THE GOOD
Horizon: Zero Dawn
I wanted to wait until I’d played enough of the game to do a proper “review” before I put this in my good list. And after about twenty or so hours of gameplay over two weeks…yeah, this is definitely a good. One of the best games on the PS4 for sure and a must-pick-up if you’re into open-world games that involve giant robot beasts, and I mean, who isn’t into that?
The basic plot of Horizon: Zero Dawn is you’re a young woman who has grown up as an outcast in her culture. It takes place after an apocalypse (like most fiction does nowadays) and the human race lives in different tribes while wild machines roam the earth killing and sucking up resources. Most machines move like herd animals, although some are more aggressive than others. It’s an interesting concept – normal wild animals like rabbits and foxes and pigs roam the wilderness as well, but the main threat to humanity’s existence are these large robotic animals that are very intimidating.
Gameplay is addicting – each beast has weaknesses you have to exploit to be able to take it down. You never feel overpowered – the only things you get from leveling up are a few more hit points and a skill point. Therefore all of the robot beasts still pose a threat even twenty hours into the game. “Easy” encounters can go sideways very quickly when an unexpected variable is introduced. For example, I thought I had a beast well away from the rest of its herd and started trying to take it down – unfortunately I didn’t sequester it far enough away and I ended up having to fight the entire aggressive herd at once instead of one by one. Whoops.
The game suffers from typical open-world tropes – there’s collectibles you have to search for, sidequests that involve you going from point A to point B, only to discover you actually need to go to point C before returning to point A. But Aloy herself makes it worth it – she’s a well-developed character who faces the world with lots of sarcasm, and it’s nice hearing her talk to herself about some of the situations she gets into. And the minute-to-minute gameplay makes you forget about the “typical” quests – I get so much joy out of chipping away a robot’s armor and exploiting the weaknesses. And the game fits different playstyles – going in with no plan and shooting from the hip can be just as efficient as taking a few minutes to set up traps and plan out your attack.
On top of all that, this is a very pretty game. Videos don’t really do it justice due to compression and the like – everything about the environment is gorgeous. The robots are very detailed and life-like in their movements – one of the little joys I get is overriding one robot and watching how they interact with other robots before they attack each other.
All in all, I highly recommend this game if you have a PS4 and like open-world games that aren’t just your typical marine shooters. The world is big enough to be impressive but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and people seem to be finishing it in 40-50 hours which is a pretty good number for these types of games. I could go on and on about it, but if you’re interested – you can watch one of my videos to see whether you’d like it or not.
THE BAD
Amai Clooney’s “Baby Bump”
This is gonna be short. Last Thursday, Amal Clooney gave a speech at the United Nations. The next day everyone was not reporting on her speech, but instead her fashion choice and her “baby bump.” The Washington Post has a good summary of everything here.
I’m going to hark back to what Tina Fey said at the Golden Globes in 2015: “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.”
It’s Hollywood’s shittacular treatment of women on steroids. Amal Clooney happened to marry George Clooney – and the media treats her like she’s the trophy wife. This is a woman who has accomplished pretty much everything that George Clooney has pretended to accomplish as the characters he’s portrayed in movies.
Why the fuck is a “baby bump” something important to report about in the first place? Sure, fine, if there’s an actress on the red carpet who is pregnant, fuck it. Report on that if you fucking have to. But this woman was literally giving a speech on crimes perpetrated by ISIS to the United Nations and the media has the gall to report on her fucking “baby bump”? Jesus Christ. What’s next? “Ruth Bader Ginsburg rocks amazing hairstyle and puts the supreme back in Supreme Court”?
Fuck off gossip trash media.
THE WEIRD
Metacritical Mass
I don’t really have a “weird” thing to report on this week. This gravitates more towards bad than weird, but in lieu of anything else I’ll just throw this out there.
On February 28, the aforementioned Horizon: Zero Dawn released. On March 3 (the Friday of the same week) the new Legend of Zelda game released as well. Both are open-world video games…both are console exclusives…both are being raved about as excellent games…and under normal circumstances, that’s all you need to know.
However, as much as I hate to say it as an avid video gaming fan, video games are insanely petty and childish. Going all the way back to the days of Nintendo vs. Sega, people who play video games have stupidly ludicrous brand loyalty. And with the advent of the internet, there’s this subset of video game players who have to prove that MY game is the BEST game and no OTHER game can be as good as MY game.
Metacritic is the bane of video game existence right now. I’ll probably go into more depth about this in a later blog post, but essentially the review aggregator holds a lot of weight in the gaming community. Horizon: Zero Dawn currently has an 89 (out of 100) average review score. That’s awesome. The new Zelda game currently has a 97, which is amazing.
But it’s not a 98, which is absolutely horrendous to some idiots.
You think I’m joking? I’m not. The reviewer that gave the new Zelda a 7.5/10 which lowered the Metacritic from 98 to 97 ended up having his website DDOS attacked and people also tried to hack his e-mail and Twitter handle. All because his review wasn’t a 10/10 (or, in a pinch, a 9/10).
This stupid shit is why people won’t take video games seriously as a medium. For fuck’s sake people, grow up.
Warning! Opinions Ahead 