Oblivion Playthrough Part 1

Every once in a while I reinstall an Elder Scrolls game on my computer and make a concerted effort to try and play it to completion. I have Morrowind with all the expansions and Oblivion. Prior to this I’ve attempted three or four playthroughs between the two games and they always end inconclusively for me. In Morrowind there is a story quest pretty early in the game where you’re supposed to find some tiny-ass object in a large dimly lit Dwemer ruins dungeon. I have read walkthroughs. I have searched that place top to bottom in two or three separate playthroughs. I can not find that fucking quest item. This is for all intents and purposes the end of the story for me. I leave. I continue playing. I explore. I steal stuff. I do sidequests and level up. I have fun but I have no ultimate goal and eventually I stop. I don’t really remember what happened with Oblivion. I guess I just got distracted and lost my place. Think of this as a blog post and review hybrid.

So this is Oblivion. You know how it goes. You start on the make a character screen like “I’m gonna make a badass looking mofo!” Twenty minutes of adjusting slider bars and you’re like “Maybe I’ll just make a regular guy.” Another twenty minutes of slider bars and you’re settling for “How about someone who looks human.” Another five minutes of making changes undetectable to the human eye and you’re ready to start your adventure with the lovechild of Steve Buscemi and Ron Perlman.

The game suggests a character class based on the few skills you hone during the introductory dungeon. It pegged me as an assassin but all I did was use the scant amount of equipment it gave me as it gave it to me. How could I not be an assassin? You do get to ultimately choose but I just went with the suggestion because I knew I could immediately start training in that class because I already had the proper equipment. So I'm a Nord Assassin. Another important piece of information is that I have no manual for this game. I bought it a decade ago as in PC two pack bundled with Bioshock and there's no manual for either game in the box. I have to learn everything in game or piece it together based on my experiences in Morrowind.

When I got out of the sewers after being released from my prison cell and the game proper started I went to the nearby Imperial City to sell the junk I’d hoarded. The first quest I found had to do with investigating a suspicious local merchant with absurdly low prices that was dinging the sales of the other merchants. I was supposed to tail him after he closed his shop so I did. I followed him all night. He went two places before going back to his shop in the morning. Here’s what I learned about him. He enjoys talking about the same boring shit that all the other NPCs like to talk about and he never sleeps. Thanks for wasting my time with this bullshit. Not exactly a good hook for the game.

I forgot about that and picked up the main quest which involved delivering the emperor’s amulet which he entrusted to me moments before his death. I eventually find the son of the emperor, whom this is all news to, and convince him that he's the guy all of Cyrodiil needs as a savior lest we be destroyed by Oblivion. Turns out the emperor was assassinated by members of the Mystic Dawn cult which is a doomsday cult that keeps opening up Oblivion gates all over the place and releasing all manner of demons into our world. So I escort this guy to safety. Some things happen and dammit, the cult steals the the Amulet of Kings which is a critical tool in stopping them.

On one of my earlier successful side quests I spoke to a woman who told me her husband had been tricked and robbed by two ladies of the evening. He was too embarrassed to tell the guard so they wanted to solicit a decoy John to get his stuff back. She told me to talk to her husband in their house. Their house turned out to be locked in the afternoon. Not really knowing what to do I picked the lock and went in. I spoke to him and he told me when and where I could find the two women. I left out the door and AAAAAAAAHHHH!

These damn guards. They have some kind of shining sense and know when a lock is picked within city limits and will just spontaneously appear before you, highjacking the camera with an extreme closeup and a booming voice giving you a heart attack. It's like watching some kind of screamer. When you get caught doing something illegal other than assault you get the option of paying a fine and losing any stolen goods, going to prison and losing experience and your stolen goods or resisting arrest. Has anybody ever picked pay a fine or go to fucking prison? Maybe if you're a monk or something and need to stay virtuous when you go on pilgrimages and you can't recall what you did and when. But otherwise you're obviously just going to reload the game and try again or pick resist arrest and run away. Resisting doesn't even raise your bounty as long as you don't fight them. And while we're on the subject of guards with bullshit magical powers you can't talk to them or they will call you on your stolen shit. How can they tell? My stuff is in large concealed. Do they have x-ray vision? Do you just submit to a voluntary strip search when you speak to a guard? What's the difference between a stolen carrot and a legally obtained one… which I also stole from someone's garden? By the end of the game I had two gifted signet rings in my inventory from different people. If anything THAT should raise red flags because it makes it look like I've been stealing from nobles or I’m a con artist or something. Luckily you in large don’t need to talk to guards so it’s not usually a problem.

So I went to the tavern and made a date with the would be whores, (I guess they’re just thieves?) to meet at their secluded cottage at night. I went in, told them it was a sting, they jumped me and two guards burst in through the door to help me who were none other than the supposed couple I’d gotten the quest from. So it was a double sting. Apparently they needed an unknown face from out of town to play a john to bring down these thieves. Okay… well why in the hell did I get in trouble for picking the lock on the house that a guard told me to go to to meet another guard to do a quest where I help the guards?

At some point I had to ask a goddess statue for Insight on what to do next. Before it speaks to you the nearby followers tell you you have to make an offering of glow dust. What the fuck is glow dust? It comes from will o wisps which are conveniently nearby. I suddenly had a PTSD flashback to the first and last time I saw one of these in my previous playthrough attempt. I made the mistake of attacking one while exploring in the woods not knowing they're deceptively powerful and impervious to all non magical physical attacks… and they heal themselves and they are invisible 80% of the time. I quickly realized that I was outmatched and ran but I could not shake the damn thing. Eventually I came across a mounted guard who assisted me. I stopped to watch but I should have used that time to run because it killed him and the horse he rode in on. I kept running all the way to the Imperial City leaving a trail of corpses behind but it followed me the whole way. I passed the stables where guards and ignorant serfs alike were having at this unstoppable scourge. They were all slaughtered. I ran inside the city gate. It could not pass through doors and thank fuck because I'm fairly certain the city could have been laid to waste by a single stupid glowy nebula. But even after I more or less escaped it it was still camped right there outside the city likely murdering every hapless person wandering by making everyone rue the day I tried to hit it with a sword.

After soliciting a lot of scholarly help in deciphering four rare banned books I located the hideout of the doomsday cult and entered under the false pretense of becoming a new initiate. I did everything they told me to including handing over all my stuff and making a blood sacrifice. The cult leader I was after left through a portal with the amulet which left me alone with his tribe of weirdos and his sacred portal making book which I’m supposed to take for a backup plan. The second you take that book at least two dozen cultists are going to try to kill you and I have nothing on me but a robe and the sacrificial dagger. You can’t sneak steal the book. You can’t even invisible steal it. Super lame. The guy who showed you in and has all your stuff follows you around like a Best Buy worker expecting you to start stealing shit. I need to kill this guy to get my stuff but I can’t do it very fast without my stuff and the longer it takes the more assholes show up to kill you. I ended up nudging him off of the edge of the upper tier in the big chamber about four or five times which killed him without triggering a fight. Then I took my stuff, grabbed the book and ran. You know I was kind of disappointed that Mystic Dawn doesn't show up in the list of factions you belong to. Technically I completed the initiation so I should be in it. Maybe they kicked me out.

Alchemy is one of my primary skills. I guess the idea is that assassins make their own poisons. I like alchemy. I always try to do alchemy no matter what class I choose. Every time I see a new plant I pick as much of it as I can wondering what kind of potions I can make with it. It's usually crap. You're pretty limited until you're a higher level and your character can comprehend more of the effects of different ingredients. Every ingredient has four potential effects good and bad. You're supposed to match ingredients with like effects to produce a potion with those desired results. The potency is dictated by the quality of the equipment you have and I don't know, probably your training. All of that makes sense until you see the actual product. Potions in this game are ridiculous. Everything about them is unintelligible. You can drink one to increase your luck by five points for fifteen seconds. Yeah, modify the most nebulous stat in videogames for an inconsequential amount of time. Great. My inventory is cluttered with small groups of potions that do the exact same thing but with a one second difference in the duration so they don't stack together.

There are even potions that do the exact same thing like “cure disease” but one weighs more and has a higher sell value. How? Why? What's the point? And just as weird there are potions that do things like resist paralysis by 14% for 30 seconds. It’s such a tiny difference for such a short period it wouldn’t even make a difference ultimately. And I don’t even know any enemies where I’m certain that they cause paralysis where I would buff accordingly to fight them. Hell, I don’t even know what paralysis looks like in Oblivion. Is it when you’re fighting those anthropomorphic spiders and you just suddenly keel over helpless for a bit? That effect doesn’t even last long enough for me to care about digging out a cure paralysis potion from my inventory. You’d have to be completely neurotic to want to micromanage such a pedantic string of fights and largely insignificant tweaks to variables.

Scrolls do basically the same thing but have an even wider assortment of magical effects. What the hell does “absorb skill: marksman” or “absorb skill: alchemy” do? Does it make you level up that stat quicker when using that skill? No it doesn’t because it’s something that you cast on a target and it has an “X points over X seconds” description. So does it take from the target’s skills to buff yours? How do you know which targets even have those skills to rob? How does it work? Skills are not quantified by points, they’re quantified by levels. Why in the flying fuck would you want to buff your alchemy skills in a fight? Who wasted their time concepting this scroll? After experimenting with the scrolls I discovered that the spells which are cast on touch make a lightning tether from the target to you which Presumably lowers their stat while buffing yours. If you check your stats it will show the skill is higher IN LEVEL not in points because that isn’t a thing. It then wears off off after 10 seconds. Once again, who the fuck cares? Especially the alchemy one? YOU CAN’T EVEN DO ALCHEMY AROUND ENEMIES. IT IS 100% USELESS.

Outlast 2

I bought the Outlast Trilogy for PS4 new for $12 on clearance and I played through all three back to back. I'm going to focus on the last one, Outlast 2 And because it's on PS4`I get to take my own screenshots. Yay! I love the disclaimers in these games. It’s like “You know why you’re here. Enjoy the game, sicko.”

Outlast 2 is a run and hide survival horror game just like its two predecessors. You have no weapons or flashlight but a trusty camcorder with a night vision mode that allows you to see in the dark with clear atmospheric conditions. This mode uses batteries which you have to collect to keep it functional. Some differences between this and the first two include now taking damage and needing to heal yourself with bandages which you can find. The run button is now L3 instead of L1 which is now the look behind button and let me tell you that was hard getting used to after playing two games with it the other way around. The other two games took place in the same asylum and secret testing facility but this one has the distinct setting of rural Arizona so it’s outside or underground for a majority of the game. Now I haven’t been to ALL of Arizona but I find it hard to believe that there’s a part of Arizona looks like this. Yosemite in California yes or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest maybe but this just seems like too much granite and too many trees for Arizona. Where are the red rock formations, sagebrush and Joshua trees?

The premise is that you’re a cameraman for a reporter, (your wife,) going to investigate the disappearance of a young woman when your helicopter crashes rather abruptly from unseen forces. You arise from the crash with a dead pilot and a missing wife so you set off to find her which takes you straight into the heart of a backwater commune of cultists. Their religion has loose connections to Christianity but kind of runs afoul being centered around rape and human sacrifice.

There appear to be a lot of different horror influences here all melded into one. It’s a lot of Children of the Corn and The Hills Have Eyes. And then there’s some Blair Witch Project and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then at the end there’s even some The Descent and even one iconic death scene that was straight out of The Omen.

The enemies in this game are all over the place in breed. They’re all humans I think but there’s insane religious zealots which inhabit the ramshackled farm and village areas. They’re like The Ganados from Resident Evil 4. There’s sick people who have been quarantined to a shanty town on the outskirts. There’s weird tribal bush people in the deep wilderness and a couple of guys resembling Master and Blaster, (let’s see how many pop culture references we can do,) who hunt you down with flaming crossbow bolts. There’re mud people in the caves. It’s like a whole freak ecosystem. There’s also no way to tell who’s going to try to kill you on sight, who’s only going to try to kill you if you’re up in their face and who just wants to puke on the ground and be left alone.

There are chase segments where you have to crawl away from pursuers through a tight spot either under a house or through a cave and you move so damn slow I’m constantly thinking there’s no way they’re not going to catch me but they don’t because they’re moving just as slow I guess. it’s almost comical that it’s a dire life or death flight measured in feet per minute.

The hiding places have been significantly downgraded. Not many lockers or beds around. Instead you mostly have water or containers of water which are hard to see out of and leave your vision blurry when you come out and oh my God, is that blood? I can seriously submerge myself in a drum full of blood to hide? Wouldn’t I have to spend the rest of the game running around looking like Carry after prom night?

Ignoring the big recurring baddies, guys with flashlights are the worst enemy. If you have to go within ten yards of them they will eventually spin around and spot you if you aren’t behind something. Considering you can’t hurt your enemies, the convention that you can essentially see in the dark while they’re effectively blind in it makes it a level playing field but guys with flashlights just screws you. However you are granted another tool which wasn’t in the first game, the camera microphone. Switch it on when using the camera view and you get a sound reading on your HUD. You can eavesdrop but that’s not that important. It works kind of like a geiger counter. Depending on where you aim the camera the bar goes up when you center on a noise source which is usually a person. The higher the bar, the closer the person to your proximity. This thing works at a good distance and through walls so it’s almost like you can see through objects in a crude sense.

Like the other games there are backstory or exposition documents scattered around that you can collect and specific events or objects that you can record with your camera. I like how your camera shows a timeline of everything you’ve gathered and shows blanks when you missed something not that you can do a damn thing about it. In the other games you could flick on your camera and the thing in front of you is recorded but in Outlast 2 you have to stand there for 10-15 seconds shooting what is usually a static object and if you move at all you risk interrupting and resetting it. Really? Come on. If it’s an event, you sometimes need to immediately turn the camera on and begin recording before whatever it is ends and you never see it again. But there’s so much crazy shit happening all the time it’s impossible to tell what you’re supposed to document and what’s just another Christmas tree decorated with entrails. Why am I recording this? It’s like the hundredth… one of these I’ve seen tonight.

The segment where you have to go rafting down the river sucks. When I started out and had to paddle across the lake I kept getting hung up on an invisible wall with no way to tell that I wasn’t moving at all. In the river the raft handles like shit but it’s basically made like the door to a wood cabin so kudos on making a door that floats like a door I guess. There are two places on the river where you are scheduled to get wrecked and lose your raft but somehow on my first try I maneuvered past both of them and made it to my destination with significantly less sidetrack and hassle. However when I got there there was no way to dock and get off either by climbing up the ladder or getting on the pier because it’s only supposed to happen as part of a triggered event. I was just stuck floating around on the worst raft ever. I went past the dock and down river to a place you’re not supposed to be able to go, (still unaware things were amiss even though I’d been clipping through objects in the environment,) and I found where the river terminates in a low res pond which I actually think is creepier than the regular textures.

You periodically switch back and forth between the twisted nightmarish present reality and a twisted nightmarish version of your flashbacks from something that happened to you in Catholic school. These sections kind of remind me of FEAR (the haunted office simulator game.) When you’re at the school sometimes the Upsidedown leaks in and the Demogorgon appears and chases you. (Yes, that’s actually the most efficient way to describe it.) But seriously this monster is crazy. It’s a guy with a bunch of arms. I didn’t get a good image because he’s kind of ethereal and teleports and kills you on touch so it’s hard. Initially I was okay with this but I got increasingly annoyed with being continually transported here because I wasn’t seeing the relevance to the actual storyline I was invested in and so it just feels like I have to do busy work until I’m allowed to go back to the forest and get chased by Ganados again. It’s like the game just gets interrupted occasionally with some other game that you have to play. And when I say that I really think these should have been two seperate games. The two have too much diversion to help eachother but enough content to go on solo. Why do they need each other? The school has its own plot and identity as a psychological horror game with one big badguy and some weird phenomena that sometimes makes you question your sanity. The most interesting thing is when the game pulls off a seamless transition between being in the Arizona wilderness and then suddenly you’re in the school or vice versa. It implies that you’re having a mental episode which is reinforced when you check your footage of things from the school and it’s distorted beyond recognition. It’s like the stuff you see there isn’t really happening… but it can still kill you. The problem is this cool mechanic is wasted on transitioning from one dangerous and scary place to another dangerous and scary place. It could be so much more unsettling with a contrast between one location where you are (at least relatively) safe or there are at least rules and constants of normalcy you can cling to and then another location that is chaotic and upsetting. A good example is when you hear the siren in Silent Hill and the world changes into Alternate Silent Hill. Silent Hill as it stands is a creepy abandoned town but that’s it. It also has monsters in it but somewhere in your mind you are familiar with the concept of an abandoned town because that’s something real. When the siren goes off, suddenly the world around you ceases to make sense as you’re thrown head first into a rusty metal hellscape. As bad a place as regular Silent Hill is, when you hear that siren you feel panic because things are going to get worse and similarly when you come back out again you feel relief. In Outlast 2 you’re just going from one Alternate Silent Hill to another. There’s no sense of dread when it happens. Instead of “Oh no, it’s happening” it’s “Great, this shit again.” 

It would be interesting to see this psychological world transition concept fleshed out into its own horror game. It needs to stay subtle, no defined crossover moment. Maybe something like Jacob’s ladder. I imagine a game taking place in a mundane setting of everyday life and then it takes a sinister turn and you start seeing freaky shit. Borrowing the Vietnam War backdrop of the movie, the player would have PTSD episodes triggered by something and then your environment would change to reflect your twisted perceptions. Maybe you go to trim bushes or something in your backyard and then you turn around and find you’re stranded alone deep in the jungle with monsters signifying a distorted version of the Vietcong you remember fighting. Maybe you’re working on your car and you go under it with a flashlight and suddenly you’re back in ‘Nam exploring a VC tunnel system full of traps. The line between reality and your nightmares becomes increasingly blurred and you eventually end up killing your wife thinking she’s a monster or something. I’d buy it… then again I buy anything that’s horror.

Not until the end of the game do you get a clear flashback of what happened between you and the girl you knew in school. In it you are your child self and it plays out as an unaltered truthful memory so it’s odd to see this blood smear through the stairs door window I recognize from an earlier foray into the school, (you can see it in the image of the many armed man). Oops. I think the level designers forgot to clean that up.

There doesn’t seem to be any line that these games won’t cross. Rape, crucifixion, baby murder, baby birth, full frontal nudity, castration and even what appeared to me like a guy masturbating over a corpse… It was a nice little romp.

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a first person survival horror game based off of the Alien franchise. You play as the now adult daughter of the movie franchise's main character, Ripley. You investigate a derelict space station, Sevastopol looking for the black box data of the Nostromo mining vessel which her mother of course destroyed and fled in the first movie attempting to escape the alien scourge which has now infested the very same station you are trapped on. So in the timeline this should be between Alien and Aliens while Ripley is still in stasis in the escape shuttle.

In case you're wondering how I feel about the Alien franchise going into this game, I've read the original book, I own the original movie trilogy and the AVPs (if you care about that,) I have a Nostromo T-shirt and my dog's name is Ripley. I've never played an Alien video game… and still haven't seen Covenant.

Isolation is heavy on sneaking and hiding. You hack computers, cut through metal hatches, force open doors and generally go places you're not supposed to go to do things you're not supposed to do. The alien is definitely not the only threat you have to worry about on your way.

There’s a long build up of quiet and isolation up to your first encounter with enemies. Four armed humans appear in a big room searching for me which is a bit excessive when all I have is a wrench. When I heard them coming I fled the room. I soon discovered that there was no way I could reenter and do whatever undetected to pick them off, (assuming that’s even possible to do.) There are utility panels in a lot of places in the game where you can turn on or off local utilities like air filtration, lights, sprinklers, loudspeakers, etc. Honestly I’m mystified as to how most of this shit can help me if it does. I only ever used them to open doors and turn off security cameras which is pretty straight forward. In this room I can shut off air filtration which will make the air cloudy which I’m going to guess will make me harder to detect. The problem is that there are no boxes anywhere near where I am and it’s not possible to reach one undetected. I had no distraction items in my inventory so I just sat and thought and sat and thought. I couldn’t even pull the enemies from the room and get them to chase me. Eventually I just turned the game off. When I came back The four people had spawned outside of their room just right there around the corner from the save point. They came at me in a conga line and I just killed them one by one with the wrench as they emerged save for the last one. What was that all about? A glitch or did the game just realize I was up shit creek without a paddle and gave me a leg up?

After that I had an encounter with the xenomorph it was short and uneventful. It was like an introduction more than anything.

The next area was my first real serviceable stealth test. The area is populated with numerous ‘Working Joes’ as they are called in the game. These are low grade maintenance androids kind of like a simple prototype of Ash from the movie(s). They certainly couldn't pass for human though. They look like demon possessed store mannequins and are one of the freakiest video game enemies I’ve ever seen. Their uncanny valley appearance combined with glowing eyes and an emotionless reprimanding of you for making them waste company time while they search for you so they can beat you to death just for being in a restricted area is effectively terrifying. They're stronger and more resilient than humans but slower. I think the best part about this is that once you get attacked by one of these you don't trust any of them for the rest of the game which now that I think of it mirror's Ripley's fear of the synthetic in Aliens that looks like Ash, (the android that basically got everyone killed.) I did pretty well overall on this part.

 It wasn’t until the second encounter with the alien that I really hit the learning curve brick wall. The alien comes out of a vent after you get a password off of the computer. Your objective is to find a specific ID card in the medical facility you’re in and then get out. If the alien catches you, you die. It’s invulnerable to weapons, is really perceptive in sight and sound and also runs faster than you which means remaining undetected at all times is pretty much imperative to success. You’d think you could just sneak out of the room and go somewhere else and your chances of encountering it would be lower. NO. Similar to the rubber band AI in a racing game which magically keeps you from getting too far ahead of the computer players, you will never be reasonably distanced from the alien. Even though it doesn’t sense you it’s always going to be meandering around within 15 yards of your location at all times. (At least in this place.) Forget looking for the fucking ID. You barely have enough of a window to pop out of one locker and into another a few steps down the hall before your motion detector shows a dire proximity to the alien again. Obviously you have to enter a hiding space before it sees you or you’re fucked. Sometimes it will investigate your hiding spot. The first time this happened a ‘hold breath’ prompt came up which I missed and then died. The second time it happened I passed the prompt but then a second prompt came up for ‘lean back’ which I failed and then died. It gives you like half a second to react. What a fussy bitch. The time after that the alien just went straight to ripping open the locker and killing me with no prompts. It hadn’t seen me or even entered the room yet. Yes, by my assessment it seemed to spontaneously appear in the room after I hid for the sole purpose of killing me. What the fuck? Have fucking mercy. This is ridiculous. It’s like trying to hide from God. I keep wondering if there’s more than one of them or if it can teleport because it's just always where you are. You can leave it behind in one room and run straight into it in the next as it exits a ceiling vent in front of you. I tried messing around with a utility box I found in a pretty dark and obscure little nook. I got impaled from behind with my back against the wall. How did it find me? If I can’t successfully interact with THIS without dying then what the fuck can I interact with? How is the alien coming out of a solid wall behind me? I can’t walk around. I can’t stop to pick up or read things. Hiding works about half the time. How am I supposed to accomplish anything? Some of the automatic doors just plain take forever to let you in too. Is there even any excuse for this other than to be a pain in the ass and potentially deadly? This is simple technology in supposedly the distant future. It would be impossible to find an automatic door in present day that comes even close to opening this fucking slow. Yeah it's probably just loading the area beyond the door but it's still bullshit.

I got into a discussion with a GameStop employee who asked me how I felt about Isolation. I told him, “It's kind of a pain in the ass.” He told me he never finished it and it's on his backlog now. And he said that the alien learns from what you do and adapts. When I look at the trophy stats for the game it shows that only 28% of players complete the game, (get the final chapter trophy.) The game is a legit pain in the ass but I did get better.

I’ve never failed this abysmally hard at sneaking or at a video game in general since LAX in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which was one of the very rare occasions I abandoned a game and it was at the very end. I spent one entire gaming session just dying in Alien: Isolation like 20 times. I accomplished nothing except learning how to run and hide and what places were pointless to visit in the obnoxiously large area. Now that I know you can lean back while hiding I do it automatically. When I turned the game back on the next night I died twice in quick succession but then found the ID and escaped. I thought that was the end of that encounter but no. It's still skulking around for the rest of the chapter. The chapter finale gets pretty ridiculous. You're supposed to get to the elevator and leave the area but you have to run a gauntlet where not only the alien is lurking but men with guns who are looking for you. You don't even have to deal with the men. Just hide somewhere, count to twenty and they’re probably all dead because the same improbably cruel criteria for staying alive also applies to your human foes. (Combat and running is to the alien what premarital sex is to a murderer in a slasher movie. You do it around them, you're dead.) Suddenly they added vent openings in the ceiling that are instant death by alien if you just walk under them. They don't even show up on your detector. So you have to navigate through this dark area watching everything from the monitor in your hand to the hall in front of you to the fucking ceiling, stopping to scrutinize every single overhead square shape you see in the strobing emergency lights.

Eventually you get a flamethrower, (I like that they touched on all the equipment from the first movie: shock sticks, flamethrower, motion tracker.) The flamethrower is your ace in the hole for when the alien finds you. When previously all you could really do is scream, “Not in the face!” now you can hose that bitch down with napalm to drive it off, (or more like a couple of very frugal fireball button taps.) This could constitute an indefinite fix for continuing your mission for a while or the alien could come right back seconds later for round two. It's a crap shoot.


 Making progress in this game is often grueling. You move slow and quietly punctuated by long periods of hiding and then maybe you get killed and do it again. A lot of times the alien just won't go the hell away so you can move on. It has this tendency to just camp out near your objective. You might see it close on the detector or come in the room so you hide in or behind something and wait for it to fuck off but it doesn't. It's pacing around the room like it knows you're there and is just trying to wait you out. Sometimes it'll just go stand in the doorway. The worst is when it leaves and then comes right back in like it's going “Ah-ha!” It can do this for forever. Once after accomplishing a significant amount of tasks I decided to backtrack to a save point. On my way I had three or four encounters with the alien where I had to hit it with fire and two times where I had to hide. When I finally made it to the save point the alien came out of a ceiling vent and I had to drive it off with fire. It retreated to the vent only to come out seconds later. This time I hid behind a big column and we played ring around the rosie for like two minutes while I used the motion tracker to see which way it was moving so I could stay out of sight. I JUST WANT TO SAVE AND GO TO BED! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?


The game has a crafting system. You can collect parts and blueprints which allow you to create about half a dozen different gizmos. You can actually make a medkit. The rest are distraction, disabling or lethal depending who you use them on. They can all be thrown or planted so that they're triggered by proximity. The only ones I ever really used are the EMP device which momentarily disables uninsulated androids and the Molotov which can be used to scare the alien in a pinch if you're out or want to conserve flamethrower fuel because it depletes quickly and the more you use it the more resistance the alien builds to it. Everything else I may have used successfully once. Those noisemakers don't seem to draw enemies far enough away from me to actually accomplish anything.

The loading screen gives you tips at the bottom which is nice because it takes like a fucking hour to load the game. One of the tips is to listen to dialogue of survivors before approaching to assess if they're a threat. This is bullshit. You will never definitively know from listening to them if they'll try to kill you once you make yourself known to them because they're never going to say something as contrived as, “GRRRR, I'm going to shoot the first person I see,” or “Gee, I hope more survivors show up. I love new friends.” when I come across ANYONE or ANYTHING I automatically assume they're a threat. I've spent inordinate amounts of time listening and sneaking around people who ended up being indifferent to my presence. I've barged into rooms I thought were safe and gotten shot at. That time I tentatively entered a big occupied lobby finally realizing it was safe only to come back minutes later and get shot at. What is up with that shit? It makes no sense. Are these bad people that ousted the good people while I was out? Are they the same people but got angry at me for some mysterious reason? Why would I assume to recheck a room I'd already established as safe especially when I'm running from the alien and have my nose buried in the motion tracker. I can only really figure out the working Joes since realizing that their eyes are only red when dangerous.

The sound design in Isolation is top notch. In fact I think it won an award for it but I can't remember where I saw that. Suffice it to say that every sound made me feel like I was about to die which is great for a horror game.

 I like how well the game sticks to the retro futurist technology of the 1979 movie. You have a lot of monochromatic green computer screens and I love the big data chip you insert every time you use a save terminal. You get to talk to the main computer via keyboard just like Mother. You get to suit up in the bulky ribbed space suits with mounted lights. You even get to play a flashback where you enter the original derelict, (after the Nostromo team,) and see the Space Jockey. You see the adult xenomorph(s) plenty. You see eggs hatch. You see facehuggers hatching, crawling and attached. You see bodies cocooned on the walls. But strangely you never see a chestburster scene which is probably the most iconic thing about Alien. Even if you've never seen Alien you probably know about this scene. It's just something that's enshrined in pop culture. Hell, within it's genre it's arguably the most horrific thing in a horror movie. You get choked and faceraped by a giant spider, unknowingly incubate its egg and then an alien explodes out of your chest. Why would the game not use this?

 
This game really drags on. You just go from one issue or one foiled scheme to the next. It finally ended at about the seventh or eighth time I thought it was ending. There is bad luck and then there is moving the goalposts. When you're seconds from evacuating after getting the run-around for the last four hours and then get snatched away and cocooned in a mysterious location with the mission being go back to where you just were THAT'S MOVING THE FUCKING GOALPOSTS.

This game will definitely piss you off. Just when you think you've seen everything and have it figured out it throws you a curveball. You might not enjoy the game's cruel nature of kicking you in the dick, in fact I'm sure that's why so few finished it, but in the end the experience is at least undeniably very Alien.

Turok: Evolution

Oh, it's been so long since I played a game worth writing about. Feels good. Turok: Evolution is the 2002 prequel… I guess to the first Turok game? I played that game a little a long time ago until I got lost and didn’t know what to do so I don’t really know how I feel about Turok games going in other than I like the idea of shooting dinosaurs. Evolution has that weird mix of sci-fi and fantasy with dinosaurs you get from Dinosaur Planet or rather Starfox: Adventures. Look at that cover. I mean REALLY look at it. Eew. Is that torn skin in the bottom teeth? WTF? Can they do that? I remember when I bought the Andrew W. K. album ‘I Get Wet’ on CD. The wrapper had a black bar covering Andrew’s bloody nose.

This is a well established franchise. You know what to expect. It’s an FPS where you play as a Native American man who’s been flung into… the distant future... past. Something, something, kill dinosaur people. You know, how exactly DOES all this work? How are there humans, birds, monkeys, regular dinosaurs and anthropomorphic dinosaurs with alien technology all in one time and place? Did they ALL time travel or is this an alternate dimension? It's kind of weird. This is like the island from Swiss Family Robinson or Lost.

The game controls are default inverted for look up and down which is egregiously wrong so I turn it off and also bump up the sensitivity on both axis so I can turn quicker. When I turn off the game and come back later the settings have reverted to their default positions. It doesn't save the settings. Every time I turn the game back on I first have to re-enter the settings again. (That’s not redundant if it’s the third time it’s happened) It's not even that quick of a fix either. It's three screens deep in the pause menu. It's a small thing but it's incredibly annoying.

The game uses the traditional med pack health system. The levels have no checkpoints and only save after you’ve completed them so some of these levels you’re going to get REALLY familiar with. The game also has cheat codes. I didn't try any but definitely thought about it after restarting a level for the dozenth time.

Aside from the typical FPS gameplay there are also many TPS flying segments. (Actually they can also be FPS if you like that camera angle.) Holy shit do I hate these flying segments more than anything. You are supposed to fly a weapon enabled pteranodon or… Quetzal...coatlus… Is that a thing? Anyway, you fly through these horribly cluttered jungles, caves and canyons populated with enemies and obstacles, some of which break or fall, and you are not allowed to touch anything. (Imagine the Death Star trench and the Death Star interior are combined.) If you touch something, you die and start over. You don't even have to smash straight into it. You can graze the side of a canyon wall and it kills you instantly. Sometimes you'll get lucky and deflect, taking damage but that's pretty rare. Easily the biggest challenge here is not the enemies but never hitting anything. Going back to Starfox, imagine playing Starfox where you're not allowed to hit anything with your Arwing or you die and start the level over. And on a weird side note I just realized you fly a LOT more in this Turok game than you did in Starfox: Adventures... and the flying is even better integrated into the game. Your flying weapons do jack shit. You have infinite .50 cal rounds which you can upgrade for a few seconds with a pickup. Rockets are the only thing that reliably kills stuff with any sort of efficiency but you can only carry 20 and have to stock them with pickups. Every chapter that involves flying inevitably brings you to a part where you have to destroy something big which requires you to blow up several moving and/or partially concealed weak points. You're surrounded by enemies shooting at you from all directions in close quarters. Your turning radius is the size of a soccer field. So to recap, survive or destroy dozens of enemies shooting at you. Blow up the weak points by flying to the outer perimeter wall of the level and turning around for a three seconds or less approach to hopefully line up a shot and thread the needle to score like one hit out of probably 15-20 necessary hits before pulling a hard evasive turn because remember DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING or you're starting over.

The game does this stupid thing where you lose your weapons. Not like you get captured and they get taken away but you start the next level and some of them will just have vanished from your arsenal. I'm aware you can't switch to a gun that you have no ammo for even if you have the gun but that's not what the problem is. I haven't been able to use the bow since probably the start of chapter three. I KNOW I have it. It's one of the two weapons you start out with for fuck sake. I've never run out of ammo for it. I still see arrow quivers lying around EVERYWHERE later in the game and when I walk over them I can't pick them up but it says “Need bow” as if I don't have it. Why don't I have it? Where did it go? This has happened with other weapons that I knew I owned and had ammo for like the flechette gun and rocket launcher. They just seem to come and go as they please between levels except for that damn bow and the pistol both of which I never saw again. And without the pistol I can't even snipe and that really cripples you strategically. This is such a pain in the ass when you get in a tight spot and your arsenal has been randomized and downsized leaving you with less ammo and possibly some very inflexible weapon combos. I never even had a tek bow until the end of the game for like one level and then it vanished. Oh and also the flamethrower showed up again briefly after being absent for like 80% of the game. On another note, my secondary fire on my launcher doesn't work even though I can see the ammo number and the loaded ammo in the launcher. This whole thing blows.

There is no shortage of total bullshit moments in this game whether they come by chance or by design. You can fall through the gap between the platform and cable gondola and die in two levels even though the gap isn’t physically big enough to fall through. So mind the gap and jump like an asshole while entering and exiting gondolas. There’s a part in the city assault where you come across a sleg at a mounted machine gun. If you look at him, you die instantly. That’s not an exaggeration. It doesn’t even matter if you have full health. You die before you can even attack or maybe even see him. Those guns are powerful but they aren’t the finger of God so I don’t know why it’s like this. It’s completely unreasonable. I got past this part by crouching behind a pile of rubble and lobbing grenades blindly in the general direction of the gun. I got lucky I guess because he’s far away and grenades suck. There’s a level where you have to hunt down 10 snipers to make it through a bombed out city block. You’re supposed to stay in the buildings and out of the streets because you’ll get shot supposedly by snipers but it doesn’t matter if there is just one sniper left and they have no visual of you and you are running. You get “shot” and take damage if you step into the street. LAZY. You’re not actually getting attacked by an enemy. You’re getting magically penalized for not following the mission parameters. There are times where you are deep in the jungle and can't see anything because the foliage is so thick. One level in particular that I remember made you collect three keys to open a gate to advance. The area had the triple threat of low visibility, traps and raptors. Even if you could see, most of the traps are undetectable because they drop down from the jungle canopy which is too high to see and there's no evidence on the ground. All you get is a sound and one second to move your ass. The keys are in pretty difficult/obscure places. The first is atop a natural log bridge. I’m pretty sure I never found the actual way you’re supposed to get up there because it wasn’t at all apparent. I instead fluked my way jumping up on the low end of the log very particularly like a game tester trying to break the game. The second key requires you to fall off a deadly cliff and land on a super fucking tiny platform. It’s so small you have to be as close to the edge without falling off to be able to see and line up with it.

Platforming it such a bitch. You shouldn't have to do it in this game but there are definitely segment that require finesse. The biggest problem is that when running to jump from the edge of one thing to another you always reach the edge sooner than you think you should and just fall off because you jump too late. This is compounded by the fact that you don’t jump very well so you want to try for those extra inches.

The ladders in this game are garbage. You can never just walk into them and climb. You can't get on until you've satisfied whatever finicky angle or altitude required for engaging the climbing mode. Then when you do grab on you're probably situated on it poorly and just fall off again halfway up. When you're climbing a ladder you are forced to look straight up which becomes an issue when you get to the top because any enemies you're exposed to up there get to take pot shots at you while you get off the ladder and reorient the camera. Its natural or at least believable that people glance up when climbing a ladder but they're not going to keep looking up until they're standing on the top rung. That's ridiculous. Also it's easy to just fall straight back down when transitioning back from climbing to walking and it takes VERY LITTLE height to injure or even kill you.

The levels get more obnoxious and less interesting in setting as the game progresses. Jungle? Good. Mountain? Good. Cave? Good. Ruins? Good. Temple? Good. Rural Outpost? Good. Desert? Okay I guess. Urban combat? Fuck that shit. You can get that anywhere. I didn't pick this up to play a shitty CoD clone. I want to be Rambo in the jungle and killing dinosaurs. That’s your thing. Let’s do that. Past the game’s halfway point I don't even see plants or wild dinosaurs anymore. Booooooooooring.

That big setting change to urban/industrial interior and the random weapons are what really killed the joy for me. I’m a masochist or maybe I just really hate to quit any video game or show i start until the bitter end no matter how awful it is. This game is definitely hit and miss and I don’t think most people are willing to stick with Evolution through the misses for an overall meh.

Halloween 2017

I didn't do anything too fancy this year for a jack-o-lantern. My hard drive died and I don't have my patterns anymore so I had to come up with a new one. This is the Terror Mask from the Splatterhouse game series. 

Bottom of the Well Painting

Here's a painting I just did based on the creepy face you see on the wall in the Shadow Temple and the Bottom of the Well dungeon in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It's probably the quickest painting I've ever done. It's acrylic on wood, only one foot squared and made entirely from leftover premixed paint from other projects. It came out very German Expressionist and as always looks better in person.


It was kind of difficult trying to interpret a blurry N64 texture but that's also sort of one of the best qualities is that telephone game or having something lost in translation. You're kind of forced to fill in the gaps and put it in your own interpretation. I never noticed that the hands appear to be coming out of a hole in the floor. This implies that this guy either has a long neck and he is trapped in something similar to stocks or this is a severed head propped up on hands. Either way it's even weirder than I thought. I may do a series of creepy stuff in OoT like Bongo Bongo, the Dead Hand, Redeads, etc.