For me, Borderlands was the ultimate ‘don’t know it til you try it’ game of the generation. Leading up to its release, nothing about it sounded like something I wanted to play. However, after all of the positive buzz, I figured that I should get around to it eventually for academic purposes. By the end of my 100-plus-hour run, I might as well have been rewarded with a Ph.D, as I explored every nook and cranny of that game.
During Black Friday, I bought a copy of LEGO: Marvel Super Heroes. Historically, I haven’t been a fan of the LEGO games, as I don’t have fun playing them. Quite frankly, I suck at them. I always get stuck on the puzzles, even though they’re designed for little kids to figure out. In spite of that, I still bought this in hopes that the Marvel license and a sale price of $25 would be the turning point. After two hours of disappointing play time, I packed it up and traded it in.
The “I normally don’t like this style but…” purchase is one that, in hindsight, I make way too often.
I’ll never forget my first foray into Rapture. Before the game came out, I hopped into the demo with no idea of what I was getting myself into. From the moment that bathysphere went underwater, I was hooked. Below the ocean was the world of Rapture; an underwater dystopia that was beautiful in a way I’d never seen in a video game before. Once inside, the story that unfolded rose to a dramatic crescendo…and stopped. When that promo screen enticing you to buy the full game appeared, I just had to have this game.
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Season 2 of The Walking Dead video game puts you in the shoes of Clementine. Despite being a little bit older and painfully aware of the world around her, she’s still very much a child. This is the theme that drives episode 1 and will likely carry through the season if she manages to make it through. After playing through the events from All That Remains, I really hope she does make it through.
Up until its release, I’d written off Catherine as a niche porno game. While there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re into that scene, that style of game is not for me. As it turns out, this is not that type of experience at all. Instead, it’s equal parts puzzle game and dating simulator. It’s also one of the most unique and awesome games to come out of this generation.
This is one of my backlog shelves. I strategically position them in a way that it is easiest for me to reach while I’m sitting at my gaming desk. I like to think that having those particular games sit in prime shelf space serve as a reminder that I want to get around to these eventually. Between physical and digital releases, I have a few dozen unplayed games lying around.
Having the luxury to play something new to me at a moment’s notice is nice. However, there is a certain point where the expectation of completing a backlog becomes unrealistic.
Just before playing Skyrim for the first time, I watched my brother play Oblivion for an hour. We had a copy that was given to us years ago that we just decided to crack open. Man, that game didn’t age well. Besides the obvious degradation in graphical fidelity, its take on the middle ages appeared very rote and the mechanics looked like Dungeons and Dragons to a fault.
Skyrim blew the doors off of its predecessor and pretty much every other game out there. There wasn’t a game with a world as big, graphics as pretty, or an experience as immersive. For dozens of hours of my life, I thought the game was damn near magical.
How do you follow up one of the greatest games ever made? Well, if you’re Nintendo and you’re trying to create the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you wait 22 years before making and releasing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS, it retraces some of the steps of its predecessor while introducing some of the boldest innovations to the formula yet. The end result is a game that brought out the same child-like joy I felt playing as Link at his 2D best while set in the freshest Zelda adventure in a long time.
The turn-based strategy genre has been largely stagnant for ages. Sure, I greatly enjoy the semi-regular Fire Emblem entries, though there’s surely room in the market for more, right? 2K Games agrees, as they took a huge risk with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I’m so glad that they did, as its earned a slot in my top 10 games of this generation.
One of the first products to come out as part of the PlayStation 4’s big indie push is Contrast. Created by Compulsion Games, this is a puzzle platformer that forces you to think of shadows in a different light (no pun intended). While it definitely looks cool and has an interesting gameplay hook on paper, some glaring production issues put me off fairly quickly.
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In Third Person 