Tuesday, November 18, 2008

And I have yet no time

Between work and other engagements, I've been trying my best to keep up with the deluge of games coming out for the Christmas season. It's no mistake that companies do this every year - largely because their sales and PR departments are run by degenerate apes who tie in sales of everything to the Christmas season.

Games don't need a special season. They can sell whenever. But I get where they're coming from. Try telling that to a big-wig CEO who wants to see some black numbers for Q3, or whatever bullshit lingo they use for the Sales Season.

Anyway, off that rant, and onto the games I've been playing:

Fallout 3:

In all honesty, I was expecting... I don't know... more. I'd been playing STALKER up until the release of Fallout 3, and since I've never played the original or Fallout 2, I'm missing a lot of what happened in the universe prior. My largest problem could just be that fact. A lot of the content is delivered with a sly wink, like it's some inside joke, and I'm just not getting it. Sorry home-slice, but back in the day, I was more interested in piloting fighter-craft through solar and extrasolar mines.

It's been fun so far, don't get me wrong. But after playing STALKER, which despite bugs and horrible translations, still oozes atmosphere and made me jump more than once. After dropping a Super Mutant who was menacing me with a minigun with little more than a switchblade, I decided that perhaps this wasn't the game for me.

Dead Space:

Yes, I'm coming back to it, simply because I've now started my second play-through. Despite having grossly upgraded weapons and better suits now, the game still fucks with my head, convincing me that certain death is still around every corner. Honestly, you could put me in a goddamn mech with the hand of God as my weapon, and I'd still shake with fear at every long hallway and blind junction. It's just that good.

Fable 2:

One of my few titles for the X-box, Fable 2 was bizarrely addictive for about the first three days. I've played through as both good and evil, pure and corrupt, and I like the amount of work that's gone into realizing the world, and more importantly, its mechanics. In all honesty, if you wanted to, you could marry yourself to thirty different women (or men) and just spend the rest of the game trying to keep them all happy, while simultaneously trying to micro-manage your rapidly multiplying progeny.

Yes. You have kids. In the same game where you get bonus experience for scoring a headshot.

WoW: WOTLK

Yes, I choked and went and bought the new expansion, largely just so I could play as a Death Knight - a class that I was looking forward to playing way back when the game first came out. As you can probably imagine, I was very disappointed when I discovered that there were no Death Knights, but I'm pleased the situation has since been remedied.

On top of those titles, I've also been passing some time playing titles such as Braid, Castle Crashers, and of course, the ADHD Ritalin-fest that is Geometry Wars.

I know there's a lot of other titles still out there, but I'm pretty content with my platter thus far, and I will probably be so for well into the new year.

Cheers.

4 comments:

Tracy said...

What's your DK name??

Trevor said...

Honestly i haven't found any time to play anything outside of my 3-4 hrs a night of warcraft.

That game is addicting too addicting.

The Death Knight is awesome, especially when all I've ever played is rogue.

I might get Fallout 3 I've been looking around for a new shooter, I'm getting sick of Area 51, I've been out of the FPS market for a while

D. said...

well I was going to make a post much like this today, but now i don't have to.

I agree with pretty much all of what you said.

Fallout 3 is certainly a good game, but the joke that it is just "oblivion with guns" is actually quite true.

It does a lot right, and is probably the best we'll ever get from a 3-D fallout, unless the original development team somehow makes the next game...but it is still missing something.

I don't know. Basically it's no Fallout 2.

And the sly wink stuff you speak of, feels more to me like they were trying to deliver the same type of humor found in the first games and sort of, mostly, failing.

also: Descent versus Fallout? fuck that man, Fallout slaughters that shit!

Geoff said...

Man, Descent was epic. I've never had so much fun playing a game. It pretty much required two overdeveloped hippocampi to play, but damn, was it ever worth it.

I blame the Quake generation for putting an end to that. The failures of masses of simpletons is also what doomed Fallout to be eaten, digested, and regurgitated, so in that, we have a common foe.