Review: Play Nice

 Play Nice is Jason Schreier's corporate history of Blizzard Entertainment. Written in a breathless manner that befits its subject, the book is fast paced and covers Blizzard from its origins as a 2 person startup to a corporation that was sold first to Davidson & Associates, then to Vivendi, then to Activision, and finally the sale to Microsoft.

For those of us who got their careers in Silicon Valley, this book is a reminder that the entertainment industry, particularly video game companies outside Silicon Valley, doesn't believe in sharing the wealth. Other than the two founders, the initial employees at Blizzard never got stock options or any other form of equity, so when Blizzard was first sold, only its founders got wealthy. This story repeated itself until the sale to Activision, whereupon some staff (not all) got some sort of profit sharing bonuses, but even that was computed in an opaque fashion. It's no wonder that game industry veterans are frequently so bitter.

The book does mention people I actually met (e.g., Pat Wyatt, one of the early engineers at Blizzard). Wyatt was actually as good a programmer as his reputation, though Warcraft (and later Diablo) had its share of bad code. Nevertheless, I remember Wyatt walking me through Warcraft's two player code over the phone and talking me through inserting an IP layer into it --- it was a very productive session.

The book does cover the various sexual harassment scandals that ultimately caused the Blizzard sale. It places it in context, noting that many various events could also be attributed to Blizzard's fast and loose culture and very young staff. It also covered the go-go years at Blizzard, when it could seemingly do no wrong, from Warcraft II to Starcraft to World of Warcraft, it seemed as though Blizzard's every product was a big success.

To the extent that the book has villains, its mostly corporate managers who had no passion for video games and themselves could never sit down and play video games or take it seriously as a hobby. The book attributes Blizzard's success to its own employees being enthusiastic games who would provide feedback and polish the product rather than release it early to make a fast buck. Taking down Diablo III's auction house, for instance, was also an unusual move for a company to actively delete a way of monetizing the product in favor of making the game actually better for players.

Of course, such dedication to product quality is very hard in a world where "enshittification" is the rule. Whether Blizzard continues to make good games after its acquisition by Microsoft is very much in doubt. I enjoyed the book and found it entertaining. Well worth your time.

Review: Steam Deck OLED

 My brothers bought me a Steam Deck OLED as a birthday present.  I remember playing the heck out of the PS Vita back when I bought one, and a device that has access to my entire collection of PC games was exciting.

The worst thing about the Steam Deck is the compatibility. The device runs Linux instead of Windows, and is meant as a platform to sell steam games. I don't have a big steam backlog, and in fact, most of the games I own are on Epic Games due to the large giveaway library. To my surprise, both Epic and GOG installed nicely by my brother functioned really well, to the point where I could play The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (as well as the original) and to me when I launch both games there's no distinction between them. Other libraries, however (EA Connect and Ubisoft Connect) did not install no matter what I did and time spent tinkering with them was a total waste of time. What's worse, the initial installs of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City failed as well! My brother had to tinker with it, installing different compatibility libraries and in the case of Arkham Asylum deleting and redownloading it to work. My Windows PC has its share of compatibility problems, but not to this extent! For instance, XCOM-2 ran, but I couldn't make a single move!

Cloud saves on Epic Games and GOG didn't work either, so in all cases I had to restart games from scratch. Maybe this is to be expected, but if the device had run Windows I bet it wouldn't have all these problems. (Valve promises that some day they will have fully supported Windows drivers --- I'm not holding my breath --- what incentive do they have to make that work?!!)

The games that work, work well. I happily played The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider ran well and had an immersive experience. So did the Batman games, once my brother got it running for me. Obviously any of the weaker games (like Braid) would just work as well.  Bluetooth audio connect to my Pixel Buds Pro worked well, and with no discernible latency, which was impressive. One interesting glitch is that the device is very aggressive about awake from sleep. If I pulled out the Pixel Buds Pro within pairing distance of the Steam Deck, it would wake up from sleep! I eventually turned off the Steam Deck completely so as to avoid that.

The battery life was much less impressive. You can get about 120 minutes of either of the triple A titles mentioned above. When connected to the 65w powerbank, you can nearly get through a 6 hour coast to coast flight. That's probably good enough --- my Pixel Buds Pro wouldn't make it past that anyway!

All in all, this is the device that will get me buying games on Steam again. Well done!

Review: Marvel's Midnight Suns

Marvel's Midnight Suns is Firaxis' turn based card game set in the Marvel Universe. I usually enjoy Firaxis's strategy games, and when there was a steam 3 day trial I tried it and liked it, but not enough to pay list price ($40) for it. I figured I'd pick it up for $20 or so in relatively short order but the price never dropped that low. I noticed that the local library had the PS5 version on its shelves and put a hold on it. The game was long enough that I would play a bit, save, return it to the library after the 3 week loan period, place another hold on it, and then play it again. It would take 3 such periods to finish the game.

Unlike in XCOM or XCOM 2, movement doesn't matter very much. Or rather, you get one move per turn, but during your turn various attacks made by playing cards move the various characters as well, so you have to take that into account while making your plays and moves. You have 3 card plays per turn, and unlike XCOM, those attacks never miss and the damage that you achieve is always squarely provided on the card itself so you don't have to guess. Attacks can also have additional properties (some attacks require heroism to power, while others may grant you an additional card play if you knock out an opponent, while others may cause stun or cause the subject of the attack to be knocked back), and attacks that knock back an opponent into another object may trigger environmental effects. Overall, the game play is fun and since each character introduced into the game has different cards and different play styles each mission is unique and fresh.

The in-between mission/strategy part of the game, however, is annoying. You run around talking to various characters in order to increase friendship level between characters. There are also puzzles to unlock and chests to open, all of which grant you in game currency that you can use to upgrade each character's card decks, or single-use utility items. There's a research tree that's not well constructed, and various side stories. There are also combat side-quests where you can power up your character or unlock more puzzles and side-quests. This bit of the game outstays its welcome in short order, and I found myself short-cutting things by searching for the best gifts to give each character so I could get these side-quests over with.

The story is not bad, and of course, the Avengers characters are fun to play, as is Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the Midnight Suns characters are also fun to play though not well known. Much of the dialogue and voice acting is horrid, but I could overlook that.

I don't usually play a game to completion, having too little free time and too much to do, so for me to even finish a game is rare, which places this into the recommended category.

Review: Life is Strange - True Colors

 I kept intending to play Life is Strange: True Colors, but what tipped me over was seeing it at the library and checking it out. It took me 2 renewals to finish it, but it was a good story. Here's the thing about the Life is Strange series - it's not a video game so much as it is a short form TV show. Each episode is about 2 hours or so, and while you get a few choices here and there, the narrative is mostly linear --- you don't actually have any effect on major outcomes. The hallmarks of the series are the story, the characters, and the music.

What's exciting about this particular instantiation is that it features a female Asian protagonist. Even better, Alex Chen doesn't come from the depiction of the model minority background --- her family was broken up when she was young, and she's been through a series of orphanages and foster care with a history of fighting and anger. She starts the story having been through that phase of her life and arriving at the mountain town of Haven on invitation from her brother, whom she hasn't seen for years. The fresh start ends in tragedy and the story launches.

Unlike the original Life is Strange, True Colors eschews any real puzzles. Alex Chen does have a super power --- and I love it that her super power is empathy --- she can use it to understand how others are thinking and seeing the world, or relive moments trapped in objects. Each episode revolves around a single event, and as each episode proceeds she has chances to help other people or bypass them. It's not necessarily clear for each decision what the outcome will be, and in some ways I was surprised by the support or lack of support from various characters in the climax --- which is a good thing! The final episode was by far the weakest --- the ending is inevitable no matter what you choose, but that's to be expected.

Overall, the writing is good --- the characters ring true, and your choices are fun. It's not as good as the original Life is Strange game, but it's still worth your time.

Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow showed up on many "Books of the Year" lists. I checked it out of the library with suspicion, since books that show up in literary lists are usually pretentious, difficult to read, and full of characters you don't care about. To my delight, Gabrielle Zevin defies such expectations. Her prose is transparent, her characters real, and more important, the world she builds is so close to the world we live in and her voice so authentic that it overcomes my resistance to reading mainstream fiction.

The story revolves around Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who met when both were friends as children but had a falling out, only to reclaim their friendship when both are at college (at MIT and Harvard) respectively. The two had bonded over video games as children, and in reclaiming that bond, decide to partner and make one. The name of the first game, Ichigo, ironically, was the codename of Pikmin Bloom back when I was at Niantic. 

I loved the characters of Sam and Sadie. Both are half Asians. (Zevin makes it super realistic that both managed to get into top schools by having both of them explicitly not have Asian names) Sam has the attitude of many highly intellectual folks:

Sam was a complete teetotaler. He never drank, didn’t even like taking aspirin. The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in the hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated. (Page 96)

He over-intellectualizes everything, and has the timidity and lack of social courage you may have observed in many such folks. Yet despite such stereotypes, Zevin paints a complete picture of his traumas, his stoic nature, and his willingness to push on. I love the way Zevin does so --- not only does she provide the usual narratives and internal dialogue, she also includes interviews with Polygon or Kotaku as appropriate --- the world she creates feels lived in.

Similarly, Sadie Green, for all her virtues, has a semi-neurotic nature who regularly makes up stories of betrayals from her closest friends, and resents the perception of other people for whom her friends can't take responsibility for or correct. After all the events in the novel, the two friends get together and reminiscence:

“There must be some other versions of us that don’t make games.” “What do they do instead?” “They’re friends. They have a life!” Sadie said. Sam nodded. “Oh, right. I’ve heard of those. They’re those things where you sleep regular hours and you don’t spend every waking moment tormented by some imaginary world.” (pg. 392)

I won't spoil the novel for you --- it ends with the characters overcoming their foibles, but the path it takes there is what matters. Like real life, the journey is the reward. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book with its hyper-real setting, and the author can't fake this one --- she truly does enjoy computer games.

The book isn't without flaws, but they're minor. There's a reference in an early section of the book about burning out video cards while writing a game --- I've been in the industry for a long time, and that's never actually happened. You can see it as an attempt by the author to depict technical work and going over-board.

Reading the blurbs for the book, it's clear that the authors go overboard to avoid mentioning that the book is about video games. Bah. It's as though games is not a legitimate venue for creativity --- ignore such things. The novel revolves around video game designers and programmers --- it's about time they got a novel, and I'm very happy it's a good one. Reading this book with my highest recommendation.

Review: Scooby-Doo Betrayal at Mystery Mansion

 There was a sale on Amazon for Scooby Doo in Betrayal at Mystery Mansion for $13. My first edition copy of Betrayal at The House on the Hill had long suffered water damage, and at this price I couldn't pass it up since it was more than 50% off the price of the bigger, adult-oriented game.

Just like the original, your cast of characters go exploring the haunted house. The themes allow you to explore inside or outside the house, and the instructions are a bit vague, but we got through the game, including rolling the haunts and the betrayal scenarios. I half expected the game to go unused after one game, but the kids love it and have been demanding to play it the entire winter break. Note that they've never so much as watched a single episode of Scooby Doo or any of the movies, so it's not because of the theming.

The gameboard is smaller compared to the full sized game, and in the 6 games we've played the monster has won only once. There are only 24 scenarios, but with a reconfigurable gameboard that's unique every session the kids will keep asking for more until they get bored.

Recommended.

Review: Gran Turismo 7

 I didn't set out to play Gran Turismo 7. What happened was that I found a good deal on a Thrustmaster T150 for $100. Since I had a collection of racing games from PS Plus, I got it, installed it on a desk, and played Dirt 5 with the kids. Dirt 5 was a lot of fun, but the throttle kept slipping under me, and Dirt 5 had such a strong force feedback that the steering wheel would actually vibrate loose from its clamp and come off!

Pengtoh suggested that I got a FGT-lite racing chair, which looked expensive, but would solve a lot of these problems. The darn thing took me 2 hours to put together on a summer evening, dripping with sweat. It was heavy and solid but required quite a bit of tweaking to get positioning right. Once you got it setup, you never wanted to move it and I never successfully folded it. Worse, while getting it setup once in a while I would knock one thing or another out of alignment and in the middle of a game I'd fall over!

At the end of a month, Xiaoqin asked me to send it back and I didn't argue. It took another hour to take it apart and then I had to drive it to the UPS store to return it but I didn't regret it. The thing might be useful if you had a dedicated video game room, but it was simply too difficult to fold.

Finally, I got the Playseat Challenge. This wasn't a heavy duty chair, and was considerably lighter and easier to put together. It's so light that when you flip up the steering wheel to get in or out of the chair if you didn't stabilize it with your hand or body weight the chair would flip over! But this one folds nicely, and comes with a velcro strap that keeps everything together neatly. I can get it to fit myself or Boen properly, and it handles up to a 200 pound weight limit.

OK, was the steering wheel worth it? The answer is yes. I don't really enjoy racing games but this setup actually made them worth playing. When there was a Gran Turismo sale on the playstation store I picked it up and had fun --- you can actually tell the difference between cars from the feedback on the steering wheel, which is very impressive. I'm never going to buy a sports car, so this is much cheaper than the real thing. In fact, I even finished the single player campaign (called "Menus") and watched the post-game credits. It's been a long time since I actually got around to finishing the video game, so that says alot about how much fun it was.

And Boen at least enjoys it.

Review: Hades (PC)

 In 2019, some colleagues of mine were raving about Hades. Not being willing to pay full price, I waited for a sale, and when Epic Games offered it for $16.24 and stacked a $10 coupon to bring it down to $6.24, I decided to pay for it, since the Playstation version was unlikely to drop its pricing for Hades to that level for at least a few years.

Hades is touted as a rogue-like. Randomly generated dungeons, limited number of lives, and restricted saving to prevent save-scumming. You start out with one weapon type, and each time you go through the dungeon, you have the chance to grab power-ups that can be used to unlock weapon types, special abilities, and even add rooms to the dungeons that have a chance to aid you rather than hurt you. As you progress, you unlock conversations with various characters, eventually being able to stack special effects as favors from Gods, and tackling tougher and tougher levels until you manage to hit and beat the final boss.

I'm sure other people are better at the game: it took me 51 runs before I managed to beat the boss. As you play the game you learn which effects stack well with which other effects, and which choice of weapons (you're incentivized to change weapons through a mechanic that rewards you with more persistent reward bonuses) demand the selection of which abilities, and when to pick trade-offs like increased wealth vs better power-ups.

The reason this game drew me in while other rogue-likes didn't is the increasing impact of your power-ups over time. As you accumulate them, you make further progress, even if you're unskilled at controller movement and couldn't dodge an attack to save your life. This meant that I was more and more willing to do another run since I knew it wouldn't be wasted. Furthermore, the meta-game was deep enough that I started approaching it as a resource allocation problem.

The kids loved the story enough that they became more interested in Greek mythology as a result. So now they know the names of Poseidon, Hermes, Thanatos, Eurydice, Orpheus, and Demeter. Many people claim that video games have no educational value, but my guess is those people are also the same people who claimed that comic books have no value, yet I impressed my GP teacher first day at RJC by naming the president of the USA during WW2, something I learned by reading a Batman comic.

I did the game through 10 defeats of Hades, and I still found it fun enough to want to keep playing. That's rare! I hardly ever revisit games that I "finished".

The game was fun, and I hardly ever finish games, so that means I'll put a recommended tag on this.

Review: Cyberpunk 2077 (PS5)

 I actually pre-ordered Cyberpunk 2077, but the reviews ahead of the actual release were so bad that I cancelled my preorder and elected to wait, hoping that by the time I got around to it the experience wouldn't be the disaster many web-sites had claimed it was.

First, I managed to get my hands on the PS5. Then, Best Buy had a sale on it for $10. At that price, I bit and started playing it, keeping it mostly on my PS5 the entire time.

The most important part of The Witcher 3 was how good the characters were. As I played Cyberpunk 2077, I discovered that the characters were nowhere as well realized. A lot of it was that the Witcher came with baggage --- lots of books, and two previous games, and I had read enough of the books that I had a good understanding of the characters even prior to the game, and had predilections about which way Geralt would decide, but Cyberpunk had no such priors and I don't remember any novels from the setting, even though I actually might have read the RPG manuals ages ago.

The story is actually reasonable, once you take all that into account. You're playing a mercenary in Night City, and in a heist gone wrong end up with cyberware taking over your mind. From there events play out and you have a choice of how to deal with the main story, side jobs, and other ancillaries, with consequences playing out in the story.

The game play is easy: I went for a gun toting reflex driven combat-oriented build, and just chose to go in guns blazing all the time eschewing stealth. It worked for most of the game, though a few (optional) side quests would be locked out because I didn't have tech levels set high enough. The game actually has surprisingly little combat, and what there is wasn't painful as long as you levelled up enough on side jobs.

The game crashed about 5-6 times during my playthrough. Annoying, but with sufficient checkpoints that I never lost a lot of progress. Load times were long, but not as annoying as in The Witcher 3 where you'd pause for minutes when you died.

The graphics were decent. Definitely on par with any PS4 games, but didn't feel good after masterpieces like The Last of Us 2.

All in all, I thought the game was reasonably good (there aren't that many games I play till the end), so I enjoyed it. I thought Ghost of Tsushima or Miles Morales were better games, but neither of those games are RPGs, and this was the first RPG I liked enough to finish since The Witcher 3, so I'll still label it recommended.

Review: Horizon Zero Dawn

 Horizon Zero Dawn came with really good reviews. It is, however, one of those cases where the gaming press preferences run pretty counter to my own. The game's setting is a post-apocalyptic Earth where robot dinosaurs roam the earth and your player character finds a bluetooth headset early on that allows her to augment reality sufficiently to detect weak spots, examine their programs, and eventually gathers the weapons necessary to attack, takeover, or ride them.

I dutifully played the game on normal difficulty for a while, and did actually a large number of quests and got through 2/3rds of the game when for whatever reason I had to put it down for a while. I didn't start playing again until after I'd gotten a PS5, but had forgotten how to play. It was too difficult to play on normal after such a break, so I turned down the difficulty to story mode and just kept plowing through the quests to get to the finish.

What I've discovered is that the game's combat systems are way too intricate: you have only 4 weapon slots but you have more weapons than you can use in those 4 slots. Add to that the game's dinosaurs have a lot of different weaknesses, etc., so you're forever scrounging supplies so you can craft the right ammo to take them down. Even in story mode I'd run out of blaze canisters, until I discovered one day that the rewards from quests were in "treasure chests" sort of like loot boxes that you can open to extract the contents, and those actually have blaze canisters in some of them. Still, I ended up having to find a merchant to get enough so I couldn't run out.

The art for the game is gorgeous, and the story is decent. But the quests are kinda one-note, without the story telling in say, The Witcher 3, with its plot twists and misdirection. By the time I finished the game I understood the story but was not in a hurry to listen to any of the audio clips. I finished the game out of obligation but did not feel obliged the pursue the DLC. I guess I'm not going to be first in line when the sequel comes out later this year.

Review: Press Reset

 The subtitle of Press Reset is "Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry." I picked it up expecting light reading in the face of a Sylvia Plath biography, but unfortunately, the "Ruin" part of the book dominates the "Recovery" piece. The book essentially covers the shutdown of several well-known industry game studios, and the human cost of it. I've worked in game-industry adjacent companies in the past, to the extent that I've been loaned out to various game industry companies to help build games. My experiences talking to game industry cohorts closely reflects what you'll read about in this book: the game industry is rife with worker exploitation, uncertain outcomes, poor pay, and no share of success even if your game succeeds.

Now, there are several recent business model changes that have affected the game industry. The book outlines several of them, and is a good reminder of how fluid the industry is:

• MMORPGs promised a lucrative subscription model. The problem is that there's only room for a couple of big MMORPGs, and it's difficult to break into it. (The book has a harrowing tale of 38 Studios shutting down suddenly, denying their workers their paychecks)
• Indie games that are self-published provide a continuous stream of evergreen income rather than a single big hit that dissipates. That model, however, leaves all the risk to the authors, and is unable to sustain a big budget, high-fidelity game (it's the only "Recovery" story in the book, describing the team behind Enter the Gungeon)
• Free-to-play (especially prevalent in mobile) theoretically provides a wide audience, but distorts game designs and especially is a poor mix with nostalgia reboots. The book describes Dungeon Keeper and  how it came to be so detested.

At the end of the book the author tries to propose ways to salvage the industry and prevent it from burning out so many employees. I view that as a lost cause: the entertainment industry in general has a line out the door of young people looking to make their mark and get famous, even if it doesn't make them rich. Without unionization (very  unlikely in the current environment), I doubt if any of the approaches described will be successful. That makes this book a useful cautionary tale for parents whose kids want to get into the game industry. Recommended.

Review: Dreams/Art's Dream (PS5)

Dreams (PS5) is a game construction kit. I don't actually have time to construct games, no matter how easy to use the construction kit is, but the distinctive style of Media Molecule was such that when the priced dropped to $10 on a sale I bought it just to play the pack-in game (which took me a good 5-6 hours).

Media Molecule's mixed media art style is so distinctive that even though Bowen stopped playing Tearaway when he was 6, he still recognized the style and said it must be the same people who made Tearaway.

Boen and I tried a few community-contributed levels and mini-games, but to be honest, I think few non-professionals have the time or ability to polish a game to the point where it's compelling to play, so after watching a few music videos and playing a few unfinished adventures we gave up and just went all-in on Art's Dream.

Art's Dream was clearly designed as a showcase/demo for what could be done with Dream's game creation engine. The playstyle would flip from 3-D platformer to 2-D shooter, to point-and-click puzzle-adventure, and then to a flying or racing style game. It's quite clear that the underlying engine is versatile and capable. The music is beautiful, and the story while kind of cliche (though it happily drew in Boen and Bowen, when Bowen wasn't pretending to be too cool for Media Molecule games), did not suck. I had a great time. And because it's a Media Molecule game, I knew that every level was doable even by someone who wasn't 9-years old (unlike for instance, any Nintendo game I ever encountered) within an afternoon.

I enjoyed the heck out of the game and wished it was just a little longer when I finished. That meant it was perfect. Recommended.

Review: Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)

 I'm learning the professional game reviewers play games very differently from those of us with day jobs that don't involve games, so stuff that they find mediocre can turn out to be excellent. Ghost of Tsushima is one major example. The game play might not be considered anything out of the ordinary for a genre like "Assassin's Creed", but the game has many features that made it particularly playable:

• No individual mission lasts more than about 15 minutes, making it easy to play for short amounts of time. Conversely, you also have "just one more mission"syndrome in a big way
• There are no level gates for missions. This completely eliminated the grind. You don't have to the stuff you don't like, and you can pick and choose what you like to do.
• Leveling up is fast and easy, and resources plentiful. You can finish the game with the majority of the map undone and still hit the level limit
• Difficulty levels are tunable in the middle of a game or in the middle of an encounter. You never have to bang your head against the wall just because some game designer thought to punish you.
• Not all skills are important. You can pick your favorite one to spam/reuse, upgrade everything related to it, and have fun.
• The stories are reasonably well done, and not to repetitive.
• The production values are high, and nothing is an eyesore. Playing on a PS5, the responsiveness and speed of loading is so great.

Somewhere at Sony, there's a PM who decides what level of features and difficulty should be in a game. Whoever that person is, they're incredibly respectful of a busy dad's time, and this consistently makes Sony's platforms and first party games great to play.  I played this to the end and am still playing to clear the map. Recommended.

Review: Spider-man Miles Morales (PS4 Pro)

 I wasn't going to pick up Spider-man: Miles Morales until it had dropped in price, but all the reviews mentioned that it was a short game, which meant I might actually get a chance to finish it during my winter break. My biggest complaint about most video games is how they feel like a slog, or are too hard, or take too long so I never get to the finish, and I played the original Spider-man so much that I got the platinum trophy, so I decided that I should put my money where my mouth is and play it.

From a game play point of view, the game isn't much different than the prior Peter-Parker rendition. Miles Morales has several bio-electricity powers that Peter Parker doesn't have, and as a result, the game's more willing to throw lots of densely packed enemies at you, so you get a chance to use those powers (and you get punished if you don't). In exchange, you get a lot fewer gadgets.

The story is great: it's nothing like Into the Spider-Verse, since the previous Spider-man game had already killed off Morales' father. The game introduces a new Peter Parker model that looks a lot more like Paul Holland's character in the movies. The tension, angst, and family drama are every bit as good as any of Peter Parker's stories, though there isn't any romantic interest or tension in the story. The theme is appropriate, especially for a year when Black Lives Matter has been on every person's mind for at least a few months, but in no way does it feel like a cash grab or cheap.

Reflecting on this game as well as The Last of Us Part II, I've been very impressed that all the games that I've really enjoyed have come out of one Sony Studio or another --- forget the hardware, these games really do sell the system and keep me in the Playstation ecosystem for the long haul. Well worth your time, and a great substitute until the next great Spider-man movie comes out.

Highly recommended!

Review: D&D Adventure Begins Cooperative Board Game

 So much of what I could do with Bowen was because he was a precocious reader, never being intimidated by board games that required reading or even RPGs that required multi-hundred page books to play. Boen is a different story, but so when the D&D Adventure Begins Board Game went on sale, I bought it hoping that it would work for Boen.

You have to set expectations for this correctly. First of all, it comes with no character creation rules, but several decks of cards. Not surprisingly, the decks of cards are basically flavor text, all with the same game mechanics. And then there are various bosses, also with mostly flavor text, and then the adventure deck, which actually are quite different from boss to boss, which gives each adventure scenario a different flavor.

The character levels only go up to level 2, which is just fine for a short board game. DM control passes from player to player, but requires that the DM be able to read, so when playing with Boen, Bowen and I traded DM roles. The combat encounters are fun, and death is at most temporary, with no one permanently kicked out of the game unless a TPK happens, which would require a lot of bad luck in combination with poor strategy. This is a far easier game than any of the adult D&D board games. 

By far the best thing about this board game are the role playing encounters. Some of them are really whimsical and fun and in keeping with a 5-year old's spirit. One of them asked all the players to do a silly dance and have the DM judge which one is silliest. Boen really got a kick out of this one!

We sat down to play one boss and after defeating it, the kids immediately asked to play another one. And would have proceeded to playing all 4 scenarios if I hadn't gotten bored. This one's a keeper. Recommended.

Review: The Last of Us Part 2

 Several years ago, I reviewed The Last of Us and compared it with eating your vegetables. Not having very much experience with video games, I didn't realize that the game was basically a 3D combat game, where each level could not be traversed without killing everything in it. Yet the story was haunting, as was the music, and of course the art direction and graphics made your jaw drop.

I'm a cheap skate, so I didn't buy The Last of Us Part 2 at launch, but rather, waited until it had dropped in price to $30, and then put in a Best Buy coupon to bring it down further.  I'd played all the PS3 and PS4 naughty dog games, so I thought I knew what to expect, and I really enjoyed the sensibility that Naughty Dog brought --- the games were more like movies than they were simple shooters, alternating between walking simulators, and the art direction and cinematography were second to none.

The opening of the game made my jaw drop once again. I'd played Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy, but The Last of Us Part II made me forget that I was playing a video game and not watching a live action movie more than one. While Xiaoqin had occasionally commented that some of the previous games I'd played looked like movies, none of them (not even Red Dead Redemption 2) came close when I was holding the controller. The game play is quite similar to the first game, but with my expectations set correctly by the first game, I no longer tried to get through levels without killing everything --- I knew now that you had to kill everything to get through, and that the game would actually do a reasonable job of replenishing your supplies, but if you stealth-killed a few enemies early on you had less pressure for the rest of each level.

The levels were huge. I was very pleasantly surprised towards the end that one of the levels was so large that I could go back to a previously cleared section to run away and pick up supplies to continue fighting and eventually cleared the level. That running away is an option was a good thing --- I'm not so good at video games that I can just play through them, and continually dying was not fun and broke the cinematic experience. I mostly played the game on normal, but had 2 encounters where I dropped the difficulty level to easy because the game was so atmospheric that playing in the dark hours of the morning I got more than a little bit spooked.

The scenery is good, but there's nothing as spectacular as what I saw in Uncharted 4 or even in the original Last of Us. Seattle, for instance, was frequently overcast, and I never got high enough to get a grand view, though certain sunsets were pretty.

Which leaves the pacing and story. Here be spoilers. So read no further if you wish to be surprised during the game.

Review: Blood and Truth (PSVR)

 I got the PSVR several years ago, but until recently never got around to actually finishing a game on it. Part of it is that the medium doesn't work well for long games, and AstroBots rescue mission was just too long and hard --- we never got past the 3rd boss. When Sony had a sale on Blood and Truth over labor day week, however, I realized that The Heist by London Studios was one of the better demos on the PSVR Worlds disc. After finding out that the play time was only 5 hours I went for it.

The game puts you in the perspective of Ryan Marks, a former special forces soldier, engaged in a one man battle with a rival family that tries to take over his family's business after his father dies. The story and tropes are well worn and one-note: this is a game that relies heavily on cliches and the technology to keep you engaged.

The technology does keep you engaged: the game is immersive in ways that no other normal shooter is: the feeling of presence in cutscenes and in the on-rails shooting sections are nothing short of amazing. The ability to turn your head and point your guns at what you intend is amazing. That's not to say that the technology is perfect: I had to restart the game several times whenever the PSVR control calibration drifted, resulting in your hands pointing the wrong way. One particularly frustrating situation was that the act of sheathing your automatic weapons over your shoulders was so clumsy that I could never sheathe my weapons without firing off a few shots, one time killing myself with a rocket launcher. It is a testament to the immersion of the medium and the effectiveness of the game play that I put up with all the clumsiness in order to play.

The reload mechanism, snapping off a magazine from your bandolier and then slipping a clip into your other hand feels intuitive and perfect, as do the "bullet time" sequences that you get to trigger with a cool down. The sections where you pick locks, cut wires, or do other simple puzzles are also excellent examples of integrating haptic feedback, immersion, and interaction design together to make everything feel natural. Kudos to Sony for pulling off a AAA-style game in VR, crude resolution and all, and making it playable. If they can fix the drifting issue, the PSVR will be an engaging medium for many.

Recommended.

Review: Knizia's Lord of the Rings Board Game

With shelter in place, I had the kids at home nearly all the time. I started working through some of the board games I'd bought to play with adults, and came upon Reina Knizia's original Lord of the Rings board game. It was a cooperative game, so the 2 kids were unlikely to kill each other over who won.

The game itself is very abstract, with very light theming. You get a bunch of tiles, you draw them, handle the event, play your 2 cards, and then play moves on. There's a large amount of cooperation and sacrifice, but many events are randomly out of your control. With adults I don't recall playing it more than a few times.

But boy, the kids took to it. Not only did Bowen and Boen got into it, they broke open my unwatched Extended Edition movie trilogy and watched all of them. Then Bowen got out his Kindle and started reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings simultaneously in tandem.

With that kind of response, I can recommend this game, but upon doing a search on Amazon realize that it's now out of print and good condition versions of the game fetch a pretty penny! (Mine are not in good condition, so I'm blase about the kids abusing it, but I will tell them that the board game is out of print and cannot be bought any more!)

Review: Beat Saber (PSVR)

I usually have a rule about finishing a game before I write a review, but I'll make an exception for Beat Saber. The game's been around for a while, since VR became available commercially, and had never gone on sale, but since we had a rainy November, December, and January, I bought it at full price and was surprised at how much we played it.

It helps that there's a very gentle learning curve, and then the difficulty ramps up quickly in campaign mode. But all the songs are unlocked right at the beginning, which means you can switch to party or solo mode and play them without pressure, setting difficulties to whatever you want.

The PSVR version seems no different than the Oculus Quest version, though the presence of wires on the headset proper sometimes interfere with your flailing around. The songs themselves aren't very good, and the DLC songs don't feature any artists I'd ever heard of. But other than that, there's very little to complain about for this game --- I never got motion-sick, and it is amusing to see the kids pick it up and do well. Some of the other songs can give you a pretty tough workout --- so much so that the headset might be drenched with sweat by the end of a heavy session, which is great when it's raining outside.

Recommended.

Review: Monsters 2

Monsters 2 is the sequel to Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate HD. When Bowen learned that this was available for the PS4, he didn't hesitate to dig into his wallet to pull out the $15 to pay for it (and the DLC!). It was written by different developers while using similar concepts and developing similar ideas, but utilizing more modern technologies.

The big change is that the maps are now in 3D. This means that tikiman can jump, and coins and gems can roll down the hill rather than just staying put. That adds a significant challenge in the game, because now not only do you have to move further to pick up your coins and gems, but also the elevation of the tower affects both the damage it does and the range, as well as potentially putting obstacles in.

The other game mechanic that's different is the use of advanced towers. Those now require gems for every single purchase, rather than having to be purchased once and then unlimited purchase. This is balanced by reducing the number of gems required to purchase a tower. The tower mix means that you'll actually use advanced towers less often, with only a few overpowered ones (such as the hive tower) being obvious purchases.

The game is divided into areas of 3 similarly-themed levels, with each area locked by gathering a number of rainbows (which you gain by beating a level without losing any chibis to monsters). Each level has 3 difficulty levels, fun, tricky, and mayhem. Tricky is unlocked by completing the level at "fun" difficulty, but so far we haven't figured out how to unlock mayhem.

The game has couch-coop, which makes each level quite a bit easier, as you now have twice the number of actions to respond to the monsters, and you can break up the duties however you like, for instance with one player chasing coins while the other focuses on building and upgrading towers. This gives your hyperactive kid something to do while you worry about strategy. The game shines here, and we almost never play it except in couch co-op, and it's not nearly as frustrating as say, Overcooked, which we loved the concept of (and enjoyed the first few levels) but couldn't get good enough to finish, as that game was designed to frustrate you.

Monsters 2 is therefore a game I can recommend for parents to enjoy with their children. I wish it supported more players, but the balance is just about perfect as it is right now.