So I've updated my blog again. This by itself is nothing new, something I seem to do every few years or so. What's different this time is I'm actually cleaning things up and restructuring things. I have had 20 years of webspace continuity and almost 15 years of wordpress. This is cool, but also a horrible mess. My server is a trainwreck of files, layers of old php files layered as if in geological records. As such my stuff is almost always out of date and backing anything else is a huge pain. So it's time to pack everything into boxes and knock down the house.

Wordpress is gone, as are a lot of my old posts. Most of this isn't a great loss. Most of my old posts are painfully out of date, or about long dead internet drama. If you really need to embarrass me, the wayback machine is right there. I can't actually hide anything, nor do I intend to, but, considering the fact that every post on this new blog was copied by hand, I don't need to keep everything I ever made up on my refrigerator forever.

I've made an effort to maintain, with the right URLs, every important thing I have ever wrote. Stuff like the Reaction article. If something is missing, feel free to email me and I'll try to re-post any reasonable requests or redirect any old URLS.

This also applies to any random files I have removed too. I have them all backed up, so if I accidentally removed something that is still useful to people, I want to know. I have an old file still up of mugen tutorials cause someone asked me what happened to them 5 years ago. These were originally uploaded in like... 2006, so don't worry, just ask.

As of right now a lot of Brave Earth stuff is missing. This is in no means any indication of any abandonment of the game. Part of me cleaning stuff up involved things related to working on the game. The problem is most of it is way out of date. Expect a lot of things like character Bios and stuff to be reposted once there is actually a release date. I'll probably be crossposting on here and steam when that time actually comes. For now I'm going to keep it as a single page.

Dragon’s Dogma the type of narrow, niche fanbase that made me know I’d love it whenever I got around to playing it and even though I knew this would happen, I wasn’t ready for quite how much I’d love it.

Dragon’s Dogma is a weird game. It feels like someone played a game of telephone, describing the conventions and goals of the big western RPG genre to the designer of Devil May Cry, who then declared “I got it” and made a game. The reality isn’t quite as funny. Hideaki Itsuno had a lot of the core ideas for this game all the way back in the year 2000 and he clearly was a fan of the western games he was inspired by. But instead we get back funhouse mirror reflection of the genre, seen through the eyes of someone with a very different value system.

In many ways this is similar to Demon’s Souls, a reflection of western fantasies and RPGs with an entirely different value system. But in the decade since, Miyazaki’s vision has permeated the culture of the game, and besides coming from the same place, often aping the same references (down to Berserk), these two games could not be so similarly different. Dragon’s Dogma still feels almost like outsider art, a beautiful jewel that nothing else is quite like.

I could go on about the combat, how the game has some of the best feeling and satisfying variants of the Stinger attack I’ve ever felt, talk about how the classes are WEIRD, or other things but one of the most defining features of Dragon’s Dogma, that permeates its whole design is that the game wants to make the player Choose.

It all matters but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t Dark Souls you aren’t going to be punitively punished. You’re not going to be tricked into making choices you didn’t even realize you were making. In fact the game goes out of its way to make SURE you know what you’re deciding.

The “moral” choices in these games feel more real and nuanced than other games. There are rarely right answers. Characters understand. Do you give the hot merchant girl who seems a little shady a bunch of money? Sure, but it doesn’t hugely matters. She appreciates it, but the choice doesn’t come back to haunt you. Do you evict the family for the rich merchant? They’re understanding that you’re just the one breaking the news and SURE you can buy the house but the game doesn’t present it as the obviously good answer. It’s just something that can come up. What’s your reward? Appreciation. When the merchant goes to trial, is he guilty? I mean… he probably is for SOMETHING, but it’s unclear. You can find evidence for and against, you can forge evidence for and against. Hell, you can just FORGE items, even important plot items. Which merchant do you give the gold idol to? Do you help Mercedes during her duel? Is either choice right? Who is your beloved? Do you get a ton of special dialog with your loved one? No, they just go into your house. But you have the freedom to chose. Even how you give gifts and respond to pawns you hired fits this type of player expression.

The important part is that the choices matter enough for you to see results but not so much as to make you worry about gaming the system, or hunting for a best ending, or whatever. But making a decision is hard, and you have to make them.

Thematically, this plays through the whole games. Pawns are devoid of will, and is your will, your ability to chose that gives you command over them. The dragon exists to find someone to make an Arisen, someone with the willpower to choose. The present them with difficult choices and challenge them. They need someone with the strength to inflict their will upon the world. Grigori fights you with every ounce of his strength, but that wonderfully, beautifully written dragon wants you to kill him. He wants someone who can take what is theirs.

All this to find someone who can replace the “Seneschal” of the world, to slay the previous god and replace them, to refresh the willpower of the universe. Every step, you are given permission to stop. Grigori understands sacrificing your beloved for peace. Not embarking to find the Seneschal is a valid place to stop playing the game. The game even tells you, as you fight god, that the peaceful life is an underrated one.

… And once your god, you chose when to die. This is a game, fundamentally, about having the willpower to Choose.

Odds and Ends

Alright, this will be less focused but just to get some stuff out.

This makes sense, coming from the designer of Devil May Cry. The DMC games are filled with choice. It’s not about being OPTIMAL. you CAN be optimal, but the games are about style, about being cool, about expressing yourself. This leads into combat that feels like a toned down DMC. Stingers, double jumps, crazy infinite arrow blasts. The game doesn’t try and constrain you with offensive resources, it wants you to express yourself. I expressed my self by being a Mystic Knight, third strike parrying everything, and by oppressing all those who would oppose me, with my friend the orb. Now I’m doing NG+ as a solo assassin which is just FULL of options.

Visually, the game is dated but beautiful. You see the rough edges, but the lighting is unusually naturalistic. It just… feels like being in the woods, a lot of the time and it makes things just feel so real and immersive, even with some of the age. The game didn’t need to have a day night cycle. The game looks beautiful during mid day and it could be kept like that but… traveling at night is another choice, and one the game encourages despite it’s drawbacks.

The story of the game is wonderful. While being low in dialog and character building it still manages to stitch together an amazing cosmology. The cycle of godhood is so creative and the Pawns are just wonderfully weird. Grigori might be my favorite dragon ever? The voice actor does a hell of a job. I love shit like the Duke’s whole mini arc

I also love how wildly bisexual this game is. Like the Duke’s Wife assumed my girl was ready to hook up with her at a moments notice (and she was right). It’s definitely more of a female leaning slant but the game still gives you the freedom to… romance whoever.

The armor in this game is funny. Want DS style armor? Covered. Wanna be Red Sonia? Covered. Less options for boy sluts, which is unfortunate, but the swinging pendulum of armor has me loving silly hot fantasy armor again.

I cheated a bunch by the end of the game. Rift crystals were too rare because online isn’t THAT active anymore. Also I’d dupe items I had cause forging stuff, while affordable, was just annoyingly time consuming. I in theory like that inconvenience tradeoff, but after the 20th forgery I was like ‘alright alright enough of his’.

I played on the PC version so no Berserk armor, but I love how this game takes a totally different set of Berserk influences than DS. Very Golden Age-y, while also being its own thing. Especially stuff like “Hey we made Mercedes cause we clearly love Caska but she’s not Caska, and the weird Witch Pawn isn’t Schierke… even if she lives in a tree house guarded by a golem”. All the influences are obvious enough to be appreciated, but unique enough to not be rip-offs.

Anyways, Madeleine is my wife. Dirtbag girls forever, see you in Dragon’s Dogma 2.

I know I said I was going to post on every game I played, but that turned out to be too much work. Some games are worth talking about but don’t operate well as whole post. So lemme hit the four games I didn’t write about

Breath of the Wild

Hey I’m caught up. The problem with writing about this game is everything has been said and it’s very obviously good. I liked it a lot, like most people. Big shocker, BOTW is good. So I just wanna hit two points.

First, Princess Zelda is so bullyable. Like oh my god she’s so pouty. It’s amazing how you could just tease her and she’d cry, even though she’d also be into it…. and how she can withstand combat with Ganon for a century. Truly a duality of womanhood. A true queen.

Second, I was thinking about that whole, awful article about how “Zelda had to be more like Dark Souls” thing and how some people might go “See that was right!!” even though… it isn’t. It does similar things like trust the player, allow the game to be cheesed, and just giving an unusual amount of freedom and that feeling of being trusted by the Dev is something a lot of people felt with DS… But it’s not like DS and never needed to be.

As usual, people who say something should be more like Dark Souls don’t actually know what’s good and special about Dark Souls.

Strive

I like it now. Goldlewis is my dad. I swing the coffin and peoples health disappear. Most previous complaints are still mostly valid but I play Goldlewis now so they’re other peoples problems. Playing a character with no legacy version to compare to was a pro move. 7.5/10.

I’ve been planning to play though a good portion of the Armored Core library for awhile now and now that the seal is broke, I probably won’t stop until I’m done with AC3 (I want to play AC4 and For Answer but lacking a machine that can do PS3 emulation, I’ll need to track down physical copies so… who knows when that’ll happen). But instead of waiting to finish the 3rd Gen of games (which… might be as many games as I’ve played so far), I figured I’d write about AC1 and 2 as they make up the first “universe” of Armored Core.

So right now I’ll be talking about Armored Core, Master of Arena, Armored Core 2, and Another Age, skipping only Project Phantasm (which seemed good but MoA was the more ‘must play’ entry) and about half of AA.

“You are to destroy order? Destroy the world? Is that what you want?

We were needed, that is why were born. People cannot live without Order, even if it is a lie.

Go on living, Raven. You or I… which one of us was ultimately right? You have the right and duty to find that out.”

“Those who wield too much power…those who only bring chaos…they are simply not part of the program.”

“We all make mistakes. Don’t you think, Raven? We humans need strict supervision. We cannot live on our own. A state dedicated solely to Ravens… I’m a realist, not some fool. All that I’ve wanted to do was to revive the ways of old…”

When the computer asked the Raven in AC1 “which of us was right?”, Klein’s ultimate answer was that it was Nine Ball. That his actions were a mistake. That he has to… crash… Phobos into Mars to… bring back the old ways with Martian technology? I’m not sure how this was supposed to work but the message was clear.

But upon defeating him, he tells you how to stop Phobos. Nine Ball and Leos, as Ravens, both respect strength as the ultimate authority. You were victorious… so as Nine Ball cedes gracefully to Leos, Leos cedes to you. There is a whole lot of little thematic details in the story about the destabilizing effect of personal strength… that people as strong as you are dangerous for the world… and they’re probably right.

Armored Core 2: Another Age

To keep this short, I didn’t finish Another Age. Another Age is exactly the type of product I would have wanted when AC2 came out. Just an ABSURD amount of content, over 100 missions. Easy structure to see progress with. Missions tend to be more repetitive, but it’s more missions to use with your cool mech! I played abouth a 5th of the way through and decided it was time for AC3.

So if you’re replaying Armored Core now, it might merit a skip, but every missions would have been a precious gift to 18 year old me.

All and all, so far I’m having a ton of fun. AC3 is going slowly but well, and I expect to write stuff up again once I finish it and Silent Line.

Before I get started, lemme say that I have a very deep and personal relation with Battletech. From Mechwarrior 2, to painting figures and playing the table-top, to running campaigns over Megamek. Battletech, and it’s awkward, chunky aesthetic and it’s weird neo feudalism will always deeply appeal to me.

I love Battletech and the 2018 Battletech PC game does a lot to remind me why I love it. It also kinda blows.

Maybe Stylish is Good Enough

Battletech has always made it hard to avoid damage. These are big armored tanks that take a lot of damage. Big clusters of missiles are going to slam into you, ignoring LOS and you’re gonna like it, because you’re gonna do it to the other person more! But it gets awkward when you’re trying to play an X-Commy style game of risk management and gets triple fucky when you get to the terrible missions the game has. Every mission has you send in 4 mechs to slug it out with 8-12 enemy mechs. It becomes a game of outcheesing the rather dumb AI, cutting down their firepower as fast as possible. What damage mitigation you do have is powerful (Bulwark gives huge damage reductions) but requires you to basically live in the trees. Mission are designed as if you’re not supposed to kill everyone, but clump enemies so close together and make your escape zone so out of the way that killing everything is usually the safe option.

It honestly feels very immersion breaking for me to just watch waves of mechs crash against me. These valuable, expensive machines that have operated for centuries, just throwing themselves away. In a game that should possibly closer to WW2 fighter pilot kill counts, you have slaughter, and with that slaughter, less changes to play safe. The game asks you to endure, but with no fun ways to endure. And if things go wrong? You can quit the mission at any time, cutting any tension but accepting your loses. It feels hollow. The asymmetry that makes a game like X-Com work is lost here. The only asymmetry is that the AI is dumb, but more numerous, but his equipment, in all its terror, is the same.

Some rule changes make this work. Maps, movement distances and ranges are shorter than in Table Top. This makes things more visibly manageable, but makes making use of terrain harder. Instead of trying to break LoS or use a hill to expose less of you, you’re standing on ‘cover squares’. Instead of scouting and attacking from a distance with long range units, you move in and brawl with your heaviest units. Missions never give you tonnage restrictions or BV value restrictions. You have no reason to take anything lighter than a heavy. Need a fast mobile scout? Use a Grasshopper. Especially in a game where getting hit and critted isn’t a question of if but when.

Repetitive missions with grindy objectives and little room for tactical maneuvering leads to a very dry, monotonous game that is either cruelly hard, or severely easy depending on how cheesy you’re being. I don’t think there is a single thing Battletech does better than any other game in this genre.

… Except for being Battletech.

It’s Kinda Unfair How Cool Battletech is

I should hate this game. I don’t even like Turn Based Strategy games that much. But it’s Battletech and it’s a strong Battletech story, oozing Battletech vibes and I can stomp around in a Marauder, blowing heads off with AC/5s to maximize salvage. Cheesing enemies is fun enough to survive the campaign and it wasn’t until Career where I was finally like “you know what, fuck this game?”

But you know what, that took like 80 hours so you know what? This game is pretty cool I guess, even if I wish the gameplay had just a little bit more going for it.

Battletech as a franchise is just that cool I guess.