Gaming With GADD

Week ending 7/22/14

Last week the rut was broken thanks to help from the PS2 and I also managed to beat two games that had become GADD staples as of late. Now I don’t know what I’m going to be playing, other than Abyss Odyssey which I purchased and downloaded immediately after submitting GADD last week. So much for waiting for reviews to come in like I was talking about.

Wednesday

Abyss Odyssey
Might as well start the week off with the newest thing. Abyss Odyssey is a VERY light style rogue-like game, where a Warlock is asleep at the bottom of an abyss, and his dreams are manifesting into the real world and destroying it. You play as Katrien, also a manifestation of his dreams, who must travel to the bottom of the abyss and defeat the Warlock in order to wake him up..or kill him. I’m not completely positive. If you die in the abyss you become some random soldier who is much weaker and slower, and must get to an altar in order to revive the main character. If you don’t make it to the altar, then you die for real, somewhat like the Dark Souls series. Upon death you keep all of your experience and money, but lose all your items. You can also set up checkpoints in the abyss, but you have to get checkpoint tokens first and those are far and few between. Jumped right in to a multiplayer co-op session and it literally just drops you RIGHT into the game. Just.. “Here you go. Go play.” We immediately found out that the game is MUCH better suited towards single player, as the connection was really laggy and even if that gets fixed, friendly fire is on and even if you’re attempting to be careful you still wind up beating the hell out of your partner. The combat in this game is really unique for a dungeon crawler though, as it’s almost the exact same as Super Smash Bros. Later on the in the night I went and played it by myself to make sure it was actually better suited for single player and yeah, it’s obviously designed to be played that way since you freakin get a prologue/tutorial that doesn’t even make an appearance in multiplayer. It’s also much more manageable, so much so that I beat the Warlock in my FIRST freakin run through the abyss. I was not expecting that at all, and it only took about an hour and a half to do so. But the game is intended to be played multiple times as the path through the abyss continually changes and you start to unlock more characters to play as, plus I know there were at least a few instances I didn’t see in my one run. Additionally, the Warlock himself is supposed to change when he gets beaten enough times by everyone in the world. One thing that confused me during my run, though, was why do you have the ability to fight the shopkeeper? I fought him and won, but didn’t get anything for it other than a trophy. I know I have to be missing something, as there’s no way that’s the only reason to fight the shopkeepers.

Thursday

Abyss Odyssey
One other game mechanic I forgot to mention yesterday is how you can transform into just about any enemy after you use your special attack on them and turn them into a spirit. Most of the enemies just aren’t very good, due to me just being used to how Katrien controls, but they make good sponges as they have their own separate life bars. I went back into the Abyss with Katrien, instead of using the new character I unlocked, just to see what else I could find in there. I discovered a devil skeleton who gave me an item, but then said he had to hunt me down and kill me for taking it. He got real close, but I killed him and then went on to kill the Warlock again. 2 for 2 on single player runs! I’m the best Abyss Odyssey player in the world! …Then my PS3 froze on me immediately following the fight, with the freaking saving prompt still showing. My data BETTER not be corrupted damnit.

Murdered: Soul Suspect
Instead of going into a ratefit at losing my completions on Abyss Odyssey, I decided to ignore that aspect for now and play Murdered instead. I was really hyped for this game before it came out, because in my head I pictured it was a big budget version of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, which was one of my favorite games of 2011. But then it got closer to release date and it was revealed that the game had combat, and what looked like really shoddy stealth combat at that, and my hype levels went WAY down. I had a code for a free Redbox rental though so I decided to use it on this and see how it went. In Murdered you play as Ronan, a former street thug turned cop with ridiculously ugly tattoos, who is murdered (shocking, I know) at the beginning of the game by the serial killer he was chasing and becomes a ghost. Ronan is unable to cross over to the other side until he finds out just who the killer is, and instead of just ghosting all over the killer and following him until he takes off his mask, he decides to use detective work to figure out who it is, and stop to solve other people’s problems along the way, cause you know…video games. The gameplay consists of investigating crime scenes for clues, until you get enough to answer the main question at the scene. You do this by just looking at shit, or possessing people and reading their minds and/or influencing them to do things. You also have the aforementioned stealth combat, where demons try to destroy your soul or some shit, and you have to hide in ghost trails and move between them until the demon gives up and goes back patrolling a hallway like a lame Metal Gear Solid 1 guard. Then you sneak up behind them and snap their necks, or, you know “exorcise” them. There’s also a BILLION fucking collectibles to get which is really freakin annoying. There seems to be a decent game hidden in here, but it’s buried under a bunch of bullshit. I played through about 2 hours, enough to get through the opening area and solve a few mysteries.

Friday

Murdered: Soul Suspect
Only played a very small amount of this, as I wandered around the town and did whatever side missions I could find, but didn’t advance the story as I decided that passing out drunk was the better option. But one thing I did notice in my play time, is that for a game where you play as a freakin ghost, there are SO many damn boundaries to block you off from where you can’t go. It truly is amazing how many walls a ghost can’t float through.

Saturday

Murdered: Soul Suspect
Completed the church area and did more stupid shitty combat on the way to advancing the story, and the more I play the more I question why I’m continuing to do so. There is just so much dumb shit to fight your way through to get to the decent parts of the game. Speaking of dumb shit….Oh my god, I just went into the police station and there’s a fucking poster for Just Cause 2 hanging up. Just Cause 2 is awesome, but seriously, get the hell out of here with that! I shouldn’t be dying laughing at your game over here, but I am! Did the police station and graveyard as well, and I just want to kill myself every time the stupid demons come out and I have to do more shitty stealth sequences. The gameplay is poor, the combat sucks, and the story is really pretty damn dumb. So why am I playing this again? I HAVE NO IDEA. Tomorrow is the last day though, I’m either beating it or returning it to redbox, because I’m not going to pay for another day on this damn game.

Sunday

Murdered: Soul Suspect
Came in with the intention of powering through this because there was no way I was going to pay Redbox for yet another day on this game. I probably could have had this game beaten on day 2 if it wasn’t for my GADD kicking in. Every time I see a freaking collectible in this game I have to run over and pick it up, even though I have no intentions on trying to collect them all. The only collectibles I’m actually trying to get all of are the area specific ones which give you a cheesy campfire ghost story when you get them all. It took a few hours of powering through the large amounts of crap, but I did wind up beating Murdered today! I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this game is BAD in every aspect. Nothing is inherently broken, it’s just that literally every single aspect of this game is poorly executed. I can only recommend this game if you’re like me and have an unhealthy ability to ingest bad forms of entertainment, and only in rental form. In no way should you spend more than $15 on this game. I’m honestly ashamed of how many collectibles I ended up picking up in my run. While I didn’t get them all, I got somewhere around 170 of them, and that’s far too many. Also, the final reveal of the killer was done so freakin poorly in this game, and I’m going to semi-reveal who it is right now, so if you have any interest in this game, stop reading now. But I just want to say, to all future game makers and just story tellers in general, if you plan on having a shocking reveal as to who your killer is, it might help if you DIDN’T KILL OFF EVERY SINGLE OTHER CHARACTER THAT IT COULD BE BEFOREHAND. KINDA MAKES THAT SHIT OBVIOUS, DON’T YOU THINK?!

NBA 2K14
Didn’t really feel like getting into a full long game session, so NBA was the answer instead. Played game 2 of the Western Semis against the Nuggets and game away with a second straight blowout win.

Monday

NBA 2K14
Finished the series against the Nuggets by losing game 3, but winning games 4 and 5. Game 3 was one of those “fuck you” games, where no matter what happens, the score is going to shift huge to the other team every time you’re on the bench, and you know the game won’t let you win. Responded with a triple double in game 4 (28 points, 13 assists, 11 boards) to take control back and then had a mediocre game 5, but it was still enough to win.

Tuesday

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
I played about an hour to 90 minutes of this back when I first got my PS4, but probably only made about 30 minutes worth of progress, due to my “playing” mostly involving running around like an asshole and attempting to catch fish in the water with my bare hands, knowing full well that I couldn’t. That didn’t stop me from doing it for over half an hour though! My history with the series is as follows: Didn’t like AC 1, I thought the repetitive nature of the game was horrible and got bored with it well before the end. I really liked AC 2 however, and LOVED Brotherhood (best game in the series, anyone who says otherwise is a fool) but thought Revelations was a tired piece of garbage. Never played AC 3, but I hear it was pretty bad as well. I heard good things about IV, plus I needed something to play on the PS4, so I picked it up, but as you can tell, I didn’t actually play it. Today that changes! …Or does it? I went in and started playing my usual Assassin’s Creed style, aka be a jackass and literally drain every single piece of content I can get to before having to do a story mission. But being so early in the game, I don’t even have the freaking hidden blades yet or anything, so after doing a few assassination contracts, I realized it was pretty futile to keep doing this without at least the minimum usual items that one would have while playing an AC game, so I forced myself to ignore all the map markings and go right to the story mission. Then the story mission ended up being a a “trail this guy” mission and fuck that. Those things are easily the worst part of an Assassin’s Creed game, who was the dumbass who decided to put one so early into the game? Nah I don’t feel like messing with that crap right now.

This week was a bit more focused due to me somehow continuing to go back to Murdered until it was beaten, and I feel like next week is once again wide open. Do I go back to Abyss Odyssey? I’d like to think so, cause I don’t want to have just wasted my $12, but you guys know I’ve stopped playing games for less.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

While Murdered was terrible, it was in no way the worst game that I’ve played all the way through to completion. That “honor” would probably to go Jumper: Griffin’s Story for the 360. That game literally has NO redeeming qualities, and is so actively bad that I spent the majority of the game literally screaming at the top of my lungs at the TV over how bad the game was. The only reason I played it all the way through was because I was in a deep achievement whoring stage at that time, and it came fast and furious with the easy high point achievements. What is the worst game you have ever played all the way through?