Midsummer '14 Day 30 & Watch Dogs Revew: Rise Against - Help is on the Way

Not late so much as delayed, I was writing this thing and the deadline slipped by.
DAY THIRTY:  RISE AGAINST - HELP IS ON THE WAY

This song is by Nickelback-clone Rise Against. Rise Against is not a particularly good or bad band - they are at best competent and at worst trite and dull. This song is among their competent ones.

So if they're insignificant, why do we care? Because it's also one of the only interesting songs on the Watch Dogs soundtrack.

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: WATCH DOGS
Watch Dogs is a Ubisoft cross-generation video game that came out in May. It was met with great anticipation after solid showings from trailer footage and pre-release hype. Of course this is all a wind-up for the punchline:
The game sucks.

Okay, that's not precisely what I mean. Instead, the game passes every basic competence test while failing every single test for excellence. The game is thoroughly and universally mediocre.

Let's start with the all-important plot. I didn't get all that far, through the middle of Act 2 before returning my rental copy, so I won't judge it based on the ending but based mostly on the impressions the game gives to a new user.
You are Aiden Pierce. You were a dude who has a criminal past, but you've tried to put that behind you. Then all of a sudden your beloved niece is the victim of seemingly random violence in a car attack that you managed to live through. You get involved with the underworld again to try and hunt down the culprit, despite the ubiquitous surveillance.
Did I mention the surveillance? The setting is a near-future Chicago in which a single system controls watches every part of Chicago, maintaining a rigorous database of every single person in Chicago. Aside from the fact that even in the growing surveillance-state nature of the states, this would not be the route taken (as it provides the same weakness the game preys on - a single exploit would unlock the whole thing), it's aware to an almost silly level. In fact, scanning every single person in the city, the only one who comes up "unknown" is, well, Aiden Pierce. Even though his absence is kind of conspicuous - every single cop should immediately know to stop him if he's in view of any camera.
Aiden is a hacker (though a rather poor one if I do say so, in spite of how great we're told he is), and has gained access to the system that now controls literally everything in Chicago. The system, dubbed CTOS, controls every single digital interface in the city, and Aiden has cracked it. Hooray.

To hunt his niece's killers, we're opened into the game with him beating and terrorizing a man who ultimately doesn't know much of anything, hanging out with a renowned fixer. He seems to spout some kind of "I'd rather not kill" philosophy, which is immediately thrown away. In this game, you will kill hundred of people - ordinary gang members, agency workers, security forces, cops (an infinite supply of cops), anything. The game's tagline is "Hacking is your weapon" but it's not, your collapsible baton and  your silenced pistol and your sniper rifle and your grenade launcher and your automatic shotgun and your grenades are your weapons.
Does that sound like a lot of high-grade guns for later in the game? Nope. I had 'em three missions in, because everything opens up immediately. No, wait, actually things open up halfway through Act I, then there's literally nothing that seems to be locked off. You can do all the side missions, unlock everything, get every weapon and car, reveal the whole city, do literally everything that isn't directly a story mission. There's no real sense of the game pacing things out.
And if things seem like they're expensive, well, no problem! One of Aiden's tricks is that he can drain the bank accounts of the people he meets on the street! Not everyone though. Only some people can be drained, and they're usually the people with, like, one or two hundred in their account at most. You're taking the poor for what they have. And since you get a little blurb of insight into the life and occupation and income of every single person you see, you feel bad for people. Especially when I'm told that I'm robbing people in situations like "Taking out a second mortgage" and "Recently laid off" and "coming from family's funeral." Maybe its just me, but when I was playing this with friends, there was a trend toward the people you can steal from already being down on their luck.
And this isn't just something you the player know - Aiden knows it too. So what do we have so far? Aiden is a murdering vigilante using the mass surveillance but not breaking it down, robbing ordinary people down on their luck to fuel his crusade against what at first could only have seemed like random violence.
So he acts like he's doing this to bring peace to his niece's mother and brother, the latter of which has PTSD as a result of the loss. Oh, but he's doing it against his sister's wishes, who just wants him to let it go so they can heal and try and move their lives forward. Instead he gets them caught up in it and makes targets out of them.
And Dead Cell! Dead Cell is fictional Anonymous, hacktivists against the surveillance state. Oh except these guys actually seem to be behind virtual (and perhaps physical) terrorism.

So okay. Aiden is a vigilante, willing to kill anyone and everyone in his way to get vengeance for a single murder, falling in with virtual terrorists while taking advantage of the surveillance state they are also fighting, working with criminals who are mostly killers themselves, robbing average civilians to buy automatic weapons and fancy sport cars, and putting on a batman voice and pretending to be in the right this whole time.
And this is the protagonist.

Aiden is not a likable character by any stretch of the word. He doesn't even have that lovable charm of most anti-heroes and he's an asshole to his former friends (he has no current friends). In any other game, this is the man you're stopping!
The game tries to wrap itself in an anti-surveillance-state PRISM-is-bad message, and while I didn't see the end myself, I'm told it kinda handles it ham-handedly.

So what about the gameplay? Is it fun at least? Not particularly. Lots of driving everywhere, except the driving's not particularly fun. The controls are loose and the for a seemingly-realistic traffic flow, the lack of turn signals alone kinda screws with the flow. Turning is a bear, even with the best-handling tightest-turning motorcycles. I stopped using cars fairly quick and relied on just motorcycles - much easier, plus you can just ignore the traffic and blaze your own path through the streets. Hell, getting hit isn't even that bad, you just get thrown from the bike.
You can hijack every single car in sight, but because the game wants you to use the phone's Cars On Demand app that orders a vehicle to near your location (for free at least) there aren't very many parking spots let alone cars parked in them. Chicago is apparently a city of people driving but never parking. And because the Cars On Demand app always puts it somewhere in a lot or on the street near you but not right AT you, it's often a hassle.

The stealth gameplay wasn't that bad, but not exceptional. I'd play, well, any other cover-based stealth game as soon as Watch Dogs. Even The Last Of Us, which while I loved its plot and characters found its gameplay slow and unsmooth, was far more effective. I personally made it a bit harder on myself because I didn't like killing people in Watch Dogs (I interpret the melee takedown as nonlethal), but even if I wanted to use my guns there's only one silenced pistol as well as a silenced uzi that's hidden behind a pretty extensive unlock requirement.
And god help you if the cops find you. They're everywhere, spawn from everywhere, are fast and smart and call in helicopters pretty quick, and it is literally impossible to fight your way out, as they spawn infinitely until you hide and they give up.

The soundtrack is varied, but none of it is particularly noteworthy. Passable, but not exceptional. None of the voice acting is awful, though Aiden's gravelly grumbling is just, like, whatever.

The graphics are okay, though the debacle with the PC version's graphics is just ridiculous. Even on next-gen they're really not the revolution they'd been talking about, but they're still good.

So the plot's early game sucks, the protagonist is supremely unlikable and hard to root for, the driving sucks, the stealth sucks, the guns are whatever, the soundtrack is whatever, the graphics are good but not exceptional, is there anything I really like about the game?

Yes. The minigames.
Now, none of the minigames are killer apps that make the game worth its price tag, but they're nice pieces to mitigate the boredom. A decent shooting minigame, but that one's only okay. The highlights are:
* The poker minigame. It's basically a complete 4-person poker simulator. It's fairly robust, and while there are some tricks to abuse it into making your odds slightly better it's a decent model for someone who just wants to spend some time playing poker. I played it all the way through twice, the second time winning, in order to get its unlock, the best motorcycle in the game.
It is rather lengthy though, and some of the required animations are annoyingly long.
* The chess minigame. Unlike the poker game, it's not just a chess simulator. It's instead a series of chess puzzles, working within a situation and making best moves. It's pretty fun actually, a good puzzle.
* The hacking minigame! In general, the game's use of hacking is superficial - making distractions, looking through cameras, moving some cover around. The main minigame itself though is a pretty involved puzzle that takes some real thinking, especially the more you go through. A full puzzle game for 3DS that expands upon the concept and explores it fully and finds the extent of its challenges would be really interesting, or a low-cost Steam release. I'd buy it. As an occasional and only slightly-explored diversion to the main slog, it's fun but not a selling point.

So yes. Watch Dogs has points of occasional quality that shine through the dull mediocrity, but they're far too few and far-between. Overall, I can't warrant the game at its current price, or even half the price really. A $20 game? Maybe. It'd make a good timekiller. Really though you'd be much better off buying GTAV or Saint's Row or Assassin's Creed or any of the other comparable-but-better alternatives to the game.

There's my opinion. Later folks, see you later today in the final installment of Midsummer Songaday!
End Recording,
Ego.

Video Games: Dysfunctional Systems Chapter One (and also other VN talk)

The music, much of it done by a cool person called CombatPlayer, is a really great part of Dysfunctional Systems. Purchases come with the soundtrack by default, and it stands up decently for independent listening, which is really cool. Also, this is the intro video for the series, it's great. At the end you can hear a brief excerpt of Terminus, the theme of Episode 1.

So I played this game Dysfunctional Systems: Chapter One, Learning To Manage Chaos the other day. OR, well, okay, game might be a bit strong. Dysfunctional Systems is a Visual Novel. So what the heck is that? My best explanation is that it's a cross between a choose your own adventure book and a comic book. It's a story, and you read the dialogue boxes full of conversation and narration, and you read a lot of it, and occasionally there are points where you can make decisions that branch the story in different directions! There's graphics on the screen, often character portraits, and they move or change expression appropriately, though rarely with any major degree of animation. Music plays. It's like reading a movie that you occasionally determine the path of.

Other than choosing the path, there's no gameplay usually. That's why I struggle to define visual novels as "games" but I open them with Steam and you interact like a game, so I guess that's the best fit.
(and I don't mean to degrade them or anything as "that's not a real game," I like 'em, they just make categorization a bit tougher)

Oh, and while VNs have a reputation for ero / romance stuff, and that makes up a very large percentage of the medium, I haven't played any of those.

So I don't have much experience with Visual Novels. But I really liked this one! It has a cool premise, and all the bits are executed really beautifully.

Hoodie dresses forever.

This is Winter Harrison, our protagonist. She is a 14 year old mediator-in-training. In this game, Earth civilization has progressed to utopia - she has no foundation for the idea of war, deadly sickness, oppression, or murder. Earth has managed to create the technology to enter different planes, where stuff is not quite as rosy. Mediators travel to these places to eliminate chaos - not to right wrongs necessarily, as establishing order is not always are good.
In the game, Winter has been beamed to a former colony that is still ruthlessly oppressed and exploited by the mother country, despite legal independence. She is being towed along by a mentor, Cyrus. They are there to fix detected impending chaos in the world.

I won't spoil more. It's really good. Regardless of the path you choose, there are two major ending types, and even those two have the same general events play out, just with wildly different character relationships at the end. The game has this kinda funny cute tone to begin with, but gets all serious and dramatic and interesting very quickly. More than anything else, it does setup for the future while current stuff is also happening. They have a great framework built.

Confusing thing: pacing. You get the fully-animated title sequence thing about an hour in, which is about fifteen minutes from the end of the whole thing. This kinda makes sense - it's a Chapter 1! The problem is it doesn't make much sense for Ch1 as a standalone release, which it's going to be for a while. Unfortunately, Dischan simply didn't make enough cash off of it to continue development right now. They've axed over half the staff and have put Dysfunctional Systems on indefinite hold while they figure out how to have money. Sad. I really liked what they had going.

So, uh, go buy their thing. It was on for like $2.50 last week, which is why I bought it - it looked pretty and I figured the premise sounded cool enough that I could pay the same as a cup of tea for it. It's always $5 otherwise, which is still decent. Heck, it's even on the app store.

HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSITE. GO BUY IT IF YOU LIKE SCI-FI STORIES.

This was the first time I intentionally bought a visual novel. I guess I had a vague idea the last time, when I bought Analogue: A Hate Story and its sequel Hate Plus at PAX, but that was mostly just based on them sounding cool on an impulse. Those are also amazing and you should go play them, though they're not quite as easily-accessible as DS.
Also, well, I guess the Phoenix Wright games are basically visual novels with more interaction. But I definitely didn't think of them like that when I bought them.

So, are there like any other Visual Novels out that I should really go play? I have no idea what to look for in this field. I've played 999 and want to play Virtue's Last Reward, and I would want to play Steins;Gate if the anime wasn't so thorough in its amazingness, but I'm really clueless here.
Also, I'll probably draw some more Dysfunctional Systems sometime. Winter is fun to draw.

End Recording,
Ego.

Movies: Catching Fire

Heard this on the radio a week ago, now I know where it's from. A good song.

I could do a whole complete review of Catching Fire but why bother because my real conclusions is HELL YES GOOD I LIKE THIS MOVIE A LOT.
Seriously, I liked The Hunger Games, but this was in a whole new league. Some of that is just overall improvement, some of it is the shuffled staffing, and like a whole half is Jennifer Lawrence just killing it out there. Among the better emotional performances I've seen in an action movie.
Also the movie was not hesitant to pull any punches. My mom (who saw it before me) was talking about how it wasn't quite as violent, or at least wasn't as explicit about the violence, as the first movie. I don't really agree - it was really brutal. The man in District 11, Gale, Cinna, it was intense.

I have a special love for that speech in District 11 though. I'm not invested in Hunger Games too much - I've only read the first book, and I only saw the first movie in the theater and not since. I like it, but I'm no superfan. But that scene made me emotional, hell I almost cried a bit - I'm serious, and that's really damn rare for me. Ed on Twitter made a good point - it was one of the few moments where Katniss is being completely unlike her normal self, breaking out of her hardened shell, and I think that added major power to it.
Well, even if I'm no Hunger Games superfan, I'm pretty sure I'm now a J-Law superfan.

Go see the movie folks.
I should have a real, more significant post soon. I'm almost totally finished with Assassin's Creed IV, so my focus should return soon.

End Recording,
Ego.

August of Games: Day 27 - Dishonored

I haven't often said this this month, but Dishonored's soundtrack is pretty disappointing. It's very much an ambience soundtrack with very little melody, and even the ambient stuff is pretty boring. This is from the trailer, for god's sake. However, this is a great song still. Interesting in-world, fun to listen to as music, sets the right mood, just good. If the soundtrack could have upheld this standard we would have been set. Sorry Daniel Licht, it just didn't work this time.

Dishonored
Developer: Arkane Studios (published by Bethesda)
Genre (Setting): Gritty Dystopian Fantasy
Genre (Gameplay): First-Person Stealth
What is this game: In this game you play a guy who was framed for assassinating the Empress. You bust out of prison and, teamed up with a group of loyalists to the old regime, hunt down the conspirators responsible for the frame job and rescue the kidnapped daughter of the Empress. There's a whole bunch of dudes who need killing. There's some plot twists, but not tons like some other games.
Setting-wise, this is a fantasy city where refined whale oil is the primary power source and the world has been ravaged by a plague that basically turns you into a zombie. Things are gritty and grim, reminiscent of what a city would feel like during the Black Plague, but with more architectural development. Kinda like if the Black Plague had struck in the middle of the Renaissance, rather than before it.
The city is dominated by a powerful and restrictive religion that bans worship of The Outsider, a mysterious individual who grants people magic. You happen to recieve a little of that magic.
Using your magic and your knife, along with a couple other gadgets (like sleep darts or a pistol), you creep through all the levels of the game. You can be totally non-lethal! It's certainly easier than being non-lethal in Deus Ex Human Revolution. But anyway, you can choose to take out even the main targets nonlethally, though it requires a great deal more effort usually. Your most iconic magic is a short-range teleport that lets you move between cover, get up on buildings, or disappear from the sight of guards. You can upgrade your magics as the game goes on.
 
What's great about it: Let's get this out in the air, because I wasn't sure about this early on: this may have a visual similarity to the aesthetic used in (and share a publisher with) The Elder Scrolls, but this is the polar opposite of Skyrim. TES has a lot of problems, but here's a couple of my big ones and why Dishonored breaks them down.
First, TES is not a narrative game. It is a sandbox game. Skyrim especially was built so you could do whatever at any time and there was no sense of urgency or importance to either the plot or the side stories. It was complete freedom to the point where it sacrificed the cohesiveness of its story. Dishonored doesn't QUITE have the same freedom, locking you into your objectives (with occasional side objective, given that the city is very large and you are free to sneak through many regions of it), but giving you the choice of how to go about things. The story keeps moving forward, and I was sucked into the plot.
Second, there's no grind. Advancement comes through two types of collectibles, which means you go out and do side sneaking stuff that you wouldn't have experienced otherwise.
Third, the environments you explore are varied! Not just in layout, but in appearance as well, which in general was something Skyrim sorely lacked (though I am told this was better in Morrowind and Oblivion). The city, the flooded district, the bridge, they all have distinct looks but share elements that tie them together. On the whole, the visual design of this game is off the charts cool. The setting is very well thought out, and the look of everything is not only thematic, but it's just plain awesome
Gameplay is also FUN! I'm a stealthy sort of gamer, even though I'm usually not good at it, but I feel comfortable replaying levels several times to actually get good at it, which is very, very rare.
There's a lot of angles to come at things, and they expand if you take certain powers. I never even touched Possession or Rat Swarm or Windblast, and those could have opened new opportunities as well. Of course, Blink is important, and the base level is free. Dark Vision, however, is equally, if not MORE, important than Blink. Take it as fast as you can. Also, there's a couple of Bone Charms that are randomized in what benefit they give, so if you get lucky and get either of the "Weapons-Out doesn't slow you down" or "Strangle Faster" ones early you're really lucky.
In general, you experience this game as a story. It's a narrative-driven experience at every corner, which felt really good. I didn't feel railroaded, and I didn't feel unfocused. I really like this game. I'm actually considering recording myself playing it (not that my computer could handle recording AND playing it :/ ). Play this one.
It also has side-story DLC featuring a character who is important to the main game but usually not present, which is a bold decision that seems to have worked. I haven't played 'em though.
And all this from an underdog studio known for cancelled games and providing assistance to other developers rather than making their own stuff. This was their first solo effort since 2006. All eyes should be on what these guys do next, because they've set quite a bar.
 
How do I get it: 360, PS3, Steam. I don't know its console price, but I'd guess around $40 at this point. Steam has it for $30.

End Recording,
Ego.

August of Games: Day 22 - The World Ends With You

The soundtrack is killer. I think it's the best the DS has to offer, and still beats many other games nowadays.

The World Ends With Us
Developer: Jupiter and the S-E Kingdom Hearts team (Square Enix)
Genre (Setting): Modern, Fantasy
Genre (Gameplay): Action, RPG (this game is genre-busting and doesn't match any traditional genre styles)
What is this game: This is the game where you are extremely asocial and wake up with amnesia to discover that you are part of a ridiculous activity  called the Reaper's Game. Only completable with a partner, with failure meaning complete destruction, the Game takes place in an alternate Shibuya coexisting with the real one. Players are invisisble and intangible, but with the ability to read thoughts of the real public and influence the trends of Shibuya. The plot is long and twisting, with a cast of colorful and unique characters.
Gameplay-wise, as I said, it's genre-busting. Out-of-battle, you go around the city, finding tasks and furthering the story. You can shop in the real world's stores (branded with a special mark that allows you to interact with the general public in order to buy stuff). At any point, you can tap your player pin in the corner to read the thoughts of the public and locate enemies to fight.
In battle, combat is split between the DS's two screens. On the bottom screen is Neku, your main character. Neku equips "pins", which are basically different attacks - for example, your starting pin allows you to drag the stylus over space to generate damaging flames that follow the stylus, while another one (my favorite type) allows you to slash across an enemy to have Neku leap across the map to perform a melee attack. At first you can only hold a couple pins, but by the end you can hold six. There's a LOT of pins to try out!
On the top screen is your partner. Each of the game's three partners has a different style of fighting with different commands, but they revolve around either the d-pad or the face buttons (depending on which hand you've got your stylus in). It's very hard to keep track of both at the beginning, but after playing a while you start to get used to it. Thankfully, the top screen will fight automatically if you ignore it (though not QUITE as competently as if you were doing it, but it's good enough that you needn't concern yourself with it all the time). You and your partner share a health bar.
That's a good general description I think. There's a LOT of nuance involved, and a lot of extra stuff.
The aesthetics (sound/art) are a pixeled art style with a lot of care in it and a blend of varieties of music, primarily j-rock and hip hop. The game has some heavy influences from music in general.
 
What's great about it: Let's get this out in the open: I just walked over and looked through my DS collection (a rather extensive one - overall the DS is my absolute favorite system), and I can say without hesitation that The World Ends With You is my favorite. This is a game made of solid gold, from writing, to theme, to characters, to gameplay, to graphics, to music. Jupiter may be famous for Picross (and Picross alone) and Kingdom Hearts isn't the best reputation ever, but somehow they pulled out a perfect piece. Let's examine.
The storyline is lasting. It's not some one-and-done affair, and even when you think it's coming to a head it manages to keep going, but without overstaying any welcome. I didn't see where it was going, and neither will you - it's unpredictable, but not in a "gotcha!" sense where it takes 90 degree turns just to trick you. I've fallen quite in love with the characters, and Neku/Shiki is one of an extremely small number of ships that hold in my head (the others being Tali/Paragon Shepard and Phoenix Wright/Maya). Tetsuya Nomura often isn't a great designer in my mind (being almost wholely responsbile for the zippers and belts style that has infected Final Fantasy since his work on VII), but his work fit perfectly into the Shibuya setting, as Shibuya is one of the world's hubs of outlandish and creative fashion.
Shibuya itself is remarkably accurate, and many local landmarks are immortalized in pixel not only as background, but as story and conversation pieces. Makes sense I guess, seeing as both Square Enix and Jupiter are based out of Shibuya.
Okay, here's a weird moment for me: so, I'm this huge opponent of grinding. I simply cannot take it. I put down the game after ten minutes, which is a limitation on me enjoying many classic RPGs. Well, TWEWY doesn't require it! Thank god. However, if you want to do EVERYTHING, meaning leveling your Pins, buying everything, making all the shopkeepers your friends, maxing your level, whatever, you're gonna need to do it. For the leveling one, sure, but fighting is also where you get cash. So this is the weird bit: I love shopping in this game. I have no idea why, but I love making friends with the shopkeepers and getting everything from every shop and this takes like a bajillion yen. And somehow, this game makes grinding not so bad! Literally the only other games I can handle grinding in to a large degree is the Pokemon series.
Theme is interesting. This isn't something that will speak to everyone the way it does to me. I'm naturally a fairly shy person, but I want to be outgoing, and the main theme through the story is Neku's coming to terms with the fact that he's not alone in society and that life is richer when we reach out and expand our own worlds. I shit you not: before the bigger social ventures I've done (particularly conventions) I've reminded myself of the big lesson of the game (also the title), The World Ends With You. The idea being that our experiences and understanding, our world, is only as large as we allow it to be, and we expand as people by expanding our own worlds. So yes, this game has some personal significance to me.
The graphics are a little pixelated dream. Real pixel-art, rather than mindless 3d modeling, is an amazing thing in this age, but it's even rarer to see if come up with quality this great.
Musically, well, "perfection" springs to mind! A soundtrack not bound by being stuck with the DS's speakers, it's a regular CD in my car.
So, gameplay. People often critisize a steep learning curve, but it's only bad if you demand perfection from yourself or have too much pride to mess into the very variable difficulty settings. See, there are three mechanisms for difficulty in this game: Mode, Level, and Chain. There are (as of post-game) 4 difficulty modes, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Intense. Higher difficulty modes cause enemies to drop different (better) items. You can alter your own level in this game, from your 1 to your current maximum. Manually reducing your level sets your stats back, but increases your drop rate for each level you removed. You can chain multiple fights together (usually 4, but in post-game your can reach 16), and each fight you add to the chain doubles your drop rate, though you don't recover between fights in a chain. Basically, if you want a very easy experience, you can set it to Easy, max level, and fight one-at-a-time and ignore the top screen completely. If you want a very difficult experience, you can set it to Intense, level 1, and chain together every Noise symbol on the screen at once and control the top screen manually. And if you want something in-between, you have the dials to provide a simply incredible number of different levels of difficulty so you can find the one you like most.
I'll stop gushing about this game now. Please, go buy it and play it. You won't regret it. Basically, this game took a company that is renowned for keeping gameplay the same game after game, and reinvented the whole damn RPG wheel into an innovative piece of glory - and if there's one thing you should know by now about me, it's that I prize innovation.

How do I get it: I'm guessing you have to get it used if you want it for the DS. They recently made an iOS port called The World Ends With You: Solo Remix, which I don't recommend as much - there isn't half as much nuance to the battle system without the partner being a constant control factor, and the redrawn (no longer pixeled) sprites aren't as great-looking. But it's currently the option it seems, and experiencing the game even with these flaws is still an extraordinary experience. It currently costs $20 there.

The Solo Remix fills me with a bit of bitterness because they did a week-long countdown thing in coming up to it in which it was incredibly obvious that it was new TWEWY material, but it looked like it was gonna be a sequel. It NOT being a sequel broke my fuckin' heart. The Solo Remix also comes with hope though: there's an extra little cutscene at the very very end of the game (after the post-game stuff) that heavily implies a sequel. Hope lives.

Oh, yeah. There was this special DS Lite they released alongside the game in Japan! It was a bundle thing. It's also very hard to obtain! I'd be willing to pay significant amounts for it if any of my readers happen to have one. You see, not only is the DS my favorite game platform overall, but the DS Lite in particular was my favorite iteration of the DS. Its size is absolutely perfect for me. Getting this thing would be a dream come true. this is what it looks like:

End Recording,
Ego.

August of Games: Day 16 - The Last of Us

Confession: this isn't what I had planned for today on my schedule, I had Dead Space written. Maybe I'll displace something later this month for that, but as I just completed The Last of Us I wanted to talk about it!
 The music from the game has three directions: tense ambience, haunting violin, and emotional piano. this track is the third. They're all excellent, though the latter two especially so. I should check out what else Gustavo Santaolalla has done.

The Last of Us
Developer: Naughty Dog
Genre (Setting): Modern, Post-apocalypse, Zombies (infected, not necromancy)
Genre (Gameplay): Third-person shooter, stealth, survival-horror (sorta)
What is this game: This is the game where you play an unrepentant murderer and smuggler who is hired to take a girl to a facility outside of the Boston quarantine zone (for the record: quarantine with the healthy people inside and zombies outside). It's a tough journey they undertake as they face down infected, bandits, and military. Really though  this game is the story of a murderer growing close to the girl and coming to care for her as a daughter.
Gameplay-wise it's mechanically not dissimilar to the Uncharted games with some shifts. First, Joel is much more of a tank than Drake (despite not having regenerating health like Drake) - he's slower and less generally mobile, but hits like a god-damn freight train. Seriously, Drake had some violent kill animations, but it has nothing on the brutality Joel displays. Unfortunately he can't really take many bullets, or beatings for that matter, thanks to the afore-mentioned non-regenerating health bar, and getting caught by even one guy means everyone knowing where you are for a bit. Now, this isn't so bad in most games - I'm lame at games, but I can usually manage at least decently. The trick that made The Last of Us a lot harder to stealth was that it has this horrendous habit of checkpointing you AFTER you've already been caught. You often get a small grace of people not knowing exactly where you are after respawning, but they're looking for you. Several times I found myself wishing I could just return to the start of the fight rather than the latest checkpoint.
Guns fire very slowly for semi-automatics, at least before any upgrades. (you'd think a guy who's used a pistol for 20 years could fire it more than once every second and a half). Fully-upgraded guns are strong though, but the lack of ammo is tough - you'd think Joel could carry more than 9 rifle bullets, you've got a whole backpack. The lock-on aim system, if you turn it on, is really effective, especially with the rifle. I didn't turn it on until I started playing Ellie and it'd just had enough of missing all the damn time because I'm a shit shot. I know it kinda makes me a wimp, but whatever. That fully-upgraded rifle of David's is awesome.

What's great about it: Basically, uh, everything that isn't the gameplay. The gameplay is good, don't get me wrong! But it sure as hell is the weakest point of the game. The acting (both voice and mo-cap) is great, even though Ellie is obviously a look-alike to Ellen Page and it sucks that Ellen Page didn't get anything out of it - that's a very complicated situation though. I'll restate that though, the voice acting and writing are absolutely unbelievable. The graphics are excellent, and the design of both the characters and the enemies is really good. The environments are expansive and lush. The music is haunting and bleak. As far as presentation goes, this is the top of the line in modern days.
But that's ignoring the game's most powerful asset: its story. I don't want to spoil any more than I already have; it is DAMN good. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the ending yet. I've already expressed that I think Joel is an unrepentant murderer, but that doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong - just that he definitely could've taken a nonlethal approach on occasion and still been completely effective. I don't mind the killing zombies, or even the killing bandits or David's folks, but the military and the Fireflies I think a nonlethal approach would have been just fine. Not completely of course, just, like, people like those last guys in the operating room?
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that even if the gameplay is a step down from Uncharted 2 and 3, it's still fun, and it is absolutely worth the experience.

How do I get it: On PS3! For $60 still I believe - it's a new game. I don't call this out usually (as I established on Day 1), but rental is currently a good option and is the way I got it, from RedBox.

There exists the potential for a sequel inside of the ending, especially because the world has other stories to tell elsewhere. However, I don't think any sequel'ing should focus on Joel or Ellie. Their story is told, and to continue it would reduce the overall impact of the first game's ending. For all the controversy about the ending, I feel it was a good idea, a good story, and a great ending, even if I don't agree with Joel's choices.

So, uh, congrats Naughty Dog. You've made a work of art that firmly continues your streak of having the most cinematic-feeling video games out there that still retain their strong sense of being a game. Chalk this one up as a complete and total success.

End Recording,
Ego.

Sunday Songs + Movie Review: Now You See Me - Codec

Now You See Me is a move currently in theaters, about a group of magicians called the Four Horsemen who use their magic to perform large crimes in public defiance of the police. I was expecting a regular ol' crime movie, and thought it'd be decent.

I wasn't expecting Ocean's 4, with all the great things that brings with it. The cast was full of stars I didn't know were in it (Mark Ruffalo? Morgan Freeman? Michael Caine? Jesse Eisenberg? It's like a who's who of some of my favorite recent performances), the camerawork was really fresh and fun, it featured slick and charismatic criminals (stylish like the Clooney/Pitt/Damon trio in the Ocean's movies or Matt Bomer's character in the show White Collar), and it had some of the most over the top and crazy magic tricks I could think of. Starring an all-purpose magician, an up-and-coming illusionist, an escape artist, and a mentalist, the movie was all around a fantastic time. Yeah, the ending is a little vague and leaves you puzzle it out for yourself and kinda leaves you hanging without resolving anything, it was the most fun I've had at the movies in a while, and I loved Iron Man 3 and Star Trek: Into Darkness, and had an absurd blast of a time with Fast and Furious 6, so that's kinda saying something. Really, ignore the critics this time. It's definitely worth seeing, and worth seeing on the big screen too.

Now the music. See, the movie's soundtrack is amazing. Definitely the best film soundtrack of the year so far. It uses a single theme melody to tie a lot of the songs together, and there are several remixes of the main song in the movie. While much of it is a sort of electronic-augmented orchestral slash jazzy feel, there's also a number of far more electronic songs here. Party movies wish they could use dubstep and the like in the way this movie does. This song, Codec, is a great one. Technically it's by a guy called Zedd instead of Brian Tyler (who did the rest of the soundtrack).

Verdict: Go see this movie, for serious. Also buy the soundtrack. But more importantly, go see the movie and support this director's continuing efforts. (ps he's the guy who directed the first two Transporter movies as well as the Edward Norton Hulk, which was a good one).

Links:
Now You See Me
The Four Horsemen
Now You See Me (Robert Delong Remix)
Welcome To The Eye
Now You See Me (Spellbound Remix)
NOTE: these remixes are official and on the soundtrack, not fan stuff.

Video Game Review: Deus Ex Human Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe0imQJjzWI&feature=player_embedded
One part of this game's knockout soundtrack.

Deus Ex Human Revolution was very interesting to play. I've not played the original, or at least not a lot - I'm pretty freakin' awful at it, and the game's graphics (at least on my computer) are way too damn dark. I've neither played nor looked at the sequel, I don't even remember its name. I didn't even read a plot summary before booting up the game.
Actually, weird story. For at least a year, I simply COULD NOT make the game run on my computer. It wasn't a spec issue, my computer was fully capable. I tried everything we could think of to make the game start. I was capable of starting the separate DLC The Missing Link (though at this point of writing, I haven't played it yet anyway), but for some reason the main game just refused to go. Skip ahead a year now, and it still won't start, but I go through another round of experimentation and finally get it right! Novemeber 2012, I can finally play a 2011 game.

Speaking of "2011 game," I should describe DXHR. Released in 2011, the game is a science-fiction (cyberpunk) first-person cover-based action game developed by Eidos and published by Square Enix. I intentionally didn't call it a Shooter. See, the genius of DXHR's gameplay is that it is variable. Not, like, variable levels of difficulty (though there are difficulty levels; for reference, I played on whatever silly name it made up for easy mode), but variable in the different WAYS you can play the game. A lot of games like to advertise that you can build the type of character to fit your playstyle. This is a big function of The Elder Scrolls - build a magic focus, build a weapon focus, build a stealth focus, etc. In DXHR, there are three main methods of playing, though only two are really that effective. Your choices? Essentially, you have "guns" or "stealth." Technically you could try a "melee" path but without stealth you're just gonna die if you do that. What's different in this game is that, in 90% of circumstances, this is NOT a false choice. In TES, if you don't focus on something combat based, you're dead. In the Metal Gear Solid games (moreso the last three, the first two there's not even any semblence of choice) if you choose to focus on combat and ignore stealth, you're dead (and an idiot). But in this game, if you choose to focus on combat, you can win. If you choose to focus on stealth, you can win. If you choose to focus on hacking, you only need a bit of the others. The entire game really hinges on this ability to play in different ways, and every level is actually pretty artfully designed to accomodate all playstyles. It reminds me of the Assassin's Creed games, especially Brotherhood and occasional spots of III. In the AC games, EASILY the worst bits of the game for me (aside from when the controls run away from me) are the forced-stealth segments because they force you into a single playstyle that lacks some degree of fleshing out - a real sad thing with the full synch system providing a much better path to inspiring stealthy gameplay. As a quick aside, Assassin's Creed 1 is almost entirely freeing, allowing you to stab a dude pretty much however you wanted, stealthy or action-y, without penalty. I think the perfect inverse of DXHR's mutliple paths idea would be Uncharted 2. UC2 is ALSO a game that includes multiple subsystems in the game - guns, melee, stealth. Unlike DXHR, which in general you can solely focus on one path, UC2 is INTEGRATED. Avoidance isn't really possible, so stealth can't go on its own. The game puts enemies in hard to reach places, making pure melee difficult. You CAN do the game as solid guns, but you're REALLY at a disadvantage if you do. I'm not judging one game as better based on this, just really talking about the different ways a game maker can approach game-building - focus on multiple near-exclusive paths (DXHR), focus on multiple integrated paths (UC2, TES), focus on a single primary path that the game does well (MGS).

I'm done talking about that for now. Something the game does in stunningly good fashion is the level-up system. Levels aren't statistic bonuses, but points you can invest in upgrading or installing Augmentations (cybermods). The interesting difference of this versus, say, Elder Scrolls (the only other example from above that has an advancement system), is that DXHR's system is actively and constantly giving you cool new things to do. Yeah, TES does it with Perks too, but in less-constant fashion. Upgrades like the Icarus Landing System or the Punch-Through-Walls or any of the eye-affecting augmentations are strong gameplay elements in that they increase the variety of things you can do and see and keep things fresh. Probably the only one I can think of that was intrinsicly boring in the way of other games's statistic boosts (boring in the sense that they're simple numerical upgrades - you might be seeing my RPG design philosophy here, numbers aren't interesing) is the Dermal Armor, which is just a health/defense boost. Maybe the battery/recharge-rate ones too. The other nice thing is that everything feels necessary and helpful, always. When I had Praxis (level-up points) I always felt conflicted about what to take because there were so many cool things I wanted to get, there was never an obvious "oh yeah, this one is far more important" situation.

That said, one of them IS more important due to the fatal flaw of the game, the single issue that vastly hurts the game, and that's the boss fights. Within the game, there are three significant ones. Now, boss fights can be good, even in a stealth game where you're avoiding combat - just look at MGS, it has some really interesting ones, MGS3 in particular did a great job with the freakshow bosses. The problem in DXHR is that they entirely forgot their guiding design principle of multiple-paths. The boss fights are solid gunplay. Stealth will not help you. Melee will not help you. Non-lethal will not help you. You need to take out big guns and shoot them until they fall down and hope you don't fall down first. There is no other way to do them really, though I'm sure true pros can disprove me. Here's a problem for me, because I mostly played stealth and non-lethal when I could. After the first boss fight and hearing that the others were all serious gunplay, I immediately began sinking all my Praxis I could into the Dermal Armor. From then on, I never left my shotgun with the burst-round system (essentially a two-bullets-per-shot mod, with double ammo cost) at home. That, my super-modified (especially silenced) 9mm, my stun gun, and my tranq rifle never left my pockets if I could help it. But seriously, the boss fights are a pain in the ass, and if you are forced to play a shoot-y game then the other paths are NOT really viable until you've got those augments under your belt.
Let's talk about the individual bosses. The first one, Barrett, actually isn't too bad. I didn't have combat upgrades at that point and still won on, uh, I think I MIGHT have died once. You can just kite him around cover while you recharge your health. The second one is a HUGE bitch, but there are some clever tricks you can do involving shooting the hell out of the wall consoles to electrocute everyone (including you, unfortunately). The shotgun is great for that, breaks 'em fast. Lots of kiting her around while recharging, and the vision mod that lets you see her while she's cloaked is pretty helpful at times. The last one is a trick boss. I sure hope you didn't get that LIMB Clinic upgrade chip when the glitching was happening, the game was trying to trick you. I knew it was a trap, but I got it anyway. If you did, you get no HUD and no Battery and no Abilities for this fight and your vision is all wonky. He's a huge bitch. It's fortune + kiting to win, plus being accurate enough to not run out of ammo like I kept doing. He's also FAST and skips over walls, you need a big gun but not one that's slow to fire or is inaccurate. Basically, you need to be damn accurate with your combat rifle (the seeker-rounds mod is super-helpful - yes, you can still turn your gun mods on! The game won't tell you that, but you CAN!) or have your shotgun at the ready (I keep typing "shotfun"...). Good luck. Apparently The Snake is a joke if you didn't get the chip.
Blam. Blam. Blam. I'd like to put the guns down now thanks.

Stealth is decent. My big issue is that, once caught, you're not gonna be un-caught really. My other big issue is that stealth PLUS non-lethal is really really not great, because you can't keep watch over people to make sure they don't get woken up by their friends and then you're on high alert and all of the enemies are there. So you essentially need to be perfect the first time or it's time to switch to combat mode. Understandable I guess, but I'm used to games being a little more forgiving than that. However, there's a lot of opportunity in the game to not get caught, and I'm pretty impressed by that. Very well thought out.

Hacking is a lot of fun. I'm not so sure about the difficulty curve (it's either too hard or too easy depending on the moment and the augments you sank in - don't bother with Analyze or Fortify really). However, despite that, it's fun. Seriously. And hunting for passwords for systems you MIGHT be able to hack but but think the password is sitting around the environment somewhere is really cool and one of the best things I recognize from the first game.

Here's my biggest issue with the game: despite the availability of various game systems, the game isn't particularly conducive to a non-lethal run. See, there are three avenues to doing a non-lethal run. First, avoidance. As already mentioned, this can be problematic because one notice and you're fucked. However, this is also the best method overall. Second, non-lethal weaponry (the stun gun and tranq rifle). The tranq rifle doesn't have great accuracy and is hard to use, but the stun gun is really effective. However, the game has a very nasty habit of not giving you a ton of ammo for these guns. Lastly, there's melee - when you do a close range attack, it's one buttom click, held for lethal or pressed for non-lethal, and it's perfectly effective. The problem there is that in DXHR, you have a limited number of batteries. From empty, only one recharges - more than one, you're going to need to use consumables to fill 'em up. How does this relate to melee? Well, apparently, punching a dude drains a whole battery. This is not good. I do not understand the sensibility of it, and next to the boss fights it's the most infuriating thing in the game. Another, more specific problem for doing a non-lethal run is one of the final levels, which mostly consists of fighting mindless crazies who just rush you and come in swarms - turns out single-shot non-lethal weapons and battery-stealing melees are bad for swarms, and discipline is hard to maintain when you have an automatic-fire combat rifle in your pocket that would be SO much easier. The game really does everything in its power to make a non-lethal run hard, but also infuriatingly boring.

Social gameplay! The game knows what it's doing, that's for sure. It's the most robust social system I've ever seen in a game, especially with the CASIE implants (which I highly recommend, they make the game significantly more fun). DAMN good. If more games can do a social system with this level of depth, it will be a step forward.

So, let's talk real quick about the other three facets of the game.
Plot: The plot is actually quite good. While the way it comes on at first made me think it was going to be a pretty heavy-handed story about growing corporatism, I was surprised. Yes, the situation is a bit heavy-handed. But it's not judgmental really - the game takes several sides of a real issue, exaggerates them, and then presents the arguments both for and against each of those sides. I ABSOLUTELY believe that that conflict would come up about that way if Augmentation technology eventually reaches that degree (which I believe it will, but that's a different day). Things got overblown in the game, and directly calling things the Illuminati was pretty ridiculous, but the basic conceptual debate is good.

Graphics: The visuals of the game fall into two categories, cutscene and in-engine. The cutscene graphics are pretty damn gorgeous - I'd expect as much, since Eidos let their publisher Square Enix do 'em, and if there's one thing Square Enix knows how to do, it's make cutscene graphics. Theyre pretty astounding, but I don't quite think they have the STYLE of the engine graphics. The in-engine stuff is frankly AWESOME. See, despite a relative lack of technical perfection, it has something that the video game industry thrives on - art direction and style. The places are memorable, even if they're not perfectly rendered. The game puts this yellow glow on things (supposedly the HUD from your cybereyes) that looks really good. I'm not doing a great job of describing it, but I'm unbelievably happy with the graphics for this game. It's one of the most interesting to look at games in recent times, by quite a bit.

Sound: In-game sound effects? Pretty standard. Soundtrack by Michael McCann? Fantastic. I featured it originally in February Songaday, but more significantly I featured McCann's X-COM Enemy Unknown soundtrack on October Songaday Day 24 and linked a bunch of DXHR songs. It's really good, and you should check out that page for some samples. It's easily accessable through the Music tab up top!

That should be pretty much it. Let's conclude:
DXHR is a very well-built game with a lot of refinement and some well-thought out design choices, marred by a couple crippling little flaws that exist too close to the core of the game for comfort. This is still a triple-A title and is absolutely worth a play if you're a cyberpunk fan, or even just a sci-fan fan in general.
Score/Grade: 93/100, A.

End Recording,
Ego.

Video Game Review: Halo 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gnx4SoWaZE&feature=player_embedded
So Halo 4 happened! Only a few days after Assassin's Creed III crossed my Xbox, I had Halo 4 in front of me. Now, if you read last week's review, you know that I found ACIII disappointing unfortunately. At this point, I'd hyped myself up and really needed a good game, something to fill the hole that ACIII failed to fill. I put my faith in Halo 4. And you know what? It did exactly what I wanted it to. Halo 4 is great.

Background: What's my Halo history? Halo 3 was our first Xbox game when we (being my bro and I) got a 360 a few years ago. We charged through it and loved it. We got a hold of the original and played that, and then my bro also played Halo 2, which I didn't like as much (the New Mombasa segment was great, as was Delta Halo, but anything with the Flood or the Arbiter was kinda lame). We got ODST when it came out, and Reach as well. I got Anniversary and really liked it, though bro didn't as much - I agree that it wasn't up to the standards Reach had already set. Reach was my favorite overall, though I eventually have found some true coolness in ODST, it just takes a different playstyle. I still long for some Halo 3 scenes though - The Citadel, and the first mission on the desert-y sequence on The Ark and stuff really stick with me.

So, I wanted to just give my first impressions of the game. I'd gone at midnight to pick it up, and had just come home. Here's the thoughts.
* Okay, let's see how this really is. I really hope it's good.
* Nice, the title screen is very pretty. And I like the music too.
I'll note that by this point I'd already listened to the soundtrack.
* Okay, options, cool, customization is back, wait, all this stuff is locked? Dammit. I don't do multiplayer, I hope I can get the stuff.
* Campaign start. Here we go.
* Oh hey, Dr. Hadley survived the whole war! I knew she got off Reach, but here she is! This is an interesting direction to take things, replacing MC...
* Man, I know these are cinematic graphics, but seeing as ACIII could've really used a top-notch set of graphics like this I'm still really impressed. These are incredibly lifelike faces.
* Okay, we have in-engine graphics and the Forward Unto Dawn. Everything still looks gorgeous - good sign.
* Oh hey Cortana! Your mo-cap actress changed, but your voice didn't! And thankfully the Chief's voice actor is the same. I got weirded out when it was all strange in Anniversary. I don't quite like this Cortana version as much as the old one.
* Still marveling at all the pretty.
* Alright, alright, matching to controls. Hey, they're pretty close to how I remember!
* Guns...*krakrakrakrak* OH MY GOD that should not have felt really good. I'm only shooting a wall *krakrakrakrak* HOLY CRAP the gun just sounds great and it makes it FEEL right. Is...*blam.blam.blam* yup, pistol's feeling good too.
* Covenant! I was hoping to fight them. Why though? Oh, I guess "a lot can change in 4 years" makes sense.
* Yeah, these guns just feel right.
* Oh my goodness, how did I DIE? This is easy mode! I hope this doesn't become a trend...
END THOUGHT STREAM

So yeah, straight from the get-go, the game got me on-board with almost no effort. Everything just FELT right. Aftr 343 had trouble making everything just feel right in Anniversary, this is a huge sigh of relief. The graphics are right there at the top of the 360's arsenal as far as quality goes, and the art direction sure ain't bad. I noticed the Covenant Grunt has a makeover, and had, like, scales on its bulgy arms and stuff and looked more like a creature and less like a generic enemy thing.

Let's hit the basic topics:

PLOT: Mostly, I liked it. You can tell they were leaving things blank for the next games, but the stuff they give us is generally pretty cool. I really like the inclusion and canonization of Rampancy (linking in Marathon). In general, the story got a little less strong as the game progressed, especially two particular scenes. First, the scene with the Librarian was silly as all hell. For the remainder of the game (which I was co-oping with my bro by that point), my reaction to absolutely everything was to tease the game about the word "Genesong." Really, what the fuck is that? I was really trying to take it serious, but that kinda snapped it a bit. The other bit is the final scene. The, uh, "final boss." That was pretty pathetic. We eliminate the villain and prevent his escape, and the whole thing with Cortana really makes no sense. The ending is really a pile of gibberish. I'm not sure how the plot from this one can be strongly exapnded into a trilogy the way the Flood from H1 could, but I'm interested to see them try and pull it off. Everything else about the game has given me faith in 343's ability to continue this series.
I do admit, it was saddening to have the game go by without the other heroes of Master Chief's story. Sergeant Johnson and Miranda Keyes are dead, and I miss Johnson very much. Additionally, I was pretty sad not to hear Reynolds' (Fillion's) voice in the game - I mean, Buck survived Reach and New Mombasa and the Ark, right? Still, I suppose it gave it a much more close feel to be just Master Chief and Cortana. Master Chief showed a lot of emotion for being what he is, and he's growing on me not only as an icon, but as a sympathetic hero too.

GAMEPLAY: It was rock-solid. As soon as I got into the swing of things, I was really into it. It was fun, it felt right, and the enemies were varied with good AI. I'll mention that those flying shield-things that the Promethean Knights let out are a bitch to hit and their presence immediately makes them the priority target and amps up the difficulty. Three of them is just nasty. But with a partner, I was okay with it.
My big sticking point was the guns. There were a LOT and a very varied selection. Even when guns filled similar roles, such as the Shotgun and the Scattershot, they behaved somewhat differently. I loved the Promethean guns, and liked some of the Covenant guns. I was sad to see no Plasma Rifle at all, but there was a lot of good still. One thing that DID kinda piss me off was the utter lack of Gravity Hammer save for a single one in an unexplained "Here's one of every gun, the final boss is coming soon" room, and you don't get to use it very long. See, I just really love the Grav Hammer. Swords are cool and all, but those hammers are boss.
Difficulty isn't always stable through the game, but other than that the gameplay is rock solid, as I said.
Of course, there's not a ton of divergance from the norm - it's ALMOST a little too the-same to be fresh, but the new coat of paint and everything, plus a carefully refined and recalibrated system make it worth it. Also, the new batch of armor abilities and always-having sprint is great. Hard-Light Shield? Fuck yeah. Also it's great that one of the control schemes is almost word-for-word Borderlands 2 (which my bro had been playing, so it worked out perfect for him actually).

GRAPHICS: I am blown away. THIS stretches what the 360 is capable of and looks better than just about any game I've seen, even on the PS3 or PC. Everything is just utterly well-designed, well-made, stylish enough to avoid the uncanny valley of photorealism, and the animations are smooth, natural, and interesting. I'm blown away.
They filled the world with monumental, wondrous things. However, as some have said, it doesn't wield that power in quite the right way to get us to feel like we did when we first witnessed the Halo ring on our screens. Not for lack of trying though - the stuff is awe-inspiring, but not impactful in that same never-forget-it way.

SOUND: The soundtrack is great. Neil Davidge did a good job. There's a major flaw in that the game lacks a single truly iconic theme that will be pervasive through the trilogy the way Marty's Halo theme was. That said, some of the songs, like Arrival, which is on the Music page, 117, in October Songaday, or Green and Blue, up top, are stellar pieces. I miss the Halo theme by the way, but understand the purpose of the split.
I'll shout out again about the sound effects. Combined with the specific jerking of the recoil, they make the game feel incredible to play. It's visceral and raw in a way that I haven't felt shooting in any other game to be.

SPOTS THE GAME FALL SHORT OR I AM UNAWARE:
* I haven't a clue what the multiplayer is like, which is a guiding criterium for many who play Halo. Sorry, but I don't do online multiplayer really. It is not a judging criteria here.
* That said, aside from potentially the multiplayer, the game lacks replay value. No individual level is so fun that I want to play it over and over like I love The Ark level from 3 or New Mombasa in 2. It lacks the medals and scoring system that made me play Reach obsessively, trying to unlock components for my Spartan and trying to do runs in different styles. Frankly, there's not a lot to hold interest beyond a single playthrough unless you're a multiplayer person.
* The game doesn't do a great job with making the characters you interact with, like the Spartan IVs, very deep people at all.

CONCLUSION: The game filled the gap I was facing from ACIII perfectly. It was exactly what I needed at the time. It's a strong game, and among the most gorgeous looking things to come out this year.  But chances are you're gonna play it once and either go to the multiplayer or be done. Also, the game isn't going to be bringing you into the fold if you already disliked the way Halo games work. Still, it's a bearer of good tidings that the new developer doesn't indicate a drop in overall quality.
Score: 8.5/10.

End Recording,
Ego.

Video Game Review: Assassin's Creed III

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMTjbCdHLi0&feature=player_embedded

This is greatness. I've extensively talked about Assassin's Creed soundtracks already on the first Sunday Songs (accessible easily through the Music tab! No I will not stop plugging that page). I won't elaborate much further, but while I think Balfe dropped from Jesper's work he had, there ARE several truly excellent songs (like this one, and Fight Club, and even some of the more ambient ones like Through The Frozen Wasteland).

Hey there! As I mentioned in the first Historical Songaday post, for the month of December I will be filling out at least some of my backlog of stuff to post and will be doing reviews every Tuesday and Friday! I said Thursday before, but I've changed it to Friday - this doesn't change the number of reviews, just spaces 'em out a bit better. If I can make enough of 'em, it'll be a game review every Tuesday and a movie review every Friday. I hope to god I can keep up with a commitment like that. Enjoy!

ASSASSIN'S CREED III
OK, so Assassin's Creed III happened. I finished it. Now, I want to be very clear right away; my opinion of the game is NOT the popular one. It isn't particularly common (though I'm not alone), and you should not take my word as a deciding point of whether or not this game is for you. I hope it's an influence, but my thoughts here are definitely non-standard.
What opinion is that? I find that Assassin's Creed III is a well-crafted game that simply isn't actually FUN.

Background: So I love the Assassin's Creed series. Immensely so. Ever since I actually played AC1 I've absorbed the series with vigor. I've 100%ed every game up to this point, including achievements, collectibles, side-missions, and such (excluding multiplayer because I don't have Xbox Live). Here's how I rank the series:
1) Brotherhood. A strong plot, strong location (that occasionally got dull), strong history, and absurdly strong gameplay.
2) Assassin's Creed II. Only barely beaten by ACB, ACII had the best locations overall (Venice is simply amazingly well done) and the best soundtrack, but suffered from gameplay hiccups - primarily Ezio just doing whatever he damn well pleases. Also, the lack of kill streaks from the later games hurts it.
3) Revelations. A decent plot, very competant core gameplay with annoying peripheral gameplay (tower defense game, bomb making), a great location without enough variation. Also a barely-usable minimap, which is a killer.
4) Assassin's Creed I. Astounding ideas, a brilliant set of locations, marred by repetitiveness, painful gameplay inaccuracy, and graphical breakage. If fully remade in the vein of Revelations's innovations, it would be extraordinary. Just the addition of a database would be enough for me, since I'm a huge fan of Crusades history. Assassin's Creed I is still a great game though.
I know a friend on KG who pretty much reverses this order, loving ACI and disliking Brotherhood, and he absolutely loves ACIII beyond all others now. So yeah, subjective.
I'll note here that Geop's amazing Let's Plays of the first and second games add a huge amount to the game as well, and when I mentioned them to my history professor (who teaches an early modern Europe and a Middle Ages course) he had me send him the links and he was impressed by their detail and precision.

Introduction: Assassin's Creed III is the fifth game in the series, featuring a new Assassin in the lead-up to, the process of, and toward the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War. Connor, a half-Native American, is killing Templars and hunting the second-in-command of the Templar forces.

Gameplay: Easily the game's weak point to me. It entirely does away with the control system of the previous game, replacing it with an entirely new system. ALL movement stuff is covered by the RT button now (I will use Xbox terms because I played that) - you pretty much just have walking and full on sprinting now. You can half-hold the button or barely tilt the stick for a slightly lower speed more akin to just holding RT in the previous games, but it's so sensitive and awkward to half-hold that no one is going to do it. Unfortunately, because you're now always sprinting, you're also always freerunning, and Connor runs up all sorts of everything, even if you're just trying to ru  along. He's harder to control at that speed, and they removed an interaction with movement from previous games where you made your choice between holding A or B while running to either sprint (for speed) or shovve through crowds (for safety). Now you shove while you sprint, so there's less interaction and running through cities is just pretty boring - or would be, if not for the guard posts, but I'll get to that. The other big overhaul is that the entire combat system now revolves around the B button. Not in any particular format - you might as well just mash B and when time slows down because you triggered the counter you hit either X to murder them or A to disarm them (after which they can be murdered quite easily). After you kill a man just keep hitting X until you see a flashing red arrow above an enemy's head and then switch back to the B button. It's not thrilling. There are ways to use your secondary items in combat, but with the highly limited number, inexplicable removals (I had to go buy an entirely new complement of snares at least 5 times, and that was before I'd used ANY), and the fact that none of how to use them in combat is explained, it's not significant. Also, since using your gun in counters seems to not use up bullets or require reloading and usually kills even block-y enemies, it's pretty trivial, except when the game is dicking you over - random points where 2 enemies attack at once (either enormously fucking you or just resulting in 2 automatic kills, regardless of enemy type), stupidly long kill animations that get you stabbed in the back in the meantime, rows of other guards who line up to gun you down and who, if you're in an animation at the time, get over half your health removed, etc. Also camera angles that continually put trees in the view path, but I'm not really going to hold that against them. The lack of a dodge and the fact that both enemy health is hard to track and, more than anything else, there's just SO MANY GUARDS. If you get into an open fight, you're going to need to fight off several dozen guys over the course of the fight. If you run, you will never escape if you don't take advantage of something like water or one of the few entirely abandoned areas. If you do the open fight, well, you're gonna get at least 2 Notoriety, which just about guarantees you'll get into another fight, which will hit you into top notoriety, and if you get to THERE, you WILL constantly get into fights. It doesn't help that you'll get into an open fight if you step into a guard post, which are mostly open to the air, unguarded and unmarked from many angles, and entirely left off the map. Notoriety isn't easy to remove - without posters being marked on the map, you'll never use 'em (especially when the omnipresent guards get pissed if you tear one down, almost immediately dragging your notoriety back up). Print Shops are so few and far between that I used just one: the tutorial one. Heralds are cheaper, more present, and reduce Notoriety by 2. Unfortunately, they get frightened super easily and are almost always in sight of guards, so if you've got 3 Notoriety, you're caught. It really got to the point where, if I got to 3 Notoriety, I got into a fight and put down the controller and let myself die because it reset my Notoriety to 0. It's just too much hassle otherwise.
Combat UPGRADES are useless. You can upgrade your sword, your tomahawk, and your gun - I pretty much used the default of all three the entire game. POST-game, I've now acquired every upgrade. I've gone back and tried out the old ones again for comparison, and the result? Don't bother. Basic tomahawk + Hidden Blades is the whole game. I have yet to use a duckfoot pistol right, though the double-barreled pistol and twin holsters are both useful. There is no health boosting. The Bow, which doesn't upgrade, was often better than the pistol anyway.
Other items? Well, I admit that I like Rope Darts. The Hang mechanic NEVER worked right, but that doesn't mean I didn't have fun with it. Smoke Bombs seemed almost essential to be stealthy a lot of the time. Poison Darts aren't as discreet now, making them far less useful. Snares I didn't even realize COULD be used in combat until near the end. The bow isn't useful other than as a counter, but it's very useful there. Overall, just use the Hidden Blades and Tomahawk and you'll be FINE when the game doesn't fuck you over.
Also, there seems to be a human shield mechanic but I don't know how to do it, never did it, and have no interest in doing it beyond getting completion.
Hunting. So, uh, does Ubisoft think I have a thing for animal murder or something? I know, Native American traditions, fur trading, ways of the times, etc., but it didn't need to be a gameplay feature. It wasn't fun, it was more or less random if I caught my prey (because I'm not gonna bother with patience on a meaningless thing, and I'm sure as hell not bothering with Snares or Bait), violent animals ALL HATE YOU, they deal a billion damage (more in about 2 seconds than a whole volley of musket shots), killing predators is a fucking QTE (really Ubisoft? QTEs? I thought the high-profile developers had figured out that we hate them!) which is kinda inexplicable since any of the animals could totally be fought with the regular combat rules, and worse than anything is the bodies. Come on. I don't want the bloody rabbit carcass, and I certainly don't want a zooming-in mini-cutscene when I skin it so the slaughter isn't pointless. I don't blame Connor or Native Americans or even hunters in general but I don't want it in my videogame. And the hunting-fan and video-game-fan is a pretty niche overlap - the Cabela's games are enough.
Of course, I guess it isn't REQUIRED to hunt, since money is absolutely useless in the game. Everything you need can be scavenged, and since no upgrades are really necessary, you needn't hunt. *I* had to because I was dedicated to seeing everything before calling it done.
Also, people simply cannot be stealthy if they're not in tall grass. If you are standing, even standing still, animals will notice you immediately a flee, without question.
The big targets (Bears, Cougars) needed a COUPLE more places to find them.
That reminds me of the map! Not the minimap, which is just fine, and IS an improvement on Revelations's minimap by leaps and bounds. The general map is too, with a couple issues. First, on the Xbox there's still lag entering the map screen, which is hellish for doing completion. It's getting better though. Second, why do you move the cursor with the right stick? That's weird and took a long time to adjust to. Third, what on earth is that whel on the left doing HERE? The hunting overlay makes sense, but the rest should be in some other meny or don't need to exist at all (such as the liberation one).
Moving from there to the menus, there is no simple place to check what the optional objectives of your current mission are, which is a huge oversight - having to go into the DNA Tracker is just dumb. The splitting of some things into the Map's menu also made some things hard to find. Let's move from there to a big point...
Optional Objectives. This is the entire way the game does difficulty. Except unfortunately, with all of my ability, the game still fucked over half of 'em for me and some of them I'm not even sure how they're possible. I will need to either go through with a video walkthrough to do them and wind up extremely frustrated, but you know what? The game hasn't given me the enormous urge to 100% the achievements and the full sync and everything like the others. I just don't find the game that much fun because I end up having to fight the game a lot. Now, the creative director for the game made some extremely controversial and, in my opinion, utterly retarded philosophies about game design a bit ago (the big ones being "Easy mode is killing games" and "Games should be judged on plot along") which, for a guy who argued severely against difficulty modes and exalting optional objectives, this was not their most skillful execution. Optional objectives, in my opinion, work best when they serve to open up or bring attention to new or interesting methods of doing things - even in, say Revelations we had missions with the full sync objective being to, for example, kill the target using a grenade, or from a hiding spot. These were often a bit harder, but were MODIFICATIONS of strategy. In ACIII, a lot of the optional objectives are merely extensions of the strategy that is extremely obvious, and is often just "avoid damage" (the laziest one of all next to time limits in my opinion). They're just "do real good" and are more like difficulty levels on top of the baseline rather than truly adding any interest to the game.
NOTE: I HATE intense challenge in a game where my focus is the story. In other words, I hate challenge in games where I'm not playing explicitly for the difficulty. I play on Easy Mode EVERY TIME when I'm not playing, like, Super Meat Boy or Binding of Isaac or Bit.Trip. Guess what: I'm not playing ACIII for challenge. I want the games to be easy enough that I don't get frustrated. That's a great point for the optional objectives, except that struggling with the controls keeps the game from being easy or even not being frustrating for me. I don't get upset with games (I played through Super Meat Boy with a smile and the occassional sigh when I die), but I was audibly growling at the game.
I need to mention the Frontier. Damn it, I thought we got over this in ACI! The Frontier exists almost entirely to act as a way to show off the tree-running and give a big hunting-ground, though the presence of Lexington and Concord (drawing the Frontier into the story) definitely helped. It was still just SO EMPTY though.
Trading and crafting...Well, the trading mechanic with the Convoys and everything? Useless. I don't even remember how to use it but there's no point, just hunt big game if you actually need money for some reason - if you don't feel like finding the bear area, elk are all over the place and are excellent for money. As for crafting, I didn't do a single craft until I beat the game, but I realize now (having crafted every usable item) that it probably would have actually been helpful. Unfortunately, 90% of the stuff you can craft is pretty much bullshit with no use.
Social stuff was, uh, not. It was "interactive conversations" which are interactive in the sense that the person is speaking to Connor - you don't make choices or anything. Otherwise, people are for 6 things: Liberation Missions (including Assassination Contracts), Courier Missions, Delivery Missions, Frontier Missions, Shops, and Games. Courier missions are bringing letters to people - you have unlimited time and there is almost no reward. Delivery Missions are about collecting materials, like those in the Trade Goods menu. Frontier Missions had potential and were about investigating legendary sightings (Bigfoot, Headless Horseman, Kraken, etc), but they end up just being "Go to the spot on the map and click B on the clue." The Database stories are pretty good though. Shops are self-explanatory. Liberation missions are not unlike the missions you did around town in ACI, and are the most varied thing in the game other than the main questline. Games, though, are the bizarre black sheep of the game. They are, quite literally, board game simulators. Have you ever wanted to play a rousing game of Checkers against opponents of variable difficulty from within the comfort of Connor's skin? Now you can! Seriously. I didn't need a Checkers (and more) simulator inside Assassin's Creed. These are interesting enough but why on earth did you take your time to program them when you could have been reconsidering changing the controls or making Connor do what I intend for him to do?
Enemies are extremely good at noticing you, which is annoying when trying to stealth. The knock on walls move is also not particularly useful most of the time since it has some really low range. It's not TOO bad, except that with the amount
Oh yeah, time to talk about naval combat. There's not a lot of variety of mission types for the amount of missions, but I can't imagine what else they could do with it, so I thinkt the solution would be to just do less of it. The controls aren't particularly forgiving, but they can be done. Protection of others, on the other hand, cannot really.
The underground network of each city was an interesting way to bring them in, but they could have been more interesting individually (living around Seattle, the tunnels that now reveal the old Seattle layers are really cool! It isn't just tunnels like in the game cities). Also, mazes suck. As a cool place to go exploring? Great! As the means through which you fast travel? Great! As a boring exercise to unlock all the Fast Travel points while forced to move slowly through poorly lit passageways? Pretty lame. This could definitely be a revisited idea in future games if they're in cities with tunnels, it just needed some more work.

Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression completely. There are fun and cool things in the game. I will make a huge point of saying that the new "tree-running," as I've been calling it, feels incredibly good. Like, amazingly good. It's smooth, it's flowing, there's little to no disjointedness, and in the Frontier you can cover a lot of ground. It just FEELS good. They succeeded in this aspect.
Once you have the controls down (no mean feat) none of the non-normal minigames are particularly bad.
The fights where you use the environment were definitely a good idea, but they were done very poorly. There's very little significant way of knowing which scenery bits work, you can't take advantage of just anything and all the scenery fights are "Only fight with scenery" fights. Also, triggering the scenery things are just doen by countering while standing next to the relevant scenery. I really like the idea, and with some more integration, this could make the entire game's combat system a lot more dynamic. I'm excited about what this means for the FUTURE of this idea, but I'm unimpressed by this particular execution. Utilizing the environment in combat has always been a bit of an issue for the games in general, often fulfilled with QTEs, and I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.
It is so nice to have multiple cities again. They unfortunately aren't as visually distinct as ones in previous games (hurt by the lack of color filtering - in ACII we had orange-ish Florence, blue/pink Venice, gray Forli, and green San Gimignano, in ACI we had blue Acre, red Damascus, and green Jerusalem, Rome was green and Constantinople was yellow but those were single-city games so it didn't matter much. NY and Boston have the same color scheme, which is unaltered). New York has a very distinct burned portion, which is cool.
Fast Travel from anywhere? Hell yeah. Sucks a bit that you can't fast travel directly to other towns, but it's not that much hassle.
This is kinda a testament to liking the tree-running and the weakness of the optional objective design, but I had FAR more fun getting the collectibles (feathers, chests) than I did actually doing missions. This is suboptimal, but I enjoyed it enough.

The Desmond Segment Gameplay: I want to approach these separate real quick.
The first mission, for being JUST CLIMBING, is AWESOME. I fucking loved it. Maybe it's the prospect of modern day assassin-ing, but I really really really liked it. It also gave me wonderful Assassin's Creed vibes up by that red crane.
The second mission, though, is kinda bullshit. The fact that Desmond HAD to stealth it but lack many of the techniques of his ancestors.
The final mission? SUPER FUN. I love Desmond combat. The only way this could have been better is if they gave Desmond unique animations to represent the blended styles he's Bleeding Effected into him. Switching between a forward facing knife style like Altair's short blade and sword, a twin-hidden blade style like Ezio, and a hidden blade and reversed knife style like Connor (which is the only one he uses because they built him over Connor's animation frame). It would be a lot more work for a small scene, but it would have REALLY impressed me and made me ready for a full game of Desmond. The third segment is all combat though.
I wish there was a different locale for the third mission and the Abstergo raid was fourth and was a much more extensive mission involving full climbing, stealth, and combat, drawing it together. It would have been really cool. The third could be the Egypt mission where William gets captured - maybe Desmond was preoccupied or had to go off on his own to get the power source or something.
I don't know why you couldn't pick up a gun from the security forces. I mean, it woulde make the section even easier, but it would be cool and easy since all the gun mechanics are already on Connor's models.

Writing: I'm back and forth on the writing of the game. On the one hand, I happen to be one of those big fans of the meta-story. Not stupidly, fanatically so, but I do happen to really like it (though I'm unhappy with Lucy's death still - I liked her as a character! She fit the dynamic of the group well, I woul dhave much prefered Rebecca to be the traitor. I like her too, but not as much as Lucy). The overall arc of the plot of Connor is decent, and reminiscent of ACII and ACB, but different enough.
Things break down when you look a little closer though. Connor is a LAME assassin. I mean really, he's just dull! His character is written without an ounce of humor, he's not particuarly strong in his convictions, and his voice actor really needed some more training. In general the writing of characters was just entirely without any particular wit and cleverness. Everyone takes everything so damn seriously that I find myself just begging to go back to Ezio. Charles Lee is written as Evil McBadGuy without any shred of ambiguity in the good and evil (which hurts the series's theme of the Templars and Assassins both believing their the good side that will bring about a better world). The individual lines of Desmond and William aren't all that well written, especially when they're fighting.
I'm left with two characters of refuge. Shawn Hastings picked up a ton of the slack on the humor side, investing his own brand of humor into almost all Database Entries, and doing a good job of being funny in both the emails, over the radio, and in person. The other refuge, to a much lower degree, is Haythem. Haythem is witty to a point and is laid back enough in his speech to be a decent character.
Speaking of Haythem, I have a writing issue with relation to pacing. Put bluntly: Ubisoft, what the fuck were you thinking? There are 12 sequences. The final two sequences are short, and Sequence 10 isn't too long either. You do not play the main character until Sequence 4! You don't put on the Assassin robes until the end of Sequence 5! Really now, the game was over half done when I put on the Assassin robes. There were better ways to pace that. They even try to use the "oh wait, you've been playing as the Templar boss!" thing as a huge humorous plot twist, with a humorous achievement and all. Skip the joke and let us play the main character.
Generally, if you can get over the complete lack of humor in the game, it's of decent quality. It's just not really any fun to listen to.
Somehow, the incredibly pointless life-happenings of the Homesteaders, while it felt tedious to do (note that I did them all in a row after beating the game), they were surprisingly decently written.

Graphics: Someone needed to be a little less ambitious with the capabilities of the 360 - it still has frame rate trouble from time to time. It jsut needed a little more downsizing. It's disconcerting when you get near the top of a view point, when everything suddenly gets SUPER SMOOTH.
The lip synching is NOT up to par. Really now, that was kinda pitiful.
The CGI didn't quite hit me the way Revelations's intro did, but okay.
They did a good job of avoiding the overly detailed (and thus overly brightly outlined) outfit for Connor. They screwed this up in Revelations, but it's definitely better now. I'll say it that I don't like Connor's Assassin robes - they're just TOO plain without being character-ful. However, the Colonial Assassin outfit recieved from Achilles is excellent, and the Captain Kidd outfit and the tribal clothes look really good.
Now that I've gotten my complaints out o the way, the game looks great. Textures are great, even my metric (the quality of a game's stone texture tends to be pretty indicative of the quality of the graphics in general). The water is great both in still and in motion, and general animations are great. Character animations for real characters are good (I'm especially impressed by Connor's running-through-water animation - it looks a little silly, but that's how a real person would totally look!), and animations for minor NPCs are also good!
The game looks great, basically.
...did they change Desmond and Rebecca's motion actors? It's unsettling.
I like Haythem's hidden blade design and want a better look at it. Heck, it looks more hookblade-ish than Connor's!

Sound: I discussed the music of this game at length in a Sunday Songs segment (the first Sunday Songs segment!) so check it out for most of it. You can get there easily through the Music tab up top, or by following THIS LINK.
Other than that, I'll mention that I'm not particularly impressed by the voice acting as a whole, save for a few characters such as the real-lifers.
Sound effects are decent as a whole, but not spectacular.
Actually, the music DID fix a huge issue with Brotherhood and Revelations where the music would just be absent a lot of the time with just the ambience of the crowds taking its place, and the music didn't really get shown off to its best potential. This game may not have as stylish music for individual listening as Brotherhood or Revelations, but it definitely made the most of what it had. I distinctly enjoyed hearing it while playing. It was especially great in the near-end scene where you're stalking the other tribe members that Charles Lee is in charge of, when you hear a great combination of the general town-y Sherlock Holmes-y sounds and the definitely more Kyd-y sounding Native American sounds. I think that song is Wild Instincts, but I don't recall off the top of my head.

History: I don't need to say much. The game is as historically interwoven as ever, and I LOVE. EVERY. SINGLE. BIT OF IT. The history was among my main drives to follow through the game despite other flaws. I would love to see a modern day all-Desmond assassin game, but if I were to get that, I WOULD sorely miss the history.

I think that's all.
Conclusion: This is a game that, despite a strong presentation (marred by downsizing issues for the Xbox 360), is broken in half by its gameplay flaws in my opinion. When it comes right down to it, I think your own enjoyment of the game will be closely related to your opinion of and ability to adapt to the new control scheme. I don't like it. Maybe you do. For me though, it, plus several other design missteps, make this the worst of the Assassin's Creed games. Now, this doesn't make it a bad game! It's a good game, or at least a decent one. I just expected so much better from them. Thanks to the history, it managed to redeem itself some, and it's worth playing if you have an interest in the American Revolution.
Score: Between 6.5/10 and 7.5/10.


Have a good evening, and another review comes Friday!
End Recording,
Ego.

The Metaphorical Unboxing (followed by Annotation, Analysis, and Review) of tremulus

http://threefour.bandcamp.com/album/arbent-rite

34's album Arbent Rite was the soundtrack for this post's writing. I recommend the whole thing, but especially Chain To The Edge of The Sky, The Shatter, and Felt A Shadow.

 

The Metaphorical Unboxing of tremulus

Note to Sean Preston or any of the team at Reality Blurs: If at any point you consider me to be giving away too much information about the game for a publicly-accessible document, please inform me and I will trim it down. I'm not trying to give people the tools to reverse-engineer the game or anything.

Having received the digital preliminary copy of the game, I'm going to go through my experience as I read. This will be taken like the Dungeon World annotations in that I'll be moving in page order (so I may ask questions I answer myself later), but more extreme in that I haven't a damn clue what's in this book at all, unlike DW which I was already pretty familiar with.
* I set my music. This is an important step for me always (as you might be able to tell :/) For the right mood, I decided on listening to some 34. I'll have them linked right up at the top because they don't have a youtube presence, but I know the fella who did it (and now does a piece called Fevrier, also linked), and it's some pretty great stuff. I'll be starting with the album Arbent Rite. Now let's begin.
* tremulus (always lowercase) is an RPG written and produced by Sean Preston of Reality Blurs. It is "a storytelling game of lovecraftian horror". Yeah, that's why I backed it on Kickstarter! And that's why I have a copy, because Kickstarter backers got one.

* Beginning with an introduction to the general genre. What is Lovecraftian Horror, will this book be tentacles and mad gods, a brief on the Mythos, etc. In answer to that second question, there MAY be, but this book is not about the Mythos. This is of interest to me because I've never read a Lovecraft story. Nope. I'll get to it!
* And the RPG primer. I'm not so sure about the description of storytelling games saying that most require no dice or game master, because I think they do a lot of the time, but okay.
* tremulus is Apocalypse World-based with shades of FATE and Fiasco. People play individual characters, we have a GM called the Keeper, there are subsystems, and all of it combined is being called Haiku. I can see that, Haiku is pretty cool for a name.

* Playbook choosing! Unfortunately, there's no direct instruction to distribute the playbooks and go around reading their little descriptions as in Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts - I always find that a helpful thing for choosing playbooks, and it's nice to have it explicitly mentioned. But who do we have...
* The Alienist, The Antiquarian, The Author, The Devout, The Dilettante, The Doctor, The Heir, The Journalist, The Professor, The Salesman.
* Of the descriptions, The Author, Detective, and Salesman have great taglines here, especially the Author, it immediately makes me want to play him. The Heir and The Doctor make sense and are descriptive of who they are, but could stand to be more evocative. The Alienist confuses me: "You are well educated and study to treat the mind." I'm not quite sure what the Alienist does, but what the description and the name say don't line up to me. It sounds like a psychologist, while an Alienist sounds like a monster-obsessed mind. Maybe it'll be okay when I get to the playbook itself, but I'm just not so sure on what that tagline is telling me.
* Everyone starts with a Lore move. Through play, you might gain more. These are a tool to fight the darkness. I'm suspecting something that will be along the lines of Monster of the Week's Luck (not in function, but in general concept).
* Oh man, seeing The Touchstone makes me think of a person, thanks to the Apocalypse World playbook. No fault of this game, but i was confused for a moment - I really need to spend less time with my mind stuck in Apocalypse World.
* Oh, the stats! Hooray! Funny stats are my favorite. We have Reason, Passion, Might, Luck, and Affinity. Uh oh. This is very much looking like my Dungeon World stat issue. I think Move structure is genius, but it ran into problems for me when the stats more described your ability in various areas of skill rather than who you were. Cool wasn't a thing you trained like a skill like Strength is, Cool and Hot and Weird are just things you ARE, and it was thanks to that that pretty much all the moves appeared all the time, whereas things such as Parley aren't rolled that often in DW (though genre implications has a role there too). Sharp was the closest thing to the more skill-based moves. Now, this isn't doom, it just sets me on edge to watch for the issue.
* And secondary stats, we have Wealth aka barter, looks like Lore aka MotW Luck, and Trust aka Hx variant (in keeping with every game changing Hx - I'm not sure why it happens, but I love it). Though I'm curious: it said before that we all start with one Lore move, but it says we begin with 0 Lore here. Do we have the move and just can't trigger it til we get some Lore? I guess you'll answer that soon.
* A lexicon! Defines the key terms. I didn't see one of these in MH or AW, it's nice to have them all together. This would probably make a great reference sheet for players new to Apocalypse-Powered games.
* I sort of like having a definition of Charged Situation. It was nice having it as a fuzzy distinction of "well, is this scene charged? No? Then no need to make the move, I'll just tell you." but I like the implications that come with the idea that, when the players are making moves, this situation is now charged.
* Aww, Damage? No Harm or other name for it? I kinda find Damage the lazy way out. I'd be interested to hear rationale for this, as it's a curious choice in my opinion. Wait, just read a few lines down, you DO have Harm? You have the term Damage defined as, essentially, Harm and Shock? I'd DEFINITELY say pick one or the other - either use Damage as a whole, or keep Harm and Shock separate. Putting Damage in there is just wasted space to me.
* Dark Insight is sweet and I like it and want something like that in the others.
* Hmm. I hope there's a further explanation of Hold elsewhere, because that's consistently been my hardest-to-explain idea to people.
* Ooh, I DO like that, once the PCs have made a move on someone/something, it becomes Of Import. Really adds weight to the importance of the characters that even everything they interact with is Of Import.
* Oh my, Sanity Checks!
* So, are tags purely of narrative import, distinguishing things as having that trait, or do they have mechanical weight as well? I suspect I'll get an explanation later.
* The Golden Rule. Take The Action To Get Its Effect. I gotta say, it's certainly not as catchy or descriptive as "When you do it, you do it. To do it, you have to do it." or "Moves Are Indivisible." What you have here is just the "To do it, you have to do it" side - that you want to Poke Around if you want to go through dusty boxes in the attic, but not the side that, when if you just start going through those boxes, the move has to trigger. It's a hard thing to describe - it's SO important, but I feel you really need to confront the idea of the idea that moves have triggers. If you want to make a move, you need to trip that trigger, and if you trip the trigger at any point, you have to make the move. This is the first place I'd actually consider tremulus to be doing a less-than-great job of introducing the game. This is all assuming that you WANT both sides of the trigger, but I'm quite confident you do. The side you have right now is the side that tends toward roll-playing and deciding based on mechanicals rather than fiction, and as a self-described Storytelling Game, I don't think that's your intention at all.

* Basic Moves! The defining piece of the game. We have eight of them - imagine that, it's the same number as Apocalypse World! Hopefully we don't have a straight copy job.
* "Act Under Pressure." Not looking too good for the straight-copy-job thing. I'm just teasing, it makes sense to be here! I actually think Act Under Pressure is a generally easier phrasing for people to understand than Act Under Fire. Probably why Monster of the Week ALSO chose the same wording.
* Um, Sean? Uh, we have MOST of the move's part here, but we're kinda missing something. We have triggers, we have a stat to roll with, we even have examples, but we need results! I've rolled my 2d6+stat and have a 7-9, what do I do? I know it's a Partial Success which often leads to a Yes, But... situation thanks to the Lexicon, but is there no more guidance that that?
* Okay, I confess, I just looked ahead and saw the actual copies of the moves a few pages ahead with all their parts. Why include them here then? It's not any more useful as a reference I don't think. Just attach the examples to the actual move text later.
* Convince sounds like Manipulate, Help/Hinder is almsot exactly Aid/Interfere, Poke Around and Puzzle Things Out sound new, Read a Person is exactly as AW, Take Control is Seize by Force, and Threaten is Go Aggro. I'll talk more about these when I have mechanics.
* Character Creations summary! Wait, okay, there IS an exclusive playbook clause! Just went back and I did find it, but you may want to highlight it if you consider it important, because I totally missed it the first time.
* Always two playbook moves, huh? Most of the AW-variants have the number of playbook-moves determined on a playbook-by-playbook basis, so that's curious.
* You may want to add a step between Review Lore Move and Establish Trust of Introduce Characters, unless you're okay with some people forging on to Trust before that.
* Death = grab a new playbook! Carrying over Wealth and Lore is nice. Now, playbooks all default to 0 Lore, but what if your playbook has starting Wealth? Do you add it to your previous character's Wealth, or replace the starting Wealth?

* The core rules. Man, 2d6+stat, 10+/7-9/6- is still just so beautiful.
* Player-facing rules are also great. I appreciate not rolling my own dice and just responding.
* Oh, "The Power of Narrative" thing is a WAY better description of Moves Are Indivisible than The Golden Rules was.
* Hx was how well you know someone. Bonds were the past you'd shared. Strings were who you had control over. Trust is exactly what it says - how much you trust someone.
* +1s are always offset by -1s. Can you do it in reverse? Like, see that you drifted away from someone in play and give them -1, and just have the +1 be a byproduct? What if you grew closer to someone but DIDN'T drift away from someone in the fiction? Or if you drifted and didn't grow any closer to someone?  I like it being a "may" thing.
* Secrets are cool. In-built character development. But if there's no XP or anything for the flip, why ever advance one past +3? It's statistically powerful, and getting that secret would actually weaken your stat power with them AND with someone else. Perhaps, when you learn a secret, you only do that - if you flip over +3, you don't have to take another -1, you've already lost your stat power with them so no need to make it worse, and same thing with flipping over -3.

* And NOW the basic moves, for real this time!
* Okay, on a layout note, the spacing between the move/trigger and its outcomes should not be the same as the spacing from one move to the next. It looks confusing when it isn't.
* Act Under Pressure is a carbon-copy of AW, which is 100% okay with this move because it's generic and versatile.
* Aaand Convince is indeed Manipulate, promises, concrete assurance, and all. Except instead of PC incentive being XP it's Lore, which is cool. Explicitly making a 6- a Trust loss makes sense but I'm always weird when it's not "Make a move, as hard as you like."
* Help/Hinder is now balancing +2/-2, instead of the +1/-2 of before. I think it's tonally appropriate though. This 6- is great though.
* Poke Around is one of the two "discovery" moves, the physical one. I don't think the cumulative -1 is necessary - AW accounted for that in the framework by removing the Null Result. Players will moderate their retries on their own because failure doesn't just mean nothing, it means bad things happen. I also don't really like using a 6- to determine nothing is there, since that's stilla determination about the scene. I would DEFINITELY go with the Hard Move always for this one. However, the ability to simply generate "Good things are here" on 10+s is cool.
* Hey look, Puzzle Things Out is the other discovery one about mental discovery. This is pretty much Read a Sitch/Discern Realities, but is not only applicable to locations but also to objects or information. I quite like this one, including the possibility to take a Lore instead of 3 questions. Not so sure about the questions being flexible, since that was how Read a Sitch was Advanced in AW. I'm not concerned about it though, I'm sure it works.
* Read a Person sounds 100% the same. I like that it uses Passion, unlike Puzzle Things Out's Reason. However, as the only Passion-using Basic Move, I wonder if Read a Person couldn't have been pulled under the branch of Affinity as well. Sure as hell not necessary, but an interesting thought.
* Take Control is seize by force, by the look of it. It even has seizing something by force as a trigger. I'm not sure about the exact comparison of the lists, but it''s fairly similar. I definitely like the increased guidance for when they're impressed / dismayed / frightened.
* Threaten is definitely Go Aggro. Like, precisely. I'm not so sure if this phrasing allows for the frequent "Go Aggro, and what I want is to blast his face off" from Apocalypse World, requiring Take Control to really hurt something. If I understand right though, this move isn't as frequent in this genre as in AW, so that's all good.
* Okay. Now, I need to clarify. It may sound like I'm harping on the game for paralleling Apocalypse World very closely. I'm not. This game is admittedly and explicitly based on AW, and this basic move set is a big part of retaining what Apocalypse World does. The small changes are enough to shift the use of the moves, don't take this as criticism. Monster of the Week does about as much variation, and I really like that one too. Making the parallels is simply for my comprehension.
* Of course, I'm still craving a parallel to Open Your Brain To The Psychic Maelstrom. DW has Spout Lore, and MH has Gaze Into The Abyss - hell, Gaze could probably work even transported wholesale into here. I may just do that, simply because I'm absolutely smitten with Gazing into the Abyss. My last two sessions of AW my players have done several Open Your Brains and it's made me so excited to stretch my MC muscles doing that.
* Coming back after doing something else for a bit, I'm seeing the motivation for Hold 1 for MC Hard Moves. I think the idea is that this is a suspense-builder. Since all rolls are player-facing, all players know when they fail a roll. In most Apocalypse-Powered games, you know that you will be immediately hit with some sort of consequence. However, if the Keeper hold 1, he has the ability to wait. The PCs know that there's going to be a consequence in the future that could come down at any time, but are in the dark as to what it could be, or when. They just know they've failed and that the badness is coming. This sure isn't the most amazing suspense-building tool (an honor held, for me, by Dread), but it seems to make sense. I hope to see how this works in play.

* Damage, death, insanity!
* I'm not so sure that's the best way to handle fist combat, but I suppose it's a very intentional genre choice here.
* Okay, here's a contradiction: "Harm inflicted is based on the weapon. Unless you have a special move, Your Character's Fists Do 0 Harm." and on the next page, Punching Someone Hard With Your Fists is 1 Harm.
* "A really big explosion. No, even bigger than that." is frickin' hilarious.
* Is getting hit by a car really AP? I would think that would still take any armor into account. That's just my general curiosity though, not a game balance thing or anything.
* I like what they tell us about Shock. I giggle at the idea of recovering Shock and becoming less disturbed when you find that asshole's corpse, though of course that doesn't actually happen.
* 6 segments is fine by me. Seeing them on tracks is less cool than a shape like the Countdown Clock, but it makes sense to not be one, so no worries. Trying to think of a cool shape (since, with set numbers of hits rather than scaling HP, shapes and stuff are okay), but don't have one yet.
* Aww, still got a Roll+Damage Suffered move? Damn, I actually am not a giant fan of these, but that said, I don't see anything problematic here.
* Healing seems a bit more formalized than in AW, but that's okay. Alcohol to cure shock is cool.
* AND HERE'S HOW ANGEL KITS WORK
* The more I see it, the more I DO like having special names for each of the harm stages, but I'm going to have to make a separate print-out/card to keep track of those for me.
* Maybe it's because debilities have yet to be taken in my AW game, it doesn't seem to be that much less dangerous with them. Of course, I suppose it's 5 saves from death, but still.
* Amnesia is a cool mental disorder, definitely seems to be evocative of amnesia. I kinda wish this would reverse so 10+ is remembering something helpful, 7-9 is nothing, 6- is problematic. Maybe switching to the greater form would use the written results, as just a roll penalty is kinda weak.
* And that follows through several of them. Roll penalties, while significant in the math of the game, are just kinda weak.
* Night Terrors shouldn't hurt you as well with a success - it's a success! Penalties, even mitigated ones, don't really belong in the 10+ category.
* Aaand a lot more roll penalties. Come on, there were cooler things to do with mental disorders than this.
* Rituals are cool, except the example says that its ritual is Power 7, which I can only imagine is average for a somewhat difficult ritual. If you fail that, if the damage turns physical, you just DIED. You take significantly less damage if you were hit by a BUS. I get that rituals are big and scary, but when I take less damage from a train, I think the scale may be a touch off. Maybe it's intentional though and Rituals are supposed to be ultra-lethal. I DO understand that you can distribute the damage between physical and shock, but it still seems extreme.


* Hey, tags! Okay, in general, I'm already familiar with these.
* Nothing seems particularly noteworthy except for Unreliable. This is the only one other than an N-variant item with a hard-coded time it makes something happen. Rolling a natural 2 to break it is the equivalent of a natural 1 roll in d20 systems (though it's even less probable, which is nice), but it makes me conflicted. There's something nice about the vagueness of Activating Stuff's Downside just being something an MC does as a hard move, while this explicitly makes it something that ALWAYS happens on a -2, even if a different hard move would be cooler. On that note: Does the natural 2 breaking it SUPPLEMENT or REPLACE the hard move caused by failing the roll? I would imagine balance would say it replaces it, but I don't like it deciding my hard move for me.
* Definitely like it describing the range tags specifically, I don't remember a guideline like that in AW and it would help. I mean, Bones has a pair of magnums, but I don't actually know how accurate he is with them.
* "In general, a weapon should cost harm+1 Wealth..." does that apply to AW as well? Is that how it kinda evens out? Because that's also helpful, I never know how much to cost some things.
* Wait, Haggling is for trading stuff for stuff? Damn. It's a nice-looking piece even for buying stuff with Wealth, though it would require a teensy bit of rewording (10+ buy it for -2, 7-9 buy it for -1. I'd actually probably go with 10+ buy for -1, 7-9 buy for -1 with strings). I think, thanks to the promise part of Convince/AW's Manipulate, it makes certain talk-y skills like haggling difficult.
* Advancement. Now, everything is pretty standard, but I definitely like being able to eliminate a mental disorder. Here's a question about difference from Apocalypse World: Is there a bounded number of advancements? Most characters in Apocalypse World can only survive about a dozen advancements before either selecting change playbook or retire to safety. Now, you unlock alternate-playbook moves from six on, but can you select new move every time (despite the AW-typical limit of two or three more moves from your playbook)?
* Okay, I just noticed the other big distinctiont here: there's no XP system, it's just when the Keeper says to advance. This is a really important decision. The various ways to get XP all have really distinct effects upon how the players act. Having none at all is also an effect - mostly that players will do what they feel like, rather than trying to twist into whatever shape they need to get XP. That also removes a tone-building piece from the game though, as convincing players to act in certain ways to get their XP can reinforce a genre. I think this is an important choice here, with a pair of good choices. Including an XP mechanic can try to build the genre, but comes with all the dangers of an XP system (see my previous essay post on the topic of XP!), but while I haven't seen it in here, most Apocalypse-Powered games come with the same First Rule: Portray your character as if they're real. Since that sort of nullifies the idea of pushing your character in an XP direction, yanking XP entirely can be pretty good. It DOES put a ton of power in the hands of the Keeper though, and XP mechanisms are often good because they give players a concrete method to get better - you hear some criticism of Fate Points in FATE games because they're really important but are arbitrarily doled out by the GM, and XP is no different in a case like this. It's definitely something to keep a careful eye on while I play...

* Oh man, I'm at the Playbooks! Also, this is a ton of text here for only being 50 pages in so far out of 246 :/ I'm never gonna get this posted at this rate. Hopefully playbooks, thanks to a parallel structure, will go quicker.
* The Alienist. Well, it definitely seems like The Alienist is a psychologist type, which I suspected from other references in the text. I gotta know though - why Alienist? The name evokes something way different to me than it is. Is this a Lovecraft-ism? A now-unused term? Just a cool thing? I can accept it and understand Alienist in the context, but when I heard Alienist at first I definitely didn't think of this.
* Is Androgynous a really appropriate piece for this guy? Not a judgment, it just seems odd to me. But then, these guys seems like he's supposed to be odd. Otherwise the looks are cool.
* What the hell's a valise? To Google, I guess...
* A motorcycle! Sweet. Also, Diary of a Madman is a sweet item, as is a sword cane. Not sure why a Clipping Service is relevant, but overall this is a cool gear list.
* Well, the therapy move is really obvious, of course. I haven't looked at the printable playbook document, but if it isn't there either you ought to reproduce the actual roll for healing on the playbook page. Save on pageflipping, y'know.
EDIT: Just checked the classic playbook set. Definitely not there. Totally needs to be there. Flipping, even with the page reference, is kinda annoying. I know if anyone plays one in my game, I'll probably have them write it out in the empty space under the class name.
* Oh, what's the time frame on Therapy? A couple of dedicated hours? Several days worth of sessions? I'd just say a couple-hour long session.
* Not so fond of all of the use stat X instead of stat Y for move Z. Even less fond of straight bonus to basic moves. Quid Pro Quo is great though.
* Basically I just really like when moves are actually new or unique moves, not just number-shifts on rolls. I'm sure there can be good ways to play though the moves, and it's less dangerous to the XP system to be able to roll one stat all the time (moving two more basic moves to the Alienist's specialty?) when there IS no XP system.
* The Lore move, on the other hand, is freakin' awesome. It's really giving me a sudden appreciation for the Lore system, it's definitely growing on me.

* The Antiquarian's name, on the other hand, is cool and evocative. It helps that item-users are kind of a weak point with me. Also, this art more than most of them makes the Despeckle filter used on it pretty obvious. That's the filter's name in GIMP at least, maybe it's something else in Photoshop, but either way I'm familiar enough with the effects on that one that I can identify it. Despeckle takes a little less work than the process I use for AW-itizing art, but doesn't have the perfect lines of my take. Note that this is analysis, not judgment - it looks good, regardless of what your exact process was.
* And the names continue to be intensely strange ad I love it.
* The stat layouts are of interest on this one; many, many playbooks with attribute-sets give you a +2 in something and then a variety around that, clearly denoting the important stat. Battlebabes are Cool, Gunluggers are Hard, Skinners are Hot, Alienists are Passionate (you can see what I mean about the naming of the attributes here - the ones here and in D&D/DW are descriptions about things, more akin to skills, while AW/MH stats are descriptions of what you ARE), but here, the Antiquarian has a much more varied set of potential stat layouts. This means that you can play him in a lot of ways, but you have less guidance for what the classes moves are actually built to aim toward using. Admission: I just looked ahead and this more varied layout is actually standard here! Very cool. I like that, kind of a medium between AW's always-good-at-stat-X characters and Dungeon World's complete flexibility.
* Knick-knacks are 100% better than wealth. Essentially this is oddments, which I love, and while I recognize why they aren't the standard unit of wealth, that's something I happen to love about the post-apoc setting of AW. Either way, having them is great.
* A pile of gear with actual statistical effects? Sign me up. I've always been fond of that particular Eyeglasses mechanic - I swear I've seen it before, but don't remember it from AW, but it's great, despite being a stat-mod it's valuable to the player as a helper device and helpful to the Keeper as Hard-Move bait. Scooby-Doo's Keeper loved knocking off Velma's glasses with his hard moves - absolutely LOVED it.
* Yup, this pile of moves is great. Several actual modifications or new moves in addition to some more stat-y ones. The only one I'm not too big on is Shrewd Dealer, and mostly because I think there were better ideas for how to do it. Surprised at the difficulty the playbook has with Affinity, I thought that would be a decent area.
* Actually, I'm not super-thrilled on Fortunate either, mostly because there isn't anything about it that seems to make it an Antiquarian move rather than another playbook's. It's a stat boost, but its reasoning is generic, and that latter bit is the real issue.
* Not as brilliant a Lore move as the Alienist's, but still pretty good.

* The Author was one of the ones whose early description really got me into it. This description is keeping it up.
* These are some fun items. Also, the Author is filthy rich between 1d6, 2d6 Royalties, and 2d6 Author-in-Residence. The pet is awesome, as is the Writer's Circle. It was on the Antiquarian as well, but why include the +1 Lore? Is it just for Lore-lovers and to round out the list? The Alienist didn't have it, and most of the others don't either. Perhaps a vestige of a previous draft, or a new idea that didn't go all the way?
* Author-in-Residence is made of gold, Bookish seems cool but rather limited in scope, Creative Thinker is pretty nice, Hard To Rattle is odd-yet-appropriate for an Author, and Strangely Intense is evocative yet uninteresting rules-wise. I wish there was another new roll move here to finish out the list.
* Novel Experience, however, is pure gold.

* The Devout is a very strong archetype in the genre for me.
* Personally, I like people-person religious characters, so I'd probably go with the +2 Affinity stat set. Lots of variety though.
* "A relic (weird) handed down to you by your old mentor." There are only four choices and you get two. If you DON'T pick that one, you should probably play a different playbook, because that is freaking awesome.
* Sanctify seems a little complex for being not the most intricate effect, but I like it. In fact, I like pretty much all of them (even Easy To Talk To - I like people-person priests!), though Grace gives me pause. Can you use Grace whenever being lucky is a factor (even if it's not the rolled stat), or only when you actually Roll+Luck?
* Hmm. Not my favorite Lore move, but decent.
* So far, of all the characters, I think if I were to play the game right now I'd be a Devout.

* Detective time!
* Look at those names. Those really are cop names, yes they are.
* What exactly constitutes a medium sidearm? I mean, a .9mm would be a small, a .45 would probably be large, what's in-between? A .357? I don't know anything about guns. I would understand if it was a medium gun or a large sidearm, but is there really that much range in the game rules from small, medium, and large SIDEARMS?
* That list of gears is amazingly hard to choose from, I want every last thing from it. Note that most stat twinks will take the hat and the client or the hat and a big gun.
* Rough and Tumble + Tough As Nails, the shotgun and car, and the +2 Might attribute set is me. Yeah, I kinda play tanks.
* The Lore is, oddly enough, not that interesting to me, although it seems okay. I'm just not feelin' it.

* Now the DILETTANTE is filthy rich.
* Surprised to only see one name with roman numerals after it.
* Fur Coat as armor is excellent, as is the pet. I like the specification of Alive, especially since the Author's didn't. Does the Author have the option of Pet Rock in that case? Anyway, trunk full of books is getting hacked to be exactly as the Bag of Books in Dungeon World.
* OH MY GOD all the new roll moves! Beautiful. This is my preference. I'm iffy on having very explicit definitions of what happens on a 6- as I like to have it open for Hard Moves, but still, this is how I want it. All of them are great.
* Even the Lore move is great, especially with the safety clause about unmodified successes not spending the Lore.

* The Doctor also makes the Despeckle filter really obvious.
* The Doctor's gear, unfortunately, is not quite as interesting as some of the others, though I like the Reference Library.
* Again, you may want to reproduce the Physical Wellness Healing roll on the Playbook sheet to save on page flipping.
* Field Medic is pretty cool, and Forensic Expert is great because it's usable in multiple situations. Emergency Triage is just as brilliant as Shock Therapy, mostly because it's the same damn thing with physical, and Luck instead of Reason.

* Someone got wordy with The Heir's description. I love it though, it's a great little story.
* "Benjamin Blackwood." Benjamin. Fucking. Blackwood. None of the names matter after reading that one, I know who I am.
* Lots of good gear choices.
* I like how, no matter what, you're somewhat Reasonable, but not REALLY Reasonable. You knew enough to stay out of the family til now, but not enough to reject that side completely.
* Ancestral Home, Certainty, Frantic, How Bad Is It? and Sensitive are all fucking golden.
* Lucky is also golden.
* This character is golden. I'm going to be playing Benjamin Blackwood now. Or maybe not - I'd never be able to pick which moves to take with that amazing list.

* The Journalist is ALSO a wordy description. Also, obvious Despeckle.
* Ehh, the Gear choices are kinda weak.
* After the first two moves, the rest are amazing. Snappy Comeback's name isn't all that great, but the rules are way fun. Undaunted is VERY strong.
* The Lore move is also really great, a simple, unobtrusive, but intuitive use of Lore.

* I wish I had a professor named December Green.
* Not the MOST amazing gear list, but sure as hell not the worst.
* The Professor's moves aren't too interesting though. Sage Advice is interesting in that it is pretty much purely for working together.
* Learned is nice, but not amazing. Kind of a theme with this one.

* "A cracked, wooden baseball bat you’ve had to use once or twice (unreliable)." HELL YEAH I like the Salesman already. The pickup with Camper, the useless bric-a-brac, a weird old book I like it.
* The Salesman moves are fun too, all of them.
* Just The Thing is exactly the way I want Lore moves to function.

* Wait, the Actual Play examples are of a solo game and of an online game? That's a very cool idea, giving Examples of Play that show off more unconventional ways of play, especially the solo game since that's so often a difficult setup to work. However, I think it would benefit from another AP of straight all-around-the-table game to highlight the differences of the game in those play styles. There ARE differences, and you don't want the readers getting the wrong idea of how their game will go if they are unfamiliar with the trappings of those other styles.
* And here we are at the Keeper's Section!

* "Like the players, you have certain rules by which you must abide, specifically designed to help you work with the players to create an entertaining and suspenseful storytelling experience for all involved." Holy shit man, this is really good. So many games have an all-powerful GM, and fall into a lot of Fiat territory. This whole section is why you should trust the designer of a game to present the game experience they want. We don't hack our video games to be more like other video games we like, and RPGs are no different, they're designed with a purpose, and if the GM doesn't fully grasp this purpose they should just play the game by the rules they're given. The Maxims here are not hard.
* The Agendas are entirely and completely predictable, having read AW. Mostly because those agendas pretty much sum up all games. I find it curious that you specify making the world real as a Keeper agenda, but have yet to mention AW's central rule (Play your characters as if they're real people) in a player-facing section. Not bad, but curious. Paired with your version of The Golden Rule, it seems like you expect and encourage some out-of-game and mechanical thought, which I'm not so sure about.
* And Always Say is also predictable, but especially important is What Honesty Demands in this game, because a mystery game is definitely a place where GMs may try to hide things or play Gotcha or string players along, and saying the truth breaks down those habits. And it really does - I genuinely feel that after playing AW I'd be a far better Dogs in the Vineyard GM for that purpose.
* The principles are sensible and...wait, what? Where the hell's the descriptions of what these mean? The first one is the Barf Forth Apocalyptica variant (not quite as snappy, but I have yet to see one that IS as snappy - Blanket the World in Darkness from MH is close, but not quite). 2, 3, and 4 are transplants. So are 6, 7, 9, 10, and sort of 11. It's those remaining two, 5 and 8, that bother me.
* "Look Through A Cracked Lens Of Madness." From the language, this is meant to be the Look Through Crosshairs variant, but doesn't actually mean that. What this one more implies is something a lot more like the 1st principle, to view everything as a portal to the strange and mad, not the Don't Treat Your NPCs With Kid Gloves that the original is about. It may need a complete rewording, or it may just need an explanation, but it isn't working for me as is.
* "Successes should be bittersweet at best, with rewards few and far between." Is this a translation of an AW one? I only single it out because I don't recognize it. The wording is descriptive enough that I get the idea even without an explanation though. It says something about the tone that this would be an added one.
* Regardless of my own ability to identify what these mean, if you wish for the game to be able to function completely without buying AW as well, explain these.
* And I just flipped ahead to see if you DID explain them later, and nope. Do it.

* Keeper moves are probably the heart of the Keeper's duties.
* Huh. You pulled out the "as established" moves as Situational ones.
* Hmm, you reworded Announce Future Badness (quite well, I'll add), as well as the off-screen one. Also, if I'm not wrong, calling for a Luck roll is definitely new, as is Present Items and Clues and Reveal Knowledge. Those last two are very odd - they're rewards, but as hard moves can be chosen as punishments.
* Good examples.
* On a personal note, the more AW I play, the better I'm getting at What Do You Do?-ing.
* Sanity Check? Well, I'm not sure I would use this unless it's extraordinarily startling/terrifying, it's quite a punishment. The way I would probably wield it myself is to use the trigger "When You See Something That Simply Cannot Be..."
* Oh hey look, the Shock scale. Didn't the physical one show up way way back? Why is this one elsewhere?
* I was reading the game Wonderland the other day, and I'm a big fan of the concepts of Don't Rest Your Head, but the rules of the both of them bug me. They would both match up amazingly to this though. Just kinda coming to that realization thanks to the text about Fine-tuning Fear and Terror Is In The Eye Of The Beholder. A DRYH AW hack would be pretty awesome.

* Oh, it's hazards. Elders, Townies, Landscape, Weird, and Doom. Somewhat curious about the non-mention of a Front equivalent, I glanced ahead and see that they're called Frameworks. Maybe mention here that created Hazards will generally be sorted into these groups of related Hazards, called Threads.
* Anyway, these hazard types translate into Important People, Mobs, Places, Monsters, Events. Sounds like a pretty complete set. AW also had Afflictions, but that always seemed the weirdest to make into its own category.
* And each has subtypes, with impulses, and moves. Sounds like Threats exactly. Even most of these subtypes and impulses come right out of AW. That's fine, as AW's lists are excellent.
* Examples of each subtype, and a piece of advice on how to use them. Sweet.
* What bothers me is that none of the wordings of anything other than the general Hazard Types (not the subtypes, not the impulses, not the moves) particularly evoke Lovecraftian flavor. This is a great place to inject flavor and evocative phrasing into the Keeper's side of things, and I think the chance is being kinda passed over in lieu of the more familiar AW pieces. The Breeding Pit especially makes me think way more of post-apoc than Lovecraftian.
* Oh my god, examples of every single move of their's. Holy cow. If you had room for this, you really REALLY need to take the space to define the Principles. Note that this isn't a complaint about this - I like having these. Oh, btw, "Claim territory: move into it, blockade it, or assault."'s examples aren't italicized like the rest. Just fyi.
* I really like the idea of formalizing the Linchpin of Threads. All three of my AW Fronts have a clear one (all three times it happens to be the "Elder" equivalent, but oh well - considering a shift to that though), so it's cool to formalize it. It'd be especially if there was another small group of moves that Linchpins got about controlling or wielding their group, either explicitly or in the abstract.
* Textures are also good. AW had Scarcities to fill this role I think, but I actually prefer this way.
* What's the purpose of the little The Cat's Cradle bit? "Interweaving frameworks together creates a miasma of possibilities, allow for more complex stories to be told." That's probably not necessary to tell people that, it's pretty obvious, but okay. I just don't see why.
* On frameworks, The Tragic End (Dark Future), The Unknown (Stakes Questions), Lurking Evil (Description/Cast), Darkness Grows (A Countdown Clock!), Theme (Expresses:..). Very familiar.
* Yeah, Frameworks are very familiar, but a good expansion/variation on the Front situation. AW is very specific to NOT make one for the first session - do you wait to make one in tremulus? Or should you start with one since play looks to lend itself to being a touch more episodic?
* ASHES, huh? I like it, despite being a little tacky. It's simple and memorable, and appropriate to boot. A good rule of thumb for the ASH score as well.
* Tags! Tas everywhere! I freakin' love it. Stuff like this is what I read Monster Rulebooks for.
* And Special. Oh, it's their custom move! I invent these all over the place for my own Fronts, it's always my favorite part. Brain Suck is a great example idea.
* And some example creatures! The Lovecraftian creations are all pretty cool, with sweet ideas and great Custom Moves. The Creatures of the Wood, on the other hand, are pretty much boring as sin. I kinda feel the same about using them in games though - I don't like the mundane in these games. Just me, but still, those are really boring stat blocks.

* Odds and Ends. XP advice (desperately needed), don't just keep picking Inflict Harm over and over, Rituals are crazy strong and should never be taken lightly.
* How to give away clues, items (good or minor), Lore, Rituals, Secret things. I like the info, very in-depth.
* I'm not so sure about that way of handling Acts Under Pressure. But then, this is a very hard topic, though one of the most rewarding in the game when done right (I did one last game where Life could have: Not made it to safety / Take a bullet but make it to safety with friendly NPC Vincent / You make it unscathed but Vincent dies. He chose to take the bullet. You could tell he was really struggling with the decision, and it made me happy.).
* Everything under Conveying Horror and Building Dramatic Tension is awesome advice, and the real core of this book so far I think.
* Oh hey, Make Maps/Leave Blanks is here.

* Okay, I'm at Using Playsets. Everything from where I last was and here is still gold. But I want to cut it here for the minute. Playsets look really cool, but are divorced enough from the text that I want to discuss Ebon Eaves in its own post, and this one is, frankly, long enough already.

If it looks like I'm shitting on the game for any reason, I'm not. I think it could have done a bit more to try to distance itself from Apocalypse World, but it will still do an astounding job of playing a Lovecraftian style mystery/horror game. I'm excited to play it (though not quite as excited as I am to get back to our current AW game, which I still need to write TWO Actual Plays for). With that, I bid you adieu, and leave you with a final request:

Spread The Madness.
Ennd Recorrrrding-ing-ing,
Egoqowutfu...///