Rust Is A Fascinating Social Experiment

You start naked and terrified. Rust is a massive online sandbox that mixes the Minecraft free-building  design with a DayZ setting. You start with nothing but a rock, 2 bandages, a torch, and your naked ass. You're dropped onto a server with other players, collecting materials, building shelters, crafting clothing and making weapons. Rust is also PvP, so you will be killed, multiple times, and looted, by players choosing the bandit's life instead of the pioneer's. You respawn with nothing, so you better store your valuable items and materials in storage boxes, or chests, but those can be robbed too, so you need to build a house to keep the treasure in. Doors in the game can only be opened by the player who built them, so you're relatively safe inside structures that you've built. However, there are players who advance enough to craft C4, who can blow your stupid door off and get to you.

What results is a game that is truly terrifying. During the game's nighttime, advanced players grab their guns, and raid all of the pitiful wooden shelters that the n00bs are building. For players without guns (and they are difficult to make), staying inside is a necessity at night. You can't see anything without a torch, and lighting a torch lets every advanced player know exactly where you are from miles away. Resources are so time consuming to farm, and valuable weapons/armor are so expensive to acquire and maintain, that killing other players for their shit is just too tempting. Most players will try to kill you on sight, and if you're naked with a rock, you have absolutely no chance. 

What's great about Rust is that the game didn't make the rules. The developers provided a sandbox, and made materials extremely valuable. It was us, the players, who made the in-game Rust society one of overwhelming paranoia, adopting a "don't trust anyone regardless of circumstance" mentality. I spent most of my night here, in my little shack, guarding the door, planning my next day. I need to kill sheep to get animal fat and cloth, enough to make a sleeping bag and some low-grade fuel. Sleeping bags are spawn points, and having one in the house is the only way to guarantee that you can spawn inside with your stuff, as long as nobody raided your stash and blew off your door while you were logged out.

I got lost in the middle of the night and was hunted by a player with a rifle who kept whispering into his mic, "I'm going to kill you taco" or, "Why are you running taco?". I found a pair of radiation-proof pants and was then chased to the top of a giant boulder and beaten to death by a naked man with a hatchet. Rust is a land of chaos and bandits right now, but there are almost 40,000 players, and I've heard on the Steam message boards that some players are building towns, with walls, and leaders....

Materia

I think you can easily separate your favorite thing from the best thing. My favorite band ever is Styx, but are they the best band that has ever played music? No, they aren't. My favorite football team is the Dallas Cowboys, and that certainly proves that point. My favorite Final Fantasy is 10, but we all know that 7 is the greatest role playing game ever made, and I think the nucleus of that awesomeness is the materia system.

Think about where role playing games were in the mid 90's. Patience was mandatory, grinding, trial and error, the life of an RPG fan before the Playstation was a frustrating one. I was one of those kids, obsessed with 8 and 16-bit fantasy adventures, and even though they showed my developing brain no mercy whatsoever, I knew how much more satisfying they were compared to Contra and NBA Jam. I was playing Phantasy Star 4, and Secret of Mana, getting my ass kicked but also experiencing the first game generation that was really presenting novel-complex stories. FF7 definitely expanded the idea that a game's narrative can be long, detailed, and rich, but Square also gave us a different type of difficulty. FF7 is hard, and if you take on all the optional challenges, extremely hard, but what the materia system offered gave the player unprecedented control over their team to tackle these difficult tasks.

Ruby weapon is as hard as any boss fight in any game. However, getting tentacle raped by Ruby inspired creativity instead of pity. You reloaded your save, then tooled around with your materia set-up before challenging the boss again. While the materia system has been directly ripped off by a few, it has been subtly copied by dozens. The control you have in modern RPG's, the complete customization and extremely detailed party building minutia that you have these days are, in my mind, a direct result of the Playstation Final Fantasy revolution. You may have a different Final Fantasy that you call your favorite, but when it comes to sheer importance and impact on the gaming industry, FF7 will forever be the greatest.

Look familiar?

My Favorite Video Game Beards

I think the title is pretty self-explanatory, on with the list!

Valus

Shadow of the Colossus has the best example of an old Dutch beard that I have seen in a video game. Valus's beard is long and shaggy, tangling with his robust chest hair because of his hunched back. The main reason that Valus catapulted onto this list is that unlike every other game beard, Valus's is climbable. 

Basch

Final Fantasy 12's strong point is the complex political story it tells, and it's weak point is Basch. When this cliche-plagued knight with a Japanese teenager's attitude first appears in the game, he is sporting a perfect dirty golden beard that only a medieval dungeon occupant can grow. I liked him at first, until he shaves his face and starts saying stuff like, "I failed to protect my country, what is shame to me?" The initial beard was super sweet though. 

The Merlin advisor from Civ

As you advance in CivRev, your advisors change their appearance to suit the current age. When you enter the medieval age, one of your advisors appears in a Merlin suit with a gorgeous Gandalf beard. You can tell that the developers took extra time to get the beard physics correct because it sways back and forth with his animated movements.

Cid from FF4

Cid's beard is great because it embraces chaos. The hair grows wild in every direction, but oddly, the 360 degree area around his mouth is shaved down and obviously waxed bare.

Oghren

Instead of filling this list exclusively with dwarves, (I really, really wanted too) I just picked the best game-dwarf-beard to represent the rest. Oghren from Dragon Age sports a rarely used classic double war braid with blood red hair. I also really like it when dwarves keep their scalp hair cut short, demanding that the beard receive every ounce of attention.

Final Fantasy X and X-2 for Vita

I have been holding off on getting a Vita, but now that they have announced that March 18th is the debut of this bundle, I will be joining the ranks of Vita-fans. 

This is exactly what nostalgia should be, playing through a game that you loved as a child, with a couple new shiny extras that the original had and achievements/trophies. I can't wait.

The Plan

Krillbite Studios has released their game, The Plan for free on Steam. It only takes about ten minutes to complete, but it is absolutely worth checking out. You experience the life of a fly with only directional buttons to press. the music is gorgeous, the visuals are very Limbo, and, you know, it's free.

So at the end of the game, you get a blank white screen at which you can type a message. Afterwards, you are taken to a screen of stars, hovering over each one will reveal a different message typed by different players of The Plan. Most of them were "Awesome", or "Huh?", but I found one that said "Brandon likes call of duty :]" proving that CoDdooshes are absolutely everywhere. Everywhere. 

Her

We love the Oscars, so each year Stephanie and I watch every movie nominated for Best Picture. This year is especially exciting because there are two sci-fi movies on the list, and they aren't run and gun Starship Troopers movies. Her, and Gravity are the best kind of science fiction, the type that introduce an interesting premise while asking very serious questions about the future of civilization. Her is about falling in love with a true AI, the initial prejudices leveled by society, and what happens when an extreme introvert enters the brand new romantic frontier.

This movie blew me away. I've always been a fan of Joaquin Phoenix (mostly because he made the only movie about a musician's rise and fall that was watchable) and I was shocked by how deeply I related to his character Theodore in this film. It's not just that he's a stay at home guy who plays a lot of video games, but because his desire for physical relationships was crushed by a bad experience only to be completely swept off of his feet by a personality that suits him perfectly. This movie is an amazing exploration of love, what we define it as, and also the coming AI singularity, an event that all of us sci-fi nerds have been terrified of for decades. 

Go watch it.

The Banner Saga Review

I've been reading a lot of reviews about The Banner Saga, but not one single writer mentioned something that seemed glaringly obvious to me, The Banner Saga is a modern Oregon Trail!

Watching trailers and gameplay videos can easily fool you into thinking that The Banner Saga is a pretty Final Fantasy Tactics game, but it's really an army micromanagement game. True, the battles play out on your basic RTS game board, but the in-betweens are where the meat of the game is. Traveling across the continent with your caravan, you manage the day to day supplies, keep morale up, decide where and how long to camp for, and make extremely difficult decisions with no real way of telling what the consequences will be. This game IS The Oregon Trail, but with deep, engaging side-distractions.

This is Ekkill, easily my favorite character in TBS. He's rather difficult to get, when you meet him he's trying to kill you, and even after forgiving him for that he'll try to kill you again. Choose against your better judgement and you'll get to enjoy probably the funniest character in the game who also happens to be one of the best human fighters.

The Banner Saga has so many nods to games that I love grouped with some new ideas that I have never seen before. If you like medieval fantasy, strategy games, or Dragon Age in any way, then you'll agree with me that The Banner Saga is a masterpiece. It's only 24.99 too, so go buy it.

Xbox #5 is dead

This is a picture of my Xbox 360. It's actually the fifth Xbox 360 that I have owned, and just like the previous four, it broke. The first 360 that I had red ringed after just a couple months, inconveniently right in the middle of my first Elder Scrolls experience. I sent it back and received a new console free of charge a month later. Frustrating, but not the end of the world. My second 360 red ringed a year later, and I learned that it fell victim to the plastic heat sink debacle, a stupid problem caused by Microsoft's insistence that plastic parts be used instead of metal ones. My third Xbox 360 suffered from the same problem, and I tried the towel trick, voiding my warranty and just prolonging the inevitable. That one was my bad, and I ponied up the cash the buy a brand new 360, the fourth unit to grace my living room with it's presence. The fourth Xbox lasted almost two years, before red ringing. I sent it to Microsoft, and they just sent me a totally new 360, without explaining the problem with the previous console. My fifth 360 lasted a very long time, almost three years, but it died yesterday. The disc tray won't open, and after some research I found out that the problem lies with the black plastic gear that opens the tray itself. This plastic gear heats up, and leaves behind a black residue on the disc tray. Over time, this goo coagulates and builds up, requiring you to open your entire system and clear it manually. Easy fix right? Just ship it to Microsoft and they'll fix it as long as you have a warranty. However, Microsoft is no longer replacing Xbox 360 units free of charge. 

This is my NES. This is the exact same unit that sat in my bedroom as a six-year-old. My NES finally kicked the bucket a couple weeks ago after twenty-six years of operation. Never replaced, never refurbished. My question is this: Why does a machine built in 1987 work for twenty-six years when the modern console generation needs constant repair/replacement? I took great care of my 360(s), I have never dropped, bumped into, spilled Mountain Dew on top of, or even breathed on any of my Xboxs. I understand that the tech inside of these two machines are radically different. The NES's job was basically just to recognize controller button presses and put the cart's picture on the screen. The 360 is galactically more complex, surfing the internet, using lasers to read encrypted disc information, I understand that. 

My simple point is that perhaps, just perhaps, WE MASTER THE ART OF METAL PIECES INSTEAD OF PLASTIC PIECES IN A MACHINE THAT HAS A SUPER FAST HEAT GENERATING FAN BEFORE WE START MOVING TO THE NEXT STEP. The little parts inside of Xbox 360s literally melt, literally. They used plastic instead of metal to save money, and then shafted every 360 owner as soon as the Xbox One was released. This is why the PS4 will be receiving my money, and not Microsoft from this point forward. Not because of plastic parts, (I understand they didn't do that for the new-gen) but because the ethics that I'm looking for in a corporation taking hundreds of my dollars simply aren't there. 

The Banner Saga is brilliant

Growing up almost exclusively with home consoles, I promised myself that if I ever purchased a powerful computer, then I would take the time to see all of the comp gaming that I've been missing out on. The Banner Saga is my first Steam purchase, and I am seriously impressed. There aren't many RTS games that I really enjoy, in fact Starcraft, Xcom and C&C Red Alert are the only strategy games that I can even think of that I put more than 40 hours into. The Banner Saga is just as good as those games I just mentioned, and somehow accomplished it by doing nothing the same. At all.

The graphics are hand-painted and gorgeous. They look good in these pictures, but when you play the game yourself and see these Dragonlair-esque bright colors moving around the screen, you'll definitely notice them and find yourself blankly staring at your monitor, admiring. The cutscenes look like an updated 70's fantasy cartoon, making me reminisce about The Hobbit cartoon, or even the Disney Robin Hood. I was sucked right in.

The Banner Saga's setup is radically different from that of Starcraft or Xcom because it refuses to get unnecessarily complicated. You move into range, and then you strike, turns alternate, and hack away at each other. When the game first begins, you'll notice how strategy is nonexistent. Like the Braveheart battle, you just charge ahead and hope your big guy drops their big guy first. Your soldiers start leveling up and getting promoted however, and soon you'll have archers laying trap tiles on the field, and Backbiters slamming people 5 squares back with their shields. Every character has an armor and a health bar, hitting the armor opens them up to big future attacks, and hitting the health brings them closer to death. The end and the beginning are unrecognizable, starting with hack n slash and finishing with tactical battle precision, The Banner Saga has now joined my super exclusive list of timeless RTS masterpieces. It's 24.99, get it, now.

Cloud says "shut up" a lot

Here's some investigative reporting! If you play Final Fantasy 7 again, and you should, I want you to count the number of times Cloud says shut up. I am a little surprised that my teenage self didn't notice this. It seems arbitrary too, interrupting Sephiroth's Jenova speech and laughing at Vincent's dead wife. 

Am I the first one to notice this? 

Is it the only way? I don't remember them discussing any other options at all.

Gauntlet

I love Gauntlet for the old NES, it's one of my favorite games from childhood. I was in a single player Gauntlet mood a couple weeks ago, even though to play solo is a guaranteed game over, and I popped it into my 26 year old NES, only to have it not work. After determining that the Nintendo itself was broken and not my Gauntlet cart, I gave the machine a tearful farewell and ordered this funny looking thing. It's a RetroDuo, it plays NES and SNES games, and was cheaper than me fixing my almost 3 decades-old Nintendy.

Gauntlet is a fairly difficult game, but not impossible. It certainly isn't on the Super Ghouls and Ghosts or Ninja Gaiden difficulty spectrum, in fact, with a buddy and 12 hours to kill, the dungeon can be conquered. Gauntlet is so great because of what other video games of it's time had to offer. Gauntlet gave you a choice of 3 characters, all different, but balanced, it had awesome music and a cooperative contest with your partner that had you racing each other for treasure, not kills. Gauntlet had bells and whistles that I had never even heard of at the time, and even though it could never compare to the superior arcade experience, the NES port was extremely satisfying. 

The successful Gauntlet player is not he who tanks, but he who lets others tank. Become the ranged wizard or archer, let your idiot friend be the warrior, watch him attract every mob on the screen, then steal every piece of gold for yourself. Dart for the keys the second the screen pans over them and never put your back in a corner. It's a Gauntlet, so the rooms are overwhelming and may seem to never end, but after 50 restarts and a couple broken treasure-truces with your co-op partner, Gauntlet can be defeated.

This is the music from the Gauntlet title screen that instantly brings me back to my 8 year old living room, collecting treasure while taking breaks only for Teddy Graham refills. Press play and experience the brilliance.

Lots of DLC to play

I finally conquered the overwhelming stack of 2013 games that had been mocking me for months. Assassin's Creed 4, Dead Space 3, Zelda, Sleeping Dogs, I plowed through those in a just a couple months, and now that I can poke my head out and look towards the horizon, all I see is DLC. A bunch of games that I have fallen madly in love with have big expansions that are coming out soon, or have already come out and I haven't gotten around to them yet. So here is my game list for the next couple of months, and it's all downloadable content.

State of Decay released their first big expansion, called Breakdown, a couple months ago, and I've been itching to play it. State of Decay is a zombie sandbox built for those of us who appreciate the art of z-stories. Survival planning is SoD's specialty, and a quick death awaits all of you who are stupid-jock enough to pick up a bat and just wade into the middle of a group of undead. The expansion adds a new storyline, adjustable difficulty, (you can only adjust it up) and also turns the game into a true sandbox where the game can in theory play forever.

The Last of US has a big piece of DLC coming out on Valentine's Day, called Left Behind. It's a prequel, following the early part of Ellie's story. There isn't much being told about the new stuff, but Ellie's friend is named Riley who was a main character in one of the comics. If this DLC has anything whatsoever in common with the original game, then I will buy this the second that I can.

Bioshock Infinite's first chapter of the Burial at Sea DLC had an insane plot twist, and the chapter 2 trailer has me very excited about what's to come. We are back in Rapture, but with characters from Columbia, with body switching and the old crazy Zander Cohen as the big villain. Also, they are going to let me keep my new microwave gun for all of the DLC chapters! It's not coming out until late March though.

My favorite RTS of all time, Xcom released an enormous 30$ DLC package called Enemy Within, a couple months ago. The new fancy stuff looks great and all, but what Im really excited about is just the addition of new maps and new enemies. Xcom is wonderful already, so just giving me a bunch of new toys and aliens to play around with is all an expansion needs. This is the DLC I'm most excited about, and I think I'm going to get to it last, so that I can really take my time and enjoy it.

The new Walking Dead season is pretty good so far, and I think the next episode will determine exactly how good it's going to be. Playing as just Clementine is a drastic change, but the gameplay is sound and the story is interesting. Clem has become a hardcore zombie killer, and it'll be fun to play as she grows up. 

Blitzball

Watching the SuperBowl last night got me reminiscing about Spira's Blitzball league. Every Final Fantasy has a prominent mini-game that you can sink hours into, and like any good video game side distraction, the rewards apply to the main quest. Blitzball was a great change of pace from the two previous games' card battling games, and to my surprise, Square-Enix made underwater soccer a lot of fun.

What made the Blitzball mini-game so great was all of the little details that you could keep track of outside the arena. You had a roster to maintain, with contracts to extend or cut, and in FFX-2 the players you recruited were NPC's that hung out in the various towns you visited. Add the roster micromanagement to the cool idea of making Wakka's boss fight special moves a direct reflection of his Blitzball performance, and what resulted was a basic soccer stat game with a ton of bells and whistles. 

It helps when the mini-game distraction makes sense in the overall plot. Spira is a group of islands, so it makes sense that their favorite sport is played underwater, and Blitzball increases in popularity when attacks by the giant Jesus-fish increase as well. The more depressed and fearful the islanders of Spira are, the more they crave Blitzball to take their minds off their problems. Every major settlement in the country has a team that represents them, and certain towns react differently when your main character, (Tidus, Blitzball superstar) rolls in. 

The Luca Goers, the New York Yankees of Blitzball. 

We received two games that featured Blitzball in it, and I desperately want a third. Sometimes I daydream about a full Blitzball game, like Fifa, but with town recruitment and expansion teams now that Sin isn't breaking cities anymore. Or imagine a Blitzball game setup like Street Hoops, where you play superstars such as Nimrook or Bickson, improving your back-alley blitz skills to one day move into the big leagues. I love Blitzball, and while real life sports are great and all, they always make me pine for the fake ones.