Tuesday 6 May 2014

No Game New Year: A Brief Summary of the Last Month or so...


First of all, I must apologise profusely for not posting for the last few weeks. There’s a whole host of long and not very interesting reasons for it. A lot of it is to do with the fact that I’m a guitar teacher, and what I really ought to be writing is the 130 reports for the children that I’m teaching in the area. While I struggle to motivate myself to do it, I also find it very hard to justify doing anything else when I’m not doing it. So I haven’t been writing blogs because I know I ought to be writing reports – even though I can’t motivate myself to do it.

Anywho…

I’ve been playing a lot of games over the last few weeks, some I got further into than others but none have I managed to finish yet. In the spirit of the challenge I really ought to be getting rid of the ones that I’ve not kept at, but I can never really bring myself to do it; there’s a chance I might come back to it later. The main games are:

 

XCOM: Enemy Within

This is an updated version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love this game, I really do, but it is so hard to do on classic difficulty that to be honest I rarely get further into the third month of the game before I derail the whole thing by getting my entire squad killed and not having anything remotely resembling competent understudies.

 

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

I’ve tried this game a number of times and I’ve struggled to get in to it, but this time I decided that rather than play to a theme, play the character I want to play – in this case a sneaky Dark Elf thief – and I find that I’m enjoying it a lot more. But in an open world game where there is so much to do, I often find myself wishing I was playing something else after a few sessions several hours long where I don’t appear to have done anything to progress the game at all.
 

Far Cry 2

If there is ever a game I should have given up on it’s this. It is a good game, I’m not denying that, and I’m fairly sure has more to offer in its single player campaign than many of its contemporary modern-military shooters, but somehow I can’t motivate myself to keep going with it for more than a few sessions. I think once I’ve finished the game I’m doing now, I might give it another go, or later in the year… I kind of owe it a chance to finish!
 
Speaking of which…

 
Dragon Age: Origins

This is the game I am currently playing. I’ve had a few false starts with this but I’m enjoying it now. I’m playing a Dwarf Fighter character with a specialisation in two-handed weapons because I wanted to maximise damage output as a tactic, and so far…

Well, the fantasy setting is nothing if not generic, Elves and Dwarves, that sort of thing. Darkspawn – the games thematic bad guys – are from what I have seen so far a different version of the usual Orcs. And the idea of a specialist force of soldiers, in this game called the Grey Wardens, created for the purpose of keeping these Darkspawn at bay is certainly nothing new. Is it even an interesting spin on the idea? Well, no, not that I’ve seen so far. We’ve all done Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, early Final Fantasy games before. There’s nothing new here that I’ve seen so far after a good 20 hours of play.

That being said, it is done VERY well, which is something we can always rely on Bioware to do. I’ve played bits of the first Mass Effect game, but honestly I find myself reminded more of Knights of the Old Republic – with better interactions between the characters. The difficulty, which I rather foolishly set to Hard, is deceptively gentle at the start of the game, but becomes very hard later on – particularly with boss battles, which I rarely feel equipped to deal with. And the idea of recruiting an army to fight the Darkspawn is something I’m looking forward to finishing off, if only for a refreshing change from fetching… maguffins, I think, is the word, or quest items. The game play itself is fun, as are the quests and the feeling that, while there are things going on in the world that are bigger than you, they might all be relying on you to save them…

This is a little bit general but I’m going to be on this one for a long time so I might as well leave it there for this week. I’ll go in to specifics hopefully at the end of the week, where I can discuss things in more detail as I hopefully find out more about the game.