Gaming With GADD

Week ending 7/1/14

I really have no idea what I’m going to be playing this week other than Valiant Hearts, which just came out and I’ve been jonesing for it for weeks. As a matter of fact, I likely will be getting into at least some gameplay and story spoilers for that game, and since the story is the key hook there, I’d advise anyone who may be interested in playing it to proceed with caution, as GADD does regularly deal in spoilers.

Wednesday

Valiant Hearts: The Great War
I didn’t get to play anywhere near as much of this as I wanted due to PSN being down when I attempted to play it. Granted, I didn’t have to be on PSN, but I wanted to do some streaming so I decided to wait until it came back up. There are a few things in this game presentation-wise that just struck me as off. The first one isn’t a huge thing, but it instantly jumped out at me how unusual it was that at the main menu the button prompt for X is “validate” not select or even confirm, but validate. Huh? Secondly, and more importantly, it’s really jarring how this is a serious war drama, and when you go to new locations you can read historical information about the significance of where you are and what happened in this battle/location…but the documents are SPONSORED by something called Apocalypse WWI, which is apparently a documentary. For those who don’t know, Valiant Hearts is a puzzle/adventure game set during World War I. The main characters at this point are Emile, a Frenchman who was drafted by his country, but then subsequently captured by the Germans and forced to be a cook for them. Among the Germans is Karl (non-playable, at least as of now) who was also drafted, and is married to Emile’s daughter. The other playable character is Freddie, an American who has voluntarily joined the French army after his wife was killed by the Germans. Very early into the game the two meet up and are working together, along with a German war dog, who is totally gonna fucking eat it at some point in this game and it’s gonna make me really damn sad. The dog can also be given commands to help solve puzzles. At this point everything seems pretty straight forward in the puzzle gameplay, even if I did get temporarily stuck a few times because I’m playing it on the harder difficulty setting, which basically means the objects I can interact with don’t light up. Aaaaand now I think my copy is freakin glitched, as I’m stuck at a puzzle that I know EXACTLY what I need to do, but the prompt isn’t there for the dog to do his part. I even looked it up on youtube to be 100% sure that I need to do what I think I need to do, and yep, that’s exactly it, only the prompt isn’t there for me. Well that’s great. Son of a bitch, and I was really getting into it too.

Thursday

NBA 2K14
My Suns have gone on a really great run lately and they’ve now got a 4.5 game cushion with 10 games to go. Hopefully we don’t completely fall apart like the real Suns did this year. (sorry B. Patrick)

Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Ok good, when I reloaded my game, it started the scene I was on over and I was able to get through the puzzle glitch free. Today’s play session was really weird. I had a freakin vehicle sequence and then a boss fight, both things I was completely stunned to discover were in this game. Also: LATE ass title-card…nice! I’m just REALLY into this game right now, the gameplay is good enough to keep me engaged, and the story has just such a genuine unique touch to it that you’re just not used to seeing in video games. Instead of celebrating the people in the war as superhuman ass kicking machines, it goes so much more into the actual human elements and how completely fucked everyone and everything was. Also this game is supposedly based on actual letters sent from people who were deployed for the war, even though that probably still only means it’s 2% at most true.

Friday

Had to leave town for the weekend as I had a small job assignment that came up, and wasn’t able to get any gaming done.

Saturday

See Friday

Sunday

See Friday, didn’t get back home until late Sunday and didn’t feel like playing any games.

Monday

Mercenary Kings
Holy shit, started the the Major rank today and it introduces a whole lot of new enemy types and a suddenly HUGE difficulty spike. Even after upgrading my weapons and armor as much as both I and my co-op partner could at this point, we were suddenly dying at WAY higher rates than at any other point in the game. Played for probably 2 hours or so and made it through about half of the missions in Major, even if we made almost no money on one of the missions due to getting a lot of death penalties. Probably around 2/3rds of the way through the game at this point, and it’ll likely be beaten at some point in July. I remember thinking this game was kinda dull when I played a few missions in single player, but multiplayer gives it a whole new life.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Started up Chapter 2 and immediately begin playing as a new character, Anna, who is tracking down Baron Von Dorf, the main German general villain in the game, because he has captured her father in order to make him build weapons. She’s also a medic who heals soldiers on the battlefield…with a rhythm game mechanic. This game just keeps putting shit into it that I wasn’t expecting. It’s odd how it actually feels kinda good to help the people out, I think it’s due to how grounded the majority of the game is, and how very little it gets into the ridiculous and outrageous that helping people out actually feels like a real thing.

Tuesday

Just feeling like ass and had a giant headache for most of the day today, so didn’t get any gaming in.

Sorry for the really short GADD this week guys, but sometimes that’ll happen as I missed out on the entire weekend and just didn’t play much this week. Next week will hopefully see a return to GADD’s regular form as I keep playing Valiant Hearts and try to either put in time with Xillia or not completely let Stick it to the Man fall off the wayside. Plus maybe, MAYBE I’ll actually hook up my 360 again? It’s crazy just how quickly that thing has died in my eyes. It shouldn’t be dead, there’s still tons of great games on there I want to play!

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What game, that hasn’t had an iteration in its series at all in at least the last 5 years, would you like to see a sequel to? I’d really love to see a sequel to Azure Dreams. Azure Dreams was a dungeon crawler for the PSX where the main goal was just to get to the top of the tower, but the floors on the dungeon would randomly generate every time and you could only leave every 5 levels, otherwise you had to keep going up and if you died you lost everything. You also had a familiar monster who would fight beside you in the tower, and you could also breed them with other monsters to create new ones, once you found their eggs in the tower. There was also a whole mechanic where you had to rebuild the town as it was destroyed and there was a light dating sim element as well. This may seem like run of the mill stuff now, but back in 1998 this shit was GROUNDBREAKING. Hell, even the monster stuff was pre-Pokemon (at least in the US) so that was pretty unheard of as well. I don’t know how well a new version would translate to 2014 gaming, but I’d like to see them give it a shot.