Category: Games

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Fire Emblem Heroes Is Pretty Great … The First Time Around

I haven’t owned a current Nintendo console for a while, so I have missed out on all the Fire Emblem games, but now that there is a mobile version I was able to get in on the fun, and I love it.  At least I used to love it.  It starts out really strong, and it has that Nintendo polish that you have come to expect.  The base gameplay is great, but the end game is terrible.

While the console version of Fire Emblem is a tactical turn based RPG, the mobile version is more like a miniatures game.  You get new units with new abilities, and then you swap them in and out depending on the abilities of your opponents.  Then you simply position them the best you can to best use those abilities.  It is simple to learn, but complex to master.

The problem is that Fire Emblem Heroes is also what is called a “gotcha game”.  To get new units you earn orbs, and then you cash in those orbs and pray you get something good.  Even if you do get the unit you want, it may be a lesser version of what you want.  You see all heroes have a star value attached to them, so you may get a cool hero, but he may only be the three star, and to up him a star level you need hundreds of thousands of “hero feathers”.  You can only use those feathers after he as gotten to level 20 in the game.  Not to mention if you add a star to your hero he starts again from scratch from level one with none of his learned skills.

At first this is okay because all your heroes are low level and the game is throwing orbs at you, but once you get to the upper levels of the game, the orb earn rate drops through the floor, and it will take forever to grind your hero back up to where he was.  Not to mention just earning all those dang feathers.  Worse yet the game uses the old mobile standby “stamina”.  Every level takes a bit of stamina to play, but once you get to the upper levels they take so much stamina that you can only try the level a couple of times before you have to quit and wait for your stamina to refill, or pay up for more.

The game is so fun that first time through you don’t care about all these free to play issues, but once you have gotten through the game once it really starts to make the game less fun.  There is no good end game unless you are willing to drop a bunch of cash, and that is a shame because if it had tweaked some of these game systems I could see Fire Emblem Heroes becoming a new obsession.  As it is now, it was just a really fun diversion for a couple of days.

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Shmee Revisits Morrowind!

Thanks to The Elder Scrolls Online announcing the new Morrowind expansion, I got a little nostalgic, and I decided to fire up The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and relive one of my all time favorite games.  It was not an easy process.  The first problem was that Morrowind was not designed for 64-bit computers with more than 4GB of RAM, so I had to get a mod to get it working.  Then due to the high resolution of my monitor (according to Morrowind), I had to download a new font pack, and since I was doing all that anyway, I decided to download a few mods that tweak the game’s gameplay balance, fix bugs, and improve the game’s visuals and sound.  Two hours later Morrowind was up and running on my PC.

I was ready to dive in.  All I had to do was open the trap door to the prison boat I was on…  It took about me about 30 minutes to figure out that the the ‘use’ button and the ‘activate’ button are different (The first time I played Morrowind was on the Original Xbox).  It turns out you ‘activate’ people and doors with spacebar.  The game did not tell me this, and who in their right mind uses spacebar for anything other than jumping.  All the default controls were wonky.  I mean right click brought up the menus instead of switching to magic, so after another 30 minutes of remapping my controls I was able to complete character creation and start playing the game.

Of course all the mods I had installed were not optimized, so my frame rate was swinging between 200FPS and 15FPS, so I had to do some tweaking to get everything to stay above 30FPS.  I have never had a game that looks so bad, run so poorly, but after looking in to the forums I found out the frame rate is just a problem with Morrowind on PC in general, and not my mods.  It turns out 15 years ago developers couldn’t imagine a world with 100% draw distance.

Four hours in to my quest to play Morrowind something happened, I got lost in it all over again.  I just want to go home and play it now.  The combat mechanics are sketchy, the graphics didn’t hold up, and the story is still trash, but the world of Morrowind is still one of the best ever made.  Skyrim and Oblivion have normal generic fantasy worlds (Oblivion did have its gates I guess *shudder*) , but Morrowind with its mushroom forests, boggy swamps and gray deserts are so unique and imaginative that I want to see every nook and cranny.  It is so delightfully weird, and no game will ever match the shear amount of loot you can find and use.  SO MANY EQUIPMENT SLOTS!

Most of Morrowind has not held up well, but the world is still amazing, and the loot hound in me wants to make sure I have every slot of my character filled up with something magical.  I would pay sooooo much money for a new special edition of Morrowind, but I don’t think it is ever going to happen.  Morrowind is a game for the ages, and the game that turned me in to an RPG player for life.  If you have never played it, I doubt you would be able to look past its flaws, but for those of us who have 15 years of nostalgia built up, this is still one of the best RPGs ever made.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Is Fine

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a return to form for the Deus Ex franchise after the clunky yet still okay Invisible War, so I was supper excited for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.  It turns out that the Dues Ex franchise must be like Star Trek movies where only every other one is good.  That is not to say Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is bad.  It isn’t.  It is very competent in fact, but it lacks that hook that makes me want to play.

Mankind Divided takes place a couple of years after Human Revolution, and the world is still recovering from ‘The Incident’ where all augmented people went crazy and started attacking non-augmented people.  This has caused places like Prague, the game’s main location, to start segregating people based on whether they are augmented or not.  Of course all sorts of dangerous people are trying to use this situation to further their own goals, and it is up to Adam Jensen to stop them.

The story’s setup is pretty good, and it should provided a decent launching off point for this game, but they never really find a way to truly make anything matter.  I am almost all the way through the game, and I still don’t care about any of the characters.  ‘Augs’ are being treated poorly, and I should feel bad about that, but Mankind Divided must not be in my face enough with it or something because it all feels kind of shrug worthy.  Worse still this game bills itself as an RPG, but much like Fallout 4 they have taken most of the choice out of Mankind Divided.  You can choose to do side quests or not, and sometimes you can go left or right, but you are never having that big of an impact on the story, and that is a shame.

Another letdown is the loot.  If you are like me and playing this game sneakily, then you will need next to none of the stuff you can pick up.  You will never find a better taser pistol, or a better tranquilizer rifle.  You can pick up things like shotguns and load them with EMP rounds then a attach a silencer, but it will still make too much noise.  The same goes for the augmentations you can pick.  For me, all I will ever need are, the one that lets me talk to people better, jump high and turn invisible.  Hacking is nice, but not necessary.  Everything else is cool to play with, but not practical for the non-violent approach.

I will say the one place Deus Ex: Mankind Divided shines is its approach to combat and level design.  If you are trying to be stealthy there are all sorts of fun ways to get around guys and take them out without killing them, and based on all the gear and augs I am not using, if you want to be the human embodiment of death, you will have a wide variety of options too.  Honestly its varied levels and combat options are why I keep pushing forward with this game.

In the end, I always have fun when I play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but I just don’t get that feeling that I ‘need’ to play it.  I have to get myself to start, but then once I do I enjoy myself due to the cool levels and combat.  I just wish the story, loot, and augmentation options were as good.  Since Deus Ex: Mankind Divided seems like it is endlessly on sale for $30 or less, I would say it is worthwhile, but I would have regretted paying full price for it.

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Nintendo Switch Controllers Cost How Much!!!!

Some people have been griping about the price of the Nintendo Switch.  It will cost $300 with both the left and the right Joy-Con controllers and the dock.  That doesn’t bug me too much.  If it is $300 now it won’t be long until you can find a sale where they are probably $25-$50 less than that.  The Dock costs $90, again not a big deal.  How many people are going to need more than one Dock?  Since I work in the IT industry I can tell you that $90 for an HDMI dock isn’t that bad.

What is bad is the controller price.  You would think that when you buy a new Switch controller that it would include both the left and the right Joy-Cons, you know so you could play any game with it, but that is not the case.  Each left and right costs $49 each.  You do save $20 buying them together for $79, but still, $79 for a new non-premium/special edition controller is a lot to swallow.  It makes it hard to justify for families.  I know that like the console itself the price will drop on those pretty quick.  However, that means they will be $60ish on sale.  The price of a full price game.

The Switch still looks really cool, and I can’t wait to try one myself, but those controller prices are ridiculous, and that is coming from a guy who spent $150 on an Xbox One Elite controller (I still love it by the way).

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Shmee Gets Covert!

Look at me giving another board game review!  Hey I get away from my TV sometimes… Anyway today I am going to review Covert by Kane Klenko and published by Renegade Game Studios.  Covert is a worker/dice placement game, so kind of like a mashup of Pandemic and Lords of Waterdeep, but still nothing like those two games.

In the game you are in charge of a spy ring, and it is your job to move the spies where they need to be while finding the equipment they need to complete their missions.  Other players are of course doing the same thing.  While you can’t outright attack other players, you can block them from being able to make the moves they want to make thanks to Covert’s clever dice placement system.

Much like Lords of Waterdeep you will have Mission Cards, and on these cards will be the things you need to get/do to complete your mission, like a shoe-phone, a spy camera and a spy in Minsk.  To move your spies and try and get those resources you place dice in the areas with the actions that you would like to do.  To help you visualize this let me give you a shot of the board:

As you can see along the top of the board are action wheels with the numbers one through six.  At the beginning of every round players roll five dice, and then take turns placing the dice in those wheels.  The trick is that once one person has placed a die in that wheel, the next person that wants to do that action must place a die next to the existing die, so if one person places a six in the ‘Take a Card’ area the next player would have to put down a one or a five.

Now we can see each other’s dice, so if I see you only have fours, threes and a one, and I have a one and I get to go first.  If I put my one down somewhere you will not be able to place in that area unless I or someone else plays a five or a two.  Luckily this game offers a lot of ways to get things done, so you should never get too stuck.

That gray grid on the side of the board pictured above will have numbers in it from one to six.  It is the code cracking area.  Every player will get to use the code cracker once per round.  If you can crack a code, you get a resource you can use for your mission or hold on to for two victory points.  Also the main cards of the game, ‘Agent Cards’, have multiple uses.  Each card has not only an item like a shoe-phone on it, but a plane ticket to a city, or a random little ability, like to perhaps change a die number by one, or take a discarded card.  Can’t get in the ‘Take a Card’ action wheel? You can earn Agent Cards by picking up intel cubes the other players leave behind while moving around the board.

Don’t have any cards, and none of your dice work?  You can buy ‘Special Operations’ with extra dice, and they have the special abilities from the cards, so they let you alter the game.  Not to mention every spy leader has a special ability, like being able to move the code cracker twice,  move agents for free, or look at cards before drawing them.  All sorts of good stuff.  To give you an idea of what this all looks like, here is a shot of the back of the box with a fully setup game:

Now, I got more in to game mechanics then a I wanted to with this review, but I think it is important that you realize that there is a lot going on with this game.  It is not just place a worker and get a thing.  It is a puzzle, but none of the puzzle pieces are hard to understand or explain.  To people who play a lot of board games, they can start playing this game in ten minutes.  Others who don’t understand the worker placement genre, it may take a little longer, but not much.

I love how crunchy and think-y Covert is.  Every round you are trying to make sure you are not missing an avenue to get what you need or delay another player from getting what they need.  The only downside is that some people may think too long, dragging this game out.  I have only ever played Covert two player, but I could see four players being a bit much.  Anyway, I think this a great game to have, and a good take on the worker placement genre, so if you find Lords of Waterdeep too shallow, you can dive in to the deep end with Covert.