DOOM (PS4): I'll be Damned.

I can't deny what the first person shooter genre did to the video game industry. The first one I ever played, probably like most people, was Wolfenstein 3D. It was new and interesting, but one of the games that has heralded as one of the most iconic of the entire genre is the Doom series. Like most people, I feel this is one of the games that really defined what made a great FPS. Fast paced, interesting weapons, fun monsters to kill. I specifically have childhood memories of Doom 2 being exceptionally good.

But as well all know, FPS games and I have a very/love hate relationship. There aren't a lot of them that I really love, and many of them seem to be carbon copies of each other. Very few rise to the top. That being said, the recently reviewed Overwatch has kinda softened me on FPS games lately, and I found myself curious about this newest installment. Thankfully due to one of my local libraries, they had a shiny new copy waiting for me to check out. 

DOOM{2016}(PS4)

I honestly went into this not caring what the Doom story was. I just wanted to go in and shoot some demons. Thankfully, the game obliges. The game opens with you seeing a red mark appear on the screen and you waking up chained to a stone sarcophagus with a demon fast approaching. You break one of the chains and quickly smash its skull against the stone. After freeing yourself you quickly find a handgun and dispatch a few more enemies. When you enter the next room to find the famous Doom Marine armor waiting for you.

Upon touching it you have series of flashbacks of hell and demons. When you come back you are armored and checking the PC screen next to you, all of the information about what has gone wrong is blocked off and receive a message from one of the scientists. He goes to explain that he has plans for how you can mutually help each other, but the Marine pretty much trashes the screen immediately, grabs a nearby shotgun and heads out into Mars to raise hell.... again.

Hello again, old friend.

So right out the gate I have to appreciate this. Doom for a lot of people is really just one thing: Man with guns shooting demons from hell on Mars. The people at ID software clearly realized that people did not like the direction that Doom 3 had taken, and realized they just want what they had before, just newer. And that is exactly what they did. They framed the story, gave you a gun, and put you out there to start shooting everything in your path. This was smart of them, because pretty much from the first level I was locked in a ready to go. 

To be fair, there is a story. The long and short of it is a Mars base owned by the Union Aerospace Corporation is here to solve the earth energy crisis. Dr. Samuel Hayden heads this project and has learned not only how to siphon energy but also can travel to hell to steal and research artifacts they've found there. One of his subordinates however, Olivia Pearce, makes a pact with one of the demons from hell and opens a portal allowing their release. Hayden is forced to release the "Doom Slayer" trapped in one of the artifacts, to try to take the fight back to the demons and send them back. As you play through the game it fleshes out the context of this story.

Seriously, Do people who start cults not listen to how crazy they sound?

But who fucking cares, we aren't here for a new doom story. We are here because we want to kill some eff'n demons. Now as someone who was a fan of the original Doom and Doom 2, I only really had a couple of things I really wanted in this game. Are the iconic monsters there? Are the guns I enjoyed using still there, and is the game fast paced. This was pretty much the standard for me on the game being good.

The game starts you off with a pretty big and wide open area of mars terrain to get you going. There are handful of imps around and lots of infected humans. It felt like i had a pretty fast run speed but I didn't really have any sense of context for how fast I was moving due to the size of the map. That did not last long. Almost immediately I found myself in an area of tighter corners and I found myself strafing at a full sprint as imps dashed at me chucked fireballs at me, zig-zagging closer so I can pop a close range shotgun blast. Speed? Check.

The speed of the game feels just right. Fast and frantic without being too much.

As I played through the the game, I was very happy to see some familiar faces appear as a I played. The regular shambling dead were kind of new, and I kind of "hrrrrnnngg'd" at what appeared to be more than one variant of Imp walked by. But maybe not even a level goes by when see one of the newly modeled remnants appear, leaping around and firing from its shoulder mounted rocket launchers. The redesign was amazing that it looked new, modern, and terrifying while still exactly reminding me of what sprite it used to be.

And then I turned around to see a Cocademon I didn't notice before point blank range chomping me for an instant kill. Scared the living fuck out of me. But as I continued to play the game more and more of the original monsters started to appear, all with cool new designs, new tricks, and new behavioral patterns. Not only that though, they made sure to have specific demons appear in specific map layouts which forces your to adjust your attack strategies because the same tricks won't work with different combinations of enemies. Even that first encounter with the Cyberdemon my brain just went "Ooooh yeah.. I remember you. *cracks knuckles* Lets go." Iconic monsters? Check.

At this point you know of this third check point is going to go. I don't remember the specific order I picked the weapons up but you start with a shotgun. OK no big, the game always has a shotgun. Then you pick up an assault rifle. Yeah yeah, FPS I get it. Even when I picked up the rocket launcher I met with a un-enthused "meh"... But then I landed the double barreled shotgun, and all the memories of Doom came flooding back.. That "ooooooohhhh yeahhh, shit's about to serious now" feeling just hits you the moment you see those two shells get loaded into the gun. The pulse rifle shortly followed and of course the infamous BFG 9000. Doom Weapons? Check.

Another point about the weapons that I should note is that there is no reloading in this game. I don't specifically remember that there was reloading in the old Doom games, but apparently there was not. But because I was so conditioned by Overwatch and most of the modern shooters these days, I would constantly find myself hitting the square button to reload only to yank out the chainsaw instead. Fun note about that weapon: If you use that to kill a demon, they drop a shit ton of ammo. I did not realize this right away and it caused for me to have a lot of difficult and stressful moments of the game because I would be fighting very tough enemies with practically no ammo, because I'm an idiot who didn't know how to get more.

But wait! There's more! While I continued to play through the game there are areas where you have skirmishes with waves of enemies, typically while you are fighting your way to get blue yellow and green skulls or key cards (another throwback to classic Doom) while the fight is taking place I noticed that I was sort of head banging in place. I realized that I was REALLY enjoying the music in this game. In points of high tension and battle Doom delivers an unrelenting mechanical hybrid of industrial. Very sharp and hard repetitious riffs, with very punctuated drums.

I know this sound, I've definitely heard this before. And sure enough one google search showed me that behind the soundtrack was Mick Gordon, who you would know from the amazing remixes of the Killer Instinct OST from the updated release of that game. The music in this game absolutely rocks my ass off. I must have played a 4 hour stream of this on one day off and I couldn't help but constantly comment on how bad ass the soundtrack was. There is no official OST for the game available, but if you search the Internet hard enough, there is a 3 disc rip of the all the music from the game, and it is fucking bad ass. Mick Gordon is quickly becoming a member of my god tier of video game musicians with Akira Yamaoka, Richaad EB, Shoji Meguro, and Nobuo Uematsu.

For the most part, I love the level design. For a pretty large majority of the game I was able to navigate my way through level after level without finding myself getting lost too much. The game guides you only with a small HUD that points you in the general direction of where the objective is and most of the time so long as that is pointed the right way you will be able to march your way to the goal without getting too lost. It does a pretty good job of not being too linear in the maps because there are a number of areas where you can spread out and use various covers and launchers for some pretty wild firefights without using cover mechanics.

But the path indicators don't necessarily mean you are going the right way. Sometimes the only indicator your have is blocked by a locked door, which then forces you to explore your surroundings to try to find the appropriate colored key to move on. Normally this is a very good thing because the levels are designed to be complimentary to exploring. but when this happens, I am the type of player who will find himself completely lost with no idea how to backtrack back to where I needed to go. The in-game map is not very helpful when you have multiple levels all layered over the same spot.

There is one really specific section that annoyed the shit out of me because it was a map that had a series of teleporters that warped you all over the map. This was an incredibly frustrating segment and it showed while I live-streamed it. Because in order to proceed I needed to find a yellow key. It took me nearly an hour to constantly be warped from place to place trying to figure out what specific area would help me find they key. But then once I found the key, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the area with the door so I could continue on.

This is one of my primary gripes about FPS games. The moment I find myself lost and wandering to figure out where to go next, is the moment I start to lose interest in the game. What followed were a couple tortuous hours of constantly wandering the same areas to the same droning song with no monsters to fight. It forced me to close the live stream because it wasn't entertaining anymore. The game could have lost me at that segment. Thankfully not long after I called it a stream I stumbled on where I needed to go but it could have lost me there for good.

Fuck. You. Map. You were not helpful at all.

There is also a multiplayer section that for some bizarre reason requires several minutes of loading to get to from the main screen. Something I don't understand, and for a guy who is usually pretty against playing multiplayer giving me a more difficult barrier of entry just makes me less likely to try it, which is pretty much what happened here. I can't comment on how fun the multiplayer is because I didn't try it.

This iteration of Doom features something called the SnapMap editor. I suppose the most comparable comparison I can make would be something like Halo's forge mode. Essentially its a plug and play user generated content map builder for players to create and share. Since I just had the game checked out from the library and this seemed like a lot of work, this too is something that I didn't really try. But from what I have been reading some real wizards have come up with some clever uses for it.

Apparently there are whole bunch of hidden things to find in this game too. I found a couple of the Doom Solider dolls as I played through the game, but talking a friend about it apparently there are ways to unlock classic levels of Doom titles to play in the new system. They must be well hidden because I didn't find a single one of them but a quick google search proves that they do exist. So I guess that really layers some replay value to the game in addition to the series of challenge maps you come across in the game, as well as the multiple levels of difficulty.

One last little nitpick here. The install file for this game is fucking retarded. I get that we've reached an age where we can't just throw in a cartridge fire up a game. But I thought the whole point of the PS4 is that I could toss the disc in, and it would install just enough that I could start the game up while if finished downloading and installing the rest of it in the background. After the game was "ready" to start I was treated to another install screen, just like the bullshit Resistance 3 pulled. By the time the update file finally finished, the game was taking up a whopping 77GB of hard drive space. That's almost a 5th of the drive! Absolutely ridiculous and probably unnecessary. Download enough to let me start the game, then do the rest later. Yeesh.

I have to be totally honest here, I freak'n loved this game. Honestly I'm pretty surprised at how much I loved this game. For someone who is pretty lukewarm to the majority of the FPS genre as a whole, Doom pretty much managed to nail down every single thing I liked about an FPS game while managing to leave out almost everything I don't like about it.

I really cranked through Doom once I really knuckled down with it and I don't remember having this much fun with a FPS campaign for a long while now. And this is how I know it was a good game. Once I was I got through the whole campaign, I deleted the game data and moved on to a new title. Maybe less than hour later I found myself looking away from the game I was playing looking at the box for Doom. I wasn't ready to stop playing, so I put it back in, cranked up the difficulty, and started to play it again. That means something.

So If you still haven't played through this game yet, you are in luck as Doom is frequently reduced to 30$ these days, which motivated me to purchase a copy of it for myself even after beating the campaign. I enjoyed it that much. I look forward to going back and playing it on a harder setting. Surprisingly and highly recommended.

Seriously, the new design of the Cocademon terrifies the crap out of me. 

Persona Q (3DS): Yo Dawg, I heard you like Mashups.

Alright alright, I know what you are thinking: "Oh wow, CannonMan is going to gush about how much he loves the Persona universe again. Talk about how much he loves the characters, and wishes they were his real friends. Yadda yadda blah blah." 

Damn fucking right I am. Let's do this.

PERSONA Q (3DS)

Depending on which protagonist you start with, the storyline's opening starts off around midway through the points of Persona 3 and Persona 4. For example, if you choose to play the game as Yu Narukami from Persona 4 the game opens up during the Yasogami High Culture festival, and when Yu goes to get his fortune read by Margaret at her fortune telling booth (after the group date cafe bombs), they wind up in a variant of the Velvet room, when they leave they find that an old Clocktower that has long been destroyed now stands tall.

On the Persona 3 side, Mintao Airsato (the P3 hero) has just gotten over a cold and decided to take the team into Tartarus on their mission to discover the what the dark hour is and why it appears over Gekkoukan High. At the base of Tartarus, Minato enters the Velvet room where he finds Elizabeth and Theodore. There is a disturbance, a chime of a tower bell, and the rest of the Persona 3 team finds themselves in the Velvet room as well. The elevator that holds it begins to plummet to a crash, and when they exit they find themselves at some alternate school having a culture festival.

Depending on who you picked, you search your way through a dungeon/exhibit called "You in Wonderland" try to find your way back home where you come across two mysterious students named Zen and Rei. They appear to be trapped in this bizarro school as well and they can't use personas, so they decide to join up with your team to try to escape.

As you fight your way down to the bottom of the first dungeon you get confronted by your first boss, and just before you get overwhelmed by shadows, the other team comes in for the assist. They both realize that way home must be through 2 suspiciously locked doors in the velvet room, and going through the culture festivals dungeons will unlock the locks that hold the door shut. With that, the two classes decide to work together to see this through.

Don't ask me why they felt they needed the dance poses for the assist... I have no idea.

Alright cool, seems like we have a interesting mashup of Persona's two most lovable casts of characters. That'd be great for an interesting one off. But more surprisingly to me, is that according to the developers, this game is supposed to be canon to the story. That just doesn't make sense. the Stories of P3, P4, and the 2 fighting games happen chronologically to each other, so they clearly aren't all the same ages. They also didn't know each other when they met in the fighters, so that wrecks havoc on established story.

I assume this will all be determined as the story plays out and I approach completion, but as someone who has become somewhat obsessed with this universe, its doing a pretty good job of twisting my brain around trying to figure out how this can be considered canon. I'm just hoping it doesn't end up one of those "They don't remember what happened" things at the end of it. It probably will. :(

Now, let's make no mistake here. This game isn't a single mashup. Nope, its not just the mixing of P3 and P4. In addition, its also a fusion of the Persona game franchise, and the Etrian Odyssey (a series I had never played). It mixes aspects of the two game types together so while I have familiarity with some of the aspects, others are completely brand new to me and in some cases a little disorienting.

The biggest change is that game fronted me is the dungeons. This game uses the Etrian system for dungeon crawling which is basically done on first person grid based maps. I, HATE, first person. We all know this, and I was pretty worried that it would turn me off to the game completely. I am very bad at navigating an environment in first person and more than likely will find myself getting lost.

Persona Q tries to assist this by allow you to make a map of the floor on the bottom screen of the 3DS. It gives you a myriad of options to draw walls, place icons for doors, stairs, chests, and other things like place notes that you can type for yourself. To be honest it was a tad overwhelming, and I know at least one person it sort of turned to game off for.

Ugh.

However, as I played along I realized that some of the icons you can place change automatically depending on how you discover things, and drawing the walls aren't overly important because it will at least shade the squares you have already stepped on.  So if you tend to just focus on doors and portals, and maybe chests or important events, it makes the whole thing a little easier to manage and less time consuming. Mitsuru complained to me it wasn't detailed enough but I seemed to be able to navigate it easier.

The battles are sort of a hybrid of the two games as well and that definitely threw me off. Now, I've played games that have the two rank battle formation system before, Final Fantasy IV specifically comes to mind. Easy enough, heavies up front, weak in back. But what makes it a bit more challenging is I have to remember what characters have ranged weapons and can actually deal better damage from the back rank, the game tells you but I did have to shift my lineups a bit to compensate for it.

So far, the game hasn't made me split up. But I'm leveling a bunch of people just in case they do.

Also, the weakness system changes things a bit too. Normally in a Persona you can just spam whatever elemental weakness someone has and knock everyone down, then crush a massive all out attack. Not so easy to do in Q, because most importantly hitting an enemy with an elemental weakness doesn't always knock them down. It can, but its not guaranteed. Also, if you are slick enough to get everything knocked down, you aren't promised an All-Out Attack either.

If you hit a weakness or critical on a baddie, your character's little icon will glow gold. What this does is gives them an MP free action on their next turn, so long as they haven't been hit. This allows you to maintain your assault without draining your very limited MP without the cost of the expensive casts. But on top of that, you have a chance for an All-Out Attack when people are fired up, and its more likely the more characters are. I've had it happen with at least 3 people fired up, but if you can get all 5, its pretty much guaranteed.

They have also added a feature from Etrian in the form of visible wandering bosses known as FOE's. Each map has a number of them that wander the map in specific paths or are triggered by certain events. Sometimes evading them is part of the puzzle to complete the level, and typically when you first meet them, they are significantly stronger than you are. Most of the time you will be prompted to run away from them if you get locked into an encounter. They are worth some middling experience but you will usually get a decent persona if you beat them, so its good to go back and grind them once they are easy enough.

Some FOE's can be downright infuriating, which makes them satisfying to grind later.

The game remains contained to the school they are trapped in, so there aren't a lot of  NPCs you can interact with outside of the residents of the Velvet room, so there really is no social link system in this game. There are however quests that you can do for rewards, and many of them require "taking a stroll" with your comrades which allow you to get your hilarious persona interactions from the crossing over casts. This is kind of a hit or miss.

On one hand, its great to see some of the personalities of the two casts clash, and see what you could considering the sprouting beginnings of certain characters relationships with each other. But on the other, if you have played and love both Personas 3 and 4 then you pretty much already know what character types they are, and it can make some of the events a little predictable. For example, at one point Yousuke complains about being hungry, and the team gets into the idea of a cookoff. It's a rehash of a Persona 4 joke, but now they add Fuuka to the mix, who was also a bad cook in Persona 3. You can save Yousuke by making the right decisions in prepping the meal, but it still goes bad for him like you would expect it to.

I'm a bad fan. I am so disappointing in myself about it to. As we've heard me say a billion times, one of my favorite characters in this game is Kanji Tatsumi: the tough looking, rough n' tumble, and possibly sexually confused thug with a heart of gold and passion for sewing & cute things. Part of what makes me love this character so much was Troy Baker's performance of him. As I was telling a friend how much I loved how he did in this game, I looked it up to realize that Kanji in Persona Q is actually played by Matt Mercer. But he did such an exceptional job that I didn't even notice the difference. To make matters worse? I learned that he was the voice of Kanji in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax too, and I didn't notice then either.

So this game kind of spells out for you that there are only going to be 4 dungeons for you get through. This at first kind of miffed me. Only 4 dungeons? Tartarus in Persona 3 had well over 100 floors. The TV world in Persona 4 had well over 4 dungeons, so I thought this game was going to be a 20 hour breeze. I was wrong. With just 4 dungeons my first save of the game already has well over 80 hours. Why is that? Because this game is GRIND-TASTIC. I know JRPGs have some degree of grind to them but this is ridiculous. There is no easy way to do it and I'm getting the sense you have be at level 100 to beat the game.

Kanji just wants to wuv a puppy. Quit being a baby about it Koromaru.

They added some nice features to the Velvet room in this game that make fusing personas much easier, and you have the ability to choose what skills you want to transfer over rather than just randomly trying to get them. I found this super helpful. They also added a sacrifice feature which allows you to dump 2 personas for a big XP boost for the one you are leveling. So basically you can just grind for weaker personas and use them to boost your currents, OR you can use the compendium to get similar types for a fee and get a bigger XP boost. These are great features and I hope they appear in the upcoming Persona 5.

The music in these games are so awesome. I don't know why I love it so much but I do. Every song is just some well constructed theme fitting melody, and almost every song uses almost genre of music and meshes them together into something wonderful. The P4 hero's battle music "light up the night" is this mix of Ska, Rock, Hip-hop I'd guess? And as much as I can't stand horns in my music (and trust me, I usually have a visceral reaction to ska) this theme is just perfect. I find myself listening to the boss battle music all the time just because I love the background vocals "WhooaaaYeaaaahhhhh". Persona always gets a gold star on music.

In addition to the music, the game operates in a more "chibi" style art for the characters which gives it a more cute feel to it. And I gotta tell ya, as dumb as I thought it was to start? Inside of a few cutscenes I fell completely in love with it. It felt right at home and in some scenes made the game seem even funnier, (why won't Koromaru let Kanji pet him!?). Combine this with a number of returning voices and it all falls right into step.

So what didn't I like about the game. Grind. Grind is the end all be all problem for me in this game. Yes, I understand that Etrian games have a tendency to be a bit grindy. And I know that Persona is no slouch to doing that either. But there has always been kind of a unspoken rule when it comes to JRPGs in that in the majority of them, unless there is some easy form of level grinding, typically around level 60 is when you can beat the game. Well, I'm pushing my characters past that and I'm still struggling with the last dungeon.

Zen and Rei are the only 2 characters out of place. While they fit right in, they obviously have a few secrets.

The persona level cap is always a point of annoyance for me too. It makes sense that you can't build personas past the level of your main character in the game, so that doesn't bother me all that much. But one of the features of the street pass is that you can share a persona and get ones from other people. The problem is, these are also restricted by the level despite being in your pass book. So I have like 5 different personas locked in my book that would be game changers and help me finish the game, and I can't purchase them because some of them are like 20 levels higher than me. Why bother letting me see them in the first place..

The game can actually be kind of insulting too. Through out the game there are a number of puzzles you find and have to solve. I won't lie to you, a number of them are actually pretty difficult. Hell, one of them in the later stages forced me to use fuck'n algebra to solve it. Guess what Persona Q, I passed algebra with the lowest possible D. I'm not that smart. Some of them, not all, the other characters will solve the puzzle for you. They'll be one I couldn't figure out and Naoto will just step in and do it for me. Not for the fuckin' algebra one though.

Absolutely love the little Catherine reference used in this scene.
Fun fact, the "Love is Over" end theme appears in the P4 Animated series.

The biggest problem of all though, is that I didn't finish it. I couldn't finish it. Some people love the grind of games, I don't. I want a fun experience that will take up a great amount of time with a good story to go with it. If its designed well and the music is great, so much the better. And while Persona Q seemingly has all the intangibles that would make me give this game a fantastic rating, I hesitate to do so. Why? Because I got bored, and boredom is the kiss o' friggen death in a video game. I've gone on and on this point before, but if I hit the point in the game where I become bored with it, I move on. It's that simple.

I am going to eventually come back to this, but I have to say the amount of excessive grind really took the wind out of my sails personally. But if you are a fan of JRPGs and more specifically the Persona universe then this game is going to be right up your alley. It made me laugh on more than on occasion, the battle system is and interesting hybrid, the music is fun, the puzzles are hard, and I certainly dropped a huge chunk of time on it.

Reviewers have been going batty for this game and giving it scores of 8's, 9's, and I have even seen a few 10s. While I think perfect scores are a bit high for this one, the rest I would say is pretty accurate. While perhaps not the best Persona game I've played, Persona Q: The Shadow of the Labyrinth is a very welcome edition and hold over till the release of Persona 5. I would give this a strong recommendation to any 3DS owner.

And like all persona games, Ken rides the bench.
Because he sucks. 

Outlast (PS4): NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

Hoooo boy. Ok, so as you should all know if you've followed this blog for any specific length of time, I've got a bone stuck in my craw about the state of horror video games. A lot of the big mainstays like Silent Hill, Dead Space, and Resident Evil have lost their edge. Some can startle, but they don't really scare. Many of them seem to be falling prey to the monster that makes them all bland and homogeneous 3rd person shooters that takes no risks and pushes no boundaries. 

And then I played Slender. That game gave me a lot of hope that out there, hidden beneath mountain of triple-A game development lies a bed of developers who understand. Who GET it. People who know what it is that makes a game scary and by proxy, fun. Before, indie games seemed to really thrive more on the PC, and that's really where horror games have found their home, but the PS4 has been striving to bring indie to their console, and now their PS+ freebie for February I get to sit down with a trailer that I've been pretty stoked about.

OUTLAST

The story as I understand it here. You play freelance journalist Miles Upshur, who receives an anonymous tip that there is something seriously not right happening at Mount Massive, an asylum owned and run by the Murkoff corporation (A company with a bit of a history of shady background as is). So night vision camcorder in hand, Miles pulls up to the asylum to see if he can blow this case wide open. Upon breaking into the asylum, shit immediately gets upended as he greeted by blood splatter, scattered gore and limbs, and bodies of the staff and security littering the floors.

While exploring one of the first rooms, Miles comes across the body of what appears to be a SWAT officer who is spit through chest on a large stake. He rattles to life just long enough to gurgle that Miles needs to get the fuck out of there, and now. Advice that should have been heeded, because shortly after Miles leaves that room, he's attacked by an ogre of an inmate and flung out the window into the atrium of the asylum.

This is one of those games that has rather unclear narrative. Not in the regard that it has bad storytelling, but one that when you pick up files and paper, you really want to read it. Each one of them give context to the seedy underbelly of the asylum. Each little note and scratch paper you find gives a creepy backstory about how things happen at Mount Massive. They don't appear necessary to continue along with the game, but they paint a very interesting picture if you follow along with them.

In addition to that, The main character also takes notes in a journal as you play through the game to sort of keep a backtrack of the events that are taken place. But these are written from the perspective of the character, so naturally as you progress along and more and more shit goes wrong, the writing in the journal gets much more panicked and aggressive. It even uses the occasional *gasp* naughty word.

This is one of those games a-la Slender or Amnesia: The Dark Descent where your only defense is to hightail your ass from danger. When you are being pursued, hiding spots are scarce and darkness is your ally (but you merely adopt the dark). So when somethings on you, the music will crescendo and you will need to hoof it out of wherever you are. You will want to find a dark spot, and duck behind something, get in a locker, or get under a bed.

Light is very scarce in this game, so you will need to bring up your camcorder for a lot of portions of the map. You can record things as normal, but I don't really see a point to it without using the night vision. The night vision lens is almost mandatory to navigate a large section of areas, many of them completely pitch black otherwise sans a scant glimmer of light in one part of the room. You also have a limited battery life for your camera, so you'll want to keep an eye out for when you need to replace the battery. So far the only thing that happens when it runs out is you lose range on the night vision, but every inch helps so make sure you grab batteries when you see them.

I have yet to figure out if having the camera up alerts enemies to your presence, so I am constantly picking up and dropping it to avoid detection. This leads to enemies just popping up in my field of view out of nowhere and scaring the absolute shit out of me. In hindsight the batteries appear to be for the light on the camera, because if they run out the night vision still works, you just can't see as far. So its probably just safer to assume that you can be seen if you have your camera up in the dark.

And the enemies... Ohhhhh the enemies..  Grotesquely deformed insane asylum inmates running free, screaming crazy, groaning in agony, and attacking at random. I haven't played far enough to see why everyone is so fucked up looking, and quite frankly I don't care. I can't take it. Everything about this setting is horrifying. There will be moments you walk through and area and inmates will just be walking around, groaning, crying, asking to go home, asking to be killed, screaming unintelligible nonsense, or in some cases even talk normal to you. It's fucking frightening.

Reminds me of a particularly bad Raspberry jam incident I had once.
..... I don't like to talk about it.

But what makes it even worse is 80% of the time, you don't really know who is a threat and who isn't until its far too late. Some of them keep to themselves as you walk by, some of them will lash out of the cell at you, some will spot you and flip their shit and come at you with a pipe or a knife and then the chase is on. To make matters worse many of them you can't even see, so you have to bring up the night vision in the camera which causes all their eyes to glow white over a grim, darkened, and deformed looking face. NOPE, I'm good.

Even the really obvious scares still manage to fucking get me. There is a scene early on where you pass a guy in a wheel chair. He's clearly not dead and whimpering. If you crouch in front of him and then zoom the camera in close, you will see that his eye sockets are completely covered in seamless skin. He is loosely restrained to the chair. I see this and think "this fucker is going to jump at me". So I approach it and tread closely and nothing, I try to antagonize and nothing.  So I move past and complete what I need to in the next room.

Now I know that asshole is going to jump at me. I know he is. But he hasn't twice before so I just barrel through and sure enough, this douche screams and lunges at me, getting in my face and screaming crazy. I was playing it live on twitch.tv, so my friend got a priceless reaction of me jumping like a 5 year old girl and smashing my knuckle into the dual shock controller. Fuck this game.

Dr. Satan here (Trager) is easily one of the most terrifying.
Not because of his looks, but what he says.

This is a type of game that doesn't really have a musical score to it. Actually, now that I am thinking about it I am fairly sure this game doesn't have music at all. It uses the horror movie mechanic like you would see in a game like the original Silent Hill where instead of music you have horrible droning noise, that will gradually increase as moments start to get more tense. Or when they aren't tense. Or just whenever at all. It really does a good job of keeping you on your toes.

Is the game perfect? No, of course not. I'd say one of my biggest hang-ups is one that is pretty common for games like this, and that is that the movement speed is practically a crawl. If you are being chased by some hideously grotesque sub-human with the intent to murder you, the relaxed jog you seem to go on would not be the speed you would use. You would be blasting full sprint until your heart.

If you catch sight of Walker, its time to Leave..... And FAST.

Another thing is what is the point of the batteries? If the whole camera went down when the batteries died, that would leave you with potential situations to be completely screwed by the environment. It would force you to explore more carefully, and use your camera more sparingly.  Instead, all it does is slightly reduce the range you can see in the dark, which just makes it a momentary annoyance than an actual handicap. I suppose this stops you from being completely fucked in a dark room, but I think that the batteries should have more impact than they do.

And seriously, tons of people in this game are wielding a knife, or a hammer, or something. There are sticks, boards, and rocks all over the place. I'm not saying throw in a combat mechanic, but you could at least give some momentary way to stun a pursuer for you to run and hide in safety.  The game has a real shitty habit of putting the game's most dangerous enemy in a position where have virtually nowhere to run if he spots you.  it has left me frustrated and constantly dying in more than one situation throughout the course of the game.

This guy.... This FUCK'N guy....

It's pretty short too. If you are not anal retentive about exploring every nook and cranny of the asylum, and are fairly good at this type of game you can probably rip through the thing within a few hours if you really committed to doing it. I played it at a fairly causal pace (as casual as terror will allow, mind you) and I was able to complete the entire game in about three or four sessions total. I got it on PS+ for free, but its only 15 bucks, so I suppose for the value its set at, that's probably an appropriate length.

I also have a minor issue with the ending of the game as well. I don't want to say that the end of the game is predictable, but I certainly wasn't shocking. It could have gone any number of ways at the end, and I don't think any of them really would have shocked me. Like a number of horror games, it kinda loses steam after the first few stages. So when it got the big finish of the game and the credits started roll, it left me with a resounding "Eh... yeah that happened."

All that being said, it absolutely delivered on what it was supposed to. I played the game in the dark, effectively had the shit scared out of me on a number of occasions, and managed to keep a tense and oppressive atmosphere and real sense that I was in danger the entire time.  Its not going to redefine the horror genre, and some of the subtly goes the wayside in the back half. But in comparison to a number of horror franchises that have been released in the past 10 years or so, this provides an excellent example of how to do a horror game properly. Definitely worth a sit through. 

Payday 2: A 4-man job to steal my heart.

So my utter loathing of the FPS genre is fairly well documented. I only played 3 of them  90% of the time I won't give an FPS the time of day, 8% of the time I try one to see what the hype is all about. But oh so rarely, but the slimmest of margins I will get a FPS game because its one that I enjoy or really want to try. 

And since I watched the guys at Achievement Hunter make a let's play of this title and have been purchasing more games through Steam lately, I have been keeping an eye on this one. The Steam holiday sale marked the price down, but I wasn't ready to jump in just yet. Then on Xmas morning, a friend of mine saw one of my threads mentioning how on the fence I was about getting it. So out of the blue he purchased a 4 pack and gave me one, thus giving me the opportunity to sit down with.....

PAYDAY 2

There really isn't very much of a story when it comes to Payday 2 at least from what I've seen. You play one of four professional thieves brought in to do some scores from some of the local areas crime lords. They characters have names and minimal backstories, but ultimately they are completely irrelevant. This must be some kind of record for this blog, because I am already done talking about the story.

So typically the game fires up with you being introduced to your safe house. This I think was intended to be used as a character's online showing off space because there are places to show how much money you have amassed in the game, and places to display your custom masks and modified weapons. But after your first walk through you will probably never end up coming in here again. I certainly didn't.

Your first trip through the safehouse basically will give your instructions on how the controls work. I am not an active PC gamer but from what I have been told the controls are fairly standard PC FPS. So if you are a fairly active PC gamer you probably won't be lost here. WASD controls, R to reload, F to grab and interact, G to put down or use items, Shift to run, crtl to crouch. That essentially appears to be it as far as controls go.

I am Super Kawaii. Judge me.

When you wish to start a mission, you will need to go into Crime.net (or Crime.net offline). This brings up a map of the available lobbies set up by other players currently in. You will get washed by a LOT of available missions so it probably couldn't hurt to get your feet wet in the offline modes.

When selecting a mission they will be signified with white and yellow dots. White marking how well that job pays and the yellow marking its difficulty from 0-3. All of them missions have a specific code name so when you select it the goal and location are always the same, just some of the internal pieces move around such as safe location or locked doors. After completion of the missions, you earn your daily pay rate and whatever bonus loot you pick up during the mission.

Shouldn't have a problem finding a game. Finding a game with jerks though, there in lies the challenge.

At mission completion, the majority is moved to you "offshore account" which allows you to choose your own mission with its own difficult (but selecting them on the map as they appear are free). The remainder is your spending cash, which you can use to purchase better guns or use with skill points to advance your character. And that shit is expensive, so expect to play a lot to level your skills up.

So the majority of the actual missions may have different themes or winning conditions, but most generally follow the same lines: Go in, Steal what you are after, fend off the cops till your escape gets there, then escape with the loot. Oh sure, at the start of almost every mission you can walk around the joint, find where the cameras are, where the guards patrol, and try to concoct some clever way you can loot the joint without even being seen.

You can shill some extra cash before a mission for intel or extra gear. 

That, Never, Happens.

Nope, be it your own mistake or one of the jackasses you are playing with, someone will trip an alarm, let a pedestrian get away, or be seen by a guard. The alarms will sound and the cops will be coming. It's at this point in the mission the game will quickly turn into a game of survival mode. A good majority of the time you will either be waiting for a drill to bust into a large safe or vault so you can go in and loot the materials, so you can take this opportunity to loot the small goods or barricade entry points to fend off the police assault.

The police will tend to move in waves, so every time you see the yellow warning in the upper right corner, that means they are coming after you. Starts off simple, regular street cops with handguns. But then they will start to bring in SWAT teams. Then some kind of black and yellow shock troopers, sometimes with some blue Judge Dredd looking guy who can tazer you. The worst leading up to these incredibly heavy armored slow moving bulldozers who are just designed to eat bullets.

Your level of success is really determined by how many people are playing the game. I have played a number of missions single player with 2 AI partners, and almost every time I would start to fail at the point where I have to move the gained loot from the source to the van. It gets exceptionally harder single player because as the level increases so too does the number of bags you'll need to steal, which means more trips to the van, which usually means more bullets in your body.

And while I'm at it? The AI partners in the game are fuckin' retarded. They do not help carry the loot bags, and they really take their time shooting anything. They don't zip tie any of the hostages, and a lot of the times, they just kinda wander around instead of helping fend off the police. The only reason to use them is they are typically close enough to you that when you get shot down, they will be able to pick you back up. Unfortunately, even you have a hostage if they don't get to you in time the game is still over. In mulitplayer hostages can be negotiated to bring players back into the fray.

Crowd control will NEVER go like you want it to.

If I had to make a complaint about the game and this is really a nitpick, is that the number of missions is pretty low. There are 4 crime bosses with a select number of missions, some of them are duplicates of other missions just on a pro job level (which basically means no continues and more XP). By the time you reach a decent level, all of the first few missions are a not even worth doing on the hardest levels because you will fly through them so easily. There is an extra DLC mission for 7 bucks, that seems a tad pricey to me for just one level.

I suppose this is more of a personal gripe too, but the other problem I have is actually getting multiplayer games together. I have friends who have the game, I keep asking people to play. But I usually only get one out of 6 friends to actually jump in the game with me. Playing it with a group of people is really the way to do it.

The assaults are when the action picks up, and the Police can be pretty relentless.

Seriously though, there are shooters I like, there are a LOT of shooters I hate. But I think might stretch to say this is the first shooter I love. I am almost always willing to jump into a game of this. The longer 3 day missions are an absolute blast with friends, and I'm already considering to restart my character just to play it over again with the increased challenge. I got the game for free thanks to a very generous friend, but I'm seriously kicking myself for not picking this up sooner. This game is an absolute blast and if I had played it sooner this could have seriously been in the running for my 2013 game of the year.

Payday 2 is fucking awesome. Play it.

Bioshock Infinite (XB360): Full of Hot Air.

When I play a game in the first person perspective, I get very unpopular with my friends because of my usual harsh criticisms.  Look at the first person games I have reviewed here, maybe one or two of them actually walked away with positive recommendations out of me.  But I don't consider myself a "hater" of first person shooters, because there are a handful of examples in the genre that I gravitate to, enjoy, and love. 

One of those examples was the first Bioshock game. Scary setting, good story, excellent pacing, creepy enemies, and the fuck'n Big Daddies. I hold it as one my staples of excellent FPS games and aside from a friend spoiling the games biggest twist for me, it was a near perfect experience. I severely disliked the 2nd one, however. It just felt boring, unimaginative, and lifeless. Just tacking a less interesting story onto the same game I've already played. Because of this I hesitated on the newest Bioshock release. However, I've heard numerous positive reports and seen many high scores. So many its time to give this series another chance.

BIOSHOCK INFINITE:(XB360/PS3)

In Bioshock Infinite you play as Booker DeWitt, a disgraced agent who is indebted deeply to the wrong people. In an attempt to clear out his debt and start fresh, he was been tasked to go to the floating city of Columbia to find and apprehend a young girl by the name of Elizabeth. After heading to a rocket silo in Maine, he is launched up into the floating city and is greeted by an almost eerily cultish society.

He manages to pass through undetected until at local raffle o' racism, a citizen notices the brand on his hand. Shit starts to go haywire as apparently the cities prophet, Comstock, foresaw that Booker would arrive to take the girl away and bring the fall of Columbia. Booker is branded as a false shepherd and the people begin to revolt against him. Booker manages to work his way to the tower where Elizabeth is being held captive and convinces her to escape with him.

I'm going to have a hard time putting some structure into this review, since my feelings on this one where kind of all over the place. But to sort of give things away, I had a lot of hesitation going into this one because Bioshock 2 I felt was so poor I didn't even want to bother with Bioshock Infinite. Infinite actually starts off very similar to the first game as well, although instead of a plane you are taken by boat to a silo in the middle of the sea where you are strapped in and taken to this games variation of Utopian society.

But unlike the previous two games, nothing apparently is going wrong here. People aren't hideous deformities because they are overly spliced. The city isn't falling apart because of the nonstop pressure of the ocean. Everything is brightly lit because the city is high above the clouds. It was just.... A city. It's an incredible let down because the moment the gameplay actually takes place, it just feels like you are on a regular old cityscape and the floating city concept is chucked out the window. There isn't water leaking in through the walls and there is no dark and scary atmosphere to the game. If anything the city and the people in it seem more cartoony than previous games which from an art style standpoint I think is a bit of a downgrade.

The actual aspect of the floating city comes into play on some of the maps when you have to engage in the rail system. Most of the time these are simply to travel from point A to point B, but there a handful of maps where firefights take place on multiple levels of floor and you need to use these rails to glide up and down floors or purse and airship. Its a pretty interesting concept, but it never felt exactly fluid with me. A lot of the time you just kinda hop onto the rail and pray. Most of the time I never even used it, and if I didn't need to use them to beat the game? Then in my opinion they weren't incorporated right. 

Because of its first person perspective, this can also get you turned around real fast. Infinite introduced a bit of way point feature much like Dead Space does where you can drop a line and it sort of guides you in the general direction of where you need to go, but with the rails it becomes incredibly difficult to follow and there have been a number of times I found myself going completely in the wrong direction. At some points it doesn't even work, but that's usually become some kind of event needs to take place first.

I never did get the knack of using the skyhook.

I would have liked the fact that the city was floating to play more of a factor into the combat as well. There are occasional points where you can miss a jump and fall off the edge, but I would have liked it more to be incorporated into environmental kills. Allow me to blast out a glass floor to take out a group of enemies or give me some kind of force blast to throw people over the edge. That would have increased the combat for me immensely. 

Another thing that would have improved the fighting for me would be interesting and fun enemies. This is another area where I feel Bioshock 1 crushes Infinite. In one you have the splicers and they all have unique attributes about them. Some just try to run and stab you, some throw hooked blades at you, some of them can disappear and come back. On top of that? They were fucking crazy. Just listening to them sing to themselves, pray out loud, cry about how lonely they are before they notice you just adds to this feeling that things are fucked up, and raises the tension greatly.

Infinite's enemies are basically just 1920's soldiers or civil servants. Sometimes you have a citizen with gun, sometimes you have a soldier with a gun, sometimes you have a rebel with a gun, or in a pinch sometimes you have a robot with a gun. Whew, give me a minute to re-balance myself from all that staggering innovation.  And like the surrounding city, everything is all sunny and enemies are wearing overly saturated bright colors. I suppose it gives them a distinct look but it kills much of the intimidation of the foes as I fight them.

Now, not every enemy in Infinite is completely generic. They do have a few interesting concepts such as steampunk robo-washington, a hooded man with a coffin on his back who can break into a murder of crows and teleport, and Infinite's answer to the Big Daddies, the Handyman. The crow man was pretty cool, but after a while it just becomes another fodder enemy. Not difficult enough to be a reoccurring boss, and not frequent enough to be a grunt. The Handymen are the only things that feel like a boss or miniboss, but unlike the big Daddies where you can use your surroundings to fight them, it seems like the only way to put down Handymen is just unload your weapons into the big glowing spot on their chest. Snore.

The combat in this game left me a bit disappointed as well. Maybe this can be easily fixed by adjusting the sensitivity settings, but the aim in this game felt very jerky and off. This isn't something I ever had an issue with in the previous Bioshock games but it was a enough of an issue here for me make note of it more than once. 

Not the Big Daddy. At all. Boo. 

Weapon's kind of disappointed me too. At first I thought Infinite had less weapons than the first one, but in reality its about the same amount. The problems are they took away two of the different and original weapons like the crossbow and chemical thrower for extra variants on machine gun and assault rifle. In addition to that, they also took away having a variety of different types of rounds for just one regular type. Both of these are a let down because I love the chemical thrower and giving me different ammo types allowed me to strategize or switch for tougher enemies.

The other thing about the guns I hate is they took away the ability to collect all of them for the same ole boring ass two weapon slots. I fucking hate this. When I pick up a rocket launcher, I don't want to use it right away on some dumbass foot soldier. I want to hang onto it and pull it out when I have a tougher enemy or a mini boss. I can't do this when I can only carry two guns because that makes ammo capacity limited. So what ends up happening is I try to maintain the two weapons that allow me to hold the most amount of ammo.

And where the fuck is the wrench?! I was a master assassin with that thing by the end of Bioshock. Mashing someone with the but of my gun isn't nearly as satisfying. So maybe I got some perverse joy by continuing to wail on the skull of a downed splicer with the wrench long after I killed it. So what? Don't judge me.

Guess what: Pistols and sniper rifles barely work on this thing.
Let me carry more than two fucking guns. 

I suppose the mentality is to make you use everything when you pick them up, but it basically takes out the element of situation need. There are points in the game where I would have loved to have a sniper rifle, but not at the sacrifice of the machine gun that has carried me so far already. Or there would have been a situation were I needed one, but there wasn't one around to swap out for. I'm not going to carry around my sniper rifle for when I might need it next when I'm getting onslaughted by foot soldiers and I need lots of ammo and high rate of fire. I hate this system. 

I felt the same way about the Vigors in this game. A number of them have different names but essentially, they are variants of the Plasmids we have used in previous Bioshocks. But these are cut down too: No enrage, no hypnotize, no ice blast. Either they have a broad one like Possession that just works on everything but shittier (since it never seems to last long enough to stop me from getting gunned down), or the majority of them collect dust because they all do the same thing. Quick fire for attack, Hold down for bomb trap. Once you level up Fire (huge damage) and Lightning (chains to multiple enemies), I found literally no reason to use anything else.

I will say though, perhaps I'm a bit harsh on the vigor aspect. I've talked to a couple of people who have also beaten the game and each of them said they used two specific vigors, and all of us chose a different two. So I suppose it is more a matter of personal preference rather that effectiveness  Still, would have liked some more diverse options.

So if I can swing back to the story for a second here, they game really goes hard for the shock factor right out of the gate because as soon as you crack the surface of this Pleasantville-esq society it pretty much throws right in your face "Holy shit! Look at how racist all these white people are!" Aside from flinging out terms like Master Race, pretty much anyone not fully Caucasian is part of the cities downtrodden, abused and neglected. As I played through and listened to NPCs spout off nearly every racial slur I could think of, I could only help but think "Christ, this is white folk figuring out how to get away with it."

But then the story shifted and without spoiling to much, starts to delve into the idea of alternate dimensions. It was around this point that I started to forget about my complaints with the game play and really started to get engrossed in the story. This however was quickly knocked back down because after a good bit of pacing, the game just explodes in BioCall of Duty:1921. There is just firefights going on all over the place, shit blowing up, and everything moves a frenetic pace. It fucking pissed me off because if the regular baddies with guns made it feel less like Bioshock, having massive military firefights made it even less so.

Seriously, White folk figured out they can be as racist as the want
so long as its done in the name of art. Good work games industry.

But then something strange happened, in the late stages of the game I came across a boss fight where this spectre started raising up spirits from corpses. They still had guns by they had these creepy glowing eyes on their spectral bodies. This ghost would rip around the field screaming in anguish as she rose more soldiers, and if she had enough she'd fly at me and start swinging her ghostly claws. I noticed the sky had darkened and winds were swirling. I could only think "where the shit was this cool stuff when I first started playing the game?!"

Apparently the game knew I was not going have positive things to say, so in a last ditch effort it started throwing things at me that looked awesome. So I guess I can say its back half was much stronger for me than its front, although its around the point I started liking the game that the story went fucking bananas on me.

This shit needed to happen much sooner. 

If I had to pick something I liked about this game I would say its probably got the most interesting characters yet. First off, Booker is not a silent protagonist. He's got a name, a face, and quite the substantial bit of dialog and back story to him. He starts off somewhat jaded and cold  but goes through a good amount of development to make him a likable protagonist.

But who I liked even more than that was Elizabeth. Not because she's the games token pretty face to escort around, but because as far as support characters go she might be the best one I've seen in a long time. Even though she's an obvious damsel in distress, she is confident without coming off as arrogant or aggressive  Despite being basically held prisoner by her father and a giant robot bird (oh yeah, there's a giant robot bird in this game btw), she is cheerful and resourceful. Even though Booker basically breaks in on her, she is smart enough to see him as her chance to escape from her cage.

But she's not just a pretty face to escort either, she pulls her own weight. She doesn't fight per say, but as you scramble around the battle field she will throw you health, salt for vigors, or ammunition in a pinch when you need them. She can also use her ability to rip tears in timespace to provide cover, cause a distraction, allow you access an area you couldn't, or bring in a robot to help you fight. She also is the teams locksmith (which really isn't much since the locks seem arbitrary and you collect the picks).

Booker may be the hero but Elizabeth is clearly the driving force in the story, and definitely seems to have the understanding that she is somehow part of something much bigger than her..... She does always seem to have this stupidly bewildered smug look on her face at all times though. It can ruin a great bit a dialog between the two characters, as if she finished the conversation and then suddenly realized she didn't understand a word she said. Still, she was charming enough to make me fall head over heels for her, (maybe not as much as these lunatics but then again....  Persona 4.)

Derpface.

The game has multiplayer too, but I didn't have the online pass for it, its an FPS game so I'm sure there's not a whole lot of innovation there, and frankly I don't give a shit about multiplayer. Online gamers are assholes. You people really shouldn't expect to hear me talk about it at this point.

The main reason I played this game after so much hesitation is that, like mentioned previously, this game has been getting immaculate reviews. If the reviewing source wasn't giving it a perfect 10, then it was getting 9.75 and that's when my bullshit meter goes off. Here's what bothers me about that, most of the reviews I have read hinge their score based almost completely on the story. Now don't get me wrong, the story after a bit of a sluggish beginning was nothing short of incredible and I wholeheartedly agree that this is the games strongest aspect.

But if the game truly was perfect as so many other reviewers have said, I should not have been able to come up with so many faults to point out. I've admitted that I am incredibly rigid judge of FPS games, but proponents of the original Bioshock or System Shock have had a number of the same gripes that I had as well, so I am clearly not alone in my feelings here. That's not to say its bad though, the game more than stands up on its own and I liked it way more than I did Bioshock 2. 

So the question I raise here is does having an incredible story completely make up for faults in gameplay? I don't think it does, but it certainly goes a long way in making me ignore faults. Take a look at one my favorite games ever, Silent Hill 2. From a purely technical gameplay standpoint the game is fucking awful. Clunky tank controls, loose and unresponsive combat, average voice acting (when compared to current day standards). But the story department is so good that I learn to overlook these flaws. Is the game great? Absolutely. Is the game perfect? No, not at all.

And that is where I see Bioshock Infinite. Die hards to the Shock series of games aren't going to find this as a true spiritual successor to System Shock 2, and the fans that really loved Bioshock 1 aren't going to see Infinite as a massive improvement to the series. But the game does have some interesting moments, some very relatable and likeable characters, and an ending so expertly constructed that pretty much every gamer's jaw hits the floor when they realize the twist.

Bioshock Infinite to me was a great experience in gaming. I played it nearly start to finish in two days, had a great time, and left the game feeling satisfied with my overall experience. The game was not perfect. Now that I finished it I don't really have any desire to go back to it. That to me does not spell a perfect score. But it does merit much of the praise its getting. The game is completely deserving of 8's or 9's or 90+%'s. But to say that this is the pinnacle of gaming perfection is a gross overstatement in my opinion.

Bioshock Infinite is definitely worth your time, but its not the apex of video games in our lifetime. Lower your expectations a bit and you'll be fine.

(Review subject to change when I get a check from 2k like all the other reviewers. {False})