GAMING
BY Euan Scarlett
Hello, welcome back to The Laughs of Us! I’ve been having a bit of a shoddy time in the real world and took a wee break to fix my head, which mainly involved taking a little time to slow down and appreciate the nice things in life, and taking a little time to slow down and indulge in some therapeutic hard-core digital violence.
I’ve had some way of playing videogames for pretty much as far back as I can remember, which is increasingly further back every year and I’ve always had it as a hobby or interest as far back as I can remember as well – probably one of the earliest would be playing one of those knock off PONG 25 games-in-one things that plugged into your telly at a relative or friend’s house somewhere, the 25 games all being Pong with a different number of lines on your side for batting the ‘ball’ back towards your opponents side corresponding to whatever ‘sport’ you were playing – doubles tennis, five-a-side football, or indeed that strange sport that involves 10 wee guys on one team versus one single, but fucking massive, guy on the other. Anyway what I was trying to get to the point of was that videogames have always had something of a role in helping me with the old stress, and the world is pretty stressful for a lot of people right now. Sometimes that stress needs a wee bit of pottering about on your virtual farm, or looking after your virtual business. Decorating your in-game characters or dwellings. Sometimes it needs somebody stabbed in the face. Depends on the day.
Some games do both well, especially big open-world reactive sandboxes where you can save the game then go off the rails to see what happens when you answer the local lord’s bestowing of an honour on you by then immediately stabbing him in the face with the ornamental sword he’s given you, then stab his guard and jump off a balcony to escape but break your ankle in the fall and can’t run to your horse and you whistle for it and all the guards stab YOU in the face before it gets to you so your dog attacks the guards to defend you as you bleed out on the ground with broken legs, then the horse piles on, but that was pretty funny.
How is it June already?
Actually, more on topic for the games section of the site, how is it about twenty years since the release of the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3? That means they are definitely retro and if you can remember having fun playing any games in the Project Gotham Racing series before it was sadly killed by Forza Horizon, or not being able to read the text on the first Dead Rising because you didn’t have an HDTV to play the game on (who did?), congratulations, you are now officially a grown up, and nearly dead.
As a member of the nearly dead like yourself, I’ve recently been looking in horror at some of the games in my library where it tells you how many hours you’ve played it for – thankfully I had not in fact played brutal survival / RPG game ‘Conan: Exiles’ for 5323 hours as Xbox suggested I had, this was merely a bug related to having left the game on quick resume for several months on the XBox console version when I switched to the PC version, where visual fidelity and draw distances can be increased with the more powerful hardware. This increased the entertainment I was getting from the game as it meant that you could not only see the line of warriors I had placed to defend my base from much further away than before, but also determine much sooner that my line of warriors were all named Donald because they chose to defend my castle without any troosers, a plethora of penises flapping on the battlements in the winds of the Exiled Lands as the Donalds kept watch over my chests full of grass and the level 3 lady blacksmith I’d kidnapped from the village over the hill where they all keep getting attacked by giant spiders and a crocodile. Top Donald is a lady barbarian who when I found her had just fought 4 crocodiles and won, but was so injured that a single tap from the slave stick knocked her unconscious, whereupon I tied her up and dragged her back to the wheel of pain to be enslaved in lore-friendly fashion, at least, the lore based on the novelisation of the movie ‘Conan The Barbarian’ and not any of the original stories. Eventually she broke and agreed to become captain of the guard, but it was her that put out the order for no-troosers and I backed her on it. The movie Braveheart should have taught a generation of Scots that a big line of penises on the battlefield being displayed in their direction often worries an approaching enemy.
Conan Exiles recently got a massive graphical overhaul on the Steam edition of the game and has moved to Unreal 5. I’m sure there’s going to be a few legit grumbles about it online but I’m quite a fan of the Conan character and the lore since reading all the books right after the first Arnold The Barbarian came out: the books are great, the Marvel comics were great, the first Arnie movie is an all-time classic that gets pretty close as an adaptation, and it was co-written by Oliver Stone and has James Earl Jones turning into a snake and Arnold punching a camel in the face; the second one loses the plot a bit but has peak Grace Jones fighting in a bikini with a big pole and breaking the glass ceiling in the Palace guard industry and Red Sonja was ok, even though Arnold isn’t allowed to say he’s Conan because of licensing issues it did bring us another outstanding Sandahl Bergman screen appearance as the villain, and I’m looking forward to this new Arnie movie he’s announced recently and hope he doesn’t die before they finish it. There’s a few great Conan stories where he’s legit an old dude with his own problems running the kingdom of Aquilonia and a grown family so it will be good to see if they draw on that stuff. As far as the Jason Momoa version goes, he was a fantastic Conan who seemed to legitimately get the character, but was wasted in that otherwise disappointing reboot and deserves a second chance now he’s a bigger star.
I genuinely love Conan Exiles and have sunk a lot of time into it and my pc has no issues with running it at all and the new version looks fantastic. I haven’t had a chance to get back into it properly with all the bells and whistles on yet, but look forward to being utterly terrified of the giant spiders in the dark all over again. I’ve never bothered my arse with the online stuff and largely play this as the NSFW sex and violence Conan-themed Minecraft it is, unlike Minecraft though, the map always the same so resources are always in the same places. Unfortunately, some of those places are very dark and very terrifying. There’s a plot of sorts revolving around your character finding a way to safely remove the magical bracelet that kills instantly if removed or attempting to cross the magical barrier surrounding the Exiled Lands, which leads to finding and defeating a series of world bosses, but you can just ignore that and go running about with your bits out stabbing crocodiles and cannibals in the face, then harvesting them and going back up the road to continue building a bone pen for the tiger you’ve raised since it was a cub. Conan Exiles is one of my go-to games and I’m happy this is still being supported after the launch of the Dune game by the same developers last year, as I would be sad if my big desert nightclub and tavern didn’t get finished.
The only other game I have played a lot of this month was Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the first of two, so far, games in a series of open world first-person rpgs set in an exhaustively researched medieval Bohemia, in which you play as Henry, a blacksmith’s son whose home village is destroyed by invaders and his family killed, leading him to end up in service of the local lord and embroiled in affairs of historical fiction. It features a large open world based on the actual region complete with villages, castles and a cathedral under construction, and the game plays largely like Skyrim and such, with quests and various skills to unlock and that. I’d bounced off it after a bit on the XBox originally because it has an annoying save system that involves having to buy or mix a specific potion to save when you want to, otherwise you have to save at a bed you own. This totally killed the game for me the first time by limiting risk-taking and making me repeat sometimes hours of gameplay because I’d pressed the button a fraction too long and instead of saying hello to him tried to pickpocket the Bailiff. This time on PC I added 1 mod that meant the potion in question was infinite so I could save anywhere and the game totally opened up for me, and I’m now heavily invested in the tale of Henry, mild mannered blacksmith / alchemist / archer / armourer / butcher / baker / doctor / lockpicker / dog trainer / sneaky thief and master of all weapons blunt or blade, but favours the face-stab as a great way to dispel all that lovely plate armour protection when there’s a bloody big hole in the front of your helmet so you can see out of it. Sword go stab.
Because when you can save the game anywhere you can then go off the rails to see what happens when you answer the local lord’s bestowing of an honour on you by then immediately stabbing him in the face with the ornamental sword he’s given you, then stab his guard and jump off a balcony to escape but break your ankle in the fall and can’t run to your horse and you whistle for it and all the guards stab YOU in the face before it gets to you so your dog attacks the guards to defend you as you bleed out on the ground with broken legs, then the horse piles on, but that was pretty funny.
Next month, less penises, slavery and stabbings. Probably. TTFN!
