Post holiday wrap up - Too much to play!

 I’m back! I had gone dark for a while but with actual newspaper responsibilities piling up and the holidays demanding most of my time, I had to put the gaming on hold for a bit. But it’s a new year and it’s time for new content so hold onto your butts, because there’s a lot to talk about.

An island in the sun

To start, I wanted to give out my general thoughts about a few games I’ve been playing over the past couple weeks. First up, one of my absolute favorite games of 2012 came at the tail end of the year – “Far Cry 3.” But despite its late release, every other title before it will have a tough time beating it out for “Game of the Year.”

Set on a tropical island, “FC3” puts you in the role of Jason Brody, who is exactly as white, privileged, and entitled as his name sounds. The game starts off showcasing scenes of Jason and his friends cavorting around the island paradise – getting drunk, going skydiving and generally being rich and obnoxious. It isn’t long before the camera pulls out and we see those images are being played on a camera, held by the game’s main antagonist, Vaas. It seems that Jason and his friends have all been kidnapped by Vaas and his group to be ransomed off. Eventually, Jason and his brother Grant escape their captivity and just before escaping Vaas’ camp, Grant is shot and killed, leaving Jason on his own to rescue their friends.

Luckily for Jason, he isn’t completely alone. Though the island is largely run by Vaas and his men, there is a small group of rebels fighting against their occupation. Jason is taken in by the group, who give him the power to find his friends and defeat Vaas in the form of a tribal tattoo. This tattoo acts as a skill tree, allowing Jason to unlock new, increasingly powerful abilities. For instance, early abilities are simple and include cooking grenades (holding them to give bad guys less time to react to them) and reloading while running but eventually allow Jason to perform impressive feats such as stringing together hand-to-hand, takedown kills.

“FC3” is a first-person shooter with an emphasis on open-world gameplay. The single player portion of the game features two large islands to explore, each with an abundance of hidden items, collectibles and side missions. Activating radio towers reveals new areas of the map while clearing out enemy camps create new fast travel locations as well as opening up side quests. After escaping from Vaas’ camp, you’re given the freedom to explore the island on your own, taking on sidequests, main missions or just exploring. Hunting and gathering is also a major aspect of “FC3.” Hunting animals for their skins allows you to create newer and better gear (holsters to carry more weapons and packs to carry more items and ammo) while gathering plants allows you to create serums for everything from simple health restoration to increasing damage dealt.

I’ve been having an unbelievable amount of fun with “FC3.” While the previous title in the series did everything imaginable to present a realistic approach to a first-person shooter (such having your character read an in-game, paper map rather than making it a menu or making it possible to contract malaria then suffer with the disease until you find enough medication, which wasn’t cheap or plentiful), this title focuses on the positive aspects of the series – open world exploration and an emphasis on playing your way. Similar to “Dishonored,” “FC3” gives you all the tools you need to be a silent killer, striking from the shadows with knives and silenced weaponry or a one-man-war who using powerful weaponry to overwhelm your opposition.

To give you an idea of the crazy scenarios possible in “FC3,” I’ll tell you about the first time I died. I was hunting a goat because I needed it to make a new holster. It was early in the game and I didn’t have a bow or a silenced weapon and, since making noise usually attracts the attention of Vaas’ pirates, I was chasing it down with my 1911 pistol drawn and trying to slice it with my machete. As we neared a road, I heard a pirate jeep heading coming closer, so I crouch down behind a rock to hide. I watched the jeep cruise by, unaware of my presence, allowing me to shift my focus back to the goat. As I turned away from the road, a leopard jumped from the grass and latched onto my arm, bringing up a QTE. After I mashed X to fight the beast off, I pulled out my looted AK-47 and, now in full panic mode, began wildly spraying bullets trying to kill the leopard.

Unfortunately for me, the pirates who had driven by heard the gunfire and turned around, helping the leopard finish me off. Even death in “FC3” is useful because you’ll learn from your mistakes on your next outing, but anytime you die it’s usually hilarious – like the time a shark ate me while I was skinning another shark or the time I died crashing into a radio tower on a hang glider because I tried to land on top of it. (I learned that I should probably land my hang glider before exiting and also that sharks can’t be trusted.)

There is also a multiplayer mode as well as a cooperative campaign in “FC3” but I haven’t tried either of them yet so I can’t comment on them as the single player has demanded, and received, pretty much all of my attention.

The most electrifying game in sports entertainment history

Despite the fact that admitting you’re a professional wrestling fan gets the same response from people as telling them you have leprosy (that response being fear and disgust), I’ve been a big-time wrestling fan since my youth and have been getting back into it over the past year or so. (For the past few years I didn’t watch any wrestling and before that I only watched independent wrestling, tired of the lame storylines and characters presented in the WWE(F) but eventually…you’re not listening anymore, are you?)  Luckily for me, 2012 also happened to be the first year in many that a quality WWE game had been released.

“WWE ‘13” is THQ/Yuke’s most recent offering of professional wrestling, *ahem* pardon me, “sports entertainment” action is the game that wrestling fans have been waiting for. Not only does it feature a huge roster of current Superstars but also features many of the stars from the WWE’s popular “Attitude Era,” which encompassed the years of the mid-late 1990s – meaning you can pit guys like Degeneration-X against current tag team champions Team Hell No (Kane and Daniel Bryan) or put on an Elimination Chamber match featuring The Rock, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Mankind, The Undertaker, Triple H and John Cena.

But more than just featuring stars from the WWE’s most popular era, THQ included the Attitude Era mode which lets you relive (by replaying with specific historical objectives) important matches from the time, such as Shawn Michael’s European Championship win over the British Bulldog in England, Stone Cold’s feud with Vince McMahon or Degeneration-X’s feud with the Nation of Domination against the backdrop of WWE’s “Monday Night Wars” with World Championship Wrestling, complete with a loading screen line graph tracking the TV ratings of both companies as you play through the Attitude Era.

Having played older wrestling games on Playstation 2 and Nintendo 64, I can easily say that “WWE ‘13” is not just the most complete pro wrestling game in years, but it’s also the most fun. The controls are simple and easy to pick up – even by non-wrestling fans. Also, the engine used in this game offers impressively fluid character animation, the likes I’ve never seen before. It seems THQ has finally started treating professional wrestling like its own sport, rather than trying to shoehorn its design and gameplay into the style of a typical fighting game.

“WWE ‘13” has tons of other features, too many for me to recall and recount here. There’s a full-on career mode as well as an expanded creation mode (for wrestlers, venues, belts and more). You can even download the created characters of other players if you don’t want to spend time tailor-making your own wrestlers – though you will need a special code to access the online portion of the game. As awesome as this feature is, the time I was checking it out, the servers took an extremely long time to process anything, which I’m hoping was just a product of the holiday season.

A Jose Canseco bat? Tell me, you didn’t pay money for this

That subhead has literally nothing to do with the final game I’ve been playing lately (though you get bonus points for knowing the reference) – the supremely frustrating, maddeningly difficult “Dark Souls.” And just so you don’t think I’m overreacting, I’ve played less than an hour so far and have already died close to 10 times. Granted, I haven’t been playing for very long, I doubt it’s going to be getting any easier.

“Dark Souls” is a third-person action/RPG by From Software. Set in an open-world environment, “Dark Souls” gained notoriety for its unrelenting difficulty. Players need to make very careful and considered choices while playing on matters from everything to class, armor and weapon and combat tactics or else suffer quick, embarrassing deaths.

The plot of “Dark Souls” is incomprehensible. I have almost no idea what’s going on at any given time or why, but I’ll now try and convey all I’ve figured out. You’re in some sort of strange fantasy universe ruled by steel, magic and demons. You start out the game as a zombie – well not a traditionally zombie, you have all your faculties and you don’t crave brains but you aren’t human either, just undead. After being free from the Undead Asylum, you battle to…get somewhere? Attain something? Free people? I really couldn’t tell you what you’re battling for, to be honest, you just are. Becoming human again is definitely part of your quest, though becoming human again is more of a gameplay tactic and not necessarily part of the story. Again, how you become human and the benefits of becoming human are completely lost on me because the game makes almost no attempt to explain this. Or anything else. Maybe you, as an undead, are jealous of the demons with cool powers and are trying to kill them all? I think? Yeah, whatever, sure, let’s just go with that.

But despite not understanding what’s going on ever, or the game even wanting you to know what’s going on ever, I don’t think I’m going to give up on it just yet. Despite the overwhelming difficulty, which stems not just from the actual gameplay itself but because of its intentional ambiguity, there’s a very well-made game underneath all of its inscrutable layers. At its core, “Dark Souls” is an old school hack-and-slash RPG where you traverse a large world and level up your character as you fight enemies and collect powerful relics and items.

As with many old school games, “Dark Souls” is unapologetically difficult and even the very first enemies you face can easily end your life. Enemies killed earn you souls which can be spent on character upgrades at bonfires. These bonfires act as save points and are also where you spend humanity to become human and spend souls to upgrade your character. However, in keeping with the “I will make you hate yourself for playing me” aesthetic, resting at bonfires also revives all non-boss enemies. Little aspects of the game design such as reviving enemies for saving your game gives a certain weight to your actions and will make you think a little harder about what you do next. Sure, you could refill your health items and save at this bonfire, but it will make exiting this area of the map a painful experience, one that could possibly negate your refilled health potions and possibly cost you all your earned souls/XP and humanity. And if you die, you’re given the chance to pick up your lost items and XP…if you can pick them up where you died. So if you died during a boss fight or at the end of a grueling area, just recovering what you lost can be a challenge in itself.

There’s also even a method of multiplayer, though, like the rest of the game, is incredibly weird and unlike most other modern forms of multiplayer. Though it is essentially a single player experience, other players can leave notes in the game world to give you hints about what to do in certain areas. Additionally, the game will often show you the deaths of other players in the area. Interacting with a bloodstain will pop up a ghostly player model, showing the last few moments of another unfortunate player’s life so that you will, hopefully, learn from their mistakes. There’s even a method of invading another player’s game with the ability to engage in some PvP combat for a significant amount of XP. But again, I’m not entirely sure how this works since it’s never explained.

It might sound like I’m whining. It might sound like I’m exaggerating. But I’m not. “Dark Souls” is one of those games that simply does not care if you keep dying. Of if you think it’s unfair. Or if you don’t know what’s going on. It does not care. Despite being set in a huge, winding, open world, there’s no in-game map. Despite the difficulty and the steep punishment for death, there’s no way to pause the game. Even opening inventory or character-leveling screens doesn’t pause the game. “Dark Souls” simply does not care about you and you should not expect it to show mercy – ever.

But, eventually, with enough determination, you’ll succeed. That success might be as major as defeating a massive boss or as minor as finding a new bonfire but with all the obstacles and hardship “Dark Souls” puts in your path, improving your skill and succeeding has a weight unmatched by almost any other game of this era.