Not sure how many have noticed, but I’ve been a bit absent in doing the whole weekly gaming thing for the past few weeks. My apologies, but life has taken hold of me a bit with my girlfriend moving away for college and I just haven’t had the time to get a lot of gaming in nor have the time to sit down and really write about it. This weekly gaming update will be a bit more then the past week or so and will cumulate a few weeks of gaming.
I’ve been putting in some time on quite a few games lately. I purchased Battlefield 1943 a while ago and have been sitting down and actually playing a bit over the past few weeks. There are two things I have learned during this time spent with the game; the first being that overall the game delivers and is a ton of a fun and the second being I am not very good at it. I probably average maybe 3 kills a game and when compared to the 10-15 or so that the top leaders average I’m doing a pretty piss poor job. Regardless, I’m enjoying the time I’ve spent with the game and it is definitely a load of fun. More often then not, I find myself left at the base initially without any sort of transport so I eventually get to the firefight a lot later then everyone else. Maybe my strategies suck? Maybe I’m just not that great at FPS games, but I’m still enjoying the time I’ve spent with it.
I also recently purchased three XLBA games; Castle Crashers, ‘Splosion Man and Shadow Complex. I’ve played a bit of the Castle Crasher’s demo and enjoyed it, but haven’t gotten around to playing the full version. I have spent a bit of time with ‘Splosion Man and I’m definitely enjoying it. First thing is first, that game is difficult. Haha, I typically start out any game I play on the “normal” difficulty as easy tends to be too easy and anything higher then normal tends to be too difficult for me. ‘Splosion Man may seem like a very simplistic game as there is really one only thing and one thing only you can do; explode. These explosions allow you to kill enemies and climb walls, but that is all you do. Run and explode, run and explode. Based on that simplistic premise I didn’t really know where they could go with the game, but damn they went places and they went places that are difficult. The game gets progressively more and more fast paced as you move on and had me sitting on the edge of my seat many times and induced the desire for me to throw my controller at the TV screen. I’m pretty sure the face paced action of the game also set my blood pressure into overdrive at some points. I’m not really sure how far into the game I am, I believe I’m at level 1-10 and I don’t know how far the game goes on, but I’m loving it. Definitely a game worth purchasing and definitely a game that has a lot more then it appears.
I’ve also spent a tiny bit of time playing Shadow Complex. I initially downloaded the trial because I heard so many people talking about it and I wanted to know what it was all about. I enjoyed the trial enough that I purchased the full game later that day. I haven’t had enough time to get very far into it, but so far I’m enjoying it. It’s interesting to see and play what is essentially an updated side scroller. Maybe I haven’t been playing console games long enough, but I haven’t seen a lot of updated side scrollers like this one, at least not in the sense of the art style. This game could easily be an FPS and has the generally same graphics as most FPS games, but you only have 4 options for movement; up, down, forward and backward and that’s it. I’ve gotten to, I suppose, what could be the first “boss” in the very beginning of the game. I haven’t gotten around to beating him yet, but I might take another shot at it tonight after work. Definitely enjoying my time spent with the game and would highly recommend.
One of my most recent “boxed” game purchases is Wolfenstein. I never played the original Wolfenstein games…well, I suppose that is incorrect…I played one of the very, very first versions of Wolfenstein on my parent’s old Apple IIe. I’m talking about a game with stick figures played on a black and green screen. I never played Wolfenstein 3D, but towards the end of high school I did start playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein and it quickly became my favorite FPS and most of my evenings after school and soccer practice were spent on an empty hill on a beach, with a sniper rifle clutched in my grasp, picking of Nazi’s. I continued to play the game through college and eventually stopped at some point to start devoting my free time to World of Warcraft. To this day, RtCW is my favorite FPS MP game ever. Forget Halo, forget Counter Strike…for me it’s RtCW. So needless to say, I was elated to hear iD and Raven was releasing a new title to the franchise. I picked it up on release day and have put about 30 minutes to an hour into it. Now, that’s not enough time to write a decent review of the game (which I intend on doing by the end of this week *crosses fingers*), but it was enough time to explore the world a little bit and get used to the game. So far so good, but I haven’t played enough to make a solid opinion of it. As soon as I installed it (I bought it for my PC since it was $10 cheaper, I knew none of my 360 friends would be purchasing it, it came with a $10 gift card…which I lost …and I’m much better at PC based FPS then console) I fired up the MP since the reviews for it have been relatively “meh” and that was the one thing I was most looking forward to. Unfortunately, there was barely anyone online and I didn’t get the chance to jump into a game. Hopefully since the game has been out for about a week, I’ll have better luck in the near future.
Aside from all these new games, there is my good old standby, World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten too much time to play recently due to the girlfriend moving and life being hectic. I’ve gotten my blood elf pally up to level 67 and with the release of patch 3.2, was able to purchase a new flying mount. Holy cow, having a flying mount is damn near the best thing ever. No more having to find the appropriate path to avoid mobs or having to find the appropriate path through a valley…I can just jump on my flying mount and get the f*** out of there. It’s glorious, truly glorious. If you pay any attention to the WoW universe, you’ll know that Blizzcon happened this past weekend. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the next WoW expansion and I think I might write a feature on it later this week or next. I realize this isn’t a WoW blog and there are a lot of other places out there to get a lot more information on these things, but I’ll probably put together a quick write up of what I’m most excited for. I consider myself to not be an a-typical WoW player (maybe I am?) in the sense that I don’t raid and haven’t really reached any end game content so I think I get more excited about things that people are less excited about. The main thing that makes me squee with joy is the fact that they are REDOING ALL THE OLD WORLD CONTENT, OMG! But I’ll get more into that in my feature.
I think that’s about it for my gaming activities as of late. I really need to sit down and finish Battlefield: Bad Company considering how close I am to beating it. I think I have this disease that prevents me from ever completing games. I always buy them, start them and at some point abandon them. I’m pretty sure Portal, Half Life and Bioshock are the few games that I’ve actually beaten and completed. I didn’t even beat Diablo II or the SP campaign of RtCW. That’s definitely something that needs to change.
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