Gaming With GADD

Week ending 12/11/14

Last week we had a rare occurrence in GADD, I actually finished a game! Yes, DmC went down, can I make it two games in two weeks? Not very likely, but let’s find out!

Friday

Titan Attacks!
Picked this up because it was one of the free PS+ games this week, and it seems like it’s JUST a Space Invaders clone with a few different enemy patterns. It seems fun, but there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before. The extremely slow rate of fire initially makes it hard to be precise when shooting, although I imagine that’s something you would eventually get used to if you put enough time into it.  But I just don’t think I’ll be putting enough time into it.

Saturday

You Don’t Know Jack (2011)
Some may claim that it’s pointless to play a trivia game by yourself, but you know what? I’m fuckin undefeated! Can they claim that?! Yeah, didn’t think so, suckers.

Tales of Xillia
According to my save data it’s been almost six months since the last time I played, and I don’t remember shit about what’s going on in the story, but as longtime GADD readers know, that’s nothing new to me. For those who aren’t longtime GADD readers, I freakin loved Tales of Vesperia to the point where it’s one of my top 10 games of the last generation. But then I followed that up by playing Tales of Graces F, which I found to be completely fucking unplayable due to an inferior combat system and horrible anime bullshit stereotype characters. I’ve only played a few hours of Xillia so far, and while I don’t remember specifics of the story, I do remember liking what I’ve seen so far from this game. I played for about an hour and a half and made my way to a new town, Nia Khera, although I have no idea why I want to be there. I did completely clear a dungeon and beat a boss, although it’s a bit less exciting when there were still tutorials going on while I was in the dungeon. Yeah, I know that 4-5 hours into a JRPG isn’t deep, but I would have that that would be enough to get out of the tutorials. Also I’m just now realizing that I haven’t seen a world map yet. Did they drop the world map in Xillia, or has the game not opened up enough for me to see a world map yet? I’ve been to multiple dungeons and three different towns, so I’m starting to think there’s just no world map in this game.

Sunday

You Don’t Know Jack
Didn’t have much time at all to play games due to, again, football. Played another two rounds of Jack though, I’m just in it for the simultaneously witty and completely juvenile humor.

WWE Supercard
Last week when I said I play this on an average of 20-30 minutes a day, but just didn’t do enough to write about it? Yeah that’s turned back into an hour or more a day now. I don’t know WHY I’ve suddenly been sucked back into this game, other than the climb to get into Survivor rank, which goes REALLY slowly now that they’ve nerfed the KOTR rewards.

Monday

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
So I played some of this back around when it was released, and just never went back to it. It certainly seemed like a fine game, but I didn’t get the hype behind it. One of my friends has been playing it lately and loving it, so I decided to give it another shot. I really think the game is perhaps TOO open at the beginning and should force you into a few story missions before just giving you the entire world to run around in, because it’s all just a bit overwhelming before you understand what everything actually means. Of course I write this, but I didn’t actually do any story missions at all today. Instead I just ran around and killed a whole bunch of captains and did a few side missions.

Tuesday

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Hey, guess what?! I didn’t do any story missions today either! The combat in this game is fun, but this aimless wandering without feeling like I’m making any progress is going to kill me in the long run because it’s just going to make me completely lose interest. I know I should do story missions and make progress, but the map has all these other non story icons plastered all over it! I’ve said it in this article before, and I’ll say it again; having a completionist mindset but also having GADD is the worst fucking thing. It’s a great way to ensure that absolutely NOTHING gets done.

Tales of Xillia
Ok so that fetch quest wasn’t much of a pain in the ass at all, as it turns out the items I needed were pretty obvious in town, and it was really just a “hey go walk around and familiarize yourself with the town layout” type of quest. After that quest I did a few side missions for the people in town, which all just led to me getting a new cosmetic item to put on your characters. On one hand, that’s not exactly hugely rewarding and it makes me wonder if I’m going to keep doing side missions if that’s really all you get, but on the other hand Alvin now has a huge booger just constantly dripping down his face so…that’s a plus? I played for a few hours and I honestly can’t remember what just happened other than I went through another dungeon and Maxwell told one of her followers that she no longer had her god powers, which I already knew so that wasn’t exactly a huge revelation on the player side. I have to say, the story isn’t currently gripping me, but the battle system is still a lot of fun, so I’ll continue to keep playing it and hopefully the story will pick up. My biggest concern is that I still haven’t found a world map. Final Fantasy X started this JRPG no world map bullshit, since then more and more have adopted it and it’s fucking awful. I feel like I’m losing so much freedom to screw around and potentially find sidequests. Please, if someone out there has played Xillia, leave a comment on this article and let me know if it eventually opens up a world map!

Wednesday

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Holy crap you guys, I actually did a few story missions today! I’m now up to a whopping 12% completion and something like 9 or 10 hours into the game. I’ve just now finally been introduced to the concept of a Warchief, and killed one, naturally. But mainly I’m still just wandering around doing side crap and killing any captains I happen to run across. Had a brutal battle today where captain after captain just kept joining the fray, until I had 4 fighting me at one time, along with their followers. I managed to survive and kill them all, somehow, but it got real dicey there for a while.

Thursday

Serena
So I saw this in my Steam library and had absolutely ZERO idea what it even was or why I downloaded it, so naturally I had to give it a look. It appeared to be a Gone Home style first person adventure game with a lot of story and very little actual gameplay. But I just wasn’t in the mood for that type of game at the time and only played a few minutes before deciding to move on to something else, but I had no idea what to play so I decided to spin the Steam Roulette wheel and have it tell me.

The Bridge
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but The Bridge is an indie physics based puzzle platformer. I know! First of it’s kind! However there are some things that set The Bridge apart in that you can’t jump at all and the majority of the traversal and puzzles come from the fact that you can rotate the entire world. Everything in this game looks like an MC Escher drawing and behaves the same way, meaning things in the background can suddenly become foreground (and new platforms) based on the perspective you’ve rotated the world to. Every level has a door you need to get your character to, but a good number of them are locked and require you to first get to keys to unlock them, and most have other objects in them that will either kill you or just completely stop your progress. It’s about 90% puzzle and 10% platformer. The closest comparison I can draw is Braid, both in the way the story unfolds and in how it causes you to think about the game world in a completely different way than most games. I only played through the first 10 levels or so, but this seems like it could get super challenging later on.

So I didn’t wind up playing Transistor this week, despite having every intention of doing so after I beat DMC last week. Maybe next week? I don’t know, I just wound up getting pulled back into two games I wasn’t entirely expecting, less so on Mordor than Xillia. But really, WWE Supercard is the main culprit, I need to stop letting that damn thing suck away at so much of my free time EVERY freakin day. I just..I need to get into Survivor tier! Then I can put it down! (hopefully)

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

So now that the last “big” release of 2014 has come out in The Crew, what is the 2015 release or releases that you are currently looking forward to the most? For me there are three leading the way. Mortal Kombat X, No Man’s Sky, and Darkest Dungeon, which I only heard about on Saturday as part of the Playstation Experience. You should definitely Google that one, because it sounds pretty damn cool.