It’s been nearly two weeks since I last played Skyrim, but while I was playing I was completely absorbed in the game, as I’d known I would be. 146 hours I put into that game, and I feel fairly certain that I’ll be going back to it in maybe a year or so, once some of the better mods have come out.

I did enjoy Skyrim a lot, but I can’t help but feel that it wasn’t as good as Oblivion in a number of ways. Sure, the graphics were an improvement. That’s a function of the improved hardware between 2007 and 2011. They also got rid of Oblivion’s lame conversation wheel mini-game. But I can’t help but feel that alchemy was much more useful and more fun in Oblivion – I’m not sure why they changed it at all. Skyrim’s perk tree was a vast improvement over the 25/50/75/100 perk schema in Oblivion, and Bethesda was smart to get rid of the weird major and minor skill system that caused such a leveling paradox in Oblivion. I also really liked the new lockpicking system. It was almost too easy at times, but that’s much better than being too difficult.

My primary gripe with Skyrim, and the reason that I preferred Oblivion, was due to the nature of the game’s main plot. In Oblivion, the world was being invaded by the demonic Daedra through horrific gaping red magical gates, and it was the player’s job to save the world by venturing into a realm that might as well have been Hell. It was epic. In Skyrim, the plot involves killing dragons because they’re kind of mean. Sure – there’s one big powerful dragon who’s extra mean and must be stopped, but the threat seems nebulous and so relatively minor. The dragons in Skyrim were never as much of a threat as the Daedra were in Oblivion. Plus, even though the main dragon will have been defeated at the conclusion of Skyrim’s main plot, there are still many powerful dragons in evidence, attacking just as much as they ever were. How much has actually been resolved?

My last gripe with Skyrim is mainly geared towards the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild plots. Although there are ostensibly unlimited quests in Skyrim, the game’s foremost quest lines are the main story, the civil war, the Wizard’s College, the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, and the Companions. That’s six questlines, and two of them are really only available if you choose to be at least partially evil. And while I’m not at all opposed to games that allow you to be evil, I find it odd that large sections of content are entirely closed off unless your character is a cold-blooded murderer or thief. Two out of six questlines is a third of the game’s non-random content, although it’s actually less since the main quest likely has far more content than other quest lines. Personally, playing as a sneak sniper is my favorite way to play Skyrim, so it’s ironic that the Dark Brotherhood is the only quest line I never touched.

I was never a huge fan of the first title in the Mass Effect series. While it did many things well, it never grabbed me as it had so many other players. So going into Mass Effect 2, my expectations were pretty low.

I love the setting of Mass Effect. The progenitor race, the mass relays, the Citadel, the interspecies politics. And as much as I’ve never been a fan of the alien species in Star Trek and Star Wars, the races of Mass Effect were as well done as could be expected. Personally, I’d much prefer that aliens were more than overly short, tall, fat, skinny, or muscular humans with face prostheses.

Bioware also does a great job with its characters. While I found Miranda and Jacob to be fairly boring, many of the other characters were very well done. Mordin was my personal favorite, and as much as I didn’t love the first game, the return of Tali and Garrus was very nice. Tali grew on me. Jack annoyed me, which made her memorable. Grunt became that supremely useful guy who I never got close to. Thane and Samara made very nice late additions to my group. All the characters were well fleshed-out, probably aided by the fact that I did all the loyalty missions, even if I did succeed in pissing off Jack and Legion to the point where they weren’t loyal anymore.

I had heard so many good things about the female Shepherd voice actress that I played the femme-Shep. I enjoyed it. She feels much less generic than the male Shepherd I’d played in the first game. I tried to romance Miranda, but was never able to make anything happen. Maybe it’s because I’d had a romantic rendezvous with Garrus.

Somewhere around the 50%-65% mark in the game, I developed a theory. It turned out to be totally false, but I think my theory was almost more interesting than the game’s actual plot. If you haven’t yet played Mass Effect 2 and want to avoid spoilers, skip the rest of this paragraph. No spoilers after the ending of this paragraph – this is your last warning. Okay. So after I learned that the Collectors were harvesting human genetic material, I knew that they needed it but not why. My theory was that they wanted Shepherd’s DNA. I thought that perhaps Shepherd was resurrected for the sole purpose of serving the Reapers’ ends, although the details were fuzzy. Following that line of thought, I’d theorized that The Illusive Man was actually an illusion, and controlled by the Reapers to boot. And while my theory was totally wrong and totally bogus, I’m willing to bet that we learn in Mass Effect 3 that he’s actually an AI. Insanely ironic that the leader of a radical pro-human organization isn’t actually human.

As mediocre as I found the majority of Mass Effect 2, the finale made it all worthwhile. The game’s end segment was fantastic. I’ve long been a fan of killing off the main characters in a story as a way of maintaining dramatic tension, and Mass Effect uses this to great effect in the game’s end sequence. Another part of what made it great and unpredictable is the fact that while I knew that it was possible for all characters to live or die depending on your actions, it wasn’t clear what actions determined the fates of the game’s characters. Loyalty? How much damage they’d taken in a mission? Something else? I’m still really not sure. The following game events are not really spoilers since they pertain to my playthrough specifically and likely will not happen in your playthrough. Legion died after successfully navigating an air vent, and he wasn’t loyal to me after I’d taken Tali’s side in an argument. But I also lost Grunt, who was totally loyal. And in regards to my other non-loyal character, it had appeared that Jack survived after escorting us through a segment using her biotic bubble, but it later showed me a quick pan of her dead body while Collectors ran past. Not sure what happened there. But I was nearly tempted to give that last segment another playthrough. Not gonna happen at this point though. I’ve uninstalled Mass Effect 2 and I’m playing the next game.

Heavy Rain’s story has been called ‘dark’ by some. And upon reflection, I suppose it’s hard to term a game dealing with the murder of children as anything else. But until I heard that, I hadn’t directly compared Heavy Rain to Dragon Age. A big part of the reason I loved Dragon Age was because it was a mature story. And by mature, I’m referring to more than just the sex and violence. I’ll grant you: Dragon Age may have had too much blood, and Heavy Rain may have had a bit too much nudity, but it’s more than just these that I’m referring to when I discuss the games’ maturity.

Even apart from the choices/consequences facet of the gameplay that I’ve already discussed, the fact that the game doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t ruin the surprises by heavy-handedly foreshadowing, and uses strong language and violence in the same way that non-broadcast shows like Dexter do works in its favor. The game isn’t for kids, and that’s not just because it has language and violence. It’s because kids wouldn’t necessarily appreciate the theme of fatherhood and be able to put themselves in a position to understand the gravity of the decisions you need to make in the game.

My compaints about the game are few. For one, while the quicktime actions in the game were intuitive, simple walking was very often the most challenging part. Even when the camera angles were good, it was sometime difficult to walk across a room in the direction you intended, which got very frustrating when there was time pressure. And when multiple actions were available, it was generally difficult to determine what action might result from pressing right and what action from pressing X. In cases like this, you were being asked to make a decision. For me, more often than not chance would decide, as I wasn’t sure what the result of a button press would be.

More and more as the game progressed, I realized how much work must have gone into the branching story. So many characters who influence the storyline heavily might have died. How differently would the story have unfolded without their presence?

I loved Heavy Rain. Even without any of the other factors, it’s a hell of a murder mystery.

As I think back on the game, I go back and forth between feeling very fond of the characters and locations and feeling ambivalent about the game overall. I found the game’s plot a bit difficult to follow in the same way that the political machinations of Palpatine in the Star Wars prequel movies was murky. If I really stop and focus on either, I can tell you what’s going on, but it’s so convoluted that I quickly forget when I’m not directly thinking about it. I’d much prefer the more straightforward storytelling you can find in RPGs like Oblivion, Baldur’s Gate, or any of the Ultima series. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s made in Japan. My personal experience with JRPGs is not extensive. I’ve never played any of the Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Grandia, or Shining Force games. I’ve never played Odin Sphere, Final Fantasy VII, or Dark Cloud. I tried Vagrant Story briefly, and I loved Dragon Quest IV and Phantasy Star I both so much that I later bought and played through the Nintendo DS remakes. But there’s definitely a certain aesthetic that goes along with JRPGs, and it can be a bit off-putting.

Having an entire party of characters but only being able to use three at any given time is a mechanic I remember from having played Final Fantasy IX. It’s odd. But the six main characters in the game are very well fleshed out. Vaan and Penelo are the stereotypical teenaged street kids with a stake in what’s going on. They’re friends, and there’s a hint of something more between them. The game does an excellent job of showing their playful good-natured immature side during cutscenes. Contrast that with Basch, a very serious honor-obsessed type who wouldn’t smile if Penelo’s shirt fell off. Balthier is a dashing Han Solo sky pirate, and his companion is a Viera – a strange magical humanoid with rabbit ears. Yeah – the Japanese have some kind of weird thing with furries. Lastly is Ashe, the woman meant to be queen. She’s obsessed with yet simultaneously afraid of power. The game sets up some excellent character conflicts.

The way magic works in this universe is interesting. I’m not talking about the spells with their lame -ara, -aga, -aja suffixes, I’m talking about the existence of “mist”, “magicite” and “nethicite” as powerful raw magical forces. Obtaining more “mist charges” and using them to enact “quickenings” is a very interesting mechanic, although very Final Fantasy in its presentation and execution. Ditto the summonable “espers” who must first be defeated and can then be summoned at will. While the espers aren’t much use in actual practice, the notion of their existence is an interesting facet of the setting. One of my favorite part of magic are “palings”. In practice in the game, they’re actually a huge pain since they prevent either magic or physical attacks from having any effect on an enemy, or else screw the player over in some other way. But the word “paling” along with its effect somehow brings to mind the kind of magic that would exist in the world of The Wheel of Time.

Another thing that struck me about the game is the sheer amount of content Square Enix was able to fit onto a single DVD. This is a Playstation 2 game, and it has the best graphics I’ve ever seen on the Playstation 2. The fact that all these very long cutscenes as well as the entire game can fit into a single DVD is damned impressive. And although I’ve always heard it said that Metal Gear Solid is the game with crazy long cutscenes, I don’t think it’s got much on Final Fantasy XII.

When the game finally ended, my characters were about level 50, some of them a bit lower. And I didn’t really have much trouble defeating the end bosses. But there was so very much left to do in the game. So many more sidequests, so many more level VI and VII hunts that I never attempted, more espers, more unexplored areas. Were I so inclined, or were I 14 years old again, I could probably spend another 100 hours in the game without repeating things too much.

Any way, Mercenaries 2 had to be one of the most infuriating games I’ve played in some time.  It’s not a bad game, it just requires a tremendous amount of patience to play due to the various bugs.  What kind of bugs you say?  Well, allow me to explain.  During the game, you’ll work for various factions and one of the things they’ll want you to do is to verify these High Value Targets or HVT’s.  The way that you verify said target is to either kill them and take their picture, or go and capture them and have the faction who hired you spirit them away in a helicopter.  There is one achievement for verifying all of the HVT’s (kill or capture) and one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Capturing them all is a tremendous pain in the ass, which we’ll get into later, but seeing how the achievement is 50 points, it’s worth it.  So, last night, I finish up the final mission which ends with me capturing the final HVT, the game’s villain, and as all of the end of game achievements start pouring in, I’m missing the one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Crap.

Now, there is no way that you can accidentally kill an HVT and have the mission end.  The mission doesn’t end until you photograph the corpse, so there was no way that I could have accidentally killed an HVT as far as the verification count was concerned.  I certainly killed plenty of HVT’s, believe you me, one poor fellow several times actually, but as I never photographed any of them, I knew that it didn’t count.  Also, because I captured the villain at the end instead of killing him, the game also knew that I captured all of them as killing any of the previous HVT’s has your character kill the villain in the end.  The problem was that while the game knew that I had captured them all, it must not have told the achievement system that this was the case.  Luckily, I remembered something a co-worker had told me about the exact same problem, so after signing my profile out, disconnecting the Ethernet cable from the back of the box, signing in, booting the game back up and doing the final mission all over again, the achievement finally popped.  Am I glad that I finally got the achievement?  Of course.  Was I irritated that I had to go through all of that crap to get something that I had already worked so hard for?  You’re damn right I was.

If that had been the only glitch, I would have been OK, but this game is rife with glitches.  Bombing targets show up as being taken out when they haven’t been, or they move to areas of the map that have no targets.  Ordering up vehicle deliveries would routinely have the fuel cost deducted from your stockpiles, but no vehicle was delivered.  Achievements such as “do x thing y number of times” either took much longer, or much shorter than stated to pop, if they popped at all.  The same guy who told me about the trick to getting my glitchy achievement still doesn’t have his achievement for destroying 50 objects with grenades despite having leveled most of Venezuela with nothing but pineapples.

Perhaps the biggest glitches in the game come from how incredibly unbalanced it is.  In a sandbox game, balance is essential as you’re basically telling the player that they can do whatever they want.  In such a situation, you have to make sure that there’s the proper give and take between things.  Take, for example, Saints Row 2.  The best weapon in the game, the Pimp Cane, isn’t available until the end, meaning that you can only use it for the final mission, where it’s pretty much useless.  Had it been available earlier, it would have made things way too easy.  As it was, the Kobra pistols you get were pretty damn powerful, and a smidge unbalancing, however you did have to go out of your way to get them, so it falls into a reward situation.

In Mercenaries 2, you can tell that the intent of the designers was to provide a game where the player is constantly balancing the contrary goals of the various factions, while at the same time, keeping an eye on your two resources: money, used to buy vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes, and fuel, used to deploy said vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes.  In a perfect world, the player would walk a tightrope where they had to be careful about which jobs to take so that they don’t piss off the wrong people while having to complete missions with the limited resources at hand.

In reality?  Yeah, not so much.

Through various code glitches and game balancing issues, this tightrope became a ten lane freeway.  To beat the metaphor even further, let’s go for a ride.

Mo Money, No Problems
As you progress in the game you get paid more and more for your talents however if you’re willing to spend the time, early on you can complete a Winching Challenge provided from your helicopter pilot over and over again to win money.  The fact that he provides the challenge over and over isn’t busted.  What appears to be broken is how the maximum bet will cap at 5 million, but the minimum bet remains a percentage of your total balance, meaning that as long as you never attempted to change the amount of the bet, he’d keep betting you more and more money.  If you didn’t mind doing the same challenge over and over again, you could easily make a billion dollars in a (relatively) short amount of time.  I should know, because I did.  Now, even without doing this, the amount of money you get paid as the contracts increase means that even when properly outfitting yourself, you’ll never go below a hundred million of your current balance.  I got to a billion dollars about a third of the way into the game and never dropped below 900 million, finishing out at around $910 million.

Oil, Or Why We’re Here
Oil, or fuel, is the other resource to keep an eye on.  You can have purchased an entire fleet of attack choppers, but if you don’t have any fuel, they ain’t going no where.  Fuel can only be found out in the field, and usually is under the watching eye of a particular faction.  It also blows up real good, so when it’s not with a faction, and instead is with the Venezuelan army, the game’s only persistent enemy faction, they will usually blow up their oil in trying to get to you.

So, how do you keep your stockpiles of fuel topped off while not brazenly stealing from factions that you’re working for?  Take this moment to look down at the floor, at those vaguely hand-like appendages on the end of your legs.  My people call them feet. That’s how.  Basically, as long as no one in the faction sees you milling about while your chopper pilot comes in to take the fuel they won’t get mad at you, despite the fact that your chopper pilot pilots a very distinctive helicopter, the same helicopter that he regularly uses to transport your ass to the faction that you’re currently stealing from.  So, to easily get fuel, you 1.) Tag the fuel to be picked up.  2.) Pop a smoke grenade signifying that you want to take the fuel.  3.) Run like hell.  Not very hard.  If you still want to go the brazen stealing route, just get in a helicopter of your own and using the winch that comes on every helicopter, even state of the art attack choppers, hover over the fuel, winch it up and fly it away.  Even if the faction knows that it’s you taking the fuel, rather than thinking that it’s one of their own birds, they don’t care.  So, them seeing you stand around while your pilot takes fuel?  Bad.  You flying the fuel away yourself as they watch and wave goodbye?  Not so bad.

Don’t Be Moody
Faction mood is the final “resource” that you have to be aware of.  If a faction is neutral or friendly towards you, you can buy things from them, they won’t shoot you on sight and they will come to extract your HVT’s provided that they’re the ones who want the guy gone in the first place.  Piss off a faction enough so that they become hostile and you either have to kill members of rival factions, blow up some of the angry faction’s targets or bribe them 20% of your bank account to get them back to neutral.

Now, they will get pissed at you for things like killing members of their faction in view of other faction members, blowing up their buildings in view of faction members or if they see you steal fuel as mentioned before.  Once they get mad at you, one of the faction members will start radioing in to their boss.  At this point, you have about ten seconds to kill the radio operator.  If he finishes his message before you take him out, you’ll take a hit on faction mood.

I’m not sure if it was intended to be this way, or if this is a bug, but another way to avoid taking a mood hit is to get out of the area before the radio operator finished his report.  Running usually won’t cut it, however if you’re in a helicopter, you can always fly away quickly enough to cut off the report.  My own thoughts on this is that because this is an open world game, the game doesn’t populate the landscape with people until you get close enough to be able to see them.  If someone is calling in a report, flying away from the site causes the game to shove the people back in to whatever hellish pocket dimension they reside in, and the radio report stops.

Whatever the reason, the ability to make people, and radio reports appear and disappear, pretty much at will, forms the basis of completing the capturing of HVT’s, arguably the activity with the highest risk of pissing off factions.  Again, I’ll explain.  Every faction has HVT’s, half of which are usually members of factions you’re already friends with.  If you run in to a camp guns a blazing, the faction will call in your transgression, you’ll lose mood points with them and may have to end up bribing them.  Not to mention that the soldiers themselves seem to be just as eager to kill the HVT as you are and will regularly shoot you with an RPG even with the HVT right next to you.  If you’re trying to capture, and not kill, this can be a problem.

So, what you do is get a helicopter.  If the HVT is not in the Venezuelan army, get whatever chopper you want.  If they’re VZ, get a VZ chopper.  Fly to the site and get close enough to see the lay of the land, as well as any SAM sites, or tanks or whatever.   When you get close enough, you’ll see the indicator for the HVT.  At this point, he exists, and can be killed.  It’s all very quantum.  You don’t want him killed, so you back away in your chopper until the indicator disappears.  He is now stuffed back in his pocket dimension, protected from harm.  At this point, you use all of your ordinance to level the fucking place. I mean, just wipe everything out.  Once you’ve done that, you can then switch to your mini gun, move in and start tagging individual soldiers.  If they start radioing in, just fly away until they stop.  Then come back and kill some more.  Does it take time?  Well, yeah, but honestly, you have to do about this much work to capture the HVT rather than kill them due to the aforementioned soldier incompetence in the face of HVT bodily harm, so it’s not that big of a deal.

When blowing up faction targets, the method of preventing a loss of faction mood is even more laughably easy.  When you get shot all to hell, you can pause the game and choose the “Medevac” option from the main menu.  This will transport you back to your base for a fee of $10,000 and the current contract is canceled.  What’s also canceled is any radio report of your naughty behaviour. When you blow up a faction target, the contract is considered complete the second that the building is destroyed, usually right when the bomb falls.  The method for blowing up targets becomes: get to the target, blow up the target, medevac out while your friendly faction member calls in your misdeeds.  Sure, the cost is 10,000 bucks, but as you progress through the game you’ll get paid millions per target.  At that point, is 10,000 dollars really going to make a difference?  It’d be like getting pulled over for speeding and having to pay a fine of a nickel.  It just doesn’t matter.

Take all of this together and you have a way of playing the game so that you never run out of money, you only have to work minimally for fuel and everyone loves you.  Hardly the high tension rope walk that the game designers intended.  The main draw of Mercenaries has always been to blow things up but good, so one wonders if the tightrope walk was really that important, but seeing how much work they put into the system, it seems important, even if they made it so deliriously easy to circumvent said system.

Don’t get me wrong, blowing up stuff was fun, and I take great pride in my ability to capture, and not kill, every HVT as some of them were very difficult, even with all of my rigging of the system, but in the end the game was too buggy to love and too unbalanced to take seriously.  I started off playing the game because I wanted to play it and very quickly changed to playing the game to get my full thousand points.

It seems like it would have been pretty easy to address these balancing issues too, which is the sad part.  Maybe make it so that taking the medevac route doesn’t stop radio reports, nor does flying away.  If you piss off a faction, doing extra work for them doesn’t net you money and mood points, but just mood points.  Consider it working off a debt.  If you’re spotted in a chopper doing bad things, don’t make it so that simply flying away makes them forget what you did.  I mean, if a black, slightly damaged chopper just blew up a tank at the base and then flies away, chances are the black, slightly damaged chopper that comes back fifteen seconds later is the same one.  Make it so that you have to get an entirely new bird for them to not notice that it’s you again.  Maybe all of these ideas are in the game and just didn’t work right, I don’t know.  All I know is that the game ended up being difficult for reasons that seem very far removed from what was originally intended.

If you’re not playing it for achievements and just want to blow things up is it worth it?  Yeah, I’d say so, provided you can overlook the bugs.  Maybe not for 60 bucks, but certainly for 30.  Calling in an artillery strike, or dropping a satellite guided surgical strike on a target is a hoot to watch and there is an impressive array of vehicles to get in and tool around with.  Unfortunately, I just don’t think that the game is stable, or balanced enough to warrant a 60 dollar purchase.  Adding to this, I can’t see myself getting the next one, when inevitably it drops.  Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “we won’t get fooled again.”

Next up for me is Fallout 3.   My achievement guide is prepped and loaded, I have a full list of spiffy weapons to look for and I’ll be taking notes so that once I’m done, I can come back with another mammoth “Final Thoughts” column.  I know I can’t wait.  I can only assume that the suspense is palpable on your end as well.