Watch Dogs 2

So I got the game (thanks again, baby!) and after a few days of playing it, I’m a bit disappointed by it or I got spoiled playing the first game.  War Dogs 2 kinda/sorta takes up where Watch Dogs left off with DedSec, a notorious hacker group dedicated to expose the corruption of personal data and freedom by the Blume Corporation and its ctOS 2.0 system, the upgrade a necessary one after the hero in Watch Dogs did a number on ctOS 1.0.  Set in San Francisco, a small group of hackers and Marcus, our hero this time around, is still running around putting the screws to Blume and while I think the story line in Watch Dogs 2 is kinda weak, it’s at least a bit familiar.

The controls have been a bitch to relearn; the only similarities to the original game is driving (and destroying) cars along with aiming and shooting.  I’ve gotten killed several times just because I’m pushing buttons I got used to using in the original game and buttons that, in the second game, don’t do a damned thing.  There’s a distinct lack of deployable weapons; in the first game, I could pick up a weapon and it would go in my “pack” and could be selected easily enough; in this game, if I’m holding a weapon and pick up another, the one I”m holding gets discarded so all I have is two weapons and as far as weapons go, they’re pretty wimpy at this stage in the game.  I mean, I have a silenced pistol, which made me happy to see… except when I walked up behind a bad guy, sighted on the back of his head and pulled the trigger… and he turned around and killed me.

What the fuck…?

Two things I kinda like:  The cops, who were conspicuous by their absence in the first game, are seen patrolling the streets of San Francisco but they don’t mess with you as you’re breaking every traffic law that ever existed, well, until you fuck up and rear end one of them – then they’re on you like a very bad habit and they are damned persistent as in the first game; in fact, it’s harder to escape and evade these cops.  The other thing is the NPCs, which are roaming all over the place.  I turned a corner and scared one into falling down; she got up and instead of walking away, she stormed over to my car, dragged me out of it, and punched me in the face!  So I punched her in the face but then somebody came to her aid and started beating me with an umbrella… and I had to knock them out, too.  Later, during a mission, some chick was driving in front of me and just stopped in the middle of the road and I tapped her bumper… and she got out wanting to fight and, well, you can probably guess what happened.  What’s even funnier is watching the civilian NPCs actually starting fights with the cops when I have them arrest somebody because of information I planted about them; once, I guess the cop took offense to the man punching him in the face… because the cop shot him.

At this point in the game play, I’m not sure I really like this game as much as I did the first because, as previously mentioned, I don’t have the tools readily available to do things.  For instance, by my fifth mission in the original game, I had to ability to “distract” a pursuing helicopter and even shoot the sniper while the chopper pilot fought for control.  In the new game, I have to collect a whole lot of stuff – then activate a lot more stuff – before I can get this needed ability, which shows in the main mission I’ve yet to complete… because the sniper in the helicopter keeps killing me before I can make good my escape.  It’s frustrating because in this mission – I have to bust somebody out of Alcatraz – it’s a long, drawn out process to eliminate all the guards using stealthy methods; just going in there and shooting up the place isn’t an option.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have enough good camera angles; it also doesn’t help that there aren’t that many things I can use for booby traps and of those things that do exist, only one of them is lethal… and it’s nowhere near where the main body of guards are hanging out.  All of the other potential traps just put them to sleep and they eventually wake up again.  In one attempt to free the prisoner, it took me over an hour to clear out all the guards before I could actually go inside Alcatraz and spring the guy… only to have that fucking helicopter – which somehow seems to know exactly where I am in the prison even though they can’t see me – blow me away before I can get close to escaping.  It’s annoying and aggravating and that’s being nice about it so I wound up quitting the mission so I can do some other stuff so I can get some stuff so I can deal with the helicopter.  That didn’t make me happy having to do that; I can accept screwing up a mission because of a mistake I made but I just have a problem with failing a mission because I don’t have the tools available to deal with all possible threats – it’s like taking a knife to a gun fight.

This game has a couple of toys:  A drone and an RC (remote controlled) wheeled thingy call a Jumper… because it can really jump up onto things.  The Jumper is cool because I can use it to sneak into places and do the physical hacking that sometimes has to be done while I sit outside and away from guards and the cops.  Moving vehicles in this game is just as crazy as in the original game (you just do not want to know how many cars and motorcycles I’ve trashed and I wasn’t actually being chased) so controlling these toys is a bit iffy.  I use the Jumper a lot and I’m just now getting the hang of sending it into air ducts and sneaking past motion sensors, etc.; piloting the drone isn’t that bad but unlike the Jumper, it can’t interact with anything – I can spy on things, interact with a camera, even hack a NPC but I can’t use it to unlock anything that requires physically being able to plug something in.

Like I said, the story line leaves something to be desired and, just my opinion, I would have thought that for Watch Dogs 2, they would have recruited Aidan – our hero in Chicago for the first game – to help them get rid of Blume and ctOS 2.0 once and for all.  Instead, the only character they brought back from the original game is one that not only didn’t actually do anything in the first game, he’s not doing anything in this game except running his mouth, the video game version of an REMF – a rear echelon motherfucker – who’s good for sending me out on missions and getting me killed while staying nice and safe back at headquarters.  Don’t get me wrong – the game is fun and has a few surprises – like at least three gangs that I’ve identified so far and gangs you can sic on a target or even the police.  One mission had me stealing a car from them, something they weren’t happy about nor were they happy about my blowing up quite a few of their members prior to snatching the car so it wasn’t surprising that they chased me all over the Bay Area until I finally managed to ditch them… and the cops who got in on the act.

It took a little while for Watch Dogs to grow on me but it’s taking much longer for Watch Dogs 2 but I’ll keep hacking away at it and, who knows, maybe this game is really better than it appears at the moment!

 

Road Rage

If you’ve read about my playing Watch Dogs, you’ve seen where driving a vehicle in the game is a comedy of errors but I forgot to mention something about that:  When driving in this game, I have a major case of road rage.

Now, in real life driving, it’s not as if I’ve had some unkind things to say to some of my fellow motorists, you know, the folks who drive under the speed limit or when the light changes to green, they’re sitting there as if they’re waiting for another color and, yes, I’m sure I’ve given people reason to be a bit… miffed at me.  But this game makes me nuts when I gotta drive somewhere.

The folks who designed this game could have made it very interesting if they made you obey traffic laws or risk getting pulled over by the cops, a problem since you’re the main character in this game and the cops would very much like to have a very long talk with you about your vigilante behavior.  But since they didn’t, it get to run traffic lights and stop signs, drive on the wrong side of the road, cause accidents and, sometimes, when driving from one location to another, I will run vehicles off the road… because they’re slowing me down from getting to where I need to be.

Now, unless I’m doing something that has a time limit, I’m really not in a hurry to complete a main mission so, um, there’s no reason for me to be in a hurry and I can actually obey real-life traffic laws… and Lord knows that I’ve tried to drive like I’ve got some sense… and it’s just not working.  I drive along nicely and they drive so slowly that, um, I get impatient and the road rage commences along with breaking every traffic law in existence, oh, like driving on the sidewalk, for instance.

 

Watch Dogs Update

On 27 June, I finished the final act in Watch Dogs, technically beating the game even though there were many other activities – side missions – that could be done.  I did a few of them but the others, well, after the intensity of doing the story line missions, stuff like tailing someone seemed mundane and unexciting so there was only one thing to do:

Start over from the beginning.  As I clicked the “A” button on “New Game” I saw the warning that all my previous progress would be erased and, for a moment, I was reluctant to continue because I’d gotten a ton of money, had every weapon that could be had, even had a rather impressive stable of cars I’d hacked from NPCs and/or outright stolen as they sat empty at the curb or wherever they happened to be parked.  Not sure if I ever mentioned it but carjacking someone will guarantee those pesky, swarming cops will be all over you in a heartbeat if you don’t remember to activate a Jam Calls and cut off the call for help.  That was a lesson I learned when I first started playing the game… and I haven’t carjacked anyone since.  Anyway…

I figured that if I had accumulated all that stuff once, I could do it again; I also thought that now that I know what has to be done and could kinda/sorta easily remember how I did it (or eventually managed to do it), the second time around should go better… which is exactly what didn’t happen.  I still crack myself up trying to drive in the game and you should see the look on my face when I have to get into a car chase because I know for a fact that some T-boning and quite a few head-on crashes are gonna happen, right along with mowing down any hapless NPC who happens to be in my erratic path of travel.  What has amazed me is how I’m making mistakes that I didn’t make the first time I played, simple stuff like turning around so I can scan the area behind me (some of those bad guys are pretty damned sneaky) and stepping right off the edge of a building, killing myself and having to start the mission over again.

I don’t know if it’s me or it’s a gamer kind of thing but I find myself being more… careless even though I know good and damned well that some missions require a lot of patience and stealth and I’ve found that, on several occasions, how I finished a mission the first time doesn’t work the second time through – damn you, Ubisoft!  Some missions were easier the second time through while the ones that were easier the first time have proven to be anything but.  There’s one mission where I have to infiltrate the gang’s headquarters (and a place I’ve been to already in the game) but using a thug I’ve co-opted to do my leg work.  I have to get him to his boss’s server room unseen by the gang members roaming around all over the place and, of course, in the path I need to guide him and then only using and hacking the various cameras.  Well, folks, the first time I did this, my patsy only got busted (and got the shit shot out of him) once; the second time?  I was consistently getting him caught and shot and I realized, oh, around the third or fourth time failing the mission, that I couldn’t remember exactly how I did it before.  I realized that I did remember how I did it; it was just a thing that what I did the first time wasn’t working the second time but, yeah, I managed to get my patsy in place and accomplish the mission even though the fool got cold feet and eventually got busted by his boss (who is also his cousin) and, presumably, tossed out of a window.

I’ve gone into combat areas without making sure I had everything I needed, like an important tool called a ctOS Scan which, when activated, gives me a picture of where all the bad guys are located.  I learned that going in “blind” is really dumb and I got my ass shot off several times before I literally slapped myself in the head because I’d forgotten something important:  I could quit the mission, go load up on all the stuff I needed, and do the mission again.  Duh.  I’m still doing stupid shit, namely, blowing myself up with IEDs and grenades; the way you toss these items can be iffy especially when you’re hiding behind something.  An arrow-like thingy pops up and you have to point it to the area you want the device to land, but the targeting arrow thingy doesn’t always point where I think it’s going so I wind up tossing a grenade… right onto whatever I happen to be hiding behind.  Or, once, I tossed a grenade toward a cluster of bad guys and, my friends, I was kinda drooling over being able to take them all out at one time… until the grenade bounced off of something and landed in my lap.

I’ve learned a greater appreciation for the game’s physics engine, let me tell ya.  Now, it hasn’t all been a series of self-induced fuck ups; I’m still having fun playing the game the second time and I’ve developed a fondness for infiltrating Gang Hideouts.  For these you have to target and tag the person to be taken down without killing him but the bad guys around him are fair game.  Okay, okay, so a few times I accidentally killed the guy and had to start over and, um, okay, a few times, the damned fool walked close enough to a perfectly placed Proximity IED meant for someone else and blew himself up.  Those things aside, I arm myself with my silenced .45 or maybe the silenced SMG (sub machine gun) and have found myself giggling gleefully as everyone except the target gets a bullet to the head, leaving just me and the target who gets beat down with my trusty ASP baton.  Well, um, damn, one such mission didn’t go well and the target got away and I had to chase him down and take him out without killing him, which I did (after causing so much damage and civilian casualties that not only did my rating go down, I was feeling kinda bad about it) but not until he managed to call  his boys for back up and now, they’re chasing me and they are as relentless as those damned cops.

I wound up destroying my car and before it blew up and killed me – and make me restart the mission – I bail out into the river and start swimming… and the bad guys are on the other side following and shooting at me.  I’m thinking they should give up in a moment… but they don’t and I’m a sitting duck swimming around to find a place I can get out of the water – sadly, I can’t stop swimming, pull a weapon and shoot back.  Eventually, I get to dry land and the bad guys I didn’t managed to wipe out during the car chase are still getting into position to take me out.  Now, what I should have done was get out of the water and haul ass away from them… but, no; I arm myself with my M1017 – a “Barrett” .50 sniper rifle – and I’ll admit to having a Borderlands flashback.  I take out the guy “closest” to me – he’s hiding behind a wall directly in front of me on the other side of the river and I send a bullet through the wall and take him out.  Yeah, it was like that but, wait, the moment gets better.  One of the things I learned playing Borderlands (which has the most excellent sniper rifles) is perfectly leading a moving target and executing the perfect head shot.  No, it’s not as easy as it sounds (and I know that because I’ve actually had weapons training so I do know how to shoot) and thanks to the game’s physics engine, which perfectly simulates gun movement due to breathing and heartbeat – you can see the wavering when you aim.  Anyway, the last bad guy is running down the road and I pick a spot I know he’s gonna run through and pull the trigger…. now.

His head exploded – never saw that in the game the first time – and I actually started laughing my ass off because the shot was perfect even though the actual controller motions were anything but.  I said, “Thanks, Borderlands…” and walked out of the area and onto the next mission.

 

Watch Dogs

I came to this game “late,” meaning I didn’t get it when it first came out (whenever that was) and Watch Dogs 2 is already out there.  If you remember my last post about gaming, man, this game was making me nuts because I was learning what it was I had to do and driving the various vehicles.  Well, I finally figured out how to play the game and I’m on the last thing to do in story mode:  Find the guy I was partnered with in the beginning of the story and end him since he’s the reason why Aidan (our hero and sometimes villain) got into this mess in the first place.

I’m still wrecking vehicles as if I’ve never used an Xbox controller before, though…

There’s a sense of familiarity with the game now; as I roamed the city; instead of me asking myself, “Where the hell am I?” and other such question as I did so often early into the game, it feels like I’ve been playing this game for years instead of about a week or so.  As I was hurtling from one part of the city to another to do another task, I really noticed the quality of the graphics in the game and they’re beautiful and quite realistic, right down to the sound tires make when going across a drawbridge.  There are day cycles, night cycles and it even rains and the game’s physics engine is so good that while driving in the rain, I pressed the accelerator too hard… and spun out as if I’d hydroplaned.  I just wish that the people who created the game had provided an option to adjust the controller sensitivity; there are times in the game when I’ll react to something quickly – but Aidan doesn’t; sometimes it’s just annoying, sometimes it’s gotten me killed.  Still, my son-in-law (a fellow gamer) did warn me that the controls were hard to get used to when he said that I should check out this game.

This game, more than any other game I’ve played, reminds me of an older game called “Crackdown,” which took the gaming world by storm (and won all kinds of awards including the coveted Game of the Year award) with it’s amazing graphics and open world/sandbox platform which gave you a whole city to play in while being able to interact with the actual gaming environment in a way that hadn’t been done before, like being able to pick up a car or even one of the many non-playable characters (NPCs) and throw them.  Those of us who loved Crackdown are waiting with bated breath for Crackdown 3, which promises to turn sandbox-type games on their heads.

Watch Dogs, at least for me, has this same kind of feel as I roam this version of Chicago and interacting with the environment, from hacking people’s cell phones to being able to jam communications, cause area-wide blackouts and, one of my favorite “hacks” in the game, blow up guards by detonating any grenades they’re carrying.  This game has puzzles in the form of hacking computer system; some are easy, some are rather complicated and then made even more so by only giving you a few seconds to complete connections before the “intrusion” is detected and now you gotta start over again.

As when I play Borderlands, there are some moments when you’d better not even think about charging in the front door with your gun blazing; stealth and some kinda serious thinking are called for; it took me almost an hour to penetrate one facility simply because the direct approach kept getting me killed whenever I tried it from different approaches.  One hack, called a ctOS Scan, lets you see where all of the bad guys are in a target area; some patrol in fixed areas, some roam around a bit unpredictably and, as you might expect, as usually between you and the target you need to get to and hack… and then you have to escape.

I like the weaponry in the game, from IEDs to fragmentation grenades along with a slew of pistols, assault and sniper rifles.  So far, my favorite weapon is the Spec Ops silenced 1911 .45 pistol; when you’re skulking around a place and the cameras (which you can hack) aren’t providing enough views of the target, stealth is called for and since, um, I’ve come to love shooting bad guys, ah, man, there’s no better thrill than having one of those pesky guards approach where I’m hiding and I get to put a silenced round into his unsuspecting head… then cap the guy who finds his body in the same fashion.  I like the sniper rifles – I learned to really like them playing Borderlands – but aiming them can be… suspect to the point where they’re not as reliable as I’d like.  Then again, if the game designers made it too easy, the game wouldn’t be all that challenging, would it?

One task I had was to intercept a convoy of bad guys and take down two suspects… and the best weapon for this was the semi-automatic grenade launcher.  Admittedly, it took me a few times to complete this mission and for a couple of reasons; one, it was hard for me to tell the bad guys from the innocent civilians running around my kill zone and the bad guy I didn’t see would off me.  The other thing was it just took too long for me to switch from my grenade launcher to an assault rifle or maybe an SMG, although the game says there’s a quick switch toggle but, so far, I’ve not been able to get it to work.  But, yeah, that grenade launcher is sweet because as much as I like shooting bad guys, I also love blowing up shit!

Even though I’ve gotten used to the game, um, I still find myself doing dumb shit like, uh, hmm, blowing myself up with my own IEDs/frag grenades.  Or like the few times I was standing at the edge of a building and accidentally hit the “climb down” button, jumped off the building and died.  Or, as I did last night, turn a corner the wrong way and wind up getting wedged into a space I can’t get out of while the bad guy I was chasing got away.  I’m sure Linda gets a kick out of listening to me rant and rave at my own stupidity as I play the game as I either cuss something out or call myself an idiot or a dumb ass for making mistakes that, at this point in my ability to play the game, I shouldn’t be making.  But, sometimes, yeah, it’s my own fault; I got caught up in the moment of taking out five or six very bad guys and had totally forgotten about the half dozen Proximity IEDs I had sowed in the area and, um, especially the one I walked right past which, yup, exploded and took me out.  Even the cat looked at me funny as I kicked my own ass for such a stupid oversight.

The last mission is proving to be the bitch to end all bitches; I’ve attempted it five times now and, so far, nothing I’ve done has proven successful and the fact that the game designers gave the “Chicago PD” a swarm mentality, sheesh, well, it’s hard to get shit done when every damned cop in the city – along with a helicopter I can’t shoot down – is swarming all over me at almost every turn.  I need a plan… and I haven’t come up with one yet so I’ve been running around the city doing the side jobs, like tracking down burner cell phones, ammo dumps, and even preventing street crime to improve my reputation with the civilian population so that when they see me, they won’t drop a dime on me to those pain in the ass cops.  One really laughable moment came when the cops finally ID’d me and put a warrant out for my arrest; apparently video game cops aren’t fans of vigilantism as their real counterparts are.  I’m listening to the news talking about the warrant when a NPC standing in front of me pulls out her cell phone, says, “It’s him!  It’s The Vigilante!” waves at me, and takes my picture.  This is what I love about open world/sandbox type games – you just never know what the NPCs will do, like the one who was entertaining two ladies and beat-boxing for them, or the one guy hanging with his homies and spitting rhymes and, yeah, even four guys hanging on a corner and crooning in perfect harmony.

I’ve actually stopped what I was doing to just watch the NPCs and the shit they do.  I also get a kick out of how they do “normal” stuff, like get into car accidents (and without my help); some have road rage and if you bump into one, don’t be surprised if they cuss you out and threaten to whup your ass.

I really like this game and so much that I’ve started it over on my second Xbox One profile, the thought here is that, hopefully, I’ve learned from my mistakes made the first time so the second time should be better… and that’s not proving to be the case.  Oh, sure, I know what I have to do now but that doesn’t make it easier to do but, at least for this “do over” I already have the silenced .45 and, ya mon, it’s a game changer…

 

Let the Games Begin

The other day, a guy was making a food delivery and he seemed kinda stunned when he looked to his right a little and saw a game paused on my Xbox One, prompting him to ask who was playing the game.  Since I know there’s just the two of us and our cat, it seemed to be an odd question and more so since Linda wasn’t even in the room… and the cat was in hiding (and can’t hold a controller).

So when I told him I was playing Battleborn, he asked how old I was, his surprised deepened as if it never occurred to him that someone my age can play games on an Xbox One… or at all.  I offered unto him that I happened to know there were people older than I am playing games like Borderlands, Call of Duty, Gears of War, etc., and, I dunno, I guess I got some major props from this guy.

I play games of some kind every day, several times a day on either my iPad or my Samsung tablet and, yes, my Xbox One rarely gets turned off because I usually have a game in progress.  Thanks to my Xbox Live Gold membership, I have access to a lot of free games like the one I’m playing now, Watch Dogs, or the occasional free trial for games like Battleborn, which I went and purchased.  Both of these games reminded me of something kinda important, like how tough it can be to figure out a new-to-you game and more so when there’s no manual readily available.

Sure, I can go online and down one… but where’s the fun in that?  Yesterday, I’m playing Watch Dogs and feeling the frustration a bit because I haven’t really caught on to all of the game’s nuances, which is getting me killed repeatedly and all because I have no idea what to expect despite knowing what an objective is.  Like the part that drove me crazy for a while – getting sent to prison to find this guy and convince him not to rat me out to the cops – and only armed with my trusty and powerful smartphone that allows me to hack pretty much any- and everything.

I get out of my cell but now I have rooms to sneak into, stuff to hack in order to find this guy but I gotta do it without any guards seeing me.  Getting past this part was aggravating but I finally get to where this guy is – the guards are kicking his ass to convince him to give me up and now I finally get my hands on a weapon – a shotgun – and it’s simple:  Take out the guards, question the dude, get out.

Uh, not that simple.  It took me about fourteen tries to kill all of the guards… then the game tosses in something I’d not encountered:  A practically bulletproof “enforcer” who blew me away while I sat here asking, “What the hell is that?”

Now, I’m not above looking up the fan Wiki and finding out what I don’t know about a game… and it seems that if all you have is a fairly wimpy shotgun, the only way to kill an enforcer is to shoot him in the head… and as many times as you can while he’s busting caps in you.

Took me another five or six times before I finally offed the enforcer and the other two “normal” guards that sneaked in and capped me once.  Now I gotta get out of the prison, past a slew of cops waiting just outside the door and, oh, yeah, a helicopter!  While I’m doing this – and it only took three tries to eventually escape – I was thinking about how much fun it is to learn a game blind but, again, how frustrating it can be because you just have no idea what the game is going to throw at you next.

There are some laughable and somewhat embarrassing moments, like any time I steal a car and have to drive it.  I am an experienced in-game car driver but this game reminds me of the very first time I tried to drive a car in a game.  The driving controls are familiar… but the way the cars respond has me spending more time wrecking them than actually driving them; in one part where I was being chased by the police, man, I destroyed more property than Hancock and killed more civilians than in any game I’ve ever played and all because the damned cars are hard to control.  I did (eventually) escape… but not after totally trashing ten different cars and hundreds of civilians!

I’m gonna take a closer look at the sensitivity controls; they either need to be dialed down or up so that I have better control; otherwise, the civilian population will get wiped out.  Oh, before I forget, this game is played in a beautiful rendition of Chicago, a city I’ve been to quite a few times so that helps… some but the game’s graphics is among the best I’ve seen.

Now, Battleborn.  It’s a great game if you like shooting things and the game has a slew of characters at your disposal and all with different abilities and weapons.  You can play it solo or join up with others.  To learn the game, I started playing solo and some levels are easy, some tough and intensive, but I’m thinking, okay, this is challenging and I can see why the preferred playing mode is multiplayer because there’s just too much for one player to pay attention to and tends to result in a lot of respawning.

But I’m getting through it until the “episode” I’m currently stuck in; I have the “help” of another character fighting off all kinds of enemies until I get to the very last one and, yeah, I’m pretty pissed off because for this round, I have to protect a device from being destroyed and I’ve not found a way to keep it unscathed.  The last attacker shows up, I’m throwing everything I have at it -and right  along with some weapon emplacements – when the bad guy backs way out of weapons range and launches a mess of missiles at the device.

Mission failed.  Player totally bent out of shape, hands hurting from gripping the controller tightly and applying body language that never helps anything and the beginnings of a headache.  I’m used to playing games where there are multiple playable characters that have different abilities, like any of the Borderlands games and because I play these games, I’m fairly decent at wiping out multiple attackers but I’ll admit that Borderlands has spoiled me because I have at my disposal a shitload of weapons I can pick and choose from to decimate the bad guys and to great and spectacular effect.

Battleborn gives me one, “upgradable” weapon along with a “DNA helix” of other abilities that I have to pick and choose from and, frankly, with the characters I’ve played with so far, some of those extra abilities suck.  Badly.  I know the level I’m currently stuck on can be beaten… I just haven’t figured out how to do it without recruiting another player to come into my game and help me out… which I kinda stubbornly refuse to do because I am a gamer, have been one for a long time now, and ego demands that I exhaust everything I know of before calling for help.

But it’s still fun even though both of these games are good at frustrating me.  Just as I learned to play the Borderlands games so that I’m not really thinking about what I’m doing or how to do something, I will eventually master these games as well.

Eventually.

 

Yes, I’m a Gamer!

My gaming days go all the way back to playing Pong and, today – thanks to my baby, Linda, I have an Xbox One after trading in my Xbox 360 and my PlayStation 3.  A few years ago, my daughter and son-in-law talked me into playing this crazy-assed game called “Borderlands,” a first person shooter (FPS) game and a type of game I used to suck at; I tried to play “Halo” when it first came out and got my ass handed to me because I couldn’t coordinate what I was seeing with what I was supposed to be doing… so I avoided these kind of games… until I was finally convinced that I had to get Borderlands so they could teach me how to play it.

Since I didn’t have a working Xbox 360 headset, we coordinated my training over Skype… and I got hooked big time and eventually conquered Borderlands… then it was on to Borderlands 2… then Borderlands:  The Pre Sequel.  And along the way, I learned that I just love killing things and blowing shit up – it is strangely relaxing as much as it can raise my blood pressure.  So, when I got my Xbox One – without Kinect – since it didn’t come with a game, I needed a game… and got Borderlands:  The Handsome Collection which is Borderlands 2 and The Pre Sequel in one package and includes some downloadable content (DLC) that I would have had to pay extra for.

Now, before giving up my PlayStation, I had already beaten The Pre Sequel with three of the four available characters so having to start over on the new Xbox platform wasn’t a big deal; I choose to play as Handsome Jack (thanks to the included DLC) and quickly finished the game… but along the way, I noticed two new locations I could travel to:  The Holodome and Deck 13 1/2 so I said to myself, “Before you move on to True Vault Hunter mode (same game, higher level of difficulty), let’s check out Deck 13 1/2!”

And I wish I hadn’t.  Oh, I finally beat that part of the game… but it wasn’t easy and by far one of the craziest game modes I’ve ever played.  I was spending hours with controller in hand, constantly fighting (and killing) bad guys and with weapons that were barely equal to the task; every night, when I had reached my endurance limits – read this as I was either very frustrated or frustrated with the beginnings of a major headache – I’d turn off the Xbox, shake my head, and wonder why I choose to subject myself to this madness, like playing the game itself wasn’t bad enough.  As I’d climb into bed with my last actions (and brutal destruction) still reverberating in my head, I’d tell myself that I’m not even gonna play the game tomorrow.

And found myself doing it anyway.  To play Borderlands – any version – you not only find yourself playing with weaponry that’s pretty cool but, often, not equal to the level of bad guy trying to make you respawn and start the level over again.  You need strategy and some ingenuity and a bus load of luck as you increase levels and the bad guys get harder to kill.  It’s not unusual for you to wind up facing, say, a Level 35 bad guy/boss but you’re only Level 30… and your available weapons might only be up to Level 25.  So, as I’ve found throughout my Borderlands experience, firepower alone isn’t going to help.

I started the Deck 13 1/2 debacle at a respectable Level 35 – the boss, which I had to defeat twice was Level 38, and my weapons averaged Level 32 and you can imagine that I spent a lot of time respawning because I not only had to face the boss but more bad guys than I could keep track of.  I was running out of money to keep myself stocked with ammo for the weapons it took me a while to figure out would put a dent in the big bad boss’s health meter; my weapons – and I was carrying 30 of them – were proving themselves to be barely effective and everything I tried resulted in a respawning – which was taking chunks out of my available cash as well.  The good thing was that I was still leveling up; some of the bad guys I was killing were dropping better weapons than what I was carrying; so I could sell the ones that weren’t working so I could have respawning funds and to buy ammo.

I was getting closer to defeating the boss every time but my frustration levels were off the chart because I’d get close to offing him… then either get killed in spectacular fashion or make what would be a rookie mistake and get cornered by a flocks of the other  bad guys I couldn’t pay attention to – but I had to.  After two days of getting my ass kicked, I got up to Level 37, just one level below the boss’s strength and, oh, I was doing better… but he was still wiping the board with me.  I died many deaths; once, I took a rare moment of rest and saw that I had maybe four shots left to kill this worst boss I’ve ever faced… and only got in three of the before, once again, having to respawning.

I almost screamed loudly out of sheer frustration; I gently put the controller down – I leaned a long time ago not to throw them – got up, took a piss, drank some water – ate my last doughnut – and said, “Okay, motherfucker, your ass belongs to me; I’ve had just about enough of your shit!”  Two hours later – and somehow managing to not get killed, I defeated the boss, did a lot of fist pumps, shit the Xbox down and went to bed very happy…

Oh, I have to mention that the folks who got me addicted to this game do not have this version (and Borderlands 3 was just announced for a 2017 release) and I’ve been riding their asses to get caught up so they can suffer and have their ability to play the game challenged.  I still need to get a headset adapter but I can still video conference with them on Skype…

 

QatQi

First, I have no friggin’ idea what “QatQi” might mean or if it means anything.  What I do know is this is a game I found for my iPad yesterday while looking for something new and, hopefully, exciting.  While checking out some word game apps, I ran across this game and both the name and screenshots associated with the app caught my eye and I thought, okay, let’s check this out – how bad can it be?

I love word games and I spend lots of time playing “Words With Friends,” “Scrabble,” and even the now-venerable “Bookworm.”  QatQi (pronounced “cat-key”), however, is unlike any word game I’ve ever played or even seen before and it’s rather addictive, right up until you almost literally wind up boxing yourself into a corner and with a bunch of letters you can’t really use.  Let me see if I can explain the game…

You open the app, which is free on Apple’s App Store (but has in-game purchases available) and you see a multilayered circle, the months of the year within the innermost circle, and the name of the game… like you’re gonna forget it… and maybe if you have an iDevice that’s compatible with this game, you might want to forget the name of the game.  Anyway, there are seven levels in this multilayered, “spoked” wheel, for lack of a better word; each level, for some reason, represents, say, May 5th to May 11th and the seven levels are the days of the week – and this is using the current calendar – May 5th was on a Monday and Mondays are the easiest puzzles to work out and get progressively harder as you move through the week.

The object of the game is easy:  Spell words and rack up the points – you can spell words horizontally and vertically only – but what isn’t as easy as it looks is that you have to make your words fit within random “borders” – I can’t think of a better word but I can tell you that some of the shapes makes playing this game both fun and quite nerve-wracking.  When you successfully use all of your letters – and the amount of letters needed to complete the puzzle do vary, like the one I’m doing now – and stopped playing so I could write this – has 125 letters and, yup, as you use letters, more take their place.   When you complete the round, you’ll see your score and if you’ve allowed the game to know where in the world you are, you’ll see how you stack up with other players around the world, in the US (since I live here), the state I live in, the county, city, and zip code and while I wasn’t surprised that I’m the only player playing in my zip code, I was a bit surprised that I’m not the only person in my state playing this lunatic of a game.

I know I haven’t done a good job of describing this game but you folks out there with an iDevice running iOS 7.0 or better can go to the App Store and read the description of the game and if you wanna test your vocabulary and puzzle-solving skills, download it and give it a try.  The game’s pretty to look at and has enough levels to keep you plenty occupied… or have you reaching for some headache relief.  When I started playing, I was rather tentative because I wasn’t quite sure how to play the game and I honestly don’t remember if there’s a tutorial at the beginning of the game but it didn’t take me long to figure it out and I stupidly thought, “Okay, this is kinda cool – shouldn’t be that hard to do…”

Yeah, I know – famous last words; it didn’t take me long before I got myself into some terrible messes that required me to restart the puzzle instead of using up all of my undos – the in-game purchases give you the opportunity to buy more stuff but if you’re not of a mind to do this – and I’m not – you can get more by either waiting 20-25 minutes or by watching the occasional video about other games to get yourself 20 undos.  I can’t honestly say that I love this game but, wow, it is a lot of fun to play.

Oh, if you don’t have an iDevice, I got some bad news for ya:  There’s no Android version of this game.  I have a feeling that I’m going to be playing this game for a very long time…