Bloodborne (PS4) First Thoughts (Might contains spoilers)

Bloodborne, spiritual sequel to Dark Souls.

I nor played Dark Souls, Demon Souls or any this kind of game before. Closest resemblance fron the games that i have played before would maybe be Devil May Cry 4, and that is far different from Bloodborne, so I don’t have any baseline.

Game starts with character creation, there are sliders for everything from pupil size to chin angle, hair color to nostril lip thickness. When i finally got into the game, I did not even see my characters face, not once in these 10 hours that I have put into the game.

You start without any weapons, ok, maybe you got to get around with fists in beginning. After checking all the drawers and rolling over boxes I finally got through dark hallway to bloody medical room. There it was my first enemy, black wolflike creepy monster feasting on corpse. It noticed me and charged, i dodged and got a hit in, 3 damage, not too shabby considering the monster had about 300 points of health judging by health bar. I managed to deal 1/4th of its health as damage before I died. After very long loading screen i got to some place that I had never seen.

This place is called Hunter’s Dream, a central hub of the game. There is a shop, storage chest, teleport to any checkpoint of game, and later unlcokable level up doll. Also i found some weapons so that monster shouldn’t be a problem. I went back and slew it easily. I got into town and killed a couple of zombies, found another checkpoint and thought that this is not that hard. Until now i was fighting one enemy at a time, but now there was a pack of four with one very fast dog. I died… Respawned, died and respawned and died a couple more times until i got more used to controls.

I spent 3 hours running from that same chekcpoint through same enemies, after I finally found a way behind some boxes that lead back to the checkpoint, but unlocked door that is a shortcut to boss. After I died to boss 1st time that level up doll unlocked and I got some more stats. You slay monsters get blood echoes which you can use to buy gear, upgrade stats and upgrade weapons later in game. You lose all of your blood echoes when you die but can go pick them up by killing the monster that killed you last time. You need to go back to checkpoint and teleport to Hunter’s Dream to use these blood echoes.

That 1st boss took me about 10 tries to finally kill it, got new checkpoint and progressed further just to find new monsters that would kill me countless of times.

This game is challenging, there are many places to discover and hidden passages everywhere. I cannot wait to get to new bosses and just die, die, die after some more deaths die a couple more times and finally finish this masterpiece.

Never alone (PS4) review

Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) was one of free games of April for PS+ subscribers. It is a 2D platformer based on Alaskan indigenous stories. You play as an Alaskan girl and as snow fox, both of them have their own traits: Fox can climb walls and go through small gaps and command spirits and girl can sling on ropes and throw a bola, which can break ice.

Game revolves around getting through Alaska solving platformer puzzles. All puzzles have same structure: find a spirit use fox to move it, jump on with girl, jump to next platform, brake ice, go forward. This gets old pretty fast. There is also plain old wind mechanic to make longer jumps. Controls are clunky and characters slide way too much. Jumping feels heavy and wind makes jump timing really hard.

Overall game is pretty easy and you get checkpoint after every jump. Some jumps seem tricky but moving the spirit platforms around makes those a walk in the park. The game has a couple chasing events where you run from polar bear and snow storm, these parts make a nice change in between of tedious jumping puzzles.

Graphics are nice and smooth, there is no music but wind blows all the time and there is also ambient based on your location, overall visual and sounds are very good and fit for the style.

There are also Alaskan history/ cultural clips in between chapters. Real life documentary about bolas and northern lights make this more of a learning experience than a game. There are few videos that you unlock by finding a hidden owl. You should find all of these on 1st playthrough because all of them are visible, just need to do couple hard jumps to get them.

I encountered a major bug that made me get stuck in one spot of the game, one platform that is supposed to move automatically was not moving at all. This was fixed by restarting the game, but after 30 minutes of trial and error on this bug made me almost quit there.

Overall as a game Never alone is not something i would pay for, but as a whole wit the documentary it is worth playing.

Score: as a game 4/10, as a whole 7/10

WoW Token

Blizzard announced some time ago that soon you are able to buy WoW gold wit real money via sellable game time token. These tokens can be bought from blizzard store for 20€ (15GBP, 20USD). Upon using it you will get 1 month worth of game time, which would be stupid because you can buy 1 month with 13€. Catch here is that you are able to sell that token to other players and make some gold.

This gives players that want to have more gold but don’t want to depend on unofficial gold sellers (they are illegal by the way), a way to buy gold with real money. And players like myself that have large supply of in game gold are able to buy their game time with it, essentially removing the monthly fee. At the moment I have enough gold to buy game time for 10 months if the price goes down to 20-25k gold/token. In my guild there is one guy that has enough gold to buy game time for 10 years, but also players that are struggling with paying the repair fees and raid consumables and enchants.

You can only sell tokens to other players through in game auction house with tab specifically made for it. With this Blizzard can monitor the price of token and buyers will be safe from scammers. Starting price will be 30k gold and it will change according to market, more supply prices go down, less supply prices go up. There is no need to worry that you need to pay like 100k gold per token because Blizzard has stated that there are upper and lower limits of token price. If Europe market is anything like in NA price should settle down at about 25k gold per token. When you post a token in auction house, game will tell you how long will it approximately take for the token to sell and how much gold you will get for it. And when you are buying token you will see the price that is currently appropriate for the supply. Tokens are sold in the order they are posted, so you don’t need to worry about undercutting.

For myself and many of my friends this is great thing, we all have too much gold to use on anything relevant. One of my friends did not renew his subscription two weeks ago because these tokens were coming. I would have done so too, but my game time will expire in two weeks and tokens are coming out today in Europe. This relieves me from the 13€ per month subscription so i have more money to use per month, or maybe I’ll save it for buying other games.

Best thing is that you can completely ignore the tokens and play like you have before Blizzard implemented it.