Week ending 4/29/13

So as we last left off, I was once again getting deep into Tales of Vesperia, and despite my best attempts to suck at the fighting, I was still enjoying myself and slowly progressing. Going into this week my plans are to beat Vesperia sometime this week and…I dunno. Eat a cookie or something.

Tuesday

Not exactly off to a great start as I failed to play a single thing today. Tomorrow! Tales tomorrow! I swear it!

Wednesday

….I didn’t play Tales today. Instead I reorganized my game collection and moved all my games out of their cases into a binder instead, and holy shit is that thing gross. No, like a literal GROSS. I counted. I have *144* xbox 360 discs. So, what’s the best thing to do when you find out you have waaaayyyy too many 360 games? BUY MORE!

Poker Night at the Inventory 2
Yeah I bought and played this. As a poker game it’s poor at best, but the poker isn’t really what this game is about. It’s about the banter between Brock Samson (Venture Bros), Claptrap (Borderlands), Ash Williams (Evil Dead trilogy), Sam (Sam & Max) and GlaDOS (Portal). In that respect the game works fantastically, with witty dialogue and pretty funny exchanges, with the biggest complaint being that they didn’t get Bruce Campbell to do the VA for Ash. The fake Ash is still pretty decent though, and I’m having fun unlocking the bounty objects.

Thursday

Poker Night 2

Again, and man this game has ISSUES that a downloadable poker game just should not have. No excuses. There’s no reason why a glossed up soundboard should regularly take 10-15 seconds to load up bits of dialogue and have constant frame-rate issues. IT’S POKER! HOW HARD CAN IT BE?! But, you know, for the most part I’m still having fun trying to get the bounty items, despite the constant repeated dialogue you see multiple times per game.

After that my grab bag of 10 random used XBox 360 games from http://www.gamedealdaily.com came to ruin and/or save this column. Remember how I said I had 144 discs? Yeah let’s add to that. PERFECT. I’m starting to get a sneaking suspicion that I’m never going back to Vesperia again unless I force it. But either way, come next week, it’s going to be a special themed GADD where I at least play something from all 10 games (except the 1 game I already have and the 1 game that is literally unplayable in it’s current state)

Friday

Poker Night 2
I really need to stop playing this shit and get to something else. I’m not even enjoying this anymore. Turns out 3 days is the shelf life on this game.

Tales of Vesperia
YEAH! Let’s do this, break time over! I accidentally wound up grinding for over an hour due to getting lost on the damn worldmap. Eventually I got to the point where I was killing everything in one hit and I realized I was in the wrong area and turned back around. ….But then it turned out I was actually in the RIGHT area and had to go through pussytown to get there, so I had to turn around again and go all the way back through there again. By that point I just hit the inn in the town I needed to be at and quit to go to bed. If I’m gonna play RPGs I really need to start at a better time than 3AM, I’ve heard they’re better when played for more than an hour or so at a time.

Saturday

Tales of Vesperia
And at a decent time as well! I’m gonna play through the rest of this game in one single solitary sitting today. (spoiler alert: No I’m not) After about 2-2.5 hours I got to a big turning point in the story(and boy is it hard to do a day by day non-spoiler retelling of an RPG) and that seemed like as good time as any to stop for the night. Also in my play-through today I managed to get lost AGAIN. This time inside a castle, and it turns out the room I was looking for was a mere three fucking screens away from where I started. It took me HALF AN HOUR to find this. I’ve quickly realized that modern video games have made me stupid and unable to traverse a map without a waypoint anymore. Gah, when the hell did this happen?

Sunday

STILL MORE TALES OF VESPERIA!
And now there’s all kinds of talk in the game about the final battle. Sorry guys, I’ve played an RPG before and I know “the final battle” is never the final battle the first time it’s mentioned! After around 2 1/2 hours (including a pain in the ass puzzle. Really all the dungeon puzzles in this game suck and are no fun whatsoever. Probably the only complaint I have with this game, other than my own impotent rage about getting lost) I made it to the “final battle,” and even though I know it’s NOT the final battle, I can’t confirm this today since I died on the boss. Going to have to try this again tomorrow.

Monday

Well there’s no Tales today because I had company over, but that might be a good thing since I’ve only played a whopping 2 games this week before today

Homefront
Ok I didn’t actually play it myself, but I watched him play it(and next week’s theme is already shit because this is game number 1 from the random grab bag) but as a person who isn’t a shooter fan this game seemed completely competent from how much he played. Nothing that stands out, other than the fact that the online pass has gotten EXPENSIVE AS SHIT with all the THQ bankruptcy issues  

 

 

We would then go on to play Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages is an XBLA/PSN game from 2011 that is a combination of Tower Defense/Super Monkey Ball where you build up a course full of obstacles to try and slow down/destroy your opponent’s assault ball as they try to roll down a course and crash into your tower, while you do the same thing on their course. But we decided to scrap all that low level strategy crap and just play the Skee-Bowl multiplayer mode where you both go down the same course attempting to knock down targets on the course and be the first person to land in a Skee-Ball type group of holes at the end of the course, with the higher holes being a higher multiplier on the points you earned on your way down the course. What? We just needed something simple to drink to.

Tony Hawk’s Project 8
It’s Tony Hawk. We played DRANK(previously Horse) mode. You know how that goes, I don’t see the need to explain it further, plus we only played for maybe 20 minutes before we were bored at it cause HOLY SHIT does Project 8 suck. After that we went on to

Fight Night Round 3
Man I forgot how much fun this game was. I also forgot how much my friend SUCKED ASS at this game. I had to go all the way down to Featherweight while he was at Heavyweight before he was finally able to beat me. I really should go back and play this game again because man did I enjoy getting back to this after years of it collecting dust. Of course I say that now immediately after the fact, but I’ll be shocked if this game ever shows up in another GADD article. So, that’s it for this week. We’ll have to see if Vesperia manages to sneak its way into next week’s Very Special Grab Bag edition of GADD. For it’s own sake, I hope it does, or it might wind up not getting played again for another 2 years, and I’m SO CLOSE to the end to. In my estimations I’m probably something like 6-8 hours from the end (or 12-16 if I keep fucking getting lost) and it’d really be a shame to drop it from my gaming consciousness again. With that, I leave you with this week’s

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Is it just me, or have you also found yourself becoming more and more dependent on in-game maps and map markers in video games? If you say no, go back into a game with a wide open map and no marker system whatsoever, then come back to me and see what you say. I’m ashamed that I’ve apparently become this way, I used to have an awesome video game sense of direction.

 

 

Sorry about the shorter column this week, but I just didn’t do much at all worth talking about gaming-wise until Monday.