With the qualifiers for IEM Poland coming up I'm going to devote all my time to practicing for that so don't expect any more of these blogs for a while. I doubt I'll qualify because, well, Zergs, but hey you gotta try right?
I think I'm done with chivalry. ******* fun game though. I noticed a few people are playing it after I wrote my review on it, which is neat. It makes me think someone owes me money though, but I'm not quite sure who.
So tonight I got together with my regular gaming group and we played the Game of Thrones board game. We played the most recent edition updated to the Dance of Dragons storyline so there's considerable spoilers. The core gameplay experience doesn't change much from one of the earlier expansions so if you've only been watching the show and you don't want to be spoiled then consider playing one of those instead.
The game of thrones boardgame is best played with the maximum 5 or 6 people, depending on the version you're playing, and each player takes control of one of the main Houses of Westeros. The playing board is full of territories divided up like Risk and each territory is worth something; influence or supply or it has a Castle on it. Castle territories are critical, partially because that's where your troops come from and mostly because the player with the most castles by the end (or 7 at any point) wins the game.
Now GoT:TBG comes under a genre I like to call Cold War Simulator. These are types of games where you all can easily spend many hours simply staring at each other and barely making any huge moves before the game time is almost up and the last hour becomes a flurry of activity. And this is because at any point, there's about twelve different ways you could be attacked or otherwise set back. Because of this mutually assured destruction, you'll rarely spend the game doing very much other then building up resources. Because if you're not doing that, then someone else will and that person will be favoured to win.
I hate Cold War simulators because I simply lack the patience! About two turns into our six turn game I'd declared all out war on a neighbour and promptly taken a castle territory. Matt had already pissed off two other players so I expected that we would all pounce on him and pick his carcass apart.
But this didn't happen. Partially because Chris is a coward and also because Will was concerned that his position was so tenuous that any resources spent attacking Matt would leave him vulnerable. So I spent the whole game trading territories with Matt and achieving basically nothing. The games mechanics are set up so that all out warring someone to death is not really an option, as I discovered to my chagrin. So I attacked myself out of a chance at winning.
This is not the games' fault though, and to be fair it's really well made. The board's visual design is brilliant and every aspect of it is brimming with glorious flavour. Everything is clear and crisp and great fun to play with. It looks a little imposing but the rules can be quickly explained in about ten or twenty minutes to a newcomer and you can be playing the Game of Thrones in no time.
But the main thing about this game is that it's a game of plot and plan and talking that punishes more direct and belligerent players like, well, myself. Every turn you play an order token on each of your currently manned territories and they range from consolidating power and building up resources, to marching soldiers into other provinces and maybe attacking enemies to defending or raiding or supporting. These order tokens are all placed face down and then revealed all at once so there's plenty of room to backstab and make deals and alliances and that's basically where the whole game is played. Making the right orders and encouraging people to make the wrong ones with nothing more then some simple words.
It's also a very hard game, the game doesn't like you to feel almighty. Chris had trouble mustering armies with his limited starting resources and felt like he couldn't get anywhere, Will had trouble because his starting area, whilst bountiful had him surrounded, James had trouble taking advantage of his superior Supply capability because a certain fate card wouldn't flip, Matt had trouble because I kept attacking him and I had trouble because Matt never seemed to be too affected by my victories (defeated armies in this game rout instead of dying so it's incredibly hard to actually kill enemy soldiers. which means they just attack a vulnerable province right back so ARGH GODDAMMIT) and Dominic had trouble because he's too good natured to backstab people and not feel guilty about it.
The other qualm with a game like this is Kingmakers. Basically it's the last turn and three or four people can see that they simply cannot win, but if they support certain people in certain unsporting ways then that person can win. If I'd wanted to I could of left my vital Castle territories open for Matt to take and win very suddenly. In one last fight Will, who couldn't win, had his last huge army on the sidelines of Chris and Dominic's final struggle. If Will sides with any of them, that person would win that battle and the whole game. Fortuantely this didn't really come up because I keep fighting to the bitter end and Will decided to abstain but it's still kind of a frustrating issue that the game doesn't really resolve.
But that's detracting from an overall superbly well designed game assuming it's the sort of thing you like. If you like grand strategy, diplomacy, scheming and the and a fun night with friends then Game of Thrones: The Game Board Game edition is probably for you. I should also mention that it takes a long time to play, so definiely use an eggtimer or some other time device to force people to hurry the **** up when they make their decisions. It took us 6 hours to get through ours, which can be extremely tedious when you know you cannot win.
FAR CRY THREE!
I kind of liked Far Cry 2. Oh don't get me wrong it's a shitty terrible game, but it did a lot of really neat things. It's a perfect example of a game that had terrible gameplay but brilliant everything else. Far Cry 3 is extremely different. 2 was gritty and amoral and just downright nasty, but in a good way. 3 is just a rollicking good time full of explosions and mayhem and good ol' fashioned machete ultraviolence. If FC2 made you scared to play more Far Cry games then fear not, this game is very little like it's predecessor and it's all the better for it. Mostly.
The easy way to summarize FC3 and to pretty much end this discussion is simply to state that FC3 is an open world First Person Shooter with bit of RPG sprinkled over it all wrapped around a Modern Military Shooter core. If you kind of like Call of Duty but wish it was more wide open then go play FC3 and have a grand ol' time.
It's got basically all the things it should. You can drive around, you can explore ancient ruins and caves in search of collectibles or mysteries, you can do all those weird minigames and side quests that find their way into open world games... somehow and you could, I suppose, just go through the regular story missions, which is most of the game anyway and is pretty fun. I mean it's trashy and silly and kinda poorly written but it's a shooter so we kind of go into it expecting this.
Some things didn't work for me. The stealth works great but mostly because all the guards are incredibly stupid and are begging for my machete through their chest. The idea of hunting animals to skin them didn't feel that interesting because when you have an assault rifle and the ability to easily craft a syringe that will let you sense them through walls and cliffs from like 30 metres away how is that fair for them?! Some of them are already herbivores let's not make this too difficult! The dialogue is, as I noted, pretty bad so a lot of the numerous cutscenes felt annoying and dragged out and there threatened to be (though thankfully avoided) a Player Character/Annoying Ladyfriend dynamic as bad as Raiden and Rose from Metal Gear Solid 2. Leads to some awkward segments really.
(Stupid pretentious bullshit starts here)
I guess the main thing that irked me is the Modern Military Shooter aspect. See, in the game you play as a twenty something everyman who isn't combat trained at all but has a magic tattoo on his arm that will teach him as you go. A huge plot point is that you start the game weak as a kitten and that you need to grow stronger and learn to be better at killing people so you can overcome the tremendous challenges before you but this isn't reflected at all in the games mechanics. You can stealth really damn well and instantly kill people, you're really fast and athletic, you're super accurate with guns and whilst the first weapon the game gives you is a puny M1911A1 about three minutes into it, and without having to fight anyone, the game gives you an AK47 which holds 30 rounds, is super accurate and kills in about 2 or 3 hits.
It's not that the game isn't hard, on the hardest difficulty it presents a reasonable challenge I suppose, but it's not because it's hard to kill enemies. That part's super easy. It's just that you have to take cover and not try and John Rambo your way through because if you're careless you'll soak up too much fire and die. It kind of made me think; imagine playing a shooter where your only weapon they gave you was a pistol. It has 5 rounds. It requires 3 to kill anyone because it's bad, 2 to the head. It has a range of 3 metres, if you try and shoot anyone past this range then your shot simply will not connect at all and it takes ages to reload because your character isn't used to doing this and it just takes ages. Your opponents have bigger and better weapons.
THAT'S a game that feels oppressive and nasty. That's a game that's not playing fair. Games should do this! I played Dishonoured and as soon as I had blink I knew the game stopped being fair to itself. Blink made that game ******* retarded I could just zoom everywhere and abuse it. Get caught out? No problem Blink to safety. About to get discovered? That's alright I'll just blink here. Memorize guards patrol routes and patterns? Sod that blink and stab!
Far Cry 3 kind of sucked for me because it felt like for the most part it was being too fair even on hard. Enemies die in 2 shots and all my guns are super accurate, reload quickly, have lots of rounds and kill quickly. Animals don't have assault rifles. I do. How is killing any of them a challenge?! Fights don't escalate to absurd unwinnable extremes like GTA or Just Cause 2 do. I kind of felt like using the bow for most of the game simply because whilst it kills very quickly, it feels a lot fairer to Legolas through this then be Terminator.
The other thing that was dumb was the writing. Not just the dialogue or characters, most of which are kinda dumb and forgettable, but also the whole introspection aspect, the whole "I'm a cruel terrible monster who just murders cuz it's fun, but only now feels remorse after killing like three thousand pirates". Only one game that I know of reconciles being a game about shooting hundreds of dudes being fun and the actual act of shooting hundreds of dudes being a terrifying experience. That game is Spec Ops the Line which came out this year and like I said above is worth playing, though I warn you that if you do play it you'll never look at shooters the same way again.
If you're not going to do this properly then don't bother. I'm fine with my shooter game not being serious and just being a fun romp about killing a ton of dudes as long as it's about that. Any attempt to be deep and meaningful whilst being a game about killing ten thousand dudes in all kinds of violent methods simply is not going to work unless you really dedicate yourself to it.
Anyway, rant over. The game is fun if you like light entertaining unchallenging shooters. And it's a fairly glorious one at that.
It's 3 am now so I'm gonig to go sleep. I might go back and proofread and edit some of the crap I wrote.
Oh, and Tgun.
He knows what that's for.
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