UPDATE 28 August 2024: I was wrong about how the Option controls work.

It turns out that I was mis-understanding how the Option controls work in this game. It's actually not nearly as bad as this blog (and its accompanying video) make it out to be. I will be posting a new blog and video in the coming days to address my mistake and explain how the Option actually works, and also the logic behind why I think EA made this change. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

In my previous post about EA Sports College Football 25, I mentioned that there are 4 big challenges that I'm having, which have caused me to loose the vast majority of matches that I've played against the CPU, on the All-American difficulty, with no adjustments to any gameplay or A.I. sliders. 1 of those problems is my fault, which is that I need to get better at reading the defenses and not turning the ball over as much. I'm still working on it... The second issue is that CPU-controlled defenders do not properly play outside containment and take horrible pursuit routes that give up big plays and scores. That's not on me, since I can't personally control all 11 players on the defense, and am dependent on them doing their assigned jobs. The third problem that I've been having is the same problem that everyone else is having, and was the primary topic of the previous post, which is that the kicking meter is too damn hard.

The 4th major issue that I'm having with College Football 25 is the changes to the Option mechanics and controls. Option controls have been changed, such that the user now has to hold the X button (on PlayStation) in order for the QB to keep the ball, or release the button in order to hand off to the fullback or halfback. More importantly, however, is that the timing rules for the option hand-off no longer lines up with the animations, making it difficult or impossible for the user to execute these plays as they are designed.

As many of you already know, EA Sports College Football 25 is considerably more challenging to play than your average Madden. I have been struggling a lot. At the time of this writing, my record against the CPU currently stands at an abysmal 2 wins to 10 losses, after starting 0 for 7. All of these matches have been played at the All-American difficulty without any modifications to the sliders. They've all been close losses. I'm not getting blown out by any stretch of the imagination. But these struggles are really starting to sour me on the game as a whole. I have personally found that most of my struggles have been the result of 4 factors, 3 of which should not be causing as many struggles as they are causing, and I am starting to chalk those up to poor design, rather than my own lack of skill.

The first factor is my own mistakes, to which I take full responsibility. And I'll admit, I am making a lot of mistakes. Specifically, I have been interception prone. Most of these interceptions are being caught by lurking linebackers in the middle of the field. These linebackers seem to play their zone coverages considerably deeper than in Madden, and so routes in the middle of the field that are usually open in Madden are being intercepted in College Football 25. The linebackers are not super-jumping or making one-handed catches or anything like that. They're just playing their zones differently than in Madden, and I haven't adjusted to it yet. Pass trajectories could maybe have more arc and touch on them, but maybe that's just me not using the pass charging mechanic correctly. Though EA's games have a long-standing track record of low pass trajectories.

The 2nd problem is that my CPU-defenders are not playing contain very well, and are routinely taking poor pursuit angles and giving up big plays. This is something that EA and Tiburon definitely need to address, as defensive force players and safeties should do a better job of keeping the play in front of them.

I have been losing a lot of close matches against the All-American CPU.

But this isn't the issue that I want to talk about today. The issue that I want to discuss is the 3rd reason why I am losing matches of College Football 25, and if you have been keeping up with the early reviews and impressions of the game on the internet ... or you read the title of this post ... then you probably already know what I'm going to talk about. The single biggest reason why I am losing all my matches of College Football 25 is because of the new kick meter. And this kick meter is coming dangerously close to making me hate this game.

Cities Skylines II had a rocky launch. It was a better launch than some of Paradox's other published games, like Star Trek: infinite, which had its support cancelled and developers laid off within a few months of release. But it was still a rocky launch. Personally, I thought Skylines II was fine. It didn't blow me away like the first game did 10 years ago, but I also didn't get the hate that the fanbase was throwing at it. I thought it had a good mix of features and concepts from most of the original game's expansions, I liked a lot of the design philosophies of its new features, and I wasn't experiencing as many of the performance problems that other players were reporting. So I was mostly having a good time playing it.

Though, to be fair to the critics, I didn't have any cities with 100,000 or 200,000 population. My biggest city was only hovering around 75,000 population around the time of the first mini-DLC. So maybe my cities just hadn't gotten big enough to the point that the simulation really started to break down, or performance really started to become a problem.

I was enjoying CSII before the patch, but none of my cities were big enough to start breaking yet.

I did have my own complaints, of course. Most of those complaints had to do with the lack of player expressiveness in this sequel, compared to the first game (and it's Parklife expansion).

Well, developer Colossal Order has been hard at work trying to give the critics, and also myself, almost exactly what we were hoping for. The result is a pair of recent game patches that have addressed many of the biggest complaints with Cities Skylines II, and which very well might have saved the game from an early grave. If only Star Trek: Infinite had received the same loving attention...

I wasn't sure about the Bloodborne board game initially. The Dark Souls board game wasn't particularly good, and I already had a pretty great Bloodborne-themed card game. But I kept seeing good reviews of Bloodborne: the Board Game, and it was designed by the same designer who made the card game, Eric Lang, who I trusted to make a compelling board game. So I bought it. And then it sat on my shelf for a couple years because my friends and I were busy playing other games, like Star Trek: Ascendancy expansions. One of these days, I'll get around to actually playing a new board game promptly after buying it... One of these days ...

A narrative-driven dungeon crawl

First and foremost, Bloodborne is not simply a Bloodborne-themed reskin of the Dark Souls board game. They are made by different companies and designers, and have totally different design philosophies. Dark Souls is built around grinding with no real purpose other than to eventually beat a single boss. Bloodborne is a much more structured and purposeful game, which is built around narrative-based campaigns. In fact, this Bloodborne game actively and explicitly discourages grinding by implementing a strict turn limit. As such, a Bloodborne session (a single chapter of a campaign) takes about 90 minutes to play or less. It won't drag on for hours, or into the next day, like some of my Dark Souls play sessions did. This, by itself, makes it a lot easier to find people who are interested in playing, and to get them to come back for subsequent sessions to finish that campaign.

Because Bloodborne: the Board Game does have narrative campaigns, I actually feel like I need to preface this review with a SPOILER WARNING. Some of the images may contain story-related cards, board configurations, and enemy placements, which may contain spoilers for the first 2 campaigns (mostly the first one). The review itself does not contain any explicit spoilers for any of the campaigns, so feel free to read on. If you are worried about potential spoilers, and want to go into the game as blind as possible, then I advise that you avoid reading any of the text on cards in any of my photos, especially cards that are labeled "Mission" or "Insight".

Bloodborne is more narrative-driven and less grindy than its Dark Souls board game cousin.

The core set comes with 4 campaigns, each with its own short story and narrative branches that take place over 3 or 4 chapters. As of the time of this review, I've only actually played the first 2 of those 4 campaigns. But I've played the first campaign multiple times, with multiple different groups of players, so I still feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the game -- good enough to give a meaningful and relatively informed review.

Each campaign has a deck of cards that provide objectives for the player to complete, as well as the occasional reward. It plays out kind of like an old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, with each card telling the players to draw a specific numbered card after completing the given card's objective. In some cases, the players will have a choice, or the card will have different conditions, and depending on which choice the players make, or which condition(s) is met, the card will instruct the players to reveal one card or another next.

The total of 4 campaigns is actually a solid amount of content, and each campaign can be played multiple times to see the different branching paths. But the campaigns aren't quite as replayable as they might initially seem. Each decision always has the exact same outcome, which means that once you've played a campaign once, you know what choices to make in order to get which results. Knowing the outcomes sucks out a lot of the mystery, intrigue, and threat from the game, and allows players to micro-manage their decisions to optimize their play.

Player choices can cause several branches in a campaign story, opening up different quests and rewards.

I keep being drawn to games developed by the Chinese Room, despite always being disappointed by them. Their games always represent the things that people dislike most about "walking simulators". But since I don't have any inherent dislike for walking sims, I keep giving The Chinese Room another chance. Still Wakes The Deep caught my attention by being described as "John Carpenter's The Thing set on an oil rig". The Thing is a masterpiece of horror, and one of my favorite movies ever.

I had visions of Still Wakes The Deep being a story about inter-personal paranoia in the claustrophobic and isolated setting of an oil rig that is gradually being overtaken by a Lovecraftian alien threat. That's only partly true though, as Still Wakes The Deep plays up the cosmic horror element, while downplaying the paranoia element and replacing it with simpler themes about interpersonal relationships and the artificial walls that people tend to put up between themselves and the people they care about.

An oil rig is a great setting for horror, combining dark claustrophobic corridors with the terror of being stuck at sea.

Alone, together, on an oil rig

The setting of an oil rig is an interesting one for a psychological horror story or video game. The environment is completely enclosed and claustrophobic, with little-to-no escape. People are forced to live and work together in close quarters, and their survival is largely dependent on one another. Being stuck in such a setting, with people who you can't trust, would surely be terrifying.

The short length of Still Wakes The Deep does hurt it a lot. Specifically, the inciting incident happens very early and suddenly, with little-to-no build up or transition between "normal" and "everything's gone to shite". I never felt like I got a chance to really get to know any of the supporting characters, to the point that I wasn't even sure what their names were, or which character was being referred to when a name came up in a document or conversation. Similarly, when I find any given body or corpse, I have no idea who it's supposed to be. I had a brief opportunity to snoop around in a few characters' cabins at the start, but all that really told me was that the boss is a hard-ass, and there's one other character who might be a racist, neo-fascist prick. Other than that, there's like one opportunity to have a brief exchange with each of the main supporting characters, and it's all optional, and most of it is more about the state of the rig anyway.

There's hardly any time to explore the rig or get to know the crew before the inciting incident.

The brief intro, and fact that the rig goes to shite so quickly and suddenly, means that there's also never an opportunity for the player to get a feel for the setting itself. I got about 20 minutes to walk through a couple hallways, some crew cabins, the mess hall, and the main deck, and then it's right into the horror, with the rig literally falling apart around me. From here on out, it's hard to ever get a sense for where, exactly, I am on the rig, or how the different sections fit together or relate to one another. When floors and walls literally start collapsing, I can't tell one hallway from another. This is despite the fact that the game loops the player around through the same mess hall and lounge, that we saw in the intro, like 5 or 6 times throughout the game. Despite revisiting this same location multiple times, I never really recognized it until I was inside the lounge or mess hall. Every set piece just feels like a semi-random series of corridors and obstacles in which all I have to do is push forward on the analog stick to get where I need to go. There's no open-ended exploration whatsoever, no hidden secrets, and no alternate paths.