Matthew Przybysz
Week ending 1/1/15
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone out there in GADD land! I apologize for the lack of GADD last week, but with Christmas preparations and all, I didn’t have ANY time to play video games last week, except for an extremely excessive amount of grinding in WWE Supercard, and I don’t think you guys really wanted to hear about that. This will still be a shortened article, due to still having family in town from Christmas, and then later in the week I’ll be going out of town to do late Christmas with my dad’s side of the family.
Friday
Fantasy Life
Received as a gift for Christmas. It’s a JRPG/Life Simulator for the 3DS where you get a list of 16(I think) jobs to choose from, and live your life accordingly. Instead of picking a basic RPG class, I decided to be a cook and see if the game would actually let me just live a normal boring life. At first I was impressed with how accurately tedious the opening was, just running around getting ingredients and then going back to my Chef Master and cooking food for him. But after the tutorial the game opened up to side-quests, and it appears as though I’m going to have to partake in my fair share of combat anyway. The game acts as if it doesn’t want you to stick to just one job, but instead jump around between a lot of them to get different skills. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I feel like the advertising of this game is misleading.
Saturday
Board Games
LOTS AND LOTS of board games. We are a board game heavy family when it comes to Christmas time. Nothing too exciting in the mix, just regular old board games that older family members can get into without needing to know all kinds of complex rules. After that we loaded up
Drawful
Drawful is part of the Jackbox Party Pack that was recently released for both current and past generation consoles, consisting of five games from Jackbox Studios (formerly Jellyvision,) You play the games on your phone, with the console and TV being a central hub for everyone to look at. In Drawful everyone is given something oddly specific(like “child dressed up as Abraham Lincoln”) they are told to draw on their phone and then everyone has a turn guessing what each drawing is. But you don’t actually want to guess what it is, you want to make a guess that OTHER people will then select as the actual right answer. It’s a game all about bad drawing and deceit, and it’s a TON of fun.
Fibbage
Fibbage is also in the Jackbox pack, and it’s a whole lot like Drawful. However, instead of drawing an item and then BSing about what it’s supposed to be, you’re given a random factoid and you have to lie about the answer in such a way that other people will select your lie as being the correct answer. Drawful is the more fun option of the two, but you’re more likely to get a group to play Fibbage because you’ll always have those people that are self conscious about their drawing ability.
Sunday
Most of the day was consumed by football, but I did fit in some gaming time for
Far Cry 4
Received it as a gift for Christmas, and while I’m normally not a big FPS fan, Far Cry 3 seemed like the type of fun stupid FPS that I would enjoy, but I never actually got around to playing it. I hear that FC4 is basically just more of the same, but it’ll be new to me! Played through the prologue and while I really like what I’ve seen so far, it definitely feels like the actual shooting is going to be the weakest part of this game for me, although it could just be that I’m using a shitty early weapon gun. The early bits of mood and setting I’ve liked, and I also had a really fun bug where one of the story characters I needed to talk to was floating with his head through the ceiling!
Monday
Went out of town for more Christmas activities with my dad’s side of the family and didn’t get any gaming in.
Tuesday
Still out of town, killed some time with Supercard but that’s about it.
Wednesday
Still out of town.
Thursday
Got back into town sometime late in the evening, but I did get some gaming in
Far Cry 4
Got entirely confused by getting dropped right into a village that I didn’t remember being in and having no clue what any of the icons on my screen meant. I eventually stumbled my way into a story mission, found my first vehicle, and drove off the side of a cliff in less than five seconds so that was pretty fun. But then the mission itself consisted of climbing a tower to unlock various parts of the map and suddenly I was hit in face with the Ubishovel. I immediately decided that I didn’t feel like doing this right now (after finding a village and selling off the contents of my full backpack, of course.)
Papers, Please
Played two more days and was worried shitless that I would be rusty due to it being two weeks since I last played PP, and while I was to a certain degree, I also got lucky that I took like $50 in bribes so that my shortcomings were able to be glossed over as I went into the play session with just $5 in savings, but finished with $40. Also, I now have a freakin GUN. What?!
Sorry the week was so short, but next week will hopefully be a packed week between old games, Christmas games, and games that I picked up during the Steam sale. MAYBE I’LL EVEN GET INTO TRANSISTOR! …..Ok probably not. Come back next week for a full sized edition of GADD!
QUESTION OF THE WEEK:
It is now officially 2015, which means that it’s time to find out what everyone’s favorite game of 2014 is! I went through a wiki page earlier in the week to determine it for myself, and my god were the results sad. Of the games I played that came out in 2014, there were only about 9 or 10 that I would even classify as good games. For the ENTIRE YEAR you guys! Out of those games, I came to the conclusion that Valiant Hearts: The Great War is my GOTY for 2014. While I really liked Valiant Hearts, I feel as if in most years it would probably only be around the 5 spot, but it marched through the field full of broken garbage and BS full price hd remakes. Congratulations Valiant Hearts on being an awesome original thought provoking game that actually managed to bring out the feels, something very few video games are able to do.
