Gotta Post Fast

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Yeah, I know…  While cleaning out some space on my Steam drive, I figured I should at least give some games one quick shot before deleting them.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is an okay kart racer, but it does still seem to rely on random luck a lot, and the PC version isn’t the greatest, with no multiplayer and confusing keyboard prompts that don’t actually work if you have a controller plugged in (you can’t even use the keyboard to enter your name).  There’s another just-released Sonic kart racer that’s supposed to be a lot better anyway.

Mars Attacks, Again

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Today I checked out XCOM: Enemy Unknown since, well, it just came out.  It still feels like I’m in the tutorial, as things have been heavily scripted and railroaded so far, but a lot of the feel of the old X-Com is still there, which is encouraging.  It’s a bit simpler than the original in some ways, having removed stuff like free aiming, action points, and kneeling/prone positions, but it adds in others like class specializations, skill choices, and varying mission and funding rewards.  Combat is still as brutal as ever, with a high attrition rate among rookies and those damn lucky shots the aliens always seem to get.  Definitely one I’ll be playing more of.

And I also checked out the Forza Horizon demo.  Definitely a lot of similarity to Test Drive Unlimited, though you’re confined to the roads and it’s hard to tell from the demo just how much variety there really is.  The events were decent enough, though occasionally kind of bizarre like the race against a plane.  About the only thing I didn’t like is how it always asked if you wanted to do a Rivals race on the same track right after the event.  NO, I want to do something else now, not just redo the same race again!  A good chance I’ll pick it up, if I can find the time…

McTardy

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Coming out of another MMO stupor…  Today I tried both Bit.Trip Core and McPixel, two recent indie additions to Steam.

Bit.Trip Core is a lot like Bit.Trip Beat, with dots flying around that you have to hit, except that instead of hitting them back with a paddle, you shoot out from a center point in one of the four cardinal directions.  It’s tougher than it looks since your shot only lasts a split second, and it become hard to judge which dots will hit which direction’s center point first.  And much like Bit.Trip beat, it’s not really grabbing my interest.  Bit.Trip Runner is still by far my favourite of the series.

And McPixel is kinda like WarioWare for the PC, in that it’s a whole bunch of minigames where you have to figure out what to do within 20 seconds, or everything explodes.  It’s pretty random trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, but there’s a reaction animation to pretty much everything, and a quick breezy style to it that makes it kinda fun just to goof around and try things.  Definitely a keeper.

And I also played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights Of Loving over the weekend, but they barely count as games and only took 15-20 minutes each to complete anyway.  An interesting experience and worth checking out, though.

MMO Mania

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking again…  I’ve been spending a lot of time in MMOs lately, and they always make it easy to overlook spending some time on other games as well.

My mesmer is up to level 40 in Guild Wars 2 now.  I haven’t really said much about it, but it has been different enough from the traditional MMO experience to remain fairly fun.  The world events manage to keep me involved in group efforts and pull off what feels like meaningful wins without actually forcing me to group up with random yahoos.  Crafting is interesting in that it rewards you for experimenting, but I’m also often left frustrated at not being able to figure out what the fourth ingredient in some recipe is, and the drop rate on the ‘fine’ ingredients leaves my crafting lagging behind.  The personal story missions sometimes feel unfairly difficult — in one of them I had to face three waves of 5-8 enemies each wave and just kept dying over and over and over again while gradually whittling them down — but at least they’re trying something a bit more personally customized. Tactics can be quite different even within the same class depending on what talents and weapons you use; I’m doing well with both the staff and scepter/gun combos with my mesmer (scepter/gun is more of a glass cannon, unloading a ton of damage at once but then having to survive until cooldowns refresh, whereas staff is more about stacking condition damage), but could still stand to practice and experiment with other combos, too.  Haven’t tried any of the dungeons or PvP yet either.

I’ve also been playing more LOTRO, getting my lore-master up to level 26, and I also created a few alts to do other tradeskills on, since components for them were clogging up my bank and bank slots are expensive.  I’ve finally moved out of the ‘lowbie’ zones into the Lone-lands and North Downs, where spots of civilization are starting to become farther apart.

Maybe The Towers Come Later

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(I’m kind of cheating by backdating this one, but I didn’t write about it the same day I played it for some reason.)

I finally got around to trying Dungeon Defenders, yet another tower-defence-style game, though I only really got through the tutorial map. Overall it seems decent enough, with my only real concern being that the first-person perspective and combat needed makes it really hard to watch your defences and evaluate how they’re actually performing, especially once the level becomes cluttered enough that you’re not really sure what effect it’s having on pathing.  I’d definitely spend more time on it though, and maybe get some co-op going.

It’s Hard To Put Down The Books Too

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I popped into Lord Of The Rings Online this morning intending just to check the points store, since there’s some kind of summer sale going on, but I wound up playing a good 6 hours or so and doing a bunch of quests for the summer festival event and getting the Sunshine title.  I really should put more time into LOTRO…if I can remember how to actually play my character…  I think I only killed maybe three things today, that got in my way as the rest was just running around, talking, racing horses, and fishing.

And I Forgot To Study Too

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After a weekend spent mainly in Guild Wars 2, I tried out Academagia today.  It’s essentially Harry Potter: The Realism Sim, where you create a student, choose their attributes and specialties, go to classes, meet friends, have various events happen to you, and so on.  Not in the interactive adventure sense though, but through a whole ton of text and menu options, like those dating sim/princess maker-type Japanese games.

It looks like there’s a fair bit of depth to it in terms of what you can develop and discover, but it’s not really grabbing my interest, so away it goes.

Mine Is Probably Pretty Dark, Yeah

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Today’s new game is also a brand new…ish game, the just-released-a-couple-hours-ago PC port of Dark Souls.

It’s known mainly for being difficult, and oh yeah, it is.  The first boss took me four tries to beat, and that took a bit of luck.  Individual fights with regular monsters still have to be approached with care or they’ll knock half your health off.  You’re not just mowing through everything at breakneck speed, and upgrades are gradual.

It’s a refreshing change from the usual RPG type I play though, so I’ll certainly stick with it.  I did play a bit of the predecessor, Demons Souls, but never really gave it a proper chance.

To 3D Or Not To 3D

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I haven’t paid much attention to the 3DS since I’ve learned to pretty much wait for the second revision when it comes to Nintendo handhelds.  So, now that the 3DS XL is out, will I get one?

Well, I haven’t really been playing with my handheld systems much lately anyway.  I’ve bought a whole bunch of puzzle and RPG games for my DS, but haven’t really put much time into them since I just don’t find myself in situations where I think “Hey, may as well pull out my DS…”  Given the opportunity, I’d rather play something on the PC or 360 instead.

Really, it depends on whether there are any must-have games on it.  And looking over the list of games released so far…not really.  That’s not to say there aren’t any good games for it, there are certainly ones that I would play if I had infinite time to do so, but nothing really stands out as gotta-have-this-and-it’s-only-on-3DS.

So no, no 3D for me.  And pretty much the same reasoning goes for the Vita as well, as it’s not even really about the 3D capabilities.  I’ve got too damn many consoles and too little time to worry about trying to play everything under the sun.

Quite The Quandary

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I wound up putting a fair bit of time into Quantum Conundrum today, almost completing one of the three wings, so it’s not going to be a terribly long game.

It’s common to compare it to Portal, as it’s the same kind of solve-a-puzzle-as-you-go-room-to-room, but with dimension shifting instead of portals.  One dimension makes things lighter, another one makes things heavier (and there are two others I hadn’t reached yet), and you might need to put items on a pressure plate and block a laser but you have to be careful about the order you do things in because the laser will destroy the item in the regular and light dimensions but you have to shift to the light one to move another item that would normally be too heavy, and fans will blow around items that are too light, etc.

The puzzles that require some thought are fairly interesting, but unfortunately there are some segments where you have to position items and then jump across on them, and the jump mechanics aren’t so good, making those segments a bit frustrating.  Overall though, I think it’s still good enough to come back and finish off at some point.