Mass Effect 3 Extender Cut DLC banner featuring Shepard and her crew.
Hi all, it is time for the usual questions:
- What games have you been playing lately?
- Are there any you would recommend to other Border House readers?
- Are there games that have you ranting or raving?
- Are there any games that you played and want to see covered on the site?
This was was another busy week for me with not many video games. I got in a few rounds of Iron Brigade with friends and otherwise just downloaded the Extended Cut free DLC for Mass Effect 3 to see the longer ending but I have not been able to play it yet.
What have you been playing?
I’m finally at the final boss for FFXIII-2 (I just decided to come back to all the side content later and check the game off my list), and oh my goodness but that entire final dungeon can be devoured by an acid shark that’s on fire, thanks.
I ended up abandoning Class of Heroes, and instead started Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, which I’m very undecided about. It’s interesting, but the text appears far too slowly for my reading speed (and I don’t seem to be able to speed it up).
I’ve also picked up Ash II: Shadows on iOS again, which I had been kind of bland about and then the characters started interacting and I remembered why I loved the first one so much: these games are hilarious. (Sometimes with gender and other fail–why is there only one female character, ugh, and it’s not doing a very good job of being progressive–but the intra-party snark often makes me laugh out loud.)
and oh my goodness but that entire final dungeon can be devoured by an acid shark that’s on fire, thanks.
Right??? Yeah. F that dungeon. So awful. The best part is, if you want a complete bestiary (which you need for a Trophy), you *have* to play through it *twice.*
I was kind of meh on Hakuoki. Not bad but…ehh, underwhelming.
….that really….encourages me not to go for platinum on this game. Sob. Killing adamantortoises for hours on end? livable. That sodding maze again? No thanks. (I say this now, and next month I’ll be grimly grinding right along.) I’ve got 60-some fragments right now, and level 15 in the Crystarium, so I think the final boss should be manageable at my party’s current status.
Yeah, “underwhelming” is a good description of it, I think. I often joke that I play games for the plot, but I’m finding it surprisingly frustrating to basically be playing the social-sim part of Persona without having the dungeon crawl to break it up.
To be fair, it’s quicker the second time around – there’s just a platform at the end of the dungeon that only has ONE random encounter, and it varies between two monsters that only appear on that platform. So you have to get one monster, then close up the area’s gate and re-enter it anew to get the second one. It’s dumb and stupid and I hate it but doesn’t take *too* long, all things considered.
I think I wouldn’t mind Hakuoki’s pure story gameplay if the story was good enough, but it’s not. It’s very weirdly executed and I just got bored clicking through the dialog, waiting for something interesting to grab me.
Is that the one with the behemoth? Because that was my big problem–I couldn’t beat it. I’d be fine until it stood up and then all bets were off and everybody was dead before I could blink. (I ended up dinking around swapping paradigms a lot, aiming for that trophy, since I clearly wasn’t getting anywhere with killing it even sentinel’ed up.) That’s not…the worst, but it’s still disheartening. :/
I agree that Hakuoki is really strangely executed. It seems like there are some interesting ideas hiding under there, and I think the characterization is rather solid, but it’s not quite a mystery and not quite a horror/supernatural tale but hasn’t figured out which one it really wants to pursue.
No, they’re not behemoths. They’re like…the jabberwocky from Orphan’s Cradle in XIII, if that sounds familiar at all? It’s a platform that’s just next to the one with Chocolina at the end of the dungeon.
The other thing about Hakuoki is that the plot will just like randomly skip ahead a year or more and it’s like, “whoa, wait a sec, where did all that time go and what has everyone been doing?” A lot of big plot developments are kind of hand waved away with quick explanations in passing, so it feels very jarring. To some extent, I know it’s probably the nature of the genre: if I’m focusing on say Hijikata instead of Okita, Okita’s story is going to get brushed to the side because that’s not where the POV is. But it still felt weird, storytelling wise.
Yeah, the timeskips in Hakuoki are definitely weird. What do you mean “and then six months passed in which nothing happened?” Don’t you have agency? weren’t you doing something other than skulking the corridors?
Ooooh, those things. I can handle those. Well. I beat the final boss last night and I am torn between “Well PLAYED, Square” and keysmash of rage at the ending, which I will avoid specifics of, but wow. (First three stages of the boss fight, no big deal. Last one took me three tries ugh.)
I am still playing FFXIII-2 also! It is the only game I’ve played this year that isn’t on my phone… I am getting to be a really slow gamer in my old age.
I’m finally home, but quite busy… yesterday I thought I’d play the ME3 extended cut DLC, but the download took forever and I ended up playing some Dragon Age 2 instead. I’m really fed up with DA2, but I want to see the ending now, I’m curious how the story turns out (though I’ve ran into some egregious bugs, so I hope I’ll get an ending matching my actions – to explain without spoilers, for example Anders totally thinks for some reason that I’ve sided with the templars when I’ve done no such thing…)
I hope I’ll have some time to get to the Extended Cut tonight…
I’ve recently played Portal 1 and 2, and enjoyed them immensely. Though I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that I liked the ending song from Portal 1 better than either game.
Now I’m playing a few games from the Art of Murder series. They’re fine: they’re not especially good in any way, but they also have nothing that is shockingly bad or very annoying over time (I’m looking at you, adventure game voice-acting) and the gameplay has been very smooth and logical except for one temporary hitch at the start of the second game, which makes them nice adventure games to play to kill some time.
I hope Mass Effect 2 picks up soon because I am getting bored.
Pocket Planes! If you enjoyed Tiny Tower, you’d probably enjoy Pocket Planes, which is by the same developer.
Is Pocket Planes on Android?
To my knowledge, it’s only available for iOS.
I picked Quantum Conundrum and yes, I have to say I am vastly disappointed, maybe I’ve set my expectations to high and I know it is 15Euro game on Steam from small developer and it’s hardly fair to compare it polished big titles like Portal and Portal 2. It’s not a bad game, it’s just not too good either, it tries too many things without excelling at them, it has clever physics puzzles but it is undermined by platform puzzles that get really quickly very demanding on reflex and precision and controls on PC and FP camera doesn’t make it easy in this department. The graphic isn’t bad but it lacks polish and quickly became repetitive. The added narrative that similar like in Portal should smooth puzzle solving isn’t working despite John “Q” de Lancie doing VO, I don’t know what‘s missing but it doesn’t work. I’ve not beaten game yet, but the saddest thing I can say about my experience with game is that with each solved puzzle I actually feel like playing Portal or Portal 2 again despite beating both of them numerous times…
I also got the game; having just finished it yesterday, I have similar feelings. It’s certainly a good game, but the humor is somewhat off. I feel like they were trying to walk the fence between darker and lighter humor and ended up missing the mark on both sides to a certain extent.
Also, I love puzzle games, but I despise extremely hectic 3D jumping games, and as you point out, QC incorporates a lot of both. I frequently knew how to solve a puzzle 5-10 minutes before I managed to actually get past it on account of finnicky controls, framerate issues (gods below, I haven’t had this many technical issues with a game in a long, long time!), or just plain inability to time my jumps properly.
As has been said again and again and again, it’s a shame the game has to sit in Portal’s shadow like it does, but it’s almost impossible not to make the comparison while playing, unless you haven’t played the Portal games.
Well, I have to thank both of you for the reviews, because I was really considering trying the game *because* I liked the Portal games so much.
It sounds like it’s pretty certain that the game would have just ended up on my “unplayable due to accessibility issues” pile, so yeah.
SimCity Social on facebook. I feared it would be a Cityville clone, but it’s not really. I mean, it is a clone MOSTLY but it’s different enough that I’m not angry. Cityville has a lot on SimCity Social though, because it’s been out so long that it has more buildings so the cities are more varied from neighbor to neighbor. All the SimCity cities look alike unless someone got really creative. Hopefully that will improve with time.
Best of all, there’s no poorly rendered 3D people stuck everywhere. There are 3D people, but you can’t really see them. Sometimes they’ll go for a picnic somewhere randomly and that’s cute.
The “gifts” you can give each neighbor is sorta annoying, though, if you have a lot of neighbors. And the sharing mechanic is really annoying right now. They want you to post about everything and by default they will. I deleted “post on my behalf” from my permissions to help keep from flooding my friends.
I’ve only been playing a few days, but I just discovered you can make 2×1 and 1×1 houses so now I’m having a ball with those for some reason. I both love and hate that the houses upgrade themselves on their own, but that’s the game’s gimmick and what separates it from Cityville.
Ahaha, on my phone, the picture accompanying the article on the main page was cropped so it read “ASS”. Yeah, I have an immature sense of humor. =P
I’ve been playing Pocket Planes on the iPad, Dino Life on my Android phone, and TERA on the PC. Highly recommend the first two.
I’m finally almost done with Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I finally see why it might be disappointing. However, I did enjoy the fights with the two bonus bosses I found, and I’m thinking that what I am assuming is the final boss battle should be pretty tense and challenging (which is what I want), seeing as I spent the past ten game hours running away from almost all battles.
I’ve also been playing Animal Crossing: City Folk. I started up a new town (and spent ages resetting until I got a town layout I liked…) and I’ve been having fun. I’m not a big fan of Kapp’n, though, only because he’s always going on and on about “lasses” and assuming my character is straight. Every time I go to and from the city, I have to deal with him being all, “how about them city lasses, huh?”, “did you meet the lass of your dreams in the city?”, “you smell too pretty, you’d better get a manly stink on you because your lass won’t like it if you smell nicer than her”, and so on. I’m really getting to find it annoying. But other than that, I’m enjoying the game.
Dwarf Fortress! After my usual obsessive search for a great embark, I found one with a wicked waterfall and finally started my first 34.11 fort. Since one of that version’s biggest additions is a minecart system, I kinda want to build a rollercoaster for my dwarves once I’m past the “dirt-poor hole in the ground with no military” starting phase.
Also, I recently became interested in Minecraft. It never looked appealing before (not due to the graphics, mainly due to me not liking first-person games much), but after watching some videos I said well, why not, I do enjoy a good sandbox. I do wish there was a way to teleport to the spawnpoint like the Magic Mirror in Terraria, since I do tend to get lost and am also a packrat who hoards everything I pick up. *cough*
Dwarf Fortress, Terraria, Minecraft. Did I mention I like sandboxes? Story-driven games, my other love, keep letting me down with a lack of meaningful consequences, so I might as well go for games with deeper and broader gameplay and do my own thing.
On the multiplayer front, L4D2. Three of my fellow ex-WoW-guildies and I played through Dark Carnival on Advanced a couple evenings ago, my first ever shot at that difficulty, and it was great fun though two people died in the finale due to lag. I always feel guilty for surviving when a friend (or even bot!) dies.
You definitely might consider installing some mods to expand Minecraft’s building and crafting system. Redpower, forestry, industrialcraft 2, railcraft and buildcraft are all great technology themed mods. There’s also thaumcraft 2 and equivalent exchange, which deal with magic; but you’ll have to change block ids to get it to work with the other mods(which you can do through the config file). Actually, I can send you my config files if you wanted to install thaumcraft(equivalent exchange doesn’t have block id conflicts).
If you like the complexity of dwarf fortress, you’ll probably like those mods too. They’re worth it if you’re willing to invest the time to install and learn them.
I’ll stick with vanilla for a while, thanks, just to learn the game as-is. Though I do already wish for a slightly greater variety of creatures (friendly, neutral and hostile) and resources. Maybe I’ve been unlucky or just not determined enough because running through miles of lookalike caves and tunnels tends to bore me, but I haven’t had luck yet with finding anything beyond iron, or anything else of interest beyond two monster spawners.
Right now I’m bouncing between ME3 without the new DLC, a Human Noble play through of Dragon Age Origins and a Sarcastic Mage M!Hawke playthrough of Dragon Age 2.
A lot of friends have been posting about Dragon’s Dogma so I might poke at that.
I am so behind. Backlogged central, hi. I still have Dragon’s Dogma practically unplayed! I downloaded but haven’t played through ME3′s Extended Cut (no motivation, really). I bought Skyrim’s DLC Dawnguard, though I am very unsure about its pricepoint for the content. It might be a fairly meaty content, but it doesn’t really offer a whole lot extra or new to the world itself. It’s more like side-content (building on vampire lore and vamp/were talent trees and then quests in the new area). Happy to have it, nonetheless. I have Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City still sitting there, too.
Annnd lastly, a friend and I kind of went splurge overboard with picking up Dungeon and Dragon’s Online first expansion, Menace of the Underdark. Playing with that off and on, when there is time. If anyone else is playing DDO, just let me/us know and we can hang out.
What server are you on? I’m on Sarlona myself.
We’re on Thelanis. :3 One thing I noticed, at least on this server and at this point in the life of DDO, is that people are generally helpful and friendly. Which is a nice thing. I’ve only run into a couple short-tempered people, but even then they weren’t spouting hate speech or making awful insults.
Liberal Crime Squad: quickest summary I’d have is “Symbionese Liberation Army simulator”. Apparently one of Tarn Adams’ earlier projects, so, from the guy who brought us Dwarf Fortress.
Interface is a bit clunky and somewhat more sexism than absolutely necessary, but does a good job at letting the player feel a sense of accomplishment.
I just started a Silent Hill 3 play through, I stopped at the construction site. I also found my first PS2 memory card with a bunch of saves from 2002-2003, so I am going to check those games out. I am really intrigued by older saves that I have not touched in a while.
I also purchased Journey, I might continue my God Hand play though as well.
A lot of Wii lately with Monster Hunter Tri with friends, Xenoblade, Replaying Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, and played Mario Kart with a roommate the other day.
I still have to either start or finish the following titles too-
Sin & Punishment 2, Red Steel 2, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Pikmin 2, Marumasa, Little King’s Story, Zack & Wiki, Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World, and Rhythm Heaven Fever.
I actually use me Wii a lot and enjoy it but I also got a 3DS awhile ago and am trying to play that. In the middle of beating Kid Icarus. Loving the online on that one. Very frantic.