Game EXP: Mother Russia Bleeds (NS)

I picked up Mother Russia Bleeds a while back, sometime around late March and early April when a lot of indie games were going on sale around the beginning of the pandemic; it is, as of this writing on sale at 75% off.  Mother Russia Bleeds (MRB) is a beat'em up brawler from Le Cartel Studios and published by Devolver Digital.

Side-scrolling arcade-style beat'em ups are not typically my thing, or at least I think they aren't, but I do enjoy games like Golden Axe, Castle Crashers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, The Simpsons Arcade Game, so I am not completely new to the genre.  What got me interested in MRB was the early 1980s alternate history aesthetic (coming off of Wolfenstein: The New Order), I enjoyed the trailer from the eShop although I knew that the cartoon art for the trailer was not representative of what the game looked like, and again, with it being on sale, I thought a beat'em up would be a good change of pace.

And it was.  Kind of.

The Cast of layers.

I started the game on Normal difficulty playing as Boris for a couple of reasons.  First Natasha, and Ivan all looked pretty standard fare for this type of game with Ivan being the strong slow type and Natasha being the fast weak type. Boris, I liked his lanky, crouched, half-crazed Romani Mark Bonanno type appearance.  His stats I preferred too since he was not on either extreme and I would prefer to be slightly slower and stronger than weaker with less range.  I chose Normal because it is what I try to start every game given the option.  Granted my combo and group fighting skills are not very good so I knew that even on Normal difficulty, there was going to be some challenge, but that was why I picked up MRB in the first place.

The body count in this game is stupidly high. And that's what makes it fun.

In the tutorial and first two chapters (because the game refers to stages/levels as chapters), I handled myself well.  I never tried to beat the stages for time and just focused on surviving, but since I am not the best beat'em up player, I did die a number of times, and this is where my first criticism comes in.  MRB is styled after arcade games of the same genre, where you would put in a quarter and buy three-four lives.  Once you go through those lives (because there is no way you are getting through unscathed), another quarter goes in until you run out of quarters or patience.  In MRB, when you die at the end of your first life, the screen goes grey, and you are taken back to a loading screen which prompts you to "Press -/+ to Continue."  Obviously, I want to continue, or I just would have paused and exited the game.  This just feels like an unneeded extra step that slows down the action, in a game that is all about action.  I do not mind the checkpoints in the game, especially since you have unlimited lives and I can understand having you restart from a checkpoint rather than respawning, or at least I got used to the concept of restarting rather than respawning.

Don't Worry, that Dude's With Me.

In the second level, the mechanic of Nekro is introduced, which is indicated by the needle next to the player's name/health in the upper left.  Nekro is a shiny green Re-Animator colored drug that is core to the story and can have varying effects on the player.  The first is that you can use it to heal yourself as there are no pot roasts or whole turkeys hanging out in trashcans or behind brick walls in this game.  The secondary effect depends on which type of Nekro you have decided to use, which you select at the same time as your character, and the type of Nekro available are only unlockable if you play the mob-rush arena mode, but more on that later.  The point is, when you start out, this drug that you can pull from spasming corpses (as long as you do not completely destroy their head by punching it into oblivion like the picture above) to refill your syringe with up to three doses, and use it to either heal, or give yourself temporary increased speed, strength, and instakill one or two enemies.  It is a pretty neat mechanic that I definitely took advantage of although I would typically save the Nekro for heals.

About 0.47 Seconds Before Disaster (But Not For Me. Finally).

Eventually, in Chapter 3 I did have to turn down the difficulty to Easy from Normal and thus began my run through the rest of the game on Easy because I stopped caring that I was trying to impress either myself or anyone else.  It really was the boss fight that did me in as I felt that I was doing fine for the most part, until additional mechanics and conditions for winning were thrown into the meat-grinding-mix.  During the boss fight, you had the left side of the screen like some kind of meat-grinding combine harvester in the bottom of an Olympic sized swimming pool.  If you hit the harvester, you lost a significant chunk of life.  On the other side, you had the stereotypical big-burly 50% muscle, 50% fat boss-dude who you could hit 1-2 times before he knocked you to the ground.  Oh, and along with the boss were types of enemies that you had encountered earlier in the chapter.  I also found that it was difficult to draw Nekro out of enemies due to the threat of the harvester and the boss.  It was after my fourth attempt that I apparently reached the end of the pool, the boss knocked me down, then jumped up on an escape ladder leaving me to die by the harvester.  This was when I turned the game down to Easy.  And in doing so I had to start the entire chapter all over again.  Which was a bit annoying, but it only took about 15 minutes to get back to the boss.  It was not until my 10th attempt that I finally managed to kill the boss by hitting him (enough times) with a baseball bat into the harvester, gumming up the machine and stopping the driver from killing me after I killed his boss.

These Older Attendants are Rather Spry for their Old Age.

My second "Well god damn this bullshit" moment happened in Chapter Four.  This section had you on a train, and around the third checkpoint, you needed to hold a walkie-talkie and keep it away from (I think) any enemy or they would radio the conductor and stop the train, preventing you from getting to your destination.  If an enemy grabbed the radio, you would usually have a couple of seconds to get to them and knock the radio out of their hands by any means necessary.  Now, you could punch enemies while holding the walkie-talkie, but this seemed to do significantly less damage, and you could not throw your enemies because this made you drop the walkie-talkie too.  I found that my only attack options were to either kick, or do a jump-kick, both of which knocked back the enemies, but did not seem to do as much damage as punching (but it did do more damage than hitting with the radio).  This section really felt like it was designed to be played with multiple people as you could have radio-person running around avoiding enemies (and kicking when they could) and have the other person wailing away on everyone else.  That was how it felt to me, and it felt very annoying.

Все копы – ублюдки!

And that was pretty much it for what annoyed me in the game.  Almost.  Chapters five, six, and seven were all well-paced, the locations were interesting with nothing so gimmicky as needing to fend off wave after wave of enemies while a computer technician spent for god-damn-ever hacking into a computer terminal.  Once AK-47s were introduced it made me feel damn near invincible, which after chapters three and four was a great change of pace.  Plus having a couple of NPCs fighting next to you (the Gimp in Chapter Five and the revolutionaries in Chapter Six) is always welcome support.

Chapter Eight, the final chapter in the game though, that was when things once again took a turn for the worse.  Maybe because I was kind of over MRB at this point, having fun part of the time, but still feeling that because I was playing solo that I was missing out on aspects that the developers had worked on, or that the game was not designed with this particular play-style in mind.  There was even one of the pop-up tips on loading screens that said you could have computer-controlled characters fight alongside you, but I never saw that option in the character selection screen, or in the options menu.  The final chapter consisted of a lot of areas, ultimately taking me nearly 20 minutes (and a couple of deaths/checkpoint restarts) to reach the final boss, or the first of two boss fights, broken up into four different fights, but only one checkpoint.

Attempt #2 of 10,247.69

When you first fight the final boss, you have to prevent him from escaping via a helicopter rope ladder while being mobbed by mobs of the mobsters' men.  This section took three attempts.  The next was more of a fight inside Boris's mind against a physical manifestation of the Nekro drug that you take throughout the game.  That battle had three (three-and-a-half?) different sections, none of which spawned additional Nekro [for healing or whatever the secondary effect was (more on that later)], so the life and Nekro you enter the fight with is what you have until the end, so it does kind of behoove the player to die immediately when the fight starts if you are continuing so that you can start the fight over with full health and Nekro.  The three fights of the Nekro Boss were alright as themselves, but they did take a while to figure out what to do, plus when you died, you had to start all over.  I cannot specifically remember how many attempts I made against Nekro Boss, but I know it took three or four to figure out I had to throw the syringes against the pulsating walls, figuring out the Pummeling Fists of Flesh was easy enough, fighting the actual boss was a handful of times, and I beat the final form (when it splits into two entities and speeds up) on my third attempt.

I am Hoping that Out of Context, There Won't Be Spoilers Here.

I did end up earning the Bad Ending, which was pointed out to me because I used Nekro during the Nekro Boss fight, which makes sense that if you use the drug during your fight with the physical manifestation of that drug, it could be that you are giving it power?  Or something?  But once I beat the game and it rolled to credits, I was not about to jump back in, spend another 20 minutes getting to the Nekro Boss fight, just to see what would happen if I managed to make it without using Nekro.  I enjoy a challenge, but only if I am already enjoying the game.  Now, someone could say that that fight up to the Nekro Boss would be easier with X-Type of Nekro, but you are only able to gain additional types of Nekro outside of the main storyline.

Squeal for Me Pig Boy!

Earlier I hand mentioned that you are able to select the type of Nekro you use, but only under certain circumstances.  You start out with Nekro that heals or gives a strength/speed boost by default.  To get additional types of Nekro, you have to play the Arena enemy rush mode that you unlock as you complete each chapter and make it to at least the 10th Wave.  Each Arena area uses a section of the chapter, along with enemies that you find, all dealing with a slightly different mechanic, gimmick, or environmental hazard.  In the starting area, you just fight in a standard pit in a street.  In the sewers area (Chapter 2), there are rats that run through the area making you slightly slower and (I think) cause a little damage when they latch on, and in the BDSM club area (Chapter Six) where you have enemies throwing bottles at you (that always knock you over) but there are weapons that frequently fall from the sky.  Now, there is no difficulty setting for the Arena mode and I was only able to make it past the sixth wave on two occasions, the first being in the first Arena which I got to Wave 10 and earned the [name] Nekro which was vague in its description of "[description]."  After a couple of attempts, I gave up because dying was not any fun when you are seven waves short.  So I settled for the standard Nekro for the rest of the game, which was fine because as long as it healed when I needed it to, then it worked well enough for me.

So I believe this is where I part ways with Mother Russia Bleeds.  I would say that I had fun for about 65% of the time, but there were times when the game was beyond frustrating (game mechanics, level design, single-player vs. co-op) but when it clicked, it performed very well (weight of attacks, story, humor) which is why I still felt compelled to play the game to the end, even if it was on Easy.  I could see a second run in my future, but only if I were playing with someone better than I at beat'em up brawlers and playing local co-op.  I might even be tempted to play as someone else besides Boris too.  Maybe.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Game EXP: Diablo III: Eternal Collection (NS)

I was planning on writing a First Impressions article for Diablo III, but then I just kept playing and before I knew it, I had 25-30 hours clocked in and I was in Act IV of the game on my way to facing the lord of Hell.  So now here I am, having beaten the monstrosity of Diablo himself, talking about my experience playing this six year old video game, but only a month old game on the Nintendo Switch.  And despite how much time and the frequency I spent playing, I feel like my ultimate takeaway from Diablo III is that it is kind of a silly game.

Well, before I am eviscerated by hard core gamers who are offended at my declaration and will/may/might accuse me of my n00b-ness, let me break down my street-cred just a bit.  My introduction to the Diablo franchise was sometime in 1996-97 when I watched Dellaños play it on his computer at some low frame rate that allowed his fight with The Butcher to take about 30% longer than it should have and allowed enough time for him to plan out his moves between clicks.  Later when he got the game running faster than 5 fps, he said how much harder the fight was when the game was running at speed.  He later gave me a copy of the game which I played until my computer died and I lost the .iso file.  I also played a fair amount of Diablo II (single player mostly) in the mid-late 2000's, although I never finished because my netbook crapped out after having a pint of stout dumped on the keyboard.  So, I may not be a hardcore Diablo gamer, but I am still fairly familiar with the franchise as a whole.  Just do not ask me all about the lore.

When I booted up Diablo III on the Switch, I decided that I would forgo my usual Frost Mage play style that I fell in love with in Diablo II (and that I later used in Torchlight II) or Fighter that I nearly always use in Diablo (when I can get the game running), and I decided to play as a Monk.  My thought going into the game, was that I my weapon choice was going to be heavily limited to knuckle-style weapons, maybe a kama, staves, or other similar weapons.  Armor too would be limited to light-type such as cloth, hide, and/or leather.  What I was not prepared for was at level 30 having my Monk doning what looked like a mish-mash of medium and heavy armor while wielding a massive glowing two handed sword*.  I also liked the mention that the Monk has some level of healing abilities.

Long gone now are the days of delving into a dungeon or scouring a field killing a handful of enemies with individual clicks of the mouse.  In Diablo III, I now only have to hold down the A button while wave after wave of demons break upon my walled fists of destruction.  There were even times while while fighting in Act IV (having bumped up the difficulty level in the game from Hard to Expert) that I started falling dozing off, but still holding down that A button and apparently randomly pressing one of the other skill buttons, and I was still very much alive after opening my eyes.  Early in Act I, I came to realize that Diablo III seemed to be mainly about fighting as many monsters on screen at a time, and linking together attacks to kill as many demons at a time. thereby increasing your experience modifier.  Sure, I felt that there was some level of exploration involved in the game, and I did my best to reveal as much of the map as possible, but the main reason to do that was to discover more enemies to kill.

You know, let us talk about the difficulty, which I think couples well with my assertion that the game still manages to be a bit silly.  Now, I have only played as the Monk class so all of my views are based on that playthrough experience.  According to Blizzard's online guide, Monks are designed to "emphasize high maneuverability over staying power, darting in and out of melees and avoiding protracted slugfests."  If you were to ask me, I would say that Monks are very well designed to engage in slugfests.  Maybe it was the way I equipped my Monk, but I would try to have at no fewer than three pieces of equipment that had allowed me to gain health either per second, per hit, and/or per kill.  By the end game, I had items that had +5285 health per second, +3550 per hit, +825 per hit, +2750 per kill, along with an armor rating of 1511k.  That's right, 1,511,000 was my armor.  My modified damage was 46.0k, which probably is not too high when compared to other classes that focus on reeeeeaaaalllly high dps.  And I was only at level 62 when I beat the game.  And here is the real shocking bit for people who have played the first two Diablo games but not the third: I used my one health potion (because you only have one that has a recharge timer) maybe fewer than 20 times the entire game.  This is not supposed to come across as horn tooting, but more of a critique about the way the game was constructed.

What Even and Why!?

Speaking of construction, I do not think I fully understood all of the emphasis the developers took to being able to customize your character.  One of the sellers/artificers in the game had the ability to change the appearance and color of your gear.  Don't like the look of your sword, change it to look like that other sword.  Want to wear red armor instead of blue, pay 5,000 gp to do that, but hope that on your next excursion you don't get some legendary loot dropz.  I also did not see the benefit of making every single piece of your characters armor to look like rags.  Is it to give the impression to other players that you are weaker than you really are?  Is there even a PvP area in Diablo III?  And lastly on the cosmetics train are the banner, wings and pets that you can tack onto your character for no other reason than because they are there.  You can even equip your character with Mercy's wings from Overwatch, because to hell with any sense of lore continuity right!?  All of this genuinely felt like it was integrated to make Diablo III more appealing to an MMORPG crowd.  Actually, a lot of what makes Diablo III Diablo III feels like it was to attract the WoW base.  The only real benefit I can see for all of this fanciness is to make your character more visible when you are playing co-op and you both are surrounded by 75+ demons with 35 more coming in from the surrounding areas.

I realize that I have spent the greater part of this article harping on a game that I put in 35+ hours into and that for the most part, had a fun time playing, and there was plenty that was actually very well done in the game, especially for the Switch port.  Everything was very smooth in both docked and handheld mode, and I never noticed any stuttering, even that one time I racked up 100+ kills, although there were a handful of times that sound effects were either cut out entirely or were a second behind whatever action I had just performed.  The voice acting was as good as I was expecting it to be, which has always been of high quality since the first game.

I will most likely talk more about the Diablo III DLC, Reaper of Souls (which came pre-packaged with the Switch port, hence the "Eternal Collection" subtitle) as well now that Season 16 has started, but I wanted to give myself some time away from the Nephalem to play another game I have sitting in my queue.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental


*P.S.

Not very Monk like if you ask me.

Playing Golf IRL

I played golf this last Wednesday.  Real golf.  As in the sport where you sit in a cart (or walk if you're a professional apparently) and drive around to a spot where you wack a 1.68 inch (4.27 cm) ball some odd hundred yards (occasionally fewer than 100 yards) using a stick with a flat blunted end (a club, if you will), towards a 4.25 inch (10.795 cm) hole in the ground marked by a flag on a pole standing no less than 7 ft (2.1336 m) tall.  I did this 18 times Wednesday along with two other gentlemen on my team/squad/posse.  This whole event, from the first hole to the last, took me about five hours to complete.  And believe it or not, I had fun.

But the mechanics of golf, as an active participant are kind of odd.  At least from the perspective of someone who plays video games, but has not played a golf video game made after either 1999, or 2014, depending on your definition of what constitutes a legitimate golfing game.  In the golf video games that I have experience with, there are only a handful of mechanics such as the direction of the ball, the choice of club, strength of the swing, and sometimes, taking into account the direction that the wind is blowing in.

In real golf, there is so much more to take into account, like am I going to bring the club down low enough to hit the ball (as opposed to not high enough and either topping it, or missing completely), or too low and either hit the ground and nothing else, or take a chunk of dirt and grass along with the ball as it travels a dozen yards instead of the 175 to the green.  And that is just hitting the ball.  Nearly every time I swung the club, I would hope to Hades that my ball would go in the direction I wanted it to.  

Okay, quick interjecting.  I started playing golf when I was about 13, 25 years ago.  I took lessons at the golf course the next town over when I was 13, as well as at the country club my Grandparents were/are members of, and even as recently as 14 years ago I took a series of lessons to help improve my swing.  Now, I am not a great golfer and usually only played a couple of times a year from about Jr. High through maybe 2005, so maybe 13 years or so.  I should also note, because it is going to make sense in a moment, I can only hit with irons.  I have tried a number of times to use various woods and even my Grandfather gave me a driving iron which I did use on occasion, but I could never get the hang of how odd woods felt.

So, I brought up only using irons because, at least in the golf games that I have played, if you select a driver to use on your tee shot, your player is proficient in using that club.  Granted your particular character might have different stats than another character, but that high strength and being able to hit a ball farther than another character might be offset by the fact they tend to slice the ball when they hit it really hard.  I am of course only mentioning this to make a point, and that is, in real life, playing golf is hard.

Case in point.  This is the 3rd hole on the course, courtesy of Google Maps.  You tee off from the tee box there in the lower right hand corner in the shade for the trees, hit your ball over the roughly 100 ft. wide pond and onto the green in the upper left.  From the tee to the center of the green was 90 yards with the green slightly sloping back towards the pond.  I decided that my 8 iron would give me the best shot at some loft, while not hitting the ball too far.  Now in a video game, you could nearly guarantee that you would not hit the ball in the water with enough power.  You might hit the ball past the green, but depending on the game it might not go out of bounds.  In real life, as I was standing there in front of the ball that I just put down on the tee (I had pulled a crud ball out of my bag in case I did hit it in the water), and my mind went to how much easier this would be in a video game.  Here, I was hoping that my choice of the 8 iron, combined with my clearly subjective choice in the amount of strength I needed and how much I ended up using would get my ball on the green and not embarrass myself in front of the two people that I had just met a few hours earlier.  Oh, did I also mention that there was no flag on this hole, because there were three holes punched in the green, so you had to hope that if you hit the green, that you were at least somewhat close to one of the three holes?  In the end, I hit the ball about as well as could be expected without getting a hole in one.  It was decided that my shot put our threesome closest to the hole so we all went with my shot and ended up getting a birdie on this 3 par; we were playing a shotgun scramble style of play.

By the end of the day, I realized that after not having played 18 holes of golf in close to a decade, that I still was not too bad considering my absence from the game for so long, although I did play a short 12 hole pitch-and-putt last year, but I was also playing with my boss, and we were drinking, so it was significantly less serious and a lot less pressure than Wednesday's game.  But thinking about all of the mechanics that go into playing golf really messes with your brain, kind of if you think about all of the necessary movements required to even just walk.  

Now who is up for a round of QWOP Golf!?

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Rocks Hit the Water Like Broken Glass

First Impressions: The Hat Man: Shadow Ward (PC)

The Hat Man: Shadow Ward is an inexpensive game developed by Game Mechanics LLC that I picked up a while back (last year?) when it was on sale (so, it was about $1, which included the soundtrack apparently), and for that price, I am kind of okay with that.  Had I paid $15, I would be upset, a little annoyed, but ultimately I would probably stick with my purchase as I do not feel the need to demand a refund every time I purchase something that I am not happy with through no fault of the developer.  What research I did before purchasing The Hat Man: Shadow Ward consisted of watching the trailer, looking through the available pictures, seeing the price be somewhere around very cheap, and bought it, so ultimately, no arguments.  Now that that is out of the way, let's talk about The Hat Man: Shadow Ward.

The description of the game on Steam says that you "discover the horror of the Canton insane asylum as you attempt to rescue your daughter."  Okay, pretty vague, yet you know the basic plot.  The trailer too gives a pretty decent depiction of what to expect.  

To date, I have spent 38 minutes with this game so I can only comment on what little of the game that I have played, which is pretty much the whole point of these First Impressions articles.  But after the 38 minutes, my reaction was kind of, "Meh."

Initially I was a little confused as to what I was supposed to be doing, after finding out in-game that my daughter was not in her room in the asylum/hospital that she was staying in.  Without giving too much away, everything went from this:

to this:

in nearly the blink of an eye.

So you the player, who has the option of playing as either the Mother or Father (and both are fully voice acted (not great, but not Resident Evil on the PSX bad) end up looking for your daughter who has inexplicably gone missing.  The rest of my time was spent playing a clone-esque skin of Slender: The Eight Pages, all the way down to actually collecting pages through what seemed like a procedurally generated lower floor of a not very well maintained psychiatric hospital.  Once I realized that, at least this part of The Hat Man: Shadow Ward, was the game that I was playing, my interest plummeted dramatically.  Similar to how my interest in the full game Slender: The Arrival dropped off when I reached the stage in the game that was paying homage/a remake of Slender: The Eight Pages.  This was not the game that I thought I was signing up for and I am not sure how I feel about that.

I will say that very often the game looks very good, which the occasional exception, such as door handles being two dimensionally "printed" onto doors, but that is purely cosmetic.  One other annoyance I noticed, was that early on, there was a door that was partly opened that I was unable to interact with.  Sure, the closed door that I could not open or interact with, the fact that it was closed with no door handle meant that I could not open it, but a door five inches open should be able to be opened.  Unless of course that there is a corpse blocking the door.  One other instance that bothered me was that a particular item was established, early on and in an obvious manner to have a secondary effect, that I have not found to be universal.  Yeah, that is a bit of a vague statement, but give yourself 10 minutes in the game and you will realize what I meant.

One last interesting thing, is that when you start the game, you are prompted to set the screen size and graphics quality, which for me I have it at "Good" rather than "Fantastic" or "So So" since "Fantastic" runs very slow for me.  Even on "Good" which is playable, runs at about 20 fps max, and even on "So So," I max out at 20 fps.

Well, that is my limited experience with The Hat Man: Shadow Ward, a seemingly Slender: The Eight Pages clone set in a procedurally generated asylum.  And while the game is pretty scary, it is scary for similar reasons that Slender is scary: that you know you are being hunted in a contained area while forced to collect pages before you either die or beat the game.  There is even an achievement for beating the game in under 30 minutes, so it is at least obvious to the developers that there is, at the absolute bare minimum, 29 minutes 59 seconds worth of content here, and honestly, if you loved Slender: The Eight Pages and want to play a similar game with a different setting, then The Hat Man: Shadow Ward is right up your darkened alley.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Live In A Dark World, Where No Light Shines Through

P.S.  But do not forget: