Although not a terrific game, the indie survival adventure game Miasmata (developed by Bob and Joe Johnson of IonFX) is an interesting title that does deserve to be played by its target audience. It's not a particularly challenging game, but players can back themselves up into seemingly insurmountable holes. Knowing the game's mechanics and rules - and knowing them early - is important to ensuring that you aren't forced to restart from the beginning or give up entirely.

Like with my previous strategy post for Alien Isolation, I am not going to provide specific walkthroughs for the game or any of its specific set piece challenges. In fact, doing so would be even harder than in Alien because Miasmata is a completely open-ended sandbox game. Instead, I will be offering some general-purpose tips that should be relevant for the entire game. This will include some techniques for working around the game's bugs and odd design flaws.

This should be a pretty obvious tip. If you find the plants that are used for the 3 parts of the cure, or the three emphasis drugs, you should immediately pick them and ...

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Continuing my series of strategy posts about Brave New World's modified civilizations, I'm going to take a look at strategies for Oda Nobunaga's Japan. Since Brave New World's Fall patch Japan was given additional buffs towards culture and coastal starts.

Japan is a series of four large island and numerous smaller islands that were formed by volcanoes. It has been inhabited since the upper paleolithic era (about 30 thousand years ago), and its people have lived in relative isolation for much of its history. It has gone through periods of war with its closest neighbors across the sea: China and Korea, and has had significant cultural influences from both, such native Shinto's two competing religions: Buddhism and Confucianism. Throughout most of Japanese history, the country has been in a feudal state, with regional populations being loyal to a warlord who is granted land and titles from the emperor (or "Shogun"). In-fighting between warlords was common, and power often ebbed and flowed between different clans and families.

Samurai Daimyo Oda Nobunaga helped Ashikaga Yoshiaki to reclaim the title of Shogun for his clan in 1568, and Nobunaga used the leader as a puppet to enable his own conquests. He was a brutal warrior who once set fire to an enemy complex, killing tens of thousands of civilian non-combatants (including women and children) in order to put down a rebellion of farmers and monks. He eventually attained military control of more than half of the territories of Japan on behalf of the Shogun. His successor, Hashiba Hideyoshi, would complete the unification of Japan 11 years after political and personal tensions lead to Nobunaga's assassination by a vassal clan.

In the 19th century, Japan's isolation finally ended and it began the process of rapidly modernizing. By the 1930's, Japan had developed into a modern military-industrial machine that was almost the technological equivalent of the United States and European powers. It became the dominant power in the Pacific prior to being defeated by the United States in the second half of World War II.

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While looking for new survival horror games on Steam, I stumbled onto a very intriguing title: Miasmata. During my holiday break from work, I decided to boot up the game and see if it scratched my survival horror itch.

It didn't, on account of not actually being a survival horror game. But what I found instead was an equally interesting premise that immediately caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.

The Johnson brothers kept this game about as simple as it could possibly be (perhaps to its detriment). They had a core concept, and they stuck to it. As such, Miasmata is a very novel game. It is probably the only game that I've ever played that is solely about scientific research.

The end goal is to cure a disease that the character has contracted and then escape the island. This disease acts as the central challenge to the game: you have to periodically medicate yourself in order to control the symptoms, but all medications must be derived from the local flora. Failure to do so can slow you down, blur your vision, and eventually kill you. A sheer majority of the game, thus, consists of wandering around the island collecting samples of plants, and then returning them to the nearest laboratory to examine them and use them to concoct various potions. In addition to medicines, you can also create potions to enhance your physical strength and perception. Doing so will allow you to run and swim further, and allow you to always know your location on the map (respectively).

Unfortunately, the process of analyzing the specimens is automated (via a skip-able cutscene). You don't actually have to do anything in order to figure out what the plant's effects are going to be, and no actual scientific knowledge is required by the player. Each plant also only has one effect, so the potion-making mechanic (which is the core of the game) is pretty shallow.

The effects of each plant will be noted in your journal, which is one of the best journal features of any game that I've ever played. It has a handy status page that includes pockets for storing your medicines, as well as holding your water flask. It also shows your objectives and has tabs to collected notes, your research results, and the map. The journal is also populated with hyperlinks that take you to the journal page with the relevant information. For example, if you find a note with ingredients for an objective drug, the status page will add a hyperlink to that note underneath the objective. It's every bit the journal that Silent Hill: Downpour wanted to have!

As you explore, you'll also find camps left behind by the deceased research team. These camps can contain notes that can reveal bits of backstory, provide recipes for various potions, or point you in the direction of key plant specimens. The camps also act as safe places for you to restock your supplies (including water), rest, and save your progress.

Keeping yourself hydrated and rested is important, as failure to do so can aggravate the symptoms of your illness and potentially kill you. Unfortunately, the feedback for this isn't terribly great. You'll get a notification when you're thirsty, but the game doesn't bother to tell you that you're tired. Instead, your health just starts rapidly deteriorating for no apparent reason. It took me a while to figure out that it was due to a lack of sleep.

A curious omission is that you don't have to eat. The game even includes various weapons scattered around the island, and there is an attack and throw command. But you can't attack the hostile panther-like creature that occasionally appears to hunt you, nor can you hunt and kill any of the game's various wildlife (beetles, squirrels, birds, and so forth). So you can only run and hide from the creature, and you only collect plants, which don't need to be attacked in order for specimens to be collected. So why are the weapons and attack mechanic even in the game?

Probably the second most significant mechanic is the map triangulation feature. Instead of revealing the map passively as you walk through it, the player must actively identify the location of landmarks ...

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Yesterday, Chicago Bears coach Marc Trestman announced that he would be benching Jay Cutler and starting Jimmy Clausen in this coming Sunday's game against the Detroit Lions. It's about damned time! After Chicago lost to Dallas two weeks ago and were eliminated from the playoffs, I thought the Bears would put Cutler on the bench. When I turned on last Thursday's game against the Saints and saw Cutler step onto the field for the first drive, I stopped watching the game.

What more was there to see in Jay Cutler? How could he not have conclusively proven that he is a bust? Why weren't the Bears taking the opportunity to test out Clausen and / or David Fales for the remainder of this dead season? It seemed so stupid! Heck, if Clausen could win games or spark the offense back to life, it could save Trestman's job. It would be solid evidence that the Bears poor season was mostly on Cutler's shoulders, and not on Trestman's. Again, the Bears looked good last year with Josh McCown playing during Jay Cutler's injury, so Trestman and the Bears have already proven that they can be successful with other quarterbacks.

Well, Trestman and Emery finally smartened up and realized that Cutler isn't the guy. But now they only have two games to examine the potential of Clausen, and it seems unlikely that they'll bother with rookie David Fales. If I had been coach, I would have given Clausen one game as starter and given Fales one game as starter, then give the third game to whichever of the two performed better. It would let me know whether Fales is a keeper, or if I should look to the draft for yet another quarterback. The big question will be: can either quarterback successfully run Marc Trestman's west coast-style offense?

Unfortunately, neither Clausen nor Fales will have access to star wideout Brandon Marshall, ...

UPDATE December 23, 2014: Cutler to start final week against Vikings due to Clausen injury

Jimmy Clausen started against the Lions last Sunday, but still wasn't able to provide a spark of life to Chicago's offense. He didn't do anything special, and he also threw a game-ending interception. He also apparently suffered a concussion. As such, Chicago is back to starting Jay Cutler this coming Sunday in the season-finale against the Vikings.

I think Trestman is making a bad decision by starting Cutler. If I were in charge, I'd give the game to rookie David Fales. There is no better crucible for testing a new quarterback than with a meaningless late-season game. Even if he isn't fully prepared, playing him will help the coaches to identify his weaknesses and problem areas against a starting NFL defense in a live game. And if the coaches and management don't see anything redeeming in Fales play, then they will know that he isn't worth keeping on the roster and potentially hurting the team's chances in future seasons if the starter(s) ahead of him go down with injury.

Playing Cutler, on the other hand, only risks getting Cutler hurt and destroying any possibility of a trade.

I'm going to write this one off as yet another bad decision in a very long, sad history of bad football decisions in Chicago...

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I haven't talked about Bloodborne on this blog yet, other than in passing. This has been because there wasn't much information on it except for the most superficial information and a few minutes of gameplay video. But over the past few months, more information has come out, so I'm going to take a moment to talk about some of the features and mechanics that I am excited about.

If you're not already aware, Bloodborne is the PS4's spiritual successor to FROM Software's hit games Demon's Soul and Dark Souls. Both of those games are among my favorite games on the PS3. I'm eagerly awaiting this game, as it is likely going to be the reason that I end up buying a PS4.

Overall, the game looks to play similarly to the Souls games with one major exception: it takes place in a steampunk, Victorian setting instead of a medieval fantasy universe. This means that the traditional sword and shield gameplay doesn't transfer to the new setting. In fact, shields don't seem to play a role at all. Instead, the player's off-hand can be used to equip a second bladed weapon or a gun. The lack of a shield means that the game is designed to be faster-paced, and combat is intended to be more aggressive and offensive so as to encourage players to attack and dodge rather than backpedal behind their shields.

Little is known about the game's story so far, except that it involves people transforming into vicious beasts, and the player character is hunting them. There might also be a bit of a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" theme here, as it's been hinted that players can transform into beasts. This is presumably a replacement for the "soul form" and "hollow form" in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls (respectively). There will be multiplayer components similar to the previous Souls games, but specific details are limited.

According to a preview at a recent Sony expo, the PS4-exclusive Bloodborne will have some interesting new features:

A demo shown in December's PlayStation Experience expo in Las Vegas, Nevada (apparently, there was an official Sony PlayStation convention in Vegas that I didn't hear about until the week after it was done?) revealed an intriguing new feature: the game will include a procedurally-generated dungeon.

The "Chalice Dungeon" (as it is called), is an optional dungeon that will vary from player to player, or character to character, or game to game, or visit to visit, or moment to moment (depending on how you interpret the tranlator). A key semantic point is that the dungeon is being called a "procedurally-generated dungeon", and not a "randomly-generated dungeon". The extent of the randomness isn't entirely clear ...

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