Since there’s a good thread over in Cafe Society about what folks are reading, I thought we could have an omnibus thread over here about what we’re gaming. Whether it’s video, board, role playing, or whatever.
I’m playing a couple games right now:
**Professor Layton and the Unwound Future on the DS.**It’s a good game and if you liked the first two (or more if you’re lucky enough to be fluent in Japanese), then you’ll like this one.
**The PROS:**Good puzzle solving and animation. Nice music and lots of unlockable side puzzles. It’s a perfect DS game in that it can be saved at any point and can be picked up and put down at any time. The CONS: The dialogue. There’s no way to skip through it and sometimes I don’t want to just keep tapping through the ramblings to get to the puzzles. And there was one puzzle that I completely disagreed with the answer. The puzzle had a restaurant line cook with five dishes, three with pork on top and two without. How many moves would it take to arrange them so no two were next to each other?
Answer? One. By taking the pork off of the top of the dish and moving it to the other one. That just wouldn’t fly in this country with dietary/religious problems, especially with pork. I can’t imagine a restaurant that would want to do that.I’m close to finished and I’d give it an 8/10.
**[Batman Arkham Asylum](Batman: Arkham Asylum) on the XBOX 360.**There’s something about this game that reminds me of the days of NES games. It’s got this old school Castlevania vibe for some reason. It’s “open sandbox” in the very loosest of terms but it feels more like the old side scrollers where it’s a list of things and a certain direction to go in. The PROS: Great graphics, sweet atmosphere, lots of different ways of interacting with the environment and good compelling story. The action and controller responsiveness is spot on and makes the game seem seamless.
**The CONS:**My small complaint was that the controls are a bit too complex unless playing straight through. It took me a couple iterations and I’ve got the hang of it and have almost completed the game. (I think).
Still hashing out the rules to Fields of Fire a solitaire wargame using cards instead of a board and focusing more on command and control than hex based, dice rolling and to-hit modifiers. The solitaire aspects of the rules really make it more difficult to understand than other types of games and I was waiting for the 2nd edition rules to be released, which happened two days ago.
As always, still playing Black Ops on Xbox for my morning kill-o-thon.
Aiming for cultural victory with Spain in Civ V, but I seem to be losing steam (;))
When I don’t feel up to that, I’ve got a British campaign going one month at a time in Hearts of Iron III … estimate completion of the game sometime in 2016
I’ve been splitting my time between Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Prototype on Steam, and City of Heroes. I’m presently waiting for Portal 2 to go live.
I’m getting a new PC in a week or so. I’ve never played an FPS, other than Doom or Wolfenstein, and am very much looking forward to getting the Orange Box. They say Portal and Team Fortess 2 (included) are great as well. I’m finally going to be able to upgrade WoW to Cataclysm, and am super horny for Diablo 3. I was looking forward to finally playing GTA IV, but the reviews for PC are pretty bad, as are the ones for Civ V, and, frankly, almost every new PC game I wanna play…
I finished Professor Layton (and still give it the same rating) and Batman Arkham Asylum. I’m excited for their sequels but in the meantime, I picked up **Portal 2. **
Awesome game play, humor, and graphics all rolled into one. However, I got seriously stuck in one spot for over an hour. For a while I thought the game designers had done something maddeningly genius that I was really impressed. I was stuck in the elevator in the dark. Only sounds and not an ounce of light. I could hear the portal guns and footsteps. Turns out that I had done a manual save and put the game down for the day when I was in an elevator. The game automatically loaded the last saved game and instead of loading the next level, it found a glitch. Luckily I was able to load the autosave and just had to complete a bit that was easy and move on.
Stalled out on Dragon Age: Origins at the Dwarf zone; somehow am not feeling the political intrigue.
Mid-way through Act III of Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and enjoying the mindless violence, though I kind of wish I’d made something other than the standard bashy warrior-type for my first character.