Tag Archives: open world games

First Experience with Mass Effect: Andromeda

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Note:  There are spoilers in this article.

 

Being an avid fan of the Mass Effect series, I had been looking forward to Mass Effect: Andromeda for what seems like forever.  Enough so that I couldn’t resist purchasing the Super Deluxe Edition to get twenty weeks of bonus content for the multiplayer side game.  As with Resident Evil 7 and Dead Rising 4, I was certain that Mass Effect:  Andromeda would not run on the computer I have.  Even more so in this case, since my PC is an i3 with only 6 GB of RAM and Andromeda required an i7 with 16 GB.

I still had to try, if only to cash in on the multiplayer content, but my PC became the Little Engine That Could.  I watched in awe as the game not only booted up, but actually ran without crashing.  I launched the multiplayer to collect whatever booster packs were available – I got an ultra-rare combatant and some nice weaponry in the process – before delving into the main game.  The picture is very grainy and there are a few minor bugs here and there, but nothing that really ruins the overall experience for me.

The story for Mass Effect: Andromeda is fairly simple.  You are playing as Sara or Scott Ryder, the default names given to a set of twins at the core of the story.  No matter which twin you choose as your character, the other still has a role to play.  You are part of an expedition to build a new home for humanity in a galaxy far removed from the Milky Way.  Such a task proves to be a challenge when it’s discovered that an unforeseen calamity has rendered all potential “golden worlds” uninhabitable.  It has also left the space station hub meant to be a waystation for colonists in dire straits.

To make matters worse for Scott or Sara, their twin is rendered comatose and their father, the expedition’s leader\Pathfinder, is killed at the end of the game’s first mission.  The task of finding planets to colonize and thus save thousands of people aboard the space station falls on the shoulders of Scott or Sara.


One of the things I love about Mass Effect: Andromeda is the character customization.  For my first outing, I picked the female Ryder twin, who I renamed as Claire.  The look I chose for her also determined the appearance of her brother and father.  The notion of having a non-playable character’s look be established by what is chosen for the main character is a feature I’d previously seen used in Fallout 4; I really dig the concept and hope to see it utilized in many more video games to come.

My character, Claire, and her father.

Though I had some idea of what to expect from having watched Youtube videos of the opening, I still felt like a out of my element at times.  The first thing that took some getting used to was jumping, particularly over long distances.  The game didn’t offer very clear instructions on how to leap over the more dangerous chasms on the first planet you explore.  I had to resort to trial and error and a lot of failed attempts before I made it across.

The next hurdle was in navigating the terrain.  I got turned around a number of times and was going in circles since there isn’t much deviation in the landscape.  The occasional fights I got into added to my confusion on which way I should be heading.  It’s a wonder that I even made it to a spot on the map where the story would advance.

It took me some time to get through the first mission, but all my roaming still yielded some discoveries about the planet I hadn’t seen in the Youtube videos.  Some landmarks I stumbled across got me inclined to think that this world will be revisited at a later point in the story.

Despite my eagerness to start exploring the next world to potentially colonize, I spent a good deal of time wandering around the space station hub – the Nexus – to talk to people and complete side quests.  After roughly two and a half hours spent “goofing off”, I finally ventured to the area of the Nexus where my character’s personal starship, the Tempest, could be found.  I might not have the best quality picture for the game, but I thought the ship looked beautiful when I first saw it.  In some ways, it looks nicer than the Normandy from the original Mass Effect trilogy.

The game crashed when I initiated a conversation with the Tempest’s pilot, but so far that’s been the only instance where it did.  There was no recurrence of this when I tried it again, so I gleefully surged ahead into the next part of the story.

Exploring the desert planet, Eos, came with its own set of challenges.  Soon after making my way to the planet’s surface, I uncovered a ground vehicle that could make it easier to get from one location to another – unless you’re like me.  As I’ve learned from many other video games that came before, I suck terribly at driving.  This largely led to me spending a half hour doing donuts around the derelict outpost where I found the vehicle or attempting to get up a very small hill with little success.  Part of the trouble associated with the latter was I couldn’t figure out how to shift from four-wheel to six-wheel drive.

After gaining access to and exploring an entire underground vault, I decided to shut down the game for the time being.  Mass Effect: Andromeda was set up so the game could be downloaded at the same time it was running.  I was disappointed when I saw the download, though near finished, had inexplicably halted.  I couldn’t figure out how to get it going again, so chose to cancel and restart it.  This turned out to be a mistake when the download started over from the very beginning.  I was unable to continue my saved game or access the multiplayer side game until it reached a certain point.  My internet connection isn’t the best, so it took two days to pick up where I left off.

As soon as I was able, I accessed the multiplayer game to participate in a few skirmishes.  I had no trouble joining a four-person team, but the load time to start the actual fight was unbelievably long.  After waiting several minutes to join in on the skirmish, I got a message saying my internet connection had been lost.  I subsequently tried a solo run.  While that one did launch after an excessive load time, I quickly got swarmed by the enemy units I was up against.  If that experience taught me anything, it’s to not stay in one spot for the entirety of the fight.

When I was able to resume the main game, I went about establishing a military outpost on Eos to serve as the first successful human colony in the Andromeda galaxy.  I then journeyed to another planet called Aya, where I met with the peaceful alien race, the Angara.  Sadly, this is where my fun came to a screeching halt.  After I recruited an Angaran team member, the game went into an infinite loading screen.  I thought if I gave it enough time, I would be able to carry on with whatever adventure came next.  After waiting nearly four and a half hours, I decided I would have to call it quits.  It appears I will need a new computer if I want to play out the rest of Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Until such time, I am determined to stay spoiler-free on what comes next in the story.  But the game has done such a good job setting up several mysteries with the antagonistic Kett alien race and the underground vaults built by an ancient species known as the Remnants that I will anxiously await the day where I get to see how the narrative plays out.   I can promise a continuation of my impressions of the game when that day comes.

©3/28/17

Dead Rising: Not Your Typical Zombie Game

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The video game franchises of Fallout and Resident Evil are among my all-time favorites, but they are far from the only series I absolutely love.  I would say that what I enjoy most about story-driven video games is that they offer a departure from everyday conventional life.  My adventures have ranged from uniting a dozen different alien races to combat a common threat (the Mass Effect trilogy), battling dragons, giants, and other fantasy medieval beasts while trying to prevent the end of the world (Skyrim), and finding that manipulating the fabric of time comes with a steep price (Life is Strange).

Yet there are very few video games that offer an escape from reality to the extent that the Dead Rising series does.

My first experience with this series was with the first Dead Rising for the WII system.  While that version is “watered down” and doesn’t have the same amount of content as its Xbox 360 counterpart, it is still a very enjoyable game. The basic scenario is that photojournalist Frank West gets a tip that strange events taking place in a small Colorado town called Willamette.  He has a friend transport him inside the town by helicopter to avoid the military barricades on the ground.  When some army copters show up to chase him and his pilot out, Frank jumps onto the roof of Willamette’s shopping mall rather than lose the chance for a possible award-winning story.

Upon making it down to one of the main entrances for the mall, Frank discovers a group of survivors building a barricade to keep a horde of zombies from getting in. This plan quickly fails when one batty old woman spots her beloved poodle outside and opens the doors in an attempt to rescue her pet.  How she managed this with the other survivors failing to stop her is anyone’s guess.  Frank is one of the few people to escape the zombie swarm and make it to the mall’s security office before the door is welded shut by a surviving guard.

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My favorite ensemble for Frank in
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record

The remainder of the game entails Frank using an air duct to get back out into the mall to rescue stray survivors, battle zombies and the occasional psychopath (more on that later), and uncover the truth of what started the epidemic, or strange events, plaguing Willamette. And that’s where the real fun begins.

The primary thing that sets Dead Rising apart from other zombie apocalypse games is that the game’s emphasis is on making the overall experience more comedic than horrific.  Aside from the clothing to change into and food needed to replenish health, any object that can be picked up by Frank can be used as a weapon, however unconventional.  This includes — but is not limited to – guns, wooden benches, sledgehammers, trash cans, cash registers, mannequins, hangers, and a stack of CDs.

Another element that adds to the overall fun factor is that Frank can swap his own clothes for one of the many outfits available throughout the mall. The player even has the option to have him wear a woman’s dress or a banana hammock while running around killing zombies.

The third staple of the game and of the series in general, is that the player must also face off against certain people labeled psychopaths. For the most part, this means either people who are using the outbreak as an excuse to engage in criminal activity or ordinary civilians who don’t cope well with the end of the world as they know it.  Most of them also add to the humor element present in the game.  My personal favorite is the supermarket manager encountered early on.

While Frank escapes Willamette in the best possible ending out of multiple conclusions, the military fails to keep the epidemic from spilling out into the world. And that’s where the setup for the second game comes in. Dead Rising 2 takes place in the fictitious Fortune City, an area consisting largely of casinos and shopping centers.  Fortune City also capitalizes on the epidemic by making zombie killing a spectator sport in a gladiator-type arena.  A new outbreak occurs when someone deliberately sets loose the zombies to be used in the fights from confinement.

The most interesting thing about Dead Rising 2 is that there are two separate versions of it, each existing as its own game.  This one introduces a down-on-his-luck motocross rider named Chuck Greene as the hero.  The other, a spinoff subtitled Off the Record, sees the return of Frank as the lead protagonist.  There are so many differences between the two that each tells a story unique to Chuck or Frank.  One thing that remains the same is that each protagonist strives to expose the mastermind behind the outbreak and bring him or her to justice.

Dead Rising 2 retains all the elements that made its predecessor so humorous, but also embellishes on them. There are three times as many objects to use as a weapon than those present in the first game. And two objects can now be combined to create a more carnage-inducing, often wacky means of killing zombies, with the exception of the beer hat.

In my opinion, the psychopaths encountered in the second game are even more comical than those in the original. My personal favorite is Carl Schiff, the postal worker who is determined to deliver the mail even in light of the outbreak.  His dialogue is dependent on if one is playing as Chuck or Frank, but both encounters are equally entertaining.

Dead Rising 3 brings the overall story full circle by tying up loose ends from the first and second games. The protagonist this time is a young mechanic named Nick Ramos who finds himself at the center of yet another outbreak.  Nick discovers that he may hold the key to eradicating the zombie epidemic once and for all.

Like Frank and Chuck before him, Nick can change into any outfit present in the game. While Dead Rising 3 ups the fun factor by eliminating the need to create combo weapons at workbenches and introducing combo vehicles, it lacks humor in one area.  I know I’m not alone based on reviews I’ve read find Dead Rising 3 psychopaths more off-putting than entertaining.  There are fewer of them in this game, and most are made to represent one of the seven deadly sins.  Suffice to say, the one for gluttony is particularly nasty.

The other downside, as with the first two games, is that the player is racing the clock. To get the best possible ending, the mystery behind the outbreak must be solved within a set amount of time.  As much as I love the series, the games don’t allow for much wandering to your heart’s content without getting a “game over.”  And with the ending of the third game having such finality about it, this seemed to be it for the franchise.

I recently heard news of a fourth game due out in December 2016, and I couldn’t be more excited. From what I’ve read, Dead Rising 4 will breathe new life into the series, no pun intended.  Frank is set to return as the main character, and the franchise is literally going back to its roots.  The action will take place in a rebuilt shopping mall in Willamette, introduce a new breed of zombies unrelated to the ones featured in the original trilogy, and will for once ditch the timer.  The notion of having all the time in the world to explore the environment while solving the mystery at the core of the story has me anxious to begin playing this game.

As long as it retains or surpasses the hilariousness that the franchise is most famous for, all the better.

Fallout 4 WTF Moments

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I had been looking forward to the video game, Fallout 4, for years, even before it was announced it would be released in early November 2015. Being an avid fan of the two previous installments–Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas–I was excited to begin a whole new adventure in a post-apocalyptic world. When I saw the first previews and news about Fallout 4 in the summer of 2015, my anticipation grew exponentially. Unlike the previous installments, this new game looked to be a far more immersive experience. There was so much that got me excited.

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My first playable character. Not sure where I acquired the face paint around the eyes from, but didn’t start out with it.

Instead of playing as a character born after the world was destroyed by nuclear war, players were treated to someone from the old world that got frozen in time for 200+ years. This new character, customizable according to player preference to be either male or female, would also have a voice; the game’s developers commissioned a couple actors to record a ton of dialogue for this purpose. For my first play through, I chose to be a redheaded female modeled to look like a character from one of the fiction stories I write.

However, I did not anticipate the different style of gameplay or know that I needed to exercise more caution to avoid getting killed. In the midst of adapting and learning tactics, I encountered enough harrowing or unusual situations to put together my Top Ten List of WTF Moments, each with its own subtitle.

Before I delve into this list, I’d like to start with a few honorary mentions – one from Fallout 4 that I encountered after I wrote up this blogpost, and one from Fallout 3 that I had forgotten about.

Who are you?
Sometime during my first playthrough of Fallout 4, I was walking along the road when I saw someone coming from the opposite direction. Didn’t think much of it until the guy spotted me, pulled out a tire iron, and started running at me yelling, “You’re gonna pay!” After I gunned him down, I found he was from one of the game’s shady factions that, as a do-gooder, I’d managed to tick off.

Here’s something you don’t see everyday.
I was having such a tough time during a battle against a couple of Fallout 3’s Super Mutants that I eventually ducked behind some cover to recoup. I took down one of them after some doing and was planning my attack against the other when he suddenly stopped shooting at me. When I poked my head out, I found that some wacky game glitch had turned him on his side and buried him halfway in the ground.

Now the list, leading up to the Number One WTF moment:

10) Noooo!
While crossing a bridge over one of the many waterways, I wondered aloud, “Why is there so much gasoline here?” After taking another couple steps, I heard the telltale beeping of an incendiary landmine ready to go off. I futilely tried to escape, but didn’t make it in time.

9) What the hell was that?!
While running from a group of hulking green creatures called Super Mutants, I heard a beeping that didn’t sound like a land mine. Before I could even figure out what that sound was, something exploded right next to me. I later found out that one Super Mutant in each group acts as a suicide bomber with a mini-nuke.

8) Are you kidding?!
While sneaking my way through a monster-infested city using alleys and sticking to the shadows, I was caught off guard when a mutant black bear, usually found out in the wilderness and not in the middle of a city, started walking past the entrance to an alley and spotted me. It killed me in one blow.

7) Who’s shooting at me?!
At one point, I was given a mission by one of the game’s NPCs, or non-playable characters, to rid an auto factory of a gang of raiders. The roof had a walkway around the smoke stacks. While I was elevated, I took a good look at the roof and didn’t see any raiders in sight. As I was descending the staircase, five bad guys literally appeared out of nowhere and opened fire on me. My best guess here is that my computer’s graphics card was having trouble rendering the enemy units until I got close.

6) Seriously?!
Upon my first visit to a friendly settlement, one of the children running around offered to give me a tour, which for some reason qualified as a quest to complete. During the tour, I stopped to loot some food and healing items from one of the rooms. The next thing I know, the words “Quest failed” appeared on the screen because I didn’t keep up with my guide.

5) Oh-kay….
In one underground facility, I was pitted against a pack of creatures called molerats who tunneled through the dirt and ambushed me in whatever room I happened to be in. Somehow, one of them got stuck due to a game glitch, which I didn’t figure out until I’d descended a staircase and wondered why it wasn’t coming after me. For some reason, it kept popping in and out of a hole in the same room. I eventually backtracked to finish it off so I could get rid of the “danger” indicator flashing on the screen. Even attacking it with a blade didn’t interrupt this behavior; I could only deal damage to it intermittently. Killing it took some doing.

4) Oh, my God, I’m gonna die!
From my time playing Fallout 3, I knew that the largest creature around was a Behemoth. When undertaking a mission to reclaim a fortified settlement that had been “decimated by a giant creature that came out of the water,” I assumed that this was what I would be fighting. I had already taken down one Behemoth in this game, so figured this wouldn’t be a problem. So imagine my surprise when the monster I was fighting turned out to be an equally huge sea creature that could spit acid and took me ten tries to beat.

3) My bad.
As part of the main questline, I needed to track down a character named Virgil for information. When I got to the cave where he was hiding, I mistakenly thought I needed to eliminate his guards to talk to him. Unfortunately, my decision to start shooting made Virgil outright hostile. I was forced to attack him; once his health was depleted, he collapsed to the floor and appeared to be winded for several seconds. I thought this would enable me to talk to him when his health suddenly filled all the way back up and he resumed attacking me. This cycle repeated at least three more times; at one point, I personally blurted out, “I’m sorry, Virgil. I just want to talk.” I soon figured the only way to fix it was to load from the last savepoint.

2) Holy crap!
Just when I thought I had gotten a good handle on the game and how to survive, I was thrown for a loop while wandering through a rundown section of a science facility. I ran into a cyborg called an Assaultron I had never encountered before in any previous Fallout game. Even so, I thought I was doing okay until this high-powered laser beam shot out of its visor and completely depleted my health in 1.5 seconds.

1) Hold the elevator, or Preston is suicidal?
At one point, I had to escape from a thirty-story building by taking a window washer platform down. Once my character was on board, I pressed the button to go down since I was under fire. After the ramp slid back, my A.I. companion, Preston, came running like everything was normal and dropped off the side of the building. Because A.I. companions are indestructible in this game, he survived the fall. What makes it even funnier is that this wasn’t the first or last time that Preston tried to get on an elevator after the ramp had retracted.

Overall, Fallout 4 is an amazing game; I feel it is far more engaging and interesting than its predecessors, and there is no shortage of areas, both above ground and below, to explore. I look forward to countless hours spent enjoying all this game has to offer, as well as what the expansion packs, released and forthcoming, will add to it.

Fallout 3: WTF Moments

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Despite now being an avid fan and having logged over 300 collective hours of gameplay, I had zero knowledge of the Fallout video game series until I took a game design class at a local community college. One of my classmates played a clip of the first twenty-some minutes of Fallout 3 while pointing out elements that made it a well-designed video game. The notion of playing as a character who lived their entire life in a fallout shelter venturing out into an unknown world in search of a missing parent was enough to intrigue me. I got hooked and wanted to experience more of this world.

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First view of the world outside the shelter

I’ve since come to learn that I am a lot more cautious and patient than most players. I spent the majority of my time trying to go unseen by the game’s dangerous monsters, robots and humans while wandering through this post-apocalyptic wasteland. And sometimes, what I would find more frightening than some of the mutated creatures were the glitches that seemed to pop up unexpectedly. After much thought, I decided to put together a list of 10 of the most jarring or bizarre things I encountered from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
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1) Didn’t see that coming
I knew from my classmate’s demonstration that one set of creatures I could expect to encounter would be giant black ants. I ran into some early on in my gameplay and didn’t find them all that difficult to kill. A few good hits with a melee weapon–my general favorite at the time–made short work of them. Then I acquired a quest to clear a town of giant fire ants. The first one I saw upon reaching this town was red instead of black. I didn’t see any other difference until it got close. Before I knew it, my entire screen and vision was filled with flames that the fire ant was spewing at me.

2) Think I just had a heart attack!
All enemy units appear as a red blip on the radar, but you can only see the blips present in whatever direction you’re facing. That being said, I was crouched and sneaking through a wide, open area with the computer’s volume off when the word “Danger” flashed on the screen. This means that something is moving in to attack. I could only see one blip on my radar. Since I was playing without any sound and unable to hear anything coming, I watched intently for several seconds to try and see what was approaching me. When I failed to spot anything, I turned around…and a molerat’s face filled the entire screen with its mouth open.

3) Do I have to fight this thing?
I had exercised so much caution during my first play-through of Fallout 3–even sometimes taking detours to avoid a fight–that I didn’t see or even know about the game’s most dangerous creature until very late in the main questline. I was trying to escape from an underground facility known as Raven Rock when I came upon this large crate at the top of a staircase. I used a nearby computer terminal to open the crate and watched in terror as this demonic-looking creature with long sharp talons stepped out. Fortunately, it didn’t see me and it moved away to attack the enemy units further down the hallway. It took me three to four minutes of sitting by the crate before I worked up the courage to move.

4) The mother of bad ideas….
One of the side quests for Fallout 3 entails retrieving an important document being guarded by a dangerous cyborg inside a small office. I didn’t have the skill set needed to persuade him to hand over the document without a fight. After several rounds of trying and failing to beat this cyborg, I got frustrated enough to try an alternate–and very stupid–tactic. In a nutshell, firing a mini-nuke launcher in a small, enclosed space is effective at both killing and committing suicide.

5) This area is totally f***ed!
There is a location in Fallout: New Vegas called Black Mountain where so many odd things occur that I call it Game Glitch Central. Repeat occurrences of seeing monsters literally appear out of thin air right next to me, my character being randomly thrown back down to the base of the mountain path, and game crashes, among other problems, eventually made this an area to avoid at all costs, for me at least.

6) Can’t we talk this over?
When I first started playing Fallout 3, it was on a laptop with a mouse touchpad. The touchpad was highly sensitive and more than once, the gun I was using would discharge when I least expected it. This really became a problem when I was roaming around one of the friendly wasteland settlements and accidentally shot someone. The next thing I know, I had every single adult inhabitant running at me with guns drawn ready to take me down.

7) Oops!
Being a gamer who prefers stealth over frontal assaults, I had adopted a unique tactic over time. With a high Sneak skill and decked out in the Chinese Stealth Armor that made me invisible when crouched, I planted land mines in the path of any enemy unit or monster I came across to take them out. This tactic didn’t work as well when several Enclave soldiers made a turn at an intersection before reaching the mine. I maneuvered to get ahead of them undetected and planted another land mine without picking up the first. Once they had been taken out, I was looting the bodies for good stuff to sell when I heard this booming sound behind me. When I turned around, I saw I’d inadvertently killed a merchant who was passing through the same intersection.

8) Reload required?
The first expansion pack for Fallout: New Vegas, called Dead Money, took you to a highly toxic area centered in and around a derelict casino. The overall mission requires the player to access the casino’s vault in search of treasure. For me, it was a very time-consuming and dangerous undertaking. At one point, I had to escape from a radio tower that had half a dozen monsters roaming about outside. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I wasn’t at only one bar of health, had no healing items, and very little ammo; all it would take to kill me would be one or two hits. It took some doing, but somehow I made it out of that situation in one piece. A good thing too, since the last time I had saved was about 50 minutes of gameplay earlier.

9) This is beyond freaky.
I don’t know how many players, if any, encountered the unique game glitch that I did in Fallout 3. Strangely, this one only seemed to target a specific creature, the Yao Guai, a mutant black bear. When killed, it would sometimes fall into the ground and then spring back out with a distorted, taffy-like appearance. I sort of wish I had a picture of this effect, but it was always unnerving enough to send me running off in another direction.

10) WTF?
One of the weirdest glitches I encountered in Fallout 3 was when I approached one of the many mountains and was seeing two red blips on my radar. It’s a good thing I looked up to see the sky, or I would have missed seeing two black shapes launching into the air. My initial, irrational thought was that something was jumping over the mountain to attack me. I looked around wildly until my gaze landed on my A.I. companion; he was holding his gun at a perfect 90 degree angle. I watched him stand in that position for a couple seconds. Then, lowering his gun, he said, “Oh, they got away.” I later found out that there’s a glitch that randomly launches some monsters into the stratosphere.
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Prior to my hours spent playing Fallout 3, I don’t believe I had ever played an open-world game. I’ve since come to love the idea of exploring a large map to your heart’s content and being given the option to just ignore the main game story indefinitely. Despite how many hours I spent playing and replaying Fallout 3, I don’t think I explored every nook and cranny on the map. The world of Fallout: New Vegas was a smaller scale, but gave the player the option to gamble on slot machines or card tables set it apart from its predecessor.

Yet, each game had its flaws. I don’t feel the main story of Fallout 3 was compelling enough to make me want to play it over and over. Fallout: New Vegas does have an interesting plot and gave the player the option to become the ruler of the Casino Strip, but it doesn’t have a big enough map in which to roam around.

Even though I may never go back to playing the two previous games, especially after the recently-released Fallout 4 has eclipsed them by far, I can still look back fondly on those moments that made 3 and New Vegas a particularly memorable experience for me.