The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Once upon a time, there was a game called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Based upon some fantasy books I'd never heard of, Morrowind offered my younger self hours of exploration, surprise, and entertainment. It's hard to overstate how much I look back fondly on that game. Morrowind offered a unique world full of things I've never seen before. Gigantic mushroom trees, flowing volcanoes, flora and fauna beyond count... This game was a mixture of weird and absolutely real. What impressed me most of all, though, were all of the things you could do. You didn't have to explore the myriad caves, dungeons, temples, and forgotten ruins of the world; you could choose whether you wanted to help the Mage's Guild, the thieves, the different noble Houses of the land, random strangers needing help, or more. What's more, the game was steeped with an immense history that added weight and wonder to everything you did. Hundreds of books, rare and common, were scattered throughout the land for you to read and collect as you desired. The primary quest involved a foe whose story was steeped in the mythology of the world itself. You, yourself, were the central part of a prophecy referenced by important characters, lore, and architecture within the game. Everything in the game contributed powerfully to the sense that the entirety of the world was yours to explore, control, and experience.

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After countless hours with Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came along. And, sadly, Oblivion was more disappointing. While it continued the trend of giving you a massive landscape to play around with, its tone was more bland. Where Morrowind had such bizarre structures as buildings made out of the backs of giant crabs, Oblivion took a more stereotypical tack with the goal of reaching a broader audience. We were introduced to a more generic fantasy setting with horses, stone houses, elven armor, forests, and more. It didn't feel as original and, what's more, the dialogue, background story, and quests were dumbed down. Our character, instead of being involved in some dense epic where the good and bad sides aren't exactly clear, goes through a painfully simple save-the-world quest without ambiguity. Everything felt less. Oblivion still was a serviceable game; it just didn't feel all that special.

Then The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim arrived.

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Sojourn to the Icy North

Do you remember that first moment reading about the Wall in A Game of Thrones? Do you remember seeing the immensity of it for the very first time in the TV series, manned by tiny Night's Watch figures small as ants, looming over a frozen wilderness? Now imagine that first moment as a child when you discovered the wonder of snow. Remember it falling on your open palm? Remember feeling the small surge of cold water against your tongue as you opened your mouth to the whiteness of the sky?

Skyrim seizes on these feelings and holds you spellbound. On one side, you have the forbidding awe that comes from traveling and exploring a land that you have never truly seen and do not fully understand. On the other, you have that sense of fascination and glee that is both new and familiar. You get the sense that this game, vast and dangerous as it is, is full of such surprising things that you can (and probably will) spend days inside of it. You'll keep on searching every nook and cranny. You'll see the top of a mountain and dare yourself to look out over the world from the peak of it. It's hard to capture into words precisely what it is about Skyrim that keeps you thinking about and coming back to it.

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From Barrow to Ruin

In terms of the setting, Skyrim brings to the plate a world worthy of Morrowind. It's funny; I look at them as equals, yet Morrowind offered something that Skyrim did not. See, as I mentioned earlier, Morrowind's world was wholly unique. Mushroom forests surrounded a spectral fence enclosing the ruins of an ancient civilization within a dormant volcano. It's hard to make that shit up, and it has next to no bearing on anything I've seen before in a fictional world. By contrast, the setting of Skyrim, while definitely interesting, is clearly based on our idealized notions of ancient Scandinavian tribes and clans. The Nords are a thinly veiled pastiche of the Vikings of the real world. They worship pagan gods. They believe that, upon dying, their spirits will go to a warrior's rest (much like the Valhalla of our Norse mythology). Their weapons, their architecture, their combative spirit... Everything about Skyrim and the people that live within it usher in a memory of Earth's north European medieval past, from the ribald songs of warrior poets to the sharpened iron axes of raids and wars to come.

However, what makes this so engrossing is that, even though Skyrim provides an environment that we have some familiarity with, it is also a fantasy setting and era of history that not many games, movies, books, or TV shows have put much focus on. Even though it isn't unique, we still feel like we have a great deal to discover about it. Thus, even as you can logically predict that the most powerful warrior chieftain will be buried in the back by all of the loot within a Nord barrow, you still feel wonderment and caution when poking around the place.

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Backstory

One aspect of these games that is important to me (that might not be important to anyone else) is the existence of a strong and deep backstory. The reason why Morrowind was so incredible to me and maintained such lasting power was the fact that, due to the referencing of past events and the expansive histories behind factions and powers, I felt like there was always something more to discover behind it all. Tolkien knew the power of this when he wrote Lord of the Rings; you don't even have to explain precisely what has happened or could happen with events tertiary to the story, you just have to hint that they're there. The easiest way to conceptualize this is to picture a glacier. You get to see and experience the tip of the iceberg. But everything below the surface is what really fires the imagination and makes you yearn for more.

Skyrim does this admirably. With every city you visit, multitudes of quests have you investigate this or that ancient tomb or longstanding disturbance. When exploring the countryside and the mountains, you are able to find crypts and ruins that speak to events that happened there in ages past. Hundreds of books are littered throughout the game and, whether you read them or no, they contribute to the construction of a powerfully thick mythology that makes you feel like you're in a living, breathing, and evolving world.

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Plots in Parallel

One odd thing about Skyrim, though, is its plot. It isn't bad, by any means; in it you are the prophesied Dragonborn destined to save the world from an armageddon of resurgent dragons. It is the predictable mix of epic tale and power fantasy perfect for a sweeping video game. My confusion arose from the other plot going on.

You begin the game as a man or woman being sent to the executioner's block. On the way, you discover that Skyrim is in the thick of a civil war. On one side, we have the Empire: the ruling administration over the Nords of the land. On the other hand, we have the revolutionaries of Ulfric Stormcloak: a charismatic rebel who thinks that the Nords would do better as an independent nation. You are about to be executed because the Empire thinks that you're associated with the rebels and doesn't know what else to do with you. Yet suddenly, by the powers of deus ex machina, you are inadvertently saved by the attack of the first dragon the world has seen for hundreds of years. You are then set off on your quest of discovering what your relationship is with the dragons of the world.

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This pretty much sums up the problem. For whatever reason, Skyrim decided to go with two major story arcs and then sideline one without warning. I get the feeling that this wasn't originally the plan. The Civil War plot permeates every city and most every conversation in the world of Skyrim. Though it could have been simplistic and two-dimensional, it is actually fleshed out to the point where it is genuinely difficult to choose between which side to support. The Empire believes that it must bide its time in the short term and concede to the excesses of an outside power, only so that it may wait and muster arms until it can realistically oppose said power. By contrast, the Stormcloaks believe that surrender, even feigned, is a betrayal of the Nordic morality system and way of life. They view the Imperials as interlopers and stand behind their desire to defend their home, even to the death. It's a tricky balance. It boils down to compromises vs absolutes. Secularism vs faith. There is no right answer and, no matter who you side with, you're destined to make some decisions along the way that make you realize that maybe the other side was the better choice.

Yet I have to point out that this dilemma, prevalent as it is, has next to nothing to do with the 'main' plot. It's like the developers looked it over, at a plot spanning the entirety of the game's geography, and was like, “Screw this. We need some dragons!” Granted, dragons are pretty damn awesome, but it's interesting to note that the Dragon plot isn't nearly as multifaceted as the Civil War plot. Your enemy is pretty clear and stereotypically evil in the Dragon plot. The lines are nowhere near as defined in the Civil War. Altogether, the confusing and mixed importance set to the two different plots added a discordant note to an otherwise flawlessly decorated masterpiece. It was akin to reading a fantastic book and then getting dragged out of it because you noticed a particularly nonsensical and glaring typo.

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Conclusion

I could talk about the gameplay, but I don't get quite so much out of talking about such factors. In brief, Skyrim's gameplay improves upon the excellent examples set by its fellow Elder Scrolls predecessors. My only complaint is that your followers still act retarded and the melee weapon system still makes it feel like you're flailing about wildly most of the time. These are small complaints and nowhere near enough to detract from playing the game, but they are definitely worth noting as areas to improve upon in the inevitable Elder Scrolls VI.

All in all, this is one of the best games I've ever played. Given that this game has received its fair share of love and praise over the past year or so of being out, this probably comes as no surprise. It offers a playing experience with an astonishing amount of depth. It boasts a world that never ceases to amaze. And it offers so much to do within it that it truly boggles the mind.

Guild Wars 2

Written by Joe the Revelator

In the beginning, there was World of Warcraft, and like the Borg it swept the world assimilating all. Students grew fat and acne-scarred playing 14 hours a day. Men lost their jobs and girlfriends. Old gamers lost whatever shreds of dignity remained to them. And somewhere in China, a new occupation grew to support families, and eventually small fishing villages; an activity known as "Gold Farming".

Then came the unavoidable WoW clones that offered similar MMORPG experiences without the monthly pay-to-play charges. But lacking the budget to employ a small army of developers, administrators, and writers, these WoW-alikes were doomed for failure. Eve Online may have dominated the cosmos. But WoW laid claim to inactive imaginations, offering hours of furious level-grinding, social chatting, and troll sexing.

And lo, there emerged a new MMORPG, which offered an eighth of the race/class choice variety at a fraction of the price of WoW. Warcraft had elves, orcs, bull-men and undead men, and everything in between. Guild Wars had hulking men in armor with so little variety from warrior-to-warrior they may as well have been Storm Troopers. And Guild Wars had mages (every other class was a varient of the mage concept) in bikini's, and bikini-like chainmail.

But Guild Wars was cheap. It provided hours of faction-based fighting and fantasy realms with only one payment of 60 bucks, plus an additional 30-or-so for each expansion. Their innovative server-cluster design allowed players to engage in a level or zone with three to seven of their friends. Or three to seven halfwit NPC mercenaries, if you'd already lost your friends to the WoW hivemind. It was good, mostly-clean fun, and it didn't require you to be logged in for the entire day.

Like sands in the hourglass...

Nowadays, WoW is looking a bit weathered graphically compared to newer games, and the online population consists of Chinese gold farmers and diehard players, who have grown so immense since WoW's release that they couldn't physically walk away from the game if they tried. Guild Wars, on the other hand, is just passing its RPG midlife-crisis. To keep it "fresh" they added everything under the sun to entice players into staying until the release of the sequel. Last time I logged in, the mob in town looked like a comic-con if the nerds were edgy enough to start taking serious mind-altering drugs. Ghosts disco-danced with short-skirted anime girls. There were robots, zombies, and the occasional player who was actually trying to fight the evil forces of...whatever.

Guild Wars 2 has done away with that old pesky innovation. Instead they've looked at every other MMORPG on the market and tried to blend the positive aspects of each. From the menu systems to crafting, combat, and skill bars that change with the weapons you are wielding. Even the quest system is borrowed. You can literally point to which older RPG model they've ripped off, and where they've implemented it.

Big people. Dog people. And rats.

Having said that, on the surface Guild Wars 2 is a free-roaming MMORPG, wherein explorable areas and towns are open to everyone simultaneously, and PvP is extremely limited. Nobody can run up behind you at level 1 and carve a charm bracelet out of your spine with a level 80 axe. Nor can you hog a low-level zone once you've achieved the powers of a Greek god. Zones are scaled, effectively knocking you back down to the level of the town/battlefield you've entered.

The races you can choose from are the Charr; big non-specific animal men who've recently escaped from the Island of Dr. Moreau. The Azura; blue chiwawa-rat hybrids. Plant people, aka Sylvari. Boring old humans. Or bigger humans, aka Norn. But in the end your pick of race is pointless, since the class will determine all your stats and skills anyway. A 12-inch tall Azura warrior has just as much oomph behind his swing as a 6-foot 300 pound were-tiger.

Class: I won't go into the classes. They're the same as Guild Wars. You're a warrior or a mage-ish caster. There are, however, black powder guns in the game now. And a new class has been imported from Team Fortress; The Engineer. And yes, they come with turrets.

Ban - The God of GW2

Before giving GW2 a thumbs up, I will throw out one caveat. The Guild Wars 2 staff is very liberal with the "Ban" button. The need to keep gold farmers, hackers, and exploiters to a minimum has left them with itchy trigger fingers. And perhaps rightfully so. Many websites are claiming recent games with gold-driven economies are being ruined by hackers. Just do a Google search for "D3" and "Hackers" and you'll be buried under an avalanche of sweaty nerd complaints. Even a site like Forbes has an article on hackers taking advantage of real-money auctions in rpg's.

My advice if you choose to play GW2 or any upcoming MMORPG's, is to be prepared. If the game offers an authenticator; a device or service that checks for a code or sends you an email when people try to log in under your name, get one. Keep all boxes and receipts that the game came with. Use complex passwords (numbers and letters). And be prepared to appeal any ban on your account that isn't justified. Most games have appeal-ticket system, so you can automatically ask why you're being punished when your barbarian gets a pinkslip. But if the ticket doesn't work for you, or you're not offered one, or you're fresh out of gold cougarans to bribe the administrators, you can always shoot them an email through the "contact us" section. Simply write the department you're trying to reach in the "subject" box and most of the time they'll be forwarded to the right person.

Minecraft

Written by Joe the Revelator

I apologize in advance for my infrequent posts of late. A demanding work schedule combined with my choices of entertainment have left me with little to talk about; re-reading old books, half-watching episodes of old sitcoms, and of course, playing the devil's game, Minecraft.


Why I Shouldn't Play Minecraft

My relationship with Minecraft could be likened to a recovering alcoholic living in a brewery. Whenever I start a new game, any game, I find myself rushing to the character creation options, tweaking my way through the customization menus, and eventually spending hours on whatever home-base layouts offered within the game. I'm an anal retentive freak about building my lair. When I bought a home in Skyrim I became a nesting bird on heroin. I spent more time looking for shiny objects and glowing weapons to adorn my Hall than I did worrying about the main quest line. By the end of the game I had so many bloody helmets on my shelf, ripped from my victims for no reason other than their decorative value, that my wall looked like the interior of the Predator ship.

In Neverwinter Nights 2 I maxed out the build-chain of Crossroads Keep with the highest quality garrison, best commanders, and top-notch defenses. In Mass Effect 2 my ship had the highest upgrades before mid game. In Morrowind I converted my "Tower" into a town, using teleport spells to import exotic dancers, merchants, and guards. For Fallout, I reverse-pick pocketed every citizen of Megaton, so my home would be surrounded by power-armored yokels brandishing alien blasters. In Guild Wars my clan hall had every vendor upgrade. My guild had one member.

A game that allows near-infinite construction possibilities with the ever-present threat of zombie invasion was the last thing I should install.

My First House

Cube-Ist Art

For those who don't know, Minecraft is a low-graphic 3d construction game. The player looks like one of the blockheads from Gumby and the world around him is composed of cubes of various colors. Brown blocks with black lines represent tree bark. Grainy tan blocks are sand. Pink blocks with eyes that emit "oink" noises are pigs. Etc. The game stretches the limits of what one can do with simple textures and effects, creating vast landscapes of mountains, oceans, and subterranean caverns with lego-like surfaces.

The only threat to your character, aside from drowning, falling off your construction, falling off mountains, falling into chasms, and falling into lava, are the zombies. Whenever the sun goes down the zombies spring up, filling the land with milling, shambling monstrosities that moan and groan endlessly. They vary from green-skinned walking horrors, to skeletons with bows, to black mini-Cthulu's who can teleport into your lap and re-adjust your spinal column in one hit.

Without anyone else in the game I can only assume this is an "I Am Legend" scenario, wherein I'm supposed to invent a vaccine for the brain-eaters who are lucky enough to seek shelter before the sun turns them to ashes. Unfortunately my character is (as well as everyone else's character) more of a stone mason than a blood pathologist. The only cure I can offer comes in the form of a rock to the skull.

This is the face of addiction.

Stuck in the Stone Age

From what I've seen online, the character can slowly advance to higher tech levels of equipment and buildings; from mud huts to steel skyscrapers, with levers, electronics, and pig-frying bacon dispensers. Unfortunately I've never gotten past the iron age. Most of my tools are stone until I run into a patch of raw iron. I've mined the other minerals available in the game; gold, diamond, coal, "red dust". But what's the fun in building something small and high-tech, when you can create monolithic towers with glass-encased lava flows and deathtraps? Or giant stone god statues with phallic shaped heads?

Having said this, I can fully recommend playing Minecraft to anyone, anywhere, for any reason. I could also just as easily recommend getting hooked on crack, demolishing your house, and constructing a monument to yourself out of the rubble.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Sometimes it is hard to start writing a review. When it comes to something you love, you really want to have every part of it grip the reader. Part of the fun in writing reviews comes from that desire to hold the audience spellbound, to convey upon them that, “Yes. You should buy/read/watch/play this,”. Not because you are some sort of advertiser or marketer, but because you honestly want others to enjoy and experience what you have, even if their own journeys turn out differently.

I almost didn't write this review. The fact of the matter is that my respect and adoration for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is so immense that I worried that I couldn't do it justice. I have the same feeling for most things that I love. I have probably mentioned my favorite book, Blade of Tyshalle, a dozen times in this blog, but have I reviewed it yet? No. Instead, I lamely review the prequel and sequels surrounding it, as if admiring it from afar.

Hence, I go into this review with some trepidation. It is the same fear that comes from showing something private to a stranger. You want to have them appreciate and love that which you love but, when it comes to the question of, “Why should I?”, you don't know where to start. So, more than probably any other review before this one, I've thought this over, turned upon it repeatedly in my mind, pored the internet for the best pictures that I could find, and then settled down to write this, no matter how awful it may turn out.

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Technology's Dominance in the World of the Future – The Augmentation Debate

Where else could I start but with the setting of the game and the quintessential question behind it all?

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game set in the near future of 2027, a time where corporations have superseded the power and influence of governments. The world is dark and urban, reminiscent of Blade Runner. Technology, and the advancement of it, is paramount, and the world is captivated by the invention of biomechanical augmentations and their effect on society. It is hard to overstate how powerfully the debate on augmentations affects the story of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Incredibly, the plot and backstory are so well written that we are given a wealth of information and perspectives on the technology. And the arguments are so persuasive on all sides that it becomes genuinely hard to determine what is the right path.

The first perspective we see is that of Sarif Industries (your employer) and other corporations who build the augmentations and distribute them to the public. They provide the argument that augmentations are the next stage of human evolution. Through mechanically enhancing ourselves, we are better able to seize our destinies and improve life in general. This has merit; we see time and time again that augments are used to easily replace limbs, enhance/replace eyesight, delay aging, fight lung failure, and more. And it is no surprise that the use of augmentations is opposed; most new technologies receive a fair share of demonization before people are used to the change.

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But there are also those who hate the concept of augmentation and believe that the human body is perfect as it is. This manifests in different ways. There are some who regard the body as a divine vessel that shouldn't be tainted with machinery. There are others who believe that augmentations are too dangerous and can be misused. This gains credence when you see how dangerous augmented soldiers can be when the technology is militarized. And then there are others who point out that augmentations are affordable only for the rich, thus making the gap between rich and poor even starker.

In between, we have those who believe that research and distribution of augmentations should be encouraged, but only under the weight of strict regulation so that it isn't misused or manipulated by those who have the power to do so. In their defense, the pro-augmenters point out that the technology can only help humanity and that the regulation of it will prevent realization of the technology's full ability to take us to places that we've never dreamed of reaching.

As you go through the game, the characters you meet and the places you go subtly press the perspectives surrounding augmentation upon you. And all of it comes to a head in one of the most brilliant endings I've ever encountered in a video game: a confrontation of ideas where you influence the direction of the entire human race in a selection of different possible options where there isn't a wrong answer. It is one of the most difficult choices I've made in a video game and, if I were to talk about it, it would take up pages by itself. It is the purest realization of the saying, “Knowledge is power,” and easily proves that video games are capable of talking about immensely complicated and deep social issues.

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Adam Jensen

Plot and Characters – Corporate Espionage in a War of Shadows

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you control Adam Jensen, the head security chief of Sarif Industries, one of the main producers and innovators of augmentation technology. Within minutes of the game's start, the corporation's headquarters are attacked by an unknown faction. Jensen investigates and is nearly killed trying to stop augmented mercenaries. The only thing that saves him is months of surgery and the willingness of his employer, David Sarif, to insert Jensen with enough biomechanical parts to keep him alive. From here, much of the plot is finding out why Sarif Industries was attacked, discovering why many of the scientists were killed, and realizing that there are immensely powerful players and factions at work whose objectives influence you, your companions, and the entire world.

The story of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one primarily of corporate espionage, operating in the shadows, and investigating people and businesses when and where they least expect it. In this, the game succeeds brilliantly at being somewhere between a dark science fiction and crime noir novel. Much of the time, you just don't know what is going on, and one of the best parts of the game is discovering one small piece of information after another that gives you a better concept of what is happening. If I were compare it to a movie, I would compare it to Quantum of Solace, that most recent Bond movie where we, as the audience, don't quite know who or what the enemy is or how to stop it. That same disturbing realization that there are powers at work beyond your comprehension permeates the atmosphere of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

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David Sarif

Along the way, you meet a wide cast of characters who help, oppose, or operate independently from you. They have their own motivations, complexities, and quirks to a degree that you rarely see in a video game. One of my favorite relationships in the game is between Jensen and Frank Pritchard, head of Sarif's cyber-security team. Throughout the game, especially in areas where you are on your own on an infiltration mission, Pritchard's is the only voice you hear through your receiver. And the guy is a prick. Seriously, the moment you meet this guy, the first thing you want to do is reach through the screen, slap him in the face, and call him an asshole. But, despite it all, you work together and are on the same team. Thus it is interesting to watch that, even though Jensen and Pritchard are annoyed to high hell with each other most of the time, they have a mutual respect and, on some level, an attachment and caring for one another. It is a measure of nuance that I didn't expect to see, and was pleased to encounter it.

These nuanced sorts of relationships are everywhere and help turn a good plot into a great one. You and your employer, David Sarif, have a peculiar sort of father-son relationship. Your confrontations with Bill Taggart, a spokesman for the anti-augmentation movement, take on a baiting quality that illustrates that Taggart respects you while simultaneously reveling in attacking your personal positions on the augmentation debate. Jensen's relationship with Faridah Malik, his pilot, is one that slowly takes on the quality of feeling like two people clutching to each other in a storm that they do not understand. Hell, just talking about the depth of this game's characters and story makes me want to stop writing about it and just play it again!

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Gameplay – Choices Beyond Measure

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is designed to provide an enormous amount of player choice. Aside from the different endings that you can choose from, the game offers a vast multitude of ways that you can play the game. To fully illustrate this, let me create an example for you:

At one point, you infiltrate a competing augmentation corporation in search of sensitive files that will help tell you what their overall goals are. You have snuck inside and now you have a number of choices regarding how you want to try and search the facility. Before you choose, though, you look around the corner and see cameras, a concealed security turret, a half-dozen patrolling guards, and, in a corner office, a scientist typing away at a keyboard.

At this juncture, you have a number of possibilities:

• You can run at the first guard, dispatch him with the razor sharp blades hidden on your forearms. You then take cover and gun down the remaining guards while tossing an EMP grenade to dispatch the turret.
• You can observe their patrol patterns and silently approach each guard in turn, knocking them out one-by-one and dragging their unconscious bodies into areas or cubicles where they won't easily be discovered. You can then watch the tracking of the camera and sneak past it when it's faced away from you.
• You can do the same stealthy observation routine and just sneak by everyone without knocking out anyone at all.
• You can discover a nearby ventilation shaft which you can crawl through in order to bypass the entire area or attain a better vantage point.
• You can look for a security console in a nearby room, hack into it, turn off the cameras and fiddle with the turret's safety measures so that it can't distinguish friend or foe. The resulting firefight could either take out the guards or provide a distraction enough for you to bypass them.
• You can sneak into the scientist's office and persuade him that you are: A. A guard who forgot the access code into the next area, B. Someone who he really doesn't want to piss off right now and thus should give you his computer passcode so you can read his emails and perhaps retrieve the information you're looking for, or C. Appeal to the fact that he really hates his job and has no loyalty to the corporation and thus should help make your corporate espionage easier.
• Knock out or kill the scientist and get access codes from his cell phone.
• Any combination of these options.

And I haven't even mentioned the possibilities that open up from the augmentations that you can use. One augmentation enhances your ability to lift things, thus allowing you to, if you wanted, pick up nearby vending machines to hurl with incredible force at the guards as if they were bowling pins. Another augmentation enhances your jumping ability, meaning you could jump to the second floor and bypass any need to access the stairwell, if that was a concern. You can punch through a weak wall and make your own entrances. You can activate a short-term cloaking device to roll from cover to cover. You can implement your rebreather/oxygen supply augmentation so that you may scatter gas grenades everywhere and then walk casually through the coughing and soon-to-be-unconscious guards. And a whole slew of others.

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But what was perhaps most impressive to me was the inclusion of what are essentially persuasion boss battles. This is where you run into someone who you need to convince of something (it could be someone threatening to kill a hostage or someone considering suicide), and you have to try and gauge how best to persuade them to do what you want them to do by reading their reactions and trying to understand their perspectives. You can choose to confront, redirect, appease, accuse, and on and on... And the decisions and choices that you make truly matter. If you choose to threaten to expose a cop's drug addiction in order to get him to do what you want, he will lose his job, show up at your apartment, and try to kill you (this happened to me, and I was so surprised that he actually succeeded and I had to reload). If you successfully persuade someone that you are trustworthy, you might get information about what's going on to a degree and extent that you wouldn't have received otherwise. It's hard for me to convey how unique and immensely satisfying it was to convince a dying man to take on augmentations to save his life, even though he loathed augmentations with every fiber of his being. I basically had to turn around his entire life's philosophy by reading his reactions as he was dying in front of my eyes.

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Conclusion – Go Play This Game

All in all, Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers tricky social concepts, incredibly interesting characters, a perfect cloak-and-dagger plot, and gameplay choices beyond count. It has themes on transhumanism, intelligent references to mythological tales such as the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and blah, blah, blah. This game is amazing. You know I think it. If any of this appeals, then you are missing out if you don't check out this game. It's definitely worth your time and is one of the best and most comprehensively awesome games I've every played.

Diablo III - Story and Setting

A long time ago in a galaxy pretty close and nearby, a certain computer game called Diablo was made and released. It featured taking a warrior through an incredibly long dungeon of multiple levels, fighting through hordes of demons before taking on and defeating Diablo, the demon lord, himself. The game's ripples were few but its profit was enough to justify the creation of a sequel. I never played this original Diablo.

Then, Diablo II emerged from developmental slumber and took the world by storm. Entire summers were devoted to slaying fiends. Millions of people found that they could live with less than eight hours of sleep so long as they had just one more opportunity to get a rare or unique item drop. Fields, deserts, jungles, and Hell itself... Every biome was tread and retread until we found ourselves at war with the cows themselves. They marched forth with halberds raised and droll moos as their battle cries and were cut down in turn, collateral damage in our madcap quest for “phat loot”.

The addiction that Diablo II brought with it was legendary. Games like Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Call of Duty: Insert-Bullshit-Number-Here have had their fans, but nothing short of that behemoth World of Warcraft itself has been able to command such a obsessive-compulsive brand of gameplay. But this story is not over. As you may have heard, the thousand-pound fiery-eyed demonic gorilla that is the Diablo franchise has come out with the newest and latest form of video game-equivalent crack/cocaine to sucker in an entirely new generation: Diablo III, the reason why hundreds of thousands of people won't be seeing sunlight this summer.

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Does it Measure up? - Setting and Story

Yeah, I know. Cue the boos. The immediate reaction of much of the video gaming population is that, “Diablo's gameplay is the important part. Who cares about the story?” The answer is: I do. Deal with it.

The Diablo series is known for putting the combat and treasure hunt first and foremost, leaving the story and details of the greater world in the background. It's there if you want it and, if you aren't looking or interested, much of it can be missed and leave you blissfully unaware. Neither camp is wrong. Some people like blasting through the games so that they can get the next epic upgrade to their equipment. Others take their time, talking to the NPCs (non-player characters), learning more about the world, and gleaning knowledge of the gigantic conflict that seems to perpetually arrest it.

First things first, I have to point out that Diablo's world (hilariously and ironically called “Sanctuary”) has got to be the most godawful fictional world ever created. Have you ever asked your friends the nerdy question of, “What fictional world would you most like to live in?” Yeah, Diablo's would be right at the very bottom. It's a miracle people exist at all much less maintain civilization and cities to live in. The countryside is fucked. Demons butcher anything in sight. Vultures roam about and attack you when you aren't paying attention. Even the damned flowers try to kill you if you get too close.

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Then Things Got Ugly

Diablo III takes this setting and makes it even nastier. Think your king has been acting a bit weird lately? Yeah, he's probably a demon lord. Think you're safe in your mountain keep? Some trollop with a rock might piss off the wrong archfiend, causing him to emerge from a volcanic wasteland with a hundred thousand angry demons to utterly destroy your day. God forbid you're one of the soldiers in Act III; your life expectancy is less than five seconds, particularly if the main character steps anywhere near you.

However, on a setting basis, I found that I enjoyed Diablo II better. Diablo III is certainly a very pretty game and its vistas hint at an astonishing amount of depth. But, aside from the surprising turnabout in Act IV, it feels as if it is simply retreading the steps of D2. The first act of both games? Nighttime plains/marshland. The second act of both games? Interminable desert. The third act of D3 copies the expansion act of D2, but does it poorly; an epic snowy landscape is quickly replaced by unending circular dungeon crawls into the center of a volcano. Theoretically epic? Perhaps, but in practice I got bored pretty fast. These things are important to note because Diablo games are built on the premise that you will be going over these terrains over and over. I already feel like I covered most of this ground a bazillion times already in the previous game.

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“Stay a While and Listen”

As for the plot, the fact of the matter is that D2 felt like a more interesting and epic game. In D2, you are fighting to stop the Prime Evils. Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo slowly come into prominence and plan to summon legions of demons to basically end the world. To stop them, you must venture into Hell itself and smash their soulstones upon the Hellforge.

I won't go into the details belong that because, frankly, even I don't care to. But it is important to note that D3 just isn't at this level of intensity. Your main foes for much of the game are two of the Lesser Evils: Belial and Azmodan. Diablo does emerge at the end to threaten Heaven itself (which pleasantly surprised me), but it feels too little too late. It was like the writers remembered that the game series is titled Diablo at the last moment, and so felt they had to rush the big guy into the story just so he could be beaten yet again. In addition, Act IV felt absurdly small in comparison to the others and didn't even have its own town area.

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The game tries to create some empathetic connection to the player by having us follow the story of Deckard Cain, his daughter Leah, and the archangel Tyrael. But this ultimately fails. Leah is built up to be the main character but then comes off as daft and ancillary to what you are doing. Tyrael is supposed to be this big badass former archangel but becomes significantly less awesome when you realize that he (and all your henchmen/escorts for that matter) are almost completely useless in a fight, particularly when compared to the standards of D2. And Deckard Cain dies within the first few quests, so good on him.

The other characters are one-dimensional and often more annoying than interesting. Zoltun Kulle's betrayal is painfully aware from the moment you first talk to him, and his only claim to awesome is an incredibly epic sounding voice. Imperius simply shows us that even archangels can be pricks and spends not even a single moment doing anything remotely intelligent. If God exists in this world, he really sucks at picking his subordinates. And don't even get me started on Leah's mom.

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Despite all this nitpicking, though, I wanted to point out that D3 is still a fantastic game. Though I'm not sure if I'll get around to reviewing the gameplay aspect of it (as it is easy to write that off in a sentence by saying it expands upon D2 and makes it better in just about every way), it almost goes without saying that the game is horrifically addicting in the best possible way. But in terms of staying power and how it feels compared to its predecessor, the story, its protagonists, and its antagonists just fail to make it feel like D3 is truly better than D2.

Diablo III

Written by Joe the Revelator

Sometimes reviewing a Blizzard game feels like talking about a dental checkup. Getting one costly and ubiquitous. It's something that once you've experienced before, you probably won't be shocked by it again, and everybody's done it. Diablo 3 is exactly like this. From the install music which has been dusted off from old Diablo, to the final cut-scene, it all feels too familiar to really strike a nerve.

And although the acts are set up in the same format as the previous game, I will give D3 credit for its beautiful cinimatics and amazingly visual levels. The top-down dungeon crawler is one of the best I've ever seen. Playing through the first act by myself, even as a burly, over-the-hill barbarian, it had genuinely eerie moments. Good ambient music combined with a few monsters stolen from Resident Evil (lickers) and giant demons with nipple rings, puts D3's creepy quotient fairly high, which is important for a game that will swiftly turn into boring level-grinding and boss-running for loot.

Stay a while and listen...

For those who played Diablo II, here are a few key differences. As I mentioned, the game is prettier, and the PC specs required to run it are considerably higher than its predecessor. Diablo I and II are small enough to fit on a thumb drive, which comes with the over-priced special edition of Diablo III. The character customization has been beefed up, allowing you to create your own battle standard and dyed armor, though you're stuck with same-face characters with the choice of male or female versions of each class.

Class selection has been made leaner, limiting the player to Barbarian, Monk, Demon-Hunter, Wizard, or Witch-Doctor. Old classes and class skills have been divied up between them. A few of the old Paladin skills were given over to the monk and Demon Hunter. Demon Hunter is a mashup of Amazon and Assassin. Wizard is the old Sorcerer class, except now she's on LSD. And the Witch-Doctor was given all the weird skills that used to belong to the Necromancer and Druid.

As a 4-man multiplayer group, which is the limit for party size, the team must find a balance between damage and survivability. After you've slogged through the dungeons alone, I highly recommend joining a group, which will net more experienced points and goodies.

Streamlining Hell

The breakdown for a party works like so: Effectively, the Barbarian tanks for the group until he's killed outright by suicidal exploding demons. The Demon Hunter (aka glass cannon) will do somersaults around the map and look creepy, ostensibly doing damage until she's breathed on by a zombie and dies. The Monk will run ahead of the party and open all the chests alone, and will refuse to die, healing himself faster than the bosses can damage him. The Shaman will summon an army that looks exactly like the demons you're trying to fight, confusing the party. And the Wizard will turn the map into a rave with flashy spells.

The loot system has seen vast improvements since the days of D2. Loot from dead monsters and chests, magical or otherwise, now drop individually for players. In fact, the game doesn't even display other people's goodies so there's no confusion, or begging, since the neckbeards in your game can't see the sparkly items you dug out of a demon's entrails. Gold pickup has been streamlined too, automatically (probably by magnets) leaping into your inventory when you run over it. This eliminates the issue of having one team member who spends all his time clicking on gold piles instead of fending off the hoard of ravenous monsters.

To D3, or not to D3?

I find the little touches matter most in roleplaying games. Which, at heart, is what Diablo is trying to be. While playing the single-player campaign, there's time to read the lore, and listen to the monologues given by the main characters as you pilfer through their journals like a stalker after prom night. You feel more vulnerable wandering through the catacombs with only the chatty NPC henchman to keep you company. At any moment you could be swarmed by zombies or swallowed up by sandworms from Dune.

In multiplayer there isn't time to stop and soak in the environment. The stronger, more experienced players will push the fight from one act to the next, and the game gets a little rushed. It's hard to feel threatened by dark forces of hell when they're being bombarded by wizard napalm and machine-gunned by the hunter's duel crossbows.

I recommend playing Diablo III alone at least once, a few times with your friends, and quitting before you end up buying in-game weapons with real money, or spending 24-hours on a RedBull-fueled 'Meph Run'.

Games I'm Not Allowed to Play - Dwarf Fortress

Oh yeah. That screenshot looks like the brain fart of your old DOS computer, doesn't it? Funnily enough, this shot captures a lot of what makes Dwarf Fortress so complex and, by extension, addicting. As you might be able to guess, the right side of the screenshot is an overhead two-dimensional representation of the fortress. Those are rooms, dining halls, armories, warehouses and more. The icons depict different things and, remarkable as it may seem, playing the game enough allows you to recognize them fluently. While you may not be able to, I can see the bedrooms of various dwarves, I can see the room with casks of ale. I can see beds, tables, foundries, ore, engraved walls, and on and on. Some icons are easier to guess the meaning of than others. For example, the two big arrow symbols pointing outside are ballistas ready to be fired. All of the smiley faces are dwarves. Outside, you can see on the far left the curve of a river, the bridge over it, and the road leading to the fortress entrance.

Long story short, this is a game that manages to find a truly insane amount of depth and complexity by using the most basic graphics imaginable. By setting the bar for graphics so low, it permits a massive amount of resources to be dedicated to the most crazy awesome things you can think of. Your dwarves can all be equipped, clothed, given rooms and tasks unending. They can make friends and gain skills that make them more (or less) useful to the running of the fortress at large. As for the fortress, you can construct traps, pump-driven systems, smithies, forges, farms, and more. You can conduct trade with visiting merchants, distant elf nations, and go to war with goblins, undead, and even homicidal elephants. What is perhaps so addicting about this game is that it is basically a medieval/fantasy SimCity to the most complex (yet definitely learnable) and hilarious degree.

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Bird's eye view of a fortress

I say hilarious because there are no win conditions. Part of the fun is seeing how far and how long you can go before the fortress collapses due to domestic strife, outside intervention, or even inadvertently digging too deep and opening a corridor to Hell. One of the times I played, some asshole accidentally killed the cat of my most deadly swords-dwarf. He hunted down and killed the offender. When the police-dwarves stepped in to arrest him for the murder, they proved unable to, and he swiftly killed them too. A growing cycle of violence quickly consumed the entire fortress as family members got pissed and swore bloody vengeance. In time, the swords-dwarf was killed, but too much violence had put internal affairs on pause for so long that the survivors all starved to death. All the children were stolen away by nearby monkeys. Not kidding. All of this started because some prick accidentally stepped on a cat.

It can require a dark humor to get entertained by this, but it gets to the point where your management skills cannot counter or keep up with the chaos that the game can present you with. A flood can throw off your construction plans. One dwarf might get jealous of another, causing dissent that you must prepare for by having an established system of justice (or by straight up assassinating the guy). The game is tough and it requires planning, but it is planning of a sort which doesn't frustrate so much as make you consider what you might possibly do to work around it. Example: goblins show up, you barricade the doors. How do you solve this problem? Well, you don't have to if you work on attaining self-sufficiency within the mountain. Alternatively, there might be a plateau reachable from another level that the goblins can't reach but you can, allowing you to plant farms and reach the outside world that way (or even snipe down at the goblins with crossbows). You could send out your combat-capable dwarves to fight them, you could create an alternate entrance that is actually filled with traps for the goblins to run into when they see a new open door. Or, hell, if you're really determined, you could dig deep, find a lava flow, and create a pipeline to dump magma right on top of their heads!

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Conclusion

The sheer creative possibilities and the massive options before you is what persuaded me that I had to stop playing Dwarf Fortress. It brings out a sadistic inner architect and social experimenter that can never be satiated. It makes me want to hurl myself into it again and again to build ever more intricate and interesting fortresses and to see how many dwarves I can take care of and keep safe (or domineer) before the system falls apart. But, even though I've banned myself from playing it, I've still been plenty entertained by the stories of others who do.

For a brilliantly depicted example of an entertaining game of Dwarf Fortress, consider checking out this link. It'll send you to a site that tells the story of one particular fortress where players would switch off for every in-game year, each different player having different projects and different things happen to them until the fortress' inevitable doom. Things such as a dwarf-elephant war, accidental drownings, and fights over who gets the best crypts. It's hilarious and definitely worth checking out if the game intrigues you, but not enough to get sucked into the addiction first-hand!

Mass Effect 2 and the Myth of the Open World

Most RPGs (role-playing games) fall into two categories: linear or open world. Neither is better than the other. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and whichever you prefer is up to you. The upside of linear games is that they are tightly focused on the story and characters, and their environments are generally more fully realized and detailed, as the creators don't have to worry about creating huge, expansive worlds. The downside is that they force the player into a situation where they have no escape. If you don't like what's going on, you don't have the option to go to another part of the game world and do something else for a change. Side missions are limited, if they exist at all, and your ability to maneuver or explore is minimal.

As for open world, the upside is that you have an entire game world at your fingertips. You can go off and do whatever you want as it pleases you. The main quest can be put on hold so that you can go explore random caves, go fishing, or simply choose a direction and see where it takes you. The downside is that these games can encounter a problem with lack of focus; the sheer plethora of choices at your fingertips can paralyze you into inaction. You might lose interest in the story because you aren't being prompted or reminded of it. And the characters might be simplistic caricatures, as the game creators have to make a lot more of them to populate an entire world.

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The Promise

Mass Effect 2 promises a great deal. Not content with a world, we are given entire star systems to explore. We can cheerfully plot the Normandy to wherever we please, provided we have the fuel to back it up, and the amount of systems you can travel to are many. Each system has a handful of planets that can have paragraphs of description to them, adding further to the idea that you are a tiny part of a gigantic universe. The game itself takes you all over, from the dank, Blade Runner-esque urban ghetto of Omega to the clean and polite United Nations-like Citadel Station. You can land on planets in perpetual blizzard as well as those that contain sparkling waterfalls and astonishingly vibrant greenery.

The Codex (in-game encyclopedia) is incredibly effective at conveying this depth. Through it, we can get the deepest details of any given species: their biology, mating habits, military tactics, and diplomatic approaches. We can read of past historical events, wars, treaties, and agreements. We can read the hard scientific concepts behind the ships that populate the game, their interstellar travel systems, and their weaponry and armor. The characters that come to populate your squad provide further glimpses of an immensity beneath the surface, quirky personalities providing stories that make you want to see and visit the places that they describe.

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The Truth

But, while Mass Effect 2 talks the talk of an open world, the universe it gives us is woefully and disappointingly limited. There are probably a hundred or more planets that you can visit in the game, but you can actually land and explore only a handful. The vast majority merely give you the image of the planet, a little blurb describing what it is, and allowing you to scan and gather resources from its orbit in a swiftly tedious mini-game. The galaxies and worlds described in the Codex are barely touched, creating the frustrating feeling that there should have been so much more to the game that just isn't there.

What's more is the fact that, of the worlds you can visit, the amount of space you have to explore upon them is typically very contained. Most combat missions only truly take place among a handful of rooms. Having only a few small areas on an entire planet feels like a cop-out. For example, during your time on the entire space station of Omega, the only area you get to explore is a single nightclub and a slum. On Citadel Station, all you get is a strip mall and a solitary room for 'the Presidium' (supposed to be Mass Effect's entire Galactic Senate). This would be alleviated if the gameplay were spectacular, but it is only a generic cover shooter plus force powers. This would also be countered if the areas were densely populated with interesting figures to interact with, but the majority of NPCs (non-player characters) are just visual fluff that you cannot interact with.

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Conclusion

This criticism is not to say that Mass Effect 2 is a bad game by any means, but is merely to highlight that it is a game that promises and makes you want to believe so badly that you have an entire universe at your fingertips, and then gives you little with which to satisfy that dream. Though it seems such an enormous game, it is merely a pretender, likely subservient to the belief that people who play it will not have the patience or interest in exploring. Thus Mass Effect 2 will likely have a bittersweet finish for me, an enjoyable experience tempered by a lament of what could have been.

Mass Effect 2 and the Alien Experience

One of the most common traps that science fiction can fall into is the tendency to treat aliens in an overly basic manner. It happens all too often; we are introduced to a species who are identified by, say, their warrior instinct or attuned sense of honor. This would be fine except for the fact that most science fiction writers tend to make this trait the defining characteristic of every member of that race. The leader of the tribe? Dedicated warrior. The old grandma who takes care of the kids? Waxes eloquent with war stories of her grandsons. Baby alien? Wants to grow up to be a noble hero, just like his dad, brothers, uncle, grandfathers, etc etc. The entire species becomes subservient to these general and stereotypical character attributes and, once you see one, you know immediately what to expect with dreary regularity.

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Star Wars: An Exercise in Single Dimensions

The Star Wars series is a classic example of this. It maintains a sci-fi universe chock full of diverse alien species. In the more recent prequel movies, it gets to the point where any public gathering that you see contains a dozen new aliens that you've never seen before, products of George Lucas' artistic expression given an absurd amount of free reign. But, when you think about it, these aliens are a collage of mind-numbing simplicity.

Take Chewbacca and the Wookiees. He is steadfast, loyal, strong, and ferocious to those who are his enemies. While he is one of the only members of his species that we ever see, we find out from Han that his entire species is essentially full of Chewies. Their loyalty is cemented by the cultural concept of the Wookiee 'life-debt', and they are altogether identified by their hairiness and fortitude. There are no voiced or visible exceptions to the rule.

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How about the Jawas or the Ewoks? Each are small species that are all subservient to their assigned traits with little to no diversity or uniqueness outside of them. The Jawas are cowardly merchant scavengers and that is all you ever see of them. The Ewoks are cutesy tenacious tribal teddy bears. Tusken raiders?  Perpetually angry, nomadic... raiders. Remember those long necked svelte white aliens from the second prequel (Kaminoans, for the nerdy)? All of them were defined by a cool scientific attitude and apparently their entire race was dedicated to cloning people. The only possible exception I could think of was Jar Jar Binks being distinctive from the rest of his Gungan people. Unique in the worst way possible.

The point is that you never saw an Ewok who acted apart from the mold. You never saw a Jawa casually toting a laser rifle. You never saw a cowardly Wookiee. In Star Wars' defense, this simplification of entire species was probably necessary given the sheer amount of them. But it seems very limiting and not at all true to reality. After all, you can't label humans simply as aggressive imperialist impulsive warmongers. If you think that's correct, then you've never heard of Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, or Buddhist monks.

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Battlestar Galactica: An Exercise in Bipolarity

The next step up is to classify your aliens in strict this-or-that terms. This is also flawed and unsophisticated, but it is a bit better. To do this is to comparably regard life as only having those who are Democrats and those who are Republicans. Sure, there's a significant population to both sides, but there are still people who exist outside of these ideologies. Another example is the knee-jerk reaction to look at everything in life as good or evil. Many things can be classified as such, but there's also a plethora of things that aren't quite so clear cut.

Battlestar Galactica gives us the Cylons who, while initially are just set on killing all the humans, gradually evolve into allowing the existence of a splinter faction: those who believe the humans can be spared and worked with. Some Cylons may look different, but all of them fit into these two categories and that becomes their most important characteristic: pro-human or anti-human. Any side quirks are subservient to this overall identifier. Battlestar Galactica makes an effort to give the Cylons some nuance. The Boomer models are known for being duplicitous. The Leoben models are known for being manipulative. But in the end, all that really matters is their alignment to the humans, making them two-dimensional at best.

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Mass Effect: Aliens with Depth

Despite how easy it would be, Mass Effect avoids the sci-fi writers' trap in its totality. And you wouldn't quite think that going in. After all, the game's internal Codex (encyclopedia) identifies the separate species through some generalizations. The turians are opportunistic, imperialistic, and prone to find themselves in combat. The quarians go on pilgrimages and rites of passage, as well as generally being known for stealth. The asari are empathetic and known as diplomats and lovers.

The key difference here is that Mass Effect uses these stereotypes merely as guidelines. Much like regarding humans as impulsive, stereotypes have a grain of truth but aren't necessarily indicative of races or species as a whole. Mass Effect has countless examples of this. Sure, turians are known for being mean and aggressive, and yet you find one (Garrus) twisting those traits toward something you wouldn't expect, serving as a Robin Hood to a destitute population. Similarly, the crimelord Aria T'Loak (an asari) is a subversion of what you'd expect from the stereotypes; she's the ultimate socialite... of illegal enterprises.

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Conclusion

 I could go on, but the point is that Mass Effect depicts aliens in a way that uses established stereotypes as a foundation of understanding, a mere stepping stone to further depth instead of the end point. The aliens aren't all the same traits like in Star Wars, nor do they only tack to a bipolar definition like the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. Instead, like us, they are capable of operating completely independent from what you might expect, while simultaneously allowing you to recognize what makes them a member of their unique species/race.

I still am not very far into Mass Effect 2, but I did want to point out this particular facet of science fiction storytelling that the game has excelled at so far. It gives me great hope in the continuing quality of this stellar story.