Week ending 1/7/14

Well it’s the new year, and you know what that means? Promises of sweeping changes, only to wind up with everything being exactly the same. So instead I’ll just skip that point and acknowledge there will be no changes to this article any time soon. I was actually tempted this week to try and look for a PS4, but then I took another look at the current library and wisely decided to pass.

Wednesday

Peggle
Blinking lights and dinging noises make me feel happy. Sometimes I don’t even pay attention to what I’m doing. If you’re playing Peggle seriously you’re kinda doing it wrong anyway.

Fight Night Champion
More of story mode. The game is forcing me to actually block now. Who the hell wants to do that in video game boxing? I want to knock bitches out in under 2 rounds. I don’t want to go the distance, that’s bullshit. However, in good news, I figured out how to punch people in the dick! YEAH!

Thursday

Fight Night Champion
Ok so now the story mode is just becoming bullshit. All of a sudden one of the guys you fight is basically a vampire, and every time he clinches with you, it SEVERELY lowers your maximum stamina. Seriously unless I somehow failed to notice, this hasn’t been the case yet with any other boxer. That just completely takes me out of it and makes it feel way to arcadey. Is Bald Bull up next?

SSX
Also bought during the XBox sale last week. Honestly I can’t say too much about this right now because the single player mode is almost a tutorial for the real online game..and the servers are down right now. EA didn’t kill the servers for this game ALREADY, did they? I sure hope not, because what I have played is really fun, even if it does seem easier than any other SSX before. As long as you’re anywhere near a rail it’ll basically magnetize you onto it, and is way more lenient on letting you land when you really shouldn’t have.

Friday

SSX
I decided to try this again, and was pleased to see the servers were up. EA didn’t pull the plug, there were just server issues yesterday. There are still a ridiculously low number of players on this, but I guess that’s what happens to the majority of online games almost two years after their release. The core game is a bunch of fun, but it sucks that there’s no real head to head multiplayer, instead you’re racing against ghosts of their best times or scores. I’m still only about a third of the way through the single player mode even. There’s definitely a lot of game to be had, but the question is, without a full compelling online mode, do I care?

Saturday

Had some company over Saturday night, so the games were getting switched out fast and furious. There were more games that were played, but if they were played for like 10 minutes or less, what’s the point of me doing a writeup on them?

Cloudberry Kingdom
Downloaded Cloudberry Kingdom and gave that a go. Cloudberry Kingdom is a multiplayer masocore platformer, but it disguises itself by being pretty easy and accessible for the first 20-30 levels or so. Levels are normally only about 20 seconds, so that’s not exactly a lot. Story mode switches it up by giving you different variables added every 10 stages. Sometimes you can double jump, sometimes you have a rocket, sometimes you’re a fucking jet for no reason at all, etc. While the story mode levels are fun, the real long term draw is probably in free play, where you can just tell the game what type of level you want, the difficulty, what kind of powers you want your character to have, and it’ll just procedurally generate a stage for you. This was played until we decided we were too drunk to try and continue at the difficulty level it had escalated to, so we moved onto something else.

Fight Night Champion
Discovered that at some point the Fight Night series put in weight class limits. You can’t fight anyone more than two weight classes above or below you. So much for my dream of beating up Mike Tyson with the one bantamweight in the game. I don’t really have much else to say about this game that I didn’t say last week, except that with company the “new” stamina system didn’t go over very well. I’m pretty sure it’s the same system that’s always been in the game, but the stamina bar was never put on the screen by default before.

Rock of Ages
I’ve written about this game before in prior GADDs. It’s tower defense meets Super Monkey Ball meets Monty Python, but nobody cares about that right now! This reason it’s in GADD this week is because of the skeeboulder mode, where you and an opponent both simultaneously roll a giant boulder down a course trying to knock over targets, and at the end you hit a ramp and launch your ball into a giant skeeball target. It’s a GREAT drinking game.

Cloudberry Kingdom
We then decided to go back to Cloudberry Kingdom because we had a lot of fun with it earlier in the night. Turns out that wasn’t the best idea after a night full of drinking. We were in NO WAY equipped to handle the shit this game was throwing at us. After completing somewhere around 160 levels earlier in the night, I don’t think we were able to pass 10 on the second go around before we came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t gonna happen anymore.

Sunday

Cloudberry Kingdom
Turns out this game isn’t as fun to play solo as it is in multiplayer. Part of the fun is mocking your friends for how badly they suck, but when you’re playing solo, well…you’re the only one there to suck. Still gonna try to power my way through the story mode, but holy hell is this game starting to get hard. If you’re gonna get this, play it with friends, you’ll have a much better time that way.

Monday

Cloudberry Kingdom
THIS GAME IS A FUCKING CUNTY BITCH! I mean that in the nicest way possible, of course. Holy hell I’m still having fun, but this game is making me want to throw my controller through the damned TV more than any game this side of Super Meat Boy. Not even Trials Evo got this frustrating. You wanna strap me onto a wheel, and then attach rockets to that damn wheel?! Holy shit that’s SO DAMN HARD to control. Plus the game doesn’t even give you checkpoints anymore?! Man……fuck this game. Up to chapter 6(of 7) and I have somewhere around 60 levels left.

Long Live The Queen
So…….yeah. This happened. I bought this during the Steam end of year sale, despite having no clue what this was or what it was about. Turns out it’s a life-sim style anime game, where you play as a 14 year old princess. OH FUCK, I probably got put on some kind of watch list just for buying this game, didn’t I? The game starts with your father, the King, pulling you out of school after the death of your mother, the Queen. The majority of the gameplay is determining which of her *32* skills you want to have her trained in, in order to try and make her a better princess/future queen. Skills range from stuff like dancing, to archery, to falcon training, to elegance and everything in between. The catch is that the princess is also moody, cause..duh, teenage girl here. You have to control her moods and try to adjust them to how you want her to feel, because different moods give bonuses and penalties to your ability to train her in certain skills. After you have her train for the week, the game then pops up scenes that will most likely do skill checks for whatever is needed for the scene being displayed. Depending on if you pass or fail the skill check, the scene will obviously play out differently, and potentially change the entire story for the rest of your game. The problem with this, however, is that the game gives you almost NO indications as to what could possibly be coming up, and you have no idea what skills to train, especially in your first play-through, so you wind up failing SO MANY skill checks and wind up feeling like shit about your play through. In addition, you’re tasked with making so many important decisions about your kingdom. What the hell dad? I’m still only 14 here, and you’re still the damned king! Why don’t YOU make some of these damn decisions?! My first play-through was a comedy of errors, largely because I never learned anything about history and my princess had no idea what was going on in her own lands. I was eventually murdered by an assassin on the way to my friend’s birthday party, after being shot in the gut with an arrow, and then my idiot princess decided to jam it further into her own body to try and stop the bleeding. ….She failed the medical knowledge check, obviously. Yeah that’s right, you will flat out get MURDERED in this game. It doesn’t give a damn that you’re only 14. Hopefully this was at least a learning experience, so that I’ll know what to train in next time.

Tuesday

Long Live The Queen
I DIDN’T LEARN A DAMN THING! Holy crap my second play-through was almost as bad as my first one. I feel like I passed a few more checks this time than before, mainly because I had her train her ass off in public speaking and manners and all that stuff. I decided to completely change my decisions this time through and make her a snotty stuck up princess who didn’t really care about anyone other than herself. As such, I had her skip over the birthday party, cause fuck that, there’s assassins outside the walls! I screwed up when I eventually did have her make a public appearance for some kind of battle tournament(I think) and some kid charged up to me wanting to duel because I had supposedly had someone in his family executed. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. It’s not like they were the only one, I’m a busy girl! I have lots of executin’ to do! Either way, he stabbed me to death, probably while my worthless guards were just watching and not doing shit.

Cloudberry Kingdom
Didn’t go into story mode today, didn’t want to deal with that headache. so I went into Arcade mode for the first time. Arcade mode gives you a set number of lives, and just keeps throwing levels at you until you run through them all, all the while keeping score. I was doing really well until level 50 or so, and then the difficulty just seemed to ramp up. Oh well, at least I got the achievement for 500K in arcade mode(nowhere close to the 1.5m achievement though.)
I might be way off here, but I feel like this is the longest GADD ever, which definitely pleases me. Just don’t tell anyone about my penchant for playing with 14 year old girls?

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

I feel like this might have already come up in a previous GADD, but since I had to deal with it again this week….man, how much does it suck when games have online ONLY multiplayer? How ridiculous is it when you can play a game with someone sitting right there beside you?