Giving up
I don't actively quit on games often at all. I'm far more likely to get bored and just stop playing them, or jump on something new before finishing what I've already got. But I very rarely give up on a game on purpose.
I'm probably not going to finish Resistance: Fall of Man. I got it because it was cheap and I've heard a lot of good things about Resistance 3 and I wanted to start the series from the beginning. But Resistance was a PS3 launch title, over six years old, and it has aged poorly. It's a fairly good looking game, but it seriously lacks color and the gameplay is very bland. Then it has a problem with checkpoints being too far apart, and where I am in the game is getting fairly difficult. So now it's not exciting, and it's not fun.
So instead of forcing myself to play something I'm not enjoying over and over until I get through it, I'm giving up. I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, and I've started Resistance 2, which is a better game so far. I've got way too many other games to play to suffer through something I'm not enjoying.
#16 – Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (PC)
Blood Dragon is amazing. It's just what I needed right now. I've been a little busy with the house and finishing up this semester. It's been rather hard for me to sit down and concentrate on a single game because I feel like I've got so much else better to do. Blood Dragon was developed in six months on top of the Far Cry 3 assets. It doesn't look like Far Cry 3, but it plays in a pretty similar manner. It's just over five hours long, which was perfect. I've read a few reviews that say it tries too hard, and I didn't see it. It felt like a great homage to low budget 80's sci-fi. It's parts Terminator, Predator, Robot Jox, GI Joe, Robocop, Hardware, and plenty of other references I've forgotten or missed. I loved it.
Cats and dogs in the new house
Today, we moved the cats in. I've got experience in jamming uncooperative cats into travel containers (one time, Genghis got out, and when I tried to get her back in, she peed on me) so I wore my motorcycle jacket and gloves for the process. Sure enough, all of the cats put up a valiant fight, Genghis most of all. She may be tubby and sleep almost all day, but she's at least half ox and very stubborn.
As soon as we let them out at home, Old Fat starts exploring like she owns the place, and Genghis and Gozer find the underside of the bed. While this 9000 year old cat is walking around and seeing the house and not paying any mind to those three dogs, Genghis and Gozer spend almost the whole night under the bed. Since Katie and the dogs have gone (mostly) to sleep, Gozer has come out and looked around, and Genghis has found a nice spot in my office.
Our house is pretty big and we've got way more rooms than people, so in picking out what to do with the rooms, we've designated one as the cat room. It'll be where we put the food and litter box and some cat related stuff. When we brought the cats home, we hastily threw some of the necessities in there, but we haven't really worked out the dog-proofing part yet. See, Chester is a notorious cat turd connoisseur, Harley loves the taste of cat food, and Fawkes just likes to mess with cats sometimes, so it's in our interest and in the cats' interests if we could have a safe room for them to eat and poop in.
For now, we are accomplishing this through monitoring of the dogs. They've been pretty good at staying near us, as they usually are, but since Katie has gone to sleep, Chester has decided that he needed to guard the cat room. You know, in case Harley decided she wanted in there, as if that old dog could do anything to stop her but growl and fart. After I caught him trying to sneak in to grab a late night snack and shooed him into the bedroom, Harley has taken up the charge of defending the cat room.
We might be able to fix this with a cat-climbable gate, but that old cat isn't as spry as she used to be. Or a cat tree with a pad big enough for at least the food. A lot of my ideas center around the whole cats climb better than dogs idea, except Old Fat isn't a great climber or jumper anymore. We're just stuck on how to dog-proof a room from a large-sized dog, a medium-sized dog, and a cat-sized dog, while keeping it available to the world's oldest cat.
What am I doing?
Moving!
Okay but I've been half-heartedly playing Resistance: Fall of Man, Guacamelee, and Vanquish on PS3. Resistance is underwhelming but it was a launch title and actually quite old at this point. Guacamelee is beautiful and fun but I think I've either encountered a bug, or I'm stuck. Vanquish is sliding around on rocket boots.
I've also recommitted to finishing Darksiders 2. Jake finished is not that long ago, which reminded me that I never finished it myself. I thought it was because I'd gotten stuck in it but I loaded up my save and found that I'd just stopped playing.
Here's the thing. I loved Darksiders. I love to tell people it's the best Zelda game ever made, because it's the only one I finished even though it's not actually a Zelda game. It's so close it might as well be. Anyway, it's fantastic. Darksiders 2 isn't bad, but it's different. It's a little more loot-y and a little more grind-y and kind of less Zelda-y. And I think one of my mistakes is that I started on Apocalyptic (hard) difficulty, and I can't go back now because I'm over 16 hours into it and dying on most large fights at least once.
But everything is going slowly because I've been trying to get this house closed on, which I did today, and spending this weekend moving. I might not even have internet again until Monday or Tuesday, which is kind of a bummer. Oh well, awesome house!
#15 – Infamous (PS3)
Infamous came with my PS3, as well as Infamous 2, Uncharted, and Uncharted 2. It was the first game I played on it, and the first of those four that I finished. It does comic book style really well. The story is largely told through comic book framed cutscenes. There's a morality system where you can choose play either a hero or a villain. Your power is electricity, and you can either use that to revive civilians and restrain bad guys, or suck the life out of them. Often the "good" choice is to sacrifice yourself to save others. Actually, that's pretty much the only choice. It's pretty much always damage yourself, or let someone die. It doesn't get much deeper than that, but it doesn't have to; it's a comic book. The ending is a pretty good surprise, except it leaves a bunch of loose ends. It even goes so far to acknowledge those loose ends, so I guess the devs were pretty confident in the probability of a sequel. For being not a huge fan of open world games, I've been completing an awful lot of them lately.
4 out of 5 lightning bolts
#14 – Bioshock Infinite (PC)
The less I say about Bioshock Infinite, the better it is for you who has yet to play it. It looks great, plays great, has an engaging story, and builds a world more immersive than most games I've played. I'm mad that I'm going to have to wait a million years to get another game like this. You don't need to play Bioshock or Bioshock 2 to get into it, even though they're also fantastic. Just get it.
5 out of 5 mechanical George Washingtons
#13 – Proteus (PC)
Proteus is so short, it shouldn't count. Less than 45 minutes for a full playthrough. It's a lot like Dear Esther, except there's no narrative, and the graphics are 8 bit at best. It gives the game a real unique aesthetic. There are different seasons. There are unique landmarks, and the island you're exploring is generated each time you play. It's a less linear experience than Dear Esther, but I feel like there is less to see in Proteus. It's a pretty game, in its own way, and the music reacts to where you are.
But having heard a lot about the immersiveness of this game, I can't help but feel I missed something.
2 out of 5 musical frogs
What am I doing?
It's only been a week but it feels like I've not done enough. On consoles, I'm floundering between God of War 2 (because I have the PS3 collection, and I want to play 3, but I somehow feel the need to finish 2 first) on PS3 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow on Xbox 360.
I picked Lords of Shadow back up because that new 3DS game is out, and I've been playing God of War 2, and I figured I could quickly wrap it up. I was wrong. Last time I played it, I was stuck on the music box level because I rage quit during the lightning bolt section. When I picked it back up again, I managed to stumble through that part and finish the level, but now I'm fighting monsters again and I've completely forgotten how most of that game works, so I'm rage quitting for being frustratingly shitty at it. I still want to finish it but I have to summon up some real willpower to do so first.
On PC, I'm lazily replaying Bioshock 2 because Bioshock Infinite is coming out in a little more than a week and I want to get myself in the right mood. Then Steam had a sale on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that I couldn't resist. I've wanted the game for quite a while. It's not bad. It's kind of like Fable crossed with Elder Scrolls. There's a shitload of stuff to do, but it's mostly fetch quests, which are disappointing. The world is very rich and full of lore, but it's really hard for me to get invested in it because I know nothing more will come from the series. Since I bought it with all the DLC, I ended up with some DLC weapons from the start, which made the beginning of the game entirely too easy, but I've finally gotten to points where I had to think about what I'm doing. I've put 10+ hours into it within the last two days, but I still feel like it's something I'm playing until something better comes along.
I got the wild notion to reinstall Fallout 3 so I could continue my quest to complete its DLC. I hope that doesn't go anywhere because that's a rabbit hole I don't need to fall into any time soon. Gears of War: Judgment comes out this week, and I couldn't be bothered to get excited for it. Nothing leading up to the release has really excited me, and the middling review on Giant Bomb doesn't help matters. I still feel Resident Evil 6 calling my name, but then I also keep thinking of playing Silent Hill: Downpour too. And of all the stupid things, I'm playing Chaos Rings on my fucking phone. Seriously. But I'm not that invested in it.
#12 – Civilization 5 (PC)
Okay, this one is kind of cheating because you can't really finish Civilization 5, but I did finish one game of Civ 5 and it took me over 8 hours to do so. I hit the "play now" button and I got the Iroquois on a small world, continental map with five opponents on "prince" difficulty. I ended up on my own isolated continent (except for two city-states) while almost everyone else ended up on a much larger continent. The exception was another civilization that was just to my south, whom I quickly annexed. My people were mostly unhappy as I had too many cities, too many people, and not enough happiness to go around. Because of my isolation, I had a hard time fighting other countries on the big continent, but they also had a hard time getting to me. I lost a lot of land units in transit, and I ended up bombarding a lot from my ships off the coast. Not effective at taking cities, but plenty damaging to units on land. I spent the early game a little behind in technology, but when it mattered, I was ahead. I finished off with a space victory about 30 turns before the end.
The city-states make an interesting addition, and the "one unit per tile" rule means my attacks were made in waves rather than one pile of units hopping around. Cities seemed rather more difficult to take than Civ 4, and I clearly did not pay enough attention to happiness. I went with a space victory because I was strong on research late in the game, and couldn't muster the culture for a policy victory, no one liked me enough for a UN victory, and conquering everyone would have been a serious slog.
4 out of 5 mohawk warriors
Sleeping Dogs: Nightmare at North Point
If the Zodiac Tournament was a kung fu movie, Nightmare at North Point is a cheesy horror movie, steeped in Chinese mythology. An evil spirit kidnaps your date, and you have to fist fight demons and possessed people to get her back, with the help of some mystical tea, and peachwood swords. There are hell money, yaoguai, restless ghosts, jiang shi, and no police so you can run over and stab whomever you wish! It exists outside of the main game, so it goes rather bonkers at times, with possessed people attacking you at random, and the world constantly raining and night time. It's not the most exciting piece of DLC ever, and it's kind of short, but it's cheap. If you want more Sleeping Dogs, or more Chinese myths, go nuts.