State of Decay 2: About as Buggy as the First

State of Decay 2 is probably one of the most ambitious zombie-survival games out there. It’s large open world that works well for a zombie survivalist’s dream. While the game’s story isn’t exactly new or creative, the gameplay makes up for it. The only problem is that the game has quite a few bugs that can easily hinder the gameplay.

The story is simple, after the first State of Decay, almost nothing changed. Zombies are still roaming, the military that was in the area has scattered among the survivors in the game, and there’s a new Blood Plague going around. While this is going on, several survivor groups are doing everything they can to help the many groups of survivors in the area.

The Blood Plague is a new type of infection going around that’s causing zombies to turn red and bloody. If a survivor contracts the Plague, they need to be treated or else they will eventually die. After the group of survivors pick a region to stay in, they find a new home and go off to prevent the new infection strain while trying to keep you small community alive. That’s really it for the plot. The rest of the game is simply about a group of survivors that you control, to survive however you want.

The game makes it clear that maintaining a home base isn’t easy. I was forced to make outdoor beds for my ever-growing group of survivors, meaning that their morality would stay low for a while. My resources were slim at the beginning, and felt like I was working my ass off to keep my team alive. Despite this, it feels satisfying to know that my small group of survivors are still alive, despite their morale being below 50%. But after two days of scavenging, I finally balanced my resources so that my survivors were satisfied. This means that instead of looking for these pesky materials, I can venture off to other cities in the region to look for new cars, guns, and maybe a better home.

The base mechanics works pretty well overall it’s not particularly hard to maintain if you always look for supplies while exploring. So what do you actually do to build your home base? Well you choose a survivor take a fresh weapon, some snacks, some meds, and maybe another survivor to watch your back. Then like a true nerd you venture out to the worst place imaginable. Outside where the zombies seemingly appear out of nowhere and sometimes seen hovering around.

Joking aside, I personally love the feeling of being a lone scavenger while fighting off these pesky zombos who are getting in my way. It’s not easy though, while handling individual infected amounts to pressing the attack button until you can execute a finishing move, the problem quickly escalates when their friends hear the commotion. Immediately there’s a problem with having five of the infected trying to grab you at the same time. Meanwhile a special infected comes in to mix up combat

It does get crazy later on, so your survivors level up their skills fairly fast as long as they’re doing something. Search enough containers to level up a survivors’ Wits stat to increase their search speed or move quietly, increase their fighting skill to unlock helpful moves to take out zombies. Also if a character specializes in a utility skill, like cooking, they can give bonuses to some facilities in their base. It surprised me how practical my survivors became as I learned efficient ways to gain experience.

I also was able to bring a few cars back to my home base to make scavenging even easier, even if it’s a bit loud. The cars even have storage space so I could easily turn in everything I’ve gathered! Car’s come with a small price of refueling and repairing if it gets messed up.

The quests aren’t too bad either. Trading materials with survivors groups, dealing with theft, surviving ambushes by renegade bandits, and clearing out infestations are all there. There’s even some more unique missions that your own survivors will do if you switch to them. They range from retrieving a unique weapon, finding a relative, policing the apocalypse, destroying plague hearts, and even becoming an action star for fun and morale. It’s pretty interesting at most.

For co-op, players can invite up to three friends can venture out together and survive, though it’s a shame since only the host player gets the benefits for their own base and supplies.

State of Decay 2 is buggy, simply put. The game runs smooth for the most part but looks as if it will break at any moment. Enemies float from afar, I have to hit zombies at a certain angle at times or else I would miss for no reason. A zombie once got stuck behind a door I needed to go through as there was no way else to get inside, preventing me from finishing up an infestation. Switching survivors in an outpost can cause the survivor’s mission I’m switching to disappear, making the mission unavailable for some time.

Among these, are some immersion-breaking bugs that are annoying, but don’t really don’t affect gameplay. These glitches include: survivors spazzing out when opening car doors, sometimes when jumping over a fence the camera does a 180 for one moment, enough to accidentally make a survivor jump back over the fence, cars can easily get stuck in many situations, just Hopefully these glitches will be ironed out upon releases.

On a side note: a few gamemodes aren’t available from the YOSE, and there’s going to be a horde mode being made separately. It’s easy to imagine what this will be, stay in a homebase and zombies attack, in an all-out fight/shootout with the zombies, or even other human. I think that sounds pretty rad.

The game gets 6 out of 10.

As somebody who played the first and the YOSE editions of the games, I can say that it is an overall improvement. Scavenging, base building, and fighting work better than the first game, making it more playable. I can also say the beating the game itself is a bit weak, and the replayability is a 50/50 to me since the rewards are sparce. While it runs well on the PC I can’t say the same for the console versions that periodically crash. The bugs are just way too noticeable to ignore and the quest-disappearing glitch still scares me every time I try to switch characters. It’s obvious that a few more game modes will be added later on to bring some players back, but Undead Labs needs to fix up these bugs if anything.

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is Diet Animal Crossing: Pt 1 - Villagers

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp puts a famous busytime game onto your phone. It's simple, you pass time by gathering resources by helping out camp-goers' friendship levels. These objectives can be completed by either fishing, shaking fruit trees, collecting bugs, shells by the seashore, simple stuff. Not only that, you can simply talk to your campgoers to increase their friendship level. Now why do all of this? Well the whole point of the game is to have your campsite be the main hangout of all of the camp-goers! Now what's the problem? It's the goal.

Animal Crossing has been a series where the whole point of the game is to simply, do whatever you want. If you wanted to be an actual mayor of your town, like in New Leaf, then you could do that. If you wanted to become rich, then go to the tropical island and keep farming for those rare fish or bugs. If you wanted to have the biggest house in the entire town, that can be your goal too. The game was endless and had many events to work towards. I can name several events you can work towards: get all of K.K. Slider's music every Saturday, increase friendship with a villager of your choosing, increase the fish, bug, painting, and fossil catalogue in the museum, collect emotes every week from Dr. Shrunk, get the cutest clothes to become the ultimate goth girl. It's great! Animal Crossing Pocket Camp on the other hand makes things feel limited.

For starters, the places that you can walk towards is limited to about seven areas on the map. It's actually four areas if you exclude the Market Place and the OK Motors shop. Also, the aspects of helping your villagers is less-organic. God, it does not feel satisfying when you complete a villagers' request at all when you know that all just goes towards getting more resources for them to make more furniture. Also, furniture is not fun anymore. Furniture is a must for your campground to have villagers stay as a permanent resident. That's dumb. That kind of defeats the point of having themed rooms or campgrounds. Sure the game automatically moves your furniture for when an camp-goer visits, but it feels just too formulaic.

Did you know that fishing and bug-hunting is not as fun as it used to be? That's because in the previous games, it took actual skill to catch a fish or a bug. In pocket camp, you touch a bug, and your character already readies a net and you simply wait until an exclamation point appears over the bug's head. It feels more grindy now that you know you're just gathering items in preparation for a villager request. Fish always tried their best to ignore your fishing lure in the past, now they are attracted to it for no reason and it was more fair back then than it is now. It would be more fun if villagers didn't ask for like three items at the same time! Wouldn't it be easier if each villager only asked for one thing at a time? Yeah, but the grind though. I remember the games being fun since you always feel a connection the more you decide to talk to a villager. Sometimes they would get sick and you would have to buy some medicine, sometimes they would ask you a stupid question and would react appropriately depending on your answer. They would ask you to change their catch-phrase when they greet you. They would make you bury a time-capsule to truly make you feel like their best friend. Now you just try to appease them with fruit baskets and absurd amounts of fish.

Well for a free and innocent game like Animal Crossing, I have never felt so bored of it. In the coming updates, I hope for something more meaningful than going on fetch-quests forever and ever.

Tune in next time for more complaints I have.

Bojack Horseman: Thoughts about Princess Carolyn

Bojack Horseman, he's an asshole, he's drunk, he's famous, and he just can't seem to find happiness in his life. From season 1, the show has given me some motivation in my life. It's kind of hard to describe, people don't really relate to Bojack himself, not initially. He's kind of a jerk and has almost every reason to be happy, he's got friends, a reliable agent, and kind of has it easy, but he doesn't take any bullshit. He's also tends to sabotage himself, weather it be on purpose, or because he has no idea what to do. There are certain episodes where the audience can see what he's given, all of the opportunities that he can succeed in, but he just doesn't want it. If he accepted everything and tried to actually make his life better, there would be no problem, but that's not who he is. It's actually unfortunate, most people in the world are as unhappy as he is and we can all relate to that. It's not only him, but all of his friends seem to get caught up with it too. I'll start with Princess Carolyn.

The series takes place in an anthropomorphic world where humans and animal-people have been around since the beginning of time. Although the show isn't about that specifically, it plays an important role for many of the characters. Princes Carolyn is a cat, she's an agent for Bojack and many other celebrities in Hollywood (currently known as Hollywoo, due to Bojack's actions). She's sassy, not too old, overworks and tries to get actors's lives in shape. She's also a great motivator, whether she actually means it doesn't really matter Also, she has a knack for tongue twisters. It's a famous quote she says that sums up her entire character. "My life is a mess right now and I compulsively take care of other people when I don't know how to take care of myself." We all know people like this, don't we? Someone is working themselves way too hard. Sometimes they succeed and have all the rights to be smug about it. Though, it can take just one bad day to ruin it all. She just can't handle it. From the episode where she builds up this entire organization to become one of the best agencies, to the episode where it almost all falls down, she does find a way to make it right again.

This new Thoughts series I'm making is a new start, I mostly want to reflect on what I've learned from shows that I admire the most. If I write that, that's all that matters right now.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War - The Ending & The Shadow Wars (Spoilers)

So you've done all of the side missions in Shadow of War. You're about level 45 or something at this point of the game. You've collected all of those artifacts and heard all of Celebrimbor and Talion's dialogue talking about them (at least you should have). You've taken over all of the regions and have your orc army taking care of the fortresses. Now let's get to the "final" mission real quick before getting to The Shadow Wars.

The final mission consists of Talion and Elatriel fighting on the bridge towards the Witch King and Sauron. Along with Elatriel, you have all of your orcs within that region following you along to help defeat the opposing orc captains getting in your way. Sure it's not EVERY SINGLE orc captain you've dominated following you along, but it feels empowering having an actual army backing you up. In fact you can dominate the enemy captains for extra backup. Strength in numbers can help you greatly here and it makes for an entertaining fight as you actually attempt to defeat your rival the Witch King. Rival is a generous word for this guy since in-game you've only heard that the Witch King is one of the more powerful of the Nazgul, and you've banished most of them as you get to beating the game. So after some fun battles with the Captains, you meet the Witch King, he is significantly harder than many of the Nazgul you've fought and he's basically all of them combined. Though along with just him, there are several orc soldiers trying to kill me. So I skillfully juggle between him and killing other orc soldiers and I grab the Witch King's face and learn the "Truth."

Celebrimbor's body is currently being possessed by Sauron himself. Talion is upset by this, Celebrimbor is angry that Talion is upset by this. Celebrimbor has a plan where he will "dominate" Sauron's body with the new ring they have and will rule Mordor as the "Bright Lord." The story is actually very similar to the newest Devil May Cry where Dante finds out that Virgil wants to rule the land in place of the guy they just killed. Talion has none of this and is actually defeated pretty easily, Celebrimbor simply un-posesses himself from Talion and decides to work together with Elatriel to defeat Sauron. This is very unfortunate for Talion as he is dying from the wounds he suffered from the actual first time he died from the Black Gate.

Anyway we stray away from Talion and go to Celebrimbor and Elatriel's battle with Sauron in Celebrimbor's body. The fight is interesting, fun, and has more depth than fighting an orc Captain. The battle is indeed fitting to how someone would have to fight Sauron head-on as he's a giant hulking man. So you beat him, except you don't because Sauron basically calls Celebrimbor an idiot for trying to dominate his mind and cuts off Elatriel's fingers, taking the new ring and forces Celebrimbor to posess his own body. It's sort of a letdown but hey, we didn't exactly expect the game to actually end at this point. Also Elatriel runs away I guess.

Now after all of that stuff, Talion is still dying, ignoring the orcs that were backing him up he's all by himself. So Shelob talks to Talion in his head and gives him the ultimatum in order for him to attempt to make things right. Wear the ring the Witch King used to change the tides of war but also turn into a Ring-Wraith, or die. Talion dies The End.

He doesn't die, and takes the ring and goes on a mission to take back Minas Ithil, or Minas Morgul as it is now. Talion is now a Ring Wraith and has the ability to bring dead orcs back to life. Awesome! Though you can't resurrect dead orc Captains until you complete the final pit fight in Minas Morgul. 

So now what? Now we have the namesake of the game happen. The Shadow Wars. Yay. Now it's sandbox mode, where you have to defend the fortresses in each region from Sauron's more powerful orcs. Cool, maybe more side-missions have opened up. Maybe we can help Baranor with stuff. Meet Idril again? Maybe we can do something about that Balrog we didn't kill and use it to turn the tides of war? Ok no, you don't do any of that for whatever reason. You just defend the fortress in each region, except Minas Morgul. That's it. You have to defend each region when they say they're being attacked. If someone had enough patience, they could totally do this. I don't have enough patience and just stopped playing after stage 5. It gets tedious after a while and it kind of forces the player to buy lootboxes in order to get stronger orcs to defend the fortresses instead of dominating ones in the wild.

Except, nobody should do that. No videogame should have pacing in it where you say to yourself, "hey can I beat the game now?" That's just bad pacing, and it's made to look like a ploy to actually buy lootboxes. Why should I play a game for a few more hours without any sidequests? Why should I play the game when I know that there's more DLC coming? I'm simply wasting valuable time just to see the TRUE ENDING in-game. So like a normal human being, I watched the ending online and was unamused. I will still play the Shadow Wars part very slowly in my spare time, but now I feel that I don't need to. The game is still good, it's still fun, and it's still kind-of worth $60. Now, I feel like I've beaten it and will continue to play other games.

Call of Duty WWII: The Headquarters

It seems like Call of Duty is heading towards the right direction for the series. Now as we head towards the future, we go back to the past for its multiplayer and it's pretty good. Let's start with the hubworld. With your class customized to your liking with your favorite outfit, which you can earn through ingame loot crates. We'll get to that later. The hubworld is a little socializing headquarters, similar to Destiny. You can walk around, accept contracts to earn lootcrates, 1v1's which are hilarious, play old Activision Classic games, and buy prestige items. It's actually pretty neat.

There's something for me to personally say that this hubworld is probably one of the better ones in 2017 that makes the game feel close to an MMO. Here's what's great: the shooting range. You can test out weapons you unlock by shooting at targets, and you can just hop into it without loading into a different session. This is probably something that GTA V's multiplayer tried to do as you always had to load into a different session and would basically hinder your online experience. The better part about COD WWII's shooting range is that you can shoot targets with other players, making for some humorous interactions where players would harmlessly shoot each-other simply for fun.

You can do a series of emotes in the headquarters at any time, similar to Destiny. Though the high-five emote doesn't exactly work as intended. You can also use emotes if you are one of the top three players in an online match.

Players can also test out various scorestreaks, where they go into a raven's nest, and use various scorestreaks on misc. npcs just so you know how to use them in an online match, and that is awesome. 

Players can go into 1v1 matches in the headquarters live in a dedicated area. That way, players can actually gather around and watch people get heated in their 1v1 battles. "What is going on?" one player said as he saw two people arguing while fighting each-other in a 1v1.

Also the lootboxes are opened in-game in the headquarters themselves, making for some simple entertainment by watching players open their rare lootboxes they saved up. The boxes are mostly cosmetic as all of the weapons must be earned through ranking up through online matches. Players can earn emotes, new outfits for their classes, and some cool grips for certain weapons.

This is all just in the headquarters and multiplayer has so much more to offer than just heated arguments and frustrations for ranking up.

Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus Problem with PC?

Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus 2 right now is fine in my book, just got to what I call the breaking point in the story. I like the zany characters, wild story, the intense sadness the game brings sometimes, and the gameplay. So what kind of problem is there?

Apparently the steam reviews tell a story where the PC version of the game kind of, doesn't work as well as it should. The game in my personal experience with the options menu kind of... doesn't work. When I try to simply make the game 1080p fullscreen, I only get like a quarter of the screen shown, that's not good. Also the game doesn't run well on some levels, like when you go to manhattan and fight the hazmat nazis. It was unbelievably choppy and almost felt unplayable. I had a similar issue in the first game when you visit the space tour area. Very Choppy.

Users in their steam reviews are currently complaining about their game not running on 4k, many bugs involving screen tearing as V-Sync doesn't work. Though the strangest one for me is where the fps counter doesn't exactly count the actual fps the game is running on. Overall I still feel good about the game, and a full review will be incoming around tommorrow.

Team Fortress 2's Jungle Inferno: More of the Same and That's Fine pt.1

Team Fortress 2 is a game that just about everybody knows about. It's been a while for about maybe two years, there's been a lack of any meaningful update. The last known update to my memory was a match between two classes. The Heavy Weapons Guy vs. the Pyro where whoever got the most kills within the event, the winner would get a huge update where they would get unique weapons made for them. It's been a while since any of my colleagues have heard from it. Well we have no idea what the development team has been doing at the time.

Last Thursday on October 27th has answered that question with an update, or at least the 4 days leading to it. There was a video featuring our favorite Red team going on an adventure with Australia's greatest Hero, Saxton Hale hunting down a Yeti in Yeti Park. The video was a nice surprise and suddenly, I wanted to play T F 2 again.

I will not bore you with the specifics of the Jungle Inferno Update, but I will tell you what the update does for its community. We get 5 community-made maps, new Pyro weapons, 1 Heavy weapon, and of course the official Yeti  Mercenary Park. There's also some new contracts players can do in their spare time in order to get the other new update items, like weapon skins and stuff like that. Now we also get a matchmaking queue now, to make finding random matches a bit easier with your friends. You can also look for community servers just as well, but it doesn't use tf2's matchmaking so that's a little disappointing.

Now that I've played the game after the longest time, here's what I think. TF2 is basically the same game it was two years ago, and that's fine. The update also gets the community together. When I get into a match, I see several things. I see people playing as the pyro, unbalancing the teams, I see people with colorful hats, I see people using their funny taunts in the spawn room. The game is fine, it's fun and it's great.

Also look at this Heavy cosplaying as the Second Banana