Video Game Tuesday: Breath of the Wild Final Thoughts

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering what I thought of my time with the latest Zelda game. It’s my Breath of the Wild Final Thoughts.

Puzzles: I’ve already covered how I loved how Nintendo handled puzzles, but I will say one thing in addition. The puzzles weren’t necessarily difficult but there were puzzles all over the world to uncover various Korok seeds, or Shrines. I enjoyed stumbling across them in my exploration of Hyrule and I attempted to solve them on the spot as soon as I found them. For the most part I was able to do so every time with only a few exceptions. Those were ones I had to leave mostly because I had insufficient supplies to continue either exploring the area or complete the puzzles or challenges. The target balloon challenges in particular were my biggest headache, especially in the Death Mountain region because I was unable to retrieve those arrows after firing them. However overall I enjoyed coming across these random and small puzzles and solving them. Sometimes you had to throw a rock into a ring of some sort, or you had to put a metallic block in a specific place on a structure. Sure they might not take much time, but the sheer number of them was highly enjoyable.

Gear System: I also already covered that in a separate post, so check that for specifics. One more thing I will add is that I’d have loved to made my helmets invisible sometimes for certain armor sets, like the Radiant set.

Enemies: The enemies grew as I did, with some of the easier enemies showing up not at all after I had cleared all the Divine Beasts, which was a nice change of pace and kept me on my toes in my travels. Running across any Guardian was at best a headache for a majority of my playthrough, until I had finally accumulated enough materials and Rupees to acquire the Ancient armor set to allow me to not get absolutely destroyed by their laser blasts when I was unable to interrupt them with an arrow to the eye. Even then however I was still cautious around any enemy except the Chuchus.

Bosses: The bosses were for the most part, pretty easy and the world bosses were all incredibly easy as long as I had come prepared for a fight against them. The final boss was also fairly easy, but I hadn’t attempted it before I was well and truly ready to end my time with the game, which meant I had completed most of the Shrines and all the Divine Beasts. That being said if I had not attempted to do them prepared or done a speedrunner-esque playthrough I could easily see how they might be quite difficult.

Story: The story was good, and I’ll admit I had a couple tears in my eyes during my time with the Zora. Seriously though, Link caught the eye of nearly all the high born ladies in Hyrule. That was more than a bit amusing.

Artwork: I played the game exclusively in the portable mode of the Switch, and I was rather impressed with the quality of graphics. I experienced a slowdown only a handful of times and that was only when I purposefully pushing the system by blowing up 8 or more trees at once to see how the physics handled it.

Music: The music was also pretty awesome, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Overall: I’m really impressed with the game, and frankly I really hope that Breath of the Wild is the new standard they’ll use for every Zelda game going forward. The freedom allowed was incredibly refreshing and being able to go pretty much anywhere was incredibly fun. If I wanted to rain death from above on any enemies I could go climb that cliff next to their encampment and get the drop on them easily.

Video Game Tuesday: GTA 5 vs. Watch_Dogs, A Study in Design

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering the differences between Grand Theft Auto 5 and Watch_Dogs and what makes one super successful in the long run and the other not so much.

GTA V vs Watch_Dog’s Landmass: First the world of GTA V is probably bigger, if in no other dimension than in the Z axis which is sadly miniscule in Watch_Dogs. In GTA you don’t just have the island of San Andreas to drive around or boat around. You can swim under water, and more importantly fly through the air. Want to get on that really tall building to have a look at the cityscape? You can do that easily by taking a helicopter or just jumping out of a plane and parachuting down. You can’t do that in Watch_Dogs and while you could access certain rooftops easily by climbing I feel that it would’ve been in Ubisofts best interest to make this game a modern Assassin’s Creed and allow us to climb up any building. Who didn’t want to get on top of the Sears Tower and just look out at the city? (yes it is called something else now, but I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment.) Winner: GTA V

The “Livelyness” Aspect: I would’ve said that Watch_Dogs had the more lively city, at least on the current gen console systems, but then Rockstar pulled out their trump card and remastered the game they just released a year before and put it out on the same systems. Not only did San Andreas now feel much more alive than Watch_Dogs ever did, but there was so many more people on screen than before.  Winner: GTA V

Storyline: It’s not even a close contest. Watch_Dog’s might have had some of the best writers in the industry working on it, but the fact that Aiden felt and played like a less neat Batman was just disappointing. In contrast GTA V has three main characters that are all varied and entertaining, from the younger Franklin to the ever psychotic Trevor. I’m not even going to touch upon the huge amount of side characters that GTA has over Watch_Dogs. Winner: GTA V

Gameplay: I would’ve liked Watch_Dogs a hell of a lot more if the cars didn’t drive like a piece of soap on a wet floor. The fact that I had to resort to using a motorcycle for pretty much the entire game sucked. Not only that, but there weren’t any NPC’s driving them, which when you were invaded by a less skilled player you could easily tell where he/she was. Sure he could get away from you a lot faster, but that doesn’t matter as it would count as his loss as long as you found him. That being said the invasion aspect of Watch_Dogs was easily one of my favorite new systems I’ve used in a game in years. I loved hacking other players and seeing them scramble around to find me while I hid right under their noses. I even got to the top percentile of the player base in invasions and tailing. Winner: GTA V

Customization: Again not even a close contest, GTA had you able to customize not only your clothes but choose completely different outfits for each character and change their hairstyle and add tattoos if you so desired. Not only this, but you could customize your vehicles. Winner: GTA V

Multiplayer: Like I mentioned above the invasion system of the game was easily one of my favorite systems, but that was only two game modes and the others were sadly lacking in depth. Racing was always a pain in the butt due to the crap driving system, and the Team Objective mode was also impacted by that. GTA on the other hand has been regularly updated with new content, and that’s not even counting the creation system where you can make your own maps for each game type, plus the online lobby system in the remastered versions is 30 players, and that may even be bigger in the upcoming PC version. Winner: GTA V

Graphics: Hands down not even a contest. It’s GTA V and this is prior to the 4k resolution that the PC game will have. The 2012 Watch_Dogs looked amazing, but the full game didn’t live up to those standards. Winner: GTA V

Sidequests: The sidequests in GTA are just more interesting than any in Watch_Dogs, and that’s a pity because if I had to pick only one sidequest in each game I’d say that Watch_Dogs had the best sidequest with the ctOS server stations around the city those were lots of fun to do. Unfortunately those weren’t repeatable and I don’t feel like replaying the game to do them again. Winner: GTA V

Overall: Watch_Dogs had some really interesting systems in place, but they weren’t expanded upon enough to beat the sheer amount of content that GTA V has at it’s disposal. I love to see players run around looking for me, but I can only do that so many times before it get’s boring or too easy. Variety is the spice of life and Watch_Dogs had no spice.  Clear Winner: Grand Theft Auto 5!

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Video Game Tuesday: Watch_Dogs [First Act Impressions Only]

 

This week I’m going over my impressions of my first few days of time with Watch_Dogs for the PS4.

Plot Synopsis: The story of Watch Dogs follows Aiden Pearce (Noam Jenkins), a skilled hacker and former thug. Eleven months after his actions led to the death of his niece, Lena, Aiden seeks to bring his own form of justice to the culprits by manipulating Chicago‘s CtOS, or Central Operating System, a supercomputer that controls every piece of technology in the city and contains information on all of the city’s residents and activities which can be used for various purposes.

Plot: I haven’t gotten very far, but so far it’s very interesting and I’m looking forward to really sinking my teeth into the plot. There will be a full review of this game later with more of my thoughts on the plot.

Gameplay: I’ve only beaten the first 6 missions in the main campaign, but I’ve spent the rest of my time just roaming around the city unlocking various things like cars, ctOS towers and branches. I’ve even spent an hour playing Texas Hold’em which is interesting when you can watch an opponents stress level. Other than that I’ve done no side quest missions, but have spent quite a bit of time playing the online modes particularly the Hacking Invasion game type which is very fun.

Multiplayer: Right after I took this screenshot, and while I was tweeting it using the share function my PS4 I had my game invaded. However the player hadn’t started hacking me yet and when I closed the menu for tweeting and saw that a car was behind me in the wrong lane I knew instantly that it was another player. So I got off my bike and shot him in the head. It was very satisfying. He should have hacked me and than jumped off the bridge and swum under the bridge so I couldn’t find him easily while I was standing still. Anyways the gameplay in this really rocks and the multiplayer merges seamlessly with single player. If you are just wandering out in the world, not in any main story or side mission like a criminal convoy, you can be invaded by another player and they can either try to hack you or tail you. If they try to hack you you will be alerted once it starts and you’ll have about a minute and a half to try to find them within a certain area on your mini-map. It’s harder than it sounds because there are tons of NPC’s.

Music: The music in this game is pretty awesome and that’s not even counting the MP3 function of the phone in the game, which can steal any song you hear and copy it so you can play it at your leisure. I personally like the Punk Rock songs, although I wish I could import my own music.

Art: The graphics in this game are amazing and while you PC master racists are going to win in the end, I’m not going to be surprised if we get another Watch_Dogs in the near future because this game broke records for Ubisoft in pre-order sales alone. The next game should take full advantage of the power of the next-gen consoles and it’ll look even nicer.

Overall: If you don’t own this game and you like Open World games you are really missing out.

For those who like: Sci-Fi in present day and age, Hackers, Open-World games like Grand Theft Auto.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, or crude language. There is a lot of swearing in this game, and that’s not even counting the sexual innuendos and so on. This game definitely makes you feel like a creeper sometimes.