Middleditch Littlebitch

For glory!!

I know, yes, I’ve been a little lackluster in terms of posting.  Perhaps it’s circumstance, perhaps I’m one of the millions of “bloggers” who sets out to make this regularly updated blog and after the first few weeks the steam seeps out like a poop you thought was just a fart.

In my defense, it is pilot season.  Things have been a little nutty.

But, when things get nutty, my need to escape via video games grows ever more intense.  It’s times like these, when things are so stressful and downtime is sporadic, that when I do have free time, I get the serious tunnel vision gaming going on.  I hang onto my little video game like it was my last rock of crack.  And since I don’t have my 360, in case you haven’t read previous posts, I’ve got my Windows partitioned MacBook Pro as my gateway to the gigaverse.  Gigaverse?  Ninja, please.

As stated previously, I held true to my statement of reigniting my love affair with the IL-2 Sturmovik series.  Man, what an amazing WWII flight sim.  If you buy (and I stress buy, as software piracy is destroying everything I know and love) IL-2 Sturmovik 1946, the latest installment, you get 229 flyable aircraft, with an amazing flight and damage model, and everything from downing Japs in the Pacific to taking out convoys supplying Stalingrad.  I played a campaign as a Corsair pilot on an aircraft carrier, taking off and landing manually on that little fucker while it pitches and rolls on the ocean thank you very much, and now I’m back to my true calling: flying the Bf-109.  Man, the Germans got a lot of things wrong in WWII, mainly the holocaust and…starting it.  But they got the coolest uniforms (designed by Hugo Boss), the coolest guns, tanks, and by far the coolest airplanes.  Messerschmitts rule.  And when you’re in the beginning of the war on the Eastern Front, you’re literally flying the best variant of the 109 (the G2) against Soviet planes made in the 30s.  The Polikarpov I-153 was literally a biplane.  And Russians be slapping rockets on that bitch and trying to blow up meine Panzers?!  Nein!!!  It’s a mutha fuckin’ turkey shoot, y’all.

You have to read that last line like I’m singing it.  Like “heeey y’aaaalll.”

BUT!  That’s not all.

This weekend I was literally glued to the screen every waking moment.  I now enter the new week almost repulsed by my computer from the sheer quality time I spent with it, as I got real acquainted with an indie game called Mount & Blade.  Now, the sequel is coming out in but a fortnight, but I couldn’t wait so I thought I’d buy the first one just to check it out.  I’ll start off by saying the bad stuff.

It’s hard.  Real hard.  And sometimes so frustrating (both in the campaign map and the battles) that I literally had veins popping out of my neck while I spat a fine mist of saliva into the air like Ol’ Faithful.  In the end, once you get past the initial awesomeness of it all, you realize that the requirements for all the things you wanted to do initially are so insanely high that it would require far too much work to get there.  You also can’t be king of the any of the factions.  So like, what the hell is the point, know what I’m saying?

Woah woah woah, back it up.  Factions?  Ok.  Here’s what the game is.  It’s essentially an open world sandbox style game where you create a character in this fictional land that’s set in a fairly realistic medieval time period.  That’s a selling point to me, as though it’s almost historical fiction.  But more fictional history.  Anyway, you make your character, recruit soldiers (who themselves can upgrade and improve), battle other armies, get new armor and weapons (no magic, thank God), and essentially kick ass throughout the land of Calradia, all with the goal of not one day being king but just his bitch.

Now you gotta know, that this is an indie game.  So yes, there are big things to look past like the aforementioned “bads” paragraph as well as the fact the game is very dated, graphically speaking.  It’s also unpolished, even in its final state.  But, it’s a game like this that makes me love video games and especially PC games.  It’s so different.  The combat is so fucking fun and satisfying that I found myself cheering when I pulled off clutch victories.  The mounted combat is literally the best I’ve seen in any video game ever.  Think of this game as like a first person version of Medieval 2: Total War.  So you have your campaign map, and you move your army around, looting and pillaging villages and selling dried meat, then when you encounter some baddies you talk trash to them and go into the battle.  There, you can personally command your troops to wreak havoc on the opposing suckas.  I run them down with my lance and then bash them with my axe when I’m feeling saucy.  It’s like Total War meets Die By The Sword.  Haven’t played DBTS?  Go fuck yourself.

You gotta play it to really know what I’m talking about, and you can download the trial here:

http://www.taleworlds.com/main.aspx?dir=download.aspx

In the next installment, Warband, they’ll include multiplayer.  Not to say that it will be integrated somehow into the campaign mode, but you’ll be able to have deathmatch and team deathmatch style rumbles on an independent level.  Fun, but not as amazing as it should be.

So, if you can look past mediocre graphics, gameplay pitfalls, and the lack of an end goal, this game is worthy of your time.  As much as I got frustrated with it, I had a great time playing it.  Plus there are tons of mods out there for it.  Granted, the few that I tried are buggy as fuck and most of them are made by ESL students.  I give Mount and Blade 14.5 Ruby Units.  The real question is, OUT OF HOW MANY RUBY UNITS?!?!?!?