Dead Space 3

It's not good. I looooooved the first two. This one sucks. Too much action and the dudes are bullet sponges, even on Easy. I sent it back after two hours. That is all.

Catch Up

I've played a few games lately but don't feel like making a post for each one. I picked up Dishonored and Call of Duty Black Ops. I really haven't been liking the stealth in Dishonored. It feels like I can't really tell if I'm going to be seen or not. And of course as soon as they see you, you're pretty much dead.
Black Ops is fun, but man, you know the part of the action movie where stuff is blowing up all around you, and there's dudes shooting in every direction for a minute or two? That's the WHOLE GAME of Black Ops. It got to where I learned not to play it before I go to sleep since it kind of put me on edge.
I also played through almost all of Resident Evil: Revelations for the 3DS. It was okay, I guess. The voice acting was terrible and the story was kind of a throwaway, but it was occasionally pretty, and it was something to do on the portable system.
Okay, just this weekend I plowed through all of The Last of Us. Holy crap that game is good. The story was excellent, and the gameplay was a lot of fun. It had decent stealth and a great variety of types of play and locations. So when I gush about the story and voice acting, don't think I'm glossing over the other stuff. It's the kind of game that made me stay up late to finish more of it, think about it while I went to sleep, then start playing again first thing when I woke up. So, so good. They made some really unexpected choices with the direction of the story at some points. Which just made me like it even more. Okay, I'll stop typing so you can just go play this one.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

I was finally able to snag a copy of Luigi's Mansion from GameFly. The timing worked out pretty well too, since I headed out on a long weekend trip shortly after I got it. I did a lot of ghost-sucking on the three hour flight, if you know what I mean.

I actually took the GameFly return envelope thing with me thinking I'd finish it up on the trip and drop it in a mailbox and have a new game waiting for me when I got home. That didn't quite work out. This time it had nothing to do with GF shipping and everything to do with the last levels being really tough and complicated. Also, it was a much longer game than I was expecting. On the last night in our hotel room, I was thinking "sweet, this is the last level." But no, there was a whole 'nother section to go. Don't you just hate it when games give you your money's worth?

The game itself was charming, occasionally clever, and rarely frustrating. I sort of wanted to record the sound of Luigi's (old school phat) Nintendo DS "ringing" when the professor called him and make it my ringtone. Also hearing him say "yellllo?" every time always made me chuckle.                                                      

I had played very little of the original Gamecube version, so I can't say how much it compares to that. But I managed to enjoy myself pretty much all the way through the 14 hours or so it took me to get through the story mode. There's also a multiplayer mode that works either in person (with download play) or over wifi. I put in a little bit of time through that, but I mainly focused on the story.

I can't say it was especially challenging since I went through 90% of the game without even knowing how to dodge or jump while sucking up ghosts (the "combat" portion of the game). But the difficulty ramps up nicely towards the end for some of the boss fights and the sheer number of ghosts that get thrown at you for one brutal (timed) level.

In summary, if you have a 3DS you probably ought to get this one. As for me I'm on to the next one, Tomb Raider on the 360 and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

(Editors note: I typed this one on my Nexus 4 with a Bluetooth keyboard, because, hey, why not?)

Far Cry 3

I'm not sure why I thought I might like Far Cry 3. I played a few hours of 2 and gave up because everyone was shooting at me wherever I went. It got pretty frustrating if you're just trying to get to point B and you get distracted by dudes shooting at you. Then you die. Repeat times...(more than I'd like to count). 

The third installment didn't have nearly as much of that, maybe because of the more prevalent fast travel to a location. But I just wasn't having much fun with it. Maybe because of the laughable voice acting and story? Or possibly because I was supremely bad at the game. Low level bad guys would continually take me out and I couldn't figure out a way to make my character handle it any better other than ramping down the difficulty setting.

You'd think a game that let me drive around on boats and four wheelers to my heart's content would grab me more, but it didn't. I didn't think the vehicle controls were much fun since it felt like the land vehicles were driving on a giant sheet of ice. 

I did some fun open world things like riding in a hang glider, but I think after just coming off of Sleeping Dogs I'd had my fill of open world settings. 

Next up is something completely different: Luigi's Mansion for the 3DS. I've heard good things.

Sleeping Dogs

I finished Sleeping Dogs today. I almost gave up on it a few hours in when I got frustrated with it being almost a rhythm game. You see, it's basically Grand Theft Auto in Hong Kong. But there's a much bigger emphasis on melee fighting than GTA. And you usually need to take out a group of about 6 or 8 dudes at a time. They invariably get on either side of you and interrupt you when you're punching their buddy. Rude, I know. But you start out without many special moves that will give you much of an advantage. I failed one mission about 10 times in a row before I changed very little and suddenly passed it. Gaining experience and new moves was a slow process, but I eventually got used to it. Compared to the shooting and driving sections, the "punching dudes" part of the game was actually the most fun in the long run.

Another thing worth pointing out is that since it's in Hong Kong, you drive on the left side of the road. I can't tell you how many times this messed me up. I was constantly pulling out of alleys into oncoming traffic or carjacking somebody on the wrong side of the car. Speaking of that, once you get to a boat, the steering wheel is on the left, opposite of the cars. But boats typically have the steering wheel on the right (for some reason) in the U.S. Anyway, maybe that's accurate and boats in Hong Kong are actually like that.

The story is fairly interesting and it's refreshing to see a game in a sort of new setting with something other than a white male protagonist. Of course they all speak English, only throwing in some Chinese phrase every once in a while.


I'm glad I stuck with it, I was entertained. Not sure what game is up next. Maybe I'll finally get to Tomb Raider. In the meantime I started New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the 3DS. It's sort of okay, like I expected. Not nearly as impressive as Super Mario 3D Land. For some reason that one really got its claws in me and I wanted to collect everything. I don't think I envision that happening in NSMB2.

Zelda: Wind Waker

This won't be a full review because I doubt I'll make it through the full game before my next GameFly game shows up (Sleeping Dogs is on the way). I've had a vague craving to play this game again for a while now and things lined up to allow me to play it in the last few days. It's still incredibly charming, and I'm over my "what is the cartoon bullshit that they've done to Zelda!?" phase. Or maybe it helped that I played two more fairly good Zelda games with this art style on the DS so I've had time to get used to it.
It holds up surprisingly well for coming out over 8 years ago. I'm playing it on the Wii and it decided to turn on progressive scan (480p?) on the 1080p TV I've got it hooked up to. The only thing that looks bad is when things that aren't in the foreground are a bit blurry. The only frustrating thing has been the controls. I've played a ton of first and third person games in a 3D space since this game came out. Let's just say there's been a lot of standardization and improvement. I keep wanting to use the right "analog stick" to move the camera in a way that would feel at home in a Gears of War or Mass Effect game. Nope. And there's a surprising amount of making sure Link is lined up _just right_ to make a jump or something. Even in the beginning levels.
So maybe I'll keep going back to this game when I have the chance. We'll see. I did like that it's been long enough since I've played it that I really felt myself getting into the role of a young kid on a tiny island. I could almost smell the sea salt in the air when I climbed up a cliff and looked out at the ocean.

Paper Mario Sticker Star

My latest GameFly game was Paper Mario Sticker Star. http://www.giantbomb.com/paper-mario-sticker-star/3030-31755/ (Sorry for the lack of hyperlink, I'm trying out the Blogger iPad app with a bluetooth keyboard and I can't figure out how to, ya know, hyperlink.)

When I first started it up, the cartridge still had a previous renter's data in there. The saved game seemed to be near the end, and was at 18 hours of playtime. 18 hours!? There's no way I can put that much time into a silly Mario 3DS game. But after an hour or so I was really looking forward to spending that much time in the funny little world it creates.

Most of the games in the Paper Mario series can be described as RPG-lite and this one is no exception. You use items on enemies in a turn-based battle that deal some amount of damage. If you press the A button at just the right times you can deal more damage or avoid taking some damage. Pretty simple. There's a little bit of strategy with pairing the right items or type of attack with the right enemy, but there's not much to that. The boss fights can get a bit more complicated since you'll usually want to save your more powerful, rarer stickers (attacks) for them. Picking the right one in the right order is the key there.

Other than that you just have to make your way around in the world and find things that will let you progress to the next section, adventure game-style. This is where the game sometimes falls flat. I spent a lot of time looking at a walkthrough to tell me where to go next since the game didn't always make it very clear. Several times, I had been to the place I needed to go and tried the thing I needed to do, but not in _exactly_ the right way. That can be pretty frustrating.

I got most of the way through the game (about 16 hours in) before I got tired of the tedium of "go here, do this, come back." I think level 4-3, the haunted mansion level was what finally broke me. Don't get me wrong, it was well done and pretty funny, but there was a _lot_ of walkthrough looking on that one.

While I wait for the next game I started up Zelda, Wind Waker. I'm playing the Gamecube disc on the Wii, using the trusty old Wavebird wireless Gamecube controller. I knew I kept those around for a reason.

Bioshock Infinite and the return of Gamefly

I started back up on Gamefly and managed to get Bioshock Infinite about the time it came out a couple weeks ago. It took me about a week to blaze through the (roughly 12 hour campaign) on Easy difficulty. I played it quickly for one, because I'm back on the "time is money" when it comes to games idea. But also because I was enjoying it so dang much.

The world they create is beautiful. The sounds of the world and UI are familiar but consistently great. The visuals are like that too. It's really a great job of creating something that's at the same time believable and unbelievable. A lot of the sounds and cues will be familiar to players of the first two games. Which is a good thing. In fact, and I can safely say this without spoiling anything, there's a few pretty excellent callbacks to the first game in the ending sequences of Infinite.

As for GameFly, lets just say it was targeted e-mail marketing at it's best. They still have my e-mail address, of course, and they've been pretty good about not sending me too much annoying crap. So when I got a note that said there's a new shipping facility in Kansas City I thought pretty hard about signing up again. That the first month would only cost me a dollar was just gravy. If you'll remember from before, one of my biggest complaints about them was the terrible shipping times. I would typically go for a week of dropping a game in the mail before getting another one. I knew that Netflix had a KC shipping facility and knew how much of a difference that could make. As for queue management, I still don't think they're nearly up to par with Netflix, since the second game I got was down near the 9 or 10 position since all the other, more popular games were unavailable. Both the PS3 and 360 versions of Tomb Raider were in there, and that game's been out for a month or two. What gives, Gamefly? But maybe it's not an entirely fair comparison since games cost so much more than movies. We'll see how it goes.

So my next game up is Paper Mario Sticker Star. Something that looked sort of interesting, but mainly just gives me a reason to use my 3DS. I've had trouble finding a lot of reasons to do that. I played through most of the first party Nintendo stuff that they've put out, but the new Castlevania: Lords of Shadow game is the first 3rd party game that I've enjoyed. I liked most all of the 10 hours it took me to finish the story in that one. Aside from me wanting to scream "Dammit, Dracula!" (spoilers! Well, sort of) a few times towards the end, I had a lot of fun with it.

Halo 4, continued

This weekend I had planned on replaying Zelda, Wind Waker until I realized that I didn't have the disc. I must have loaned it to somebody and forgot about it. I'm looking at you, Craig.

But since that fell through, I figured I'd make use of my free month of Xbox Live Gold with some Spartan Ops (a Halo 4 play mode). It's cooperative or solo, but I've been playing the first 5 episodes solo. It's a weird mix of the old Firefight and competitive multiplayer. By that I mean you have tons of dudes you have to kill, but they stay dead every time you respawn. Which is different than the campaign. So sometimes I just plan on getting killed 5 or 6 times in a row when a ton of dudes all come out at once in a big open area. As long as I take down one or two before I die, I don't feel so bad. I don't know though, maybe I'm playing it wrong?

Anyway, I thought I'd post about it as I wait for episodes 6-10 to download (36% complete). Oh, that's another thing, this game is really chewing up my limited hard drive space. I'm still using a 20 gig version and just being careful about what I keep around. I typically have about 7 gigs free, just enough to install a game if I know I'll be playing it a lot. But this has had two separate installs of about 2 gigs a piece. And I never know what stuff will run well on the 16 GB USB memory stick I have stuck in there. Basically, I"m just trying to limp along on this hardware until the new stuff comes out in the fall.

Winter game catch up

Almost 3 months since my last post. A new Dave Record! I think. I don't feel like looking it up. Anyway, I've played a few games but only one or two have really stood out.

I picked up Halo 4 and immediately realized that I'm not very good at Halo. This is without ever even connecting to Xbox Live to play other humans. This is just getting destroyed over and over by the computer. So I dropped it down to Normal difficulty from Heroic and carried on. I wouldn't have said I loved it at the time. Not nearly as much as I loved Halo 3. But I apparently loved it enough to play through it again on Heroic once I finished. So maybe it gets a solid B overall. I still need to try Spartan Ops at some point. It sounds like it's sort of a single/multiplayer hybrid. I suppose I could stomach that.

And for something completely different that grabbed a hold of me for a week or two: 10000000. A silly little iOS game that's a combination dungeon runner and frantic match 3 puzzler. All of this in 8-bit throwback graphics (even more so if you play the iPhone version at double resolution on an iPad like I did). It sort of reminded me of the fantastic Henry Hatsworth game which had you sliding blocks around on the lower screen and platforming on the top screen. 10000000 solely has you sliding blocks, but you need to match different things depending on what's going on up near the top of the screen. It's called 10 million since that's the number on the dungeon wall where your guy starts out that says "Freedom: 10000000." That's it, that's your whole motivation. Get 10 million points and your guy goes free. You upgrade your sword, etc. in an attempt to get more points faster. Listen, I can't fully explain why I liked it, but it's probably worth your time.

I was about to wrap this up when I remembered that I made my way through another one in it's entirety, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. That's what happens when you don't write for so long. You forget about games that you loved. Look, I can't really do this game justice. I liked the strategy of plotting out my moves with no time constraint. I also liked the slow leveling up, RPG-style. I also had to get this game out of my house as soon as I could since it sort of took over my life. As soon as I finished I considered playing it again on a harder difficulty. But that seemed like crazy talk and I took it back to Matt the next day.