No gaming yesterday, as my arms were still a bit sore, so there was a bit of catching up today.

The first episode of American McGee’s Grimm was released today, for free within the first 24 hours. It’s a good thing too, since I certainly wouldn’t pay for it. It claims to go for a more ‘mature’ retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, but it comes off as taking the juvenile interpretation rather than an adult one; fart jokes abound. The gameplay is a slightly different take on the Katamari games, where you spread filth and taint the objects around you in an ever-growing sphere, gaining the ability to taint larger and larger objects the more you’ve already touched. It gets rather repetitive and is trivially easy, though.

Fortunately, it was canceled out by Geometry Wars 2, which is fantastic. It has six different modes now, all of which play very differently: in Deadline you have infinite lives, but have to score as highly as possible within a three minute time limit; in King you can only shoot from within protective bubbles which fade away after you enter them, forcing you to try and clear paths between them and run for it; Evolved is largely the same as the original game, with a few new enemy types and other minor differences; Pacifism takes your guns away and has you killing enemies indirectly with the explosion of passing through gates; Waves throws, well, waves of lined-up enemies at you, forcing you to blast holes in them to avoid getting overrun; and Sequence takes you through a series of battles set up in specific patterns. They have to be unlocked in order, but it didn’t take very long.

The other major difference is that the multiplier increases by picking up ‘geoms’ left behind by destroyed enemies, which makes you keep moving to pick them up, and the multiplier doesn’t reset when you die, so scores are higher overall than they were in the original. The achievements are somewhat saner now too, and I’ve actually managed to get a bunch of them already. And there’s a four-player multiplayer mode, though it’s local-only.

I may not be very good at it yet, but it’s a big improvement over the original and well worth it.