PixlBit

Keep in mind that we recorded this on the 11th, and as such things like THQs bundle and the free version of Metro 2033 are no longer around.

Also note that my idea for a reversable cover for BioShock was made true the very next day.  Yeah, I'm pretty awesome like that.

I blame your Dishonored hate on you being a Red Sox fan. You just have poor taste :D

Actually, I'm very aware that Dishonored isn't for everyone, so I'm not surprised it didn't "stick" with everybody at this website. If you aren't prepared for a slow and methodical journey, it's just not gonna work. Really, like you said, the hook is the mechanics of the game, and that's good enough for me. I get a real kick of of being a powerful, stealthy character. My favorite part of the recent Batman games is when I'm hiding in the shadows freaking people out, and you already know the first 2 Thief games are among my top games of all time. Some people just aren't into that as much as others, and that's OK with me.

lol - let me clarify that it's not that I didn't like the game.  It's something that I'll get into - it just didn't engage me at the time.  What I played was solid, but I didn't feel invested into what I was doing.  I'll pick it up again down the road and likely love it.

It's all good. 

So Dark Souls. Yeah, I think there's a log of "badge of honor" types that play that game, but the reason I liked it was it seemed fair to me. Yeah it challeneged the crap out of you, but I never felt like the game was cheap. I distinctly remember working on a couple of the enemies in the game for hours at a time, which in most games would have turned me right off, but I knew I kept screwing up, and I could pull it off, which kept me going, and when I did win, one of those victories was more satisfying to me than beating a lot of games has been.

Also, I have a couple of games with reversible covers. SMT: Strange Journey (DS) has an alternate cover you can switch to, and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon (Wii) has a reversible one. I never actually use them, but I've always thought it was a cool idea.

I finished Dishonored last week and overall I was quite happy with it. It was a good game overall, peppered with moments of pure awesome. The mechanics are rock solid, the level design is great, and there's a lot of replayability for me in some of those levels. The game came up short in a few ways though for people who care about narrative. There's some depth and mystery in the universe of Dishonored but I ended up caring very little about any of it, or the characters. All the big powerful men you go after in the missions don't feel important at all in the end. The Empress was kind of interesting, and at times I wanted to protect her as Corvo, but she was still pretty boring and useless in the end. The Outsider was useless and never rose to the level of mystique that the G Man from Half Life 2 got to (which they're obviously trying to emulate). For as much effort as they put into the universe, it all ends up feeling pretty flat and standard. It's very gamey, doesn't transcend any tropes, and it's not very unique or interesting. It's a frankenstein of influence from Bioshock and Half Life 2, but it never gains it's own unique vision. The most interesting thing about the Dishonored universe is the fact they use whale oil for everything, and if that's the most unique thing about the universe, that says a lot.

The things I loved the most about the game were the multiple ways to deal with targets, the multiple pathed level design, and the horror element that the rat swarms and creepers (they're zombies) added to the levels. A lot of the non-lethal solutions to missions turn out to be incredibly dark and twisted, and are arguably less ethical than simply killing them. The one that was the most twisted to me was a mission where you have to decide what to do with a posh noble woman. I decided to let her live, but doing so meant that she would be taken far away and isolated, imprisoned, and controlled by an obsessive and demented man that was "in love" with her. In Dishonored nobody is as good as they seem, everybody betrays somebody, and everybody gets screwed at some point so there's no point to taking it all too seriously. Everything is shady as shit no matter what you do in the game.

The levels were a ton of fun to explore, and you can tell that every little area in the game had a designer in it. Loot, equipment, upgrades, narrative vignettes, and side quests are packed all throughout the various areas of each level. There's no wasted space or forgotten areas in Dishonored levels, everything seems to have attention put into it. The game does so many small functional things well that other games mess up. In Dishonored you can still interact with things while you carry unconscious bodies around. When you load a save the game doesn't start until you press the continue button, which is a simple thing I appreciate control over, and most other games never do that. The game gives you stats on how you did stealthwise, which Splinter Cell gave up a long time ago. Dishonored does a lot of small things well and you don't appreciate those things until you see them done well. I can tell this game was made by people who like stealth games and don't want to suffer with a lot of the old stealth design tropes so they're figuring out ways to make the genre better.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed the majority of Dishonored, just not the last 3 levels. Prior to the last 3 levels, a big shift happens in the narrative and you spend the last 3 levels of the game trying to rectify that shift, but I honestly got bored right then, when things were probably supposed to be the most dramatic and climactic. Everything I wanted to do creatively in Dishonored I was able to accomplish earlier in the game, and the whole endgame was just a chore. By the time I got to the final level I just wanted it to be over so I could put a new game in. There's 8 big levels in the game excluding the intro level, and 5 of those levels are really amazing from both a gameplay and visual point of view, but I tuned out the last 3 levels and the end game. I'm happy Dishonored has done well and they have a new franchise on their hands. I'll be excited to see more of these games, they're doing a lot of things right.

As for Dark Souls, I love DS, but I have too much to say about it to start here. For months now I've been doing an entire blog series about my first playthrough of Dark Souls but I'm pretty sure nobody reads it lol. Dark Souls is certainly fun, it's not a badge of honor for me. It's a very well designed game, great execution, and it's very fun. It's my favorite combat ever in a third person sword and sorcery game, and it may just be my favorite RPG ever, but I'll withhold judgement on that until I finish the game. I'm getting close to beating it. Most of the stigma around Dark Souls is just misinformation and assumptions made by those who haven't played it. People think it's a game that isn't fun but pretentious masochists play it to feel better about their hardcoreness. It's not, hate to break it to you, but it's a good game and you should play it. Everybody should give it a shot. That's why I do the Dark Souls Diary to show people what the game is really like and how fun it is.

Dark Souls Diary 1

Dark Souls Diary 2

Dark Souls Diary 3

Dark Souls Diary 4

Dark Souls Diary 5

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