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Horizon Zero Dawn

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I’m always late to games anymore since my back catalog is so huge and my time so limited. The Playstation store had a super-sale on this game and since I’d heard great things about it I decided to take a break from Borderlands 3 (yeah) to play it.

The game starts out great and the “tutorial level” is the player guiding a child version of the protagonist through some ruins. It sets up the questions in the player’s mind: who were these people in the ruins and why did they come to such a horrible end? But, it also sets up a flaw in the game that dogs it throughout: an obsession with forcing current societal norms into every square inch of the game.

The issue is that the game takes place in the far, far future, but the “present” they build out either defies common sense or sets up tackling dummies to score morality points. For instance, part of the “lore” in the game decries the lack of funding for the British NHS even though this part of the game takes place in Neo-Colorado. The dominant tribe in the game appears to be some mono-ethnic Arab-like tribe, but the other tribes look like a random assortment of effeminate men and butchie black woman warriors (yeah) that were picked at random off of New York subway platform.

It continues from there with every punch telegraphed as if it were mailed a month in advance. Another lore character is a whiny white guy who complains about the apocalypse as if someone got his pizza order wrong. The main bad guy is some overly-militaristic white dude, the “noble savage” character who swoops in the help the main character is a black guy (voiced by Lance Reddick), the woman blacksmith worrying about her man, the gay guy who – well you get the point. Instead of escapism it’s just more PC gobbledegook; instead of creating their own future, the dev team just re-skinned the present as they see it from the windows of their open concept office space. It all culminates in a scene at the end of the DLC where an AI is rounding out some story elements and starts to say what started the downfall of mankind:

Me: “Here it comes, is it racism or globa-“

AI: “Global Warming!”

Me: “of course”

The game is gorgeous, though one critique here would be that the whole post-apocalyptic ruin thing is starting to wear thin: let’s face it, it’s easier to create great looking ruins of a building than a great looking building. This is a common shtick in all games though so it’s a minor quibble. For all the faults of the plot the main character never grates or gets preachy. The map design is second to none and is the only large open world map that comes to mind where I never got stuck* or fell through the map.

However, there was one other large fault with the game that I couldn’t put my finger on until the final boss in the DLC. Throughout the game it didn’t seem like dodging enemy attacks worked like it should: the enemy would “tell” their attack by winding up in an animation and then…it seemed like I’d get hit, or not, no matter what. This became very apparent with the long-winded DLC boss who had a huge wind up and it occurred to me that the developer was ‘hit tracing’ the melee attacks: the game had already determined whether or not I was going to be hit before the attack even happened. This led to the boss making odd movements to make sure the hit registered…or not. It got to the point that I just stood there and shot arrows at it since trying to dodge the attacks didn’t matter.

It was an enjoyable romp for what it was I suppose. There were a couple colorful characters and an enjoyable side mission in the DLC gave a taste of how great of a game it could have been if the storytellers could have put their axes down for a second. In the end, it doesn’t help that the main theme, man succumbing to an overly destructive technology and then living in a world that abhors technology, was done much, much better in the game Final Fantasy X. Yes it’s a little unfair to compare this game, and different type of game at that, to one of the greatest games ever made, but it shows ,for me, where the hype for this game landed: in meh-ville.

* The size of this effort must have been immense but I’ll admit there was one occasion where I got “trapped” in a niche in the map, but I was eventually able to dig myself out. Even polished games like Witcher 3 assume that the player gets what they deserve if they wander too far “off script”, but credit to the level designers for HZD in trying to completely mitigate such punishment.

Fail

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Lenten Special

So I decided to give up video games for lent.  Yeah.  Unlike previous years though, actually tried this time.  Success was limited, though not bad for myself, I suppose.  I made it about five days in before I realized that my sanity toolbox only has a handful of tools in it: booze (makes me fatter, so that’s out), food (ditto), exercise (I gave that up for lent too ;-), and video games.  Without video games I knew that I was doomed to do the other three (well, two) more often.  I had high hopes on cranking on my Chinese language training and other betterment options, but I’m really running at that about as quick as I can already with my tired brain.

Chinese

Some hay has been written about the use of “measure words” in Chinese, but they actually make sense on some level since no one in English says “two papers”, it’s “two pieces of paper”.  In this case, “pieces” is the measure word used for paper in English.  The only difference is that measure words are used all the time in Chinese rather than half the time in English.  My favorite thus far being “two cars” or Liǎng liàng chē (or ‘two vehicles of cars’) since the double ‘liang’ is so hard to nail.

I’m almost through the first book in this fairly decent set.  It’s pretty complete, though it helps to have a Chinese person to ask to round some of it out.  For instance the Chinese have multiple words for restaurant (as we do in English) though the language training set only comes with one of them.  I slowed when I got close to the end of the first book since the beginning of the second book goes over family relation words.  I’d really only concentrated on learning the words for younger brother and younger sister to this point (one advantage among the few of the being the oldest sibling), but the book has a rash of separate words for relations such as “father’s brother’s daughter, older than you”.

I asked Sally about those words since I thought that they’d be a waste of time to learn.  She responded that trying to do that was a bit quixotic and then illustrated it perfectly by not even getting the prefix for mothers/fathers side correct.  She also said that she had a faux pas at a wedding when she used the wrong word for one of her relations.  I guess she didn’t have much of an excuse as she said that they make apps, for Chinese people, so that they can put in the relation and get the word.  I mean, really?  I know Americans are stuck on English measures instead of Metric, but I’d think that we’d give it up if we couldn’t ever remember how long a mile was.

Job Lottery

I’d gotten a lead on a higher end IT management position at a private college in the Cincinnati area and it was inspiration enough to send in a killer resume and cover letter to see if I could get an interview.  It was a slight wait, but I got a response from them that they’d like to do a phone interview and to let them know what times were good and…what salary I was looking for.  Unfortunately for them I had an inside track and knew:

  • They had issues hiring technical staff to fill vacant positions, to the point that they gave up and went with contractors.
  • This position was actually replacing a position that was eliminated late last year.  They found the existing position too costly so they fired that guy, downgraded the position, and now they were looking to fill it.  That doesn’t exactly exude a ton of confidence in the position, no matter who fills it.
  • Colleges this size have had a habit lately of vanishing very suddenly.
  • Managing a college IT department is like being in a Sultan in the late Ottoman Empire: all title/no power.  I already knew of at least one failed project and knew that with their previous issues they probably had more in the pipe.
  • It’s a college.  This means that even if everything goes well I might get fired for saying a word that is offensive to the Eskimos of Papua New Guinea or some such crap (or, alas, running a rarely updated, intentionally offensive blog site).
So for each of those bullet points I added a couple thousand dollars and came up with what I called “a job lottery amount” since, if they didn’t scoff at it, it would be the next best thing to winning the lottery.
Unsurprisingly they called me and said that the amount that I put down was a bit high (though to be honest, not crazy high for the type of position) and I got the impression that expected that I would want to round down due to the nature of the institution.  The woman on the other end of the phone sounded like someone who really wanted to drive off the lot in the BMW, but alas, only had Chevrolet money.   This basically reaffirmed my decision though since they seem to be circling the same drain as many failed institutions:
  • They desperately need top talent,
  • Since they don’t have the money, top talent demands even more as a form of pre-paid severance.
  • They get bottom/no talent making the situation more acute
  • Repeat.
It’s along the same lines as “extend and pretend” used by marginal businesses where their payables go out 60 days, then 90, then 120, then, well then no one will sell them anything without cash on the barrel and the place ends up folding.

Never Gets Old

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I still hold that the best multiplayer game ever was the multiplayer mode in 2001’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein.  Various add-ons and patches made for massive 64 person (32 vs 32) matches of non-stop (sometimes literally) carnage.  The flamethrower was fun with the screaming and cooking of the guys getting flambéed, but the ‘panzer’/rocket launcher never got old.  Someone even immortalized it in the clip below (skip to the final 30 seconds or so for those not reminiscing):

What was unfortunate about the old RTCW is that the single player was…well ‘awful’ would be strong, but it was certainly ‘not-very-good’ (the two pieces were actually developed by two different developers).

It’s actually rare in my mind for video games to pull that off: the one thing that you can hold onto even if the game goes sour on you.  Superpowers that are acquired late in many games can be pretty fun, but the balance is often off.  Part of the fun of the ‘panzer’ in RTCW is that although you could wipe a squad of guys in one shot, you were equally likely to blow yourself to bits by hitting a wall that was too close (which was still funny).

Just Cause 2 comes close with it’s bevy of non-stop explosions in a fictional southeast Asian country that seems to be built of paper mache and natural gas:

It even had an interesting story in a mild anti-colonial sort of way before it went of the rails with a fake W. Bush CIA character, a ‘big-oil’ conspiracy (that, as usual, didn’t make a lick of sense), and gnashing of teeth about plots by ‘neocons’ (yes the word was actually used, and yes, as usual, the person using it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean).  Unfortunately all the explosions in its large game world weren’t enough to make me want to recommend that anyone sit through the tiresome story.

With Far Cry 3 it’s interesting in that the setting reminds me of Just Cause 2, but just about everything is way better, apart from the story which probably shouldn’t exist.  The story isn’t bad per se, it just seems like it was written by a sixth grader who’d sat through one too many Criminal Minds episodes.  Beyond that though the voice acting is great, the graphics may be the best to be had on the PS3 outside of games without the word ‘Uncharted’ in the title, and the gameplay is solid.  But like RTCW, it also has something that keeps me coming back: the knife stabbing NEVER gets old.  It often requires patience, but, well, this short clip explains it all: