Keri Honea - 41/183 - Strategy Guide Reviews

Book Review: Halo: Saint’s Testimony

August 18, 2015 By Keri Honea 6 Comments

I’m on a quest to complete all of the Halo books before Halo 5: Guardians releases in October. I finished three older books while on my vacation last week, allowing me to finally get back on track with the latest releases. Next up is a short story, Halo: Saint’s Testimony by Frank O’Connor, the series director. He’s the one who is essentially in charge of all of the Halo lore and making sure it flows between games and makes sense overall. I’m guessing he tapped out for Halo: Reach, but that’s a whole different diatribe. Point is, this is the first time he’s actually written a piece of Halo extended lore himself. Saint’s Testimony took awhile to warm up, but the climax gave me absolute chills, something that hasn’t happened with a book in a long, long time.

Saint’s Testimony features a smart AI, like Cortana or Roland, who is at the end of her seven-year set life cycle. As Cortana discussed throughout Halo 4, and what several AIs have mentioned numerous times throughout the books, a smart AI starts breaking down into rampancy at around 7 years. To prevent the AI from losing any pertinent data or literally going insane and destroying data, the UNSC has a policy in place to essentially kill the AI on its 7th birthday. Iona is now 7, and while she should have the plug pulled on her, she filed a claim with the UNSC court that she shouldn’t be terminated. Even crazier, she’s appealing to the idea that she is alive and has a right to live.

Unlike Cortana, she has no signs of rampancy, and therefore, why shouldn’t she continue to live and fulfill her duty?

It’s an interesting premise and one that really delves into the morals of the lives of AI, but not much about Iona’s testimony in the court of law grabbed my attention. She made her appeals to show how she is like a living and breathing entity (emphasis on “like”), and even goes as far as to show everyone in attendance her dreams. Yes, I admit I thought of Space Odyssey: 2010 and HAL-9000 asking if he would dream. And then I snickered, which completely killed any mood O’Connor was setting for Iona’s testimony.

What snapped me back in was everything that happened after the court hearing concluded. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say anything else about the plot. Those events, however, gave me chills. I know I said, “Oh my God!” out loud at least three times in reading the final pages. I can’t get out of my head what was revealed in those last pages. It will haunt my thoughts for years to come, and I already know I’m going to have to read this short story at least one more time to garner everything I can from it.

I am dying to know how this will impact future Halo games or future Halo extended lore. O’Connor has opened a completely new sub-plot that Cortana was only knocking on in Halo 4, as well as Karen Traviss in her Kilo Five trilogy. I have a feeling that Halo is going to go down a far darker path than Bungie originally intended, but considering where the series started, I think this is a glorious thing to happen to the series.

Despite how amazing I think this short story is, I cannot recommend it for everyone for one reason and one alone: if you have not read Traviss’ Kilo Five trilogy, the big revelation will mean absolutely nothing to you. For everyone who has read the Kilo Five trilogy and played through Halo 4, Saint’s Testimony is required reading.

Don’t gripe too much; it’s only 30 pages and only costs $.99. That’s a small price to pay for something that will most likely blow your mind.

Monday Gaming Diary: Game-Free Vacation

August 17, 2015 By Keri Honea Leave a Comment

This nightly view was ROUGH to put up with.

I actually went on a bona fide vacation last week with my family. Every year we go to the beach with the entire clan, where we swim a lot, eat a lot of fish tacos, and drink too much wine. Last year, I hauled down my PlayStation 3 to get my Diablo III on and play some LEGO games with my eldest. This year I decided to leave all of the big consoles at home, and I only brought my Vita. I figured this would be prime time to play some Mortal Kombat IX either on the long drive down or at night when everyone else went to bed. I never turned on my Vita once, and I have no regrets.

Sadly, I didn’t really play any games over the week, and that does make me sad because I brought Uno and Exploding Kittens for everyone to play. The cards stayed in their boxes, because we all ended up crashing early every night. Who knew that sun, swimming, and chasing after kids all day would make you so tired?

However, I did get a lot of reading done. I finished Halo: Contact Harvest and I’m two-thirds of the way through Halo: The Cole Protocol. As much as I am bummed that I didn’t play any card games, especially with my eldest, at least I got some me-time in with reading. And since they were Halo books, I suppose they were kind of like gaming.

No matter to me, it was kind of nice being completely unplugged from the gaming world. Of course, now that I’m back and therefore must return to the grind, all I can think of is everything I need to play and work on. As far as the massive RPGs that I need to play goes, I’m thinking of working on Final Fantasy XIV. If nothing else, even if I hate it, I can use it as a feature for work since it will be my first MMO. That’s me, always thinking how I can turn something fun into productivity!

Oh and by the way, I haven’t plugged this enough yet, but if you aren’t reading the Mortal Kombat X comics yet, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.

Project CARS Soundtrack Review

August 6, 2015 By Keri Honea Leave a Comment

I’ve never picked up a soundtrack for a racing game before. They’re usually mix tapes of various hip hop, rock, and techno tracks with the occasional orchestral piece thrown in. I have nothing against popular and mainstream music, but I’ve gotten into video game soundtracks because I really enjoy the orchestral music. (The soundtrack for Max Payne 3 is a complete outlier.) So yes, looking at the soundtrack for Project CARS never even crossed my mind, because that surely is more of the same. However, I received a press release from the label last month, advertising the soundtrack, and they included the following quote from the composer, Stephen Baysted:

Like all authentic racing simulation titles, there is no music during gameplay; car engines always take precedence. My job as composer is to try to enhance the player’s sense of immersion in this world of racing and deepen their emotional and psychological responses to it by ‘preparing’ them for the race. The music in the menu system is therefore dramatic, gripping, epic, gladiatorial and is infused with race day sounds – cars, crowds, tannoys – so that it links directly to the sound world they will be exposed to whilst racing. It tries to get inside the head of the racing driver and represent the range of emotions they feel – fear, excitement, nerves, adrenaline pumping, and danger. Imagine what it is like driving at Le Mans at 330 kph in the dark as you slice your way through traffic! As a result, it’s a varied score and reflects many facets of motorsport.

NOW, good sir, you have my attention. Firstly, there is a composer. Secondly, he wanted to make menu screens exciting? This I gotta hear.

Granted, many games have done a fantastic job with placing great music with their menus. Saints Row IV comes to mind as well as Double Dragon. Oh, the memories of 8-bit chip tune menu music. That was truly the best menu music, something that we’ve kind of fallen away from over the years. Which is fine, but it’s great that composers are finding new ways to jazz up menu screens, so to speak.

Since this is mostly menus, the soundtrack is very, very short at 12 tracks running for 31 minutes. Yet, with tracks like the one below, it’s very easy to keep this OST on loop for a bit.

Did you ever expect to hear an opera singer in a racing game? I feel revved up and ready to go, and I loathe racing games. I wonder if I would start speeding down the highway if I listened to this soundtrack while on road trips.

Instead of blending together a varied collection of tracks, Baysted put together a blend of orchestral, pop, and a bit of techno in each track. As such, you really can’t pin this OST down as one genre or another—anything other than soundtrack. At the same time, he keeps the blended ingredients similar, so the soundtrack is cohesive like a beautiful soup, rather than thrown together like leftover night.

The Project CARS soundtrack was indeed a welcome and pleasant surprise, however, it’s length leaves plenty to be desired. I know that the OST contains all of the tracks possible, since the game has no music while racing, but it’s hard to recommend $10 for 30 minutes of music, especially when one half of the soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed Unity has more than twice the songs, more than twice the length, and costs only $1 more. The music is well worth it for the variety and how much it will get you ready to race, but it may be rather steep for those who aren’t hardcore video game soundtrack fans.

Digital review copy received via label.

Comic Review: The Witcher: Fox Children #5

August 5, 2015 By Keri Honea 1 Comment

And at long last, we come to the end of The Witcher: Fox Children comic book series. Writer Paul Tobin outdid himself this time, especially since he absolutely tricked me into thinking this was the biggest let-down of an ending since Fable II. I was ready to tear this issue a new one after how each of the previous four issues were so riveting and kept me on the edge of my seat in anticipation and a bit of fear. That was how he was going to end it? Really?

REALLY?

And that’s why you stay through a movie or video game until the very end, even after the credits, or in this case, until the very last page. No matter how weak a storyline is going, see how it ends, and then rip it to shreds. It’s possible it pulls a Paul Tobin and yanks the rug right out of underneath you.

But no, I won’t spoil the ending. I’m already afraid that I’ve said too much.

It’s not only how the comic ends that makes me applaud Tobin, either. He carefully crafted exactly why Geralt is so afraid of the Vulpess and why he refuses to tangle with them to the point that the reader will, in turn, fear them just as much. In fact, if I ever come across one in The Witcher 3, I will board the first nope train out of that situation. The craziest part of the whole thing is that she never lays a hand or paw upon anyone, yet so many died by her hand.

Of course, words can only do so much, and once again, Joe Querio nailed the expressions of the Vulpess, Geralt, and the rest of the hapless shipmates. Most of the Vulpess’s facial expressions were very subtle as she didn’t show her face to everyone on the ship, but Querio was able to use the lines of her fur and whiskers and position of her eyes to beautifully present exactly what she is thinking.

With the close of The Witcher: Fox Children #5, I am both happy and sad to see it end, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that CD Projekt RED and Dark Horse will team up for at least one more mini-series. They have something amazing here, and they should keep it going.

If you haven’t read this series yet, now that all five issues are out (as of August 5, 2015), there’s no better time to grab all of them at once. The Witcher: Fox Children #5 is available both retail and digital from Dark Horse comics.

Digital review copy received from publisher.

Monday Gaming Diary: Halo Woes

August 3, 2015 By Keri Honea 1 Comment

Since Halo 5: Guardians is releasing soonish, a friend and I have a plan to play all four of the first Halo games together to get prepared for it. Neither of us have really played much of the Halo: Master Chief Collection, and this seems like the perfect time to burn through these games and get prepared for the upcoming awesomeness that is sure to hit our Xbox Ones. I haven’t touched the MCC since my review, where I mostly just played Halo 2 so I could check out the improvements and test the multiplayer functions. The multiplayer experience was absolutely abysmal and was the exact reason why I gave the collection the low score that I did.

343 Industries has released numerous patches to fix these server issues, especially those with matchmaking. Since the game has been out for nearly a year, we assumed like the fools we are that the issues have been mostly fixed. We just want to play co-op, so what’s the big deal?

We’ve tried to play together a couple of times, and each time has had the same result: we can’t join each other’s games.

This was us for over an hour before we gave up.

The first time we tried, Xbox Live was down so we didn’t think much of it. We tried again over the weekend, and we were both met with problems. I could connect to the Internet via the Xbox One, but the multiplayer connectivity was down. It insisted we had some ports blocked on our modem, blah blah blah. The only way I could fix it was to directly plug in the ethernet cable from the Xbox One into the modem. Goddamn the Xbox One is picky when it comes to Internet. I couldn’t set up a wireless connection when I first bought the thing because it insisted the signal was too weak despite sitting in the same room as the modem and router. Now it has to be plugged into the modem to work for multiplayer. Picky, picky, picky.

Once we both got our multiplayer connectivity happy, we still could not join each other’s games. It didn’t matter who hosted; we received the same error message that we weren’t able to connect. We looked at forums, and we weren’t alone in these issues. 343’s server issues are still not fixed, as ridiculous as that sounds.

We’re going to try again this week before we both go out of town, but we’re both rather frustrated. Our plan was to play the first two games together and then meet up with Blake and Chris to play the last two with four players. If we can’t get two of us to connect, how in the world can we get four?

It’s ridiculous, 343, to still have these kinds of issues with your collection. I hope to God you’re planning more Beta tests for Halo 5: Guardians, because you obviously need extensive strain tests on your servers.

At least that night wasn’t a total wash. I finished reading my current Halo book instead of playing Halo.

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