On Saturday, I took a visit to one of my favourite independent video game retailers with my girlfriend because we just happened to be in the area. After circling around the store and trying out Blazblue on the PSP, a game in the bargain bin caught my eye, which I immediately picked up.
Month: April 2010
Mass Effect 2: Electric Bugaloo
Hot off the heels of Mass Effect, I was quick to play the sequel. While I thought the first Mass Effect was an incredible experience, it also had some quirks to it that could really turn someone off. I haven’t been able to put down Mass Effect 2; stopping about 3/4 of the way through the game to write this down. If I didn’t feel compelled to gush about Mass Effect 2 to the world, I would just keep playing. Mass Effect 2 might possibly be the best game ever. I have played a lot of games in my life, and I’m hard pressed to think of many more examples of gaming brilliance.
My Thoughts On “Pulling Out”
Since the dawn of online gaming, nothing is more annoying than playing with or against a quitter. Someone who will go as far as disconnecting from the Internet to sabotage a game, whether it’s to avoid losing or to rip someone off in a trade. If you play any video game online, you will run into these types of players. Even when some games penalize players for quitting early, it doesn’t stop everyone from behaving this way. I’m not saying anything prophetic or new here, but man…it sucks.
Game Design Talk: Burnout Paradise and the Feeling of Progression
For a game that is fairly one-dimensional at its core, Burnout Paradise does a lot of little things to motivate players to keep playing. You will unlock new cars by either winning races or taking them out as they randomly drive by you on the road. The game keeps track of all the super jumps you complete, fences you smash and billboards you drive through. You can even race for the best time on basically every street in the game against your friends or against the world.
Those little things have kept me playing this game longer than I usually plan to. However, each of my sessions usually ends when I realize how far away I am to making progress in the most important measure of progression in the game: the licenses.
Game Case Nightmares
I get the feeling I’m in the minority here, but I know I’m not alone on this one. I like to take care of my games. I take pride in keeping everything intact and in top shape. This includes the cases that my games come in. Back in the days of Nintendo boxes, I would go as far as storing all of the cardboard boxes in a safe place. Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to keep everything in top shape, as game cases are well built to withstand average wear and tear.
However, having bought a number of used game stores and more recently, having bought a number of used games, I’ve seen so many games with messed up packaging. Everything from broken cases, to missing box art, to stickers all over the box. The majority of these cases makes me wonder: what are you people doing with your games?
Closing Thoughts on Prince of Persia (2008)
For the last few days, I have dedicated all of my gaming resources towards the Prince of Persia reboot. My first session with it made enough of an impact on me to drop everything else I was playing and play through this to the end. I don’t know why people hate on this game so much because I enjoyed it all the way through. Granted, it has flaws, but was definitely worth my time.
Continue reading
Reemployed Gamer
These last two months have been difficult for me. At the end of January, I lost my job due to circumstances beyond my control. It was the first time I’ve been unemployed since I first began working in 2001. The good news is I just got a new job. I start as of Monday and I’m really excited to begin anew.
On my first day of unemployment, I wrote a blog post outlining a few gaming resolutions of sorts to tide me over during this tough time. I can say right now that I failed horribly at not purchasing games, having bought a total of 16 games during these last two months, but how did I fare at the rest of my resolutions?
Where the Grass is Green and the Girls Are Pretty
Burnout Paradise was a game I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. The series first caught my eye when I played the Burnout Revenge demo that came with my XBOX 360, which came with a really cool take down mode. However, the demo for Burnout Paradise left me skeptical. The sensation of going fast was intact, as well as the joy of wrecking other cars (as well as your own), but the demo didn’t really give me a sense of how the open-world structure of the game would work.
I may be two years too late, and the developers have added a ton of free and paid additional content to the game since I last tried it, but I recently got a copy of Burnout Paradise at the bargain basement price of $5 at a Blockbuster Video sale. Was this ticket to paradise well worth it?
I Play Just Dance and See Why It’s So Divisive
Hope you had a great Easter weekend. For me, it was a great opportunity to spend some time with my family as well as my girlfriend’s family. As far as gaming goes, most of it went down at my girlfriend’s house, where my girlfriend, her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and I played a bunch of Wii games. We played a bunch of games, including the Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Track Pack Volume 2, Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 (which was really fun) and we beat New Super Mario Bros. Wii (which was epic, because we stayed up till 3am on Sunday night to beat it).
The one game I wanted to talk about today though was Just Dance. My girlfriend and her sister had been extremely excited to buy this game and finally picked it up over the weekend. Just Dance is the hottest new game on Wii, having sold over 2 million copies worldwide and garnering rave reviews from customers. However, the gaming press and core gamers have slammed Just Dance hard, claiming that it’s a half-baked product that doesn’t even work.
Now that I’ve played it, I see where both sides are coming from.
Blockbuster Finale
With the Blockbuster clearance sale winding down (buy a $9.99 game and get a $4.99 game free), I took one more trek across a number of Blockbuster stores in my area in hopes of snagging a few more cheap games to beef up my collection. It was plain to see that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point, as 99% of the games remaining are probably better used as coasters. Still, I was able to pick up three more good games that I think are well worth the total I spent on them.
Find out what two games I got, a roundup of everything I’ve grabbed from Blockbuster of late and how much it all cost. The final tally is pretty impressive.
In Third Person 