Joe and I are starting an LP! It's of a game that I have fond memories of!

Did a bunch of things in Divekick today, this time on PSN instead of PC (yes I doubled down, don't judge). Started out completely new. Here's how things went!

I was the number 1 Markman for a while! Unfortunately I hit a rough patch afterwards. Now my Marky Mark is fourth. However...

NUMBER ONE BAZ BAYBEEEEEEEE

And finished 9th in the overall rankings. Not bad for an afternoon/evening's work!

Thoughts on PSN Divekick: character preferences seem a bit less varied. I saw a lot of Kung and Shoals, a couple Bazes and Jefaileys, and the usual smattering of Dive and Kick. Anything else was exceedingly rare. I found that overall the PSN competition is not as fierce as PC's, but there are some SCARY motherfuckers on it. SaiykoHurricane's Uncle Sensei and GoogleMyName's Jefailey in particular gave me fits.

I like ARTS/MOBA games a lot, but anyone who plays these knows how much work they can be. Team comps, effective ganks, coordinated pushes, and everything else require a certain level of skill and communication, and sometimes it can feel like too much effort. Not to mention that no one likes wasting an hour on a loss.

That's where SMITE comes in.

SMITE (which is officially written in caps and I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything else), is brilliant because it distills the gameplay of an ARTS/MOBA into a fast, easily played format. Instead of an overhead cam, you have a locked camera behind your character. Instead of various clicks to move, you just use WASD. Instead of having to type everything to your teammates, you can just hit chat hotkeys and an announcer will shout at them for you. It streamlines everything and I love it. 

It also helps that it plays great.

Everything in SMITE is a skillshot. You need to aim your auto attacks and abilities, which makes for really enjoyable combat. You can move in any direction, but you'll be slower unless you're running straight. This means that if you want to get away from something dangerous you can't be facing the thing that's trying to kill you, which makes for some awesome kills and jukes. Every part of the system comes together to form a satisfying, fun whole.

I've been playing a game where you murder monsters, possess their bodies, learn their skills, and ditch their corpses in favor of bigger, scarier corpses. The game is MidBoss, and you should have downloaded it yesterday.

Plenty of games have messed around with possession or mind control as a main gameplay mechanic, but not the way MidBoss does. The best comparison I can make is that it plays like a combination of a classic roguelike and Pokemon. You begin as a puny imp in a dungeon, and by casting a possession spell on monsters (followed by killing them) you can take their body for your own. Every monster type has skills, which you can learn simply by using that body enough. It's simple in concept, but deceptively deep in execution. Also, it's hard.

A lot of modern roguelikes have inserted mechanics to soften the blow of constant deaths. Not MidBoss. One mistake or very unlucky string of events can mean death, and you just have to suck it up and deal with it (or savescum it if you're a pansy). But you won't quit, because you were just THAT close to possessing that monster you'd never even seen before, and you need to know what it does. It's been a while since a game has hooked me with that kind of appeal, and it's a refreshing feeling.

There's basically no reason to not give MidBoss a try. It's still in early beta, but each version so far has been a huge improvement over the last. If you like roguelikes at all you're almost guaranteed to enjoy it. Here's the link to the site:

http://midboss.net/

Am I the only one who hates grinding and fetch quests? I mean, no one genuinely likes doing either, but we put up with them in games all the time. Borderlands 2 is almost exclusively made of MMO style quests, and yet everyone seems to love it. And after spending a lot of time with it (we're talking over 100 hours total, played almost exclusively with friends), I can honestly say that the game isn't worth the hype. 

Don't misunderstand me here. BL2 is not a bad game. It's just a very repetitive one that opts to carry itself on its setting, weapon variety and writing over gameplay. This works for a while, but eventually the novelty wears off and you'll realize what you're doing: a long string of "kill X number of bandits" or "gather X number of random objects" missions. There are some standout missions that are clever and fun to play, but they are far and away the exception rather than the rule. And as cool as some of the guns are, doing the same thing over and over with them will inevitably get boring.

And no, the DLC doesn't fix the problem. If anything it gets worse. My coop partner Kaiser and I both grabbed a season pass before the first DLC hit. We both enjoyed the Scarlett DLC, but only because the characters (especially Shade) were well written. The gameplay was more of the same. The Torgue DLC's missions were painfully, painfully bad, which is a shame because Mr. Torgue is hilarious. We ended up quitting most of the way through it because neither of us were having fun anymore, and this was after two playthroughs of the campaign, plus the first DLC. Ugh.

OK, here's the pitch: Warframe is a third person shooter where you play as a space ninja, shoot and loot your way to victory through randomly generated missions with a variety of objectives, and use your spoils to buy and craft more suits and weapons so you can do it even better.

And it's free to play. NO WAIT COME BACK I PROMISE IT'S GOOD.

Seriously though, Warframe is bloody phenomenal. It's a fantastic coop experience that allows for any given player with any given playstyle to feel like they're completely awesome. Every suit is uniquely useful, and they can all be used with any combination of main weapon, sidearm and melee the player chooses. The microtransactions largely exist as an alternative to hunting for materials/blueprints and crafting, and while I do have some complaints with the prices on some items, it bears repeating that the game is in beta. Shit will change.