Monday 20 March 2023

The Last of Us S01

The entire gaming world has been buzzing about this show so it was a given that we would watch it. And yeah, we loved it. Toni was a bit disappointed with the lack of zombies, and I've seen others complain about that too. But personally I felt there were enough zombies to create the overhanging arc and fear of them, but not enough to take away from the story, and the story is one of friendship and trust and grief and growing up in a broken world. 

So many of the episodes broke our hearts, but equally there were so many heart-warming moments.

We both know the games. Toni more so than me, and we kept drawing parallells between things that happened in the show with things that happened in the games. 

The show was perfect and I'm excited to see the next season :3

Monday 13 March 2023

Game completed: Atomic Heart

I've been excited about this game since I saw the trailer that looked so much like Bioshock, but with robots instead of powered-up drugged-out humans, and with communism instead of capitalism. 

Did it deliver on the Bioshock premise? Kind of, but not all that much until the end. 

Storywise it does what Wolfenstein does. Wolfenstein plays with the idea that Germany won WW2, Atomic Heart plays with the idea that Soviet won WW2 while still going somewhat into the Cold War vibe with how much the US is talked about in the game. 

So the game takes place in a city/research complex above the clouds that's a communist utopia and where robots have replaced all menial work and boring tasks. The new scentific breakthrough is called Kollektiv 2.0 and will allow people to control their robots with their minds. Sounds great, right? It goes exactly as wrong as it possibly can. 

As for the player character he's called P-3 or Major Sergey Nechayev. He's an agent in the employ of the brilliant scientist Dmitry Sechenov who's in charge of Kollektiv. When the robots go hostile and all hell breaks loose Sechenov sends P-3 to deal with the mess and find Viktor Petrov, who's responsible for the disaster according to Sechenov. Things don't go as planned.

Throughout this P-3 has a cool glove with an AI attached called Charles and he befriends a horny af vending machine called Nora. Charles keeps analyzing situations and having analytical discussions with P-3, which thrusts P-3 into critical thinking instead of just blindly following orders. 

Every boss fight in the game is epic. The first one against Hedgie gave me some trouble because I hadn't completely figured out mechanics and stuff yet, but once I figured it out it was ezpz. Belyash and Natasha were both really cool fights. Dewdrop was gross. 

When I got to the theatre I was pretty bored with the repetitive enemies in the game and the boss fights were highlights. The badass rock music made the otherwise menial fights against general mobs much better. Once I got to Pavlov my overall startegy was to find a smaller room and then camp by the door with the Kalash and just mow down every enemy that walked through the door. I ended up with some pretty cool piles of either robot scrap or mutant waste.

 

Every mission zone was cool af and I loved finding and listening to Chirpers, despite not really taking the time to read the computers. However I really disliked the open world. Every robot you ever killed would be repaired in seconds because the repair drones never stopped coming. You'd run out of ammo in no time at all just trying to explore, which had the end effect that I skipped testing chambers altogether. I didn't want to spend more time in the open world than absolutely necessary. I think that's my only real complaint of the game tbh. Besides some small bugs and glitches here and there, the open world was the only real issue to me. I ran straight into one testing chamber while travelling between two mission zones and figured I might as well do it, but the lock to get inside required a goddamn key disc that I didn't have and finding it would mean exploring with robots chasing me around and not leaving me alone to do my thing. So I ignored it and moved on to the next mission zone.

I will say, however, that mowing enemies down with cars was a lot of fun. Too bad the achievement didn't track properly. Achievements didn't track properly for a lot of the game. Somehow I have missed an unmissable story achievement (even though I did that part of the story). I might do another playthrough at some point and try to take my time in exploring and doing everything, but that's a long way away.