Gaming With GADD

Week ending 7/29/14

Well last week I bought, enjoyed, and quickly became disenchanted with Abyss Odyssey, after beating it twice and having it freeze while saving my second beating of the game, and possibly losing save data. I then proceeded to rent and beat Murdered: Soul Suspect and…yeah, that was certainly something special alright. I know I say every week that I don’t know what I’m going to play, but seriously, other than continuing to bore you guys with tales of my NBA 2K14 playoffs, I really have no clue what else is going to come up this week.

Wednesday

NBA 2K14
Hey I warned you guys right at the top! I had to kill a little bit of time, but couldn’t get too into anything, so I played game 1 of the Western Conference Finals against the Thunder, and completely dominated them in the process. At one point Marcin Gortat (yeah, I didn’t update rosters before starting MyCareer! So what?!) and I had combined for 36 points without missing a single shot.

Destiny beta
Later on in the night I happened to go onto Twitter right when Sony released some Destiny beta keys, and I managed to snag one of them! Those of you who read my E3 writeups will remember that I had slight interest in Destiny there, and as comparisons to Borderlands started to become more common, my interest level started going up considerably as well. I was psyched when I first got the code…and then less psyched when I discovered I would have to download over 11 gigs on PSN’s slow ass servers, which ended up taking somewhere around 3 and a half hours. By the time it was done, it was almost 2 AM, so I really only did the character creator and the opening single player tutorial stage before going off to bed.

Thursday

Destiny beta
As soon as I log in, I’m informed that there will be some kind of stress test on Saturday and those who participate will get a free…something-or-other in the main game. So of course I won’t be at home on Saturday to take advantage of it. I played way more of this game than I was originally planning to, simply because it’s an FPS, but man is it so damn fun. I think I discovered the secret to making me care about a FPS: loot. Loot helps in EVERY video game, I defy you to find me one game that wouldn’t be improved with loots and numbers to compare against other numbers to decide if you want the new loot. Hell, it’s STILL a rush to get an unidentified object and have to take it back to Not-Deckard Cain and have to stay a while and listen to figure out what kind of loot you actually got. Also I’m sure the Sci-Fi aspect helps as well, because it sure as shit beats boring ass military guys. Reached level 6 today, and found out that they dropped the requirement for a beta key, so I was special for all of about 12-18 hours. The layout of the game is interesting in that when you’re in the world, it’s semi-massively online where you have a handful of people running around and killing shit with you, but as soon as you cross the barrier into the mission area, it gets instanced only you and the people on your fire-team are present. There’s also one open world option (still set on the same world as every other mission) where you don’t have any storyline advancing missions, but a few mini-missions that you can get by finding beacons spread across the map. I accidentally wandered into some BAD places with enemies way higher than I was (including some “Level ???” enemies that couldn’t be hurt) and also found a random public event where myself and another level 6 guy were the only ones to make it there in time, and had to stop a level 9 boss before he could hit four checkpoints. We didn’t even come CLOSE, completely miserable failure. I played solely by myself since I did all my time in the game today before they opened it up to everyone, and I really didn’t feel like playing with random assholes.

Friday

Destiny beta
Played a few more hours of this today, but only gained one level as I spent most of the day helping my usual co-op partner barrel his way through missions and not getting much XP for myself. I played some competitive stuff in the Crucible later on, and it’s basically just a zone domination mode that I sucked HARD in, due to my inexperience in FPS games. How badly did I suck? Well, our team of 6 scored somewhere around 19500 for the match, and my contribution to that was a whopping 675 points, with a brutal 0.13 K/D ratio. I then went into the Strike mode, which is a forced three player co-op mission. And man, is it a LONG freakin mission, approximately the length of three regular missions, with three bosses who are each very tough and you’ll die repeatedly to them. It was probably at least 45 minutes……and then the servers disconnected me and my team when we almost had the final boss killed. LIVE BETA FOLKS! It was maybe a good thing that the servers died though, since I didn’t realize what time it was, and I was supposed to be leaving to go out of town half an hour ago!

Saturday

Out of town all day, didn’t play anything

Sunday

Destiny beta
Got back into town late so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to play Destiny, but I did more co-op with my usual partner and took him through the rest of the “regular” missions, hitting the level cap along the way. At some point we wound up wandering into a giant freakin battle, where a few other guys were fighting what turned into literally over 50 decently leveled (6 and up) enemies. It was intense as shit and REALLY fun, especially since I got to pretend to be competent again! At some point during the fight I picked up another unidentified gun and had to take it back to Not-Deckard, and it turned out to be a level 10 weapon? Why the hell would you even put that in the beta?! That just seems mean to taunt me with a gun that you know I can’t use, and will likely not carry over to the final game. Since this is the last day of the beta, I’ll just give my overall impressions here. I had a lot of fun playing it, way more than I thought I would based on it being a FPS, and am super hyped for the main game. Granted, I am worried that I hit level 8 so easily and the level cap in the full game is supposedly only 20, so there is concern as to how big the full game actually is. Also by the time the game comes out on September 9th, I’ll likely be back on the road and stuck with shitty hotel WiFi where I would be unable to play the game if I even had the time to. If for some reason I’m still at home when the game comes out, I’ll likely be buying it day 1, but if I’m not it’ll just give me more time to figure out if my concerns about the amount of content in this game are justified or not.

Monday

NBA 2K14
Didn’t feel like getting deep into any one single game, so back to NBA it is! Came back to it at multiple points over the day, and ended up finishing off the Thunder with a sweep, and I’ll be playing the Heat in the finals, who just swept the Bulls in the ECFs.

Tuesday

Stick It To The Man
Holy hell it’s been a long time since this game appeared in a GADD. I saw it sitting there on the menu and was like “why the hell did I stop playing this again? Did I just get distracted by newer shinier things?” and decided to go back into it. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, as I went from chapter 6 all the way through the end of the game! I made a few discoveries in literally the final chapter that I was amazed I didn’t know before then. The first one, and one that makes me just feel like a complete idiot, was my discovery that hitting the square button brings up a map. I seriously did not know this until now, and it probably would have been useful to have a few times in the game. The second discovery, one that maybe I wasn’t supposed to know until the end, was that the main villain of this game is literally named The Man. Also, I don’t want to spoil what is literally one of the last things you do in this game, but I LOVE the way you defeat The Man. One of the more clever ways to take care of the main villain in a game, and it had me snickering the whole time. Those of you who “purchased” the game when it was free on PS+ should go and play it instead of just letting it sit there in your account. Those who have to actually pay for it? It’s debatable if it’s worth it depending on your tastes in gaming, but if you miss the days when adventure games were legitimately funny, you should pick this up as well.

So I only played a grand total of three games this week. Not very GADD like, and I beat a game for the third week in a row. What the hell is going on here? It’s almost like I’m turning into a regular person, and that thought scares me to death! Next week should see different games rotated into the lineup since I beat one game and literally am unable to play another. I still have this Infamous: Second Son that’s been sitting here unopened since I bought my damn PS4………naaaaaaaaaah.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

Destiny was definitely a game that took me out of my usual wheelhouse, as I don’t enjoy too many first person shooters, but I still had a blast playing that. Another example of this was Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits for the PS2. I normally can’t stand S-RPGs, but I just couldn’t put that one down for whatever reason, and blazed through it in ridiculous time for me, and even a ridiculous time for most non-GADD riddled people. What are some examples of games you like in genres you normally wouldn’t touch?