Buyer’s Remorse

Posted on July 1, 2014 by admin

So another Steam sale has come and gone and I bought a few too many games (as usual) and I haven’t really played many recently, so it’s time to start working through the backlog again…

Infested Planet: I’m not terribly good at RTSes, but this one is more up my alley. You’ve got a squad of soldiers on maps full of enemies and the goal is simple: eliminate them all. The tricky part is that you’ve only got a small handful of soldiers and there are massive numbers of those enemies constantly spawning from hives, so you have to plan out where to strike, proceed aggressively enough to push the enemy back but not so aggressively that you get overrun, protect your flank and bases so the enemy doesn’t take them back, buy the right upgrades for your current goal, etc. Enemy mutations can happen mid-battle so you suddenly have to adapt to something new, rethink your approach, and redeploy your resources. It gives you tons of choice and so far has let me proceed at pretty much my own pace, which I really like.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: Remember that old game Oregon Trail? Now imagine it as a scrolling shooter. With unicorn stampedes. And narwhals. And a whole bunch of other random, silly scenarios. It gets repetitive rather quickly, but it was only a buck and it’s great fun while it lasts.

GRID Autosport: A brand-new entry in the GRID series, this one leans more towards ‘serious’ racing. There’s not as much choice or career persistence as in something like Forza, but it’s nice to have a wider variety of racing disciplines (it includes endurance and open wheel races as well as the usual sports cars). I’m terrible at handling the RWD cars so far though; I just keep spinning out… I’d gotten kind of tired of GT6, so this should scratch my racing itch for a while.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: An adventure game where you control two characters (the brothers) simultaneously, each one on a different analog stick, and many of the puzzles depend on coordinating the two. It’s really short and not very difficult, but it’s very well-done and moving. To say more would be spoilery, but it’s definitely recommended.

No Angel

Posted on July 23, 2012 by admin

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.

No Crazy Lebanese Guys Though

Posted on July 15, 2012 by admin

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.

My Balls Are Indeed Rather Crazy

Posted on July 6, 2012 by admin

I can’t remember why I originally picked up Madballs in…Babo: Invasion or what kind of game I even thought it was. A licenseware game based on some long-forgotten kids toys from the 80s? But, it turns out it’s actually kinda fun. It’s like a mix of those marble-rolling games and a top-down shooter like Shadowgrounds, with pretty tight controls and a good amount of variety and challenge in the levels. Fun…but not quite fun enough to make the long-term play grade, alas.

Gettin’ Paid In Africa

Posted on July 2, 2012 by admin

I played a bit of Far Cry 2 as today’s game, after having only briefly started it before. I’m not usually big on shooters, but this one’s different enough in how it’s more of an ‘open world’ one, with various factions and buddies to get missions and rewards from, lots of terrain to explore, etc. It reportedly gets kind of repetitive once you get tired of clearing the same checkpoints of guards over and over, but I haven’t reached that point yet. A keeper for now, I think.

Gatling Gears

Posted on June 26, 2012 by heide

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

Posted on June 25, 2012 by admin

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.

F.E.A.R. Of The Dark

Posted on October 16, 2010 by heide

In my neverending quest to free up disk space and get games off of my backlog, I started playing F.E.A.R. last week. As an FPS, it should be fairly short.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of getting bored of it already. The combat in it is actually pretty decent, in that it’s not just spray-n-pray; you have to conserve ammo, wait for opportunities, use the slo-mo ability effectively, not take on too many at once, etc… It’s just that the environments have been so bland so far. I’m something like four chapters in, and it’s just been either a bunch of office building hallways and rooms, or your typical industrial pipes and walkways. It’s not particularly scary, either. There are sudden flashes of other scenes, or you’re suddenly dumped in a ‘cutscene’ that obviously isn’t really happening, but none of it’s actually frightening. And you can tell where the story is going from a mile away.

I’ll probably play a bit more of it, just to see if it picks up any, and it’ll probably be short anyway, but if it doesn’t then I might just abandon this one.

Just When I Thought I Was Out…

Posted on September 14, 2010 by heide

I’ve been dabbling in another miscellaneous pile of stuff lately:

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

The LevelJunkie's Lair

A gaming log. Glog. Whatever.

Category Archives: Shooters