Captain Morton's Notes

Somehow, through various Steam sales and other family members buying them, I've ended up with all the Far Cry games. Which is odd, because I'm not that fussed about the series. It's been alright. More than anything, these days I've just been disappointed with it. (No screenshots this week, because the internet has gone down the shitter and it would take all day. Sorry I guess, no pretty pictures.) Far Cry and Far Cry 2 were wildly different games. They both had similar stealth survivalist elements to an extent, but had completely different tones, and shared little on a mechanical level. 3 was definitely an iteration on 2, but the story tone was again completely different, borrowing the first game's colour palette with a story about an unlikable cunt in the middle of nowhere, which I guess was also borrowed from the first game. But they are DIFFERENT unlikable cunts, and there are no mutants, so there's that. It also streamlined a lot of 2's stuff and introdu...

I've pumped a fuckton of hours into the original WiiU Hyrule Warriors, and now that I've put a sizable dent into the astronomical amount of content in the 3DS version, I thought I might write some words about them. Once again nicking some screenshots from Videogamer. Cheers. The Zelda series is, rightfully, one of the most beloved series of all time, and as with most Nintendo properties, it's longevity is partly down to very strict control over it's usage. If a Zelda game is getting made, you can be damn sure it will be good, no matter the gimmicky controls Ninty has developed a habit of putting in things these days. Even spin-offs by other studios fall under this policy, ever since a certain deal with Phillips we all know too well. Minish Cap, Oracle of Ages/Seasons, and now Hyrule Warriors are all brilliant, and well deserving of the name they represent. The Warriors series isn't for everyone, rather it's for those who see value in repetition and mindless, yet...

See, this isn't marked as specifically the Open Beta because frankly, the game is finished. Sure the full release will have ranked mode back in, but not much else, and there isn't much I want to talk about there. There's more than enough for me to witter on about in regards to the meat and potatoes though, so I'm going to do that weather YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. Overwatch has been rightly pegged as TF2 by way of a "MOBA", the figurehead of the recent "Hero Shooter" genre push, that literally nothing else will ever be more successful than because Overwatch is by fucking Blizzard. Blizzard is big enough to have it's own convention, and frankly they've got the back-catalogue to justify it. Besides World of Warcraft, the machine that prints money, they've got StarCraft, Diablo and Hearthstone under their belts, among others, all of which are great examples of their own genres with huge dedicated fanbases. And Overwatch I feel plays to their streng...

Ended up getting a refund for Castlevania so I could get some stuff in that brief Anime sale Steam had. Specifically, some Shantae games and Toukiden Kiwami, the latter of which I will defiantly write about when I've pumped in the hours a game of it's type needs. I'm also playing the Overwatch open beta, and Far Cry Primal, and Arkham City, so for now, have a short-ish impression of the alpha for souls-like Nioh. Nioh isn't shy about what it takes from Souls. The menus are near-identical, as is it's penchant for leaving you in the dark to figure everything out for yourself. So for a Souls fan like myself, that's brilliant, less so for a newcomer. If you're a newcomer, I can safely tell you to stay clear of Nioh, as it's even more mechanically complex on every level. To begin with, each weapon now has a skill tree of different moves to perform, unlocked with points gained as you level up your standard Souls stats the way you always have(albeit with diffe...

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...