faehnri.ch

The game I have that I'm playing for the first time for today is the Boomerang Fu demo for the Switch. It's a fun little party game where you and other players are little food with boomerangs and can throw or swing to try to hit the other players. There's environmental hazards and power ups. Pretty standard party game but I can see how it'd be fun.

My current game right now is Watch Dogs 2 which I first mentioned on the 27th. You get more hacker abilities by getting research points that you can then use to buy the abilities in an ability tree. You usually get these research points when you level up, you get a significant amount each time so that's usually the easiest way to go. But there are research points you can find through out the game. But you only get one at a time and have to go all over the map. Not as quick as just completing a mission and leveling up.

But finding the research points in the wild also means you can get the hack skills without leveling up. You can unlock nearly all the hacking skills you want if you work hard going through the world and still be first level.

Another aspect of the game is you run into other players. And you can profile them and see information like their level. You can just see the other players while playing, or you can be on a mission to hack them.

What all this means is I could run into players who think think I'm a lowely first level, but I have nearly all the hacking abilities. So they run into someone that looks like they just started the game, but I can make all traffic on the road move out of the way for me, I can shut off all electricity and lights on the block to sneak, I can make everyone's phones around me buzz to distract them, and I can have my drone fly anywhere and drop remote explosives on enemies far away from me. It's funny to have a 13th level player ride in my car and wonder why a first level player can boost the engine for seemingly unlimited amount of time.

I've played this games since about when it first came out. It has online play but isn't really an MMO. At most there's four players with you. But I do remember they would have little in-world events. For instance on Fourth of July they had fireworks going off on this one island. It came out in 2016, right at the start of the Trump presidency. Some of the concerns of the hacktivists in the game might have seemed cheesy, or don't hold up. But other things are even more concerning now. But overall I'd say the themes in the game still hold.

The game world is large, but the game play doesn't seem as long as others. In some regards this game seems more like Ubisoft's response to other games of the sort that were coming out at the same time. I'm just not looking forward to the day I know is coming where Ubisoft shuts down the servers of this older and not as popular game, and I won't be able to invade another player and have to hide and evade them as I hack them.