Shadow of Mordor: How Do You Say "This Game Sucks" in Elvish?

Because I'm weak to impulse buying games on sale, and because it was on my radar, I picked up Shadow of Mordor recently. For less than half its normal retail price, I figured I was getting a bargain. But like the first game I bought for the PS4 - Evil Within - this one has turned into a tedious slog through a drab, ugly landscape with no redeeming features to help me along the way.

What're my problems with the game? Christ, where do I even start?

The AI is nonexistent, for one thing. If you get spotted, just climb to a high place and duck. Turn on Not-Detective-Vision and watch as the enemies run around in one large, Pikmin-esque group for a minute before buggering off to where they were before they spotted you. Hell, you don't even have to do that much. Sometimes ducking, walking through a bush, and veering around back of a small wagon is all it takes to confuse the enemy and get them off you. I had issues with my first real Warchief encounter, but when I actually drew him away from the pack, all I had to do was repeatedly Not-Cape-Stun him and then using the Not-Beatdown move. You may have noticed I've been including a lot of "Not-" things. That's because this game wholesale steals things from the Arkham series, which leads me to my second problem.

They fucked up the Batman combat. As much as I grew to intensely loathe the Arkham games as I worked on perfecting Asylum and City back-to-back, there was a flow to combat. There is no flow in Shadow of Mordor. Mashing the attack button has no feedback, and all of the moves ripped off from Arkham feel weak and ineffective. There's a Not-Shockwave move that basically does nothing, and you'd never ever use it over the Combat Takedown move... except when you're fighting Not-The-Flood from Halo, in which case good luck not taking damage long enough to build to your 8x (or 5x) combo multiplier to pull it off.

The graphics are terrible, and anyone who says they aren't has bad vision. Maybe put your glasses on and sit a little further back from the TV there, gramps. Mordor itself is an ugly, brown wasteland. The second area, which has a little greenery to it, still isn't much better. Characters emote vocally, but you'll never once see that emotion on their faces in even the slightest manner.

Sound design is also not very good, and the voice acting is as lifeless as it possibly could be. Look at the IMDB page for this game. There's a tremendous amount of vocal talent - really good vocal talent - involved in Shadow of Mordor, but it seems every single one of them was doing it to pay their mortgage because you'll never hear a less caring, rushed, and ultimately bored-sounding reading of dialog. I don't know what the person in charge of the voice acting was doing, but I can only assume it involved drinking large amounts of alcohol, because you'll never come across two characters pronounce anything in the game the same. Not places, not people, not anything in between.

The controls are awkward and clunky at best and infuriating and floaty at worst. There's a trophy for freeing 30 slaves in 3 minutes while mounted. Good luck with that. It involves finding enough slavers, then trying to control your mount long well enough to actually do what you want it to do. On foot, Talion feels like he weighs a ton, and he'd fit right in with his Assassin's Creed cousins, as you'll rarely get him to parkour in the way you want him to. Want to climb that thing? He's going to run a few steps up it, then stand there looking stupid until you angle him slightly to the left and try it again. Want to jump off a ledge to land on another? Well, good luck with that. Want to sneak up on a guy before he gets too close to his buddies? Have fun getting hung up on the geometry.

The difficulty is also all over the place. As an open world game, I understand it's hard to balance certain elements. But the way most tend to do it is to either keep things scaled to your level or make the area around your starting position easier, with more difficult challenges lying around the edges of the map. Here, you have neither of these things. One quest, related to your Bow, is located almost on top of your central tower spawn point. I went to it thinking I could get some XP, maybe a Rune or something, and assuming that because it was right there, I wouldn't have any issues.

I was swarmed with named mobs. The quest started innocently enough. Take out all the snipers. They come from the front and the back, you're in a little tent with ammo supplies, and it's not hard to shoot them before they shoot you.

Then a Captain showed up. Then another. Then two more. I tried to run away but two more were in my path. It seemed like every named mob in the entire game was coming for me as I did this innocuous side quest. Needless to say I didn't succeed. Doing the quest seems to spawn at least two Captains in the area, because when I went back to it much later on, the same thing started happening. This time, I got to a better position and quickly sniped down my remaining targets. The quest completed and I was free to run.

This is a running theme - being overpowered and completely out of control. I had an incident in the session I was playing directly before I sat down to write this where I was supposed to trail a Captain as he tried to recruit more Not-Orcs into his ranks. The gist is that you kill a handful of them with arrows, the rest join him, he moves to points two and then three, and the process repeats. Here's how it played out for me.

• I started on a roof, in perfect sniping position.
• After sniping five or six enemies, the Captain turns around and spots me, despite me being very far away.
• The Captain then turns his back on me and lumbers off towards spot #2. Meanwhile, every Orc - on both sides of this fight - launch towards me.
• I putter around on rooftops, trying to both lose the Pikmin mob below me while also keeping up with the Captain.
• The Captain sits at spot 2 for awhile, then fucks off to spot 3.
• I finally catch up properly at this point, and again the Captain is alone.
• A bunch of mobs, all hostile towards the Captain, suddenly spawn in on top of him.
• The Captain is killed because there was nowhere to resupply arrows, and I couldn't shoot that many enemies with what I had, nor could I hop down to fight them manually without both alerting the Pikmin swarm, which was still clustered up, or the Captain himself.

What was I supposed to do in that situation? I would've been killed if I had jumped down to fight the swarm, who was much more interested in me than killing the Captain. There's a trophy for helping a Captain survive his Recruitment, then going in to kill both him and all of his new recruits.

Another time, I was sitting on a roof for about 45 minutes trying to figure out how to do a thing. I was trying to lure a Warchief out, which involved letting the Orcs see me, hitting the alarm, and then killing 35 of them. Again, Pikmin swarm mentality. When I found a place they couldn't climb to, I just had to wait and pick guys off. Once the Warchief was out, I was in another problematic spot.

See, he had a Captain with him as a bodyguard. He was a ranged unit. Eventually I killed him via jumping off the roof in a stealth kill a couple times. But that still left the Warchief himself. Captains and Warchiefs have strengths and weaknesses. It's what is apparently supposed to help you decide your plan of attack. In reality, it just makes you go "Oh god, this is going to take ten times longer than it should."

In my case, the Warchief was immune to stealth kills, ranged attacks, and fire/explosions (which wasn't listed, but I blew up a stack of explosive barrels and he took damage from neither the explosion itself or the fire that engulfed him for a full minute solid). He also had a giant shield and could quickly turn around in case I got behind him. Any time I tried attacking, the swarm of Pikmin Orcs would rush in. So how did I overcome the challenge?

The Warchief was a Tracker, meaning he'll slowly mosey over to your general area. I thought maybe I could lure him to the edge of town and away from the swarm. If nothing else, being able to focus on just him in combat would help me work out something. I sat on a small building's roof as the Warchief crept closer, like a dog sniffing out a squirrel...

Then this happened.

All it took to kill him was to flip over him, Not-Cape-Stun him, then Not-Beatdown him about 5, 6 times. And that's basically how every fight goes. Either you one-shot kill an enemy with an arrow to the head, you instantly stealth kill him, or you do that. The hard part is not the Warchiefs (Warchieves?) themselves, it's the swarm of guys they come backed with. There is no challenge involved, it's a paper-rock-scissors game with assholes who pick dynamite.

The trophies haven't been interesting or difficult so far. Only a few look like they'll be annoying to do, and that's down to mostly the controls screwing you over or having an entire zone randomly decide to swarm you on a side quest. Captains can warp around the map as they see fit, as I ran a test where I checked out the location of every Captain I had access to. None were near the side quest area I was about to start, but suddenly, middle of the quest, I hear someone snarl "RANGER!" and oh hey it's two Captains running in. Apparently the crows told them where I was and then they Fast Traveled to me.

It's been a tedious slog, and not one I've enjoyed. There are moments where interesting things happen, but that's true of most games. In general, combat is awful, stealth is awful (there is no toggle. You literally have to hold RT constantly. In a game made in 2014.), and the quests are poorly written and acted.

Also, they manage to fuck up Middle-Earth lore, so if you're a Tolkien fan, you're gonna be grinding your teeth at a lot of the things you come across. A lot of it's to do with Kelly Bimbo, the elf you're stuck with. They tried acting like his name and inclusion was a big surprise... but the marketing and start of game text describes him in detail, so when you finally find out who he is via quest, it's impossible to be interested or surprised, despite the game making a very big deal of naming him. Also, Gollum's fucking in it because of course he is.

This one's definitely getting an article when I'm done with it. I'm aiming for Xmas, because I want to play Far Cry 4 and get the stupid, wedged-in multiplayer trophies out of the way early on that one so I can at least TRY to enjoy the world. I'd imagine the story is just as insultingly bad as Far Cry 3's.

I'm hoping there's at least less racism and rape involved this time around. I couldn't stop cringing in 3 any time something like the sex scenes or the casual racism reared their ugly heads. But it's Ubisoft. Ubisoft doesn't have a very good track record in regards to that. ...Also, just reminded myself that it's Ubisoft, so I'm going to have to sit through another 90 minute unskippable credit sequence.

Fuck.

The Evil Within: A Masochism Simulator

In the time since the last post, I've finished Lego Marvel - which I absolutely need to write up a breakdown for - and I've gotten sucked into Costume Quest 2 and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (both great games)... but here I am, grinding away in Evil Within, a game that's the very opposite of fun. I have to force myself to play, and getting trophies in it isn't satisfying. There is nothing here. Just a tedious, repetitive, unfair slog.

I haven't even gotten to the hard stuff yet, either. I walked away from this game for quite a long time just to remember that games could still be fun and enjoyable. But we have snow coming in this weekend. And Christmas is just around the corner. That's my deadline, by the way. I have until Christmas to get the Platinum in The Evil Within. I'm not sure that's long enough. When I turn my PS4 on, I have Minecraft, Costume Quest 2, and Isaac sitting there. I would rather play any of those! I still have trophies in all of them! ...Although Isaac did have a bug where, after I got Golden God, the trophy never popped. That's actually what drove me back to TEW. It's pushed me far enough that it'd only take until tomorrow to finish the game again, but god damn it's so awful that I feel like I'm wasting my time.

And when you feel like you're wasting time doing a hobby that's already one of the most time wasting things imaginable, something has gone horribly wrong.

I'm playing NG+ on Easy, because Easy is what I went through the first time on. That was a mistake. I should've done Normal, because now I have to run the game on Normal in addition to Hard, Akumu (one-hit kills from everything, including environmental objects), Speed running the game in under 5 hours, and a run where I don't upgrade anything. Man, I don't want to finish this game a second time, let alone that many times! Granted, I think I can get the trophy for Normal by just playing Hard, which I'll probably do... but I'm not doing a no-upgrades run on anything but Easy. The speed run one will be NG++ since it apparently resets your clock each run. This way I can start with all of my weapons upgraded. It won't keep me from dying to stupid nigh unavoidable traps, but it'll help.

I have miscellaneous trophies I have to mop up, too. Killing enemies with each type of Agony Bolt, doing chapter 2 without fighting, and doing chapter 8 without fighting, to name a few. This run has mostly been keys and collectibles. And, of course, upgrading. Knowing that I'm almost done with this NG+ run doesn't make me happy because of how many more I have to do. No amount of guides will help you through the truly difficult parts of the game.

Chapter 6 starts with a double gauntlet. If you don't have the ammo to keep yourself from getting touched, you'll be stuck there and possibly will have to start from chapter 1 again. Then it has a long outdoor sequence that ends with another Sadist fight. That's only the halfway point, too. Chapter 9 has you in a mansion, and Ruvik can appear at any time to chase you. He can teleport in front of you and grab you whenever he wants. Chapter 10 is one of, if not the longest in the game, consisting of a section where you have to deal with multiple snipers, then giant enemies that can charge and fight at range (which are also bullet sponges, so good luck getting past two to mash open a switch), then you have to skirt around dealing with Laura again (and she's faster than you are on Akumu, so you'd better know the exact order), and then you have the actual boss fight in the garage area. Chapter 11 has you swimming through water infested with Amnesia: The Dark Descent style monsters. Only, like so many other things in this game, they instantly kill you if they catch you.

Chapter 12's short, but it has a trophy at the very end. It's for driving a bus through a very short sequence without hitting any of the Haunted on the road. That's easier said than done, because the draw distance for the zombies is short. If they're in set locations, and I haven't watched Youtube videos of different people doing the sequence to find out if they are or not, then it becomes trivial. If not, then it becomes one of the most frustrating trophies in the entire game. Why? Because no one involved in the game thought 'hey, let's put a checkpoint at the start of that sequence.' No. If you reload the last checkpoint, you'll be going through the turret sequence again. While it isn't the longest thing in the game, it is incredibly tedious.

The game is full of sequences like that, though. Things that could just be made more tolerable with the use of intelligent checkpoints. Any major transition deserves one, and TEW simply doesn't have them. I have not cussed at my TV this much while playing a game in my entire life. Not even when Catwoman's final Campaign in Arkham City was driving my blood pressure through the roof (13 hours to complete it, by the way. Spread across about a week). Hell, I had an easier time perfecting Aliens: Colonial Marines, to give an indication of where I'm at with Evil Within. I genuinely think TEW is worse than A:CM. You have to mess with its systems, but there's actual fun to be had in A:CM. Not much, mind you, and it definitely had more than its fair share of rage-inducing moments (mostly concerning Challenges, of course) but Evil Within takes itself so seriously and has so many moments where you wonder if anyone who worked on it had ever played a game before that it just becomes a nightmare.

It's frustrating and slow-moving and the letterboxing makes things so much harder than they need to be. I literally cannot say anything good about The Evil Within at this point. Upgrades are middling, collectibles are often in insane spots you'd never find without a guide, and it's too fucking long. Oh my god it's too long. The game has 15 chapters and should've nixed about five of those. Especially when it expects you to play through it so many times for trophies.

Christmas will bring fun games. But I have to finish Evil Within before I can let myself move on to something else. I will not let Evil Within beat me. No matter how difficult it is, I've faced games that are technically harder. The difficulty in TEW comes from the lack of ammo, the bullshit traps, and the letterboxing cutting off your view. The levels themselves are what they are. Not simple. Not hard. Some are too long. Some are too short. There's never a stage that feels the 'right' length. Some stages feel like they should've been merged with others to keep the flow going. As it is, with a save point at the end of every chapter, the flow never even has a chance to start.

The Evil Within: Psychological Torture

It's an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I'm of the mind that Majora's Mask is a pile of shit.

Don't get me wrong - there are parts of that game that I like. I think the world itself is interesting and varied and I like a lot of the music. Oath to Order is a great piece, but it's a very short piece of music. But having to re-fight dull bosses over and over is grating, having to re-do things you might have done dozens of times before just to trigger something is incredibly tedious, some of the side quests are frustrating and needlessly complicated/difficult (alien invasion, I'm looking at you here), and the water area is possibly one of the worst in any 3D game. Don't even get me started about collecting eggs to drop off in a tank.

I bought Majora's Mask on release day. Gold cart. I played for most of that day and I literally never touched the game again. I don't know what became of my old N64 and its games. Possibly cleared in the garage purge that preceded us converting it into a room for my grandmother, were I to make a guess. I was not sad to see Majora's Mask go. When your gameplay goes from its intended purpose to tedious, repetitive, and frustrating within the span of one day, then you have failed as a game designer. When you make a player regret buying your 60-dollar title on day 1, something has gone horribly wrong.

I don't play The Evil Within for long periods of time. I tend to only play games in 1-hour bursts as is, and I don't think I've had a session even getting close to that. I'm only on chapter 9 of the game - on Easy, because I wanted to stroll through it to make mental notes for Akumu Mode - and god damn it I hate this game. I'm not sure I can say a single positive thing about it. The graphics aren't good - the PS4 version looks like a mid-gen 360 game. Especially if you keep the awful film grain on. I turned that shit off ASAP. Gave me a monstrous headache when I played through Chapter 1 with it on.

The letterboxing is pointless and aggravating. You'll never be able to see what you need to be able to see. And if the aiming of bottles and the Crossbow didn't have an arc-line, it might still be tolerable. But the fact that your line is constantly going off into the upper black bar is terrible. There's a trophy for clocking an enemy in the head with a bottle and then stealth killing them. I got that on chapter 7, though not for lack of constant trying. You have to point your camera so far downward that you'll effectively have to blind-fire and hope you hit where you want.

Sound design isn't good. It's hard to tell how far enemies are from you at a listen. Noises are made and you'll have absolutely no clue as to where they even might be located.

Controls definitely aren't good, especially when you're crouched. Instead of turning around, Seb will often just crouch-walk backwards like a dumbass, which I guarantee will get you killed at least once. We're this deep into video game generations and we still have fucking 'wiggle the analog stick rapidly' shit going on. That's a good way to screw up your analog stick is what that is.

But I realized something tonight, after spending just long enough in chapter 5 to get one jar of green gel to put me over 10,000 - almost every level has a really shitty gimmick to it. And if you don't know how it's supposed to go before you even play, you're going to end up dying a lot. Let me explain.

Chapter 1: You're slashed in the leg early on and spend almost the entire stage with a severe limp. You have no weapons and you're being chased by a Sadist (the guy with the chainsaw). Now there's only one big area with him, but it's a terrible area. I'm not sure I've seen any player go into the game blind and get through the chapter without A) following the Sadist into the back room and getting knifed in the beginning or B) sneaking by him in the second part without him noticing. And if you get by him in the first room, even if he never caught sight of you, he's going to charge into the second room a few seconds after you get in. If you miss distracting him with the one bottle they give you and you're screwed. If he sees you, you die. Full stop. You aren't fast enough to outrun him. On easier difficulties, you can take two or three strikes before you get impaled. That's it.

Chapter 2: This chapter's gimmick is introducing the concept of stealth kills and knowing when to run. It also introduces you to the concept of misdirection. Without fail, if you watch people play this game, the end of chapter 2 is likely to play out this way: They skirt around the outside of the stage, on the left, and see the Haunted on the ground, munching away at a corpse. They walk up and stealth kill it and promptly alert a group of like 8 other enemies that you aren't able to see because when you're crouch-walking, because of the letterbox effect, you can't see above the tall grass you're skulking through. This will lead to the player panicking, probably depleting their stamina bar fully, and getting turned around for a minute or two as they try to figure out how to get onto the bridge.

Chapter 3: This chapter hammers into your brain positioning and learning to conserve ammo. The entire chapter is basically doing stealth-kill chains on enemies. If one sees you, they're going to alert more. Then you open fire and alert even more and then suddenly you're out of ammo. If you don't sneak around stabbing guys in the head, you're going to lose all your ammo before fighting the boss (the Sadist again). When people compare this game to Resident Evil 4 - which is isn't. At all. By any stretch of the imagination. - this chapter is the one they'll bring up, since you're in a village with not-zombies. That's where the similarities end. In RE4 you were leaking ammo at all times. Never do you reach a point, even post-boss fights, where you're hurting for ammunition. Your melee sucks here, a sharp contrast to the excellent knife in RE4, and you cannot afford to shoot everyone.

In a way, the previous two chapters also have a lesser gimmick of paying attention to the world around you and knowing when you should burn bodies. Most of the time, downed bodies will not get up. After awhile, you start to realize when they're most likely going to. Is there a switch or crank nearby that will require your attention? Look around first.

Chapter 4 goes farther with the introduction to Laura, who can spawn through any corpses left unburned. It also shows you that bunching enemies up will allow you to set multiple enemies on fire at once. If you try to fight Laura, you will die. She's invincible until chapter 10(?) and even then you can only kill her if you have the Rocket Launcher.

Chapter 5 introduces invisible enemies and will prepare you for arena fights while protecting someone. In this case, your partner, Oda. There's a trophy for getting through this shootout without him taking damage. I can only imagine how big a pain in the ass that's going to be. Oda's good, but he's not that good. Enemies also have dynamite, so that's fun. You have a sort of boss fight with Laura, the multi-armed shrieking lady from all the promotional videos. I have absolutely no idea how this fight works. Are you supposed to just burn all the corpses to prevent her from spawning? I never shot her, but I managed to drop her into the furnace twice. The first time didn't kill her, the second did.

Chapter 6 is where the game ramps up its meanness. You have to keep Oda safe again while he unlocks two doors in two separate rooms while enemies spawn in constantly. This will drain you of most of your ammo and will be one of the most difficult parts of Akumu Mode, where every hit, no matter how small, will instantly kill you. After this, you're given a sniper rifle and are effectively given a non-tutorial on when you should use it. Enemies will, at one point, spawn infinitely from across the board. At the midway point of this chapter is another fight against the Sadist. After that, you'll have two giants in a tiny graveyard and then a giant mutant dog. And once you beat it, you'll have to re-enter the boss arena, where another is lurking, to get your partner's glasses.

Chapter 7 teaches you that you really, really have to be mindful of traps. Even ones you will never have any god damn clue would exist before they trigger and instantly kill you. An example: Near the beginning, you see an enemy hanging from a rope. If you drop this enemy off of it, or he gets down himself, it will release a pressure trigger on the boards he was being hanged from, and spikes in the walls - walls that have no indication of housing spikes - will skewer you. Obviously, after that point you'll start taking those guys out at range, but it teaches you that even when you appear to be safe, you might not be. Thus the chapter is mostly comprised of slow moving, sniping, and trying to use the traps to your advantage.

Chapter 8 teaches you to fucking hate enemies you can't backstab and also introduces tiny little enemies you can step on but can still absolutely damage you. The chapter isn't really that long, but it's one of the most miserable levels in the game. There's a trophy for getting through it without shooting your guns. The cave is choked with enemies. Good luck!

Finally, for now anyway, Chapter 9 has Ruvik, the bad guy of the game, randomly appearing and walking at you. I'm not sure yet if you have to shoot him or just avoid him for awhile to make him go away. In any case, all of the enemies in the area were alerted to my presence once Ruvik vanished. I went downstairs to enter the save room to get them off my tail and quit playing. It's too late in the day for that shit. Presumably Ruvik grabbing you is an instant kill like so many other things in this game are.

While the game might try to introduce mechanics in the chapters, it's really just about the gimmicks. Stealth kill everything or the boss pulls them all when you free him. Don't waste ammo on Laura because she can't die. Hide like a wuss inside of a statue and let Oda snipe-kill the two giants so you don't waste a lot of ammo and health doing it yourself. Ruvik is a twat. I know there's a brief 'drive a bus' segment later, I've heard there's an RE5-style ride-on-something-while-chaingunning-shit sequence of some form or another, and I know at least one more arena fight is in the future. I know there's an invisible boss later on.

But before all of that, I have to get through Ruvik and complete chapter 9. And then I have to complete the game. And then I have to replay the game multiple times across its many difficulties. I'll replay on Casual until I get some trophies - all of the 'do this gimmicky shit on a boss' ones or 'completely upgrade all weapons/yourself' - stuff that would just take longer on higher difficulties. Higher difficulties are, specifically, for the trophies associated with them and nothing more.

There is a trophy for beating Akumu Mode. It is called You Asked For It.

I dunno about you jokers, but I sure as hell didn't.

Dishonored and Diablo 3: Breaking OCD.

I don't have great internet. Said internet comes with an almost hilariously low monthly bandwidth limit. It makes downloading games a major thing, and it's one of many reasons I went with a PS4 over the Xbone. I don't have the bandwidth for the One's massive patches/updates. I'll never be able to download a full, retail game on the PS4, though. 30+GB are well beyond the range I can manage. At 150 gigs a month, it wouldn't take long to go over. My download speeds are also not large enough to pull down files quickly, especially over wifi. Thus, sometimes I have to make a decision. Do I delete a game knowing that I'll probably never come back to it, or do I leave it festering on my system, mocking me?

In the case of Dishonored, I chose the high ground. Dunwall City Trials is a DLC made by someone who hated their job, their player base, and fun itself. It has 10 achievements associated with it and after multiple attempts at playing some of the levels, I deleted the base game and all DLC. I abandoned it at 71/80 achievements. Dunwall City Trials might not be impossible, but it certainly is trying to be.

I wrote up the list of Street Fighter achievements despite not beating that game, and while I may yet do that for the two games mentioned in the topic of this post, it won't be until I stop being aggravated at having to give them up. At a point, the OCD that drives me to do this is overpowered by frustration and stress. Even knowing the unfinished games will be a scar on my streak of perfected games, I couldn't do it anymore. It nags at me every day, and I just have to try and ignore it. I cannot go back to that abomination of gaming. Dunwall City Trials taints the entire experience, one that I thought the Daud DLCs already were doing a fine job of on their own. I know a lot of people really loved Daud's two campaigns. I did not. The levels were sloppily designed, the powers were terrible and didn't feel right in comparison to Corvo's, and the achievements were neither difficult nor all that time consuming.

I perfected Dishonored's base game, which I still feel is an excellent piece on its own. Unfortunately, it's a case where a game's DLC completely ruins the package as a whole. I would never recommend Dishonored to anyone, especially if they want to get all of its achievements/trophies. That is a fool's errand, and it's one that only a tiny handful of people would ever be able to do.

As for Diablo 3? I just don't have the desire to grind all six classes to level 70. That's really all there is to that one. Knowing how unbelievably long that takes, and knowing I'd have to go it even slower on my Hardcore character (ie, playing on Normal without the boosted XP gain) absolutely destroyed my desire to return to it. Once I put Ultra SF4 back in, that was the nail on Diablo's coffin. It's not a horrible game - it was when it launched for the PC, but the UEE incarnation is perfectly fine. Just not if you want to grind out achievements. Doubly so if you have other games you're working on. An hour of playing will not get you much progress at all. I may go back to it from time to time, as I have this one on disc, so it's a simple matter of reinstalling, but it won't be any time soon.

For Diablo, I don't think I even need to write an achievement review. It doesn't really have difficult achievements. The only one that requires skill/patience is getting a 50-item callout. And that's mostly down to luck more than anything. The rest of the achievements are either progress-based or simply require you to play for 100 hours. I don't have that kind of time and I literally have all the time in the world to play these games. If you expect me to stick with your game for more than 20-30 hours, you'd better be packing gameplay worth the investment. Diablo 3, at least on last-gen consoles, does not. Were they still being updated like the current-gen systems were... maybe. Maybe.

Right now, I'm working on finishing up Lego Marvel. I jumped from 500/1000 points to 630/1000 in one session. It's mostly replaying stages in Free Mode, doing Open World Cleanup, and collecting characters. 13 achievements + the Platinum remain. Lego Marvel's one of those weird games, like Dark Souls 2, where the Xbox version has a 'you got all other achievements' thing. It's a Platinum achievement. After that, I need to return to Eternal Sonata. That game has very few achievements, but the ones it has require commitment. And a NG+ playthrough. And multiple guides because holy god.

On the PS4 front, sadly, things aren't going much better.

I got my PS4 about two weeks back, give or take. I bought Evil Within on release. Annnnd boy, was that a mistake. Absurd letterboxing, trial-and-error gameplay with infrequent checkpointing, expecting you to know what to do in any given situation without explaining a god damn thing, horrendous boss battles, areas that exist for literally no other reason than to make you burn down stored-up ammo, short levels that feel ten times longer than they are due to how many times you'll die while playing them... it's genuinely one of the worst games I've ever made the mistake of purchasing.

Akumu Mode, which is the toughest thing to do in the game, might be what causes me to abandon the Platinum for the game. I'm not happy that the first retail game I've bought for the system (I grabbed PS4 Minecraft just to have something to play that didn't make me want to strangle someone...) is most likely going to go uncompleted. But I don't think there's anything I can do about it, unless NG+ lets you up the difficulty. If you can go in with a fully-upgraded arsenal, then it might be tolerable. But it's a mode where everything, including environmental objects, are a one-hit kill. One-hit kills in a game with a 30-second load time are insufferable. If I do struggle through it, I'm going to keep a kill counter and notes on what struck me down each time. Maybe write down how long each chapter takes me. Things like that.

Looking forward, as far as PS4 games go, I plan to grab Akiba's Trip, Shadow of Mordor, Costume Quest 2, and Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. As far as 360 titles go, I have no idea. I plan to grab Bayonetta 2 at some point, but it's a Platinum game and I don't want to bust the WiiU's expensive, clunky, terrible gamepad, so I'm not going to try for whatever counts as 100% in that game. Impossible entities do not 'count' as far as my OCD is concerned.

I wish I had seen Dishonored as an impossible, because that's what it turned out to be. It's aggravating, it's maddening, but there's little I can do about it. I thought about downloading Darksiders 2, as I rented that when it released, but I know exactly how long and dull it is. I don't think I need that in my life. As of this writing, the Dragon Age games are on sale. I've always been interested in the series, but I've never played either of them. ...Downside is the first game has scummy DLC practices. ...It also has a ton of DLC. My problem with them is that some only have two achievements, and they seem progression-based. In other words, the only reason they exist is to force completionists and OCD idiots like me into buying them to keep their score from being incomplete.

That's fucking gross, boys and girls.

Plus it's cheaper to buy the Ultimate Edition of Origins on Amazon than it is to grab the game+DLC on Xbox Marketplace, even with discounts. DA2 is more expensive on Amazon, but the bandwidth required for both games basically means they're absolutely not downloadable titles for me.

I've been putting off writing this post, because it'd just mean having to admit and accept that I've given up. I don't like doing that. I don't think anyone who's played Dunwall City Trials would laugh at my giving up, as I'm sure that DLC can't be perfected by most average players. But it won't stop me from being hard on myself for giving up. One of the reasons my brain latched onto this was that I was doing it to keep myself from giving up. I wasn't going to quit playing, no matter how bad or difficult a game was!

But reality and what I'd envisioned are two very different things, sadly. Up until now, nothing's been able to slow my progress down. Dishonored did, and it was a serious blow to my morale. It's something that's had me feeling down and not wanting to get anything done. But Evil Within is staring me down, and I have incomplete titles still on my 360. After a year of suspending play in the 360 version of Minecraft, I went back in and got the two achievements I'd been lacking, then started on Lego Marvel again.

Getting so many achievements in one day has rekindled my fire a bit, but I don't know if it will be fully relit until at least Isaac. That one I know I'll go at full force, and it'll probably suspend my playing of anything else on the system until I'm done. For now, I'll take what I can get. Sometimes you only need a little push to get yourself going. Achievement hunting, as all things, requires motivation. Or are least stubbornness. For awhile, I had neither.

Destiny: A View From Outside

As I toil away at Diablo 3 and Dishonored, working towards an end goal that seems no closer than it did two weeks ago, I've been unable to escape the Internet Hype Machine and what it says about Destiny. I've never been a huge Halo fan and, now that I have this achievement hunting OCD, I've become even less of one. Bungie has never had what I would call 'good' achievements. There are some that are genuinely interesting and worthwhile, like beating the game on Legendary by yourself, for instance. That requires skill and effectively tells people that you've willingly accepted the fact that you've given many hours of your life to overcoming a difficult obstacle.

That said, the majority of Halo achievements are just the worst, most boring slogs imaginable. From what I've seen about Destiny, it seems no different. If anything, it actually seems worse than anything a Halo game ever did. The reason I feel this way is simple, and I hope I can convey exactly why I have such an intense dislike for Destiny, despite never playing it or even seeing that much footage of it.

I played World of Warcraft for many years. I started in the twilight of the Burning Crusade and went up through most of Cataclysm. I started as a way to distract myself initially from the recent death of my grandfather and the miserable winter that had followed that event. I'm not sure why I played as long as I did, though. The only reason I didn't go into Mists was because my PC simply got too old to deal with the engine improvements. It kept hard-locking my system. The day I purged my system of WoW was a very cathartic day. I knew my characters would still be there if I ever wanted to return. But the cost of the subscription combined with the worry it would keep freezing my system meant that such a day wouldn't be soon.

But that wasn't what drove me away initially. I kept my WoW subscription going about a year beyond when I actually stopped playing. I thought Wrath of the Lich King was interesting, even though it got a bit grindy towards the end. There's nothing inherently wrong with a game being grindy. I like grindy Korean MMOs just fine, after all. Then Cataclysm came and with it, a complete change in mindset at Blizzard. See, I know that the second M is for Multiplayer. But to me, that extended as far as seeing other people running around and making cities populated areas. I was in several guilds over the years, across many characters, but they all ended with me either leaving or getting kicked. Why?

Raiding.

To me, that word is 100% synonymous with the word 'Suffering.' That is what raiding is to me. That is always what raiding was to me. Raiding is a second job, and your coworkers are the most inept people you could ever hope to run across. I can tell you the exact moment when I finally gave up on the dream of being in a good raiding guild, too. It was very distinct and is something I remember vividly to this day.

We were in Ulduar, as we often were back then. I saw the back half of that instance once, and it was only for a Mimiron encounter that we could not overcome. Mostly, we'd sit and wipe somewhere in the first half of the raid. Our guild leader wanted a full sweep of it, too. That meant clearing out every boss, including the optional ones. Including Auriaya. Auriaya is a stone giant that patrols around a ring-shaped room with large panther adds. She can be easily avoided and has a fairly short aggro range. I couldn't tell you what the ability was anymore, even when staring at the wiki, but she has an attack that absolutely had to be interrupted. Before staring, the GL would give the order we'd interrupt in and, over Vent, would call out whose job it was to go next.

Unfortunately, the attack had a very short cast time, and people don't always have the best connections. But even with good connections - something the GL actually required in order to be thrust into interrupt duty - people would not pay attention. Over the course of three sessions, each easily three hours apiece, we would wipe to Auriaya because no one could do their jobs. We would lose huge amounts of gold on repairs, we would fly back in, and we would run head-first into that brick wall once again. I got fed up with wiping on the first night, but I wanted to keep my place in the raid, so I stuck it out. I wasn't on interrupt duty because I didn't have the abilities required. My job was just to burn things down and, if needed, to push back enemies if they were chasing after the healers.

When I feel like I'm not making progress in something, despite sinking multiple hours into it, I get incredibly frustrated and drop into a foul mood. And if the people causing those feelings are joking around on Vent chat and yucking it up right after blowing up the raid, those feelings are going to find a target very quickly. By the end of the final night (that I was with, anyway. Presumably they kept on beating their heads against it) I had had enough. I let the tanks know they were awful for being thoroughly incapable of keeping a grand total of three mobs off of the casters. I let the healers know that they were being completely inept at actually focusing their heals on the people that needed it, often spamming heals on tanks who didn't need it. And I let the other DPS classes know exactly what I thought about them using 'joke' skills and abilities on day three of a boss we weren't able to put down when everyone was actually trying.

Later, I'd join a slightly better guild around when the final raid of the expansion came out (I think). The one that opened up Icecrown. I saw the lower half and I saw a lot of the upper half of that place, but we never reached Arthas. Despite being better, it was still filled with stoners and idiots and there's only so much of that I can take, especially with a five minute runback and a twenty minute pre-fight prep and speech by the GL. I dropped out of that one willingly and it basically was the end of my adventures in raiding. I never got into the Raid Finder when it was introduced because the only thing worse than guilds was dealing with randoms. The raids you got via the Finder were nerfed to oblivion and back, and people still couldn't beat them.

So I went into Cataclysm solo, and solo is not something Blizzard accepted at that point. In Wrath, you could get tiered gear by doing daily heroics and such, getting tokens and saving them up for your armor. You had to raid in Cataclysm to get anywhere near that gear. Cataclysm was savagely overtuned for most of its life, as well. Most guilds couldn't get better armor because there was only one avenue for it, and you had to be in a competent guild. Anyone who's played World of Warcraft can tell you that 'competent guild' is an alien term. The problem extended to random dungeons, though. Even standard, non-Heroic dungeons were overtuned to the point where you would be lucky to get even halfway through them. Forget about the Heroics themselves. Those often required raiding gear to stand a ghost of a chance.

The gear and content was gated in such a way as to actively punish anyone who didn't want to spend two to five hours a night, multiple nights a week, dealing with a bunch of dipshits over voice chat. That's when I bowed out.

This brings us back to the present, to Destiny, and to Destiny's Raiding.

There is no matchmaking in Destiny. You cannot group with randoms to do its raid content. Don't have enough people who A) play the game and B) want to spend multiple hours dying to bosses? Then sorry, you just don't get to experience that content. What reason would they do this? The raid content has been described as being 'too difficult' to do with randoms. It's Cataclysm all over again. The content is overtuned to where only a fraction of the playerbase will ever get to fully experience it. Bungie thinks this is actually an intelligent thing to do.

I don't know anyone who bought Destiny. My friends list is completely devoid of Destiny popups. But even if I did know a handful of people who wanted to raid, no one wants to spend hours trying to make progress, only to be stymied by shit that's often out of their control. That brings us back to getting frustrated at not making progress, which leads to not wanting to play at all.

Raiding is a dirty word to me, worse than any swear you can think up. I cuss like a sailor and I don't like to say the word, because to me it represents everything wrong in games. Especially when it goes out of its way to block content - something you paid to get to see and experience - due to difficulty and a lack of competent players. And, in Destiny's case, it's also locked behind a friends-only barrier. If you don't know enough people who play and aren't the type to go on forums just to seek out people who join you, then you don't get to see it. Full stop. And let's say you do seek out randoms via boards. That only shows that the concept is fucking stupid, because it's easy to get around! And that's still no guarantee you'll make it through the raiding content because you're dealing with randoms!

You don't know these people! You don't know their commitment level or how good they are at the game! You're playing with them because they're in the same boat you are - they don't know anyone who plays and, instead of using an in-game matchmaking system to find random people, they've gone online to find random people! There's literally no god damn difference in these things except for the fact that you have to go outside the game, wait for replies (which could take hours or days), manually add them to your friends lists, and then you can take a stab at the content you wanted to play two days ago!

Destiny has raiding achievements, and that's really where the source of all of this anger lies. Beating a raid. Beating a raid with only clan members, which I'm assuming is just another layer of bullshit you go through on top of requiring them to be on your Friends List. Beating a raid without anyone dying. Beating a raid on Hard. These are 'achievements' in the sense that they would require effort to get. But do you really want to try getting them? Do you want to go through the tedious process of hunting down people outside of the game to get around Bungie's systems? Do you want to devote hours and hours and hours, dying to the same thing? Do you really want to try getting everyone in the group through a raid without anyone dying? Above all else, that's an achievement that's 100% dependent on other people. That's something you may never get, and there's nothing you can do to help that fact.

Like I said - I don't know a whole lot about Destiny. Maybe the raids were overhyped in regards to difficulty. Maybe these achievements are easy to get! Or maybe they'll get nerfed ten DLC packs down the line! That doesn't matter to me. The annoyance involved in getting a good group together, and depending on them to perfect the game is the kind of thing I cannot stand in games. I would hate this system even if I didn't achievement hunt. Even with fans doing things like this to try and coordinate out-of-game matchmaking, that's a step that should not fucking exist.

In doing this, Bungie is also insulting the intelligence of every single person playing their game. They are actively saying "No, you and this ragtag group of players you've assembled are too stupid to beat this overtuned content we've developed."

But then you add them to your friends list and magically, you become smart enough to go raiding?

All this is doing is adding extra steps to an already tedious process. Raiding is not fun under any circumstances. I have never had a raid experience that was fun in any way, across any of the games that have such a thing. I know that isn't the same for everyone, I admit I'm probably in the minority, and I know some people get hard-ons for content that very, very few people will ever complete. It's like they let TotalBiscuit decide how raids should go. Back during the Cataclysm beta, the videos he uploaded made his stance on difficult content very apparent. To him, randoms shouldn't be allowed to beat content. If you didn't spend days grinding for gear, you shouldn't even be allowed to enter dungeons. Heroics were overtuned to the point where you'd wipe nonstop and he found that delicious. He thought it was good game design and saw nothing wrong with the fact that it meant most players would never ever get to complete the content.

That's the kind of stuck-up attitude I'm seeing with Destiny's raiding system. There's nothing stopping you from adding people you find in town (or whatever) just to circumvent the idiotic lack of a matchmaking system. You're manually matchmaking by adding people, and that's not going to get you any closer to completing the raid than an actual matchmaking system would have. It's exactly the same, they just want to make you jump through hoops.

I can't speak for most of Destiny's achievements. But this is the reason I will never lay a finger on the game myself. As someone who has to perfect games in order to satisfy her OCD, I would never be able to put up with other players not knowing what they need to do, or actively trolling players they've grouped with. I simply do not have the patience to go outside the game for a group, coordinate when to do a raid, and then spend hours wiping over and over. That is not fun. That is, in fact, the very opposite of fun.

Difficult achievements will always exist. And when these achievements are not dependent on someone else not fucking up, then that's fine. I've beaten games on the hardest difficulties, I've ground out Challenges for weeks in Borderlands 2 and Colonial Marines, I've beat my head against the nigh impossible Extreme Campaigns in Arkham City. I've gone through a lot of tedious, frustrating, maddening achievements and I will not get anywhere near Destiny purely from the raiding content.

I apologize for this rather lengthy rant on the subject and, with any luck, will get back to normal discussions on achievements shortly. But the blog is titled Achievement Reviews, and I suppose this is just another method of reviewing. It's not the typical kind of post I'd make, but seeing raiding content gated in such a stupid way just sets off long-buried hatred of how MMOs work, I guess. I think certain things in gaming need to die out and raiding will forever be at the top of that list.

Dishonored: Art of the Shadow

As of this writing, I'm sitting at 41 of 80 achievements completed in Dishonored. I can tell you already that it's going to be a long and very... unpleasant, shall we say... breakdown, once I finally finish. That may not be for some time, however. It all depends on a number of things going my way and, as anyone who's ever tried to perfect or speed run the game could tell you, the RNG in Dishonored does not like you. What's the holdup? Well, where do I begin?

I beat both Daud DLCs finally. The second is better made than the first, but both are incredibly sub-par in comparison to Corvo's campaign. I fully understand that I am in the minority when it comes to that line of thought. The Knife of Dunwall (the DLC, not Daud) has very poorly constructed levels, for one thing. I'm not entirely sure what the developers were even going for with Daud. His Blink pauses time as long as he's standing still. It's Baby's First Stealth Game mechanics. But then it gives you these buildings with multiple floors and very cramped quarters, completely choked with dudes. From my perspective - someone who will play the Rogue or the Thief when given the chance - these levels were not designed with stealth in mind. At all.

The most apparent level in that regard is the final one in Knife of Dunwall. You're revisiting Daud's hideout. That's the one where you can either swipe Daud's key or assassinate him as Corvo. It's clogged with Overseers and music box guys. The music box guys block your Mystical Emo-Dude Powers. This wouldn't be too bad if the level wasn't a half-destroyed building filled to bursting with guys you won't be able to see in most cases. You have to rescue four of Daud's men during the second part of the stage. I'm not sure how the final bit plays out, as I was thoroughly unable to do Low Chaos. Try as I might, everything just went pear-shaped and so I ran with it. I killed more guys in that mission that I have in 2 full playthroughs of the main campaign, no joke.

I got Low Chaos very easily in Brigmore Witches, on the other hand. And while the levels are a little more lenient in regards to slipping through undetected, I'm still puzzled at how I'm going to do certain things. I'll say this - priority 1 is going to be Time Stop. I have to get it as early as humanly possible. The third stage of Dunwall and the second of Brigmore (hell, the third's pretty bad too, but I was able to choke/dart/Blink dudes with little issue) are going to be a nightmare if I can't.

But that's the DLC, and it'll be awhile before I return to it. Let me talk about the main reason I'm writing this up. Partly it's to vent, because I just wasted a little over an hour with nothing to show for it. I did get through Coldridge without being spotted, and I remembered to make a save there specifically so I never have to watch the intro sequence again. It got me an achievement, and that's likely to be the last one I get for a good while.

I'm trying for a number of things this playthrough. Mostly, I'd like to end up with Clean Hands (complete the game without killing anyone), Shadow (complete the game without alerting anyone), and Ghost (complete all missions without killing or alerting anyone. Seems redundant but okay).

Surgical, the achievement for getting from the prologue through Kaldwin's Bridge (roughly the halfway point) without killing anyone will come as I work on those others.

Holy hell, is High Overseer Campbell a pain in the ass. I sounded 2 alarms and I'm not entirely sure how. If it wasn't from spilling the wine glasses, then I'm baffled as to when it occurred. But I spilled them and so Campbell went with Curnow down to his Secret Room of Music and Trash. This involves going down a squared, spiraling staircase that typically has two guards. One that paths up and down the stairs, and one that paths in, looks through the keyhole of the door that Campbell goes through, and then goes off into a different room.

So you avoid those two guys, slip through the door (and close it behind you so peephole guy doesn't get suspicious) and then things get fun. You have to wait until Campbell opens the secret door to his back room (because there's a Sokolov painting in there, and collecting those is its own achievement), choke out Curnow, then Sleep Dart Campbell. Go in, grab the loot you want, and then buckle yourself in because it's a long haul from that point forward.

See, you have two goals here - to transport Curnow's unconscious body somewhere safe (read: A Dumpster) and to stick Campbell in the torture room's chair (and optionally Brand him). So you grab Campbell's body and go back upstairs to the peephole door. Trigger Dark Vision to see where the guards are, then try your damnedest to slip past (while closing the door again) and back upstairs, and maneuver through the rafters until you reach the room in question. ...Which does not have a door on one side. Strap Campbell in and Brand him or not. Either way, back into the rafters, back across the level, back down that spiral staircase, back through the peephole door, and hey it's Curnow.

Back up the stairs and through the peephole door. Back up the spiral stairs and through the rafters to the room where I spilled the wine glasses, outside onto the ledge, along the building, and down to street level where two guards path to chuck the idiot into his Safety Dumpster. Then you have two options, neither of which are any good.

Option A) Go through the door near the dumpster that leads back to the first part of the stage, where Samuel the Boatman is waiting. This is difficult because it spits you into a back alley with nothing high to Blink onto, just behind a series of guards that are harassing some civilians. One has his back to you and, at least judging from Dark Vision, one or two more guys down the little alley staircase. No idea how to get past them. So for the next time I get to do Option B) Going back up into the building, back down the spiral staircase, past the patrolling guards, and through a door one wall away from the peephole door!

Going through that exit puts you in a more advantageous rooftop position and you can Blink your way to Sam unmolested. It's an extra 5 to 15 minutes, because unless you've upgraded Blink's range, then you're not going to get back up onto the building from the dumpster you lob Curnow into. 

The obvious solution is to stop trying for multiple challenging achievements at once, but I don't want to replay the game a dozen times to get everything, ya know? I'll need a High Chaos ending run, and that's the one I'll get all the achievements for killing dudes with gadgets and using Stop Time to let a guard shoot at me, Possess him, then run him into his own bullet. Mostly Flesh and Steel, an achievement for never purchasing any Powers, will be its own run.

It's aggravating in a way that simply won't make sense to anyone who doesn't achievement hunt, I don't think. It's a level of frustration you'll never see just playing through the game like a normal person would. There are guides out there, but I'm trying to refrain from doing that. At least until Dunwall City Trials, which is going to do bad things to my mental condition. Not really a good time for that to happen, to be perfectly honest.

I'm calling it right now: Void Star will be the final achievement I get in Dishonored. That's for completing all Normal and Expert Challenges with a 3-star rating.

There's that word again: Challenges. And these Challenges, as with all Challenges, will be what I mop up last and what will likely cause the most anger out of everything. I'm just over halfway done, but I've got most of the mountain ahead of me. I've just climbed a small hill to get to that mountain. And at the top is a flag. The flag has a picture of a middle finger and it's signed by everyone involved with Dunwall City Trials being made.

Later today I'll start work on High Overseer Campbell again. Maybe I'll just accept the fact that playing the whole game just for one achievement will be faster than being stymied for hours on what should be simple tasks. I've hit the point in the game where I need to rearrange my doc on this game by runs instead of by category, just to sort out what all I can get done per run.

I'm sure I've said it before, and I'll openly say it again: Do not get into achievement/trophy hunting. It is bad for your mental health. And probably your physical health, as well. If you have OCD, you really should not get into it. It's a dangerous slope and the only thing you get out of it is the satisfaction that you beat the game, the game did not beat you. Very rarely is there a sense of joy at completing a game. Often there isn't even a sense of accomplishment. You're most certainly justifying the money you've spent, but is that always a good thing?

In the end, it all boils down to what type of life you have and if you need a way to extend a game out a little further. I've got an entire mountain range to cross here, and I have no idea what the other side looks like. If you have to do this as a pasttime, pace yourself. It's good to have two games to work on at once, so you don't fry yourself just beating your head against a wall over and over. Any more than that and you're just asking for trouble.

There's fun to be had in Dishonored. I know. I've had it! But this is not the part that is fun. This is the part that the struggle begins at. From this point to the time the 80th pops, it's work, and it isn't going to accomplish itself. That is what achievement hunting is, at its core. Work. I often equated raiding in WoW to having a second job. You go in for a set number of hours a week, you deal with complete assholes you'd never be caught dead with outside of the time you had to spend together, and you get absolutely no sense of accomplishment out of it, because your coworkers don't know how to do anything correctly.

Someone will always move when Flame Wreath is cast and the raid blows up. I'm not sure what that had to do with Dishonored, but it's 5:30AM and I'm trying to write a post about achievements. Making sense stopped a long time ago.

If I had to put an ETA on a breakdown article, I'd say two weeks? Give or take? Again, it's mostly dependent on how lucky I get in regards to the AI. I'll spend some time watching other people do Low Chaos/Clean Hands runs on both the base game and the DLC, and I'll most definitely watch people do Dunwall City Trials just so I have an optimal path set out. I work best on a tight deadline, after all. It's time to buckle down and get started.

September 1st, 2014 Update

Figured I'd post something to talk about the next reviews likely to go up and when to expect them. Real life has, as it tends to do, gotten in the way and slowed things down quite a bit. Still, I've gotten a handful of things in the pipe, so I thought I'd update the blog.

First up, Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition. This was an impulse buy and I'm kind of glad I did it. I haven't played Diablo 3 since the PC release 2 years ago. A lot of small quality of life improvements have been added, but the grind after L40 or so is still very real. It's not fun in any way, and there's an achievement for hitting level 70 on all six characters. That's a purple, time-sink achievement. The rest aren't too bad, but that one's slowing my completion down considerably. In the ~2 weeks since it launched, I've gotten a Crusader to 70 and a Wizard is being worked on now, currently in the mid-40s. It may take until October to finish since I'm splitting my time.

Dishonored was one of August's free Games With Gold on Xbox Live, and originally I hadn't planned to get it, since the DLC was not off. But then a sale happened, and the DLC was priced lower than the GotY version on Amazon went for. I was considerably in the clear for monthly bandwidth (AT&T is evil. 150GB a month. Overpriced BS!) so I figured what the hell. I was 21/80 achievements when I started, as I rented it when it first came out. I've gotten two or three since then just from replaying the game to shake off rust. Then I'll play through the DLC and then I'll actually start hunting.

Lego Marvel has been sitting idle for awhile. My plans to do it + Duke went down the drain when I got Diablo. That and the fact that I really need to be in a better state of mind to tackle Duke. I'm not in a position where I can afford to get pissed off at its rampant homophobia and misogyny just yet. I hope to get started next month, at the latest.

Lego Marvel may take awhile to complete, due to races and brick collecting and whatnot. Never tried to perfect a Lego game before. You certainly get your money's worth.

So that's where we're sitting. I'm close enough to the end of D3 that in a week or two I could probably just do the breakdown post for it. After all, beyond a point all I'll be doing is level grinding the entire original cast, and the difficulty seems dramatically lowered from the original PC release. That'll come first, but I don't know which of the three others will follow.