Monthly Archives: June 2012

Damn Ninjas

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Today’s game was Sengoku, one of Paradox’s grand strategy games but set solely in Japan in the warring states period.  I don’t really know much about that era though, so the constant shifting of territory between names I couldn’t recognize didn’t really mean anything to me. I thought I had a relatively good, peaceful development period going when my neighbour suddenly attacked and overwhelmed me, despite having good relations with them.  Not a bad game, but for my grand strategy fix I’ll go to Crusader Kings 2 instead, so it’s not a keeper.

Seriously

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Today I played Serious Sam: The Random Encounter and it’s…a bit of an odd duck.  Take the frantic shooting action of Serious Sam, and put it in…a turn-based JRPG?  It actually kind of works though, as combat consists of you running backwards away from a huge pack of enemies, selecting which weapon to use, and then you can move up and down to adjust your aim and dodge bullets while the turn executes, and then it freezes for the next turn and you can pick another weapon or item, etc.

It’s an interesting take on the JRPG style that’s appropriate for the Serious Sam series, but it got kinda repetitive very fast, as you wind up in fights every few steps you take.  Interesting, but not a keeper.

Mmmm, Bacon…

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I played The Baconing once before, but couldn’t remember much about it, so I revisited it as today’s game.  It’s a fairly standard ARPG whose main strength lies in the setting and characters rather than the combat, but it’s a bit too “monkey cheese” for me and I kept dying since you can lose health extremely rapidly.  Not a keeper.

Totally Gratuitous

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I checked out Gratuitous Tank Battles as my game for today, and it’s fairly standard tower defense with a few twists, like being able to design your own units, choose both the attacking and defending sides, and manually designate targets.  It’s hard to judge just how well I was actually doing though, especially since you don’t get much warning about what kinds of units are coming, so it feels like I just have to slap down a variety of defenses and hope that’s sufficient.  Not a keeper, though I think the previous game, Gratuitous Space Battles, might fit my tastes better.

Gatling Gears

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Today’s game is Gatling Gears and, eh… It seems competent enough for the type of game it is (Ikari Warriors-style ‘shmup’), but that genre doesn’t really do much for me, so off the hard drive it goes. It doesn’t help that it made me go through EA login and serial key registration twice, one time not even allowing me to paste my password. I try and use strong, unique, 16+ character passwords wherever possible, and forcing me to type them in by hand is a quick way to really piss me off…

Game-A-Day

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I suppose I should actually say something once in a while…

I’ve recently realized that I might have a few too many games, and hardly any of them even get played at all. I’m therefore putting something into motion that I’ve intended to do for a while now — play a different game that I haven’t played before every day. It’ll only be for an hour or two to get a feel for it and decide if it’s worth playing any further. If so, it gets put on the short list to come back to later, otherwise it gets uninstalled.

So, over the weekend I binged a bit and started with 1000 Amps, which is interesting but not really grabbing me enough to play much further; Blocks That Matter, which had a similar reaction but it’s short so I might finish it anyway; and Faerie Solitaire, which I might keep around just as an idle time-waster.

Tonight, I played the first chapter of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. It has a lot of the same mindless shooty fun as the previous Xbox game, but it also has some annoyances too, like how I constantly get swarmed in ways that make it hard to shoot, the active reload is really hard to hit, and some enemies just take waaay too many hits to kill. Apparently there are only three chapters though, so I think I’ll keep it and just do one runthrough, not bothering to farm weapons.