Week Ending 4-22-13

I can’t believe it, I’m actually sending in an article on time two weeks in a row! For those who weren’t around last week (SHAME ON YOU! Go here to read the debut column) this article is a journey throughout the week as I attempt to play games while dealing with a very serious illness known as Gaming Attention Deficit Disorder, or GADD for short. This makes it almost impossible for me to put real time into any single game because I’m always thinking about what else I could be playing instead. Last week I promised I would stop playing stupid BS nothing games and get into some SERIOUS GAMIN this week. Let’s see how I do…

Tuesday
Off to a hot start this week as I jump straight into action by playing….absolutely nothing! This is going to be the shortest article yet (out of a sample size of…2) if the rest of the week keeps up like this.

Wednesday
I actually played some games today! Well, game at least. I was randomly looking at games and just didn’t feel like playing anything new so I decided to dig deep and pop in

Just Cause 2
Based on what achievements tell me, this is my first time playing Just Cause 2 in just over 2 years. Last time I played I did exactly ONE story mission, so I really don’t know jack about this game other than what I hear on the internet. From what I can tell, you play as Rico Rodriguez, the world’s leading expert in high explosive lulz who loves to post everything he does on Youtube. Also he’s the only person alive who knows how to get on and off the island from Lost. I hear rumors this game might have a real story buried in it somewhere, but who really cares about it when there’s this awesome physics playground to mess with instead? In my playtime I did the second story mission and then just screwed around with some open-world bullshit for an hour or so. At this pace, expect a full review of this game from me sometime in 2038.

Thursday

Credit to CBSNews.com and 2KSports

NBA 2k13
More MyPlayer, more of me being a giant wuss who doesn’t take shots. Don’t really know what else to say about this other than my Bucks keep winning, #2 in the East, 5.5 games back of the Heat. Then later on in the night I went on to play

Cook, Serve, Delicious!
CSD is one of my favorite “waste 20 minutes but somehow wind up playing for 2 hours” games of the past year. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a game where you run a restaurant, but I hesitate the use the word “sim” because that implies making a few decisions and then lying back while your restaurant rakes in the bucks. No, in this game you are constantly active in taking the orders, cooking the food, cleaning the restaurant, replying to tweets, and serving the food to the customers. There isn’t a second when you’re not doing something, and you better be doing it FAST or you’re doomed. I feel like I’m not conveying this properly enough, so here, watch the Giantbomb Quick Look to see what this game is all about.  However my restaurant is build up to the point where I have 7 serving stations, and not just a measly 4, and that just makes the game so damn frantic and stressful, especially when you’re near the end of the day desperate to not mess up your 100% success rate for the day. In fact I’d say it’s TOO stressful, and that’s why I can only play for 2-3 days at a time now, as opposed to a week+ when it was a smaller quieter restaurant. I’m sort of disappointed that I haven’t had to deal with a single robbery yet, just because I’d like to know what those actually look like.

Friday
NBA 2k13
2 more games in MyPlayer. Nothing really to talk about in the first game, however in the second game the Bucks’ 9 game winning streak came to a stop thanks to the Hawks. We fell down 19 in the first half, and then in the second I had 17 points, including 12 in the first 5 minutes of the third quarter, but it still wasn’t enough as we lost by 6. See? I start scoring and it causes us to lose. NEVER SHOOTING AGAIN.

Saturday
Papers, Please
Papers, Please is an indie title that isn’t yet finished, but the beta is currently up for download. In PP you play as an immigration officer in the fictional land of Arstotzka, and your job is to make sure that your country doesn’t get bombed straight to hell. In order to do this you have to make sure that everyone coming into your country has the proper documentation. At first this is just a passport (or ID card for Arstotzka citizens), but as the days progress it winds up getting much more complicated more and more pieces of paperwork are required to enter your glorious motherland. The catch is that while people may have all the paperwork required, certain pages may have conflicting information or it might be expired. It’s your job to notice this and kick their worthless lying asses out. I don’t care if your country is going to murder you if you come back, it’s not MY fault your passport is expired by 3 days! Shoulda checked that shit before trying to illegally enter my country, bitch! So, if this sounds like the type of game you could enjoy, download the beta at http://www.dukope.com  and vote for it on Steam Greenlight so it can have a home after it’s finished. The beta itself only lasts 9 days at this point, so it’s a fairly quick play. After that I dug deep into my games again and pulled out

Credit to Xephfyre

Tales of Vesperia
Cause it’s always a good idea to jump back into the middle of a JRPG that you haven’t played in over 3 years, right? And immediately after loading up I get thrown into a cutscene which then leads directly into a boss fight. GREAT. It went about as well as you’d expect. For those who don’t know, the Tales series uses an active combat system where you directly control the leader of the party, and not just a traditional turn based menu combat system. So therefore, it is definitely possible to be bad at this game’s fighting, which I was BIG TIME in my first Tales fight in over 3 years. I don’t even know why I stopped playing this game, I loved it when I was playing through it years ago. I think I’m pretty deep into it as well, but then just one day…nothing. You may think the title of this article is a joke, but I think this game proves my GADD is real. Anyway, I reloaded and beat the boss on the second go-around and then proceeded to get completely freaking lost. Maybe if I had played at some point in the last 3 years I would know where it wanted me to go, but instead I wound up wandering around for 45+ minutes before accidentally winding up in the correct location. After that I was just so frustrated that I just hit the save point and quit out with the intent to play some more tomorrow.

Sunday
Tales of Vesperia
I KNOW! I’m shocked I actually went back to it too! Two days in a row! My day today started out with an amazing cutscene that I’m sure would have been more impactful if I remembered much at all about the main villain. After that I was sent to the next town, Capua Nor and played some dice because I can’t NOT play stupid sidegames. Hell I spent hours playing a Diner Dash ripoff earlier in this game. After the town shenanigans were done I went into the next dungeon/area, The Blade Drifts of Zopheir. Then I met up with another boss that had it’s way with me. TWICE. The worst part is that it has a long ass cutscene before the fight that, as far as I can tell, is unskippable. I really need to relearn how to not suck at this game’s combat, but not tonight. Maybe sometime later.

Monday
Tales of Vesperia
I’m really killing the gimmick of this article by playing the same game 3 days in a row, aren’t I? Same boss as yesterday. Same death flavor. It REALLY pisses me off when I look up FAQs for how to beat this asshole and everyone is just “HEY NO PROBLEM! THIS GUY IS EASY AS SHIT! YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT HIM!” Yeah? Screw you assholes!

Yeah, that’s it for this week.

OR IS IT?! Loaded the game up one more time before writing this article, and I *finally* defeated that boss! I won’t have to watch that pre-fight cut scene ever again! I can end this article on a happy note now!

So I decided to add a new feature to this article, the question of the week, mainly because I was thinking about this as I was writing it. Who knows if I’ll really do it every week, but for now I plan on it.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

Why do so many members of the fighting game community hold alternate costumes in such high regard? It seems there are loads of players who are willing to pay tens of dollars just for more costumes for their favorite fighter, despite the fact that they’re purely cosmetic and do nothing to actually affect gameplay whatsoever. The fighting game community as a whole likes to see itself as “above” other genres, but then they fall for this League of Legends-esque bullshit. Shouldn’t they hold themselves to a higher standard than this type of robbery? If you’re a fighting game fan who buys alternate costumes, please comment and tell me why. I can see the appeal in the costumes themselves, but why spend actual dollars on Barbie costumes for your big muscle men (or women?)