Sometimes it seems as though the blog goes for a while without an update. It starts to look a little stagnant. That’s not because I’m forgetting about it, or that I don’t feel like updating. It’s quite the contrary actually. Until I get some additional contributors to help me out, I sometimes feel like I have to try to accomplish multiple things at once. Which, of course, results in a laundry list of rough drafts and unfinished write-ups. Some of these I can eventually finish, if it’s something I feel strongly about, or if it’s one of those mid-afternoon flashes of inspiration. But for the most part, a lot of these sit in an unfinished state until they’re either no longer relevant or I’ve lost interest. So, in an effort to get some of these cleared out of my backlog and into your eyeballs, I’ve decided to do a little spring cleaning and just cram them all into one single catch-all post. I haven’t quite figured out what to officially title this yet, but give me time. I’m sure it’ll be something amazingly bland.

So without any further explanation, let’s get on with the onslaught of random, poorly conceived ramblings that I never cared enough to finish!

Is ME: Andromeda As Bad As I’ve Heard?
I can’t wait until I actually get far enough into Mass Effect Andromeda to get past this boring ass setup and actually get to do some exploring. Maybe by then I’ll…

Backlog Barbecue: Fable Anniversary
I just ran into an interesting glitch in Fable Anniversary. I was playing the game earlier today, having gotten through the introductory story chapter and just begun my training as an apprentice. As a child I was given a stick and told to attack a training dummy. Well I did, and then after doing a quick little foot race and overhearing a conversation between the wizard guy and a dead zombie knight dude, I decided to move on in the story. That means my character was no longer a child and was now an adolescent apprentice!

I played a bit more and beat some beetles, then trained with a bow. But, Life interfered and I had to cut my gaming time short. I saved my game and quit out.

Tonight, I loaded up my game and noticed that my character was a child again. My first thought was that I had not saved at a checkpoint before I quit, and that I had to play the last saved checkpoint. But then I noticed that the quests that I had done were once again active. Weird, I thought, but I continued to walk toward my highlighted objective. The current objective was the first fight tutorial when the old dude gives you the stick to beat the dummy with. The only thing was, I already had my stick. When I talked to him, he told me to hit the dummy like usual, but there was no dummy. Also, now that I was in the pen, there was no way to get out until I hit the dummy, which wasn’t there.

An annoyance, but I figured the game had just loaded an older save by accident, so I went into the load screen, where I noticed that even though the three game saves I had listed were different, loading each save brought up the same game. As in, no matter what I chose, there I was, a kid with a stick on my back.

I’m playing the Xbox 360 version through the Xbox One backward compatibility, so it relies specifically on cloud save files. There’s no way I can isolate saves so that this doesn’t happen again. I guess the only thing I can try to do is keep enough different save files that they don’t.. accidentally over-write each other? I’m still not quite sure what happened. Perhaps if I start…

If Far Cry 5 Had A Shark…
It’s been a while since my last post, hasn’t it? Well I’ve been spending most of my available time trying to work my way through Far Cry 5, a goal which I seem to be making little progress towards. That’s because aside from the sheer amount of side quests and other things to do, the random encounters keep me from getting any one thing done in a timely manner. This game takes the randomness factor and cranks it up to 11.

At any given time during my playthrough of Far Cry 5, I could’ve been beset by a giant cyclone of water. A huge funnel teeming with ocean life could have swept across the landscape, dropping sharks and other aquatic predators down onto the battlefield as I shot my way out of a bind. The ensuing chaos would unfold amidst the gnashing teeth of a great white and the madness of a drugged up moose. And as ridiculous as it sounds, it probably would’ve felt right at home amongst all the other bat-shit crazy shenanigans that seem to pop up on a regular basis in Hope County.

Far Cry 5 is a game where Mother Nature is more dangerous than any bad guy you’ll encounter. Most of my deaths have come not from the religious fanatic cult known as Eden’s Gate, but from the myriad of wild -and domestic life that roam the Montana countryside. It’s a game that you’ll want to play with one finger on the capture button. And…

Rant-astic! Horizon Zero Dawn
As I’ve noted before, I finally got into Horizon Zero Dawn, and it has the undistinguished honor to be the subject/victim of my first entry of Rant-astic! To start, Horizon Zero Dawn is a gorgeous, epic adventure with a strong female protagonist and a mysterious story to discover. But you know all this, because it’s been out for like, a year now.

NOTE: It’s a funny thing; I began writing this rant-astic article when I was about three-fourths through the game. I was furious at the game mechanics, I was tired of the constant dodge rolling, I was frustrated by inventory management, and I was done with scanning things. I started this write-up after a particularly bad night, and I had about six long paragraphs typed out. I took a break from the game, and after a few days I went back to it. I completed the story, and came back to this post. After reading what I had already written, I decided to delete all but the above paragraph and re-write my thoughts.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a great game, with an amazing story. What the developer Guerilla Games were able to accomplish is quite the feat. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game where I actually cared about the story and was intrigued enough to want learn more. The game keeps the cards close to its chest for the majority of the game, only letting a trickle of information out at a time, and sometimes even answering questions with more questions. I was pleased to discover that despite its similarity to a certain sci-fi movie about a war against the machines, it took that idea ten steps further into a great new territory.

And that’s all well and good, but hey, this is a Rant-astic! article. I have to bitch about something, right?

Well I’m in luck, because when it comes to things to bitch about, Horizon Zero Dawn delivers in spades. This game knows how to piss a guy off! See, here’s the thing, when you come across frustrating shit in a bad game, you just dismiss it as a bad game and get on with your life. When you have as high a quality game as HZD, though, you can’t just walk away so easily. The rest of the game is just so good, you gotta tough it out. And that makes the little annoyances and quirks in the game build. They snowball over the course of the 40 or 50 hours you might be investing. After that amount of time, even the smallest thing, like everyone in the game leaving their mouth hanging open after they talk, seems like a insurmountable annoyance. Seriously though, catching flies, or what?

One of those things is the laughable simplicity (and inconsistency) of the stealth mechanic. It has nothing to do with light or shadow. The machines don’t have a harder time seeing you in the dark. No, the entirety of Aloy’s sneaking is done by hiding in the weeds. When the coast is clear, you have her creep her way from that clump of weeds, to another clump of weeds! I have an honestly serious question about this. If the weeds were such a good source of inconspicuous cover, why couldn’t Aloy just disguise herself as a clump of weeds and go tip-toeing from place to place like Elmer Fudd? In fact, for her entire tribe to be fierce warriors and hunters, there wasn’t a single guilly suit among them. When being spotted by a Sawtooth can mean a quick and painful death, you’d think the Nora would be walking around in tree-bark covered loincloths, or something. Instead they decorate their bows with loud obnoxious bird feathers and have beads clinking together every time they moved. It really is a wonder they even survived that long. Having quiet footsteps don’t mean a whole lot when you sound like a damn wind chime. Oh and nobody considered that they might want to figure out how the Stalker goes invisible? Can’t imagine why THAT might be helpful!

So many of the machines move so much more quickly than Aloy does, and you’ll learn right off the bat that for some reason, when Aloy pulls an arrow back on her bow, she magically turns into a wooden mannequin incapable of turning left or right faster than the speed of molasses. While you’re trying to turn and aim at a Longleg, it’ll constantly be running around you, staying just out of the screen, laughing at you and taunting you with names like…

There was one last post in my drafts that I almost posted, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s part of a write-up series that I started at the very beginning of this blog. Part 5 of the Splinter Cell Re-visited series is still half-finished, as is the game itself. I was so burned out by playing my way through one Splinter Cell game after another, that by the time I got to Double Agent I just couldn’t do it anymore. I took a break from the series and it got swept away among all the other projects I was tackling. But I will not allow this to fade into oblivion, nor will I let myself leave this series half-finished. If anything, with Sam Fisher making a guest appearance in Ghost Recon Wildlands, it may be a great time to revive this project. It will happen, mark my words!

This concludes the first (and hopefully last, but probably not) entry into the “shit I never finished” category, whatever I may call it. By nature, this can’t be a regular thing, but I can see myself clearing out my drafts folder every few months, so who knows?