like a cheap, hasty development trick.
The ouroboros is perhaps the worst fight in Resident Evil 5, and all due to just a few small, poor design decisions.
The corresponding blog post by Shamus had already gone into great detail regarding the boss fight with the Ouroboros creature, but I am most interested in the response in the comments section. Many had made note of their own awful experiences to this boss, or referenced other streamers that had a similarly confusing time. Yet still there was the odd comment, shrugging their shoulders and saying “I don’t know what to tell ya, I found it simple to comprehend”.
I am a strong believer that true objectivity may be impossible, but it is still something to strive for when examining a work critically. You want to understand the developer’s intent and what common response players have to it. However, there is no disregarding of personal taste and whether the subjective preferences of the developer will align with the audience or not. This is where “intended audience” becomes an important factor, and while it must be taken into account for anyone seeking as objective an analysis as possible, it must also be recognized that, sometimes, one person’s experience is just that: one person’s experience.
That is to say, while it is possible to immediately understand the logistics of the fight, there are too many questionable or vague features that go against common gaming expectations to make the proper course of action clear.
In today's episode of Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield points his gun fervently while asking obvious questions that the villain has no reason to answer. The villain then transforms into a giant fish.
In his connecting blog post for this episode, Shamus brought up a lot of arguments he had heard in defense of the Resident Evil franchise. I don’t think each of those defenses were intended for Resident Evil 5, specifically. The one regarding controls, for example, was likely meant for the first three games plus the Code Veronica spin-off, where the tank controls were always of controversy even at the time.
In regards to the story, however, I think Shamus is correct in that the developers weren’t intentionally trying to imitate Western B-movie shlock. There are a surprising number of fans of grindhouse style features in the older sphere of Japanese game developers, but those games have a clearly distinct style to match. MadWorld or Shadows of the Damned bear those marks far more closely than anything Capcom has produced. Instead, Resident Evil is clearly inspired by the classic George Romero series of Living Dead films and more, a variety of creature features from several decades of time, as well as modern Hollywood trends.
However, this also dismisses the nature of Japanese entertainment itself and the variety of clashing tones it can possess. Having seen a variety of live-action films in addition to anime, Japanese entertainment often has a certain tone, or combination of tones, that do not always fit the standards of Western entertainment. Or rather, you ask two people to make two desserts based on chocolate and one person presents you with a cake while the other provides a milkshake. They are both sweet and chocolatey desserts, certainly, and both will contribute to a potential diabetes problem, but they aren’t the same kind of dessert.
Japan’s sense of humor, self-awareness, and concept of “cool” can often come off like that, and when presented out of context with the intent of appealing to a global audience, it can become downright goofy or dumb.
Resident Evil 5 continues its tug of war of being an actually fun cooperative shooter and being an exercise in bafflement and anger.
Our adventure through Plagas infested Africa continues as Shamus and I venture back into Resident Evil 5. We had performed some experiments and confirmed that the theory of the game dropping the other player’s ammunition types was largely correct. It seems like a rather misguided method of encouraging cooperation between players, or perhaps is weighted too heavily towards providing ammo of the wrong type. This almost always guarantees that, as the player’s resources dwindle throughout a fight, they’ll have to rely on their partner staying close and navigating the inventory in order to make the trade. Not only do the game’s encounters encourage the players to split up, but the fights are often intense enough that opening the inventory will leave you vulnerable.
Obviously this system can be managed, as I have played the game multiple times with multiple different friends throughout the years. It’s more a matter of an implementation that is not quite ideal, as it often makes cooperating more difficult. Simultaneously, there’s the trouble of playing the game solo with only the artificial intelligence as your companion. After a strange disconnection, Shamus was forced to watch the stream as A.I. Sheva made strange decisions and wasted all of his pistol ammunition. My own experience recollects instances of Sheva wasting shotgun ammunition trying to shoot an enemy at a rifle’s distance, or that was intended to be shot with turrets planted in the environment. The A.I. was incapable of manning said turrets on their own, instead needing to be instructed by the player. It taught me that the A.I. will waste ammo on their own, and that constantly instructing them was only costing me time and leaving me vulnerable, so better to leave it with the pistol and let it run out of the most common ammunition, turning the remainder of the fight into a single-player experience.
I feel that the inventory’s three-by-three design was in part chosen as an easy way to map item shortcuts to the D-Pad, but in 2007 Dead Space would not only allow the player to simply set those shortcuts up themselves, but healing and stasis energy would always be mapped to two separate buttons. Perhaps it would have been worth adding an additional three slots to Resident Evil 5’s inventory and adopting the Dead Space model instead – especially if you were going to force armor to take up a slot.
Juggling inventory between two players certainly forces teamwork, but the question is whether it’s fun and enjoyable or if you’ve managed to frustrate not one, but two players with this constant chore.
The first episode of Shamus and I streaming a playthrough of Resident Evil 5, filled with equal amounts of mirth and frustration. Well, maybe more frustration than mirth.
February of last year marked the beginning of Shamus and I streaming Resident Evil 5, one of my most beloved yet flawed games. There’s nothing quite like it, nor has there been anything like it since. I imagine some might point to Resident Evil 6 as being similar, but that game had so many AAA ambitions that all collapsed under the sheer weight and lack of focus to it all. Here, Resident Evil 5 seems like a simple enough proposition: take what made Resident Evil 4 so good, and reconfigure it for two-player co-op.
I had written an introduction for Shamus to try and set the scene as a brief explanation as to why this game exists, as well as propose my own mission to try and analyze and figure out what the game does well. Instead, the series was more mocking and groaning than it was positive analysis, as so many decisions end up being quite baffling and even confusing. It is a game that I think will need a proper analytical video one day.
As for this episode in particular, Shamus had many a gripe regarding the ammunition system. At first we were under the impression that the game intended certain weapons for certain characters – so the shotgun for Chris and the TMP and rifle for Sheva – but as the series went on, I began to theorize if the ammunition system is instead based around what your partner has, specifically, in order to encourage teamwork.
Such a creative decision would truly encapsulate all that makes Resident Evil 5 what it is.
Enjoy the final episode of our Batman: Arkham Origins series, wherein we continue to gripe about the story and boss encounter design. Bonus impromptu podcast wherein we conjure up a potential Superman game!
Here we are at the conclusion of Batman: Arkham Origins, a game I greatly enjoyed streaming with friend Shamus Young despite the technical difficulties. Even in the last stretch of gameplay we were griping about story and boss design, completely baffled by the decisions that led to this end product.
Shamus’ final thoughts on the game tackled many of the justifications for Batman’s behavior in Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight. It should be noted that Paul Dini, responsible for much of the animated series’ quality in writing and chief writer of Arkham Asylum, had less involvement in Arkham City and then no involvement after that. The man that came to define Batman for many had little or no involvement in the games where he feels most out-of-character.
Even disregarding the animated series, this Batman feels out of character for the one found in Batman: Year One, Batman: The Long Halloween, and Batman: Dark Victory. Perhaps it’s a matter of preferring certain writer’s interpretations, or being ignorant of other notable Batman storylines, but it feels like the chief writers at both Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal have very different ideas of just who Batman is compared to some of the authors of his best stories.
Which could also explain why none of the villains feel right, either.
Chris and Shamus engage in the Arkham Origins equivalent of a filler arc.
It’s a good thing I stopped trying to stream as my primary content. I found it exhausting hearing myself talk over and over about how I was feeling sick, and if I found myself exhausting to hear then I can only imagine how others must have felt.
There was so little to say this episode that Shamus effectively gave me the post on his blog for the week. It was an opportunity to express my feelings regarding the combat in writing, though it also naturally led to some debate in the comments section. For some, these issues were not exclusive to Arkham Origins – and I would agree, they are issues that persist in the other games as well. However, there’s a polish in those games that mitigates the flaws whereas Origins manages to amplify them. Still there were others that insisted these flaws didn’t exist and it was effectively a skill issue.
At the very least, Shamus, who was far more familiar with the combat systems of all four games than I will ever be, could confirm that there was just something off with the mechanics of Origins. I take comfort in that.
I take only confusion from this week’s play session. The bridge might be one of the better set pieces of the game, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
Part four of our Arkham Origins saga cannot help but begin to completely collapse on itself, supported by too many villains, nonsensical motivations, a complete lack of logic, and everything is on fire. Why is everything always on fire?
Another video, another technical problem. Aside from the poor framerate, I had also forgotten to adjust my audio delay from a prior stream. This would result in Batman punching a thug but the sound of impact coming well after it should have. Typically this audio delay was the result of my playing on console with friends, where the Elgato device I used at the time had an automatic delay in its video and audio feed. I implemented an audio delay to my voice and those of my friends on Discord, but as I was playing Arkham Origins on PC, it led to the PC game’s audio being out of alignment as well.
Fortunately I don’t have to worry about such issues with my current Elgato, but I’m also not really streaming that often these days either. Such is life.
I’m going to be honest, despite some of the technical stumbles, fumbling over our own words, and my uncanny inability to concentrate on speech and gameplay at the same time, this might be my favorite episode of streaming this game. We hit a lot of design elements, and I think actually analyzing a level with Shamus has better helped me to stop and consider a game’s environment or narrative better today.
In our third episode of Batman: Arkham Origins, which doesn't really tell the origin of Arkham Asylum at all, we experience cut-scene ineptitude on the part of the writers, ask obvious questions that cause all of the plausibility to fall apart, and struggle with yet another boss fight. Exciting!
Though we stumble into another series of bitrate problems in this stream, the real technical difficulty is my own brain. My mind is one of digressions, and it is because I am easily distracted by the smallest threads. In regards to streaming, my thoughts can immediately be interrupted by trying to work out the problem immediately in front of me. Even when I’m trying to focus on finally making my point to Shamus regarding proportions of objects in the Arkham series level design, I am frequently tugging on every little thread that distracts from my attention within the game world.
I can only imagine how frustrating it is to be the person I’m trying to speak with in these circumstances, let alone the person having to watch and listen. Over a year later I’m listening to myself and all I can think is “get to the point already!”
It really is a curiosity to see what happens when a game with a specific art team and style is passed off to an entirely different team now tasked with recreating that style, but are instructed to do so on a schedule. As we can see with Gotham Knights, Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal pulled off a far more consistent, if less imaginative, world since they were allowed to define their interpretation of Gotham from the ground up. Here, however, they may not have had enough time to properly study and consult Rocksteady’s own concept art and approach to the world of Gotham, and as such we see objects in strange proportions that result in a world that never quite feels right.
The real villain of episode two are the technical difficulties, from Shamus' audio being blown out to the constant dropping of frames. Join Chris and the late and great Shamus as they battle cops and streaming problems alike.
Our second stream is, naturally, where all the technical difficulties had arisen, with the primary one being Shamus’ blown out mic gain. We tried several times to fix his audio, but unfortunately no matter how it sounded for us, it did not sound well on the actual stream. Additionally, trying to screen share with him and Twitch led to some frequent frame drops.
This happens with every group stream I have with friends. No matter what audio settings remain unchanged between streams, the volume of friends will vary. I have a feeling there’s something going on with Discord between each call, but only because that’s the common source of the call.
It is for this reason I tend to proselytize the Elgato Wave:3 as much as I do, because no matter how loud I set the volume I come in nice and clear. Simultaneously, I don’t need to set the gain very high for it to capture my voice at a decent volume. The only thing missing are sound absorbers to reduce echo, which is barely an issue under most circumstances. It’s a top notch, “affordable” mic (compared to what most professional level microphones are asking for), and I got better quality than similarly priced Snowball and other model microphones frequently used by streamers.
At the end of 2021 Shamus and I had begun doing a collaborative stream discussing and analyzing Batman: Arkham Origins. I'm now uploading those archive videos to YouTube for increased visibility of one of my favorite series of streams. In the first episode, we marvel at the nonsensical nature of Penguin's hideaway and the frustrating boss fight that is Deathstroke.
Rewatching this stream makes me wish I had reached out to Shamus Young for such things much sooner. I’ve had a lot of great and fun streams with friends, but Shamus was someone special in that I had looked up to him for a long time, and the two of us had the same approach to analyzing a game’s narrative and design. He was far stronger than I am at pointing out logical flaws in the plot or world-building, but I always understood what he meant to convey and found our difference of perspective on game design complementary.
Batman: Arkham Origins was a perfect game to begin with because we both found it to be filled with shortcomings compared to its Rocksteady developed predecessors. It was also the perfect sort of game for a pair of fellows that enjoy constructive griping.
Listening to the two of us chatter away, it really makes me miss him and wish there had just been a bit more time. Granted, the loss of Shamus would always have been too soon, and in the end my regret is only that I had waited so long to muster the courage to reach out to him.
Still, I think he would be most honored if this memorial upload were accompanied by his most famous of activities: griping.
Though it will no doubt fly by the radar of most outlets, influencers, and players this year, Soulstice is definitely one of the most finely-tuned gaming experiences to be released in 2022.
There are times I have to wonder if my contrarian nature is somehow programmed into me, or if it is a mere coincidence that my tastes often rub more mainstream proclivities the wrong way. To say that I enjoyed Soulstice more than I enjoyed any lone Devil May Cry game is no doubt going to cause many character-action aficionados to scoff, and I most certainly had a better time with it than I had the first two Bayonetta titles. One might even call me “basic” for this feeling.
Admittedly, there are no doubt aspects of Soulstice that hold it back from being “as good” as, say, Devil May Cry 5 on a technical, objective level. Writing, for starters. Building upon the drama established in Devil May Cry 3 and familial lore added in Devil May Cry 4, there’s some sense of climactic finality to Devil May Cry 5 and its memorable characters that leaves fans old and recent with a level of catharsis and closure, and all delivered with a bombastic sense of style that other games fail to approach the imagination of.
Which, perhaps, would be one of the first perceived “failings” of Soulstice. It is far more subdued than its character-action compatriots, relying less on the roller-coaster zaniness and “how much more kuh-razy can these narrative loop-de-loops get?”, delivering instead a somber tale of a young warrior woman and her spectral sister’s bond. Briar is sardonic in expression and speech, contrasting with the innocent optimism and youthful wisdom of her deceased sister. Their mission is to investigate and put an end to the corruption and collapse of one of the world’s great three cities, a dimensional tear having opened above from which wraiths descend upon the populace to slaughter, contaminate, and possess.
Despite the abundance of demons or apocalyptic conflict in Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, respectively, the jovial wit of our protagonists always conveys a sense of fun in the carnage and makes a mockery of the villains responsible. The characters, setting, and narrative of Soulstice do not possess such levity, but I can assure you, the gameplay itself is such a delight that I believe it deserves to be held as an equal sibling to such franchises.
There's a lot here to enjoy as a unique experience delivered in a manner only video games can, and yet its greatest failures are ones that should have easily been avoided.
By now you have likely heard of Scorn’s greatest flaw: the lackluster combat. I’m not about to sugar coat it for you and say it’s not actually bad, just misunderstood. Not that it isn’t misunderstood, as few players seem to realize you can just stun an opponent and then sprint on past towards safety. That is a possibility most seem to ignore! However, coming to this realization doesn’t “fix” the combat, particularly as there are some areas or encounters where this will just drive you towards a dead end with several aggro’d monsters chasing behind. It just provides an option to skip most of the combat encounters.
There are some games in which bypassing combat is the whole point, and others where bypassing combat is, in itself, a different kind of skill-based challenge. That is not so with Scorn, and if it is, then Scorn is designed doubly poorly in this regard.
Note that the developers themselves emphasized throughout their marketing that Scorn “isn’t really a shooter”. There was a lot of discussion regarding the game being more of an adventure or puzzle game with only a bit of combat for atmosphere and tension. The problem is that, as soon as combat is introduced, it feels like the game is eager to drop several monsters in great quantities at the player at nearly every turn. At first it is successful in even the weakest of critters being terrifying to run into, but before long the game has thrown so many at the player that it simply becomes tiresome and annoying.
For some, this will be tolerable as the rest of the experience will be strong enough to carry them through. For others, however, Scorn will be one of the worst games they played and, if they manage to forge through to the end anyway, are unlikely to find its conclusion to have been worth it.
My final thoughts (for the time being) on this monstrous game, bringing a close to this monstrous analysis of it all.
This is the final in a six-part series exploring the game Elden Ring and its design. You can read the prior entry on the game’s end-game bosses and balance here.
I began this whole series in an effort to discuss my thoughts and feelings towards Elden Ring in greater honest detail than I had previously this year. Going by word count, I’ve at least succeeded in discussing the game in far greater detail. To what end, however? Based on that initial essay, it was to try and help illustrate why some are so pleased with this game despite exercising some of the same open-world tropes or crimes as other developers.
While I think I somewhat achieved that goal, I’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that Elden Ring is forgiven because most people playing a game such as this are simply looking to lose themselves in something fun for a few hours at a time. There is a very small population of players, critics, and analysts taking a microscope to any given game in order to figure out how it all works or could be made better. Perhaps these analytical sorts are motivated by pure academic or intellectual interest and curiosity, or perhaps they’re just trying to understand why they came away underwhelmed when so many others are claiming the title to be a modern masterpiece. There will also always be the loud voices of those that simply dislike the game because “it sucks”, or “it’s too hard”, or “it doesn’t explain anything”, though I doubt many of them even understand why they like or dislike what they do. Similarly, many of the fans on social media and Reddit that will endlessly defend it likely don’t know what it is they love about Elden Ring so much. They’ll have inklings and they’ll quote those that seem to hit the nail on the head, but in the end it all comes down to gut feelings.
When I was first playing Elden Ring, my own gut was whispering “masterpiece” to my ears. Everything just felt right, the hands of the clock seemed to speed on by I was so engaged, and every moment spent not playing the game was spent thinking about it. Uncharted corners of the map were beckoning for my attention and incomplete dungeons were turning to new objectives now that I’d powered up some. It was a game that drew me in on every level, from the moment-to-moment of playing to the idle time spent waiting for work to end so I could log some more hours.
Yet familiarity breeds contempt, and the more time I spend playing or thinking about Elden Ring the more I cannot help but feel as if it’s no masterpiece at all.
