It’s a new event in the land of Runeterra, and with it another excellent reason to return. The evil mastermind Veigar has returned in order to conquer Arcadia, and it’s up to us to make sure he doesn’t succeed.
So let’s get started.
What you see here is part of the fun of modes like this. There’s a certain joy a taking a power that we aren’t entirely sure of, only to find that due to how it interacts with cards in our deck, we’ve accidentally created an extremely powerful synergy that can easily carry us. Even if we made a couple of mistakes when building our deck, that wasn’t enough to drag us down.
Events like these are also uniquely fun because they take advantage of the world and cast of characters Riot has built up and invested in since League of Legends came out in 2009. I’m still new to the lore, but I’ve grown more and more fond of it the longer I play Legends of Runeterra.
It’s been some time since we’ve had an old-fashioned Elusive Target, and this one is both old and new: Old in the sense that it is a target from the 2016 Hitman game, and new in the sense that I had missed it back in the day because I wasn’t playing the Elusive Targets at the time.
It’s difficult to overstate just how profoundly embarrassing that attempt was from start to finish. “They wouldn’t put the safe in Margolis’s room,” I said without putting any further thought into it. That one baseless assumption must have wasted at least a solid 30 minutes of time. And then to follow that up, one the run where I went for the kill is the same one where I forgot to grab my poison from my stash. Just a ton of failures all at once.
And yet, that’s part of Hitman. We can’t always complete the perfect or even a competent kill. That’s just how it be sometimes.
Our adventures with the Master Chief have felt like they’ve been shooting towards an end for a few hours now, and yet they’ve kept pushing forward. Now that we’ve reached the Silent Auditorium, we’re actually on the verge of finally finishing off the campaign.
This is it. Either we finish Halo: Infinite, or we’ll be finished with it.
While I’m not impressed with the story as a whole, I admit that there’s a lot of good character work between Chief and his allies, the Weapon and the Pilot. They have strong chemistry, which is of little surprise since the actors have been in those roles for a long time, but it adds to the depth of their relationship. We do lose something from not being able to see the Chief’s face, but accepting that limitation they do a good job using his body language and voice acting to tell us what he’s feeling at a given moment. It’s easily the strongest aspect of the plot.
The problem is that everything else is completely forgettable. And when the story is trying to set up for another game, that’s a problem. I wasn’t around for the Halo 2 campaign when Master Chief said he was going to “finish the fight”, but even I know how it left fans frothing for more. However, it fell completely flat when they attempted to invoke it here in Halo: Infinite. Even worse, we still don’t know what The Harbinger unleashed in the finale, so there’s no context for us to speculate or get hyped over.
It’s not a bad campaign, but I can’t say it’s going to stick with me the way the original trilogy did. It’s such a shame.
We’ve got the sequence we need to enter the Nexus of the Halo ring, and now it’s time to shut down the repair procedure. And from there, we keep going… and going… and going.
What? We’re not done yet!?
Something I’ve said for years is that most big retail release video games are too long, padded in order to fit an abritrary hour count, rather than curated to better suit the story and experience they’re attempt to instill upon the player. Open world games are particularly bad at this, even when focused purely on the campaign and ignoring most side activities. I was genuinely hoping to wrap up Halo: Infinite in this session, which is why I was willing to take the extra time until the loss of progress from the game crashing.
This feeling only got compounded by the fact that the game felt like it was trying to wrap up and hit the conclusion several times over, and just refuses to hit that finale. The climb up the Nexus, where Chief and The Weapon have their big blowup, and sebsequent heart-to-heart, was the first place that felt like a natural stopping point. Then there was the fight with Escharum to rescue the pilot, which made the point to try and fail to characterize and make me empathize with him before he bit the dust. That too felt like a good place to wrap it up, and then we just… didn’t. I’ve looked it up now, and the Silent Auditorium is truly the last level of the game, but this is the third finale we’ve had to stomach and I was already eager to wrap things up.
Out of all the games in the Halo franchise, I’ve only ever had this problem with Infinite. The campaign would’ve been better had it chosen to make a few choice cuts in the editing room before release. I don’t hate it, but my opinion is starting to rapidly drop. Hopefully next week, we’ll either finish or be finished with Halo: Infinite.
As it turns out, not only does our enemy seek to make use of the Halo ring, but the ring itself has a self-repair functionality that makes their plan possible. Of course, we cannot allow them to succeed. So it’s time to sabotage those plans… assuming we can get the sequence required to open the way.
The more I play Halo: Infinite, the more I realize that the only way to answer the question of whether or not I like it is to first ask if the open-world elements add to the game, and even now I’m not sure if the answer is “Yes” or “No”.
On one hand, it suits the new Grappling Hook, which on its own adds a whole new sense of movement and momentum to each fight, closing gaps and creating distance, or taking the high ground as the situation demands. Having a large map to work with gives the tool even more utility because there’s more space to work with during these fights over FOBs, checkpoints, and key story objectives. There’s also something to be said about the freedom to approach an objective from different angles, even if the execution always boils down to shooting everyone.
The counterpoint is that many of the objectives we’re getting have felt like the open-world busywork I associate with much of Ubisoft’s output. When I’m told to assault three anti-air towers or siege four locations to find part of a sequence, my mind starts to think of it as filler content. We’re not meaningfully advancing the plot, just getting some errands done before we can make headway. And if that same objective is presented as a linear level, or like the semi-sandbox that we had in the first Halo game, it doesn’t trigger that same impulse in my brain. This sense of discomfort is something I only get in the open-world context, and I’m still interrogating those feelings.
Hopefully, as I work through my feelings and continue the campaign, I’ll arrive at an answer.
If you told me that I would be doing Savage content in Final Fantasy XIV when I started playing in August 2020, I would not have believed you. And yet, here I am with a group of friends, gathering twice a week seeking to challenge the current high-end content for Endwalker.
Even more strangely… I’m having fun.
Though I am fortunate enough to have a static to raid with, a lot of people have no choice but to raid with a group of randos in Party Finder. To be honest, I can’t imagine doing that. What’s made this so much fun was just hanging out with the static, learning, joking, and getting better at each fight together. While I also enjoy getting better at playing my class, the experience would be a lot lesser if I had the added pressure of performing for a group of people I will never speak to nor care about.
I’m glad I was able to capture this moment on stream too because we had been banging our heads on P2S for a couple of weeks now. It was a big accomplishment for us, and now we can move on to the third ring.
I’m blown away that this is the very first Final Fantasy XIV content I’ve put on my channel and blog, considering how deeply I’ve dived down that hole over the past year, but I’m happy to finally share my experience with the game. It’s been a wonderful ride.
The Banished have had free reign over this Halo ring for long enough, and now that we’re here it’s time to turn things around. To that end, we know they’re searching for something in an old ruin, excavated by a Forerunner laser.
Whatever it is, it can’t be good for us if they claim it. Let’s beat them to the punch.
We’re starting to unravel some of the pieces of the story, and what’s at play, but we still don’t have a complete picture, if one even exists. To be honest, the villains still don’t appear to have anything particularly interesting going on, and all I can gather is that they’re after some form of “Ascension”.
I freely concede that this might be because I’ve not played Halo 5, but shouldn’t there be some form of Covenent-aligned allies here helping us fight against the Banished. I have a difficult time believing that they would allow a splinter group free reign to just demolish all of the forces of their newfound allies in half a year. It feels like something that was just forgotten by the writing team.
I’m not happy with the pilot yet, but I appreciate character growth and development. Depending on where they go from here, I can forgive someone starting out from a point of abject, crippling fear and slowly growing more confident and assured in their bearing. Even better if it can be done while also giving the Chief a rare moment of humanization. It’s genuinely pretty good.
It’s a mixed bag, but so many stories in the medium are. I look forward to seeing what else the team at 343 has for us.
I’ve made no secret that I love card games. I’ve played so many of them on stream and written about them so much on this blog, that it should be obvious. What I don’t often get to talk about is how I got into card games in the first place: Yu-Gi-Oh.
Back when the anime first hit America, I bought the original Yugi and Kaiba starter decks and learned to play the game with my neighborhood and school friends. Nobody played Magic at my school, but Yu-Gi-Oh was super popular among the student body. I eventually had to stop playing during the Synchro era, but that was less because I wanted to stop and more because I could not afford to keep playing Yu-Gi-Oh and video games, so one had to give.
I’ve been on and off a few times since then, but for the past few years, I’ve been on an “off” period. Of course, now everyone has become obsessed with this new free-to-play game, Master Duel, and there’s no better time to dive back in.
So let’s dive back in.
The Yu-Gi-Oh of today is an entirely different game than it was back when I left all those years ago. For that reason, it is tempting to shake my fist at the clouds and proclaim that it’s been ruined. However, I’ve long since made peace with the fact the Yu-Gi-Oh I knew back then is long gone, with no chance of coming back.
And though I still have my gripes with it, the game that has been built on its bones has become a different and equally impressive game in its own way. From a game design standpoint, after getting familiar with other card games and how they operate, I am impressed how Yu-Gi-Oh created systems and methods to summon monsters with powerful stats and abilities, without any form of resource mechanics like mana.
Further, while I dislike the concept of “handtraps”, as I’ve played more I’ve started to understand their purpose. Since there was no such thing as mana, old Yu-Gi-Oh would have players broadcast whether or not we had a response by placing cards on the board face down, and to a large degree, that’s still true. However, there are now many cards that allow us to negate our opponent’s plays by discarding them from our hand in response.
This still bothers me, but it has a clear purpose. Decks and strategies have vastly accelerated since the time I played Yu-Gi-Oh, to the point where it is highly possible for even decent decks to build up powerful boards and card advantage on the first turn before the player going second has a chance to make a move. Handtraps solve that problem by giving them a chance to have instant speed interaction against the turn one player. One can argue, as I have, that the speed of the game is a problem, but accepting the game for what it is, handtraps serve as a good compromise.
The game isn’t perfect, far from it, but I respect what it has become, and found fun within the new form it has taken.
We’ve finally completed Infinite’s opening sequence and arrived at the open world on the new Halo ring. Let us see how much Halo has learned from other contemporaries in this space.
I’m not surprised that 343 chose a very Far Cry model to work with for their open world. It’s a well-known model that does the job, even if it’s dated. Though, unlike Far Cry, Halo still has a strong core with its combat mechanics and no illusions about being anything other than a shooter. Combat has always felt snappy, that’s no less true for these more wide-open engagements.
Adding in the grappling hook only further adds to the combat, with a vast utility that never gets old. When we’re on foot, we can use it to move faster, and climb up objects that the Chief normally can’t. If we need to back out of a fight, we can use it to quickly create distance and find a place to hide. And when we’re ready to go in, we can use it to get around or close the gap. It’s useful at almost every possible moment, and that’s rare for a new feature in an old franchise.
The only place the game seems to fall apart, at least so far, are the boss battles. I have not had a good time fighting any of these leaders, with their inflated health bars and damage output compared to a regular enemy. Halo isn’t suited to having fights like this, with bullet sponges that can drop us way easier than we can drop them, which is why they’re so rarely done in any of the other games. Infinite only underscores that point.
That said, it’s always good to come back to Halo. A few bad fights won’t change that.
I thought we were done with Hitman 3, but as it turns out IO found a way to draw me back in. In the time since we last left off, they announced their intent to provide support for Year 2 of the game.
The first aspect of this is their new Elusive Target Arcade. Let’s give it a whirl.
As abysmal as these performances were, I’m actually happy with how they turned out in hindsight because it showcases what makes this next mode special. Adding these extra conditions can completely transform the target in ways you might not expect. The best example of this was that first round, where killing him in broad daylight would have been trivial… except for the fact I had to hide all the bodies.
The extra challenge means that even before like me, who have done these targets before, have a reason to try out the arcade. They breathe new life into old content.
And with the rest of Year 2, I look forward to this and other incentives to return to Hitman.
