Fan Appreciation Time!

As I'm sure you're all aware, the Steam Summer Sale wrapped up last week.  As some of you are aware, thanks to Bastion hitting an all-time low of $2.25 per copy, I ended up with an extra 10 gift copies.

What do I plan on doing with these gift copies?  The same thing I plan on doing with my extra gift copies of Mark of the Ninja, Hotline Miami, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

These are for you guys.  Appreciation for the readership and a publicity stunt of sorts.  I'm currently working on a Facebook contest that I plan to have up by Friday.

For the contest and more details, check us out on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ZeroToleranceGames

You can also follow the official Zero Tolerance twitter:
@ZT_Games

I'm sorry this isn't a real post, but as @Tsaikotyk stated, there's been very little going on in the industry as of late, and he's pretty much brought us up to speed on it all.  Now I need to work on some graphics and figure out how I want to divvy out these Steam gifts.

- Nik "Latency" Trumble

The Good, The Bad, and The Incredibly Stupid - July 2013

We've been fucking it up here a bit as of late, with our personal lives and such getting in the way a bit, so this will be a bit of a catch-all potluck of miscellaneous stories.

Rant: Open-World "versus" Linear gameplay

An issue I find with most of us "gamers" is that we find the overwhelming need to contrast things.  Sony VERSUS Microsoft, First-person VERSUS third-person, Marvel VERSUS Capcom, Sonic VERSUS Mario.  It's apparently not enough to just enjoy two different things for what they are.  We have to enjoy one more than the other.  More so, we have to put the other down for not being "as good" as our preferred.

Evo 2013: Divekick

While I was at Evo 2013, I had the chance to play a title called Divekick, and it quickly jumped to the top of my most anticipated list for this year.

Re-Review: Remember Me

Remember Me has an astoundingly fitting title, though not in the way Dontnod and Capcom would want. Instead, it's remembered for trying to do too much of what it thought was right, and failing miserably, falling behind only the Children's Crusade in this category of legendary failures. It attempts to prove its competence in multiple genres in the most painful of ways. Imagine attempting to prove your skill at walking by doing so on ice, through an oil slick, all while wearing treadless teflon-coated shoes.

The platforming aspect has an on-rails feel to it, with the ledges you can interact with highlighted by a yellow arrow, as if to say, "We shall allow you to continue here, and nowhere else," and normally, you have to be in fairly close proximity to even get these markers to appear. However, as the game progresses, there are times where, for no foreseeable reason, even though the marker appears, and Nilin is in position to make the jump, you will fail, leading to an ultimately unsatisfying death.

The combat is slow-paced and tedious, with nearly no room for the creativity as far as what attacks to use and when. There's no reel animation or hitstun, and every attack is incredibly delayed. If you try to transition between combos or hit multiple enemies, the guy you just dropkicked can punish you for it. It's problematic as hell. The oft-touted Combo Lab is way more convoluted than it should have been. I get that the interface was trying to be minimalist, but when I don't have enough information to figure out what I'm doing, then you're just wrong. It's even worse because it was meant to give you more freedom, but really just restricted you that much more. Each Pressen could only be used once across all combos, and each of the same button and category does THE EXACT SAME THING, with only the number of moves before it altering the outcome. They didn't explain that very well in the tutorial either. Dodging also feels incredibly delayed. While there is a way to dodge in the middle of a combo string, and continue it afterwards for maximum payoff, at times the game arbitrarily decides to make you start over, even when executed perfectly. About a third of the way into the game, you acquire a projectile weapon. It has incredibly low damage, and the controls for it are terrible. It has an energy bar instead of ammunition, though it drains around six times as fast as it refills. There's no manual aim, only auto-lock, and trying to get the proper target in the midst of combat is incredibly disorienting, as it makes the camera jump around in haphazard ways.

The stealth and non-remix(We'll get to those in a moment.) puzzle sections feel like they were quickly tacked on during crunch to make the game have more "substance". The stealth sections consist of avoiding patrolling droids, under penalty of insta-death. It's not fun, there's nothing clever about it, and it really takes away from the whole experience. The puzzle sections, on the other hand, involve doing one of two things with the projectile weapon. One involves locking on to a target and breaking it, to release a door, or something to that effect, and the other involves transporting power cores around, like the dark matter orbs from Half-Life 2. Neither of these really adds much to the game either.

The memory remixes, which are supposed to be major plot points, were a kind of cool feature, but the execution was flawed. Needing to grind out circles on my analog stick to rewind and fast forward through the sequence to see if I had found(and activated) the proper pieces to complete the puzzle took entirely too long and made me hate doing them. The pre-determined conclusions, as dictated to you by the game, were a little ridiculous as well. The first memory remix happens when a bounty hunter surprises you, and is about to kill you. To complete it, you need to convince her to join your side by altering her memory in such a way that a doctor kills her husband in treatment. It's way over the top, and for a secondary character that was just introduced, and acts as a glorified taxi in-between chapters, it's entirely too much.

Overall, I'd strongly recommend skipping this atrocious pile. I had wanted it to be good too, but it wasn't. I wanted it to be good so badly that I was willing to pay 60$ for it and not pick it up for 20$ in 6 months at -insert used games retailer of choice-.And I'm not just talking about the awkward controls, or the random bugs like the one that redwashed everything on screen for half of chapter 7, or the terrible combat, or the atrocious platforming, or the camera. I'm not even talking about the Aug Eye, which does nothing until you get a prompt(which is usually when you're lost) to point you towards your objective, even if it's on the other side of 16 walls. I'm not even talking about the underdeveloped setting, or unlikable characters, or the counter-intuitive(at best) boss fights. I'm not even talking about the story which ends so poorly, and I mean the entire final act, not just the ending, that M. Night Shymalan could do better after a frontal lobotomy and a bottle of Jagermeister. I'm talking about the entire package.  I didn't want to believe it either. I thought "It can't all be this bad," and yet, it somehow finds a way to keep disappointing. 

Pros - Game is short

Cons - NOT SHORT ENOUGH.

Rant: Sequel-itis - A Deadly Disease

Recently, I've come up with a whole list of topics I felt deserved a good rant. Things like open-world “versus” linear titles and the growing popularity of eSports as spectator sports. However, this article from Monday put me in an entirely different mood.

First Impressions: Dishonored - More like Disinterested

Now let me start this by saying that I'm not one for stealth games. Drop me in the middle of a guns-blazing firefight rather than a high-security facility any day. But with all the praise I've been hearing for Dishonored, I figured “what the hell, I'll give it a shot” (that and the cover art looks cool).

Now I went into this expecting some grizzly tale of revenge and bloodshed, as the back of the box would lead you to believe. Not so, I quickly discovered. Within the first 10 minutes of gameplay, you're assaulted by more cliches than a full season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (those who weren't raised in the 90's or aren't obsessive Joss Whedon fans have no idea what I'm talking about).

You play as Corvo, the Empress' trusted bodyguard and seeming father figure to her daughter *cough*. After returning from an assignment in which you were to seek aid from other city-island-states for the awful plague crippling your home *cough*, you meet with her majesty. Now why, in god's name, the Empress sent her personal guard on a diplomat's mission is beyond me, but we roll with it. Shortly after returning home, the Empress is attacked by masked assailants *cough* that fizzle into ashes as you kill them off. Eventually they overpower you, murder the Empress *cough*, and kidnap her daughter *cough*. With her majesty dying, and more importantly bleeding, in your arms, the captain of the guard and the spymaster general find you with a dead Empress and no princess.... empress... ess... whatever. So the two come to the logical conclusion that CORVO must have murdered the Empress! *coughcoughhackcroak* They imprison you and sentence you to death. The day of your execution, which the Spymaster and new Lord Regent make very clear must be public and painful, someone has decided to help you escape so you can join their resistance! *cough* Yes! For they know that you are innocent and that someone, perhaps the corrupt Spymaster or Lord Regent must be guilty! *coughcoughcoughcoughcough*

Apologies, I have a terrible cold. *ahem* Now all cliches and pathetically uninteresting story aside, these weren't Dishonored's only short-comings. The game employs an interesting “morality” system, in that, as an assassin, you have the option to kill, or merely knock out your enemies and targets. Now, as I felt Corvo might be a tad-bit bloodthirsty after his wrongful imprisonment and near execution, I decided to opt for the more violent route. I have to say that I'm not opposed to morality systems affecting my gameplay, however, this one's different. The city of Dunwall is dynamic in the way that it adjusts to your preferred method of dealing with hostiles. If you're a genuinely nice man, and wish to repent for all the things you haven't done wrong, you'll sneak about the town putting a lot of people in sleeper holds. But in my case, I did my best to sneak my way up behind every possible guard and introduce the pointy end of my switchblade to his jugular. Though, more often than not, I found myself involved in 3-on-1 sword fights and silently delivering a crossbow bolt to anyone who noticed me.

The way in which this affects Dunwall, is that the plague mentioned in the introductory paragraph expands. There are larger rat populations, which makes them significantly more aggressive, and the game starts infecting normal townsfolk and effectively turning them into zombies. Now, as per the advice offered in loading screens, it would appear that the city is a lot nicer when you're nicer to its people, but what I'm really not a fan of is the game punishing me for playing the way I like. Allow me to compare Dishonored's morality system to those of a few other games I've enjoyed.

Mass Effect: your actions affect the story and the story alone. There are virtually no gameplay changes that take place (unless you were a total dick and got your party killed off near the end of 2).

Prototype: So smashing in Military or Infected installations might not really be a morality meter, but the city did change according to whose house you wrecked. Though enemies were enemies none the less. It never got harder or easier, it was all just a matter of dealing with soldiers or zombies.

Infamous: You get different powers based on your alignment. S'bout it. The 2 different endings in the game boiled entirely down to a simple choice near the end. You could play evil all game and still select the heroic ending. Yeah that makes sense.

Dishonored: sneak around – game gets easier (so sayeth the load screens), slaughter everyone – game gets harder (so sayeth my experience).

The actual core gameplay is, in a nutshell, Bioshock. You have your melee weapon in one hand, and can use various magic spells and ranged weapons with your other. Honestly, after the first couple hours, I just found myself wishing I'd been playing Bioshock instead. Can't say anything bad about the graphics, it's up to par with your average console games of today. The sound can be a bit irritating, especially when you've managed to escape combat, but the music continues.

All things considered, I'd be willing to finish Dishonored... if it weren't my game. As it stands, the poor bastard gets to go back to GameStop and I'll never know what happens to little Emily. Oh well.