Week ending 1/21/14

Man, I didn’t write an intro at all last week did I? That sure looked weird. I have no idea what my goals are for this week except maybe to drudge my way through some more Cloudberry Kingdom and see if Remember Me gives a better second impression? Other than those two it’s all up in the air. I have a few more AWFUL used games that I picked up after trading in a Christmas gift, so maybe I’ll get into those as well?

Wednesday

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure
The very first thing that happened when I opened this game up was an update. An update for an XBox Live INDIE game. When the shit does that ever happen? Turns out the update was to include stuff that was in the game’s Steam release, turning it into Super Amazing Wagon Adventure TURBO. This game is just flat out amazing, and it’s a dollar. Everybody with an XBox 360 should be forced to buy it. It’s $3 on steam so it’s not *as* much of a slam dunk as it is on XBox, but $3 is still a pretty great price for this game. It’s essentially a super ridiculous version of The Oregon Trail, but turned into a dual joystick shooter. Well, sometimes it’s dual joystick, sometimes it’s single joystick. You’re presented with short scenes and basically just have to survive until the game throws you another scene. There’s a very loose sense of a story progression here, but it’s basically just survive enough scenes and win. Each game is very fast, lasting somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, if you’re good enough to survive that long. My first run-through it went to shit immediately. I was clearly out of rhythm with this game and eventually died via a zombie turkey pecking my brains out. So clearly this is a 100% historically accurate game, in case you were unsure. I got further the second time, but then I decided to pick up a magical sword and ninjas killed me to get it back. On both my third and fourth playthroughs, I ended up dying in the exact same spot, when ninjas on a raft killed me while I was floating down a river (avoiding crocodiles and rocks as well.) I felt really good about the last playthrough, but it broke REAL bad when I hit the river.

Remember Me
I decided to go back into this and give it another shot…and it froze up my 360. I think someone is trying to send me a sign. A little while later I tried it again and it finally went well. The game’s mechanics really remind me of a watered down Prince of Persia, which is a mostly good thing. The fighting system WANTS to remind you of Batman, but it’s nowhere near as smooth or fluid, which is why I’m saying Prince of Persia instead. However I’m not sure why all the background NPCs want to treat my character like she’s a hooker. Seriously, every person you walk by is all “No I’m not interested,” “Hey thanks but you’re not my type,” “We don’t want your type over here,” “Oh they’ll let anyone into this district,” and more like that. I didn’t play a lot of this, but I got to the first memory remix where you hack into someone’s brain and interact with certain parts of their memories to make them remember things differently than they actually happened. It was a cool puzzle-esque sequence, but at the same time they would probably get old if used too much.

UNO
Same as last week, this was actually played just about every day, but I don’t really have much to say about it at all.  It’s just background stuff to appease my ADD.

Thursday

Borderlands 2
Started this up co-op with the same person I ran through Borderlands 1 with months ago. Man, it’s awkward starting over in this game, because by the end of Borderlands 1 we were unstoppable killing machines. Now we have to be tactical and actually worried about dying? Shit man, that sucks. We were planning on just dabbling in it, but wound up playing for something close to 4 hours before deciding it was time to stop. I’m using Zero, the assassin character, and as of yet don’t really like his special skill. It just doesn’t feel anywhere near useful enough and am mostly ignoring it at this point. We killed what was essentially the first actual boss in Captain Flynt, and might possibly burn through this game pretty fast if we keep putting up 4+ hour game sessions.

Friday

Fortune Street
I have a friend who loves this game, so I decided to play it with him, even though it normally puts my ass to sleep. Fortune Street is a Wii board game, but can in no way be described as a “party” game. It’s a very slow mental game that is basically Monopoly, but also has a stock market aspect attached to it in where you can invest in properties and wind up either getting a percentage of the rent when other people land on it or just have your shares go up when the properties themselves get more valuable. This Wii also has a Hitler Mii on it because it was the first damn thing that popped up in his Mii Plaza when he first got the Wii, so OF COURSE it had to be downloaded. Sadly, after 2+ hours of just playing on the one board (Normally a game lasts 2-3 hours unless someone just jumps out with an early monopoly and builds on it immediately) we were both dominated by CPU Hitler. I mean DOMINATED. The two of us and the other CPU player *combined* still didn’t even reach his total score at the end of the game.

Saturday

Fortune Street
We jumped into another board with the hope of bringing down Hitler’s reign of tyranny, and for an hour or so that looked like it was gonna happen. Then that fucker just freaking went off and won the game by over 5000 somehow (game was to 20,000 so that’s a large margin)

Sunday

Cook, Serve, Delicious!
Once again I loaded this up as something to do during halftime of the NFC Championship game, because actually watching football halftime shows is a fate worse than death. I felt like I was a little bit more into the rhythm this week, thanks to it only being a week since I had last played, instead of 8 months. Slowly making progress to getting my restaurant to 4 stars, but I’ll really need to play more than 1 in-game day per week if I want to get there before this computer eventually explodes due to all the hidden evil inside it, like computers are often want to do.

Remember Me
Ok I’ll admit I was barely paying attention to what was being said, but I’m pretty sure that as soon as I loaded up my save, the voice in my ear told me to go to Michael Rotunda. Who knew this game was secretly all about paying your taxes? I really wish the environments in this game were more interactive. It tries to give you a vibe like it’s an actual city, with tons of shops and vendors, including some of them being closed saying that they’re only open between certain hours, but as far as I can tell there’s no ACTUAL time system in this game and you can’t actually purchase or look at any goods. It’s just a giant tease of what could have been. Oh man the technobabble in this game is ASTOUNDINGLY bad. Remembranes? Errorists? Some other shit that I can’t remember but is equally bad?

Monday

Borderlands 2
We were planning on getting in another long co-op session today, until half an hour in and my headset suddenly died, even though it had been charging overnight. Yeah that’s great. I’m glad my new headset is a piece of shit that can’t hold a charge. I think we got literally two missions in. However in that time we discovered our winning strategy for at least this early portion of the game. He runs out and is a fleshy meat sack used to bait the enemies into the open, and I snipe them from a safe distance while he takes all the damage. It’s working out GREAT for me so far, plus my badass rank is almost 20 levels above his. Let’s just keep this our secret for now though, ok? I don’t want him to think he’s being used.

Ib & Obb
I’m writing this less than an hour after I stopped playing, and I literally have no memory of what happened in this game.

Remember Me
It seems like the best parts of this game happen immediately after I load it up. I was just treated to an ad for a “X-Mas Murder Compilation” on one of the TVs in game. Sadly I can’t actually order it. Oh good, just when I was starting to feel like maybe I was overreacting with my claims of misogyny the other day, one of the guards I’m fighting just called me a “damn whore.” That makes me feel better. It turns out the X-Mas Murder commercial was actually just a piece of buildup for a future boss, who I just killed live on his TV show while his flying droid cameramen filmed it. That’s…actually kinda cool. I feel like I’m starting to come around on this game actually. I’m starting to warm up to the story, and the actual level design has been pretty great so far, artistically speaking. On a technical level the graphics may not be much to speak of, but from an artistic standpoint, the levels are just great pieces. That boss fight took me to the end of Chapter 2, and that seemed like a good place to stop for the night.

Tuesday

Cloudberry Kingdom
I just came to the realization today that I hadn’t played Cloudberry all week, so I felt like I needed to at least play it some or you guys would miss my impotent rage, right? Well joke’s on you, cause I didn’t go into the story mode! I just couldn’t bear that kind of soul crushing sadness today! Instead i just played some Arcade mode and actually had fun instead, like a bitch. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the 1.5 million in arcade mode that one of the achievements wants, but you never know?

Grand Theft Auto V
Have you guys heard of this? It’s a small game, not too many people played it. It should really get more exposure as it’s surprisingly decent considering how small the budget was. In all seriousness I played a decent amount of this when I was on the road, when I had the time to do so. I just never got around to playing it anymore after I got back home. I’m probably about halfway through the main story, as I just completed the Paleto Bay Heist. I can’t wait til you stop working for the FIB and get to blast those fools. I feel like this game would just be so much better if it wasn’t for all the driving. I know that’s a weird complaint to have for a GTA game, but man, when you get a mission and see it’s halfway across the map, it just fucking kills your mood. I’m not gonna drive that shit, call a cab damnit! Sorry Rockstar, but your giant open worlds are no longer appealing to me. I mean sure, there’s a bunch of stuff in them you can do, but why would you? Who gives a shit about yoga, tennis, golf, hanging out at a bar, playing darts, or ANY of that shit? Just having a big world with a bunch of stuff in it doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s no longer impressive on it’s own, now it has to be stuff that’s actually entertaining.
So there’s another week with no Long Live the Queen. I’m actually bummed about that, but I’m more bummed that I didn’t even realize it until I started writing this ending up, which means I’m probably never going back to it ever again. Also didn’t get into any of the awful games I touched on at the beginning. Man I never know what I’m actually gonna wind up playing. Hell sometimes I spend more time deciding what to play than I do actually playing it. True story.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

We’ve seen that I play through a shit ton of games at a time, which often leaves games left behind, forgotten, and not touched again for months. What about you? How many games at a time do you normally play? I think most normal people try to only have 2-3 active games going. I think?