Mid-August 2014 Playlog

It's hard to find a theme in these large collections of games I play for less than an hour at a time, for the most part. To review:

Talisman - I picked up both the solo adventure and full 4-player digital board games on Steam in a Games Workshop sale. While very, even completely, dependent on luck of the die roll, the game is decently fun. I found the variety of abilities and characteristics each playable character had offered up some interesting in-game ramifications. I played 2-3 complete games, which can be fairly long, before deciding my time was better used elsewhere. It was a satisfyingly fun experience, though.

Mount & Blade - I began my campaign and was immediately overtaken by bandits and taken captive, only to escape sometime later minus my followers and much of my wealth and possessions. This happened over and over, until I was left with no one, not even a horse, and next to nothing. The only choice left was between going full-rogue to probably die alone and reviled and taking up arms in the arena, winning gold and glory and, and hopefully parlaying that into followers. That's what I'm in the midst of, now.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown - I advanced my campaign through a couple of battles, finally taking captive a couple of the aliens and beginning to get a handle on managing my forces. This is another game I don't know why I don't just play all the time.

Half-Life 2 - I played though about 20 to 30 minutes of stuff up to a point where I'm making my way up through a warehouse area from subterranean tunnels, and there are all these Combine soldiers fast-roping down onto catwalks above me and they keep killing me. They'll get theirs, eventually.

Colin McRae Rally - this really is a very bare-bones experience. It's good for a quick race here and there, though. For $7, it's really not too bad.

Hearthstone - I figured it was no more random than Talisman, takes only a fraction of the time to play, has much better production values, actual people to play against, interesting solo content, and all the might of one of the biggest and best game studios in the world backing it up, I might as well invest my time further into this as any other digital card or board game. I've actually been enjoying the hell out of the single-player Naxxramus "boss battles," which are just duels against players with unique abilities and traits. They're almost puzzle-like in that they require a certain approach to win. While nothing like them, they remind me of the puzzles I used to do in The Duelist magazine about 20 years ago, when I was big into Magic: The Gathering.

Final Fantasy III (DS remake) - I finally knocked a few minutes into playing this, before taking it and all my other DS games and trading them all in. Not much to say, other than it's FF, and why the hell isn't the action ever on the top screen? Total loss on this, by the way. I bought it new in Japan, and even had the cool strategy guide to go with it, which I gave up for a mere buck alongside the game. Oh well, not like I was ever going to use it, anyway.

Kurohyou: Ryu Ga Gotoku Shinshou (Yakuza spinoff for PSP) - This was also a quick try-out before trade-in job. It's a Yakuza game, that much is certain. I thought it looked nice enough on the PSP. Series diehards or PSP gamers not already tired of the series should take interest. It's only available in Japan, however, and these games are heavy and deep with the sort of high-level and macho- slang Japanese that many non-native speakers will have trouble understanding (from my own experience).

Wipeout 2048 - I thought I'd played this one before, but I suppose not. It was only for about 20 minutes late at night when I was practically falling asleep, but I was pretty impressed by how well it looked and felt. I did a handful of races and placed decently among my friends, and I'm looking forward to playing more.

Borderlands 2 - I have merely begun, playing Maya the Siren, and having just beat the first boss, a sasquatch type thing in the ice that was bothering a claptrap. I've got to play more to rally form up an impression.

Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition - A gift from Esteban. I haven't really played SF since HD Remix, and that only casually. Before that the last one I really played much of was Super SFII on the SNES. Wow, it's a nice looking game, and it runs flawlessly on the PC. What really pushed me over the edge in wanting to play it (and now wanting to play more), was hearing of the feasibility of playing with a keyboard. It's not something I'd ever considered, but taken logically, there's no reason it should not work, and in practice I found it shockingly easy to pull off special moves, if not completely second-nature in the way that playing with a pad is. I think the keyboard layout is fundamentally better suited to the game than the average 4-button control pad, simply due to the six-button layout possible on the NumPad (4-7, with other keys for button combos), but also due to the ability to use A,S,D, and space directions (space being up/jump). It sounds ridiculous at first, but in practice, wow. It works. With some practice and getting used to, there's no reason at all this control scheme should not be competetive with, or even superior to, other input methods.

Strategy Potpurri & Et Cetera

I'm taking a break from Hearthstone. That game pisses me off. It feels like too much hinges on the luck of the draw. It's like the decks aren't big enough to mitigate it through card variety and multiple strategies per deck. Also the fact that you can only play as a single class and use a pool of neutral cards. Multi-classing would be an interesting thing to see added.

I've kind of been bitten by the strategy bug lately. A friend of the podcast sent me a Steam coupon for 90% off a game called Conquest of Elysium 3, which turned out to be a cool 4X-style game pared down to the raw essentials. The production values are nil, but the core of the game is quite cool. The thing is, every time I quit out of the game, it would glitch up my Steam client, necessitating a trip to the task manager to kill the whole thing and restart. Not cool. I wouldn't mind seeing a better-done version of that game, though.

I also played the beginning stages of a Civ V game as Shaka of the Zulu. I didn't like how things were headed, though, so I killed that game. I wanted to try out Endless Space, since it looked cool and I had heard good things and I already owned it. It certainly looks nice and seems playable enough, but again I wasn't satisfied with my ability to understand an play the game, so I gave up and moved on. On to Crusader Kings II, which I still don't know that I quite understand. I sort of played around with it for a couple of hours as a middle-tier lord, of Luxemburg. I managed to find a wife and produce a few children, so that was good. An ill-fated war effort followed, and then me wondering what I should be doing aside from just letting the game play itself out over the years, me making the odd decision here and there. If that's how the game is played, I may prefer a more hands-on game. I guess I'll try again with EU IV at some point.

Also on the tactics/strategy tip, I tried out Guardians of Middle Earth an Defense Grid: The Awakening. The former is a console-adapted MOBA that no one plays anymore, and the latter is a well done tower defense game, probably the best I've seen, actually. I might play more of it, or check out the sequel.

Revisiting Half-Life 2 yet again, I made some substantial progress, getting all the way through Nova Prospekt and back to City 17, where I am now on my way the Citadel. Along the way were a couple of challenging encounters around turret-placement and enemy wave defense. It's a great game, with a great feel.

A couple of new ones on the playlist that I plan to re-visit are Mount and Blade (I'm just getting started, here), and Colin McRae Rally, which I had time to mess around with for a few minutes, but that's all, so far.

I Need To De-frag My Brain

I don't think I can even summon up a complete list off all the games I've played over the last week.  It's been so disparate lately with getting my new PC and installing and sampling tons of stuff--the dust has got to settle so I can see the way forward from here.

Console side first - Thin Lizzy tracks came out for Rock Band last week, so I downloaded those and tried them out.  They're from a forthcoming live album, so it's the first anyone's really ever heard them, though each of the songs (Jailbreak, Cowboy Song, and The Boys Are Back) are fairly well-known.  Love me some Thin Lizzy!  I also played some of the awesome Megadeth DLC, Peace Sells.... But Who's Buying?

On top of that, I played some Burnout the other day after downloading the re-start patch (which institutes a previously unavailable event re-start option, among other things), and got my B liscense.  I also downloaded the Halo Wars demo and have booted that up a couple of times since.  I dig it!  It's like a streamlined-for-console-controls version of Starcraft.  I was a little skeptical--cautiously optimistic--but playing the demo has cemented it for me.  I'm definitely going to be picking that up.  I'm glad, because I'm a big fan of the Halo franchise, and I'd hate to see it shitted up.

PC gaming-wise is where it starts to get a little hazy.  Let me just go through each of the games installed on my computer this week, and you can assume that I've spent an hour or two at the very least with all of them:  Team Fortress 2, Diablo II, Starcraft, Oblivion, WoW, Mount and Blade (demo), and Half-Life: Source.

Mount and Blade is an interesting Indie game.  The closest comparison I can make is Oblivion, but M&B is much more about factions.  You can join one of several in the game, and you actually accrue your own army as you go along.  I played for only a couple of hours so far, but it's pretty cool.  You start out on a giant overworld-style map, and you go around to the tons of little villages and castles that dot the land, encountering armies and bandits along the way that take you into a battlefield mode to fight.  It's your army versus theirs in a full-on medieval battle, done in a way unlike any I've ever seen before.  If you're mounted, you can gallop by enemy dudes and strike them with your sword, or feather them with arrows if you can figure out how to shoot halfway decent; I couldn't!  You can take prisoners or recruit guys from local villages, you can become the vassal of a local lord, or just do whatever, it seems, and the local economy is effected.  Towns become richer or poorer based on how the war is going, or one of several other factors you can no doubt influence.  I want to get back to this one eventually for more in-depth play.

The other main thing I focused a lot on this week was Half-Life: Source, the most-current (for now) version of the original HL game.  I played Half-Life some back in 1999, during my first year at college, but I'm pretty sure that was all LAN deathmatch.  I may have played the first hour or so of the campaign, but that's about it.  I'm beginning a full series playthrough now (probably to continue to about the point when HL2: Episode 3 is released), though, and it's still pretty great, even 10 years later.  I'm to a point now about maybe halfway in (or less), where there's a big tentacle monster in a missile silo, if you're familiar with the game.  Now I really understand people's aversion to headcrabs...