The Great Linux (mis)Adventure

Sheesh. Where to start.

Okay, let's start with the why.

My first brush with Linux was in 1998 when Red Hat was all the rage and it seemed Linux was on a mission of global domination. The GUI back then was abysmal by today's standards. KDE was a baby learning to walk. Unix users however were hopelessly in love with Linux. But I never took to it.

So now in 2025 I decided to give Linux a try. With the Windows 10 October 2025 situation, YouTube had a content explosion of "switch to Linux."

However, that was not my motivation for trying Linux. I had upgraded to 11 a long time ago. Neither were any of those "Microsoft bad" opinions gunshotted over the internet.

It was simple curiosity.

Enter the wonderful world of distros. What a bloody *ix-mess.

Now just to be clear let me state what I use my desktop PC for. Obviously, for work. Since the COVID-19 fiasco I am a WFH so the previous gaming PC had more important things to do. In order of priority, a) work, b) general internet usage including streaming services, and c) 2-3 hours/week gaming,

The work software has no Linux counterpart but that was so minor an issue, it was not even in the "switch to Linux" equation. I could always boot into Windows for 10 hours a day.

The whole browser situation went out of the equation years ago. As long as the OS boots and the browser opens, the rest is all personal preference. There are no winners or losers there, it's all subjective.

As for the rest, I switched to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice),Thunderbird, Krita, etc. as soon as Microsoft Office, Adobe, and the rest became recurring subscription services. I don't mind paying for software but the whole subscription model is disgusting. Maybe it comes from being old but when you remember that you could buy anything for Windows (Office, Photoshop, etc., etc.) install it and ignore updates and use it for life and no kick coming from anyone, subscriptions feel as pleasant as a sledgehammer to the testes.

That left only one thing that had to work on Linux: Gaming.

I am not going to list the quirks of every distro I tried because there is nothing to list.

Briefly and in no particular order I tried the following: Bazzite, Nobara, Linux Mint, Big Linux,  RegataOS, PikaOS, NixOS, EndeavorOS, Garuda, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS!, and more.

Two months into all this the thought occurred: Why am I installing distros "based on ****." Why not try ****?

So then Debian, Fedora, Arch.

By this time, some three months later, demotivation was growing obese.

Also by this time the pattern was becoming clear. To someone who knows nothing about Linux, the "gaming" distros are not doing anything special because base Linux cannot do it.

It doesn't matter which distro you like. If you are running an NVIDIA GPU, pick one that comes with the driver preinstalled. The gaming distros simply provide a GUI for taking care of the driver and NVIDIA Control Panel. Vanilla (like default Debian or Fedora) expect you to know the terminal. Searching the "store" on non-gaming distros does not provide a "click here to install/update" driver. And of course the driver does not auto-update.

Gaming distros will do a few things out of the ISO image: Install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Wine, etc. depending on the distro.

In effect, whether through GUI (but mostly through the terminal), the steps required to get NVIDIA and various gaming launchers going, the gaming distros just do it from the install ISO.

If you know how, you can just pick a plain Fedora or Debian and do it yourself and you have a gaming distro. Yes, yes, gaming optimization is mentioned prominently but beyond a certain hardware configuration there is only so much optimization. Things will work well or they will not. What compounds this further is that they all look alike. If you go with GNOME, all Linux options look the same. KDE, same. Cosmic, same. If you try enough distros, at first boot you will immediately know what you are getting into. This is a good thing as it provides consistency. The problem comes in when you are trying 15 distros and then try to figure out what the hell is the difference. The Linux ecosystem takes it for granted that the user already knows.

More than a dozen times I had to install and log in to GOG, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Amazon. Installing launchers (especially EA and Ubisoft) takes a bloody long time. EA does not even list your library outside of its launcher and sometimes it opens in Arabic. Ubisoft launcher frequently gets "fatal errors." Lutris has to be among the top 10 oddest software I have used in 40 years. Pardon the vagueness but it just "feels wrong." Just like Heroic feels "normal" because it does not install anything after itself.

If you are exclusively Steam, you are in for a good time.

If you are on AMD hardware, you are in for a fabulous time (that's mostly a guess/hope, I don't use AMD so cannot speak from personal experience).

The more you stray from those boundaries the more discouraging the situation becomes.

Some people have voiced concerns about Anti-Cheat not working on Linux. Since I never use anything that requires Anti-Cheat, that is a non-issue to me. I just want the bloody games to work. Gears 5 verifies anti-cheat at startup even for single player campaign, so as of now that will never work on Linux although it is on Steam game.

If you want to use EA, the process is the same on ALL Linux. The nature of the distro is irrelevant. As mentioned earlier, no distro can help because base Linux cannot help.

You will say, and I will agree with you, that if a $billion corporation cannot be bothered to release a native Linux launcher that is not a fault with Linux. Same goes for NVIDIA. And Ubisoft and everything that is a cumbersome chore on Linux.

There were many lessons along the way. For example, on Garuda the maximum game resolution was 1920 x 1080 on my 4K monitor. Then this happened on other distros. Forums, forums, forums. Plenty of suggestions, none helpful, all involving terminal commands. The default interface size on 4k is so small that I had to scale the display to 200%. This can potentially confuse Wayland (does not happen on X11). There was no problem with anything. Disabling the scaling enabled the 4K resolution in the game. This might have been fixed by now. Don't know. Cosmic offers scaling too but it does not confuse Wayland. That seems to happen only on KDE. Never used GNOME.

Tiny things like this. I discovered this not in any forum. No one replied with the suggestion. It was some random page on the internet that suggested the Wayland and scaling issue.

That brings us to the help provided on forums.

But before that. For someone who has been using Microsoft since MS-DOS 3.0, I don't know how Windows works in the sense that I don't know what is going on when something works or does not. Before internet search engines you either had to grab an engineer to help you out or reinstall Windows.

The point is that the number of people who actually understand what Windows is doing is laughably small (I sure don't). Hazarding a guess, 99% Windows users are like car owners. We know how to drive but not how the car works or how to fix it if it stops working.

Windows is not "Operating System for Dummies". It is "THE ONLY Operating System built exclusively for Dummies."

When interacting on Linux forums the feeling is almost physically palpable that all the "experts" by default expect you to know how to take the car apart and put it back together. Preferably blindfolded.

Linux needs to be dumbed down at this same rate for at least more than five years. The terminal experts will balk and kick at this but that is the situation. It doesn't matter how great Linux is or will become in the future, if things like downloading/updating drivers requires navigating the learning curve, Linux will have to offer something staggering in return than just "free."

Commonplace users (me included) are so basically human that convenience will always win over a learning curve. Windows will continue doing what it is but we will stick to it because it is extremely rare to have to visit a "forum" to figure out why something happened or how to do something or how to avoid another thing.

Lack of convenience. Linux needs to fix this.

Of course, all this applies only to those who, like me, wish to slowly and gently move to Linux bit by bit. There is the absence of features, features not covering everything, features requiring fiddling with the engine. Then there are the small niggling things. Those minor hindrances are more of a deterrent than anything major. If "based on" distros can do something out of ISO, then why can't the "bases"?

My thinking was that the whole open source community was just that, a single community, but apparently there are divisions and subdivisions.

The popularity of electric vehicles gave rise to a new human thing: Range anxiety.

I have that with Linux.

As a random example: If you read the Nobara details, it was basically developed by one person for his father and the page mentions very explicitly that the future of the OS is dependent on one person.

It doesn't matter what is your opinion about Microsoft or Windows, it is going to stick around for a long time. Like outlive you long time. There is no range anxiety there.

There is the flip side that Nobara only puts a customized layer over base Linux to provide a modified experience. When the base covers all that ground, Nobara will become redundant. The same applies to all distros. They all come with their own range anxiety.

I like RegataOS and Pop_OS! and will keep fiddling with it. If you can manage to ignore everyone gushing over this or that Linux and focus on expected developments in Linux generally speaking, things are moving is the right direction but due to the open source nature of development you cannot set a realistic date by when to expect major changes.

Right now gaming involves too many components: Wine, Proton, Wayland, display driver, and quite likely a lot more I am ignorant of.

I hope they manage to clear the jungle and establish a few rough paths at least if not an actual road.

But right now, today, November 1, 2025, apart from Steam, Linux simply is not gaming ready. So like me, if that is a primary consideration for you, I wish you luck. In the absence of a viable option, I am sticking to Windows.

Again, I hope this changes soon

Till that day, however, Linux as it was back in 1998, remains an interesting experiment but if gaming outside Steam is important to you, then it is not going to be a "Hello Linux, Goodbye Windows," not in the foreseeable future anyway.

Linux development news is encouraging but the timeline is vague at best. Every time I see a YouTube thumbnail about how "Linux is better than Windows," there on some aspects I tend to agree. But then there are videos with "Linux the Future of Gaming" yeah, no, not right now. Not outside AMD and Steam.

Everybody involved seems to agree on all the required improvements/modifications/new features that are needed to get everything just right but that is a seriously long way to go.

Note: Forgot to mention something. Dumping ISOs on a Ventoy USB does not work for some distros (Bazzite, OpenSuse). If a distro will not install, use something like Rufus and make a bootable USB with that distro's ISO. Weird thing, how an open source tool developed for open source operating systems is incompatible with some specific ISOs.

There is another Linux oddity to ponder.

Arkham Knight

 This imbecile game does not deserve a screenshot.

Arkham Asylum - no words needed.

Arkham City - even less words needed.

Arkham Origins - who made this?

Arkham Knight - what the hell were Rocksteady thinking?

My first 9 deaths in the game were trying to take down the blasted coolant on the Knight's tank. My other 5 deaths in the game were in the tunnels with the Knight in a mining contraption. After which I Alf-F4-ed the bastard and uninstalled it.

When you can play a game on any difficulty for 12 hours without dying and then this "tank" mechanism kills you without explaining what the hell it expects from you, the game developer messed up, big time.

What bugs me, what really eats me up, what really aggravates me is that the Batmobile is supposed to be this nimble thing. But the Knight's tank is a high-precision Formular 1 racer compared to my lemon Batmobile. Even the hellish mining machine runs at Formula 1 speeds compared to the sluggish Batmobile.

WTH?

The second biggest, most annoying, completely unnecessary component of the game is when you die, the goddamns speech before the loading screen. I think that more than the game itself made me shut this mess down.

What an absolutely sourly cacophonic note on which to end a classical symphony of balanced gameplay.

Rest in peace and go to hell Arkham Knight.

October 7, 2024.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

 And here we go again.

This is the fourth game played in 2024 that was abandoned and uninstalled at the last level.

Because of:

• An utter crap save system.
• An unbelievable escalation in frustration.
• Betrayal of 13.9 hours of gameplay in the last 10 minutes remaining of the game.

There is (of course there fucking is) a three-stage boss at the end with a platforming section in the second stage. I quit after more than a dozen attempts.

You do not introduce new mechanics 5 minutes before the game ends without informing the player.

You do not force the player to start the entire boss fight (including opening and all in-between cut-scenes) if one stage fails. Just because the game mechanic is obvious to you because you built it, it means nothing to the player under the circumstances. Your obvious is not my obvious. Two entirely different things.

But, it was not the platforming or the what-the-hell-do-I-do-now-ing that got to me.

Of all the game mechanics developers use, this imbecilic, frustrating, needless, and utterly fucking useless mechanic is the one I hate the most.

Pixel precision and nanosecond timing is not my idea of fun gameplay.

Rocket launches have more leeway than most video games nowadays.

If there is logic in creating a game 99.99% playable and 0.01% unfinishable without PTSD, it eludes me.

Kill the bloody timer on the collapsing platforms and trigger mechanism.

Doesn't the incongruity of a down-ticking clock while mucking about in the spiritual realm irk?

Does me. Big time.

A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019)

Followed this one for a five years. Finally played it in June 2024.

The non-combative approach to gameplay is just great. For someone starved for a good stealth game (after that ghastly Dishonored experience), Innocence was simply delicious to play. There were times I got stuck but it just needed a bit of lateral thinking and noticing obviously missed cues in the environment and the game just flows from point to point with no distractions.

In some sections of the game, mostly expositional bits, the Sprint is disabled but that's okay for a first play through. Repeating will be a problem but that is for later.

As someone who enjoyed (and still enjoys) reading James Herbert Rats Trilogy, especially Domain, there was something extra satisfying about watching rats in their thousands scurry around.

Steam told me that I had just finished 11 hours of play time and all I could think was "Aww, game is going to end soon." On my next game exit, I immediately wish listed Requiem.

And then Chapter XVI - Coronation. Such a pity that Innocence fell prey to the current gaming mores.

The entire game is about avoiding confrontation whenever/wherever possible. Always trying to think how to cross an arena without being seen or at least the enemy going into a neutral state while you stay in hiding.

The entire 11-1/2 hours of gameplay is just butchered in the final boss fight. A typical triple-stage run and gun boss fight with environmental hazards in a constricted arena.

After 13+ attempts, shut down the game, uninstalled.

Why do developers do this.

An absolute gem of a game ruined by the final boss betraying all the rules the game laid down leading up to that point.

What a shame.

I am going to watch all the boss fight videos in Requiem before even thinking of buying that.

Sigh. 11-1/2 hours of unalloyed joy turned into controller-chucking frustration.

Why, Asobo, why?

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019)

Oooo, Star Wars. The unmatched joy of slicing bad people and things with a light saber.

Don't feel like writing a long review detailing everything. This will be over quickly.

The only two issues I have with this otherwise excellent Star Wars game are purely subjective.

The first is the Metroidvania structure. I simply cannot empathize with that game design choice. The process of going to a location and four hours later coming back with a new power-up just so you can access the two corners that were previously out of bounds, yeah, not my idea of fun.

The second is the platforming and level navigation that can get frustrating at times. Especially rope grabbing before you get the "pull" upgrade, especially grabbing a rope from a slide down. Slide jumping was hit or miss for me. It caused more deaths than boss fights. Actually, there were no combat deaths, zero of that. The sliding-jumping-roping that was a killer.

A common issue for me when playing any game is when level design makes it necessary to refer to a map. Fallen Order does this, particularly in cavernous or underground areas. Pausing gameplay to look at a map just doesn't work for me. Open-ended games always run into this issue. A linear experience is just better. Then of course there is the tree that has to be in a Metroidvania. Don't like.

Other than that, good fun in the Star Wars universe.

Dishonored (2012 and 2016) PC Review

Is it part of getting old that you always feel out of the current excitement loop or that younger people callously redefine words?

So the many-headed on the internet were drooling on this being the best stealth game since Thief 1 and 2. This naturally piqued the old curiosity gene and I couldn't wait to play Dishonored (in 2022 anyway).

"Stealth" is not a word that comes to mind when thinking about Dishonored 1 and 2.

Again, perhaps it is my perception of what stealth should be that is the problem. The perception that combat should be 100% avoidable, the tools for staying unobserved work, confrontation is heavily punished (well, Dishonored does the last bit with much vim and gusto, there's that).

Again, again, maybe I failed to understand the stealth mechanic of these two games. Maybe.

Every time I was observed, I reloaded, tried again. A few moments later someone else saw me, reload, try again.

How do you avoid detection in Dishonored? I - do - not - know.

Throughout both games the thought kept playing in an endless loop in the old brain: How on earth did the many-headed decide these are stealth games?

It really, really made me wish that someone would remaster the first two Thief games in a new engine without changing anything else. They were not perfect but it took about five seconds to understand the dos and don'ts.

Two games, a total of 30+ hours, and no clue how stealth works in Dishonored. That is ghastly game design.

Take the whole see-through-walls process. That was supremely frustrating. You can only see enemies for a short radius but the AI can spot you from anywhere. In stealth if you get spotted there should be an option to blend away instead of having to run across most of the map to lose a pursuer(s).

Thief had very limited verticality. In Dishonored even if you take a vertical approach, the AI just makes everything, well, I don't know, something unpleasant. It's like the AI was programmed deliberately to be constantly on the lookout for a fight and never calming down.

So we have a game where it is not clear how to detection works and once you are detected there is no solution except reloading the last save.

The loot system is again peculiar. In Thief, you were usually told to get this much minimum depending on difficulty level. In Dishonored, some levels show a total of 2000 coins but you end up with maybe 200-300 depending on the path you take. So, what, you have to take ALL paths to collect everything?

Considering the scarcity of ammo and the high cost of upgrades even the action experience is not enjoyable. You scan an area, see three enemies, you get spotted and there are suddenly ten people hitting you from all sides simultaneously.

Not even going to mention the rune mechanic. It sucks. Big time.

I finished the game but it was confusing. What is this? Stealth/action/RPG? Just giving a player freedom to choose but not the mechanism to properly execute that choice is baffling game design.

I don't think I have ever reloaded a game as much as Dishonored 1 and 2.

I have literally spent many minutes perched on a ledge watching the guard patrol patterns and using the Zoom feature to jump down, knock one out, jump back up, wait another couple minutes for the next one, repeat, repeat.

On a general gaming note, not entirely related to this game, please don't do voice overs with people talking as you are traversing a level. In Dishonored 2, the clockwork boss level must have reloaded at least 25 times and the boss keeps talking as you move through the level. I finally put my headphones aside because it got so irritating to listen to that imbecile repeat the same three sentences over and over.

Am I playing Dishonored 1 and 2 wrong? I don't know. The original Thief games by Looking Glass I could play on the highest difficulty and achieve 100% goals.

These two, I just don't understand these two.

Middle Earth - Shadow of Mordor (2017)

Quickly. Surgeon's knife. No time for the anesthetic.

I don't like this one. Whew!

You may now express yourself with bricks. If you are into that sort of thing.

Lesson learned: A majority opinion or a high favorable percentage on the internet is utter, pure, unadulterated, incomprehensible bullshit. And unreliable to boot.

Monolith, Monolith, what has happened to you. I suspect after the FEAR rights being treated like a ping-pong ball and having a brilliant first entry go to trash in such spectacular fashion, Monolith never really recovered and had to over-compensate with this, this, well, this mess.

Oh, Shadow of Mordor, how you annoy me, let me count (some of) the ways:

• The save system.
  To quote the eminent Donald Duck, "Hey, what's the big idea?" Here is a game in 2017 that is so outstandingly stupid it doesn't bother to inform you when and where progress is saved. On the other hand, maybe it does it so cleverly that my meagre brain failed to notice it after 16 hours of play time.
  
  Once you quit and restart the game, always assuming that at some point there must have been a checkpoint, you always start on one of the towers. Depending on where the tower is from the current main objective, enjoy a long refreshing healthy sprint across the map to get to the mission start point.
  
  There are mid-mission save points but only as long as you don't quit the game. Er, what?
  
  No wonder they didn't include a manual save option. In these conditions that option would have sent all the programmers to hospital with chronic headaches.
  
  
• I am Batman. No, you are not.
  Combat is Batman Arkham-ish but new and improved, or rather, old and quirky and rough edged. Works well in places. In other places, so-so so-so. If you are going to tread the Arkham path, could you do it without succumbing to button mashing? (Detailed rant about button mashing here, new window). The mash problem is not as severe as in say, Spider-Man or Devil May Cry, but it's there. And it's not nice.
  
  
• Enforced stealth.
  How long, how long, how long? How long will it need to be repeated? If you cannot implement stealth properly, just leave it out. Random stealth missions with unfamiliar mechanics are a pain. The odd thing is that if you fail and restart a stealth mission, the enemies previously executed disappear so the bonus objective becomes impossible due to decreased enemy population and you have to hunt for new enemies. Some missions are bound by invisible boundaries and mission aborts if you run too far. Uh? We are still doing this in 2017? Oh, okay.
  
  
• Repetitive missions.
  In so many missions the objective changes but, well, hang it all, nothing else does. Everybody and everything looks the same. There is no feeling that you are doing anything new. It's always a case of "haven't I done this five times already?"
  
  
• Viva quick-time events.
  I quit playing this game at the Hunting Partner (dominate the white dog thing) mission because of horrible QTE. Or perhaps I should say pseudo-QTE. Maybe it is my fault that my reflexes are not as good as 20 years ago but randomizing the button every time the QTE runs is silly. In a near-death situation it is understandable, the game is giving you a chance to keep going. But in routine gameplay? And with such a small time window? And changing the button every time the QTE runs. What the hell, Monolith?

Anyway, the QTE had already happened a few times and that was the proverbial camel-back-breaker.

According to the Steam Client my total play time with Shadow of Mordor is 16.1 hours when I quit on this game. I simply couldn't find the motivation to keep going.

Shadow of Mordor is not something unique in terms of bad design but oftentimes that can be overcome. Sometimes games have an atmosphere, an engaging story, characters you can't abandon halfway through, a sense of achievement no matter how vague.

Unfortunately, Shadow of Mordor creates a peculiar cumulative effect of not having any of those.

Combat, mission structure, characters, world building, story - it's a featureless flat terrain.

If all else fails, I am always ready for even a half-decent story. But, well, this is Lord of the Rings territory and you can introduce as many twists as you want, the big bad goes poof in the end.

Writing is tough. Writing a self-contained interesting story within an established larger story is tougher still. But that's the point, isn't it? We don't expect great literature from games, just something interesting enough to keep things going. Get a good gameplay loop going and even that becomes less important.

For me, the more the gameplay fails, the more the story has to succeed and, of course, the opposite too.

Shadow of Mordor does not do this.

Sigh.

I got Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War together on Steam and such is my experience that so far after so many months I cannot bring myself to install Shadow of War. It just sits there, gathering digital dust.

Guns, Gore, & Cannoli

This post is based on Xbox controller on Windows. Have not played with KB/mouse.

This is one of those games I liked before even knowing what it was. The art style leapt off the screen and took hold of that part of my brain that likes that sort of behavior from artwork.

That it was an indie title was another huge appeal.

Guns, Gore, & Cannoli 2015: An absolute blast. There, we are done. Side scrollers are hit and miss with me. GG&C, however, refreshes the gameplay mechanic in ways that I am unable to describe except "fun."

Zombie games bore me. Probably because there are so many of them and they do not manage to differentiate between themselves. Zombie, kill, rinse, repeat.

See, when you go for the realistic zombie approach then you cannot vary the gameplay. How much variation can there be between 23 types of zombies, all equally brain dead? And if you make them intelligent then they are not zombies any longer, are they? Most zombies seem to want to kill you, eat you, or something even bizarre. Where the brain dead get their motivation from, I don't know.

The cartoon approach is the only one that makes sense. And while GG&C does not tackle any great questions about the nature and philosophy of being a zombie in a non-zombie world, why should it? It's a video game.

The dialogue tends to be on the cheap-cheese side but stays consistently above the surface. Besides, given the game situation and time period, perhaps that is a good thing.

The gameplay also tends to get repetitive and this is where you can feel the freshness of the indie developer. Despite being repetitive it does not become boring or turn into a chore.

The only one minor itty-bitty point of contention is that the difficulty tends to fluctuate, especially the boss fights that seem to jump from easy to hardcore without any build up.

Highly recommended.

Guns, Gore, & Cannoli 2018: Sigh! Alas!

How many exclamation points must a man run down? Uh, three. Okay. Damn!

The curse of the sequel.

The first game was fun. They almost completely changed the control scheme and you cannot remap the controls from inside the game. This game plays more like a very, very old game called Abuse where the mouse controls where you aim and the KB controls movement. With an Xbox controller it requires a lot of adapting. I played slightly more than 30 minutes and kept trying to use the old controls. Goodness' sake, why would you change the jump button which is almost universal in all games?

Don't know. Maybe it is more enjoyable with a KB/M combo. So far it is more annoying than fun. And since the controls are not going to change for the rest of the game... Oh, well.

The Last Campfire (2020)

This will be short.

You know how some games leave cliffhanger endings? Other games will leave weird endings like a Nolan movie. Once you are done with everything it is as if the professor is leaving the classroom with the last one-word instruction: "Discuss."

Then videos start popping up explaining the story and ending.

Done right, that sort of thing can be quite pleasant. Sadly, doing it right is full of unexpected unknown perils.

The Last Campfire's story is not entirely clear but it does not matter. The gameplay is not always straightforward and for such a small game it is possible to get lost, but, again, it does not matter.

Given the overly complicated mechanics of AAA games, it is always a pleasure to come across a game like this.

A simple puzzle-adventure combination, it makes for a quick few hours of intellectual stimulation with adequate gratification to keep the gamer going.

Another indie gem.

Highly recommended.

Getting Treed

Let us, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, talk about trees.

Not the sort that pop out of the earth and grow leaves and things, neat though the idea is, not those. You know how it is about trees. Excellent chaps but they never go anywhere.

Let us talk about skill trees in games.

I could, if 'twere in my nature, look up the history and all the rest of it but why bother. This is not a history project.

My pique, if it is pique, arises from how every other game developer now feels compelled to include some variation of a skill tree even in genres that do not warrant it.

Now a certain type of game that involves the "build" (never got a grip on that one) and fundamentally changes the gameplay, or at least the approach to it, is one thing. But more and more it seems that skill trees are a sort of cosmetic bungling to induce a sense of progression or empowerment to the gamer.

Uh, not buying it.

Like the open world concept, the skill tree is not much talked about.

To illustrate, here are a few games that can be completed without even looking at the darned thing. Sure, the gameplay becomes a lot easier if you upgrade your weapon stats and your health but the rest of it seems to be so much developer time/effort/money wasted. (Some are just upgrade systems but the concept is the same).

• Tomb Raider (2013-2018)
• Gears 5 (2019) (Yes, I am counting this one. Be quiet).
• Star Wards Jedi: Fallen Order (2019)
• Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021).
• Assassin's Creed Unity (2014).
• And, of course, the entire Arkham Series.

Well, that list could go on forever.

As of today, I am playing Tomb Raider (2013) for the third time. It reinforces my suspicion that the whole XP and collectibles and side missions exist not because they add anything to the gameplay or the overall game experience. They are simply there to let the gamer know "you missed this one bit on the map." On my third play through, all my skill and salvage points went ignored till the mission where you get the rope climber. It is possible to reach the end of the main story campaign without availing any of those "points."

Not trying to single out the Tomb Raider games here. It just happens to be the most recent in memory. In fact, Tomb Raider sits at the top of my least disliked game-with-skill-tree list. At least the developer did not start you out as a weakling that needs periodic health upgrades to keep up with tougher and tougher enemies and thank goodness for no actual boss fights (separate rant on boss fights to follow).

Some people like skill trees and that's fine.

Perhaps it is just the whole stretched-out-time perspective that demands more room than the 21st century lifestyle permits. Some concepts I can only grapple with in perpetuity, never come to terms with.

When your mind keeps diving into the far end to surface fond fun memories it becomes a chore to like the current goings-on in gaming.

After Doom (1993) there came the age of Doom clones. Everyone and the chipmunk in their nearest tree wanted to make a Doom clone.

We don't use the term "clone" anymore. It seems the product of copying is okay but the act of copying is to be treated politely. We call them "like" now.

For the past few years we are stuck in the age of Rogue-like, Metroid-like, Souls-like. Individual games now turned into genres through the act of "liking."

Unlike the Age of Doom Clones, the Age of Nnn-Like shows no signs of abating any time soon.

The same applies to the spread of the skill tree. If the real-life pop-out-of-the-ground trees could match that tenacity for the good part of a century, we could stop worrying about them.

Seriously, if you have been gaming since the 1990s, just take a moment and think about the game after game after game that has passed your PC display without any of the modern trappings whose greatest achievement is having to pause the game and juggle upgrade menus and skill trees.

The really, really sad part for me personally though is the current iteration of the Doom games.

When even the elder statesmen are not exempt, things look rather bleak.

Then again, they looked equally bleak in the Age of Doom Clones and we got over that because the gaming community simply got fed up and walked away.

Praying for a swift and moderately painful death to the unwanted skill tree.

Maybe make it optional, as perhaps part of the Accessibility options. Spare the rest of us who have no use for it.

Hmm?

FAR: Lone Sails (2018) and Changing Tides (2022)

Amid the perpetual disillusionment from AAA titles, the ever increasing complexity of even AA titles, the focus shifting more and more to either ridiculous levels of hand-holding to completely abandoning the gamer, and the rest of it including what can only be hoped is a transient plague of bad PC ports, it is nice to come across a game that, in the simplest of terms, just works.

That, however, is not the only good thing about these games.

There is an elegance in simplicity that is not always readily found. There are many games that create the illusion of complexity but sort out their components and the simplicity can possibly come as a shock.

FEAR and Halo Combat Evolved are just two such examples.

But we are not talking about FPS games. Rather it is about the individual parts which when assembled manage to get the player entangled in the machinery and when the end comes around leave you wishing it would not have come so soon.

Again, where more and more AAA titles are going for higher and higher graphical fidelity while paying less and less attention to art direction, when an independent team comes along with something as focused as this, well then that is an excellent reason to chop down a tree and get the hope fire blazing again.

Lone Sails is a side scrolling mix of adventure and puzzles that do not try to burn out your logic circuits just to show you how clever the game developers are.

The camera zooming out telling you not to do whatever you are doing is probably the only help the game gives you. Other than that, you are on your own. There is no intro or anything. Just start. The games starts much the same way Spirit of the North starts. Get busy.

There is no nonsense with timed events as puzzle games often use to falsely pressure gamers. The entire experience is very relaxed.

And you are allowed to make mistakes. There is one sequence where you have the option to take shelter and I just went past the shelter because I was a bit too relaxed in my approach. The game just kept sailing. Most games would have gone into a fail state and thrown me back to a checkpoint but not here.

The narrative, no matter how incoherent in may be, is important to me in a game. Not sure how or why buuuut it seemed irrelevant here. Might have been a self-defense reaction to all those big executives forcing out AAA story lines so twisted they would give you a headache without any physical cause. Be that as it may, there is a sense of enjoyment here that makes you go "hang everything, keep going and see what happens next."

I suppose that is the advantage of making a small game. You don't have to stuff everything into it. You take only the good bits and make them all count.

Another thing about the games is that you can only talk about them vaguely. The only way to get specific is to give the whole thing away. Not going to do that.

If you are one of those smart people (I am not, I am more like Mater, average intelligence) you can finish the game under 3-4 hours depending on how many breaks you take.

If you or anyone you know has been advised not to play games due to low frustration tolerance, you may want to try Lone Sails.

Changing Tides on the other hand suffers from an excess of complexity, just by adding another axis. The underlying concept is the same but since you now have two axes of freedom and movement in each direction along either. Combined with a lack of any indication of where to go, it is easy to get lost and confused. Some parts of the game also require specific actions. You could be staring at something head on and not know what to do because the game gives you more freedom of choice but no signal if a choice is required.

Changing Tides is good sequel but the puzzles are more intricate and there are times where the game demands trial and error more than clear thinking. This is a personal thing and might not apply to everyone but trial and error is not a logical way of solving puzzles. Some people might find the first game too simplistic but at least it was without "try this then try that, rinse and repeat till something works."

Besides that one small issue in Changing Tides this is a good pair of enjoyable games.

Highly recommended.

Spirit of the North (2019)

Ooo, foxes.

This game literally tells you nothing. No background, no tutorials, no direction markers.

Just start walking around and figure it out along the way.

Good thing too.

The learning becomes part of the journey and since the game complexity increases very gradually, there is never any over-burdening of information as can sometimes happens.

While the path to take is linear, the path is not always evident. It is possible to get confused in this game but it doesn't last long. Just a touch of exploration and off you go again.

The story never becomes clear. You still need to look outside the game to satiate your curiosity about the why and how, but again, it's a good thing.

Some mechanics border on failure, especially those requiring precision, but those are not too frequent.

This is basically a half-puzzle half-exploration game that finds a good balance between the two.

Once or twice the game might frustrate you but then it's not a perfect game by any means. And that too is a good thing. Perfection would ruin it.

Most importantly, you are never required to hurry.

If you are in the mood for an opposite-to-the-edge-of-seat gameplay experience with mild brain stimulation, go for it.

I am just glad that there are people out there still making games like this.

Go people out there.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021)

An optional but relevant read can be found here.

Proceeding towards an oldish age, I have become a cautionary gamer. So basically I let the world play a game, watch gameplay clips, read (not watch) a review or few, and then decide on buying a game or not.

After the Avengers fiasco (that one I decided to skip after watching the first trailer) I had low hopes for a good Marvel game.

Then word started circulating that this is actually a good and fun game. In fact, so unlike Avengers and without its premature-birth problems and shameless cash baiting that that alone earned Marvel a second chance.

So, I gave it the good old go.

Not going to repeat myself so just go and read the link above. If you like that sort of thing, you will like this game. If, like me, you don't, then don't bother with this one. The combat is torture. Might be an odd thing to say that it is also extremely fatiguing given that torture is not supposed to be a relaxation device but there it is.

The game's environments though are some of the most versatile you will see in a single player campaign and they are beautifully crafted and lit. Except the climactic sequence where it is a case of too much happening to notice anything.

Finally, this has to be the most talkative game I have played in more than three decades of gaming. They never stop talking. The situation does not matter. Incessant chatter flows and flows. Someone should make a documentary just on how do you write so many lines for a game, get the voice actors to deliver those lines, and lastly, how do you program for those lines to be delivered the way they are. I mean, when the main characters talk so much that your brain relegates it all to background noise, well, I would not say something went wrong but it did not go right and neither did it stay in the middle.

Maybe it took a holiday to get away from itself.

Gears 5 (2019)

Before I start the rant ... oops. Spoiler. I don't like this one.

First, you may want to do a quick read on this.

So, if you have read my Gears 4 review you might have read the bit about how some games have a death wish of wanting to be "that game."

Well, that's Gears 5 for you.

I was still reeling under the exhilaration of having played Gears 4 just a little over a month ago and had loaded up Gears 5 with barely contained excitement.

An excitement that evaporated when within a couple of minutes of starting I got stuck. Stuck. In a Gears game. Unbelievable. If you haven't played it then without going into details let me tell you it involves looking through a crack in a wall.

But being a good little gamer, I gathered the tattered remains of my gaming faith and plodded on. Later, much later, in the red sand location, the same thing happened. This time I got stuck and looked and looked and scanned and looked around 360 degrees, thanked the powers that be that 23 years ago I decided to shave my head or right now I would be pulling the stuff out in huge clumps, gave up, and, oh the disgrace of it, had to look it up on YouTube. Most people make a big deal about the weakness of the Death Star. I don't care about that. What gets me is the bloody ventilation ducts. Never liked ventilation ducts. Ducts are the ultimate architectural insult. Necessary but a better alternative is needed. Bloody ducts.

But like the Snatcher in Gears 4, these were two isolated and minor annoyances. Even though there was no more getting stuck in the game, it just did not feel like a Gears game anymore.

Here is a brief list of subjective peeves:

• The common law sin of all open world games: You have to frequently refer to the map. A map. A gosh darned map in a Gears game. A wannabe, completely unnecessary, pseudo-open world in a Gears game.
• Upgrades through Collectibles in a Gears game that have no impact on gameplay but keep popping up everywhere.
• A skill tree in a Gears game. Not for you, for the darned robot. The collectibles upgrade the robot which you can completely ignore because the game is 100% playable without its assistance.
• Side missions, argh, in a Gears game.
• Choice in a Gears game. This one is the Idiot Leader of the game. How Gears 6 will continue after this unless it has access to your last save game from Gears 5, I don't know.

Why? One solitary inquiring mind wants to know why? Why after four games did they decide to ape "that game" that is not a Gears game?

There are downright bad games that you suffer through because, fundamentally, you are an idiot. There are games with bad controls. There are games with bizarre camera angles. There are games that send a clear message of "F you, I am what I am, take me or leave me, see if I care."

Gears 5 is one those games that does everything except hiss back at you. It seems safe but at the same time you feel it would be best not to provoke it.

I wanted to like Gears 5. I did like it. But just when I was happy that the aggravating bit was over, minutes after the current objective the game threw me back into the mess.

It was one of those "complicated" relationships where you desperately want to like the girl, but the girl's only outstanding quality is throwing pointless tantrums.

You can blame her upbringing or her peers or society at large but what remains in the end is that the girl throws tantrums for no reason. And this girl is not amenable to therapy. You can only like her if tantrums are your thing.

Here is hoping that Gears goes back to being Gears and stops trying to be "that game."

Gears of War 4 (2016)

I feel it. Deep. In my bones. 2007 was a long time ago and I was a little baby, barely 37 years old, and Epic and Microsoft released Gears of War. It was the first cover based shooter I had played and it was a ton of fun.

Then Microsoft decided not to release Gears 2 and 3 on PC because of "piracy" resulting in poor sales on Windows. That the PC port was broken and that selling Xbox was a higher priority had nothing to do with it. Same crap they pulled with Halo 2. Digression alert!

So when I had the hardware to run Gears 4 and 5, of course I was going to play it.

And boy oh boy is this game fun. Mostly, er largely - well actually except for one tiny irritant - a complete joyride from start to finish.

A deplorable thing that most shooters fall prey to is wanting to be like "that game" which could be anything outselling "this game" currently.

Okay, so I was playing it seven years after release. So what?

No silly customizations, no skill tree, no collectibles, no side missions, no pausing the game to fiddle with idiotic inputs that add nothing to the game proper, no branching paths, no irrelevant choices. Just a simple, straight out, linear, old fashioned point A to point B, shoot everything in between with a few environmental hurdles. God, I miss my baby days when games were just games and not a convoluted mission statement that left you wondering what the hell did you just do for 10+ hours and what does it all mean, why are you here, what is the point, why are you expected to care.

Point A to point B, shoot everything in between. Sweet.

It is a testament to good mission design that a linear shooter with zero distractions can actually be more fun and engaging than a mishmash of multiple ideas where the game has to pause every few minutes to ask you "and what would you like to do next?"

Real life is full of those imbecilic situations of what I want to do next. Stop doing it in games. Very annoying.

Okay, let's get that tiny irritant out of the way. Snatcher. This enemy uh puts you in its body without eating you. Like evolution had decided, for some reason, to create a predator that specializes in kidnapping its victims instead of killing them. Once you are "inside", sometimes you come out and sometimes you reload last checkpoint. Not sure what gameplay mechanic is at work here. Your AI companions cannot directly help you. They are shooting the thing, so supposedly with enough hits you get ejected from the zip-up pouch but otherwise there is no player agency left. Except hope.

Happened to me only twice, thankfully, but it took me right out of the game flow. Like you are in the pool and humming to yourself "just keep swimming, just keep swimming" and you realize the other presence in the pool in not a friend or a loved one but a darned shark. Nasty jar that, what?

Apart from that one thing, this game should be on the must-have list for anyone who likes shooters.

If you missed out on the first three parts then just watch a quick video to get the backstory and go from there. You are not missing anything. I also recently bought Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and the updated visuals did nothing. If you are going to play the older games then play them first. The gameplay has evolved a lot (imagine that, evolution in a linear shooter) and going back will not be a nice experience.

For anyone who likes third person shooters and/or cover based shooters, play this game. 'Tis wonderful, 'tis wondrous wonderful.

I tell you, man, dialects are tough.

The Mashening

This is a PC gamer's perspective who has never owned a console.

Well, now that that is out of the way.

Maybe it is just age. Maybe gaming has changed. Maybe PlayStation gamers expect their games to be like this. Maybe I am just configured in a way that prohibits acclimation to it. Who can say.

There is a certain type of combat in certain games that just grates. Feels wrong. It should not be like that. Within the rules of a game it seems contrary to those same rules.

It is also the reason why I never played God of War, Spider-Man, any Assassin's Creed after AC2 which had the quick disarm-and-execute option, and oh so many more games. Simply because the gameplay loop was exhausting.

However, me being me, I did watch the playthroughs and the gameplay baffles me. Why? Why is it like this?

About an hour ago I finished watching the playthrough for Spider-Man 2. Watching that video, one thought kept looping: "The only way I am playing this is with a trainer that gives me the one-hit-kill option."

The same thing happened when watching the God of War (2018) playthrough. When you look at the size of Kratos and the way the game plays, an Argh is inevitable. Even the most basic enemies can take four to six hits to take down. Bosses come with health bars that take vast repetitions to deplete.

It's as if you are watching a blooper reel of Terminator and Schwarzenegger is having a problem breaking eggs unless he takes a hammer to them. What exactly is the point of being so powerful if you are, despite all that power, so ridiculously powerless?

There is so much content related to Halo Combat Evolved and yet in all the years since its release I have yet to come across a single video/post/comment (granted it is not possible for a single human to consume all content even on a single topic on the internet) that mentions the glaring difference between Halo CE and most other games.

There is no boss fight in Halo CE.

There is no great enemy variety. The gameplay loop is rudimentary at best. And it still remains the most enjoyable game in the franchise or even generally.

Now, this is approaching cliche qualification at missile speed. In my gaming experience, Arkham City did it first in 2011. The "shield" enemy that cannot be taken out in regular fashion. You slide under, jump over, do something to stun them, or whatever else. Twelve years later games are still aping it. Zero evolution. Sigh.

Returning to Spider-Man 2.

The shield enemy. Now with Peter and Miles given their age and height and most enemies being at least a foot taller than them, the shield people seem to make sense. But, come on, both have super strength. Shield or no shield, a punch or kick thrown at maximum power must have some effect but zero?

Then there are the boss fights. All bosses come with health bars that have to be depleted three times. Just watching the video was tiring. End, damn you, end. Sure, you could have one bar split into three parts but that does not make it any better. Why do bosses need stages? There are no weak spots or specific target foci. Just hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.

But the piece de resistance, the part that really got inside my head and started performing blindfolded brain surgery was when Harry turned into Venom. That beast must be 5 feet taller than everything around him and 3 feet wider. Guess what the shield enemy does? Absorbs the hit with no more effort than is required to blink. What is going on? It's a basic shield for the love of whatever you please, not a force field. Regular people should have all the resistance of soggy paper to Venom but nooooo, even Venom needs to strike at least three times (oh, forgot to mention, regular hits, no special moves or combos). Why?

Even against regular unarmed human beings, Peter or Miles would be suspended in air and hit someone four, five, six times before the opponent goes down permanently. How many superpower punches are required to take down even an ideally fit but regular human being with no extra powers?

Which (finally) brings us to The Mashening. Games that equate endless button mashing with a sense of accomplishment.

A year ago I was playing Dying Light. Some doors require you to mash X to shove them open and it happened frequently that if I mistimed the mashing my player would just quit and the whole process would start again. In the immortal words of Lord Emsworth, "Eh, what?"

On a side note, Dying Light is the only zombie game I ever played. Not repeating that. Zombies are boring.

There are so many games that follow this pattern. It is a good thing that videos exist where you can see this happening and thereby get guidance in what games to avoid.

The whole mash button to open door, push something, or what have you is puzzling. What purpose does it serve?

Tomb Raider needs a mention here. The game gives you a simple choice: Hold the button or mash it over and over. Why don't more games do this? It is a such a simple thing to do. Of course, TR is not a combat heavy game so there is that.

In any case, the whole God of War/Spider-Man style of combat is just dull, pointless, and has no appeal to me whatsoever.

That, however, is my problem not the game developers'. What I would like to know is where does the mass appeal for this gameplay loop come from. This is what you are doing the entire game. Mashing the same two buttons for a campaign that may last anywhere from 8 to 15 hours topped off by those ghastly boss fights where the bar depletes one hair width at a time (I know, I know, it doesn't, but).

Some games couple this gameplay loop with skill trees. Er, what are those trees for if the mashening does not ease up as the player progresses through whatever tree there might be? How much thought, time, and effort both creative and technical goes into growing these trees? And the end result is nothing more than cosmetic. If the tree actually gives the player more power to make combat easier it would be different. It does not. Combat remains relentlessly mash oriented.

I don't get it. Somebody, maybe Holmes, needs to work this out and get back to me.

Lies of P (Demo)

Demo.

Hmm. Okay, I died three times before the first heavy encounter and the fourth time in the heavy fight. Keeping in mind that this is a demo and things will change in the final version, if they don't fix the load screen, there is going to be a problem. It's 2023 for goodness sake, load screens, really?

The game did not ask for a difficulty option so don't know what's happening there.

First death was with the guy with the gun. One shot and done. I did not even see him. There was some sort of "You can't see in the dark" message and I went to turn on the Cricket lantern and bang. He one shotted me under a fraction of a second. Second death was with the same guy but because I got stuck on the stairs leading to where the shooter was and could not sword him before he one shot me again.

Third death was upstairs because someone snuck up behind me and I had no way of knowing until getting whacked good and proper. The character (is it Pinocchio, will there be nose super powers?) only attacks in the direction it is facing. An attack from the back does not cause him/her (?) to turn towards the assailant. He/she calmly keeps facing the same direction until you manually turn.

There is no effective defense against the heavy enemy. I have a bad feeling this is going to be another button masher combat scene.

Now, I could have kept going despite the recurrent deaths but the game save/checkpoint system (in the demo at least) is ghastly. You just go back to the beginning of the level and every single enemy respawns. Unfortunately, health pickups do not. I had only one, er, med kit(?) and could get no more. So one death means repeating a lot of the same and ending up with the boss with the same inventory. That feels an awkward way to do things. You could drop and extra health or two pickup if you are going to respawn everything else. And put a checkpoint before boss fights.

The game has a special feel to it. I hope they fix the minor issues.

Assassin's Creed Unity (2014)

First, my personal history with the Assassin's Creed series.

I played the first game in 2009 and had immediate problems. At the start, there are these people with tall pots balanced on their heads. Navigating that was a major hurdle. Of course, considering the sheer volume of gamers that got through just fine, the fault must have been mine. Anyway, got through somehow. After a few missions there is one where you have pick someone's pocket. Oh, the agony of that one. Again, maybe I was not understanding what the game expected me to do but it was troublesome to say the least.

But I got through the game somehow. Some say it revolutionized something. Uh, maybe it did, but not for me.

Then, in 2012, I got hold of Assassin's Creed II. Ho hum, ho hum, carrying along, no bottle of rum. Arrival in Monteriggioni and Uncle Mario. This is where the gamer inside me fell in love with Assassin's Creed.

A persistent peeve of mine (to this day) is when combat turns into a button mash fest. There has to be a way to take out your opponent in one move instead of hitting the idiot 13 times over and over. After the training session with Uncle Mario, Ezio can now disarm opponents and best of all the Counter Kill.

For the rest of Assassin's Creed II, my first act on combat engagement was to be barehanded. No weapons. Disarm. Counter kill. That was so satisfying.

Brotherhood followed with a changed combat system that was more aggressive.

I have mentioned this before in earlier posts that when a game allows a stealth approach, that is always my choice. Open combat is only when the game leaves no other option. The stealth approach naturally involves a slower and sneakier style of play. Little by little Assassin's Creed was moving away from that going into flashier and complex combat moves.

Assassin's Creed III was the last game in the series I played until now. Ubisoft had some direction in mind and the player base seemed happy with it given the success of subsequent entries but not me. Starting with a wannabe RPG attitude, more and more the series was turning into a "farm for XP" style of gameplay.

Again and again, all thoughts go back to Assassin's Creed II and the incredible focus of the game that got blurred and blurred over as the series progressed. Don't want to collect all Codex pages? No problem. Don't want to collect the six Seals to unlock the Armor of Altair? No problem. Don't like button mashing combat? No problem. Don't want to upgrade the Villa? No problem. Don't want to collect all feathers? No problem. Resource gathering? What resource gathering? Crafting? What crafting? Trading? What trading? XP? Say what now?

Yes, the AI was relatively clunky back then and there were several problems that have been resolved today and yet that game still stands out for me as the Assassin's Creed game.

Too much history.

So I quit on the Assassin's Creed series. Black Flag, Rogue, Unity, Syndicate, Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla (ha ha). Never played any of those. But over the years I kept watching walkthrough videos just to see what was happening with it. And with Valhalla it was clear that a new low had been dug and found.

And here we come to Unity (2014). Through the constant internet cacophony one note kept repeating that the parkour in Unity was the best the series has achieved (with a few hiccups, apparently you just cannot have a game without a hiccup or two).

Off to Steam, put the would-be perisher on the wish list, and buy when within budget.

August 2023, finally playing Assassin's Creed Unity.

The game starts and the first thing to do is contact Ubisoft support with the damnedest stupidest question ever: How do I start a new game?

For a few days I even thought Steam had sold me a DLC and not the actual game.

Well, that was an interesting game interface to encounter. Anyway, the game starts.

So I start running around, enjoying myself, and yes the parkour is great with dedicated buttons for up and down making things absolutely smooth. Arno seems to not so much run as glide along at ridiculous inhuman speed. If you get it right then traversal is fun unto itself.

After the prison escape and initiation into the Creed, the game proper begins and that is where my peeves all stand up together and start collecting broken bricks to throw at something.

Combat is a button mash fest. There is a parry but even a perfect parry is just that, a perfect parry. There is no quick way to dispatch an opponent. You slog through pushing the same buttons and combos, rinse repeat. I tried mightily to go about being sneaky and take out as many as possible from the perimeter inwards but it doesn't always work. Once you are spotted, they all come running and surround you. And since more than one can attack when you are still stuck in your stunned animation cycle, you just wish you could drop a bomb, climb the nearest Sync point, and to hell with everyone.

As mentioned (many times) in other posts, I don't do side missions or collectibles or what-have-yous. Just the main campaign clocked in at over 36 hours because I tried desperately to avoid prolonged combat scenarios. At a rough estimate, eight to ten hours of gameplay would have been cut down if the combat could resolve quickly but no. Slog, slog, slog.

It was like you finish today's homework, get ready to go play, and are told you have to do the next three months homework in advance. Sheesh. Have a heart, someone.

Another weird thing happened. Imagine you are playing a game and you, through your own action, get teleported to something that is not part of the main game. And before you know where you are, after six hours of gameplay, you are going about following objective markers, all the time wondering where are the main characters, where are the familiar streets, why is the map so different, why are all the AI opponents behaving so differently?

Then, you pay attention and read something remarkable. You are in Sequence 13. Er, what? 13? After 4, I went to 13?

This has become a recurring thing with me now. I have to keep going to the internet just to figure out where the dickens I am in a game and how to get back to where I want to go. Gosh.

The mistake? Following the exclamation point (or sword or whatever) on the map and not reading what mission you are going to agree to. Why Sequence 13 even highlights on the map before previous sequences are complete, the developers alone know, bless their convoluted sense of progression.

It has been almost a decade since the game released. When you go to forums and realize that these problems have been around for an equal length of time, what are you supposed to think about the developer? Starting a new game, re-starting a game from zero, getting back to the main campaign after getting shuffled into Sequence 13. These are unanswered questions floating about the internet with no clear solutions. I mean, come on. There are solutions but they are not obvious. It is basically bad user interface design. What confounds me is that how did all this get past beta testing.

Anyway, the sheer amount of time the main single player campaign takes to complete thanks to avoidable but not avoided gameplay mechanics, renders the game boring. The only time the game induces a sense of enjoyment is when you are running wildly across the map, close to the ground, the sides of buildings, or across rooftops. The moment you enter into "complete objective" mode, it just goes bad.

Unfortunately, this is not a unique issue with Unity. All AC games now are following this same pattern. Combat is now a chore to be completed.

Nine years of waiting to go back to AC and, oh dear, the disappointment.

Please bring back disarm and counter kill. One button press per opponent. Or include better stealth mechanics to clear out the field without getting surrounded by rotters that take 15 hits before they go down.

This could just be the whine of someone who simply has no patience with prolonged combat. Maybe the majority of the gaming community likes assaulting virtual people and flogging them like, as the expression is, a dead horse. There is no sense of accomplishment in that behavior. It is not like you solved a medium difficulty puzzle or something. All you are doing is hitting the same button ad nauseam. If that inflates your sense of accomplishment, maybe it's time to go and work in the garden or something. Get a dog for heaven's sake or a squirrel.

The peak of AC Unity's offense. There is an enemy that dodges your attacks. This enemy type is so nimble, they can dodge bullets, all the bullets. Even if you drop a smoke bomb and shoot them, they dodge the bloody bullets. Did these guys escape from The Matrix or something? WTH?

The Easy Anti-Cheat Debacle

The story begins vaguely around October 2022 (hey, I don't keep track of time like that) when I started thinking of buying a new GPU. With the price crisis and everything else, the purchase was made in February 2023. Around the same timeframe, Gears 5 went on sale on Steam. Bought, installed, benchmarked Gears 5, gushed all over it.

Then set it aside till July 2023 because of waiting for Gears 4. I am a stickler for proper sequencing in sequels.

Gears 4 is not available on Steam and it finally went on sale on the Microsoft Store (Game Pass is uneconomical if you only want to play two games available there). Bought Gears 4, installed, played, gushed all over it.

A few things happened. The only one I was aware of is that the Steam Client got updated. Nothing to do with the games itself. The other thing I became aware of only after reinstalling Gears 5 was something called Easy Anti Cheat. This was not there in February 2023 (at least I remember no such splash screen).

That is when the debacle proper began. Gears 5 would not start because EAC was, uh, incompatible or something. Still don't know what the actual problem is.

The Hunt For A Solution On The Internet followed as is to be expected. A lot of posts with people facing the same issue. A lot of posts repeating the same three odd solutions. Nothing worked.

Off to official support website and The Great E-mail Exchange over four plus days with Xbox support. Try this, try that, blah, blah, nothing worked.

Finally got informed that this is not a game issue but an operating system issue. Redirect to Microsoft Support. Online chat. Remote control of PC by tech support. A few hours and zero solutions later downloaded an ISO of the latest Windows 11 install with instruction to update my copy of Windows.

All this because EAC refuses to start on Windows 11.

And now a word about EAC. A search results in this: "Easy™ Anti-Cheat is the industry-leading anti-cheat service, countering hacking and cheating in multiplayer PC games through the use of hybrid anti-cheat ..."

And now the gripe. I don't play multiplayer games and have never understood the appeal of multiplayer games.

Here is an idea. When you launch a game, ask the gamer if they want the offline single player campaign or multiplayer, then pass the gamer through that door. Disable multiplayer protocols for single player campaign. All this anti-cheat bull, let the multiplayer community deal with it. If there are gamers who cannot participate in multiplayer without cheating that should not mean single player offline campaign gamers should suffer the consequences.

It is a good thing that I am writing this almost seven weeks after it all happened because at the time I was so furious with the EAC implementation that anything I wrote would have broken down into incoherency amidst the barrage of a jillion F bombs.

Isolate offline single player campaigns from EAC (or whatever replaces it in the future). Prevent heartburn, hypertension, febrile illness, tremors, excessive sweating and other medical and psychiatric problems for a better single player future.

There was another reason that fueled the rage.

There are a bunch of years in my past that were spent as a programmer. Really in the past. Around dBase III and Clipper time. One thing every programmer learns to know as a personal friend to get programs to behave is the if-then-else-end in whatever form it may exist in any language used.

The EAC implementation is just lazy programming. Just ask one simple question and go from there. What is it with the global enforcement regardless of gamer situation?

Update 30 March 2024: So last week I formatted C:\ and reinstalled Windows 11. All fresh, not from the cleaners but from the manufacturer. A week later the happy thought occurred to try again. It worked! So I guess there was some other app that was interfering with EAC. Odd thing though, I installed the same apps again and nothing interfered this time. Hmm.

Tomb Raider (2013, 2015, 2018)

Ah, 1996. Software rendering. Unaffordable 3dfx cards (funny how that holds true for GPUs even today). And then there was Tomb Raider that raced to the top of the 3rd person action adventure mountain. Only to follow a gradual decline the other side.

I played the new trilogy in 2023, a decade after the Tomb Raider 2013 release and it was a rather enjoyable play through. There were some sections where hope and guesswork more than gameplay mechanics did the job (the parachute sequence, don't know how I got past that because there were no visual cues) but it was a solid Tomb Raider game.

Game over, start Rise of the Tomb Raider. Same format with minor changes here and there. Thankfully, a lot less annoying QTEs.

Lastly, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the least fun of the three. There seems to be some cosmic scale with a tendency to go downhill in every trilogy regardless of the medium.

This could be, and very probably is, entirely subjective but why does the scope of the first one always seem so big, the world so much richer, the characters far more interesting, the mechanics so engaging.

Tomb Raider 2013 takes place on one island. You go nowhere else. But it feels huge. I am not the type of player who goes for 100% in every game. In fact, I actively avoid it. Side missions, collectibles, what have you, just don't care. I stick to the main campaign and when that's done it's done. Game uninstall, move to the next.

TR 2013 (except for the QTEs) held me the way any good game should. It is not easy to get a gamer into a state of curiosity, not suspense, that is a different thing, just simple curiosity. Why is all this happening? That feeling carried me through the game, even the frustrating bits. Above all the story needs to make you believe that the villain's motivations come out of conviction and not just bullying meanness.

That was the biggest letdown from TR 2015 and 2018. The bad guy motivation was "just because." Maybe your expectations differ but when I am experiencing a story I have this need to know the reason why the bad guy is the bad guy. Just having a character do bad stuff, say bad stuff, act bad stuff. Not enough.

The brother-sister dynamic in TR 2015 was basically: If they don't care why should I? And they really did not seem all that invested in it. Always Trinity this or Trinity that. Just pretend it is all Trinity and ignore the rest. Makes no difference. And all those Daddy sequences. Put a Skip option on backstories for goodness sake.

TR 2018 was the most confined experience of the three. I spent some time thinking about how to describe it but there are no words. It felt small. Worse, it was mostly boring. The bad guys and the allies are equally uninteresting. One quirk simply has to be mentioned. The outfits come equipped with attributes like enhanced stealth. Now, if a game gives the choice, I always go for stealth and avoid open combat. You reach Paititi and you cannot choose outfits. Uh, what? For some reason, the Paititi outfit made me want to not see it the more I saw it but nothing to be done. If there is logic in giving a player a choice and then denying that choice throughout most of the game, I missed it. This time around there are no QTEs but long "rail" sections with enough freedom of movement to make sure you die repeatedly. Why are these sections Frankenstein-ed into the main game flow only the developers know.

Those are the main er issues I had with the new trilogy but otherwise it was a good gaming experience.