Mad Max (The Video Game, not the Movie)

Mad Max was released in September of 2015, and it was a game that interested me a little bit before it was released, and a lot more after the reviews turned out to be quite favorable.  However, it had the unfortunate luck of releasing in the same year, and just two months prior, to a far superior open-world post-apocalyptic action game.  Open world games are a substantial time investment for someone who doesn't have loads of that precious, fabricated commodity.  Therefore, I refrained from buying the game at release.

Fast forward to the holidays, and the Steam winter sale.  Mad Max was 66% off, and John picked it up for me.  I've not technically finished Fallout 4, as I haven't done all of the exploring, but I've finished the campaign and quickly ran out of things to do after that.  So it was certainly a good opportunity to start a new game, at least until the Fallout 4 DLC starts popping up.

I will admit that I know of the Mad Max franchise, but I have not seen any of the movies, not the original Mel Gibson trio nor the newest Tom Hardy incarnation.  I think that I would like to see that newest one, mostly because I've heard it is excellent and I like Tom Hardy.  I haven't gotten around to it yet, though.  So, in going into this game, I really had no expectations in regards to tone, or setting, or anything of that nature that a fan of the franchise would have.  This isn't the same experience for me as when I started playing Shadow of Mordor.  (I bring SoM into this conversation because they are both WB published titles, and the design of the open world is very similar.)

I'm going to start with my problems with the game, because those will be a lot easier for me to conceptualize into words.

Chumbucket talks too fucking much.  I like the character and I think he's well voice acted.  I just feel he's way too much of a chatterbox.  I appreciate when he warns me about impending storms, or the location of a minefield, or the approach of a war party.  And, some of the other random tidbits that he says, insane as they may be, are rather humorous.  I thoroughly enjoy how cars are his religion, and how his statements reflect that.  It's really well done, but it's a bit OVERdone.

It was a stupid idea to default you to the Magnum Opus when you fast travel.  Let me give a bit of explanation on this one.  Most of the time, you drive the vehicle called the Magnum Opus with Chumbucket in the back.  (He fires your harpoons and thunderpoons, and repairs the vehicle.)  However, there is one activity in the game that requires a different vehicle.  There is something called "Chumbucket's Buggy", and it has a little doghouse on it where your dog can ride.  The dog is used to identify mines out in the wasteland, so that Max can disarm them on foot.  You can find minefields with the Magnum Opus, but you cannot disarm mines without the dog.  So, you need the buggy to do that.  This is all well and good, except that every time you fast travel, you're put back into the Magnum Opus.  So, you have to drive across the entire freaking map to get to the minefields manually.  It's boring and bad design.

Speaking of the minefields, I hate them.  There is a means to identify all points of interest on the map for easy navigation.  You can identify all the scarecrows, camps, strongholds, and snipers from the hot air balloons.  You can identify all the salvage points with a constructed project within the strongholds.  But there is no way to mark all the minefields on your map.  You have to discover them by driving across the wasteland and hoping you get lucky.  It's boring and bad design.  I would not complain about this at all if this activity wasn't linked to map completion.  But it is, so it annoys me.  To make matters worse, it's also linked to upgrades for your car.  You cannot get the max level harpoon without getting all of the minefields.  It sucks.

It seems that some dubious decisions were made regarding when to lock off fast travel.  I found myself at a lack for resources (ammo mostly) after a particularly hectic scenario to blow open a gate.  After getting through the gate, I wished to fast travel out of the area so that I could restock.  Not only couldn't I fast travel, but I couldn't even leave the area (IN THE OPEN WORLD) without failing the mission and being teleported back to where I didn't want to be.  I had to struggle through another scenario with no supplies in order to continue.  It sucked.  Granted, this has really only stood out to me once.  Fast travel also gets locked out on your during sandstorms, but that feels logical.  This one section, it just didn't make any sense.  The two areas weren't connected at all.  They didn't feel like a continuation of one another.  It felt like there was absolutely no reason why I was not allowed to leave and go restock.

I've only had a few performance issues.  There was one section, in some tunnels, where I'd crash to desktop due to what I assume was my GPU overheating.  I had a similar problem with another WB game, the aforementioned Shadow of Mordor, and it's the reason I didn't finish it.  I couldn't play it longer than 15 minutes without it crashing.  After I slogged through that particular section, I haven't had the issue happen again, yet.  My fingers are crossed on that one.  The crashing of my video card has been a problem that has plagued me quite a bit in a multitude of games, so I don't necessary blame this one fully on Mad Max.

Those are my major complaints.  It's a lot of words, but really not many issues.

The game looks great.  It's bright and glaring during the day, as a desert would be without trees for shade.  It's gloomy and foreboding at night, and requires you to need a flashlight even when you're just out in the open world during those hours.  Underground areas are equally creepy with how dark they can be, and with the ambient sound and set dressings to go along with that.  Open world games tend to suffer a bit in the graphics department because of how large they are, but this game looks great.

Since the flashlight is attached to your chest and not held in your hand, it's a bit awkward to shine the light exactly where you want it to go.  While this may seem like an annoyance, it actually makes the darkened areas more tense, because you're a bit slower than usual in shining your light towards that creepy sound you just heard.

The combat is fun.  It's rather basic at first, but as you learn more executions and special moves, it becomes much more interesting.  It feels brutal, like Max isn't a trained fighter but merely a guy who's throwing everything he has into his punches because he knows it's a life or death situation.  It doesn't have the smoothness of the Arkham games or the fancy style of Shadow of Mordor.  It's jarring and violent.  With what little I know of the franchise, this seems to be exactly how it should be.

The open world is very well realized.  It offers plenty to do, and it also tracks your activities very well.  This is important for me, because I love that feeling of accomplishment.  Of completion.  This is something that I think Bethesda open world games could benefit from.  Fallout 4 does update the map with "CLEARED" beside some locations.  But you have no idea what the requirement is for this to happen.  Do you just have to walk through the place?  Do you have to kill all the enemies?  Do you have to complete a quest?  Loot a certain item?  I have no idea.  It also doesn't do this for ALL locations.  In Mad Max, you can toggle a list of what is contained within the location at any time, so you can see what you're looking for and how many you have left to find.  When you find everything, you get a satisfying on-screen prompt letting you know.  This is probably the thing that I enjoy most about the game.  It not only makes the game more enjoyable for me, but it saves me from wandering around an area aimlessly wondering if I've gotten everything.  Huge kudos to Avalanche Studios for making a completionist's journey through their game more enjoyable.

The checkpoint saving is probably the best I've ever seen.  Almost every notable activity that you perform triggers an auto-save.  It's fantastic.  I think this is the first time I won't criticize a game for not allowing you to quick save.  It just isn't needed, because the game saves every time that I would quick save myself.  It's perfect.

These are my thoughts after about 25 hours.  Anything I didn't cover, such as voice acting, sound design, DRM, and controls have all been fine.  I covered the things that I thought were exceptional, both positively and negatively.  The game has exceeded my expectations, and I hope that Avalanche continues to make great games like these.  

That Year in Review Thing

We're approaching the half-way point of December, so that inevitably means that people are going to start posting their year-end lists.  Their best of these, their worst of those, yada yada.  I have done some of these in the past myself.  This year, however, I'm more or less grateful that the year is coming to an end, and I'm also grateful that my sanity is still relatively intact.  I hesitate to just blatantly state that 2015 has been the worst year of my life, because it detracts from all of the good things that have happened.  Not only that, but I've always felt that it's unhealthy to label anything as the "worst ever".  Unless it's Donald Trump.

However, that doesn't change the fact that in this case, it's actually true.

It all started in June.

If you live in the same region as me, you'll remember that June was incredibly rain-filled.  I believe the final count for the rainfall in inches during the month was 13, which is absolutely insane.  I think we had rainfall for over 20 out of the 30 days in the month.  Five of these days had incredibly heavy downpours, and as a result, my basement (which is where John and I live) flooded each of those days.  One of these was horrible, and it actually forced us out of the basement.  We were essentially flooded out of our home.  I remember standing there with a wet vac, sucking up the water.  It was coming through the walls faster than the vacuum could pick it up.  The drains underneath the house were, too, flooded, so the water wouldn't even go down the drains.  It was a nightmare.  And it felt like every time we would get things cleaned up and dry, more rain would fall and more water would flood into the basement.  This also happened during a period in time when I was putting in anywhere from 10-12 hours a day at work.  I was already tired and stressed.  I really don't know how I got through being flooded out of my own home in addition to what I had going at work.  Actually, that's not true.  John is the reason I got through it.

The rain finally stopped as June ended.  But that was only the start of our problems.

We got John a new computer in June.  It arrived right after we got the flood cleaned up.  Getting it set up was an exercise in patience and emotional management.  It didn't work at first.  It took hours of re-installing the operating system, getting all of the updates installed, ensuring all the proper drivers were in place.  It was the normal process that is required for any new computer, but it was a stress-filled activity because of the circumstances.  We were already tired and weary from watching our home slowly fill up with water.  Add to this that John already felt guilty for allowing me to spend so much money on him.  When the computer seemed like it wasn't going to be usable for the intensive video recording and editing he needed to do on it, he came unglued.  We got it working, but the computer failed at least twice more over the course of the rest of the year.  One, we lost everyone on the OS hard drive and had to re-install.  Once more, the motherboard went and we had to have it replaced.  And let me tell you, THAT was a joy to behold.

So, one day John upgraded his graphics card driver and rebooted his computer.  It wouldn't even boot into BIOS.  We tried just about everything -- changed the monitor power cord, change the monitor, swapped out video cards, swapped out the RAM.  The computer was still under warranty, of course, since it was only six months old, so we called the manufacturer.  The conclusion was that the motherboard died.  Fixable of course, but the problem here is that the manufacturer's policy is to have the computer shipped back to them so they could install the new one, free of charge of course.  However, that would take at LEAST a month to accomplish.  The beta for World of Warcraft was looming, which would provide John a great opportunity to grow his YouTube channel and expand his subscriber numbers.  Being unable to make videos for an entire month was unacceptable.  We knew that Best Buy sold computers from this company (ibuypower), so we asked if we could take it there to have them fix the computer under warranty.  The answer we got was the next best thing, really.  Ibuypower agreed to send us the motherboard, so that we could take it to Best Buy for repairs.  We'd have to pay for having it installed, but we wouldn't have to pay for the motherboard.  We were more than willing to accept that.

The motherboard arrived shortly after this, and we promptly called Best Buy to schedule an appointment.  We explained the situation to them, stating that we had an Ibuypower computer, it was under warranty, and we needed a motherboard to be installed.  They were very helpful on the phone and scheduled an appointment that day.  I should add that this was on Black Friday.  We had to go to freaking Best Buy on Black Friday.  Fortunately, it wasn't TERRIBLY busy, because we didn't go early in the day.  Plus, everyone was shopping, not going to the customer service desk.  We brought our computer in, said we had an appointment, and were them promptly told that they don't install motherboards.  I cannot even begin to describe how angry I was.  I can understand Ibuypower not knowing this, but I called Best Buy and made an appointment!  I specifically told them that I needed a motherboard to be installed!  They said no problem, and made the appointment.  Then I get there and am told they don't do that.  I was able to prevent myself from screaming at them, and instead asked them for the nearest place that WOULD install a new motherboard.  They sent me to a locally owned shop right down the road from where I work, and by favor of the gods and demons, they were open on Black Friday.  The guy there said he would do it no problem.  And he did.  It was done the next day, and it only cost us $60.

Let's not forget that a few weeks after it was repaired, the computer rebooted after installing Windows Updates, and proceeded to display a black screen with the words "Missing operating system." on it.  Fortunately, it was merely because the updates screwed up which hard drive the system was looking at for the boot sequence.  But COME THE FUCK ON.

I haven't even gotten to the worst of it yet.

In July, my father was taken to the hospital after he was having trouble getting out of his office chair at home.  I was having dinner with friends when my mother called me and left a message.  I was about two seconds too slow in answering it.  She was panicking, of course, so her message left with the impression that he was dead.  I called my brother to get a sane explanation of what was going on.  It was suspected that he was having a stroke.  After many tests, lost blood samples, and incorrect hypotheses, the problems were narrowed down to improper dosages on his medication, mainly his blood thinners.  Over the course of doing all of these tests, however, it was discovered that he had a cancerous tumor on his kidney.  In that instant, everything in my life changed.  Everything.

To be fair about the whole situation, things worked out just about as well as they possibly could.  My father had surgery to remove the tumor, the kidney that it attached itself to, and some of the lymph nodes attached to the kidney.  The tumor was probably about the size of a baseball.  After that, he was screened for cancer again to see if any of it spread elsewhere.  It did not.  He is currently cancer free, and we are hopeful that he's going to stay that way.  I'm very grateful for that, and also incredibly grateful that he is still alive and with us.  He feels better than he has in years.  I can say in certainty that there's nothing more sobering in your life than when you see what your father looks like when he truly believes that he's going to die.  It changes you.  It changed me.  It's a relief now that he's talkative again.  He jokes around, he participates in conversations again, he doesn't keep to himself.  He's back to his old self.  I'm glad.  But, that doesn't undo what everyone has gone though.  It doesn't undo the change that was forced upon us.

This year also decided that cancer wasn't enough on the health side of things.  In July, around the same time that my father started to have health problems, so did my husband.  John began to have severe itching on his arms and legs, and we couldn't get rid of it.  At first, we thought it was poison ivy.  Then poison oak.  Then bug bites.  Then allergies.  Then hives from stress.  We still don't fucking know what it was.  We tried calamine lotion, antihistamines, allergy medicine, steroids, anti-itch creams.  Nothing worked, at least not permanently.  Shortly after this all began, he began having trouble with his bowels.  He would have diarrhea for days at a time, followed by constipation for days at a time.  This was in July.  It is STILL a problem, and we STILL do not have an answer.  We currently have it narrowed down to two things, neither of which are serious, thankfully.  It's yet to be seen if either of these are actually the problem.  We're going to have blood work done tomorrow to test for one of them.  In January, he'll be having a colonoscopy to look for anything else it might be.  This has probably been the issue that has negatively affected us the most over the course of this year, because not only does it affect us directly, but it's been going on for so fucking long.

But cancer, uncontrollable itching, and persistent bowel problems were STILL not enough on the health side of things here in 2015.  My cat has begun having problems as well.  He's peeing way more than usual, and has on multiple occasions just jumped up on the bed and used it as a litter box.  He looks like he's having some problems walking, which seems to be related to his cat litter getting embedded into his back paws.  Most likely, this is happening because he's using his litter box so much each day.  He takes longer to pee than I do.  It's ridiculous.  And because he's used the bed on more than one occasion, I've become terribly paranoid about it.  I check it all the time.  I'm constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure he's not near it.  It's made it so it's become incredibly difficult for me to just relax at home, and it's made it impossible for me to ever play with him on the bed again.

These are the big ones.  There are many more smaller things that have happened, and while not detrimental on their own, they just started to stack upon the already use pile of ballsuck that was looming over our heads for the entire year.  There was the fact that my car's "check engine" light came on and refused to every go out again.  It's still on.  I had to get an exemption on it so that it would pass inspection after sinking a few hundred dollars into trying to get it fixed.  There was the fact that after getting back from vacation this year, which was expensive, we realized that on top of that expense we now had to shell out $600 to the government to allow John to stay here.  The day after I mailed the check for $600, John's computer chair broke in half.

You get the idea.

Given the sheer metric fuck ton of shit that has happened, it's all too easy to start assuming that bad things are just going to continue to happen.  Let's face it:  For the last six months, that has actually been true.  And it looks like it will continue to be true as we move into the next year.

What's important to remember is that somehow, by some miracle of nature, I'm still here.  John is still here.  We got through all of this shit.  And as annoying and stressful and depressing and irritating and hopeless as things seemed to have been, the year was also filled with a hell of a lot of highs, as well, BlizzCon being the most notable of these.  I refuse to allow this shit to make me look to the future while asking the question, "I wonder what's going to happen to me next?"  Fuck that.  I'm going to do what I always do, and take it one day at a time, handling the bad and cherishing the good.  And no matter what, I will continue to consider myself extremely lucky for all the things that I have.  

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, or OMG WHAT IS DLC?

I consider myself to be part of a waning demographic within the gaming community.  I prefer single-player game experiences, instead of co-op, multi-player, or massively multi-player ones.  I prefer story-driven experiences where the difficulty is not the main focus, rather than incredibly difficult ones with a high skill threshold.  I prefer games with at least a touch of humor in them with gorgeous set pieces and lively virtual worlds, rather than bleak, depressing ones that trigger bouts of depression.  

These days, it feels like I'm in the minority when it comes to that.  

When Wolfenstein: The New Order came out last year and received quite a lot of praise, I was hopeful that a majority of gamers out there still shared in some of my interests.  It was a game that did pretty much everything that has been done before.  It was special, though, because it did them all well.  Everyone already knew that the gun play would be top notch.  It was using the idTech engine, and if there is one thing id knows how to do properly, it's gun play.  Say what you will about Rage:  The actual shooting portion of the gameplay was exquisite, and the same was true for The New Order.  It was also wonderful in so many other ways, though, too.  So many other important ways.  It had everything I wanted in a shooter.  Great set pieces, maps with multiple paths, a likable hero who kicks ass, a bit of dry comedy, a decent story, and plenty of intense moments.

People loved the game, and it gave me hope that perhaps I still lived in a world where that type of game could do well.  Where people weren't so overly obsessed with games innovating, doing something new, or re-inventing the wheel.  But, apparently, that is not the case.  After the reception I am seeing to The Old Blood, it's pretty clear to me that the world merely has the attention span of a gnat and had forgotten what it is that makes a good shooter.  The New Order reminded them of that, and they loved it for it.  But now that the formula is fresh in their minds, any other attempts to maintain that same formula is met with a condescending yawn and a click of the tongue, with comments ranging from "This is the same thing and therefore it's bad" to "This game is the same as this other game that I rated with an 8 therefore since it is exactly the same I will rate it a 6."

With this kind of mentality, I have little hope that the number of games in which I have an interest will not steadily decrease year after year.  It seems inevitable at this point.  The masses just don't like the kind of games that I like any longer.  I only hope that these games end up truly being better, rather than just different.  Innovation is great.  I love it, and I certainly don't wish for it to stop.  But demanding that a game innovate for it to be considered good is a really stupid fucking idea.

All of this, every single point here, has been made without even pointing out that the The Old Blood isn't even a full release game.  It's an expansion.  Back in the days where DLC wasn't a gun, a piece of armor, or a special vehicle, a piece of DLC was actually content.  It was a piece of additional playtime created to give people a little bit more of the game they so loved.  It was to extend the life of that single-player game by adding some new content for it.  That's what The Old Blood is.  People are hating it for doing what it was designed to do.  It's only been a few years, but we already live in a world where gamers have forgotten what DLC is supposed to be.  It's rather difficult to remain optimistic about where the industry is going when gamers cannot tell the difference between a game and an expansion.  It's this kind of ignorant mentality that allows publishers like EA and Ubisoft to further take advantage of their consumers.  Gamers have no one but themselves to blame for this pathetic state of the industry.  You can hate EA all you want, but they are rich with YOUR money.

And We're Back

A little over a year ago, I ceased posting here on this blog and moved to Tumblr.  At the time, my motivations for doing this stemmed  from a desire to have greater visibility.  I wanted people to read what I had to say, and I wanted to see them reading what I had to say.  Tumblr is essentially blogging, but with social networking embedded into it.  It was the perfect solution.  That is, until I finally asked myself one question.

Why?

Why do I want more visibility?  Why do I care who is reading my posts?

Once I realized that the answer to both of these questions is "I don't.", it became a lot easier to figure out that the reason why I never blog any longer is because I don't want to put forth the effort into writing for other people.  I merely wish to write for myself, and that has been the case ever since I made my first post here back in 2005.  I sort of lost sight of the fact that a lack of exposure was exactly why I enjoyed writing them.  I could just put my thoughts down in a Google Doc or something like that, but it doesn't have the same kind of organization that I get on a blogging platform.  Call me a narcissist if you'd like.  But you won't, because you're not reading this.  See how it works?

This morning I started looking at more blogging sites, to choose the one that I would like to use to start over.  And then I thought, "Why do I need to start over?"  So, here I am, posting here once more.  It's got a nice familiarity to it.  Even my template with the orange font was still here where I left it, waiting for me to use it again.

And, just in case I forget once again, this blog is a collection of my thoughts and experiences as I go through life.  If you have found your way here, you are more than welcome to read it.  But, I doubt you will find anything extraordinary or interesting.  While it is true that I can be extraordinary and interesting, I am most likely not to very many other people.  There are millions of blogs out there, written by millions of people.  I do not have such delusions of grandeur that I consider the words I'm typing here to be of any significance to anyone but myself or those who love me.

And I am more than okay with that.  

I'm There Now

I'm moving to Tumblr.  Feel free to join me.  Updates here will cease from this point forward.  

http://pdchronicles.tumblr.com/ 

The past week was a little weird.  The punctuation on the whole thing was Friday, when I was operating on less than two hours of sleep from the previous night.  The entire day, I felt like I was floating around rather than walking.  I assume that to some degree, that's how people strung out on drugs tend to feel all the time.  I remember the entire day with surprising clarity, however.  I also remember how I felt.  I barely had enough energy to physically function, let alone control my own thoughts.  As a result, I let things bother me more than they usually would.  With the Boston Marathon Bombings fresh in my mind, a rather depressing book I was reading, a sore neck, along with a few other items falling into the category of Kick-You-While-You're-Down, Friday ended up being a lesson in timing and perspective.

But now it's Monday, and I feel fine.  Things have worked themselves out, or I have worked them out for myself.  The two men who bombed the Boston Marathon have been identified.  One of them is dead and the other one is captured.  I finished the book I was reading and found out it wasn't really that bad after all.  Things are better now.  And I'm awake.

I hear you asking about the book I was reading?  It's a dark-fantasy novel by Joe Hill, called Horns.  To put it most simply, it explores the idea of the devil being an anti-hero, rather than purely evil.  The book was fascinating while at the same time depressing.  It left me with the feeling that there were no good people in the story, and that everyone has an ugly side to them.  My thought on the matter is that I already realize that everyone has a dark side.  I don't need to be reminded of the fact in a work of fiction.  Still, the storytelling in the book was fantastic.  I can see why it's being made into a movie coming out this year.

Let's see.  What's new?  It was rather cold as balls this weekend, so I didn't get outside to do anything.  However, the seeds in the back room have mostly sprouted.  I'm not sure yet if I'm going to manage to avoid having gnarly seedlings or not.  It's a bit too early to tell.  I think I'm doing the lighting correctly, but who knows.  

Dead Island: Riptide comes out tomorrow.  I didn't pre-purchase it, nor do I plan on getting it unless the reviews are favorable.  I will say that I -enjoyed- the first game, but it didn't leave enough of an impression upon me to warrant getting exciting for a sequel.  I'll play the wait-and-see game on that one.  The only thing it has going for it is that right this moment, I wouldn't mind having a new shooter to play.  And I do like killing zombies.

Seed Starting Supplies

I got my stuff in the mail the other day.  It's still too early to do anything with them, but I figured I'd share.  Keep in mind that my camera isn't the best, so the images will be blurry.  Also, there seems to be a cat in most of them.

First off, the six packages of seeds.  I mentioned already how I went about picking them.  (Hint:  I went with the EASIEST.)



Now, obviously I need containers in which to plant them.  So I got some round, biodegradable planters that you can put right into the ground, plus a flat with smaller compartments (for the flowers, since they are smaller).







And finally, I'll also need SOIL.




One last thing is the lighting.  I had a bit of a problem last year with the seedlings getting a little spindly.  By that, I mean that they got unnaturally tall.  I think this was due to two things:  One, I may have had the light up too high, which caused the seedlings to stretch up to reach it.  Second, I think perhaps I didn't have a very good schedule with when I had the light on.  I can adjust the height of the lighting with no problem.  In order to get a good schedule down, I purchased a cat...er...I mean I purchased a TIMER that will control when the light is on, which you can see below.