Lately I’ve been playing lots of games again, and I thought I should provide people with some recommendations. I’ll try to keep it short and to the point.
First off, some Indie games. I’ve been purchasing indie bundles for a while now, and most of those were ‘okay’. Some of them were unexpectedly good though. First off is Braid, kind of famous now but I only recently got to play it. It’s really weird to see interesting gameplay emerge from a type of game that has been around for so long, but Braid manages to do so, surprisingly. Took me a good three days to finish.
Then there was Cogs. One of those okay-ish puzzle games. I can’t really explain what’s wrong with it – the polish was pretty good, the puzzles were clever and ever increasing in complexity, but somehow it just didn’t grab my attention. I quit playing it after 2 days, with a *lot* of puzzles to go.
Revenge of the Titans was pretty good, nice artwork and original gameplay. Good gameplay too, although the game seems to adapt its difficulty to the skill of the player. Needless to say, the game became almost impossible to play when you’ve performed perfectly for the first XX missions. My habit of re-doing levels when I feel when I could be doing better actually backfired with this game. Other than the rebalancing, most of the gameplay decisions felt kind of old-school, which I approve. After a week of playing, I left it unfinished at ~75% of the game.
Finally, I’ve been playing The Binding of Isaac. Now that was an unexpected gem. It’s really twisted and has a pretty sick sense of humour, but the gameplay is very smooth and rewarding. I’ve been playing it for a month and I’m just about done with it. I’d probably have to persist for another couple of weeks to get all of the achievements, but then it’d become a chore instead of fun. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
Just read a pretty nice article from RPS’s Kieron (it’s a pretty old one though). If I ever manage to sort-of finish Overdrive Assault, I really should send him (and numerous other people) a copy. And make loads of outrageous statements 🙂 I think I could manage that.
Kind of reminds me how Linus Torvalds is occasionally quoted making fun of everybody who disagrees with him. I very much agree that it does make the coverage a lot more interesting and lively, some very important pro-tips can be found in that article.
Found an interesting discussion piece [here], the motto seems to be ‘less talk, more rock’. At the very least an entertaining read, and I feel that there is truth to be found there. I feel that the point he’s trying to make is that (good) games have a particular method of communicating with their audience – not by spoken word, thought or even ideas but by action. The ‘doing’ is doing the talking, if you catch my drift 😉
Recently I’ve been playing too many games and I thought it would be kind of nice to make a little roundup of the last couple of weeks:
Supreme Commander 2 was somewhat disappointing as a singleplayer experience, although I suspect that it’s multiplayer gameplay is varied and continually interesting. I don’t really do multiplayer though, so I evaluate games by their singleplayer experience and in this case it’s not that good really. It does have a story, contrary to the first installment in the series, and the gameplay is relatively large-scale (when compared to C&C-like games).
The scale of things has been turned down a bit, building stuff happens a lot faster and a proper research tree has been neatly integrated into the game, but somehow I was just not as much into the game as I was in the old SupCom. It’s decent, but not all that good. I finished all of the campains in two days, which was a bit short.
I’ve also completed the new expansion for Borderlands – General Knoxx’s secret armory. It’s a high-level expansion featuring new enemies, new maps, new weapons, new vehicles etc. The level cap was also raised, which was kinda nice but not really needed. At the higher levels the differences between the classes become glaringly obvious and while some are somewhat suited to become a one-man-army (siren/hunter) the other ones are not quite up to par. I’d rather see a new class (or class specializations) in the expansion… The new areas have the same issue as the zombie island expansion: too much plain traveling, absence of teleporters. The new vehicles are pretty much all useless – the monster has a decent weapon but is far too slow to cover the distances in any sort of reasonable time, the lancer is way too slow and also has a crappy weapon, and the racer is really the only useful method of transportation (because of the absence of teleporters) but it’s really fragile.
The gameplay is very repetitive, although not really more so than the original game. So I guess that if you enjoyed the original game you’ll enjoy knoxx aswell, but I’m shelving the game and am not expecting anything good to come out of future expansions and such. It’s better than either of the other expansions available for Borderlands, but if you’re hoping for variety and/or a challenge you’ll be dissapointed. The only challenge was the kind-of-secret boss, which was just about impossible to defeat. Completing that challenge really lengthened the games’ lifespan, although I did not really enjoy the experience. Basically I had to complete the entire game from scratch because of the level requirement. Grinding with a purpouse I guess, but definately not in a good way. Anyway, the entire thing took a weekend of dedicated gaming to complete.
That’s it for today, next time more!