DmC Devil May Cry: Two giant steps sideways.

I've had this one on the shelf for maybe close to a year. I wasn't sure if I just sort of fell out with spectacle fighters, or maybe I just got tired with this franchise. I'm not really sure.  But when this game came out I didn't have the pressing need to pick it up at launch. LONG after its release I bought it on a buy 2 get 1 used special, it sat on the shelf turned sideways to let me know I hadn't finished it (or even started) but that still didn't press me.

To this day I don't know why I put it off so long but in the span before Watch Dogs came out I took that opportunity to just breeze through the game on easy mode so I can at least say that I completed the story mode. If anything it would give me a taste for the game and see the story. First game I've played on easy in a long while.

DmC: DEVIL MAY CRY

Explaining the story of these games is always a headache but I am going to give it a shot. The game takes place in modern day setting in a demon controlled city called Limbo City. It appears to be functioning just like a regular town does, but it is completely controlled and manipulated by a demon called Mundus, who's power reaches to control even the president. Using a drug laden soda (that might be a Futurama reference) or through the constant prattling of a political pundit (who should have just been Bill O'Reily playing himself for as thinly veiled it is) the denizens of the city live their lives in a semi brainwashed state, completely under his control.

Outside the skirts of the city lives a young delinquent named Dante. He's arrogant, brash, and is constantly being hassled by demons who rip him into a parallel plane of limbo and try to kill him. So needless to say he's got a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Dante is rudely awoken one morning by a young girl named Kat. She warns him of danger and pleads for him to come with her, to meet her boss. She works for a group called "The order" and their sole purpose is wrench humanity free from demon control. Aggravated by the hassle of demons, Dante begrudgingly follows along.

So yeah. He's got a little teen pop douche in him. But after a level or two?
I didn't even notice it anymore. New Dante is alright in my book.

So let's get this out of way so you can start flaming me. At first, I didn't much care for his look, but you know what? I like the new Dante. Yeah, he sort of has that shitty popular pretty boy look are you see in movies these days but its a small trade off from the "Oh yeah! Party time bro! DUUUUDE!" doofball Dante we have had for the past few games (3 was specifically the worst). Part of the reason I liked Devil May Cry 4 so much is because a majority of the time you play the game as Nero, and not Dante. Sorry people, but Dante has always been a bit of "Bro-ish" douchehole.

So now we have skinny androgen Twilight version of Dante, and things were not off on the right foot because quite literally the first scene you see him he's completely naked. Thankfully they don't show anything, but come the fuck on. But outside of that intro and his look (which after a while I didn't even notice) he feels like a very different character. There is definitely an edge of youthful angst to the character, and he does have a bit of young adult fiction character growth to him. Angsty but reluctant hero. A bit of dick through the game but as he gets to know Kat, becomes more of a supportive team player. After a few levels I found it really hard not to like the guy.

Kat is a bit different to most of the girls in the DMC series. She is smart and  resourceful,
 but isn't the over sexualized bad ass fighter girl. She has her tricks but is still vulnerable.

What I thought was interesting was the portrayal of Dante's brother Virgil through the game. If you have played through the series in any capacity you know that Virgil is the primary antagonist to Dante. Not in this game, as he is Kat's boss. So while you never play as Virgil he is very much alongside you for the game and it provided an interesting new dynamic to the character.

So this version of Devil May Cry I would say is broken up into two different styles of play: Classic DMC, and Platformy DMC. When you are running along the map, villains and baddies will eventually pop up and all you need to do is wail on them till they drop. I find Devil May Cry to be the standard for good spectacle fighter combat and this installment is no exception. Everything moves quickly and at a smooth pace without feeling overwhelming and too difficult to follow. Bayonetta had this problem where the combat would start to move faster than you could react adding unnecessary difficulty.

Air juggling with pistols is still as satisfying as ever.

Combos are relatively easy to pull off so it accommodates the masher and those who know when to pause in the combo to switch up the move set. They added a very nice gesture in this for this very purpose actually, after a certain move Dante will hold and ending pose. When he does there is a faint but noticeable glimmer on his weapon, this is your timer for the break in the combo. Once I realized that It was easy to keep my timing every time.

I would actually say that it is improved in comparison to previous Devil May Cry games because of how the weapon system works. You get your pistols and sword to start the game, but as you play through you start to allocate Angel and Demon weapons. Typically you will only use one of them but you do have a few options. As you fight, you will find enemies with certain guards or weaknesses, and if you use the back triggers, you can flip to your angel or demon weapon on the fly. Typically the Angel weapons are fast moving, high combo/low damage weapons, and the Demon weapons are slow but heavy damaging weapons used to punch through guards. Switching between them is relatively easy and fun to do.

I quickly fell in love with using the scythe.

What I didn't like about this is these also function as your grappling hooks. These can be used to rip away an enemy shield, pull them enemy closer to you, or pull yourself up to the enemy. In combat these work fine, not as seamless as they should have felt but functional. However, they are also used on these incredibly arbitrary platforming sections you will have to do on each level. It works for the most part, but this is kind of a double edged sword.

When Dante is pulled into limbo, the level design will alter around him ripping apart the floor, buildings, and warping all the surfaces around him to random floating platforms that you will have to navigate. To do this, you need to grapple yourself onto ledges so you can use the other grapple to yank things in place. There are also sections of maps in the level where you have to do this to cross great chasms so you have to do them in midair quickly.  For a while, this was actually a pretty cool visual effect.

But then I started to notice that I am doing sometimes 2 or 3 times in a single level, and then again during the boss fight. Now, Bayonetta did something similar because that had boss fights where they were roughly the size of a planet, so you needed to fly around the enemy to get to its respective weak points. In DmC it feels like you are really only doing it to dodge one specific attack. Maybe this plays more of a factor when you are playing it on a different difficulty, but for what I played all the platforming seemed incredibly arbitrary and unnecessary. I find the floating platform to be shorthand for sloppy level design.

Which is a shame because the the level design for a number of stages is very very cool. There is one specific example where you need to breach an enemy stronghold, but its not actually the tower, its the tower's reflection in the lake. So Dante jumps in and hits limbo skyrocketing upwards into a inverse world. It was a very cool effect. There are handful of stages where they get lazy sending you through corridors, but for the most part all of the non-platformy sections are very cool.

I just felt like I was always having to do this. Stop it. I play these games
to wail on monsters and keep them in the air with guns. 

But aside from thinking it's sloppy level design, it just feels boring to do. There are occasional stretches where you have to make multiple jumps and pulls before you actually hit the ground. They are tedious and annoying, they aren't fun, and they just waste your time. You could easily make me run along a path with a jump here and there for the same effect. But instead it adds pointless trial and error game play forcing me to backtrack when I mess up.

I have always liked the music in this series. Always had a very kinda hard rock/industrial kind of vibe to it. Although when the game started, in the intro credits it straight up said "Music by Combichrist". Now, this initially gave me a bit of a negative reaction because all I know of their music is when their drummer did a "DJ set" before a Rammstein concert I attended. It sucked, because it was basically shitty dance and dumbstep mixes of actually good Rammstein songs while he played with his Ipod, and then occasionally threw his hands up in the air. It was fucking retarded, and so are "DJ sets". (So you dumbstep fans can eat all the boners.)

Thankfully from what I've heard, Combichrist as an actual band falls in line with what I have accepted to be a traditional Devil May Cry ambiance if you will. That hard, aggressive industrial tone in the background as you are wailing on an enemy with an over sized sword. I don't know if any of their "hits" were actually in the soundtrack, but it certainly felt right at home, and has got me thinking I should probably give Combichrist proper an actual chance.

And hey! Boss fights! What an crazy novelty this game has created! I play through a level and fight some baddies, then I fight a really big boss at the end where I have to learn an attack pattern and then wail on the enemy when his weakness is exposed. Instead of just fighting wave after wave of the same fodder enemies I have been wailing on for the entirety of the game.  This was really neat, maybe other games might pick up with wild and crazy idea at some point? It certainly feels right at home here and I would love to see more of it. (Seriously game devs, what the fuck is your problem with boss fights? Thank you DmC.)

I like that I didn't feel forced to use certain weapons during boss fights

So here is the deal. Ultimately, this game is still just another Devil May Cry. The story is familiar but still manages to feel new to an extent. Even though it's not, the game can feel a bit like a prequel to the entire franchise as a whole. The new Dante is an interesting bent to the character and if you are willing to look past the new look (or happen to like it), the game feels like a reasonable installment to the series. I had my fun with it but it didn't knock my socks off, which really is status quo for the series. I'd place it in the middle of the pack. Didn't love it as much as Devil May Cry 1 or 4, but it is certainly better than 2 and 3 were.

It's just another fun romp with Devil May Cry.  I am very much glad I didn't pay the full 60 dollars for it because it would have left me with a lukewarm experience. But at the preowned price of less than 20 bucks it was absolute worth the amount of entertainment it gave me. Honestly this is probably a great place to stop with this property, because even with the new look this old dog is running out of new tricks.

Game is at the perfect price for it right now if you've never played it, but aside from a new look doesn't bring much else to the table. It's worth a play.

Watch Dogs: "Hack" might be a bit strong, but....

The hype machine is a dangerous mistress to have in the world of gaming and she is no greater personification of the double edged sword. Take something like Dead Island which had an absolutely phenomenally done trailer.  It generated a ton of hype and when it came out, it sucked. Because of this, I try to be more wary around hype.

But some people hype right.  This game was unveiled the right way by showing off like 15 minutes of completely uninterrupted game footage, showing you all the cool innovative tricks you could do. It was cleverly done and made me very excited to get my PS4. But sadly it was pushed back like 6 months. Finally it has come out and now I finally get to see if the hype was well deserved when I sit down with....

WATCH DOGS

Our story takes place in a semi-futuristic incarnation of Chicago. The entire city and its inhabitants are wirelessly a part an online data service called ctOS which allows everything to be controlled smoothly via electronics and smartphones. However, this makes it a primary target for the hacker community, hackers such as Damien Brenks and our protagonist Aiden Pearce.

In the prologue, Aiden is at a fancy shindig at a classy hotel known as the Merlaut. He wanders in as hacks into the ctOS there to give access to Damien, who beings to hack through the personalities at the hotel and siphon out their financials for a very hefty load. But they catch the traces of another hacker. Aiden motions to leave but Damien wants to explore the intruder, which results in them tripping the alarms and sending the police in pursuit. Aiden narrowly evades capture.

But the second hacker was able to find their identities and the fixers (a freelance mercenary group), are issued a contract to kill Aiden. The gunman sides up on Aiden while he's driving with his niece and nephew and shoots out the tires, causing the car to flip and kills Aiden's niece, Lena. 11 months later, Aiden has taken to vigilantism, attacking those who use the system to cheat people all the while trying to find the person who took his niece from him. He's got a lead, he's on the move, and this is where we pick up.

Aiden mourns with his Sister (but takes it harder as he feels its his fault)

What made the E3 showing of this game so fuckin cool is that it showcases how integral hacking was to the game. You were in a crowded club and it showed you how you manipulate your surroundings via hacks. When you exited it showed that the police were incoming and you were able to hack the surrounding traffic lights to have them crash and evade capture. Very cool, and that got a lot of people excited.

However as the showing continued the play started involving a bit of parkouring, and gun combat. I should have taken it as a warning sign but whatever, lots of games use guns. And that had never been a deterrent for me before. So that shouldn't have been anything to worry about, so I didn't work about it.

But then the record breaking Grand Theft Auto V came out and basically killed in all the reviews, sales, and awards. Watch Dogs precariously got pushed back to May even though supposed to be a next gen launch title. THAT was the red flag I should have heeded. That was where I should have realized this game is hiding something. Now I know this paints a pretty negative light, and I haven't even started reviewing the game yet. So let me get into that and all will be explained.

At its face value, Watch Dogs is a semi futuristic sandbox title. Still for the most part firmly rooted in the present but just far enough for the premise to have a completely networked city in the US. It plays exactly as you would expect a sandbox game to play, right down to the fairly similar controls. I'm sure the folks at Ubisoft hate the comparison, but if you played Grand Theft Auto V then a lot of the controls will feel familiar to you.

It always comes back to guns... Sigh.

There is a bit of weirdness in when you press up on the dpad you bring up your phone menu much like GTAV, but unlike it, you can't use the dpad to navigate it once its open. You have you use the right analog stick and I have to tell you that doesn't feel natural to me. Its from this menu you can order specific vehicles or upgrade your abilities, check online rankings, and so on. I would think it was more integral to the game but if I wasn't boosting my abilities I rarely went in here.

The on foot controls are smooth and intuitive. When holding R2/T you break into a free run and if you hold down O/B you fly over obstacles or parkour up walls with ease. When you are in pursuit of someone and you get within a certain range, Aiden will fly at them with a very aggressive takedown. That plays smooth and feels good when you do it. You can tell it has an Assassin's Creed feel to the way you fly around or on surrounding environments. And when you are stealthing around or getting into a fire fight, it is very easy and fast to slip in and out of cover.

I'm not a fan of much cover based shooting, but for stealth the cover mechanic is seamless.

Unfortunately, and this was probably my biggest issue with the game, is that the driving sucks an entire satchel of diseased boners. There is GTA IV driving, which is a tad too realistic for my taste. There is GTAV or Saints Row driving, which is a bit arcadey but fast and fun to play. But now we have Watch Dogs where it feels like you are trying to drive a formula one car over a frozen lake.

My first few missions that required driving turned into an unmitigated disaster. If I had to akin the driving to something, I would say that every single 4 wheel vehicle in the game operates like you were driving a fork lift. Every time you go to adjust your car or take a turn, It feels like the back of the car moves into place before the front of the car does. Maybe its the swing of the camera angle, but it was incredibly disorienting and it usually resulted in me smacking into every single other car like a pinball stuck between the bumpers. No matter how nice or how fast my car was when I first sat into the thing, I would be parking a twisted, smoking (and occasionally burning) heap of scrap metal.

Unlocking the steam pipe hack basically ruins pursuits and convoys.

Thankfully, although equally wonky, I found the motorcycle controls to be much more forgiving and easier to handle. So like most sandbox games before it, the cycle quickly became my vehicle of choice. For pretty much the duration of the game. I did eventually get the hang of driving these cars, but not till close to the end of the game and even then I avoided them unless I was evading pursuers and needed a desperate lift.

I'm torn on the shooting controls. Switching between your guns is fairly easy, hitting L1 brings up my menu and I can quickly scroll through 4 weapon slots giving me access to the all the weapons I own, so that is definitely a plus. I can also access all my various hack items (which I'll get into later) which I can also scroll through with relative ease. Moving from cover to cover as mentioned before is pretty smooth and intuitive. Its not the lock on assisted aim that GTA V had and I wasn't really expecting it to be, overall the shooting works well.

What I don't like about it though is the bizarre strengths of weapons. The it feels like when I pecking at people with an AK-47, it takes way more rounds than it should to put people down. When firing with a silenced pistol if I tag a head shot they drop like a rock, that makes sense. If I hit them in the body, it takes 3-5 rounds. OK, seems like a few but I can follow it. When I'm near point blank rank and I've unloaded 10 rounds of a fully automatic shotgun? OK, now our balancing issues are off. A fully auto shotgun should lay waste to absolutely anything that walks in front of it, no matter where it hits on the body. Ubi fucked that up as far as I'm concerned.

But I think the reasoning behind that possibly is the games big draw is the ability to hack, and using said ability to get out of hairier situations. For example, in a number of missions you will have to sneak your way (or assisting someone else in sneaking) into an area and there will usually be a number of fairly heavily armed patrols around impeding your progress. To sneak by them, you need to slink around cover, hack nearby things to draw their attention away from you, or in worst case scenarios fling out these little noise makers that will pull their attention to them so you can sneak by.

The guided stealth is actually pretty cool. You manipulate your surroundings
to kill baddies and help your target escape. Sometimes frustrating though.

The problem is, if one fucking person sees you and you don't take them out in the milliseconds of being caught? They will open fire, which results in the other people being alerted, which results in them opening fire, which leaves you pinned down with about 30 billion bullets raining down on you till one of them flings a grenade at you. Even with pretty stacked weaponry the odds are usually against you in a fire fight and ever worse there doesn't seem to be a very easy way to escape them. And boy does it let you know because you will be gunned down in this game, A LOT.

The key is to use your skills properly. Having a silenced pistol helps, you can trigger a car alarm or a retractable barrier to get some dopey guard to walk towards it, use your focus boost ability (IE: Slow time) to line up a shot, and pop an easy head shot. If another guy sees the body chances are they will go over to investigate allowing you to tag another one. Or, you can fling one of your noise makers near a steam pipe or transformer, then blow the thing up as they walk by. If things start to go tits up, you also have a tool that will black out the city for a few seconds, which is the god tier of your hacks in my book. Using hacks to take out patrols was easily the best aspect of the game for me.

Since this isn't GTA you can't open fire or throw bombs from your car, which makes the chases a bit more difficult, but not terribly much because you still have access to your hacks. Most of the time you can change traffic lights with a short quick time event, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But once you are able to burst steam pipes while you drive, chases because laughably easy because you can take out one or two cars at a time easily. If any stragglers follow you can block them with road posts or another light. 

But it has some very bizarre car camera angles as well, which makes it incredible difficult in some lights. For example, you earn a hack that allows you to disrupt a chopper in pursuit. But the camera never seems to swing enough for the camera to see it so you can use your ability, so the recourse is to stop your car mid chase so the stupid chopper can get ahead of you. It's ridiculous.

I think one of the biggest problems of the game is the sandbox tends to bombard you with side missions and they are kind of distracting. If you are keeping to the actual story, then fine, its pretty easy to follow along with. But say you are moving to the next story point, you will get this messages that appear in your HUD that notify you that a crime is about to take place, or that you unlocked a side mission to perform, or that somebody is hacking into your game.

Oooooohh.. Let me rant about this shit for a bit. OK, pervasive online? FUCKING stop with it. I understand online multiplayer is kind of a big deal right now, but you know what? Not everybody wants to fucking do it. Some people (such as myself) want to sit down with their game and play the story and enjoy the game for what it is. So when an alert pops up and says "HEY, This asshole is hacking into your game and stealing your money. You better find him in the crowded area really fast!" and then I end up not doing that, and I get penalized for it. Fuck you. I didn't ask him to be in my game, and I didn't want him there. Thank you random fuckwit for ruining my game experience for me.

I was OK with this in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls because this is was a relatively new idea. But ultimately, if I didn't want to deal with it, there were ways to avoid it. But in Dark Souls 2 the only way to avoid it was to play offline. Which is bullshit because I still wanted to be able to summon help, you assholes. Now with Watch Dogs and this past E3 it seems like more and more devs want to build games that force you to play with other people. You can piss right off, I don't like other people, and I don't want to play with them if I don't have to. So quit trying to force me.

I am the king of keeping a low profile. 

Something I recently discovered that is stupid with this game is that it only has one save slot. If you start a new game it erases your old game. I hope that some day we will eventually have video game consoles that have a large amount of memory for multiple saves. A hard drive of sorts perhaps. But alas, sadly humans haven't developed such mind bending space technology that only lives in fantasies, but its fun to dream. Seriously, fuck you Ubisoft. I've got 500 gigs of space, a 2nd save slot couldn't be that hard.

What bothers me the most about the game is that overall it has some really original ideas, but ultimately bobbles the execution by focusing on the shit I've already done in a billion other games. Yeah stealth and 3rd person shooting is fun and all, but there are like 30 other games I could probably go to a gamestop and get right now and get Stealth and 3rd person shooting. And its not like the hacking isn't core to the gameplay, it just seemed a lot more optional than it should have been to really drive this title home. Should have involved different ways to hack and more missions centralized around using them. Instead nearly every side mission is drive somewhere really fast, beat up this guy, or shoot these guys. Yawn.

Why is it when devs think of adding hacking in a game, its just Pipe Dream?
is there seriously no other minigame variant we can use to simulate hacking?

Even the story tends to bobble horribly. Its like a mix of Batman mixed with Assassin's Creed mixed with Grand Theft Auto mixed with Hitman and then poured over what could have been a good idea. Aiden is a gravely voiced protagonist who narrates to himself in a way that never seems to flow naturally. The whole premise and tone reeks of The Dark Knight (especially the final monologue), and I'm told there are similarities to the female character to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Its staggering to me how a game with such an original concept feel so unoriginal the whole way through it.

And really, a large portion of the story just doesn't really feel like it goes anywhere. I keep moving from story mission to story mission, but a good portion of the characters don't feel like they have any connection to the overall goal of the game, and their tie-in with Aiden seems token at best. I mean yes it all does connect by the end of it but I never really had that eureka "oh shit!" moment of the game. Just a "oh, its that guy. Ok then. What now?" kind of feeling.

Clara falls under a bit of a predictable trope, but I liked her as a character.

I find myself thinking about Remember Me as I played through this game. It was a game that had some really cool ideas and concepts, but then spent all they time focusing on everything else instead of what made it original. That's what Watch Dogs has done here. The game is playable, and if you can stay focused on the story, its not awful. But given all the hype that came into this game they dropped the ball badly. If this gets a sequel it could be an opportunity that this concept can work and with the right tweaking could be something really innovative. But the bottom line is it just isn't there yet and that is really disappointing.

Of course, this review isn't going to stop anyone from buying the game. Hell, PS4 has sold nearly 1.8 million copies and 3.75 million copies across all platforms according to vgchartz.com. But if you haven't bought it yet, I suggest going for it used, redbox it, or borrow it from a friend. It's pretty average across the board and I couldn't blame you if you skipped this one. I played Grand Theft Auto V again before this and that was still fresh and better than this was. Aside from the hacking, everything it brings to the table has been done better elsewhere. Hope you are happy, hype machine. You got me again.

Seriously though, its a game about Batman without Batman in it. 

South Park - The Stick of Truth: It's the show in playable format!

My Mom is a pretty interesting person. Masters graduate, devout catholic, supportive of her children, and generous to friends and family to a fault. She's pretty awesome but she and I stand on opposite sides on a lot of things. I listen to metal, she likes show tunes. I like RPGS, she prefers casual games. I love tex-mex, and she doesn't (and is wrong). But one thing that one thing that we share without question is our complete love of the show South Park.

Now, South Park has never really had a good game iteration in its history, so I was pretty excited to hear that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were going to be directly involved. But as is the curse of video game development, there were delays, glitchy problems, and generally iffy reviews. But a lot of media sources that I tend to frequent were telling me that if I am a fan of the show, I will be a fan of the game. With concerns of game length, I held off on buying it, waiting for it drop down in price. I happened to be near a redbox and gave it a look, and 360 copy was available. So I had to dust off the old girl and fire her up to play.....

SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH

The story opens up with an animated vignette (not unlike their Heavy Metal spoof) describing a war between the human forces and drow elves, and how thanks to the efforts of the "Grand Wizard" (Cartman) they have laid claim to the mighty "Stick of Truth" and whoever has possession of it's power can shape the universe as they see fit.

You and your family have just moved into South Park. You are somewhat of a quiet child, and although your parents are loving, they seem as if the move here is being used to escape something. After creating the new you, your parents send you out to go make some friends. Quickly stepping outside  (or being thrown out by your father if you take too long like I did), you will run into your new neighbor Butters. He welcomes you to town and invites you to play with them and takes you to the "Kingdom of Kupa Keep" (yes, the KKK), to meet the Grand Wizard King, Cartman. To prove your loyalty you become embroiled in the war between the Humans and Elves over the Stick of Truth.

Unassuming but All-Powerful, the bearer of the Stick of Truth holds the power to
shape the Universe as one see's fit...... Or really just has a stick and bragging rights.

So right out of the gate, I have to say that the visual style is absolutely spot on. It literally is an exact representation of the show. When you move everyone hops around in place with slight motions of the arm, and very little leg movement. The paper cutout style of art/flash animation is faithfully recreated, but now we actually have a layout to the town of South Park which allows you to see where everyone lives in proximity to each other and how small this little town really is.

It also allows you to fly around pretty quickly too. There is a fast travel system in place for the exceptionally lazy which basically allows you to bum around in Timmy's wheelchair, but I found myself only using this when it took me to a quest destination or the other side of the map completely. I guess it falls to what you are more impatient with: waiting for a load time to put you in place somewhere or the time it takes to actually traverse the world map.

The overall map is not huge, so expect a lot of back and forth.

The game wastes no time letting you know that you are in this universe because as soon as you finish punching in your name, Cartman deems your name "Douchebag" and everyone else refers to you as such regardless of what you put in for yourself. In typical Parker/Stone fashion the intent is to offend fast and often. So expect to hear the word Fuck about as often as you read it in this blog (actually, probably a lot more).

After you have created and named your character you will get to pick your job class between Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Jew. As you scroll through the options you will of course be getting color commentary from Cartman heckling you for whatever it is you are thinking about (and naturally picking Jew gives you the worst of it). These basically give you your specialized abilities for the game, otherwise the customization between the 4 job classes is generally the same. For the sake of my play through I just went fighter because I was Redboxing my game and wanted to tear through it.

"White Fighter huh? Don't see many of those all to often." - Eric Cartman

The game plays an interesting blend of homage to the show while still producing a new narrative in their style of humor. Many of the characters you meet and the places you will go all have some bit of dialog or story that throws back to something you might have seen from an episode. But as you play through the game there will be lots of subtle jabs (and a lot of the time not so subtle jabs) at various things in the game industry or other titles outright.

For example, I would say one of the games that is most heavily influenced as I played along would have to be Skyrim. Much of the score of the game mimics the boisterous Nordic sounding theme of Skyrim in its own South Parkian way, and there are a handful of times where your character is referred to as the Dragonborn. There are also handful of songs that don't directly rip off but sound very similar to the Skyrim world maps and various situational themes would occur as I played through.

Opening a characters closet treats you to a compilation of call backs to that characters
various show shenanigans. The only one you can't open is Stan's, and you know why that is.

But there are also jabs at just things people take for granted in games. For example: anything you can open is usually marked with a yellow handle and for the most part opening things rewards you with some crappy item (with humorous flavor text), things you can sell, or at best things you can use to customize your character. But a lot of times you will just be invading someones house, and the game will let you know are being a creep. I have walked in on a lady standing in the nude followed by a shriek and a door slam, a guy jacking it on his couch before he slammed the door on me, and two Canadians just going at it on their bed (they yelled at me, but it didn't stop them).

There is also a section where you pick up audio logs, and as you pick them up they get progressively more angry at the fact that audio logs are always pointless, and why do people take the time to record them when they could be escaping? They also make a number of other cracks at other games too, so it's not just a rehashing of the jokes from the show. A good deal of them were pretty funny and much like watching the show I was pretty much glued to the script to see what they were going to say next.

Naturally though, the humor coming from the minds of South Park is guaranteed to push boundaries and offend some people. Sure enough, that is exactly what happened as both Europe and Australia censored specific parts of the game. As Parker and Stone are very much against censorship, the EU and AU versions of the game make sure to voice their displeasure about the overreaching censoring government.

By game end you will be playing on both sides of the war, so all of the major kid characters will be on your team at some point. As the story progresses the villains will change, but I hesitate to call this a deep game. It's overall playtime can be finished in about 10 hours if you make a habit of skipping the side quests. I gave them a relatively fair amount of attention and I managed to tear through the game in about 15 or so hours, but I was making the push to finish it so I could be done with it in a 1 day check out. It took me two.

The game itself plays in the same vein of JRPG that Mario Superstars or Paper Mario falls into, where the team basically consists of yourself and one of the other major characters. When in combat you get a wheel of options from your basic melee and ranged attacks, special abilities, "magic" (basically ripping ass on people), and other options. When you go to attack you are given indications or quick time events to maximize the damage potential, usually a little flash for you to hit a button for your critical, unless promoted by another QTE. This also applies to defense as well as you will have a quick indicator for a block, and if you block the whole combo you will have a chance for small retaliation damage.

Along the map, you will find open flames you can "Dragon Shout" at (read: Fart)
which will blow open  new paths, or take out enemies without having to fight them.

But it does do something interesting with the battle system. While each character gets a turn, there is sort of a prep turn that you get prior to your attack. When you or your partner's turn comes up, you have the option to use a healing/buffing item or special ability, and then if you haven't made an offensive attack yet, you are then able to do so. I found this actually to be pretty cool, once I realized it. If you get speed potions (coffee) it basically allows you an extra turn right at the start of fight. So you can get a free debuff or two attacks.

And MAN, debuffs are important in this game. In addition to enemy hit points, there is also an armor level that soaks a portion of the damage you do, and if they are wearing some kind of armor or shield, that needs to be dealt with as well in order to really start putting the hurt on people. There was a specific boss fight in the middle of the game where you are fighting against Al Gore and some members of the secret service where the fight starts off pretty even, but when the secret service comes out the defensive buffs they get are just retarded. The fight took me close to 10 attempts before I managed to stumble on the right set of debuffs to weaken them down. So don't ignore debuffing your foes.

With the exception of boss fights, you can also pull up a series of summoned characters to use to basically insta-kill all the enemies on the screen. You can only use each of them once per day, and only if you completed the respective side quests for that character. Jesus is pretty easy to get as he just involves talking Father Maxie twice and then finding Jesus in the Church. Getting Mr. Tuong Lu Kim from City Wok (one of my favorite characters) involves clearing out a small tower, and Mr. Hankey was probably the hardest since you had to scour the South Park sewers for his 3 children. If a fight is too hard, use these because saving them for a bigger fight tends to render them useless.

Because the game itself is so short, it has an incredibly low level cap, once you hit level 15 you have pretty much maxed out your character. You won't be able to learn everything but that actually does allow you a degree of customization depending on what type of character you were building. I actually went with a pretty safe selection of stats during the course of the game, and I'm curious to learn how that might change things if I had picked different job classes.

Sometimes summon's that attack one person will still scare of the others.

There are also a pretty good degree of side missions and collectibles throughout the game as well as some pretty raunchy and ridiculous achievements. But more than anything it's a fun ripple for a fan of the South Park universe who really wants to know more about it. As someone who has followed the show for a long time it was nice to travel all round the town and revisit old locations, see nods to things all the way back in season one, and see nearly every character to grace the series get a small spot in the sun as you play.

Can it carry for multiple play thoughs? That I am not so sure about. Like any good episode of any show, the jokes lose a lot of their steam once you already know the punch lines and I would image that would be much of the same case here. The story allows you to make some different decisions as you play through and I think that would affect the story somewhat but overall I don't think that they would have a massive impact to the game. I think because of the game's relative shortness you could probably get through two play throughs with relative ease but after that it will probably lose steam.

Kyle's most powerful move is practically game breaking. Even if you mess up
the quick time event with it, it still does enough damage to beat everyone.

If you are a fan of JRPG style games, you will probably find this game to be an entertaining but somewhat lacking experience. If you are a fan of South Park in general, it does everything it needs to satisfy your needs as a fan of the franchise. Honestly the only people I would think of who wouldn't like this game are people who are easily offended by the show, but then again, I highly doubt those people would ever pick this game up in the first place.

There isn't a lot this game brings to the table, but what it does it does well. The gameplay is fun, the music is fitting for the theme, the humor and design are spot on. Sure the storyline isn't exactly groundbreaking, but for telling a South Park it does exactly what its supposed to. Yeah there are a handful of glitching issues and its really short, but thats good for a game carried on humor. It means it doesn't overstay its welcome.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and if I had more time with it I would probably still be playing it. I am still pretty sketchy about that 60$ price tag. I've certainly payed more for games with shorter campaigns but something about the price tag still sticks in my craw. I personally would wait for a 20 or 30$ price point but make no mistake about it, after 17 years of the series, we finally have a good South Park game.

How do I go to Canada and no run across Scott the Dick?
For shame South Park, I was let down.

Dark Souls II: A firm spanking to remind me how naughty I've been.

If you know me in any capacity, you know that I have a raging gamer boner for the Souls series. I originally quit on but picked back up Demon's Souls and finally got me into a place where I understood the nuance and the challenge, and dumped a sick number of hours into it. Then Dark Souls came out and put me right back into place. It opened the world up and gave me multiple different possibilities. It was nearly perfect, and the fact that I have like 5 characters and close to 300 hours of game play time logged shows how strong of a game is was. But now, I prepare to die..... Again.

DARK SOULS II

We are still set in the same world of Dark Souls as the previous title, and the accursed Darksign is still affecting people, cursing them to become undead, gradually losing their humanity and memory until they become a hollow. A crazed, broken, and empty undead being.

You are a wandering undead, following was seems to be an irresistible yet silent call to the land of Dranglaec. Another fallen society that seems to be brimming with available souls. Upon arriving you stumble upon a house belonging to 3 elderly fire keepers and their handmaiden. You are given an human effigy to restore your human self, and then granted passage into the kingdom of Dranglaec to try to find the king of this realm and hopefully a way to free yourself of the darksign curse.

Apparently the gateway to Dranglaec is to fling yourself in a whirlpool of death.
..... Seems Legit.

Like the previously Souls games, this is one of those games that doesn't really spoon feed you store and exposition. You are given a base premise, and then sent out into the world to get you ass kicked. But if you are willing to pay attention to the NPCs, each of them have their own little nuances and back stories that all weave into the overall narrative if you are looking to learn it.

I've yet to solve everything so it's early for me to have any opinions of the overarching narrative but I will have to say the opening cutscene was incredibly impressive from a visual standpoint. There is then another cutscene with the firekeeper that prologues you before you actually get to create your character. It ran a bit longer than I felt it should, and to longtime fans of the series they might find this off putting. Thankfully, pressing start allows you to skip any cutscene which after the first play through I am sure everyone is doing. This also appears to be the only real cutscene outside of prior to a boss fight, so I don't knock that hard against it.

Takes a bit too much prattle to get to the Character creator this time around.
Shaddap ya hold hag, I've got about 13 billion deaths to get to. 

The characters in this one do see a tad less... Memorable, I guess. But I think I base that around the fact on two characters: Sigmeyer the onion knight, who you can't miss from his appearance alone. And Soltaire because what sun-bro doesn't want to engage in jolly cooperation? There are a number of characters each with their own story quests to fulfill, but I am fairly certain I went through the game without completing any of them simple because I haven't explored the maps yet.

There have been a number of changes to Dark Souls 2 and a number of things remain the same. The character creator, for example, has gone through a dramatic change in that its actually somehow more shit than the previous titles. That's pretty impressive considering the fact that the character creation in all three of these games eats a bag of used dildos. Before the sliders and options did pretty much nothing to change the character from average to hideous, but now I have 5-20 seconds of lag before I get to even preview what it is I changed.

Honestly just pick your gender and go. The creator is just a simple reminder that no
 matter how hard you work, and how much effort you put in you will NEVER be pretty.

Its a minor complaint I suppose, but seriously, has anyone at From Software every played a Saints Row game? Not only are the changes in that create-a-character instantaneous, but the number of options are robust, ridiculous, and most importantly decent looking.  I would have appreciated that option here, but I suppose it doesn't matter since you will usually be covered in armor anyways. Even better, use something like what that Black Desert MMO is gonna use.

Souls are still the end all be all in this game. Kill enemies to get souls, kill bosses to get souls, find souls on the ground, and in chests as well. They still function as your experience to level up, and still function as the currency at the shops. Still lose em when you get killed, and they are still gone for good if you get killed again before you can pick them back up. You only can level up in one place this time around, but it feels like leveling up is faster in this game, so it never hurts to warp home to level at each bonfire and then warp back.

The Emerald Herald is Dark Souls 2's "Lady In Black". She is required to level
up and boost the number of Estus use you have, so don't flippin' kill her.

The combat system hasn't really changed all that much either, it uses the tried and true shoulder button combat any souls fan will be familiar with at this point. They did make a small change to where instead of using the run button to jump, it uses L3 instead. This did not feel smooth or intuitive to me so I changed that button back to the dash as quickly as I could. Because there is nothing more infuriating in any game than dying in the tutorial. Even in Dark Souls.

They did make some changes to how the combat works though. For example, the your equipment load is still a factor. When you start to load up on your armor it will keep a running percentage of how heavy your gear is in comparison to how much gear you can feasibly carry. The more gear you add the better your defense will be but the harder it will be to move. In the both Dark Souls and Demon's Souls you really wanted to pay attention to your numbers, because for each 25% of your weight total you added, the more it would slow you down, and the less effective your dodge roll would become.

You can tank up a bit and still be able to dodge roll with relative speed,
so unless the build stops you, bring a heavier set for hairier moments.

In Dark Souls II however, they have become a bit more lenient with the weight. Now, unless you add like 120% of your weight capacity, your movement for the most part will not be hampered. You can still run at nearly top speed and still jump with ease. If you exceed 70% you will get the lovable "fat roll" (which if you are wearing that much, you should be tanking hits with a shield anyways). If you are below 70, you will be able to roll like normal, but the speed of the roll and the distance you move is affected by how close you are. So one who is at 68.7% couldn't roll as far as someone at 43%, who couldn't roll as far as someone at 31% and so on.

So my original logic is like "Oh great, I can tank better and still get a dodge roll." Yeah not so much. The dodge roll in previous game gave a you a pretty generous amount of invulnerability when dodge rolling away from an attack. You have to be incredibly more precise when trying to roll away in this one. If you jump much too early you are still going to take a big chunk of damage and to be honest it was very hard to adjust to. So much to the point that after about 20 something levels into my mage I tried to start over with a soldier who could tank better. Supposedly the amount of invincibility you get is proportional to your adaptability stat, but I haven't confirmed it yet.

I was going to put one of my videos here, but frankly I'm awful and lazy. So here is one of those
infuriating asshats who beat the game in less than hour and half. (My best is 60+ hours)

And it wouldn't be a Souls game if it didn't remind you right out of the gate that this game is going to kick your ass, and Dark Souls II is no exception. People familiar with the previous titles no doubt have learned the easy way to dispatch enemies is to raise your shield and move straight at them and let the lock on feature swing you around to the back when then miss. That doesn't happen here. The AI this time around is smart enough to know to keep its back away from you for the most part, and their attack animations have less delay so while its still possible to get behind them, its not as easy.

They also hamper you with your starting gear. As per the usual Souls games, the character class you start with basically just gives you your starting stats and a handful of cheap gear to get you out the door. The one constant was that everyone had a shield. That is not the case here, half of the classes only will get a weapon, and that little change is all it took to throw my entire system out of whack. That first run is always a killer because you may have an idea what kind of build you want, but you never really know what you need until you find whats available.

Going Deprived gives you a nice flat base to work with stat wise, but you get
NOTHING to start with. Last game you at least got a club. Not this time.

Being hollow doesn't protect you either. I would spend a good portion of my Dark Souls experience hollow just so I wouldn't be invaded by other players and constantly losing my progress. That doesn't save you now, you can be invaded at any given point, human or hollow. Worse yet, there are certain area's of the game that force you to be teleported as a phantom for someone else to kill you. Thankfully, that doesn't affect YOUR progress and if you die you are dropped where you were taken. Just remember if you were fending off monsters because they will be waiting for you.

While I am on that point, you can't really grind like you used to either because after so many stops a bonfire after a certain point enemies wills top respawning if you kill them too many times, which essentially puts a level cap on that area. You can use something called a Bonfire Atheistic and it will allow the enemies to respawn, but this is a the same as adding new game+ to a certain area, so while the rewards are better, the difficulty also increases. Its just easier to be a SunBro and farm boss fights but keep in mind the number of souls you tally overall overtime does affect your ability to get help.

With smarter and faster enemies this time around, there is no shame
in calling for back up. I certainly did..... A lot.

You also are not able to neck down Estus like Sunny D anymore either. You are given only one to start off with and have disposable healing items to keep you afloat until you can strengthen your Estus potion, and it heals over time and not immediately, so you can't just heal up and jump back into the fray, you actually have to plan around your healing a bit. This leads to some quickly panicked strategizing against player opponents or difficult boss fights.

There are a few other changes I'm not really crazy about either. The weapon crafting for example, seems incredibly dumbed down in this installment. In both Demon's and Dark you always wanted to be frugal with hoarding your ores. Each ore affected some different type of element, and it was a good idea to hang onto them until you knew exactly what kind of weapon you were looking to build. It was more complicated in Demon's and was simplified but still robust in Dark. Dark Souls 2 basically oversimplifies all of it.

All basic weapons upgrade on one type of ore varied on size, rare weapons require a twinkling ore, and monster weapons use petrified dragon bones. All elemental stones can infuse a weapon with that property, and only needs to be used once to give it said enchantment. So instead of hoarding up your ore to figure out how to construct that perfect weapon, there really is no reason not to try to bolster up any regular gear you are using up to level 6 since that can be done with ease. It bothered me a little because it took out any need to know who dropped what, or planning ahead to prepare for a future crafting (almost every one of my Dark Souls builds plans around getting a Furysword, which requires saving your ore till about half way through the game).

Before I would take on every boss fight on my own first just to see if I could win.
After 2 bosses I just said fuck it and summoned help any time I had the chance.

Another thing I didn't care for is the map this time around isn't as circular as it was in Dark Souls. Before as you walked around there we paths you can unlock to provide shortcuts from area to area, and ultimately if you continued to follow a certain path, you would eventually loop yourself back around to where you started. It gave this good feeling of expanse. I wouldn't exactly say that Dark Souls 2 is linear, but it doesn't leave me with this greater sense that the world is connected.

Dark Souls 2 instead basically gives you the bonfire fast travel system you had to earn Dark Souls right from the get go. And while there are a handful of shortcuts the main town you start in basically just runs you in 4 opposite directions. So that's a little bit of a disappointment. It also can occasionally hamper the flow of the game because sometimes you will think you've hit a dead end and you will find yourself wondering where to go next. I found myself stuck a few times, but never for very long. It was usually just a matter of teleporting back to base to level up and then getting started down a different road instead of finishing on that I had started.

Seriously From Software? I'm getting real sick of trying to climb down
rickety wooden scaffolds in completely dark conditions. Knock if off.

And I suppose, the biggest complaint that I have overall is the game doesn't seem as well designed as its predecessors. I'm not talking about the the apparent decrease in visual quality the game has had (something I didn't even notice), but that rooms don't appear to be though out to be challenging. The are thought out to be frustrating. There have been a number of times I would walk into a situation where the room was designed to kill me immediately. The attempts to respond were minimal, and the enemies would have some kind of cheap guard passing or stun locking attack.

This is frustrating and disappointing really, because Dark Souls was so perfectly thought out. It just in some way feels like they couldn't think of a way to ramp up the difficulty and make it fair, so they just made things a bit more unfair and called it a day. Granted, I managed to get through the game once with little issue, but there are some balancing issues that I think need to be taken care of in future patches. But even still, patches can's fix up boss fights that are frustrating by design. There is a particular boss fight where you fight 3 things at once and if you aren't geared up to tank hits, you might be making a good number of attempts at beating it at nearly any level.

Lastly, and this is more of a personal gripe, but I've hit a bit of a dead zone since the initial release of the game, where either people have stopped playing or out leveled me completely. Because on the different builds I am doing I can't find any summon help to help me with bosses, nor will anyone teleport me from my sign. It sucks because I could really use the help for certain sections and I only have so many effigy's to maintain my humanity. I will say it hasn't stopped from be being invaded though, which is pissing me off to no end because now I can't even fucking progress in the game without going into offline mode.

NEVER can find help when you need it.   >:|

All in all though, any complaint that I really have for the game is nit pick or mild annoyance at the absolute best. The fact of the matter is that in 90+ hours and 3 characters I am still playing the game, learning it inside and out, finding all its secrets and picking up all its intricacies. The game is still punishing and maybe more cheaply so, but its still a fucking blast. I've had a real hard time putting it down to play some of my other march releases, and I figure I will be playing this for a long long time to come still.

It feels like the whole point of this particular installment was to mess around with the balance of the game to see if it could both more welcoming to new players while at the same time maintaining if not increasing the difficulty. This a fairly good example of finding ways to change the formula without changing the game. It still feels and plays exactly like a Dark Souls game should, and certainly is a good thing.

Is Dark Sous 2 better than the first Dark Souls game? Honestly, right now I can't say that it is. But is it bad? Fuck no. It was a fantastic play through with what shows me to be one of incredible replayability. It's only March and there are a lot of games set to come out this year, but this is one that will be in my game of the year conversation going from this point forward, mark my words. The Souls franchise is one of the best in gaming and if you haven't played one yet then you are missing out.

"I don't wanna die anymore!" - Joel Heyman
Pretty much summarizes this entire game.