Child of Light (PC): Wait, Ubisoft made this? There must be something amiss.

Sometimes I need to trust my instincts better. This game showed up on the Playstation Store fairly early in the life cycle of me owning a PS4. It had a downloadable demo and a cute aesthetic to it. And the demo had a cool battle system. I thought was an interesting demo, but in my head I was like "That's not bad. If that comes out on the PS+ freebies I'll snag that one." It never did.

Almost 2 years finally passed and I realized I could get PSN cards from my gas station with points. So I did, fully prepared to pay the 15 dollars they were asking for it since it was summer and there weren't a lot of PS4 releases. But as I was doing this, the Steam summer sale happened, and I'll be damned if that very game didn't drop to 3 bucks. There was no reason not to jump on that deal. So I did. I took my sweet ass time getting to it, but now that I have I am glad that I did. 

CHILD OF LIGHT(PC)

The tale of Child of Light opens with a limerick telling us that in Austria, there is a place called Five Hills that is ruled by a beloved Duke, and his wife. They bore a daughter named Aurora, but while Aurora was still very young, her mother passed. The Duke raised Aurora alone, but was still very happy. He fell in love a 2nd time and remarried to a mysterious duchess. On the Friday before Easter however, Aurora went cold in her slumber and was found dead by morning. The Duke was utterly distraught and became bed ridden.

However, Aurora found herself waking up in a curious place called Lumeria. Thinking to be in a nightmare she is found by a firefly named Igniculus who guides her to an alter where a Sword lies. She frees the sword and challenges the guardian there and rescues and old sage who informs her Lumeria was once bright, but a dark queen named Umbra has take over and banished the light. She has a mirror that can return her home, but can only do so if she returns the light of the sun, moon and stars. Aurora is reluctant, but has no other choice.

Sounds kind of like a children's story book doesn't it? That is probably the most apt comparison for Child of Light when comparing most of the aspects of this game. Its entire design is meant to emulate that of the children's story book from the language, to the character and art design, the presentation, and honestly even how the story plays out. 

At it's heart the game is a JRPG. But I hesitate to rush the comparison because it blends a number of elements of different styles. For example, My brain wants to say it reminds me of classic Final Fantasy, but if I wanted to be accurate, it would say its more akin to the 2D MMO Maple Story. All of the maps are 2D sidescroller, but very early on you gain the ability to fly on the map, so it actually blows up the various locations pretty significantly. It sometimes suffers from invisible wall syndrome but it the maps never lock you in a box.

Enemies are scattered around the map so encounters aren't random, but you will need to do some minor grinding. This is where the game really shines because I loved this combat system. So you fight either alone or with a teammate and it follows your pretty typical timed battle system, but instead everyone shares the same wait bar. Depending on character or monster speed they move up the wait timer at varied rates, but when you reach 10% left you get to choose your action. This section of the timer is the Casting bar and your action affects your speed for the remainder of your wait before wailing with that attack or spell.

But this is where fights get interesting, because if you manage to attack an enemy when they are in the cast timer, they get interrupted and knocked back down the wait timer. So depending on your attacks and how fast they cast, you can constantly prevent your enemies from attacking you. However, this is a double edged sword because the enemies can do the very same thing to you, and nothing can swing the momentum of a fight than having one or both of your actions interrupted and allowing the rest of the baddies free shots at you.

This is where your firefly buddy comes into play. You can control him with the mouse, 2nd thumbstick, or additional controller (so yes, this could technically be played co-op). All he can do is fly around and flash but he is more useful than you think. In Battle, if you hold your flash on an enemy, it slows down his wait timer and allows you to play catch up, which can be incredibly handy in interrupting an enemy's attack. For many boss fights, this is pivotal. You can also use him to hover over one of your party members, and if you hold his flash on them, they recover a small amount of HP every second or so.

This is not infinite however, so on each battle you will find two plants with "wishes" on them. You can collect these to give your characters a small HP and MP boost, and completely refill Igniculus' flash. It forces you to be strategic about manipulating the time in your favor and using your free healing opportunities at the right moment to not be wasteful. In some of the boss fights proper time manipulation is almost a necessity because a poorly timed interruption can result in a massive chain that paralyze and damage you, allowing them to land even more free hits.

Inniculus' flash is also usable in the map as well. You can use him to stun enemies you pass to prevent them from harming you, or if you wait you can get behind them and set them up for a surprise attack. This usually will give one of your characters a free action to start, and your teammate not that far behind. It also can be used to collect hard to reach treasure chests and items that Aurora cannot reach on the map, and he is also used for a handful of locked door puzzles. 

So let's just get the biggest flaw of the game out of the way now, because its a pretty persistent issue and will probably turn a number of people off to the game. The prose in this game is not great. When you make the decision to do the entirety of the games story and dialog in limericks, you are truly handcuffing yourself to conversations that do not flow naturally.

In some cases it can get tiresome, but as people who watched me steam it noticed, there is a significant number of instances where they either use the same word twice to make it rhyme, or they use two words that sound similar but don't actually rhyme. I may be an English major, but I wasn't good at it and even I know that isn't how it works. The geniuses who write Critical Miss touched on this beautifully.

But if you can look past some of the rough prose in this game, almost everything else about it shines beautifully. I mentioned the art style emulates children's story books, which gives it a nice watercolor pallet that compliments the overall design. This also allows it to give you a pretty diverse cast of characters. Which might I add, has an insane number of characters for an RPG that plays as short as this one. On top of Aurora, other playable characters include Rubella the jester, Finn who is kind of a gnomish mage, Genovefa the.... lizard, swamp thing, and a massive daruma-like ogre called Oengus just to name a couple.

It's strange that the game gives me so many characters to pick from considering I can only have two in the party. You can switch them on the fly, and the game doesn't require you to have Aurora actually in the fray. But I tend to dump all my stat raising items onto the hero, so she seldom left the front line. And once I got Oengus, I basically was shredding through fights. But to be fair, all of the characters have pretty varied skill sets so you can use them as the situation arises.

In addition to each character having a pretty deep skill tree (generally 3 paths you can fill out), you also collect gemstones called occuli that give you various stat boosts. These can be combined to make bigger gems, or new types of gems. Once I realized that a diamond gave you an experience boost, I pretty much dumped everything into making a the largest diamond I could so I was raking in 25% bonus experience for Aurora all game. I also loaded her up with increased dodge when casting and high powered Light attacks (since little seems to be immune to light).

If you manipulate your crafting right, you can make something called a
Princess Stone. I never did, and it didn't seem to affect me finishing the game.

But out of everything that I loved about this game, I think the music is what hit me the hardest. The game's score was produced by the lovely and extremely talented Cœur de Pirate. Again fitting for the stage it has set, much of the game is accompanied by chime, flute, string, and piano melodies. Most of them are primarily a variant of the "Theme of Aurora" which pretty much had me hooked at the opening title screen, and this style worked well for me when I played Atelier Ayesha because the song was fresh in my head, so when it changed in feel to match the scene at hand, that subtle difference felt powerful.

And standing tall amongst the soundtrack to this game, is a song that didn't even get sold on the OST. The battle music is appropriate and there are various different battle tracks throughout the game, but there is one boss theme in particular that feels truly epic. I don't mean that in the slang,"holy shit that's awesome" style of epic. I mean how the orchestral music raises and falls, accompanied by an operatic chorus that remains uptempo. This song pretty much constantly kept the heart rate up and made each boss fight where I heard it feel truly important, and when they started to go bad, it felt that much better when I overcame it. I am a huge advocate of proper score to compliment a game and on this one Ubisoft nailed it.

Wait, Ubisoft? The same people who pump about a billion Assassin's Creed games? Far Cry, Rainbow Six and every other Tom Clancy game? I didn't believe it either. Ubisoft Montreal put this game together and asked famed Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to produce a promotional piece for the game that was equally gorgeous. Who would have thought they could break away from the Triple-A money generating machine to make something different and beautiful. Honestly, I was shocked. 

So if I have to nitpick some complaints about the game outside of the excessive use of limericks, it'd have to say I was disappointed by the length. It took me only 10 hours to level up to 50+ and completely shred to the ending. And after a bit of necessary questing, the game moves kinda breakneck to the finish basically skipping having one last final dungeon and tosses you into the final boss fight. To be honest I wasn't ready to leave that world yet. I wanted there to be more.

You get Rubella first. Her Tumble ability isn't strong, but her sheer speed and cast
time basically lets you control the timeline. She is an invaluable teammate.

They provide you a new game plus so you can play it again on a harder difficulty and keep your levels, items, and occuli but the game really doesn't change. So unless you love gathering collectibles (you weirdos), you probably won't feel the need to go through it a 2nd time soon. I tried to and inside a couple of fights I didn't really feel the need to continue. Gathering collectibles sucks.

And honestly, items in this game seem pretty pointless too. Throughout the adventure you will constantly find yourself picking up potions with various effects. Some restore health, magic, some cure status affects, boost your attack or defense, hasten you up the timeline, give you immunity to things. And every single one of them means exactly dick. Unless I needed to revive a party member (which happened rarely in my case), every other item in the game didn't seem as a important as knocking  a baddie down the timeline was to me. So for a large portion of the game, the items went completely unused.

At least Quicker and Bicker rhyme.

There is a degree of sidequesting to do in the game, but I hesitate to call it "sidequesting" since most of them seem to be able to be done as you continue on with the main story of the game. There were only a few of them I actually had to backtrack for, and only one them I actually missed (which would have given me another party member, but that dounk would have just ridden the bench anyways).

And this is nitpicky, but I wish I had a clearer explanation of the crafting system when I started because had I known I could use my small stones to make bigger stones, I wouldn't have wasted time mixing things early. I use 3 difference colored stones to make a diamond. I use 3 diamonds to make a bigger diamond. But had I known I coulda just mashed all my colored stones together to make bigger ones, I probably would have saved a lot more resources making big valuable stones faster.

But ultimately, as I said prior these are pretty nitpicky complaints to a game that I thoroughly enjoyed. To say I blew through this game wouldn't be an exaggeration. I played it in like 2 or 3 hour chunks but honestly if I probably could have smashed this game in a sitting if I had the day off. Everything about it kept me totally immersed in this world and I loved pretty much every moment of it.

To that regard, I am disappointed that I had waited so long to give this game its proper chance. Among a slew of mediocre reviews, lukewarm responses, and complaints about the language used I fell victim to hearsay instead of just getting it when I enjoyed the demo. I wish I had sooner. Child of Light isn't going to shatter the gaming industry and revolutionize how RPGs are played, but it gave me a wonderful 10 hours of a children's story to get lost in. It would have been nice to be my PS+ freebie, but it is absolutely worth the 15 bucks they are asking for it.

I wished I wasn't right about Norah...

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.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag - No Trace of Scurvy here.

I said I wasn't gonna do this. Said I wasn't gonna buy or play another Assassin's Creed game. After the slap dashed never ending disaster of the previous games, I was completely sick of it. The Desmond story that never seemed to end until its car crash like sudden closing. The Ezio pissing around for 2 games pointless fluff of story. Connor Mcdouchington's emo trip through US history. I was fed up. I said the only way I'd get a new one is if they made some sort of pirate themed game, because I liked that aspect for Assassin's Creed 3.

And those mother fuckers..... Ubisoft not only made the new one a pirate game, but a launch release for the shiny new consoles. So here we go, another fuckin bout of soft science stabbiness in....

ASSASSIN'S CREED IV: BLACK FLAG

So after the abrupt end of Desmond Miles after pushing the magic button of destiny, we take control of his great, great, great unrelated silent protagonist. He's working for Abstergo Entertainment to make fancy interactive movies, and thanks to the "donated" brain meats of Desmond thanks to Abstergo's retrieval team this new guy gets to live his memories instead.

His first project is to assume the memories of Edward Kenway, a welsh commoner who married way out of his league and took to a life of piracy to make his fortune to bring to his lady fair. After coming across a shipwrecked assassin, he pursues the man and kills him to loot a reward. Kenway assumes his clothing and identity in the hopes of claiming the reward the assassin was looking to get for giving a valuable artifact to the Templars.

Unable to hold his cover, Kenway becomes mixed up in the battle between the Assassin's and Templars in their race to find a place called the Observatory, which with a drop of blood allows anyone to spy through the eyes of the blood's owner. Kenway has no allegiance to either side though, as he wishes to claim the observatory for himself and sell its powers for a profit.

Maybe its a matter of preference, but I found it very easy to like Kenway.
Practically zero angst in comparison to Conner. 

So I can tell you, all of my anger and reservation from the previous was almost immediately crushed right out of the gate. The connection to the Desmond story seemed minimal at best, and right out of the gate you start the game as a guy with swagger (which is the correct use of the term, you yolo spouting fuckwits) without being arrogant like Altair or cocky like Ezio. He also establishes right out of the gate that he's not "a good guy" by basically trying to kill the guy who offered a reward to help him.  So pretty much right out the gate he connected with me as a player, because I wanna stab some shit, I wanna get rich, I wanna drink, and I want to sink ships on the high seas.

But what I found interesting with Edward as a character that despite dressing like an assassin and eventually getting his hidden blades, he remains generally neutral in this chapter of Assassin's Creed canon. Which I suppose is good since the story has drug on too long and become so convoluted I don't really care which side wins at this point. So while Kenway dresses like an assassin, and moves like an assassin, and becomes embroiled in their mess, he's not technically one. Works for me.

No, Edward Kenway makes it very clear right from the onset that he is a pirate, and naturally if he is a pirate you would expect to spend some time on a boat. Very early in the game Kenway plunders his own ship which he dubs the Jackdaw, and this is where you are going to spend a large portion of Assassin's Creed IV. If you remember, they introduced the ship mechanic back in Assassin's Creed 3 but really didn't know what to do with it other than to build money that serves no purpose.

The perfect form of the Assassin's dive must be genetic if its lasted this long in time.

The controls to the ship feel functionally the same from their previous incarnation, but there were a handful of tweaks to polish it up such as varied ways to attack (these might have been in AC3, but I couldn't tell you). Typically you get assets for your ship by sailing the seas and ransacking other ships. This was easily the most fun of the game. You can pull up aside them and start unloading cannon fire, you can fire mortars from a far, or if you are like me you will put a ram on that ship and T-bone fuckers in two. I love that last strategy because if it doesn't sink em the moment you turn you are at point blank and can unload heavy fire for massive damage, given you can take the return fire.

Once a ship is near defeated you have the option to ransack them. Suddenly the game switches back to Assassin's Creed. You rope swing across to the enemy ship and you can start hidden blading fools and dropping 2 or 3 before you even get into close combat, and if you fill enough requirements you then take control of the ship. You can strip them for parts you use to sell or upgrade your ship, add it to your fleet, or use it to lower your wanted level against hunter ships.

You build a fleet because like previous AC games you have that timed mission mechanic where you can send your fleet on trade runs. Its a good idea to get a decent blend of them because sometimes you need to clear our the danger before you send your fleet off on missions. They are done in this kind of JRPG autoplay kind of combat, and you can see your chance of victory going in so as long you bring 1 light and 2 heavy ships to the table, you basically can't lose.

In doing this you can build money, which unlike the pointless city building in the previous AC games, you need in mass quantities if you want to get your ship ready to tangle with the brigs or frigates sailing the high seas. You need to complete a lot of the side quests for the best upgrades though, which seem necessary for tangoing with the legendary ships. But much like the Weapons in FF7, that was too much of a hassle to see through for me.

But that isn't to say that AC4 has completely abandoned the land and sneaking. You will often find yourself on a number of islands throughout the game, and admittedly, a large portion of the missions here involve trying to tail a target. Or a number of times it simply a matter of trying to slide though a heavily guarded area unnoticed.  And of course, hunting down an assassination target.

Land controls are just what you'd expect: Completely Unchanged.

The thing is, while I've heard some complaints about having to do so many tailing missions, this installment of AC felt more like the older versions I used to love. Here is your target, go get em. There were a handful of these where I would dart from brush, to bush, to doorway and cover, hidden knifing guard after guard trying not to be noticed, closing in my target and actually getting an opportunity to make a STEALTHY KILL before getting locked into a cutscene.

This is a massive improvement in my opinion because AC3 and some parts of the Ezio trilogy basically makes you watch some extended cutscene where the target runs away and you get swooped by guards, which forces you to give up any pretense of stealth and pretty much makes you give chase else they will get away. Once you get the blow darts stealthing becomes that much more fun because you can start getting targets to fall asleep or kill each other without you ever needing to enter the fray. Who would have thought the guy who isn't an assassin would be the best one at the job?

I freak'n love the blowdart. You can get a targets own guard to kill them with berserk darts

Sticking to the weapons thing a bit, the number of ways to kill someone has been cut down from previous installments. AC4 would prefer you stick to swords or a hidden blade, Gun or Blowdart. No bombs or poisons or tower defense or various forms of hand weapons. Despite the massive cut down it seems, I actually kind of preferred this because it allowed me to focus on making my weapons better instead of giving me different ones to muddle around with, and with the pirate theme, a pair of swords seemed like the way to go anyways.

The combat basically hasn't changed since the first one, which is kind of annoying because I still think the combat in these games fucking blow. You can mash your attack button all you want, but  its better to just wait for one to attack, hit counter, then go on a streak of kills until you hit counter again. Predictable and boring. All the more reason to get the job done with the stealth kills first because I feel there is at least a degree of skill with that.

Tip: Use your ships minicannons to take out their crew first. It will make fighting them
on board that much easier since you'll have less to worry about. 

Like the previous installments of this game there are a butt-ton of collectibles and side missions to do. But at least this time around it feels like there is actually a purpose to a number of them. Hunting and Spearfishing give you goods to sell, but they also are used in crafting which you need for more health, better ammo capacity, and better armor (which I highly suggest doing). The collectible shanties are worth picking up because after a few trips to sea, you'll want them to have different things to sing to fill the travel gaps. (Anything to put more time between having to hear the Johnny Bulgar shanty again.)

I sort of went on about the story already, but I have to say I was pretty pleased with this one. Yeah the Desmond canon is still kinda hanging around, the rejected Scooby-squad are still poking their heads around, but for the most part its only mandatory to partake of a few times, If you want to learn more about it you can always drop out of the animus and hack other peoples terminals. It does an alright job in connecting the stories together, but ultimately you don't need it.

I really get the sense Abstergo is a gag on how Google is taking over the world. 

Actually, in all honestly, I kind of liked the idea that you were playing a character who was on the Abstergo side of things outside of the multiplayer. So while I really couldn't care less about what the hell else is happening in the Desmond story, I was interested in seeing what was happening with Melanie Lemay and how the Abstergo brass was pushing the Templar agenda without directly saying it.

Now that I am reflecting on it, this is probably the most interesting set of characters this franchise has ever had. Leonardo DiVinci making weapons to kill people is interesting in its own right, but the ensemble of James Kidd, Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, Adewale, and even Melanie I just found to be a billion times more interesting than any of the side characters or villains in the Ezio trilogy. Perhaps I just don't care about medieval Italy. I dunno.

Oh Anne Bonny...  *Swoon*

What I liked about the Edward Kenway story is there is a clear and defined beginning, middle, and fucking ending. I was absolutely shocked because I didn't think Ubisoft had any fucking clue how to end a story. Granted, it wasn't one of the best endings to a game I've ever seen, but at least for once we got to see a story come to a conclusion in a fashion that made sense. While its true there is probably going to be about 13 billion Assassin's Creed games, at least this time we got a little fucking closure.

Lastly the multiplayer is still fun. They haven't added any kind of multiplayable sea or ship games, so its the basic set of Assassin's Creed online games you've played before, but they have added a series of wolf pack missions to play co-op with other people instead of against people. Sadly, it hasn't stopped being from being complete fucking assholes to newer players, and after a spat I had with a level 30 fucking shithead, I haven't really gone back to it. Thanks for trying to ruin the game for me asshole, I guess you succeeded because I'm not playing it anymore. I hope you grow a tumor on your spinal column.

Not a whole lot of surprises to the multiplayer, but its still really fun. 

I have to say going into this game I had some pretty staunch animosity growing towards this franchise, its unchanging nature and mechanics, its seemingly endless story, dislikeable cast and so forth. And while some of the aftertaste of the previous installments looms in the background, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag kind of brought the series back for me. They really do need to stop with the once a year release schedule though, because without more radical changes to the gameplay, people are gonna get tired of the series. With out the heavy ship focus on this one, I probably wouldn't have gotten it.

That said, after I played the story through to completion and have taken a number of weeks to reflect upon it, I can say that from my personal standpoint: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is the hands down best installment of the series. Ubisoft clearly has no intention of ending this series, but in my opinion this is a great place to do it. On a high note.

I highly recommend this one. If you've never played an AC game, this is the one to play.