Maturity comes in many shapes and
forms. For instance, I am a married woman, but I still laugh awkwardly and get
a weird lump in my throat whenever someone calls me ‘Mrs’. I’m old enough to
buy my own dog, but if anyone describes me as that dog’s mummy, I go through a
sort of white-out experience. Once, while tutoring some kids, I accidentally
said ‘nipple’ instead of ‘nibble’ and I didn’t get so much as the urge to
snicker, but I still make a happy mental note every time I see the number
sixty-nine.
As for where South Park fits into
that… well, let’s just say that I stand somewhere in between Backdoor Sluts 9 and Human CentiPad. I wasn’t allowed to
watch the show as a kid, so when I was sixteen and I finally realised the
freedom of having a computer in my bedroom, I binged on all eleven (at the
time) seasons. I’m not immune to being grossed out, but I think I have pretty acceptable
tolerance. Not to brag, but I do have photos of a dissected possum on my phone
from my third-year biology class that I use to surprise people scrolling
through to find cute dog pictures. So I kind of figured that Stick of Truth would be a pretty good
candidate for the first game to break our oath to not buy any new ones until we
finished all our existing games.
We knew it was a short game, so
we kind of figured that if we finished it quickly, it wouldn’t count as
breaking the rules. Besides, I really needed a break after seventy-something
hours of Final Fantasy X. Apparently
I forgot a destruction sphere and now I can’t get Anima unless I beat Dark
Valefor and … ugh, well, that’s a discussion for another post.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Status: Complete.
Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Hey, I only bought it like a week
ago. I haven’t played anything else since getting it. I think I did fine.
Comments: Honestly, I thought it would be a bit of fun, but also
kind of cheap. Maybe a few throw-backs to jokes from old episodes, very few
actual laughs, and a mediocre story. And glitches. I expected a lot of
glitches.
I don’t really know how else to
begin critiquing this besides by saying I loved this game. It was so true in
spirit to the show that I felt like a fangirl just by walking around the town,
raiding people’s cupboards. One of the first lines of the game made me laugh
out loud, as did the entirety of the last long cutscene.
And Jesus. When is Jesus not funny?
In the second act (I assume I
don’t need to say it, but there will be pretty intense spoilers here), I
actually felt intense, radiating happiness at betraying Cartman for Kyle. I
wish my friends were as awesome at LARPing as these kids, because they’re better
at it than the professionals. There are professional LARPers, right? Well, they
suck compared to the South Park kids. Like Craig. Freaking Craig, that kid is
so awesome. His detention mission felt like a goddamn heist movie and I loved
it. When I was in year four, the only dressing up I did was a self-made eye
patch for the time I got conjunctivitis.
The game wasn’t perfect, though,
and in ways I kind of expected: namely, in the gameplay. They put such a huge
amount of effort into the story and into keeping the atmosphere authentic that
a couple of technical issues may have slipped through the cracks. Combat wasn’t
exactly difficult, but there was a very specific section at the start of Day
Three but before reaching level fourteen and getting the katana, in which my
warrior could do virtually no damage because every enemy was super armoured. I
just had to set them on fire and wait. Meanwhile Bill, playing a mage, could
completely ignore all armour and defence while simultaneously setting them on
fire and freezing them for quintuple
damage. Oh, and healing him at the same time, so he could literally never die.
I know the warrior has some
abilities that could have potentially helped me here, but even by the end of
the game, I still never managed to successfully pull off the very first ability
you learn. Or the second. So you can understand why I was a bit soured off them
by the time I got the armour-destroying third one. Or was it the fourth? I lost
track of how many I sucked at. Meanwhile, the mage’s first ability just needed
you to mash the A button.
My point is, warrior was way
harder than mage, and Bill is not
just better at games than me.
I think some of the enemies could
have been a bit more exciting, or required a bit more tactical sense on the
player’s behalf, because I was pretty much following the exact same routine in
each battle. Except at the beginning when Butters was my only companion and the
enemies were riposting, but I had no choice but to attack with him anyway and
watch him almost die.
Also, I don’t know how much I
appreciate having my level capped. If I want to drastically overpower myself, I
think I should be allowed. As it was, I just had no reason to get into fights
(which the game helpfully pointed out), so I ran out of side missions much
quicker. And with no extra cool post-campaign quests, running out of side
missions was a big downer.
I felt I was pretty lucky with
glitchiness – I only had one problem, in which Cartman had a line that he
didn’t actually say, like he’d been temporarily muted. It was kind of a crucial
line for the story, too, so it was lucky I had my subtitles on. Well, that was my only problem, until right at the
end, when trying to abort the Snuke. I looked it up and saw that many people
had problems during this sequence, but none the same as mine. In the third step
of the abortion process, my vacuum just didn’t work. I couldn’t change the
direction it was facing, so it just sat there, with me feeling gradually more
awkward as the minutes passed, wondering, “Um… is this going for really creepy
realism or something?”
From what I saw, Bill didn’t have
many issues either, though when he did have them they were pretty noticeable.
He was invisible for the entire gnomes cutscene, and his bed vanished for half
of it as well. And of course, he just had
to get the Hasselhoff makeover, which appears to trigger the most common
glitch in the game by screwing up the aesthetics in your next save file. And
that is why plastic surgery is evil.
All in all, I think this game is
freaking awesome, and even though I have serious doubts about its replayability
I fully intend to play again as a thief on nightmare difficulty, because I read
that thief is the hardest and I’m a masochist.
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/03/South-Park-AU.jpg
I hope one day to show my parents the
bossfight in the abortion clinic and say, “And you thought watching South Park
would mess up my morality and decency!”
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