Very possible. And I think that the biggest issue is that it underperformed financially. Looking up reviews, it got a Metacritic score of 80 (which is compiled from many reviews and done on a 0-100 scale) which is good; not great, but above average. (Average is around a 75.)
User reviews are not as great; they have it at a 6.8 (and I don’t get why critic review is 0-100 and user review is 0-10). That’s just below average. My WAG is that critics review everything, while users tend to be harsher because players are more motivated to review games they dislike to vent rather than take the time to praise games they enjoyed. Still, either way, it wasn’t a failure as far as reviews go.
The problem is that it just didn’t make Microsoft much money for whatever reason and so it was ultimately considered unsuccessful. Maybe it was the way it was released, maybe it was because so many people played it on Game Pass (that’s how I played it) and didn’t spend the extra money for the extra digital stuff (which I believe were just an extra set of companion skins), but regardless it wasn’t bringing in the cash so they considered it a flop.
Took me about 8 hours to reach the ending. I was getting a bit fatigued there at the end, so much figuring things out. Still, I used a hint or two and made it through.
Oh wow, I got a response on a Playable! I don’t think that’s ever happened before! Thank you so much!
Sadly, it appears that I may have jumped the gun a bit. Level 194 has two vortexes boxed in by barriers, with nearly the entire board locked up. You’re apparently supposed to get lines past the barriers into the vortexes…somehow. I was able to the get the line up-right of the upper vortex in by clicking a few times, but no luck with any others. I absolutely despise games that are fine for a long time and then throw in a crazy super impossible level completely out of the blue for no reason and everything grinds to a screeching halt. I mentioned before that most of these are early versions of mobile games, so it’s possible this was fixed later on, but it’s mindblowing that something like this was ever allowed to happen in the first place. Needless to say, it’s off my saved list forever. I’ll see if it’s in the Play Store.
All right, on a more positive note, Mafia Wars. This is a defend-against-the-advancing-horde game where you fight a vareity of hoods with a shotgun, and later a light machine gun, double pistol, and Gatling gun, all of which can be upgraded. All but the shotgun have limited ammo, and all but the Gatling gun have reload times. You can also enlist the services of a sniper and bombardier, which are also upgradable. And of course, you can upgrade your barricade to take more damage. The nice thing is that there’s no limit to the number of times you can take on a level, so if you get clobbered, you can retreat to an easier level, build more firepower, and retry the challenge when you’re ready. After putting in some time, it seems to me that the winning strategy is to get the Gatling gun and sniper ASAP and drop your foes before they can get their attacks off. Upgrading your defense doesn’t seem very useful, as every time I allowed enemies to gather, they’d wreck me in short order no matter what I had set up. Maybe this will change when I get further in, but for now, I’m having a literal blast mowing down hordes of bad guys and getting handsomely paid for it. Some things never go out of style.
I’ve started playing Keeper about a walking lighthouse in a surreal world. A basic puzzle exploration game, but stunning visuals to keep you distracted. It’s not a very long game apparently, I’m up to the part with the pink fluff and waterfalls.
I recommend it, but I did struggle with the controls at first, and there are some parts of it that are very strange and I felt a bit lost.
My older son, who used to be a big gamer, put me on the family plan for his Steam account and let me have the 2TB drive he kept his games on, since he’s a newly married working man now, and doesn’t have much time for video games. He has hundreds of games in his Steam library, but many of them are kinda crappy games he picked up at deep discounts during Steam sales. So I’ve been picking through the turds looking for corn. I like a good FPS with a decent bit of story.
I had purchased Bioshock myself and finished it awhile back, and I saw he had Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite. I just finished Bioshock 2– pretty much Bioshock on steroids: the same, but more. If you liked Bioshock but thought eh, not much of a challenge, 2 is for you. I found it pretty challenging at medium difficulty with my fairly limited ability, and there were really too many weapons and Plasmids to juggle.
Bioshock Infinite, on the other hand, is a whole different experience-- just started playing it, to the point I just rescued Elizabeth last night and we’re starting adventures together. I’ve heard the criticisms-- that it sacrifices playability for story, that it’s nice to look at, but the shooting and action is almost an afterthought. And I get those complaints, but I’ve been enjoying the change-up from the first two Bioshock games. It does have some great visuals, and I like the world-building and the steampunky vibe (weirdly, I hate alternate reality settings and ‘steampunky’ stuff in my passive entertainments: books, TV, movies; but I enjoy it in my video games: Fallout, Bioshock, etc.).
Not crazy how Infinite goes to the other extreme from #2 with weapons and Vigors (this game’s version of Plasmids). You can only have two of each equipped at any one time. At least with he Vigors you can carry more, and it’s simple and quick to equip different ones as the situation requires. But with weapons, if you pick a new one up you have to drop one of the two you’re already carrying. I picked up a sniper rifle which was necessary to the scene it showed up in, and I love sniping. But I had to discard it right after since it wasn’t practical in most other settings. A sniper rifle is a nice weapon to have in your back pocket, but not if it’s one of only two weapons you can have. A max of 3 weapons is ideal, I think-- like the Metro games. Just enough, and not too many to keep track of.
I think for Bioshock Infinite, I got pretty much to the end and didn’t finish for whatever reason.
But I really enjoyed it a lot, more than the first two. I think it was mostly the atmosphere. I found the others dull and monotonous, while the third was lively and engaging. I get that they were going for different tones; the first couple were leaning into horror, but Infinite has a colorful, humorous comic book quality that I’ve seen imitated much more in recent games (especially the Outer Worlds series).
Yeah, good description. The first two Bioshocks were very dark, and I mean literally, even more so than metaphorically. I got tired of squinting all the time trying to see what was going on. The grim, relentless murkiness of it got a bit wearying after awhile (now I’m being more metaphorical than literal).
Huh. Yeah, so far the game seems fairly easy and not too challenging: enemies pretty easy to kill; ammo, health kits, etc. plentiful to come by. Seems like in the first two Bioshocks I was always on my last 3 bullets, last 7 dollars, and just enough Eve left for one good Plasmid blast. I have Infinite on medium difficulty, which is what I usually set games of this type to, and I’ve been tempted to try switching to hard mode to see how much more challenging it gets. But for the final battle, sounds like I may want to switch to easy mode.
Interesting. I have Infinite in my library, and enjoyed the first two, but as my library grows, I get further behind as I just don’t always have the time or energy to play.
One day I say, one day!
And thankfully, the old games are likely to contiue to play well as my aged gaming rig gets pushed to potato status by ever more demanding games despite the GPU/RAMageddon.
I did 10+ attempts and lowered it to easy. It still took me a lot.
I literally sat down, made a plan, and still struggled. Might be just me. I made it through the whole game relatively smoothly, only struggling with the final “tower defense” battle.
The first boss battle against the enemy that after defeating him gives you the fire vigor I found was very difficult on hard. (Which is what I played at the first time I played the game.)
Compared to Bioshock 1 where when they came out with the Survivor difficulty (I think it was the fourth time playing it), I still found it fairly easy. Although, boring. Because a lot of the clever tactics you could use in the other difficulty levels just don’t work because the hit points of the enemies are so boosted. It was incongruous to hear Atlas talk about the shock-and-wrench insta-kill trick in the beginning of the game and then discover that–unlike every other difficulty–it doesn’t work because it doesn’t do enough damage.
–Shock-- --Wrench-- “OMG the splicer is kicking my ass! That’s not supposed to happen…”
I didn’t play the first two BioShocks, but I did play infinite. I remember I liked it, even if it was some crazy steampunk fever dream. It was a while ago, so I don’t remember much about any of the fights, but I do remember that the ending kinda annoyed me…not because it was bad, per se. But I had just finished another game (that for the life of me I can’t remember the name) that had exactly the same ending idea. The whole “suchnsuch is the suchnsuch from the suchnsuch” trope (didn’t want to figure out spoiler tags at the moment.) But regardless, I still enjoyed my time playing it, so it was a win.
My younger son, Computer Science Major home from college, was inquiring about my gaming computer, which is almost 5 years old now, and still seems to be going strong (old thread where I asked computer buying advice and eventually picked up my current build). He was impressed with its specs, and he said with the GPU/RAMageddon, my computer is probably worth more in parts now than when I bought it new. Crazy. I remember when you couldn’t give a 5 year old computer away.
Haha, ‘crazy steampunk fever dream’ is about right. I am really enjoying this game, and I don’t understand quite why it got its rep for not being a very challenging shooter. It did seem a bit on the easy side at first, but as I’ve progressed I’ve been in several pretty hellacious setpiece battles. Maybe for hardcore gamers it’s an easy game, but it suits my somewhat meager gaming skills. And I continue to be impressed with the word-building, the story and the visuals. I recently experienced a nice moment, not sure if you would call it an ‘Easter egg’-- I found a guitar in the basement of a tavern in the Shantytown district. I chose to play it, and my character played ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken’ while Elizabeth sang along with a beautiful voice. Lovely little interlude between all the carnage.
I’m watching a Youtuber play this game. It’s pretty good, but I liked The Roottrees Are Dead more (a somewhat similar mystery-puzzle game where you fill out a family tree via '90s-era internet searching).
My 64GB of DDR5 and RTX 4090 have definitely appreciated in value.
Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 makes my processor turn the case into an EZ Bake oven. I finally set some new power limits on it and it dropped 10C into the mid 80s instead of riding the red line without a loss in performance.
Oh wow, I got a response on a Playable! I don’t think that’s ever happened before! Thank you so much! 
I was able to the get the line up-right of the upper vortex in by clicking a few times, but no luck with any others. I absolutely despise games that are fine for a long time and then throw in a crazy super impossible level completely out of the blue for no reason and everything grinds to a screeching halt. I mentioned before that most of these are early versions of mobile games, so it’s possible this was fixed later on, but it’s mindblowing that something like this was ever allowed to happen in the first place. Needless to say, it’s off my saved list forever. I’ll see if it’s in the Play Store.