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
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.
