Twelve Days of Christmas 2015

Merry Christmas all (or whatever holiday you partake in)! I hope the season has been treating you well! I don't usually do too much for Christmas, just spending time with family really, but this year my mum and I have been watching Christmas related things to get into the spirit of things. And I'll use anything as an excuse to write more on the old It Is A Title. We switched off picking what to watch each day, leading up to finally watching A Christmas Story on Christmas Day, because what else would you watch? So without further ado, here's our Twelve Days of Christmas for 2015.

Games I Beat: Fallout 4

Fallout 4
Open World Shooty "RPG"
1 Player
 System: Playstation 4
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Year of Release: 2015
Beaten: November 27th, 2015

Bethesda. Bethesda never changes. Literally. This is pretty much the same engine they used to make Oblivion. Sure, they polished the old girl up, but god damn. It's getting old. There's a trend of apologist behavior surrounding Bethesda games. "Well it is a little better in this way." "They just simplified that to widen the audience." "Well, of course it's going to have bugs, it's a Bethesda game!" At what point do we stop accepting these glaring issues that have plagued almost every Bethesda game? For me, I think I've reached that point. Most of my major complaints about Fallout 4 aren't so much things it does wrong, but things that it just fails to do entirely, ideas that are touched on, but never fully realized. Or even just simple gaming conventions that should be standard for the sort of game Fallout 4 should be. That said, I've spent well over one hundred hours with the game, and will definitely be playing the DLC whenever it comes out. I'm going to be getting very spoiler heavy, as a lot of my gripes revolve around the plot, or at least the plot's structure, so you've been warned.

Road to Justice: Catwoman

Catwoman
Directed by: Pitof
Starring: Hallie Berry, Benjamen Bratt, Sharon Stone, Alex Borstein
Released: 2004
Watched: December 21st, 2015

Thoughts Before: A long time ago I made a vow to never watch Catwoman. It looked awful, I've heard terrible things about it from basically everyone who was unfortunate enough to have witnessed it. Tonight, I broke that vow. I set out on this Road to Justice to celebrate DC comics in all of their cinematic outings. My god. They've failed overall so hard, but this. THIS. If I hadn't decided to idiotically sit through every single DC movie in preparation for Dawn of Justice I would have turned this off. This was probably only the second or third movie where a feeling in my heart of hearts told me to turn it off, but I resisted that urge and saw it through. Granted we did watch it at 1.5 times speed so it was shorter but that only worsened the horribly awkward transitions and made the fight scenes sickening.

Road to Justice: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Directed by: Stephen Norrington
Starring: Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran
Released: 2003
Watched: December 21st, 2015

Thoughts Before: I remember this being a fairly standard action movie. I'm not expecting much, but after the last several movies it can't be that bad. I know they used some pretty ugly CGI throughout, and that it doesn't fit the comics very well (though I haven't read those yet, but have been meaning to).  Reasonably speaking though, after Justice League of America, things can only get better from here.

Road to Justice: Justice League of America TV Pilot

Justice League of America TV Pilot
Directed by: Félix Enríquez Alcalá
Starring: A bunch of schmucks
Released: 1997
Watched: December 17th, 2015

Thoughts Before: So, we got off track with this. I can't deny it any longer. It's been such a long stretch of shitty movies, and my friend's life has been rather hectic, so it's kind of been sliding back further and further. We're three weeks behind now, but we will make it up. The movies are going to start (mostly) getting better from here (I mean Catwoman is coming up still...) and things are smoothing out for him, it seems, so hopefully we can get this road back on track. Anyway, this couldn't be THAT bad.

Chronicles of Ivera - Fifth Session

As we headed back to town after our embarrassing defeat and less than daring escape we could see Grief and her men were worse for the wear, putting up a giant barricade where once a door had been. They let us through, though they looked more than displeased. Grief jumped Godfree demanding an explanation, once he calmed her down a bit I realized that Silva had disappeared somewhere between here and there. So I took the clear path set before him, I blamed the entire ordeal on him.

Games I Beat: Dragon Quest Heroes

Dragon Quest Heroes The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below
Musou RPG
1 Player
System: PS4
Developer: Omega Force
Year of Release: 2015
Beaten: October 25, 2015

First of all, Square Enix is using this game to hold a beloved series hostage, that being the titular Dragon Quest series. Allegedly the future of that series in the West is dependent on sales of this game. Ironically, this game is basically nothing like a true Dragon Quest game, so this strategy is pretty fucked up. Dragon Quest is personally my favorite RPG series, and if you too are a fan of turn based RPG's I highly suggest seeking out pretty much any of those games to check out (namely I, III, IV and VIII are the typically recommended entry points). If you enjoy the series, think you might or love Dynasty Warrior style games I implore you to pick up this title new. I don't like that Square Enix is holding their own property hostage like this, but I'm willing to negotiate with terrorists. I want new Dragon Quest games, especially those 3DS remakes dammit. (Having written this in the past and having been sitting on this for far too long, DRAGON QUEST VII AND VIII WERE ANNOUNCED TO COME WESTWARD THIS SUMMER! AHHHHHH!)

Also, this game is pretty good overall, just to get that out of the way here and now. I would never recommend purchasing a bad game, unless the situation was incredibly dire. Like some insane man broke into my home and demanded I blogged about how great some terrible games were. Oh if only I were that popular of a writer.

Chronicles of Ivera - Fourth Session

What a day, what a motherfucking day. At least the rogue could lie through his teeth well. Today was almost the day we all died, it wasn't fate, it wasn't because of impossible odds. It came down to pure and simple terrible decision making. At least we live to see the light of day once more.

Games I Beat: Guitar Hero Live

Guitar Hero Live
Air Guitar Justificationer
1-2 Players
System: PS4
Developer: Freestyle Games
Year of Release: 2015
Beaten: December 6th, 2015

This one might run a little short, but I wanted to talk about it anyway. I never really got into Guitar Hero, in fact my first experience with it was doing an alright job on the normal difficulty in the third entry, after which a friend of my at-the-time-girlfriend showed me "how to play". He played one of the hardest songs on expert without missing a note and acted like some of god among us due to his mastery of plastic guitars. It was a little off putting. Furthermore, as I did play it more over the weeks I never really got comfortable with how the game played overall. Eventually Rock Band came out and I had the chance to play it at a friends house. The fake instrument genre finally clicked with me.

Chronicles of Ivera - Third Session

As I recovered from my death, near death, our barbarian friend from before wandered back into town. He apologized for wandering off, and we wound up grouping back up. Following him was another tiefling rogue, he asked to tag along as well, to which we agreed with some trepidation. It hadn't gone so well last time. After collecting ourselves we headed back to the Fey Woods to finish our business with Wandering Winds. We manged to make our way there with no real trouble. Winds asked if we would follow him to his druid circle, the Verdant Enclave. Of course we agree.