Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Whatever.



I don’t like the idea of turning this into something where I just post random thoughts.  I started this blog wanting to focus more on long form writing, and that’s still what I want to do.  But I rarely have time.

What I hate even more than the idea of turning this into a game diary, however, is the idea of letting this blog sit and fade away.  So I will write.  It probably won’t be a review, or an editorial, or something intensive, but I will write.

Anyway, I'm playing a lot of games.


Ace Attorney HD Trilogy; Capcom was kind of enough to release all three of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games on iOS.  I'm replaying the first one on iPad now.  It's lovely.  The port isn't perfect--the UI could be better, and you can't fast-forward through text--but the ability to have all three games in one app running at Retina display resolution (complete with HD sprites) is worth any minor caveat.


Injustice: Gods Among Us; I bought this game on the cheap, mainly because I wanted to be awesome with The Flash.  To my surprise, while I still have the highest win ratio with the scarlet speedster, I'm having a lot of fun playing Hawkgirl and Catwoman, as well.  Still, having gotten into fighting games with BlazBlue, I have a hard time getting behind 3D fighters.  I don't dislike them, but they're just so...slow.  Injustice is nice for when I just want to sit back a little bit, but I'm used to every split-second being of vital importance.  Anyway, the story mode was also really cool.  It's kind of like a big, long, big budget superhero movie that happens to be interactive.  And they tease a sequel at the end!


Company of Heroes; I was excited for Company of Heroes 2, and resigned myself to the fact that I would end up buying it day one.  But then I booted up the original, and realized how little of it I had actually played.  I've played dozens of hours of Company of Heroes, but I never actually finished the campaign missions.  Considering there's like 40 of them, and each can take anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour, that's not crazy, I suppose.  But I'm not going to get CoH 2 until I at least beat the campaigns in the original.


Anyway, I really love Company of Heroes, even though I'm really bad at it.  It just nails the atmosphere so well.  When you have dudes yelling and screaming and running as the ear-piercing sound artillery shells slamming into the ground mingles with that of bullets whizzing through the air and tank engines humming away, you know you've got a birds eye view of a battlefield.  It's gritty, it's nervewracking, and it's exciting.


Sleeping Dogs; I bought this game some time ago, and never got around to trying it until now.  It's pretty good.  A solid 8.5.  There are some spots where you can tell that it's been to hell and back in the dev cycle (the dating mechanic is stunningly underdeveloped, for example), but overall it's impressive that it not only came out, but came out to be as good as it did.  The voice acting and writing is excellent, the story is engaging, and the gameplay is competent at worst and really satisfying at best.  And--at least on PC--it looks gorgeous.  Just like Not Ping.


Remember Me; I like Remember Me.  I think it's a solid game.  It's not without its issues, but most of those issues reside in its somewhat simplistic gameplay, and its underdeveloped mechanics.  The world it's set in is fantastic.  Not since Mirror's Edge have I seen a game with such an interesting and well-defined setting, and such incredibly strong visual direction.  Neo Paris is perhaps even more fascinating to me than Bioshock Infinite's Columbia, another world full of wonder and intrigue.  The gameplay is fine.  It has its moments of excitement and fun, but in general never seems to achieve greatness.

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