Category: Rant

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Lost Odyssey Starts With Two Hours Of Nothing!

Let me recap my first two hours of Lost Odyssey.  I fought in an intro battle for fifteen minutes, and then I walked around and talked to people (well people talked to me) and kicked stuff for an hour and forty-five minutes.  Good times were had by all.  Well okay, boredom was had by me

Granted the world was interesting enough for me to keep playing for that two hours, and now I think I am finally to the part where I start to play the game ‘for real’, but you never can tell with JRPGs.  I mean this game had a ten minute dream sequence that was just scrolling text.  I got thirty achievements points for reading it which was nice, but you would expect more from a dream.

This game has a lot of fans, so I am going to give it another chance or two, and it is hard to complain about a free game (until the end of December), but something more interesting had better happen soon.  I don’t know if I can kick any more garbage cans or probe any more pots.  I am just kidding I love to probe pots.  They are full of all sorts of possibly useful potions and stuff.

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DC Is Sticking With Ayer For Gotham City Sirens!

Suicide Squad made tons of money despite its awful reviews, so it is not surprising that it is getting a spinoff featuring Harley Quinn and her villainous besties, Gotham City Sirens.  What is surprising is that they are keeping on David Ayer to do the film.  Usually in this kind of situation were the movie made money, but that fans were not pleased they axe the director to appease everyone.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised given that after the fallout of Batman v Superman DC/Warner Bros stuck with Zack Snyder for Justice League, but considering the studio head reshuffle, you would expect story/director changes to be happening all over the place.  I guess they just decided that in order to keep everything on track they need to stay with what they got, and then try to have Geoff Johns retool and try to get the scripts where they need to be.   I am hoping this strategy works out because I love the DC Universe, and would love for the movies being made to be actually good instead of okay.

Regardless, it looks like I will have to cast a new Catwoman and Poison Ivy.  That is an exciting prospect.  Also it sounds like the Deadshot movie announcement is incoming, so that should be fun.

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The Elder Scrolls Online Did Something Else New For An MMO, Its Customer Support Ruined The Game…

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Days after talking about how much fun I was having with The Elder Scrolls Online I am now writing a post to tell you that I will no longer be playing the game, and the worst part is that it isn’t because the game isn’t fun, but because their customer support is terrible.

My tale of woe started a little over a week ago.  I was excited to try out the new Tamriel Unlimited feature of The Elder Scrolls Online, so cracked open my box and started to install my game.  While that was happening I clicked to redeem my DLC code so I could get access to the Thieves Guild, The Dark Brotherhood, and a couple of other expansions.  Not to mention a horse, but the code said it was ‘deactivated’.  I had never seen that before, so logged a support ticket with The Elder Scrolls Online support, and I went to work playing through the intro areas of the game and doing some of the quests.  Not to mention my epic quest across the world of Temriel.

The next day (like a full 24 hours later) I got an email saying that there was nothing they could do about the bad code, and that it was up to Amazon to replace it.  It was lame to have to stop playing the game so I could return it to Amazon, but I figured they knew what they were talking about.  However the next game’s code had the same problem.  Remembering what The Elder Scrolls Online support said this time I opened tickets with both Microsoft and Amazon.  Microsoft did everything they could to contact Amazon and Bethesda to try and get the code activated, but in the end there was nothing they could do because companies are allowed to deactivate codes in case merchandise is stolen, so Microsoft couldn’t re-activate the code, and Amazon said they used the same process to activate their DLC codes that they always do, so they didn’t know what happened.  They did next day rush me a third copy of the game.

Guess what.  The third copy of The Elder Scrolls Online did not work either, so this time I went back to The Elder Scroll Online support and of course they said their was nothing they could do.  I pointed out that I was the not the only person having this problem:

And that Bethesda is having other Elder Scroll Online Redemption Issues:

So they said they would escalate my ticket.  Then nothing for three days.  I kept asking for updates or ETAs, but nothing.  Just silence.  Not even a hang in their cat .gif.

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I have never felt more ignored by customer support in my life.  Needless to say I contacted Amazon again to get a refund.  To Amazon’s credit they did once again make sure the game was properly handled and activated before being sent to me, but it all looked good on their side, and since they sell a ‘few’ video games I am inclined to believe them.  I contacted The Elder Scrolls Online support to let them know they could close my ticket, but they haven’t even responded to that.  My ticket is sill open.  I have never had customer support ruin a game for me before, but The Elder Scrolls Online figured out how.

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Dear Developers, Don’ Use ‘Retro’ Save Systems!

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Thanks to Games with Gold I recently acquired Earthlock: Festival of Magic by Snowcastle Games, and while I was never a big JRPG fan there was something about the old school presentation of Earthlock that perfectly triggered my nostalgia nerve center.  Well it did until I ran in to a boss that I wasn’t ready for, and since I hadn’t seen a green save frog in a long time it wiped out an hour’s worth of play time.   I returned the favor by wiping it off my Xbox One’s hard drive.

To all the developers out there please use modern saving schemes.  I understand that Earthlock was trying to harken back to a simpler time, but the reason saving was terrible back then was because they didn’t know any better, or there was a limitation with their software.  No one pines for the days when they would have to play the same hard area over and over again because they were stuck between save points.  No, our brains forget those play sessions so we don’t turn in to uncontrollable rage monsters.  At the very minimum include a retry button so that we can get through the boss and get to a save point.

Oh well, other then the save game deal I have nothing else to write about Earthlock: Festival of Magic since I didn’t play it enough to properly review it because I literally uninstalled it.  I have a lot of other games to play, and they respect my time enough to save my game at regular intervals.

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Dead Rising, The Game I Should Love…

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Dead Rising turns 10 this year, and to celebrate Capcom is re-releasing the old games and the new Dead Rising 4.  When the original Dead Rising was announced for the for the Xbox 360 I was supper excited.  It was like they reached inside my brain and then created a game just for me.  I mean it was a game where you could use just about anything for a weapon while roaming around a large open mall that was infested with the undead, and the game delivered on that promise.  However, it also delivered a constantly ticking clock so that you could not take your time to enjoy all the free form zombie killing action, a terrible save system, and bosses that were next to impossible to defeat.  I don’t think I have ever been more disappointed in a game.

It turns out I am not the only one who felt this way, so they had to make drastic changes to the next Dead Rising games.  Because of that I hear that things got better in the second and third games, and that they are completely getting rid of the countdown clock in the upcoming Dead Rising 4, but after the way the first game let me down it is hard to get excited about the franchise again.  Who knows maybe Dead Rising 4 will be the zombie game that gets everything right, but unless I get the game as a gift I won’t find out.  It is hard to trust something that has broken your heart.