Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As I’ve previously written in this blog, I have a spot soft for fighting games even though I’m completely rubbish at them. And the Mortal Kombat series has always been the guiltiest pleasure of them all. At that time, not knowing much about games, I only thought that the series had more realistic, less stylized graphics than its contemporaries and of course its famously gratuitous ultra-violence. Now that I’m somewhat more knowledgeable about game design decisions, I thought it might be interesting to check out this reboot of the franchise. And of course to indulge in some low-brow senseless violence.

• I was at first put-off by the relatively low quality of the character models and textures. I guess that must have come from playing too much Skyrim. After a while I decided that the graphics look pretty good in-game after, especially when the characters are in motion and when seen on the gorgeous stages. Static models still look unimpressive though.

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My Steam counter says I’ve put in 260 hours in this game and now I’m officially declaring that I’m done with it. I’m pretty obsessive about being a completionist in RPGs but Skyrim is so huge that it has worn me down. There are just too many quests! That said, I did complete a lot of them. I finished the main quest of course, completed the Civil War questline on behalf of the Empire and reached the end of every faction questline, except for that of the Thieves Guild because that one needs you to do enough random thieving jobs in each hold to qualify for a special mission and completion of all special missions to accede to Guild Master. I also skipped many of the optional quests within the factions.

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Hello and yes, I’m still playing Skyrim. Time played according to Steam is nearly 200 hours now. I originally intended to write a post detailing some of my thoughts about the various mods I have installed but then realized that since I never played the vanilla version, it’s kind of hard to judge which mod is doing what. From various videos I’ve watched on YouTube however, I can tell that my setup looks much better than vanilla so there’s no way I’m going back. So here’s my best attempt of dubious utility anyway:

• Most of the Core STEP stuff just makes everything look better so there’s little to say about them. There are better textures, better sound effects, better meshes etc. It also includes the usual utility mods that most people should be running anyway: SkyUI, Quality World Map (maps without roads are totally useless!), Convenient Horses (horses are useless if you can’t call them whenever you need them and followers don’t get horses of their own), Auto Unequip Ammo etc.

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It’s been a while since I last updated this blog. This isn’t because I’m not around or because I’m not playing games. It’s because I’ve finally gotten around to playing Skyrim. And it’s taking a long time. I’ve always known I would be playing this game of course, but I decided early on that I would wait until Bethesda had released the Legendary Edition of the game to get the complete experience. Since I knew that there would be tons of mods for this game and I would only play through it once, I also wanted to wait until such time as the mods were fully mature.

I even planned around buying a new video card for this game. I’m currently running a GTX 770. The upgrade process itself was far from painless. First, I discovered that I had somehow messed up one of my RAM chips while installing the GPU and had to buy a new one. Then I found that the GPU had a faulty temperature sensor that caused it to run at 100% all the time, making it sound like a vacuum cleaner. That took a few days to deal with. And of course, the process of correctly installing and configuring Skyrim and set it up with the ideal set of mods is itself a lot of work.

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Deadpool is one of the recent titles that was taken off the virtual shelves when its license with Marvel expired. I’d bought it some time before that, thinking that I’d like to play a Marvel superhero action game without really expecting too much out of it. As it happens, Deadpool turned out to be pretty much exactly what I wanted: a lightweight action game with just enough nods to the Marvel Universe to make it feel right but without being too heavy.

• Gameplay is thoroughly mediocre. It’s like they took a look at the awesome Batman games and did a watered-down, half-assed version of it. Controls, especially gunplay, are sloppy and there’s a strong emphasis on wild button-mashing rather than precision movements. There’s a little bit of everything in here: melee and ranged combat moves, combos, special attacks called momentum attacks  which you need to build up to, some stealth options etc. But it’s a random mishmash of poorly implemented stuff. Oddly enough, given Deadpool’s personality and the style of the game, this actually turns out to work out okay.

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This was a game that completely flew under my radar. I didn’t contribute to its Kickstarter and didn’t notice its release at all. Indeed, its Kickstarter campaign seemed barely successful. The amount raised reached the basic goal but didn’t even meet the first stretch goal.  But people started talking about it on Broken Forum. There was enough forum traffic that I listened in and the more I listened, the more interested I became in the game. And so here I find myself:

• Probably the most intriguing thing about this game is its premise. You’re the leader of a Spanish expedition seeking to explore the New World. This means assembling a company of explorers, toting around the food and supplies needed to support the expedition and traipsing through the jungle to meet Aztecs and Totonacs. There are oodles of flavour and tons of Spanish names I couldn’t hope to pronounce correctly. In short, one of the more unique and remarkable settings I’ve seen.

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Late in 1380, soon after the new town ring for Kallila has been created, a massive army of the horse-spawn arrive at the town and surround it. They do not attack but it is clear that they intend to do so. Out of desperation we decide to send a delegation to them to offer marriage between our tribal king, Tonalang and the Feathered Horse Queen. The idea is to achieve a permanent peace between the Orlanthi of Dragon Pass and the horse-spawn. At first the horse-spawn are incredulous and derisive. But then as they discuss the idea among themselves, it appears that they too have a similar prophecy that such an event would one day come to pass. They withdraw and say that they will send word of our proposal to their queen.

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This is a hard game to write about. Just about anything I could write would constitute a spoiler that would detract from the experience of playing it for yourself for the first time. So I’ll just limit myself to a few short comments:

• There is more content in here than initial impressions may convey. Go everywhere and try everything, multiple times. Still you’ll probably be completely done with it in two hours or so. It’s not a long game.
• It’s more amusing than funny and more clever than intelligent.
• I like that it’s not an examination of videogame story tropes but of videogame playing tropes.

It’s so short and so cheap that it’s certainly worth your while to experience it at least once. But I don’t think it’s a must-have or even all that brilliant. Still, a very impressive effort from what was originally a mod made by just one person.