Shun Akiyama from Yakuza 4.
It is Wednesday, so let’s kick back with our 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?
I have been playing a lot of Yakuza 4 recently. I am about to finish the section of the game with the first character, Shun Akiyama. As I play the game I realize that the reason I enjoyed Yakuza 3 so much was the relationship between Kazuma Kiryu and the children in his orphanage. I am very much looking forward to playing his segment of the story soon.
So, what have you been playing?
On the PC, I’ve still been playing quite a bit of League of Legends, mostly Nasus, Twitch, and Sona. Getting tired of playing as Sona a bit but Nasus has been quite fun. Going to work on learning how to play Blitzcrank and Vladimir effectively, next.
Also, I played some more Orcs Must Die! 2 co-op, which is quite fun. I especially like the endless mode, and trying out different trap combinations.
On iOS, I’ve played quite a few games I hadn’t previously played: Blot, Wind-up Knight, Cavorite, iBlast Moki, Paracute, Ichi, Squirrels, and Companions. All have been rather fun, especially Paracute, which involves collecting as many hearts as you parachute down towards a pillow, traversing obstacles to try to get a high score. As one might guess, it’s super cute
Just finished Dead Space 2. I am totally looking forward to the third installment, especially there are two stories tied together (single player and co-op). It should be amazing.
I just finished El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, which was delightfully fun to play but which has some seriously problematic points (which I’ve mentioned in previous WAYPW editions).
Still chugging faithfully along in Theatrhythm, where I have finally gotten access to bosses that drop navy shards, eight of which will unlock my favourite character. (Given that I have managed to unlock all but two other characters in the process of hunting for EVEN ONE navy shard, and by that I mean I have unlocked 13 other characters before getting one shard for this character, I am very perplexed.)
I’m also poking a little bit at Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, so that I can beat it and then dive into KH3D.
To return to our previous discussion… in the meanwhile, the new issue of Ctrl+Alt+Defeat came out, it has my article which discusses the game at length. :]
(How did you fare with the penultimate boss? I found it SO annoying!)
The entire last chapter threw me; to hell and gone with the pendulum platforms that I have to jump on, seriously. (only time in the entire game that jumping caused me to die.) I eventually ground through the final bosses with a great deal of patience on Easy, though I was getting close to not being able to hammer the Quick Recover buttons fast enough!
thanks for the link! I will be sure to check that out.
I’ve been feeding my Bejeweled addiction the past several days, playing Bejeweled 3 (DS) for hours at a time. It’s the best version of the game yet, and a touch screen just fits it so much better than a D-pad (as in the PSP version of Bejeweled 2 I have). In spite of the looong list of QA folks and testers, there are some minor bugs left, but they’re mostly cosmetic fortunately. It wasn’t until I got this game that I realized that Popcap had been taken over by EA, and after yesterday’s news of EA sponsoring or at least promoting the military industry, I’m even less pleased at that. Popcap has a lot of credit with me for the ages I’ve spent playing the various incarnations and clones of Bejeweled, but EA is a whole different matter. Damn their oily hides for tainting my fun.
EA really taints a lot of things – I love Bioware and I want to support them whenever it is possible because I love (most of) what they do, but they are owned by EA and it makes me feel gross every time I buy a Bioware game. Ugh.
My partner and I have been playing the Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition from Good Old Games. It’s pretty exciting to see how progressive Bioware was at the time, though the inherent racism in D&D games is omnipresent. We’ve dealt with this pretty well with light role-play — I’m playing a barbarian half-orc and he’s playing a human monk, so whenever we encounter bigotry (or gross violations of human rights and their egregious penal system — why do they have a pendulum?!) our characters are appalled and comment how in their home country, this would never be tolerated.
Ridiculously fun game, though, and it’s aged really well. Not that it’s all that old, but old enough to be impressive.
I abandoned Dragon’s Dogma a couple of days ago after just generally finding it all a bit…well boring. It really has the same problem with driving the narrative that Kingdoms of Alamur had (which is sitting on the pc unfinished.) I may go back to both of them at some point, I suppose…
Other than that, I’ve started the Telltale Games’ Back to the Future adventures. Mainly nicely done so far. It’s not very difficult as point-and-click games go, but then I haven’t played one for probably 10 years, so it’s nice to be let in gently!
I started playing Skyrim again. Good-bye life.
You and me both!
I thought this time around I’d try a magic user, but then I realised I couldn’t aim fireballs for toffee, at least not with a PS3 pad. So, naturally, I turned to thievery, which is so much more fun than I realised. But, yeah — goodbye, life.
I’ve been playing a lot of Sol Survivor with my SO. It’s a tower defense game with several co-op modes. One of the neat mechanics for co-op is that you can only go into the game with a subset of all possible towers and active abilities. There are pre-made “officers” with towers and abilities picked out to highlight certain strategies, or you can roll your own. My SO and I have settled on a combination of Freya, who specializes in setting up chokepoints of death, and Viktor, who is all about slows and damage over time.
I finished Okamiden the other day. I didn’t expect the ending to make me cry, haha… it was surprisingly moving. And the final boss battle was pretty darn cool, even if the penultimate battle was kinda stupid, IMO. Not a bad game, even if the gameplay mostly felt like a cramped, watered-down version of Okami. The partners redeemed it for me. But parts of the story… well…
SPOILERS FOR OKAMIDEN
I didn’t really like the retconning that they did, inserting Chibi into all these past events and making him at least partially responsible for all this stuff that Ammy did in the first game. It almost felt like in the end, Chibi’s role became more important than his mother’s in her own story, which kind of made me go :/. I dunno.
Anyway, playing Okamiden left me with the urge to replay Okami, so I am, and it’s amazing. <3
This isn’t about a game I played but:
Has one of you see the trailer for the new Capcom game “remember me”?
In my opinion it looks promising and I like that it has a strong female protagonist.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAjfHqbwMaM
It was also covered in today’s The X Button over on ANN: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-x-button/2012-08-15
Btw, I’ve noticed The X Button’s writer commenting on misogyny and similar failings of games several times. If you’re not already up to your neck in games newsfeeds and like Japanese games, The X Button may be a worthwhile alternative.
I have been watching the trailer(s) and gameplay videos popping up around the web of late. I really love the visuals of the high-tech/future-tech world, the memory-stealing/manipulating ideas, the blend of DE3 + AssCreed series styles. Only I’d favor this version of tech more than how DE3 presented their world. The holograms everywhere, the building ads, and all seemed much more likely.
I like the voice actress for the protagonist. I like the style and look of her. But… the back/hip-breaking sashay and sway while the rest of her body from the lowerback on up doesn’t move… is really an eyesore for me. Also, those really long manicured nails bug me too. It just seems to be more prettiness for prettiness sake rather than anything else. Nothing against the nails themselves, but in a job where you’re a martial arts wuxia master and taking on everyone and also scaling buildings/surfaces/environments with your bare hands and feet…. it doesn’t compute, and I don’t deem it necessary to design in-game. Functional can still be ‘pretty.’
Also, in the gameplay video, you are tasked to make this one dude believe he shot his (ex) girlfriend. So you manipulate his memories to ‘help’ him shoot his girlfriend (in his memory). This is all played out visually and with gun shot, blood, reaction, dead corpse and all. But when he (in ‘reality’) shoots himself in grief, the camera pulls off-screen and you just hear the gunshot. That seemed a bit strange to me. Show the violence against a woman, and even help it to happen, but not the guy offing himself. And no, this dude’s no saint or anything, he’s a mean curse-spewing, bottle-throwing (imo abusive) person.
Yeah, that’s bad. Violence against women is depressingly common.
[KA101's PTSD is something the family thinks he has, so he's just Not Happy. No flashbacks or panic attacks, and the sudden-onset headache seems to be subsiding.]
Directly removing or editing someone’s mental processes–especially without informed/enthusiastic consent–as a point to the gameplay, well, doesn’t seem that much better. (Been in that kinda setting IRL. Not so fun.) Glad you enjoyed the video though.
Still playing FFXIII-2 with my brother (we were on holiday for two weeks). Serah is seriously annoying with all her “I’m so weak, I need to be defended” lines, and the other characters keep on reinforcing this. It’s especially bad since she is ridiculously powerful mechanics-wise – at least in our game – so the gameplay and the narrative really clash.
Other than this issue, the game is very enjoyable, though it does feel like a mashup of classic titles.
Also, I finally have an infiltrator in Mass Effect multiplayer that I enjoy playing (the N7 Shadow). Now I only need time to play o.O;
I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas and I think I’m closing in on the end game, having spent almost 130 hours in this game (mostly exploring). When I first tried out the game earlier this year, I put it away and thought I would never play it again because I hadn’t played an open world RPG since Daggerfall years ago, and I just didn’t get how to play it. Now, I’m actually considering checking out other open world games later, like Skyrim. I may check out the DLC for F:NV as well, if I hear good things about them.
I’ve also been playing Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, mostly as a Salarian Infiltrator and Human Engineer. I also unlocked the N7 Fury and Demolisher, so I’ll probably try them out. So glad that Bioware made half of the N7 classes female! Wish there was a soldier class I could play as well. Most of the Soldiers are too slow moving for me.
I’m almost done with Old World Blues DLC for F:NV and it’s good so far. It’s pretty charming, since it feels more character/story focused than about “moar battlez!!” Only negative aspect is it basically assumes you’re a male char the entire time (and sloppily tries to cover it up). But I think it’s the best DLC for the game, if you’re interested.
I had one major issue with that one, which is that as a character with all her points in Guns, I was constantly out of ammo. The shop never restocked and not many enemies carried bullets. It was so bad it almost ruined the game for me.
Mm, hadn’t considered that. I was melee/unarmed and cleaned the place out.
I’ve had several votes from gaming friends that they think I’ll like Old World Blues, so I’ll probably pick that one up soon. I hope there’ll be a Xbox Live Gold sale on those DLC soon, so I can get all of them if possible. Sometimes I wish I played on PC, since prices seem to drop a lot quicker there.
Though taking note of what ambermanna says about ammo below, I wonder how I’ll do. My character has guns, energy weapons and some other non-combat skills mostly. ^^;;
I honestly loved the DLCs, especially Dead Money and Lonesome Road. They had pretty great endings, all of them. I recommend them a ton.
I finished Golden Abyss last night! It really grew on me, and I ended up quite liking it (aside from the cliche-ass ending, haha). I might actually try and get all the treasures/mysteries/etc.
Darksiders II. I am about an hour in and it’s amazing. Good to be back in this fantasy world and the soundtrack is pretty good too and fun loot system introduced. Overall a polished feeling to the game so far. I beat Dragon’s Dogma and it was worth following the main quest towards the epic conclusion.
I thought I’d give The Secret World a go. I absolutely hated it. Having actually bought it, I gave it a good 10 hours to see if I would get into it, and that’s 10 hours of my life I’m never getting back.
Don’t get me wrong, the writing seemed to be pretty good and I loved the setting. I think there is so much potential there. There are just so many things that make it not fun for me though. I particularly hate the character creator and the way that, after a short beginning, you end up in a seemingly endless grind of zombie-killing and pointless fetch-this or kill-that quests. The lag is dreadful, too, and I hate the fact you can’t skip NPC conversations.
Back to SWTOR for me!
With Guild Wars 2 releasing soon, is there any community coordination to have all BH players onto the same server or guild?
I’d like to know this, too. I generally solo, but it’d be nice to have a safe group nearby.
We actually are joining up with Praxis, at least unofficially
http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=8288
The guild has a wonderful policy about a safer space that aligns with our mission here. It’s quite the perfect matchup. Hope to see you there
Ah-ha, good to hear that is still ongoing.
Thanks for that, signed up and ready.
My boyfriend and I have been playing Animal Crossing: City Folk a lot lately, but we’re kind of fitting in some FFV time here and there. I want to really give Malicious a try though soon, and then return to some other Wii games.
I’m looking forward to playing some upcoming 3DS games though.
Akiyama-san was by far my favourite part of Yakuza, even though he’s terrible. It’s because he shares a voice actor with Spike from Cowboy Bebop, I think.
I still haven’t finished Yakuza. I burnt out playing so many minigames (so much majong) about 40 hours in that I stopped months ago. Now I want to go back.
I’ve been playing quite a bit of Awesomenauts lately. It’s basically a crossbreed between League of Legends and Brawl, and yes, that is as awesome as it sounds. :p