I've been hearing some complaints about the difficulty of kicking the football in Doug Flutie's Maximum Football 2019 (from Canadian developer Canuck Play). Many players seem to be having difficulties making field goals longer than an extra point. At the risk of sounding like an elitist, the kicking in this game really isn't that hard once you learn one simple thing about how it works. So I just wanted to put out a short post here to help out players who are struggling with the kick meter, so that they don't have to spend too long going through trial-and-error.

The kick trajectory defaults to a low, line drive.

Basically, the kick meter defaults to a line drive trajectory. This results in short, low kicks (like a squib kickoff). All you have to do is pull down on the right analog stick to raise the kick trajectory arrow. I usually raise the trajectory almost as high as it will go.

This design is counter-intuitive to most people who have played football games in the past, since most other games set the kick trajectory default to a basic kick that is usually "good enough" for most purposes. In many situations, you can just kick the ball without having to bother with aiming at all. NFL 2k5 and All Pro 2k8 continually dragged the kick trajectory off to the side, and forced you to have to adjust. This was (I assume) to simulate the pull of the wind and the kicker's handedness -- or is it "footedness"? But the height of the kick usually did not have to be adjusted.

Other games do not require as much adjustment of the kick trajectory.

Once you have the kick trajectory in Maximum Football aimed correctly, all you have to do is flick the stick down, then back up to actually make the kick. Flick the stick quickly in order to maximize the power your kicker puts behind it. The game doesn't have any meters or anything to give you feedback on whether you're doing it correctly, but the faster you flick the stick, the better. As far as I know, pulling the stick a little to the left or right will not cause your kicker to shank the kick left or right (as it would do in earlier versions of Madden).

Just aim your kick up with the right stick, then flick as quickly as you can with the left stick, and you should be making 50-yard field goals like a pro in no time!

With the proper trajectory, you'll be making 50-yard field goals like a pro!

Personally, I actually like that the game requires the player to have to manually aim every kick. It's not an automatic action like it is in so many other football games. It's not perfect, but it certainly isn't broken, the way that some people seem to think it is.

Having a little bit of free time between playing Madden 20 and starting out this year's indie football games, I checked out a couple indie games that I've had sitting around in my Steam library for months. Both are player-driven mystery games about trying to deduce the events of the past. The simpler of the two is called Her Story, which is a game that released all the way back in 2015. So I'm quite a few years late to this party.

Her Story attracted my attention because it was developed by Sam Barlow. Barlow had previously worked as a writer for Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Personally, I felt he and the other writers at Climax had butchered Origins. His work on Shattered Memories, however, which was not bound by the constraints of established Silent Hill canon, went in a more interesting direction. Maybe not as interesting as if they had gone with the initial Cold Heart pitch, but whatever. I was curious to see what Barlow would do when completely free of the Silent Hill namesake.

I was curious how Sam Barlow would handle himself when free of the Silent Hill namesake.

Down the deductive rabbit hole

Her Story stands out because it is a completely player-driven experience. You have almost free access to a database of interview answers from a woman who is a suspect in the disappearance (and murder) of her husband. The game consists of searching through a series of live-action videos of interview questions, in which every word of her answers have been indexed for search. The catch is that you can't simply watch all the clips in order, and the game will only give you (at most) the first five clips at a time (in chronological order). You also don't know what questions are being asked, so you don't necessarily have the context for her responses.

Each response is laden with bread crumbs of keywords that you can pick out and search in subsequent queries in order to find related videos and discover additional details about the suspect's life, the victim's life, and the events leading up to the disappearance of her husband. This is where Her Story really shines. The game starts with the word "murder" in the search bar, and each clip that you watch will reveal new names and places. This should lead you towards going down the rabbit hole of searching for each new name or place until you eventually come to the weirder and more interesting testimony.The scripts is expertly designed to distribute bread crumbs in such a way to dole out the story over the first hour or two in order to build up the mystery.

Pick out key words from her testimony to find related statements.

There's also no hand-holding or guidance of any kind. It's just you and the search engine. It's entirely up to the player to input the words you want to search for. You can follow-up on a particular clip by searching for a keyword in her response, or you can search for some completely different, random word(s) instead. The game doesn't highlight the next words for you to search. It doesn't stop to tell you that you've "solved" some mystery or completed some objective. There's a widget that shows you how much of the database you've viewed, but other than that, there is no in-game progress-tracker. In fact, there's not even a real end goal.

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Last week, I put up a new YouTube video called "Regarding Accessibility: A Critique of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice". This video was the second part of a 2-part series about what I perceive to be the flaws of Sekiro. The first video was titled "Conflicted Priorities: A Critique of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice". Both videos are really about the game's conflicted design, but the second part focused more on the removal of accessibility features.

I try to make a point of emphasizing in these videos that I am not trying to say that I dislike Sekiro, or that Sekiro is a bad game. Rather, I'm pointing out what I consider to be egregious flaws in an otherwise good game. You can check out the full review to see how I feel about the game more generally.

I've embedded the first video below for those who wish to watch it. I've also included a full text transcript of my commentary within the video for those who prefer to read. I'm sorry that this post is not as well-formatted as usual. Right now, I just haven't had the time to go through and convert this wall of text into a proper blog with images and so forth. I've given myself some pretty strict deadlines for the next few projects I'm working on. I don't know when, or if I'll have time to come back to this post. In the meantime, I suggest watching the video. Enjoy! If you enjoy the video, please remember to like, share, and maybe even subscribe!

In my review of Blair Witch yesterday, I mentioned that "there's a genuinely clever video game construct that re-contextualizes much of the game and has an interesting point, but which gets buried under all this convoluted plot spaghetti.". It was hard for me to explain that without going into very explicit and severe spoilers. I could have just put it all in a collapsible "spoiler" section, but I decided to split it out into a separate blog post so that I could publish the review more promptly, keep it more concise, and also give myself more time and space to explain my thoughts on this game's ending(s).

This post will be explicitly about the overall story of Blair Witch and the final couple hours of gameplay. It will be nothing but major spoilers ahead! So consider yourself warned if you haven't played the game yet.

Major spoilers follow for Blair Witch game.

Proceed to Spoilers

Blair Witch, as an intellectual property, is in a frustrating place similar to the Alien franchise. Both were innovative horror films that set numerous standards and conventions within their sub-genres, and which have been copied and ripped-off numerous times. Sci-fi games from Starcraft, to Metroid, to System Shock, to Dead Space have all taken heavy inspiration from Alien and Aliens. So much of the iconography of Alien and Aliens have been borrowed by these games, that when someone comes along with a game based on the Alien intellectual property, it's hard for that game to not feel like it's derivative of one (or all) of the myriad Alien impersonators.

the Blair Witch Project has similarly left a mark on the horror landscape. It single-handedly popularized the "found-footage" genre against the backdrop of a creepy, supernatural forest. Games such as Outlast, Alan Wake, and even Resident Evil VII all have a little bit of Blair Witch in their DNA. So when a game comes out that actually bears the "Blair Witch" name, it's kind of hard for it to stand out in the larger horror landscape.

Plenty of games (such as Outlast [LEFT]) have used tropes inspired by The Blair Witch Project.

This is the case with Lionsgate and Bloober Team's new Blair Witch game, exclusive to Microsoft platforms. Nothing that Blair Witch does feels particularly new or creative, even though most of the game's ideas are competently executed. Using a camcorder as a tool for navigation, exposition-delivery, and puzzle-solving feels pulled straight from Outlast or Resident Evil VII. Wandering through the woods and defeating monsters by pointing a flashlight at them gives me flashbacks to Alan Wake. Navigating the forest and occasionally picking up other people's trash also reminded me of Firewatch. Eventually, the whole game descends (rather predictably) into P.T. territory -- but, you know, without all the nuance or careful pacing that made P.T. so unnerving.

Who's a good doggy?

Blair Witch's most innovative feature is probably the dog companion (named Bullet), but even that feels pulled straight from Fallout 4. I probably would have been a bit more impressed if not for the fact that Bullet seemed to lose relevance as anything other than a monster compass, for a large chunk of the middle of the game. Without having healing items or ammunition or any other consumable supplies, the ability to send the dog out to find things feels like a sorely under-utilized mechanic.

Bullet is very well-introduced, and is integral to the early levels of the game. He finds clues for you, fetches key items, guides you to the next objective, and warns you of potential danger, all completely organically and without breaking immersion. But after a couple of hours, he just runs out of things to find and things to do. The puzzle shift away from using the dog, and more towards using the camera to do everything from manipulate the environment, to navigate mazes and looping paths, and even spotting monsters.

Your emotional support dog, Bullet, serves an integral role throughout the game.

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