Oops, we did it again. As it turns out, Courtney Gears is not that innocent. In fact, she may be involved with Dr. Nefarious and his plot to destroy all organic life in the galaxy.

Hopefully, we can use that to our advantage, getting close to our villain in the hopes of taking him out in time for the next episode of Janice and Lance.

One of the fun parts of going through the Obani Moons and Aridia is seeing how the cutscenes for both of those planets deliberately avoid making use of Clank/Clunk because players have the option of playing them both before and after going to Holostar Studios. In other words, the team at Insomniac can’t say with any degree of certainty whether Clank or Clunk is the one hanging around with Ratchet. It’s the kind of detail that is hard to unnotice once it gets noticed.

That said, Holostar Studios is another fascinating area, and one of the types of levels that I do adore in video games. As a rule, everything that exists in video games is artificial, simply due to the nature of the medium. When a level tasks the player to perform something that’s fake in-universe, like shooting a movie, the additional layer of abstraction allows us to play around with the artificial nature of what we’re doing.

It’s something I’ll always find amusing.

Our return to the Solana Galaxy has been met with a warm welcome from many faces, both new and familiar. We’re… I mean Captain Qwark is… leading the charge? Seriously?

Unfortunately. But lucky for us, we have more than enough raw firepower to compensate for our so-called leader of the “Q Force”.

Something that was brought up as a topic of discussion during this episode was the idea of dynamic difficulty. We often forget that it was a very long time until adjustable difficulty was a standard feature in gaming. Prior to the late sixth and early seventh generation of game consoles, it wasn’t always expected for games to allow players to fine-tune the difficulty to better suit their desired play experience.

And yet, many games before did get easier or harder to scale with the player’s level of skill, they just did it more discreetly, rather than shift a difficulty mode. We saw it more obviously in Crash Bandicoot, where when we kept dying in certain sections the game would give us extra masks and turn regular crates into checkpoints for us.

The Ratchet and Clank series is more subtle about it, such that most players won’t notice, but it does do something similar. Each time we die, the game begins to fudge variables like bullet spread and enemy accuracy to make the same section easier. Additionally, more obviously in Going Commando and later, we keep gaining experience for health and weapon upgrades with each death, meaning we’re also growing stronger with each failed attempt until the two lines meet and the level is easy enough for us to beat it while still providing an adequate challenge.

Mike Stout and Tony Garcia talk about this during some of their Developer Commentary Let’s Plays, where they mentioned that the goal is to keep the average number of deaths consistent across various degrees of player skill. If the player was performing too well, the game would dynamically grow more difficult, and the opposite is also true.

It makes the conversation over games getting “dummed down” amusing because even if players never realized it, a lot gets fudged in their favor when they play to ensure they have a smooth experience.

As we’ve previously discussed while playing Master Duel, I am fond of the Branded Despia archetype. I love that fusion, which was once one of the worst ways to summon monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, has become something not only viable but good.

And now, thanks to the latest release on the platform, they’ve been brought up to the full power level that people who play the TCG enjoy. With the addition of Branded Fusion and a few new boss monsters, we can turn a few cards in hand into a powerful board state.

Welcome to Branded Despia DPE.

My version of the deck runs both the Brave/Adventurer Engine, with Water Enchantress and Rite of Armesir, and the recently nerfed Destroyer Pheonix Enforcer engine. Both of them play relatively nicely with Despia as long as we don’t need to use our normal summon of Springans Kitt or Aluber to fetch out our Branded Fusion.

Part of what makes this deck so appealing is that it is incredibly easy to pilot once you understand the combo chains and how they lead to powerful payoffs like Mirrorjade, Guardian Chimera, Gryphon Rider, and DPE. If we go second, we don’t have many lines of interaction, but if we can go first we can set up the board with a series of powerful negates.

Though we’re not completely powerless if we go second since we still have access to cards like Maxx “C” and Super Polymerization to neutralize powerful boss monsters before we make our plays.

It’s both a fun and powerful deck that’s sadly difficult to build because of all the SRs and URs involved, but not impossible to.

We’re back with some of the greatest heroes the galaxy has ever known… and Captain Qwark is apparently here too. The last in the original trilogy, it’s time to begin Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. A new villain has come to threaten an old haunt, so we can’t just let that go unpunished.

We’re going home.

Mike Stout and Tony Garcia’s Developer Commentary can be found here.
The Golden Bolt’s retrospective can be found here.

Out of all the games in the original trilogy, this third game is probably the most hotly contentious of them all. Critically and commercially, it was a massive success on the level of its predecessors, but there is also no denying that it went through a troubled development process.

And already we’re seeing a lot of the side effects of that troubled development. Things like ship combat getting cut because the person programming it was so tired of being overworked that he couldn’t take it anymore and left don’t happen in a well-managed game development studio. As someone who adores this franchise, it does hurt to know how much crunch went into its creation, but we can’t just refuse to acknowledge it.

Thankfully though, that does seem to be a thing of the past since the latest game from Insomniac, Rift Apart, was famously finished without crunch.

As anyone who has followed my content for a long time would know, I have a long-standing love affair with the immersive sim genre. Games like Thief, Hitman, and Dishonored all rank among some of my favorite games of all time, so any similar games in the vein tend to grab my attention.

In comes this little indie game called Gloomwood, which has all of those familiar trappings. And… well I can’t just ignore it!

Though the level we played feels more literally than I would want or expect from an immersive sim, it’s difficult at this point to determine if that’s how the game will play from here on out, or if that was only because this is the tutorial stage and it needs to be linear to get the player familiar with how Gloomwood plays.

That said, the atmosphere and setting are pitch perfect, making sure that the player feels like the odds are stacked against them. The guards are eerie and unsettling, with enough power to make us fearful of taking any more than one of them at a time. And yet, there are obvious gaps in their behavior and patrol patterns that allow us a daring, intrepid rogue to slip passed them or take them out silently. The graphics and art style also help recapture the feeling of launching Thief: The Dark Project for the first time.

I’ll be playing this more in my off time, looking forward to seeing how it develops.

We’ve managed to get this far, sneaking our way into the Hackett Estate using tunnels that run underneath them, and avoided killing any of our camp counselors up to this point. The question remains whether or not we can keep them alive, or if things will take a catastrophic turn.

Either way, Acharky and I will finish our time with The Quarry.

Yeah… so that could’ve gone better. Some of it is absolutely my bad for simply making the wrong choices, but I blame the game for what happened to Caitlyn.

I hold to the comments I had during the credits. The Quarry isn’t a bad game, but it is let down by a glacially slow start and a weirdly rushed conclusion that both feel lackluster in comparison to other works by the same development team. Part of what makes The Dark Pictures Anthology so powerful is that those games are all short, paced in accordance with the reduced length to produce tight, concise narratives better fitting their cinematic aspirations.

The Quarry neither puts its best foot forward nor ends on a great note, but that doesn’t stop it from being a good time.

And next week, we continue our PS2 adventures with Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal.

Sam Barlow has become a well-known name in the indie games community after his work on Her Story, and later Telling Lies. Now, he’s back with another entry in that space, called Immortality.

Let’s give it a shot, and see if lives up to its predecessors.

It’s difficult to judge the game based on what we’ve seen in this first hour because these games live and die by their stories. And if this game is like either of his previous works, there will come a dramatic plot twist that recontextualizes everything we’ve seen and heard up to this point when we eventually uncover it.

That said, I like this new system for transitioning between shots. It produces some extremely cool effects and connections from scene to scene, and will likely result in players all taking vastly different routes through the game. The only problem I’m having now is that it’s far more difficult to go back through clips that we wanted to explore other branching-off points from them than it was to just write down the keywords that we wanted to search in a notepad somewhere and come back to them after we finished looking through the footage we wanted to.

I’m curious, and looking forward to diving back in.

Our camp counselors are still alive, at least for now. We’ve at last encountered the many threats that we’ll be confronted with in the woods this night. From monstrous creatures of the night to the people hunting them, our adversaries are out hunting.

As apparently, so are we. Let’s just hope that Acharky and I haven’t led our charges to their doom.

One of the fun aspects of incorporating “standard” movie monsters in your work, like vampires or werewolves, is establishing the “rules” that they’re governed by. There are always subtle differences between how one work handles its monsters compared to another. For example, the werewolves in this world explode out of their human skin and can’t cross stagnant water. The rules themselves don’t matter too much, what matters is that whatever rules get established get adhered to.

This was also a very significant episode as far as establishing those rules go. We know who the werewolves are and how to stop others from transforming into them. All that remains is to capitalize on our newfound knowledge.

And with luck, we’ll finish the adventure next week and get back to our classic platforming pals!

Patch day has once again come to us denizens of Eorzea, and what a stellar patch it has been. The MSQ looks to be heading in an intriguing direction, the Pandaemonium raids are continuing, and a new season of PvP is upon us.

But none of that matters to us today. What does matter is that I’m the proud new owner of a private island off the coast of Vlybrand! It’s going to be my personal getaway, so let’s built it together!

The thing that amuses me most about Island Sanctuary is that despite the fact it’s intended to be relaxing content, Final Fantasy XIV players have approached it in the most hardcore manner they possibly can. I’ve seen a lot of people trying to reach a max-level island as fast as they possibly can.

Meanwhile, I’m just here to relax and do some light gathering for an hour or two at most each day.

The wayward camp councilors of Hackett’s Quarry have been left on their own, with instructions to hide in the cabin and lock the doors until daybreak. Naturally, as they’re all teenagers, they ignored those orders and instead chose to throw a wild party in the middle of the woods.

Hopefully, with Acharky and I as their ever-present guides, their mistake won’t be a fatal one.

Things are starting to get serious, and we’ve finally seen the monsters that will be our adversaries for the duration of this adventure. These are the kind of werewolves you bring home to your mother, these are the more terrifying, horrific variety. And it looks like they injured, without killing, one of our charges.

What I respect most about these games is that the development team doesn’t really make an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes most of the time. If the player knows their way around horror movies, they’ll be able to accurately predict what can and will happen in the story, because these are almost always love letters to the genre. Some might find that tedious, but I’ll always be down for something fun and schlocky.

Something else that I enjoy about Supermassive’s work in this genre is that they always start with the most stereotypical depictions of the kind of awful characters that are common to horror movies, but as the adventure unfolds we see the other depths and traits that they bring to the table beyond that and get a better sense of them as people, more than just the roles they play in the group. If we let them survive, start to see some of the more heroic traits that either make us root for them or feel bad when one of our mistakes inevitably leads them to die.

Except Jacob though. Screw that guy. XD