Weekend Recap 2/2-4

The Weekend Recap is a post where I recap my gaming and other various happenings from the weekend. I don't know about you but I always consider Friday evening as part of the weekend!

Holy smokes, I totally forgot to post my recap for gaming this past weekend! It's a short week for me as I have Friday off, but it has felt like a long week because of how tired I've been due to staying up late playing the only game I played not only this past weekend, but this whole week as well!

The Division - That's right, I've been playing the heck our of The Division. After doing quite a bit of solo play I decided to try using some pick up groups for the daily missions, and it has been very enjoyable. I was finally able to try out the Survival mode DLC, and it's probably the most fun I've had in the game since I came back.

The premise is simple - you have to survive and the weather, starvation, thirst, people that want to kill you on site and extract with the anti-virals before you die from an infection cause when the helicopter you are in crashes. The weather is the first big obstacle that you will face. You start off with clothing that has very minimal protection from the snow storm that is pelting the city. You can get warmer clothing by crafting or loot from enemies and containers around the city.

While doing that you also need to find food and drink. While you will never die from thirst or starvation, food and water are important because food affects your ability to regenerate health and thirst will help you spot loot containers while traversing the snow covered streets. Being able to see loot better is actually important because the weather effects and lighting can actually make things on the screen difficult to see.

So you've got food and water, getting some clothing to keep you warm, now you must find meds to help slow down the infection. While you can actually die if you let the infection progress too far, it's pretty easy to find around the city. I have yet to die due to infection. There are two types of medications - pain killers and syringes with syringes being the stronger of the two. The thing is, the more of the medication you take, the less effective it will become as you gain a resistance to the medication. If you were to not take any medication at all, you have exactly an hour of real time to extract before death. The one time I did extract it took me also an hour and forty minutes, so medication does work.

In order to extract you have to craft a signal flare and get the anti-virals. The anti-virals are located in the Dark Zone. To get to the DZ you have to craft a contamination filter, but in order to do that you need to look crafting materials from around the city. Once you've done all of that and you've used the signal flare, you then have to take down what's called a Hunter, and these things are no joke. I've run into Hunters a few times by myself doing the Underground  DLC and each time I got my face crushed. I got really lucky in the Survival that I did manage to extract from because I accidentally shot his grenade in his hand which caused a whole heap of damage. After that it was about trying to kill him before he healed to full health, which he did on a few occasions. Was a frustrating fight, but boy did it feel good once I boarded that helicopter for extraction.

Survival mode is a really slow way to grind for reward caches, so if you're looking to grind for gear there are way better ways to do such. I will, however, be trying more Survival at some point. There is a bit of RNG because of the random start locations and of course the loot, but the feeling of satisfaction from completing an extraction was awesome.

Weekend Recap 1/26-28

The Weekend Recap is a post where I recap my gaming and other various happenings from the weekend. I don't know about you but I always consider Friday evening as part of the weekend!

Talk about planning a busy weekend. I had a chiropractor appointment, possible birthday party to take my son to, the NHL Skills Competition and All-Star game, UFC on Fox, NXT Takeover: Philadelphia and the big Royal Rumble on Sunday. All of that and trying to game as well!

Max Payne - I love all three of the Max Payne games, in my top 5 games all three would probably be on that list. After finishing Quantum Break I had a real hankering for a game with great storytelling and decent gunplay, so I thought of Max Payne. I didn't play much on Friday, but I just love this game. Every so often I'll dust off Max Payne because I love the story, they way it's told, the atmosphere and the awesome gunplay. Max Payne was came out at a time when developers used to program cheats into their games, and thank goodness because this game can be brutally difficult at times if you play on a hard setting. I will definitely be finishing this game for the umpteenth time and probably playing Max Payne 2 afterwards, a game that I think is even better than the first!

The Division - Since I knew that I wasn't going to have tons of time playing games, I didn't want to start one of the plethora of games that I have so for whatever reason I just fired up The Division on Friday. This became the only game I played the rest of the weekend, I just had a blast with it. In December I bought the Season Pass so I spent the weekend trying out the Underground DLC and messing around in the I guess revamped Dark Zone. I've always like The Division, but there seems to be this sentiment that it was broken or incomplete when the game launched. I honestly have no idea why there is this thought, other than the Dark Zone being crap I had a lot of fun playing through The Division.

So that was the weekend, I figure there'll be quite a bit of The Division this week with some Max Payne mixed in!

Weekend Recap 1/19-21

The Weekend Recap is a post where I recap my gaming and other various happenings from the weekend. I don't know about you but I always consider Friday evening as part of the weekend!

I forgot to post a What Are You Playing post on Friday due to being home sick trying to get over the flu. However, that did not stop me from playing games on Friday. Or rather one game as I spent the whole day playing Quantum Break by Remedy Entertainment back in April 2016.

Quantum Break - This game is a doozy. Quantum Break has the best story that I've experienced in recent memory. I've played many games over the years, quite a few have great stories and many are complete stinkers. But not since I've played Bioshock Infinte have I been so moved by a story. There have been a few MMO's with pretty memorable quest lines that elicited the same feeling, but the mixing of live-action with gameplay takes Quantum Break to another level. Even with the amazing story telling and character development, Quantum Break is a bit weak on the gameplay front, has a terrible final boss fight and an ending that's so unsatisfying that it nearly ruined what was an exceptional story.

Remedy is probably best known for the Max Payne games and Alan Wake, Quantum Break is the hybrid child of those games with a better story and worse gameplay. The gunplay isn't bad, but the half-back cover system that lacks a dedicated cover button holds it back some. There's also a couple of sequences where the game becomes a platformer. I am not a fan of platforming games and the jumpy bits feel like they were added to inflate game time. Although I did enjoy the story, with 5 acts I felt that the game was maybe one act too long.

Some of the marketing for the game mentions how your choices can affect the story, some of that is true. After the end of Acts 1 through 4 you are presented with an either/or decision, either path A or path B. You are given some indication how that choice will affect the overall story before you choose, but the final boss encounter and the ending will always remain the same. Personally I feel that the decision made at the end of Act 1 is the most pivotal because it really sets the tone for the rest of the game. At the end of the first four acts there's a 20 minute live action sequence that is just amazing. It really helps flesh out and give better context to the story and excellent character development for those not involved necessarily with the gameplay but that have roles withing the story. It's a neat idea that i hope catches on with other games, but the choices don't have that huge of an impact like you might be lead to believe.

Even with the poopy parts, I cannot stress enough just how great the storytelling is in Quantum Break. I spent all Friday and the better part of Saturday playing through the game twice because of how much I thought of the story. Even today I am still thinking about the story, the characters and the world that was created.

Elder Scrolls Online - I did dabble in ESO for a few hours while watching the football games. I have this kind of love/hate relationship with ESO; the game looks great, plays great especially with a controller, but I hate the class system, crafting and after awhile I just get this feeling that I should play Skyrim instead. Every time I think maybe I'll just uninstall the game I'll sit and play for a few hours, realize I am actually having some fun and decide not to. I don't hate this game, I'm just not sure how much more I will end up playing.

Hitman - This is the best game I played in 2017. I will probably say that every time I write about Hitman. I'm not sure what to say about this game, I just love it. Like all other Hitman games it's got a story that loosely ties together the missions. The story is fine, but it's the gameplay and the myriad of ways you can go about completing each chapter that I love the most.

Weekend Recap 1/12-14

The Weekend Recap is a post where I recap my gaming and other various happenings from the weekend. I don't know about you but I always consider Friday evening as part of the weekend!

Homefront The Revolution - What an annoying game this turned out to be. The game starts off with a bang, and the initial hour or so is actually pretty good. Once you get into the open world, however, the game begins to head towards the chore type of gameplay.

The story has some terrible pacing issues. There were a couple of times I thought I was done, but the game just dragged on and on. It's honestly about 5-7 hours too long. The gameplay becomes a chore as well; each zone you are assaulting control points, sabotaging various items or finding radios to raise the resistance level to 100% in order to progress the story.

The gunplay wants you to be more tactical, but once the enemy is aware of your presence you'll be hounded by endless waves of KPA ala Call of Duty style till you run away and lower the alert meter. Another annoyance is how the KPA are able to spot you so easily making stealth a massive chore at times.

Did I like the game? Kind of. I did play through the DLC on Saturday even though the main game left me annoyed. I even went back and tried to get some easy achievements because that's how I roll. Two pieces of DLC, Aftermath and Beyond the Wall, are great. It's honestly what Homefront The Revolution should have been like and not some open world mess. Both are much more linear and focused, have far more interesting characters, the character you play Ethan Brady has an actual voice. Beyond the Wall, I thought, satisfying ending for both your character and the game.

I bought this game on the cheap during the holiday, it's the only way I would recommend this one.

UFC 2 (XB1) - I played a boatload of this game on Saturday and Sunday. One area I struggle with in this game is the ground game. I spent some time watching Youtube videos to learn how to better my grappling offense and defense. I like this game...most of the time. The striking gameplay is super fun, but the grappling is where UFC 2 really breaks down. I've only played against computer opponents, but the AI is so hyper-aggressive and you lose stamina so much faster than the AI does, couple that with such a small window of time to defend while on in a clinch or on the ground and you've got yourself a heap of frustration.

Blade of Darkness - This is an older game that I bought on GOG ages ago before it was removed. I loved this game back when it first game out. This is one of the very few games I still have a pirated copy of from when I worked at Gamestop back when I used to do dirty pirate kind of things.

You may see this game being referenced as Dark Souls before there was Dark Souls. And it's true. I am not a fan of the Souls games, but the insane amount of gore is why I love Blade of Darkness. It's old, takes some work to get running sometimes, the controls are awful and the story is nothing. It's not really that great of a game. But for the time it was pretty with some of the best lighting and water effects, four different playable characters that each specialize in different weaponry, and you can cut the head off an enemy and then use it to beat down another enemy. What's there not to love?

I can't remember how far I played through the game before, but I've had this installed on my computer for a while now. So I messed around with the keyboard controls to make it as modern as possible and spent the better part of 5 hours playing on Sunday. Again, it's not a great game, but there's just enough combat to keep me engrossed enough to want to play more.

Well that was my weekend - video games and the NFL playoffs.