Versions of this deck have been around ever since Domanaria, thanks to Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. That card is the backbone of the deck, and the win condition. The end goal is to play him, and eventually get to his -8 ultimate. From there, his -3 can shuffle himself back into the deck so that his owner will never deck out, as the opponent slowly withers away while their permanents and lands get exiled.
Thanks to War of the Spark, the new Liliana can be played as a 1-of to offer another possible path to victory. And aside from that the rest of the deck exists either to deal with threats, maintain the player’s life total, and draw through the deck to gain the resources to play and protect it’s big win conditions.
It’s a very effective deck. While I will always love my big, evil dragon Nicol Bolas, one can’t deny that this deck does work, getting the job done.
After a miraculous recovery from the mysterious poison that nearly claimed his life, I regret to inform you once again that critically acclaimed actor Seam Bean has passed away.
I won’t deny that I was somewhat disappointed about how this mission was a near exact duplication of the very first Elusive Target against The Undying.
I hope that this is the setup for a remixed third target that does something to surprise players. but I don’t have much more to add beyond that.
Our work on the mean streets of 50s LA continues. As Traffic Detective Cole Phelps (Badge Twelve-Fourty-Seven), we’re forging a reputation with each new case we crack. The bigger our exploits, the easier it will be to climb through the rankings.
This is Detective Work: LA Noire.
To clarify points made in the video, while Rockstar published this game, it was developed by Team Bondi in Australia. That said, there are a number of design choices we see in LA Noire that a typical of Rockstar games, so I feel it’s still worth talking about them.
Chief among them is this game’s tendency to value “immersion” over gameplay flow. Part of this is the decision to go open world. Bluntly, the open world added nothing to the experience, and most players will simply choose to let their partner drive from place to place to skip the hassle. The only side activities are the random crimes scattered about the city, and most of them are either gun fights or car chases, and those are some of the worst parts of the game.
In addition, there are minor details, like needing to constantly phone into headquarters for background checks and updates. While it’s true that since detectives in that era didn’t have cell phones, this would be more realistic, it’s not something that I personally enjoy doing. Since every police car has a radio installed as well, it would have been nice if some of these were either taken care of during car rides or implied to have been deal with in the drive between areas of investigation. Rather than halt the forward momentum to have a several minutes long scene of Cole Phelps asking the operator to route him to HQ, then ask for technical services and/or updates, it would be nice if this could be taken care of while the player was mobile.
Lastly, and separate from the above two points, this game takes place in an era where people were much more overtly racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise discriminatory. I don’t mind that the game brings these elements into the story. However, in usual Rockstar fashion, there is barely any comment on it whatsoever. As someone in the chat said, it feels like it only exists so that the developers can look “edgy” and “mature” by using slurs.
It’s almost disappointing when I think about it. Rockstar has (had in the case of Team Bondi) a team of extremely skilled and talented people working on their games, and yet they have such little desire to make anything of cultural impact with their work beyond the most surface level satire of current/past events. I wish they would do better, though I know that call falls on deaf ears (and a closed Team Bondi).
Lately, thanks to my own personal run of the Ace Attorney games, I’ve had police procedurals on the brain. Though not a detective game in the strictest sense, I was hoping that streaming The Council would help to satisfy that itch.
Turns out I was wrong. As interesting as it was mechanically, The Council doesn’t have much to offer in terms of notable content beyond that initial conversation piece. Thus, it behooves me to move onto a game I know I have much to say about.
Welcome to LA Noire!
LA Noire is a game I have decidedly mixed feelings about. On one hand, I’m a sucker for detective fiction, and it’s a very polished example of that. On the other hand, there are a number of problems I have both with the game and the circumstances surrounding it’s development. We’ll get more into it as we proceed, but this episode lays the groundwork for future discussion.
What I will talk about in this column, however, is the way the interview/interrogation system works. When talking to a person of interest, the player always begins by asking a question. After the witness makes their statement, there are 3 available options:
Truth/Good Cop
Doubt/Bad Cop
Lie/Accuse
By selecting “Truth”, players indicate that they believe the witness’s statement, and attempt to gently coax more information out of them. This is usually easy to figure out.
However, what is more difficult is determining when the correct answer is either “Doubt” or “Lie” (and there is always a correct answer). Either way, players are showing that they sense deception from the witness. The difference being that “Lie” allows one to present direct evidence contrary to the statement made, while “Doubt” is reserved for when no such evidence exists.
This gets complicated for a number of reasons. Some of them are the obvious ones that adventure game players are used to, namely that the developer logic is sometimes obtuse and difficult to understand. (As I said in the video, just changing the options from Truth/Doubt/Lie to Good Cop/Bad Cop/Accuse made the game much easier to read for people, but there are other examples we’ll get to later.)
Less obvious is the fact that players aren’t necessarily guaranteed to possess all the evidence they need to successfully complete an interview. If one goes into an interview without the evidence required to call out a “Lie/Accusation” successfully, then even pressing Doubt will not be sufficient to arrive at the correct answer. There’s no points for partial credit, and once an answer is submitted, there’s no way to undo it. While the game will funnel the player to the end of the case of matter how badly they screw up, it always hurts to botch an interview because there is no second chance.
I can’t but compare this to the Ace Attorney games, since I’ve been playing so much of them lately. Because that game is a visual novel with a set “correct” path through the investigations, the game can guarantee that players have all the evidence they need before a witness makes their statement. And when while the witness is reciting their testimony, they can read and reread through it as many times as they need to, pressing them for information to clarify specific points until they can present the contradiction between said statement and the facts that have been gathered so far. If they screw up, they’ll take a penalty (enough of which will result in a Game Over), but can take another shot at presenting the correct piece.
While LA Noire is certainly fun, I can’t deny that the interrogation system, the game’s biggest defining feature, feels like it was eclipsed by a system that was created well before Team Bondai began development.
Since I attended the pre-release for War of the Spark, I received a free coupon for a Tradition Draft in Magic Arena. Now, while I already spent that coupon, I did well enough in the free draft that I earned enough gems to cover another attempt.
So I figured, why not do this draft on stream, to show off my limited skill in… Limited.
Drafting in MTG requires a whole different mindset constructed formats. There’s a skill to drafting effectively that I haven’t had much of a chance to cultivate. Other, more skillful players have already produced YouTube videos about how to draft, so I see no need to speak over their voices.
Arena differs from a standard draft in 2 distinct ways:
Rather than drafting with humans, an AI will simulate the other players who would be supposedly choosing cards in the same pool.
The players one plays against in the draft league will have chosen from card pools that are distinctly different from them.
While I can’t be certain of this, but from my experience, this means that the players in Arena Draft are able to construct better decks than one might be able to in a regular draft in paper Magic. The person who managed to draft 2 Teferis is a strong example for that, because the odds of getting that in a normal draft are simply absurd.
That said, this is a good way to satiate one’s Limited craving if they have it, and the cards drafted are kept no matter how well/poorly that player performs. It’s certainly a fast way to build up a collection, but it’s also an expensive way to do so, considering the entry fee.
Now that The Spooky Bois have finished our adventures in Raccoon City, it is time to begin a new journey.
Welcome to the Manor, as we enter a world of mystery and intrigue. At a pivotal moment in history, world leaders from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte gathered in the remote island estate of a mysterious host. The choices made will have impacts the world over, and we’ll be right in the middle of it.
Will you join us at The Council… for Tea and Crumpets?
The thing the attracts me most to The Council is how it’s hybridized RPG mechanics with traditional adventure games to make something truly unique. It’s an interesting way to handle a game where conversation is the most impactful mechanic.
The protagonist, Louie, has a set number of Effort Points than he can spend on a check for each skill at his disposal.
At Level 1, using a skill will consume Effort Points equal to the difficulty of the check (for example, a difficulty check of 3 requires 3 Effort Point).
At Level 2, the Effort expended will be reduced by 3, but it cannot cost less than 0. (For example, a difficult check of 4 would cost 1 Effort, and any lower difficult checks are free.)
At Level 3, any checks made against that skill are free.
Depending on how the player spends their points they might unlock a whole different series of options than they would otherwise have access to. A master of Etiquette might feel right at home at the morning supper, but out of place when analyzing a gunpowder barrel because they don’t know a thing about Science.
In addition, each of the other members of the cast have weakness and immunities to certain skills. Exploiting a weakness will reward the player with an effort point, while stumbling against an immunity will inflict them with a status ailment. Most often, these traits come into play during confrontations, which I’ll explain next time. (Though I gave a cliffnotes version in the video.)
So the core loop of the game is in developing your skills, while discovering the dispositions of the other guests at the manor, to effectively navigate through these social circles and assert your own influence on the party. All the while, these skill checks also come into play during the puzzle solving aspects, by providing useful hints or bypass certain elements of some of the puzzles altogether.
Mechanically, it works. Many of the other elements of the game have much to be desire, but this core loop and social interaction system are a solid foundation that I’d like to see other games try to improve upon. I find it fun to poke around and learn about the rest of the cast, in anticipation of pressing them later.
I look forward to continuing our Tea and Crumpets, and I hope you are too.
I’m sure most of the people reading this are already sick to death of “The Discourse”(tm) surrounding Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Many people have already weighed in, with voices smarter and more well-researchedthan mine, yet I can’t bring myself to let this one go. We don’t talk enough about accessibility in gaming, and Sekiro is one of the greatest jumping off points to start delving into the topic: How important it is and what game designers can do to reduce the barriers of entry for the games they make.
With regards to this game specifically, the more I think about the conversation about Sekiro, the more I begin to realize that it’s… overly reductive. I don’t necessarily know if I’m in favor of a straight up “Easy Mode”, but not for the reason you’d think. While it’s true that an increase to the player’s damage output and a reduction in enemy damage could solve some of the problems people are facing with Sekiro, I also believe that’s a brute force method that dodges the conversation about the actual problem. Rarely do I actually hear many complaints specifically about the numbers in discussions I have had. Sure, there are specific attacks by individual enemies and bosses that people complain about, for example I dislike the Chained Ogre’s grab moves because it deals over 75% of the protagonist’s max health in damage, but these are instances, and not critiques of the game as a whole.
When I talk to the people who are having trouble with Sekiro even after unlearning their Souls-ian instincts (as I struggled to for a significant portion of the early game), I see a few underlying problems that I’m not necessarily sure a numbers adjustment would fix. Chief among them is the reliance on deflect as a mechanic, for multiple reasons. Not everyone will have the reflexes necessary to react to enemy attacks fast enough, which is a complaint I see often. Beyond just physical reflexes: People with neuroatypical brains might not have the capability to process that visual information fast enough to have a realistic chance to respond. While the window for deflecting attacks is more lax than one may think, it can still be tight, and that makes the difference.
This led to a discovery of a strategy, coined “Blockdancing” by content creator VaatiVidya, but this has its own problems. To define the term, “blockdancing” involves rapidly tapping the block/defect button. Doing so creates a loop where protagonist Wolf raises his sword to block, and begins to lower it before raising it again. During this cycle, the player will block, and occasionally deflect, all incoming attacks, making it useful against enemies with long attack chains or hard to predict attack patterns. The problem lies in the input itself. This motion is painful for people who suffer from repetitive strain injuries or other ailments of the hands and wrists. Many games released in the prior two console generations, that relied on QTEs where players had to mash a specific over and over to simulate the “strain” that a character was going through learned that lesson the hard way.
Ideally, circumstances like these would be considered in the middle of the design process, so the need to address accessibility concerns wouldn’t come in the form of “quick fix” suggestions (that, mind you, would still take time and resources to implement), but such is the hand we’re dealt in this case. To address the issue of deflect timing, one possible solution comes from Celeste by Matt Makes Games. In order to allow for players of various skill levels and physical/mental impairments to still enjoy the game, Celeste’s developer Matt “Makes Games” Thorson created an “Assist Mode”, a series of options that can used to tweak the experience. One of these options was to reduce the overall speed of the game, so that people with slower reflexes and reaction times can still receive the same level of challenge as more able-bodied players without their impairments getting in the way. I believe a similar option in Sekiro would have greatly alleviated the burden for players with similar conditions.
And as to the issue of how to reduce the strain of “blockdancing”, there is another solution I propose. Games like Marvel’s Spider-man have options to switch QTEs from mashing the button to simply holding it own, to avoid unnecessary strain. Sekiro could do something similar with its block, allowing users to simply hold the button down to perform a “blockdance”. The game already makes a few (appreciated) concessions in this area by allowing for fullyrebindable controls, and this would be a logical extension of that. While it would come at the cost of not being able to hold block to recover posture, making it an imperfect answer, it would reduce the burden on players with certain ailments to more capably play the game.
And these above problems and solutions are only examples, barely scratching the surface of a large issue. Developers have been making great strides in the field of accessibility over the last few years alone, and I hope that trend continues. Even games as notoriously hard as Darkest Dungeon include options to help players of various skill levels and abilities to have the same experience. That’s the end goal: Parity of experience. Danny O’Dywer at NoClip had a similar example in the other direction with racing games, where he doesn’t play them without a race wheel and pedals, disabling a lot of the accessibility that are enabled by default, so that he can get an immersive experience in the way some just need a controller and the default settings for. Those options exist so that he, a racing enthusiast, can still get the same experience of being a badass race car driver that others want.
As the conversations about how we can embed the idea of accessibility into the core design of the games we build and play, keep cases like these in mind. One of the greatest joys I experience is sharing a game I love with other people. Although I love Sekiro, the lack of these options combined with the game’s very punishing nature, make recommending it a very tricky prospect. If I knew that options like these existed, I would be a lot less hesitant to ask other people to try it and see what they think of it. If From Software has taken some of these considerations, more people would be able to appreciate the gem they crafted so beautifully.
Join us for another exciting tale of pirates and plunder upon the high-seas. I, Mr. Doucet, and Mr. Davenport have experienced so many wonders that it’s hard to say where to begin, but our story is one of the ages.
This is the most free ship you’ll ever set foot one. With great pleasure, I would like to welcome you aboard our vessel: The Pride, named after it’s signature Rainbow Flag.
As promised in my previous post on Sea of Thieves, I will now go into details regarding my problems with the game.
The first is that this is not the kind of game I could see myself coming back to everyday. Something I’ve said several times during this and last stream is that I avoid playing too many sessions of Sea of Thieves very deliberately. I enjoy hunting treasure or fighting hordes of undead pirates, but if I play too often I’m afraid I am liable to grow tired and bored of the game. While the developers have been, and are, continuing to add meaningful content to the game, the core is still largely unchanged. For the most part, entirely driven by procedurally generated content.
Part of that, and second among my complaints, is that out of the three factions who assign you quests, one of them is not all that fun: The Merchant Alliance. Randomly searching the seas, hoping that I might find one of the items I need to transport to the target location before time runs out, is much more stressful (at least to me) than leisurely sailing to specific areas on the hunt for gold and bounties. I’ll gladly sell the occasional loot I find along the way, but these timed fetch quests don’t engender many positive feelings.
Lastly, and this is more one of personal taste. I wish there was something to strive for beyond cosmetics, even if it wasn’t character progression. While I like dressing up my character (and my ship) in new outfits, I never feel like I’d doing anything “meaningful” during my play sessions in Sea of Thieves. Perhaps that’s a bad attitude to take into a video game, but I still like to feel like I’m working towards more than just a fancy new hat or coat.
None of these are deal-breakers for me. (Obviously, since I’m still playing the game.) However, they keep me from falling fully in love with it in the way I want to. Blemishes that don’t sink the whole, but subtly detract from it.
After braving all of horrors of Raccoon City, we have finally reached the end of our long journey. Thanks again to David and Clayton for joining me for this, because it would have definitely turned out a lot worse without them.
Despite spending most of the game completely starved for ammo, the endgame gives us more than enough gunpowder to make any kind of ammo we need. Combined with our status as walking pharmacy, we had plenty of resources to last us through the finale.
I had a blast with this game, and I’m glad to have experienced a part of gaming history that I missed out on way back in the day. This is a great remake and introduction to the Resident Evil series. Continuity issues aside, there’s a good story here and the actors do a great job of selling the characters.
What a treat. Hopefully, you’ll join me for whatever I do next. 🙂
As a fan of From Software’s most recent works, from Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls 3, I was honor-bound to play Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice the moment it was released. Going in, I felt prepared for another exciting adventure in an environment that would do everything it could to kill me. With how easily I breezed through the third Dark Souls game, I thought that there was nothing From could do to surprise or intimidate me. They must be running out of tricks, so I would be wise to whatever they threw my way. Many of my friends thought the same way, to the game’s, the developer’s, and our own collective disservice.
For this reason, I completely hated the game at first, when pitted against its earliest mini-bosses, like the Chained Ogre and Juzou the Drunkard. Over and over, I found myself being cut down by these opponents, and my frustration was simmering. Worse, I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. Up until I was hit by “some bullshit” grab move that dealt over half my health’s worth of damage, I’d be attempting to dodge attacks, swinging in when I felt it was safe to do so, and backing off to heal up when I was sustaining too much damage. These habits I had picked up when playing Souls games were successful up until this point. I was an expert at From Software games, so why was I getting trounced by these foes?
Looking up strategies online eventually taught me one crucial lesson: That I could sneak around these bosses and deliver a backstab by leaving the boss area and going back in to activate their search routines. While it wouldn’t kill them outright, it would bypass one of their two phases, meaning I could skip half of the fight. A step in the right direction, enough to get me through the obstacles in my immediate path, but I was still missing a crucial component to my later success with the game. I was still getting through fights mostly by brute force, failing to internalize the lessons that Sekiro was trying desperately to teach me. Lessons that my puny Souls-addled brain couldn’t begin to understand. That wouldn’t happen until I fought my first real boss. I remember that he was riding a horse, but his name escapes me…
Right…. That guy.
Like many of the bosses before him, I found myself getting crushed again and again by attack patterns that I couldn’t dodge correctly. Even when I could find an opening to swing in, Mr. Oniwa would recover and start swinging, leaving me to dodge the first hit and get swiped during the recovery frames of my evasion. As I always do, I looked up clips of other people beating the fight, so I could figure out what I was doing wrong. In one video, I discovered my big mistake, and started seeing genuine improvements in the way I played Sekiro.
In Souls games, whenever a boss enemy performs a big swing that causes tremors when it hits the ground, the implicit contract is that it cannot be blocked. If the player does not avoid this attack, they will assuredly take damage. Watching Gyoubu’s spear impact the ground in that same way fooled me into thinking that was true in Sekiro as well. I believed that if I could not dodge those attacks, I would sustain damage. In a game where a single attack can easily eat through a third, or even two-thirds of one’s health, that was a dangerous prospect.
Imagine my surprise when I saw others boldly hold their sword in a defensive stance and just block and deflect these awesome, earth-shattering blows with ease. Masters of the blade going up against a foe far stronger than they were, on the razor’s edge between life and death, maintaining perfect posture as the force of Gyoubu’s attacks glances harmlessly off of their weapon. When the horseman attempts to make space between them to charge in, these warriors would using their grappling hook to close the distance and punish this brute for his cowardice.
Just like that, I understood what Sekiro wanted me to do, and who it wanted me to become. In From Software’s previous work, the player was an adventurer going up against overwhelming odds. Giant enemies, hordes of undead, and a world filled to the brim with perilous adversity were the name of the day. If one survived, it was by the skin of their teeth, just barely outwitting and outmaneuvering these powerful opponents. In other words, oppression was the name of the game. One had to be defensive in their thinking just to stay alive. Fearlessness would be punished by a swift execution.
While opponents are no less tough in Sekiro, a whole new paradigm is required to be successful. Gone is the adventurer who secrets away to heal, biding their time as they gradually chip away at their larger, more ominous foes. In their place is the titular one-armed Wolf: Ruthless assassin, slayer of man and beast. An opportunist who never relents, the shinobi presses offense such that their opponent, no matter how fearsome, cannot breathe for even a moment. If they respond in kind, the ninja must deflect those blows in the hopes of breaking their stance. After all, no matter how strong the enemy, a few well placed slashes and thrusts are all one needs to defeat them.
Taking this new mentality in, the difference was night and day. Within two tries, I was able to knock Mr. Oniwa off his literal high-horse and deliver that one, fatal strike. A boss that had slain me countless times before now lied dead at my blood-stained hand. And while I would never say that the game became easy, learning to play it the way it was intended to be played, rather that try to force my own approach, alleviated a lot of strain that was building up in the early game. Some habits died harder than others (it took me far too long to internalize that I could jump to dodge sweep attacks), but understanding what was going wrong and being able to correct it gave me ample incentive to keep going.
If you’re reading this and struggling in Sekiro, take that lesson to heart. Let the game guide you towards mastering the systems at play. Treating it as another Souls game will simply add to your death count. I almost quit because of how frustrating it was, and I’m glad I didn’t. Sekiro deserves more than to be treated like that. It’s not going to be a game for everyone, but it’s so unique compared to much of what’s on the market today that I can’t help but fall in love it. Never before have I felt like such a skilled fighter and assassin, and the game guided me into that.
