Category Archives: PC

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.

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.

At Least It Isn’t Greensleeves

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking a bit, going on vacation trips tends to derail whatever I’ve been working on at the time.  So, to get back into the swing of things, I checked out English Country Tune today.  I knew it was a puzzle game but wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but it turns out to be basically an advanced version of those Sokoban-like games.  Push items around a block maze to meet a particular goal, except with twists like gravity making the items drop, 3D aspects to the maze, ‘whales’ that run away from you and have to be pushed off the board, and so on.

The keyboard controls are a bit wonky due to how the direction you go in suddenly changes in spots when you move to a different orientation, and it’s sometimes hard to see parts of the level to see where valid places to move might be, but it’s a fairly interesting and challenging puzzler.  I wouldn’t sit down and play nothing but it, but I could see knocking off a puzzle here and there.

Getting Wet, Again

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No time for anything yesterday, but today I played a bit of Aquaria.  It’s basically a ‘Metroidvania’ game, where you explore, acquire powers that unlock new areas, defeat bosses, etc., but with a couple twists.  It’s almost entirely underwater, so movement is pretty freeform, and you use your powers by singing songs by playing certain notes.

Nothing earth-shattering, but it’s interesting enough that I’d like to come back and check out more of it.  It’s been a fairly slow start so far, without even any combat powers unlocked yet so it’s been a matter of avoiding enemies.