19 Oct 2008, 23:42

Games

I’ve been playing lately:

LEGO Batman: Just like all the other LEGO games. Funny, forgiving and with tons of stuff to do on the side. I love the idea of playing the missions from the point of view of the heros and then the villains.

Braid: Irritating but creative and ultimately very rewarding. Most of the puzzles have relatively easy to execute solutions, but they can be hard to figure out, while the more obvious solutions are jolly hard to do. I youtubed a few of them to get to the end, and the final sequence is just great.

Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty: a nice short episode, if you liked the previous R&C games you’ll enjoy it. The only issue is that weapon collecting and upgrading is pretty much non-existent, and that was always a staple of R&C – I hope they improve this for future episodes.

Too Human: JCAB lent me his copy, and after sitting on my shelf for a few weeks (the demo had been meh) I gave it a shot. Once I got used to the controls the combat is great, and there’s loot up the wazoo, but while figuring out the proper way to fight each type of enemy, I died dozens of times. Then the game bombed with a “disc unreadable” error and I was oddly grateful for that.

Dead Space: Perfectly executed sci fi survival horror. I’m surprised at the positive reviews considering it’s basically Doom 3 with more configuration and slower pace.

Age of Conan: Initially interesting MMO but too clunky and unpolished, I didn’t renew and I seriously doubt I’ll ever try it again.

Warhammer Online: Much better than AoC, PvP is great but PvE is quite poor and leveling feels grindy. I love the idea behind Public Quests, and some of them are very well done. Server populations are a very important factor, anything less than high population and you’ll be bored to tears.

World of Goo: I love these guys and the game is absolutely cool… but graphics are messed up on my PC, and I personally don’t have fun with it.

And of course I’m back to playing World of Warcraft. With patch 3.02, leveling from 60 to 70 is much faster, so I will have my hunter ready for the expansion pack. Since I’m playing on a US server without a real guild, I doubt I’ll continue after I play to 80.