Been slacking on the new games over the weekend, but today I tried Wasteland Angel, though it was a brief dalliance. It’s an overhead shooter where you drive around a town and destroy incoming attackers, and…that’s about it. It gets dull and repetitive really fast. If I want this kind of overhead driving shooter, I’ve already got the far-better Renegade Ops.
Didn’t have time for a game yesterday, but today I finally got to check out Guild Wars 2, albeit in beta form. I’m only up to level 4 so far, and haven’t checked out crafting or the skill tracks or such, but it’s been fun. I still don’t fully understand mesmer combat yet, but there are a couple interesting twists from the usual cast-damage-over-and-over. And besides the typical quests (‘tasks’ in this case) there are events that everyone can jump into as they happen, and are a big, hectic ball o’ fun.
Going for something a bit newer, I played a bit of Vessel today, and I’ll definitely come back to it. It’s another puzzle-platformer, but it’s based mostly around fluid physics. You’re either manipulating where water goes, spraying it yourself, or dealing with little creatures made out of water that can either help or hinder you, depending on the room you’re in. Flip switches, open doors, move obstacles out of the way, etc. It can require a decent amount of thought to get through a puzzle though, as it often depends on timing, the behaviour of those water guys, the order things happen in, etc., so it provides that nice oho-I’ve-figured-it-out satisfaction.
I’ve liked the Worms series for a long time now, though the spin-off games haven’t generally done too well. So it was mostly out of curiosity that I checked out Worms Crazy Golf today. The mechanics are pretty simple, just get to the hole on a 2D map, using standard direction-and-strength shooting. And, as expected from a Worms game, there are some tools to adjust the gameplay (e.g., a parachute for your ball), and various ways to interact with the terrain, like destructible blocks or cannons you can fire out of.
There are some things like unlockable alternate clubs, hats, voice packs, etc., goals to meet, and challenge leaderboards to sustain longer-term gameplay…but the glaring omission is that there’s no online multiplayer, only local hot seat. Worms is best when played with multiple people, and there isn’t even an AI to play against here, so I’m not really interested in doing much more with it.
(It is pretty generous with the achievements, at least; I got five on the first hole!)
Today’s game is Stacking, and it’s a rather…different…one. You’re in a world populated by Russian nesting dolls, and you have to complete various puzzles by stacking or unstacking yourself with other dolls to gain particular abilities useful in solving the puzzle. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s a nifty aesthetic, and there are some other things you can do like search for unique dolls or find multiple solutions to the puzzles. I’ve done the first ‘world’ so far, and I think I will come back to this one later on.
And since I was bored, I also checked out Section 8 today. It’s your typical space marine shooter, but it adds the ability to summon in items like turrets and supply depots mid-mission. It’s loud and fast though, with lots of bouncing around with jetpacks, and I felt like I could barely keep up. The single-player campaign is kind of anemic too, as it’s mainly a multiplayer game, but it’s not my kind of shooter anyway. Uninstalled.
Today’s game is actually a fairly familiar one: Ultima V. It’s the one entry in the main series that I never got around to playing, since it didn’t come out for the Atari that I had at the time, and I later got it as part of the collections but it was left in “I’ll get back to it at some point” state for ages. So, today I finally gave it it’s shot, and…yeah, of course it’s a keeper. I’ll probably continue to play it alongside the other game-a-day entries for a while. So far, I’ve picked up most of the people I want in my party (Iolo, Gwenno, Julia, Jaana, and Mariah), and visited most of the major cities, but I need to farm a bit for some gold, food, xp, and equipment. I nearly starved to death at one point, but I think I’m safe for now.
I originally tried to get the Amiga version working in an emulator, since it has better music and sound, but it also loads a lot more slowly and I couldn’t get it to actually write to the disks, so I couldn’t save the game or create a new party. Oh well, the PC version will do.
Like the name says, in Hack Slash Loot, you hack and, uh loot. That’s about it. It’s a roguelike, but the mechanics are extremely simple. There’s no inventory, so you just have to decide whether to use or discard anything you come across. You attack just by clicking on the enemies. If there’s anything deeper to it later on, I don’t know, because I kept dying over and over again because it’s also hard as hell. Cute, but I want something a bit deeper in my roguelikes.
I did at least get one achievement though, for dying in less than 20 turns…
Didn’t have time to play anything yesterday, but today I checked out Adventures of Shuggy. It’s a rather simple little platformer, all you do is collect gems and the only controls are to move around, jump, and a special action. That special action varies from level to level though, with things like jumping between multiple characters or rotating the whole level, and various other typical thing like switches and such show up in the levels. A decent enough time-killer, but there are a gazillion levels to it though, so I don’t think I’m going to bother trying to finish it.
Today I finally decided to check out the whole world of ‘social’ iPhone games, in the form of Trade Nations. I can see the appeal to it; there’s a sense of constantly making progress, and it pulls you back with reasons to return and do something at regular intervals, and it’s not too heavy-handed about hassling friends or microtransactions. But, I can also already see where it’s going, and there’s not enough real variety to what you’ll be doing. You’re just collecting resources to make more buildings to collect more resources to make more buildings to collect more resources… It wouldn’t be the first grindy game, but it’s grinding just for grinding’s sake. There’s no story to follow, or any actual challenge to the decisions you make that would count as interesting gameplay.
Of course it’s not a game you’re meant to play as a main focus, but I’ll undoubtedly wind up gradually forgetting to check in on it anyway.