Matthew Przybysz
Week ending 11/20/14
This week isn’t going to be the greatest folks. I just got off the phone before writing this intro, and I’m going to be out of town for a small job for the weekend, so GADD will only be a partial article this week. Hopefully I can get enough good weird stuff in during the week to make up for it.
Friday
Out of town
Saturday
Out of town
Sunday
Out of town, got back late in the night and wasn’t really feeling like playing anything.
Monday
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Went back in and switched it to hard difficulty, and while this is more the level of difficulty I’d expect from Binding of Isaac, I almost wish they would have made it harder by making the enemies faster or hit harder or just decrease the drop rate for items all around, but instead they just made it where the enemies need more hits before dying. I’m glad that it’s harder, just not in the way that I would prefer.
Watch_Dogs
I know this wasn’t all that well loved when it originally came out, but I’m hoping that now I can maybe appreciate it more. I know not to expect some huge genre changing epic, and that it’s merely a serviceable open world crime game with a hacking mechanic. That being said, I just couldn’t get into the game, even with lowered expectations. I only played for about an hour, so this is VERY VERY early impressions, but I don’t like how everything you do effects your reputation. Sleeping Dogs was smart enough to have be only stuff done in missions that affected both your cop standing and your gang standings. When I’m in the open world, I want to fuck around. I don’t want to worry about accidentally killing people, and man, is it EASY to accidentally kill people in this game. Cars just fly all over the place if you turn poorly. Everything felt too heavy last week with The Crew, and now in this game everything feels too light. I could get used to it and have some fun, I don’t know yet.
Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright
Played a little more of this before bed and just finished the opening court case with Phoenix Wright. So far I’m definitely enjoying the Phoenix Wright part more than Professor Layton, but that’s probably due to it being just the awesome exciting court room stuff, and not the slow boring collecting evidence stuff.
Tuesday
WWE 2K15
So I’ve been down on this game for the entirety of it’s hype cycle. Yukes’ WWE games are never good, especially not for the last 4-5 years or so. It’s just year after year after year of the same shit and they try to pretend like it’s an all new engine every fucking game, and it never is. It’s always the same shitty engine that ceases being fun after a few days. But then the list came out last week about just how many features and match types were just completely missing from the current gen version of WWE 2K15, and it became a fucking joke. Months ago I semi-sarcastically suggested Supercard would be the better WWE licensed game, due to it at least being new garbage as opposed to old garbage, and now it’s looking like it’s correct. But here I sit getting ready to play WWE 2K15 anyway because someone decided to preorder the game for me. I’m so thrilled. First thing I do is go into MyCareer mode because that seems to be the only semi-interesting part of the game, but of course you have to make a CAW to go into MyCareer, which immediately brings this game to a screeching halt. How the hell do people ENJOY doing this? It just takes so damn long to make anything worth a damn, so I decided to go the exact opposite and try to make my CAW look like a complete garbage monster. Unfortunately it appears the sliders don’t go as extreme this year, and you still wind up with something resembling an actual human being no matter what you do. Still, he’s got green skin with aviator glasses, a giant South Korean flag tattoo on his chest and a giant We The People tattoo on his back, so I’m pretty ok with that. After that the career opens up with you doing some exhibition matches for Bill DeMott (who doesn’t sexually abuse anyone! I thought this game was supposed to be realistic!) at the WWE Performance Center and who thought it was a good idea to open up the game this way? There’s no crowd, no announcers, no music, just you against another guy in the ring. All this does is show off just how completely lifeless and mechanical the in-ring action is. Next I decided to mess with the system to see if there was any branching, and there truly isn’t, at least in the beginning. Your first “story” is to go out there and prove yourself over four matches in NXT, and if you impress William Regal enough he’ll put you in a #1 contenders match. Well, I decided to go and get DQed instantly in every match via weapon use, and sure enough, Regal still thought I looked great and put me in a #1 contenders match. Won the NXT title and eventually got promoted off of NXT, taking the title with me before finally losing it back to Rusev. Suddenly I hit a giant wall on Superstars, jobbing left and right to all competition.
Wednesday
WWE 2K15
Still more MyCareer mode, and I just encountered my first game breaking bug. Was facing Mark Henry and we were both outside the ring when I attempted to do one of my ground grapples on him, the Ultimate Warrior’s Big Splash. Only, when my guy went to go bounce off the ropes, there were no ropes to bounce off of, due to us being outside the ring, so he just ran into the ringside barricade…and kept running and running and running. Meanwhile Mark Henry couldn’t get up, because I was still mid animation for the move that was never going to happen, so we both got counted out. Good job Yukes! But yet somehow that match was impressive enough for Vickie to give me my first PPV match, against a CAW created by someone on my friends list (CXF’s very own DubQ!) so that’s pretty cool at least. I squashed him though, after not getting a win for around two or three months. I only win the big matches! The ones that count! Went into Universe mode afterwards to see what, if anything, had changed from previous years. It appears to be mostly the same, but the one change that I do like is that all the rivalries are given names, which at least gives off the impression that it will have actual storylines, rather than just the “randomly a cutscene happens” approach from before. However, Universe mode is where the lack of match options is really transparent, when you see how often the match types are repeated. Wait, what did I just hear Michael Cole say? “These superstars are always looking to unleash their finishing maneuvers, and when they do, the complication of the match can change in an instant.” Really Michael? The COMPLICATION of the match? How the hell did nobody catch that? Went back into career mode after doing some Universe and suddenly became unbeatable, but I’m still getting months upon months of “We don’t have anything for you at this time” messages. But I’ve read online that it starts to pick up once you hit Smackdown, so I’m at least going to stick with it through that point. Also I just won a PPV match that gave me a bonus of a ridiculous 50,000 SP, so now my guy is suddenly a 93 overall, which means I’m up to the likes of Orton and Sheamus, but yet I’m still stuck on Main Event. I don’t foresee a challenge in any match for a long time now.
Thursday
WWE 2K15
Back into MyCareer mode where I’ve made my way up to Smackdown, and guess what? I’m STILL getting nothing but the “we don’t have anything for you but we’ll let you know when you’re going to get a push” messages. Jesus this career mode is SO fucking boring and barebones. It’s pathetic to tout your career mode as having “up to 15 years” worth of content when you only wrestle one damn match a month in most cases! I want to get into some actual fun material, but I’m starting to get worried that it just DOESN’T exist, and I’m bored out of my damn mind fighting random matches that don’t matter. Went back into Universe mode instead and messed round there for a while, cause at least there’s small barely visible storylines happening there, as opposed to the pure nothing in career mode. I don’t ever plan on going into 2K Showcase, as I hate how that mode is just a boring ass checklist of objectives to complete, rather than actually wrestling matches.
This may be one of the worst GADDs I’ve ever written. I’m absent for three days and then I spend three days writing about nothing but WWE 2K15? Who the hell would want to read this shit?! Uh, I mean…this is great, right?! I’m sure it’ll get even better next week, if you can somehow imagine that! I’ll try to pull back on the WWE and dive into more interesting games like…something. I don’t even know. I’m not going to commit to anything, because I’ll likely fail to play whatever I commit to anyway.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK:
The last few QOTWs have gotten very few responses, even by GADD’s already low standards so screw it, let’s not make it gaming related, let’s go food instead. Do you have any foods that you don’t like everyone always looks at you like you’re crazy when you tell them? For me it’s chocolate. I’m just not a chocolate person at all, if I have a piece of chocolate or some kind chocolate candy I’m normally good for the next few months before I’d get any kind of desire to eat chocolate again. Don’t even bring up dark chocolate, that’s just HORRIBLE and I can’t stand it at all.
