999VLR: Day 1 (spoilers)

You wake up locked in a room.  Really, given the history of the game, this shouldn't surprise you.  You're immediately partnered with a girl named Phi, your name is Sigma.  Cute.  The proctor of the extremely Saw-like game is a projected bunny on a screen that talks, and calls itself an AI by the name of Zero Jr. (since Zero Sr. would be the gamemaster, and the one who created Zero Jr. to proctor the game.  Zero Jr. flat out tells us that its creator is masquerading as one of the nine players of this, the latest Nonary Game).  Going over rules and controls and "how did I get here" and "who are you" and "what is this watch on my wrist" takes seemingly forever, since you already know that you're not going to get any actually helpful answers, and let's just escape this tiny room already.  I guess that's just my recent re-play of the original 999 kicking in there.

Room is easily escaped, except now each room has a safe with two passcodes, one that opens and gives you the key to leave, and one that will open to give you a golden file of information.  Usually the second passcode is more difficult to find, and though I poked and poked at the room, I couldn't figure out how to get the second passcode and had to leave the room without it.  For now.  I assume I'll be coming back.

Outside, we find ourselves in a creepy warehouse, complete with creepy message written in blood (or red paint, they never actually said which) on the wall.  Zero Jr. has a projection screen on the wall where he explains more rules: the nine door right next to him is the only exit, only people with more than 9 bracelet points can go through, it will only open once, if you break rules, the bracelet injects you with poison and you die, etc etc.  It's really very complicated, I'll explain in more detail if necessary later.

The other people playing the game are:
Alice and Clover, both from the previous 999 game
Tenmyouji, an old man, and apparently his grandson Quark
Dio, some kind of circus ringleader
Luna, conservatively dressed typical meek girl
and K, requisite memory-erased large fellow, strangely completely encased in armor that he can't remove, and we cannot see his face.

Right off the bat the suspicion is high, not about the other players, but about the game.  Nan notices and complains that my character, Sigma, isn't voiced, while everyone else is.  He's aggravated, of course, because he's spectating, and only hears blocks of silence when my character is supposed to be talking.  It raises a flag, along with some comments by the other people in the game.  I think even my character is not who he thinks he is, or at least, does not appear or sound the way he thinks he does.  Sigma thinks he's a 20-something year old college guy who was kidnapped on Christmas day, 2028, but now that the doubt has been cast, it could be any year, and Sigma could be old by now.  This is reinforced a bit later when they find some cold-sleep chambers that could store bodies indefinitely.

The players are divided into color schemes and either pairs or solos, and compelled through something called 'chromatic doors' that correspond to colors.  Using real RGB here, so red-green-blue, and then magenta-cyan-yellow for mixes.  Regardless, it boils down to picking one of the three doors: magenta, cyan, or yellow.  For this playthrough I chose yellow. After escaping the subsequent room, all players return to the original tiny rooms to play the secondary game that Zero Jr. calls the Ambidex Game.  Basically it's Prisoner's Dilemma, where you choose to either Ally or Betray the player(s) you went through the colored door with.  Since Phi is part of my 'pair', we must vote as a unit and either receive or be docked points together. (+3 if betraying an ally, +2 both ally, 0 both betray, -2 get betrayed)  She launches into a long explanation of why game theory says you should always choose Betray, but I know game theory too, lady.  If your default is Betray, then sure, your points don't ever go down, but nobody's points ever go up, either.  Although zero bracelet points supposedly means death, no one's getting out of here if nobody ever chooses Ally.  So I over-ride her objections and choose Ally.  Of course our partner/opponent Alice chooses Betray, and we're down to 1 bracelet point (everyone started with 3).  Another round of this could kill us.  Phi is displeased.

Clover and K voted to betray Tenmyouji
Dio and Quark allied with Luna

All bracelet colors and pairings shuffled so we had new partners.  The next set of doors is down an elevator on Floor B, but we have quite a bit of time before they open, so everyone elects to do some thorough searching of all the available rooms, which are now unlocked.

999: Virtue's Last Reward, Start

I bet if I look back at my own review of 999: 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors, it'll sound like I was lambasting it for victory being totally arbitrary.  But if you can get over that hurdle - if you can wrap your head around the fact that it's not even about victory (maybe it would help if you have unlimited time to put into the game), then the story is one of the most beautiful slow-blooming flowers you can have in this video game world of ours.

Aside: have we been reduced to low-grade story expectations?  Are we eating the equivalent of dog food, and telling ourselves it's okay because the graphics are nice and shooting people is fun?  If you're not satisfied with that, don't give up hope yet.  Dragging the story out of 999 (either one) is painfully slow, compared to other video games, but (cliche time) the difficulty makes you appreciate it all the more.  If you ARE satisfied with the story you're getting from other games, then 999 will be nothing but an endless whirlpool of punishment.  That's what I was getting at with my original post.  There's definitely a type of gamer who will have nothing but rage at the way the story unfolds over endless iterations over which you have no control.

Good news, though.  The second 999, Virtue's Last Reward, allows you jump to any point unlocked in the story, at any time.  If you make a choice and reach a dead end, simply click open the flow chart and select the branch point where you made that choice, and make the other choice.  Simple as that.  No more restarting from the beginning if you don't want, and all parts you've seen or heard before can be fast-forwarded through with impunity.  That makes things faster and more sensible right off the bat.  Now that I can SEE the possibilities, though, it looks like there are no less than 24 (!) different endings to this game, and I still don't know which one I need to do first to unlock the others.  At least, when I do find the unlocking parts, I can head right to the end of the other branches and immediately keep pushing forward.  In addition, none of the escapes have to be performed twice, because you can always enter the final passcode to waltz straight out of a room, without going through any of the motions - all passcodes you've found are permanently saved in the archive files.

Also, story portions are voiced in English and Japanese.  That's valuable.

A third gold star is given for increasing the puzzle difficulty.  The last game had somewhat token escape rooms - find five pieces of paper in the room and put them together, voila.  This one has much more legit puzzles, and way less hand holding.  There's an easy mode, for those who aren't old veterans like myself, but I hear some endings can't be achieved if you use easy mode, so no way I'm touching that.

So, mechanics are all looking good.  Time to get into the story.  Rest of posts will have spoilers.

7 Days to Die: Evolved

Woah, slacked off on posts, and in that interim we evolved from cocoon husks at 7 days to die to fully armed bad-asses.  It was hard earned, don't let me cheapen it by skipping to the end of the story, here.  Days went by.  Servers were restarted.  We slowly carved out a hidden base inside the bowels of the earth, only to have it stunningly collapse on our heads along with the thousands of zombies that spawned directly above us.  We restarted and restarted into that vast wasteland, until, exactly like Edge of Tomorrow (a movie for those who don't understand the video game learning curve), we spawned naked into the wilderness, and within minutes had shelter, fire, weapons, and armor.  The characters haven't evolved, we, the players, have learned every aspect necessary to our survival by trial and error.  It feels good.  We feel competent.  Now we wish there was a story to actually uncover with our hard-won survival skills, but I don't think there is.  Maybe I will try and write one and lobby for it's inclusion, something as simple as finding scraps of journals or working radios at the far reaches of the map.

We'll try a random map, once time permits again, and will wait for the next evolution of the game.