Captain Morton's Notes

I love Endless legend, though in some respects maybe not for the reasons I'm supposed to. Hey look, screenshots that I took. I'm right professional, me. Endless Legend is a strategy game in the vein of Civilisation, and as such you'd imagine it was meant to be played like a strategy game in the vein of Civilisation. I don't do that, though granted I also don't play Civilisation like a strategy game in the vein of Civilisation. I play Endless Legend more like cult medieval sim Mount and Blade, but with a clear end-game. I'll create a world of a specific size depending on how long I want my empire's story to last, with anomalies set to high so I can easily get a fuckton of resources, and I role play as one of the many fantastic factions in a quest for some form of world domination. In my brief experience with Civilisation I did the same, and very much enjoyed the single game I played in it. I can still remember the story beats of my Japanese empire, and the l...

Fucking good innit. Dark Souls 3 definitely fits the moniker of a "Best Of" collection, with a lot of returning mechanics, armours and weapons, and lots of callbacks in the environments and NPC interactions. But I'm an unabashed lover of fanservice, and 3 does it so god-damn well. And I've borrowed some screenshots from Videogamer. Cheers.   I created my character, a lady called Leona because she looks like a female Leon S. Kennedy. The character creator is basically Bloodborne's, though later experimentation with copying a character over (by screenshotting the sliders and copying them) shows that it isn't identical, which I found interesting. Even accounting for the fact that some sliders have been flipped right to left (a slider which went Wide/Thin might be Thin/Wide etc.), proportions aren't identical and the lighting engine is less flattering than it was in Bloodborne. The biggest, and obviously most important, issue with Dark Souls 3 is it's hair...

"This isn't Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII." Yeah, it aint. And here's a spoiler: Next week won't be either. And that's for 3 reasons: because LR:FFXII has gone all weird, because I'm currently playing Dark Souls 3 and will be for some time and I replayed Dark Souls mere hours before 3 unlocked on steam. And to elaborate on that first reason: I've managed to be so good at videogames that I've finished all the main quests in little more than 5 in-game days of the 13 it allocates, leaving me with nothing to do but power through as many side quests as possible before the end of time. And frankly, I'm more enticed by the concept of being brutally mutilated countless times by the beautiful mistress that is Dark Souls. Many still hold Dark Souls as the pinnacle of the series, even against the original Demon's Souls, and the recent Bloodborne. It was my entry point into the series, and unlike many before me who have taken many repeated trie...

Twilight Princess is the best Zelda game, and by extension, the HD version of Twilight Princess is the best Zelda game now. The End kids, now go to sleep. Oh, right, CONTENT . You're probably thinking that such a lofty claim comes from a place of nostalgia, in the same way pretty much any Zelda fan will believe in their heart, weather they're vocal about it or not, that the first Zelda game they played was the best Zelda game. Like how  Dr Who fans will always hold a soft spot for the first iteration of The Doctor they saw, "Their  Doctor". In that same vein, many Zelda fans hold Ocarina of Time as "Their Zelda", and hold it up on a pedestal as the gold standard for Zelda games. But my first Zelda game was Phantom Hourglass. I do love PH to death, and I can't think of a better entry point to the series for a 10 year old child, but it's way too child-friendly for me to consider it anything more than my own personal gem. I picked up Twilight Princess o...

That's more like it. While the first game was an enjoyable travesty with some pretty good gameplay XIII-2 is more of a genuinely good game that doesn't remember that the first game was a bit naff. The zone-based time-traveling gameplay borrows liberally from Chrono Trigger in the best ways, and while the story isn't without it's flaws, and remains plagued by the same weird, fluffed-up and generally quite odd dialogue of the first, it's actually coherent to an enjoyable extent, and was much more genuinely enjoyable rather than laughably shite. The gameplay changes are minimal, aside from one main addition. The new levelling up system is practically the same though presented in a less fancy way that threw me off for a bit. Weapons don't need the insane amount of effort put into them that they did in the first, which is great, because fuck that. And battles are actually random battles now, in a sense, with a much better and clearer way of getting an advantage by wa...

I've put more than 100 hours in Xenoblade X now and I don't even think I'm close to finishing the story yet. I've been so busy solving petty disputes and diffusing racial tensions (and good fucking god there are so many racial tensions) that the main story about huge galactic organisations and the Lifehold Core has kind of fallen to the wayside for me. Not to say I'm not enjoying it, it may not be like the first Xenoblade in many ways but it's got it's narrative hooks into me, it's just that said narrative hooks are only as big as every other brilliantly crafted sidequest in what has fast become one of my favourite fictional worlds. The best part of Xenoblade X for me is the time immediately after completing a main story quest. Once you come home after one of these a load of new sidequests will pop up all over New LA, and wandering the streets and corridors of the 6 districts and finding all sorts of squabbles and assassination attempts and alien harems,...

Kicking this shit off with some Hot Takes. Or maybe not, as the case may be. Chances are, your perception of FF13 if you hadn't played it or any of the other games in the series was that it "was a bit naff". Heavily criticised by a lot of respected parties and treated like the black sheep of the series by fans, it definitely wasn't the game a lot of people would go to as an entry point into the series. Unless you're me, and you had it turn up in your house one day when you were a kid and you didn't really keep track of games media beyond your subscription to Official Nintendo Magazine. I never finished it then, unsurprisingly, I don't even think I got very far in the story at all, but I remember it looked pretty and I enjoyed what I played of it, which was enough for me to eventually pick it up on PC many years down the line for about 7 quid in a Steam sale. Took me about another year or so of stopping and starting for me to finally finish it a few weeks a...