Category: Games

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Welcome To The FanDome!

Thanks to Covid-19 all of our favorite fan conventions have been shutdown. No PAXes, E3s or Comic Cons of any type. The online conventions that people have been throwing are fine, but they have lacked any oomph. They have all been lacking in one way or another. The PS5 event lacked release dates, the Xbox events lacked a killer app, and the online Comic Cons have lacked cool announcements and star power. With Summer 2020 coming to a close, Warner Bros and DC have finally given us something to cheer about. I mean look at all the things they announced in one day!

  • The Flash will fight along side Keaton’s Batman and be mentored by Affleck’s Batman
  • A new Wonder Woman trailer
  • WB Montreal is working on a Bat-Family game with the Court of Owls
  • The Suicide Squad had a behind the scenes trailer and character role-call
  • The Titans will be fighting the Red Hood. Also, the Titans still aren’t canceled
  • Milestone Media will relaunch in 2021
  • A new Snyder Cut Justice League trailer, and the movie/miniseries will be FOUR HOURS LONG
  • The Black Adam movie will feature the JSA, and more importantly DOCTOR FATE
  • Shazam 2 is now call Shazam: Fury of the Gods, and it may have Sinbad in it because that would be funny
  • Rocksteady is making a game where the Suicide Squad has to kill the Justice League
  • The Batman has a new trailer, and it is amazing

In fact, here is that trailer:

And that was all day one! Day two is in mid-September and will have more comic book and TV stuff. Warner Bros managed to make a day full of announcements worth watching, and I am not going to miss day two that is for sure. Which is not something I expected from a company that usually announces movies during earnings calls.

Hey, being locked inside is not fun, and Warner Bros gave us something to gawk at and cheer for, and I think that is something to applaud. Other media organizations should take note. This is how these events should be done. I hope we can get back to doing stuff in person next year, but I could get used events like this.

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Did Control Come Out Too Early On Consoles?

I am a big fan of Remedy Entertainment. They continue to make groundbreaking games that push narrative and graphics technology to their limits. Remedy’s newest game, Control, is being hailed by some as a modern masterpiece, but not on original Xbox One or PS4 hardware. The game has massive stutters and framerate drops to the low teens, and as low as 10FPS on the PS4. You can watch the whole graphical run down on Digital Foundry:

If you watch the video above, you can see that the game runs ‘okay’ to acceptable on the mid-generation consoles with just small short framerate dips. With the Xbox One X fairing the best, but man it is hard to watch what happens once the analysis gets to the base consoles. I would argue that at that low of a framerate the game is unplayable, and it never should have passed QC.

Based on the order of the framerate going: Xbox One X > PS4 Pro > Xbox One (S) > PS4, I would guess this is a CPU issue. Since the PS4 does have the slowest CPU clock speed out of the bunch. Its faster GPU usually pushes it past the Xbox One, but in this case, there is something else going on that needs some serious CPU horsepower, and while I am ragging on the PS4, Control has a pretty poor showing across the board.

This all leads me to believe that Control is generation too early. People with beefy PCs are quite happy with Control, but people with mid-tier and lower PCs are feeling the pain as well, but that happens in the PC space from time to time, and it is more acceptable there because PC players have an upgrade path if they want to get the most out of Control. Not so much with console players.

If Remedy had waited a year, Control would have come out on machines with modern CPUs and stronger GPUs with a little ray tracing thrown in, and I am sure Control would have looked great in that environment, but as it stands now, it looks like you should skip Control if you didn’t get a mid-generation console, or you have a low spec PC. Otherwise I hear it is quite the game.

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Don’t Get Outfoxed!

My daughter got the game Outfoxed published by Gamewright for a present, and she loves it. What surprised me is that I like it as well. Don’t get me wrong, this is a game for kids, and it doesn’t really offer up a meaningful challenge. However, there is a good variety of play, and it teaches kids some important board gaming skills. I won’t be playing it with my crew, but it is what I will be asking my daughter to get out of the closet if she wants to play a game.

The rules are simple. You roll dice and try to get clues and suspect cards to find who has stolen a chicken pot pie before the thief escapes. There are three dice. Each with a 50/50 chance of having a paw/paws or an eye. You need all three dice to have either the paw/paws icon to move your token to get clues, or all three to have the eye icon to flip over a suspect card. You get to re-roll dice that do not match two extra times, so three rolls total. If you don’t match all three dice, the fox moves three spaces. If the fox gets to the end before you figure out who did it, the players lose. To check the clues, at the beginning of the game a thief card was randomly selected and then put in a plastic case. The clues fit in an insert and then you can see if the fox in question is wearing or has the item in the clue. Find all three clues, or narrow down the suspects to one, and the players win.

So essentially it is a modern take on Clue Jr., but the push your luck element with the dice, and the deduction of whether a suspect is the thief help this game feel more “gamey” and less an exercise of seeing who can roll or spin or flip the highest numbers. Which are what most kids games amount to. Plus, the plastic case for the clues and the thief cards just feel good. It is fun to put in a clue and then slide open the little panel. It is a thrill when you get one that matches, but it is still fun when it doesn’t, so you can eliminate a bunch of suspects. Like I said, there is not a lot of thinking going on here, but for a kids game this level of gameplay feels like a breath of fresh air, and that is not even the best part! Check out this insert:

Oh man! That is a good insert. Everything fits in its place and doesn’t move around, and it is so well laid out my five year old can set it up and put it away by herself! Look, this game is under $20 US on Amazon right now, and it has an insert that puts games that cost three times as much to shame. I still don’t get why this can’t be the standard for board game manufactures. I know they say it is expensive, but a lot of games can’t even be bothered to include enough plastic bags let alone inserts. Let’s just say it is a pet peeve of mine that games force me to do arts and crafts to put them away.

All that being said, Outfoxed is a great game for kids. It is much better than the standard roll and move games or dexterity games they usually get. It is reasonably priced, and it may have won insert of the year (for whatever year it came out). If you have kids that like to play board games, and you don’t think you can handle another game of Life, give Outfoxed a try. You will be glad you did.

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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Isn’t Quite The Sum Of Its Parts

When Pokémon Go came out, people came down on it hard (including myself) for being a shallow experience. There was nothing to do but walk and swipe, and to the developer Niantic’s credit they have added a lot of the fan requests to the game, but the core gameplay loop remains the same. Niantic must have taken all that criticism to heart because Harry Potter: Wizards Unite has a lot of things to do, but it can’t quite bring all those pieces together in to something cohesive.

There is a story to Wizards Unite, magical stuff has leaked out in to the muggle world, and you have to go find all these “foundables” and defeat all the “confoundables”, so that the magical world stays secret. Which is a surprisingly good setup, but the problem isn’t with the story. The problem is that there isn’t the same compulsion to play that Pokémon Go has.

I think the problem is that it is too overstuffed. Yes you still walk around and find stuff, but then you have to trace out a spell, then you have place the picture of the image in your book, you have to pick up potion components, then brew your potions, and be sure to be stopping by all the inns and greenhouses for more potion stuff and spell energy (Pokéballs). You need more to do? Good, you can update your profession’s skill tree, dungeon crawl at fortresses, play the mini-game to brew your potions faster, and don’t forget to read all the text pop-ups from Harry and some new friends.

There is just sooooo much to keep track of. It is a lot to handle while walking. Pokémon Go’s simplicity makes it the perfect thing to do while walking around, and it adds the thrill of finding something new, or getting enough of a Pokémon to evolve it. With the amount of things you have to do in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, you have to stop every five feet, so instead of walking, you are standing around like a creep.

That is not to say Harry Potter: Wizards Unite isn’t fun. It is, but it seems that Niantic over corrected due to the complaints about Pokémon Go, and the game suffers for that. Still, it is a solid base, and if they get enough Harry Potter fans playing, I am sure they will tighten things up like they did with Pokémon Go. If you like Pokémon Go, or you are a Harry Potter fan, it is worth trying out. If nothing else it is fun to make up your avatar picture like you are a resident of the Wizarding World.

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I Have Finally Finished Red Dead Redemption 2!

It only took me eight months and eighty hours, but I finally did it. I finished the main story for Red Dead Redemption 2, and it was quite the ride. While my brother did it in only fifty-eight hours, he missed many of the side stories. Honestly after looking around, to get most out of the narrative you need to invest at least seventy hours. Which is crazy to think about. My only problem with this is that a lot of the middle feels like they are stretching it out. It is not filler per say, but we all know what is going to happen, and they force you to play through every beat of it. An editor should have gotten out the red pen.

In this day of people wanting games to last forever, I can see why they left everything in, but I didn’t do any of the hunting, fishing or gathering quests. Just ones with a story, and I know I missed a couple of those too. It is a shame that a lot of people will feel some fatigue or just never make it through to the conclusion. Had the story been forty hours with all the extras, I think this game would have been even better, and people would have been given the time to explore a bit more. The way it is now just feels indulgent. Like giving people a whole cake instead of just a slice, and then giving them a smaller cake at the end for dessert. It’s a lot of cake, and most people will probably not have the stomach for it.

If you can make it to the end, it is rewarding, and it dumps you off in a great place before the start of the first Red Dead Redemption. It then lets you roam around and do whatever you want in the game world. Even see all the locations from the first game, but that is up to you. Again, it is a little indulgent to add areas to the game map you don’t even need to visit in the campaign or its epilog, but go for it if you want to. For all of you that haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe get some coffee, but keep pecking away at that cake. You will be happy once you finish it, and the little cake at the end too.