Monday 11 August 2014

The Hour Of My Return Is Already Overlate

It's been a while since I posted here, because I'm dumb. No navel-gazing this time, just going to be talking about games.

Recent acquisitions:
  • Ordered Samurai Warriors 2: Empires from CeX literally months ago, they finally got around to sending it. More Musou!
  • Some free with Xbox Live Gold games: Gotham City Impostors, Battleblock Theater, AirMech Arena, Motocross Madness, Warface. I know very little about most of these, but I have seen Battleblock Theater before and it looks like a laugh.
  • Somehow I managed to win a copy of Soul Blazer from the last Crystals For Life, so... now I have that, too.
  • Nintendo saw fit to give me a free game of my choice (from a short list) so I plumped for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. Stay tuned for more on that, later in this post.
  • They also gave everybody Steel Diver: Sub Wars so I guess that's new too.

I started playing Darksiders - it is pretty fun as I had guessed. However, it is depressing seeing how every mechanic in the game is lifted from another game; is there not one original idea in the entire thing? I hope so, because it is getting predictable. I just got Ruin, the horse, so at least it won't take forever to get around any more.

Played a few campaigns of Warriors Orochi 2 now, the storyline is bizarre and pointless as always. I don't know many of the Samurai Warriors characters yet, so there are new faces every campaign, which is nice. Got quite a few generals I enjoy playing as so far - Zuo Ci is still overpowered as all get out. Still got Wu and the Orochi campaigns left to do.

Much progress is being made on the Spiderweb Software front; I beat Geneforge 2! That is, I beat it by leaving the place to fend for itself, then I continued to play it and actually beat it properly. I went with the Awakened path (again) despite initially starting out Loyalist, because Emily hated it when I chose the options that were mean to the serviles! I think this instalment is an improvement on the prequel; all of the factions (except the Barzites) are nuanced and have enough supporting rhetoric that joining them seems like a logical choice. It really does just depend on what kind of character you want to play. I've since started playing Geneforge 3, but I haven't got too far yet. I'll talk about that in another post.

I've had this PS2 fighting game sat on my shelf for a long time without playing, so I thought I'd pull it off and beat it. The game is Spectral Vs Generation and it is a very Guilty Gear-inspired piece, but with lower quality graphics; some research indicates that it is essentially a port of a PSP game, so I understand that. It's fun, nothing special, the characters are all typical anime fare, end boss is overpowered, the usual. I played as Kryce, a 'dude with sword' character with a bunch of mix-up dash things. His combos were relatively easy so I breezed through until the last guy, who is unironically named "Holy God Earth". Very annoying fight; many rounds came very close as I managed to knock him out of some of the more unsafe animations, but it took maybe half an hour for me to actually win! Might look back at it again sometime, maybe beat it with every character for the 'Completed' state on Backloggery.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins was a surprise addition to my collection; it was something to do with having a Club Nintendo account for a certain amount of time? The other games on the list I'd either played or had absolutely no interest in. I'm not the biggest Mario fan, though I definitely enjoyed Super Mario Bros. 3 back in the day, so I decided to give this one a shot. It has a hub structure which allows you to finish the levels/zones in whichever order you wish, so there isn't a difficulty curve as such. I feel like some of the zones are trickier than others, but it's a very close thing. I found a couple of secret exits, but probably not all of them (not sure if this is actually tracked in-game). Rushed through all the zones without much problem, but after you do all six zones there's a last level which is way, way harder than the rest of the game. Again, this level alone (and the multiple-stage boss at the end of it) took me about 30 minutes by itself. Not a bad game, but I am glad it was free.

It sounds like a lot of activity, but it really isn't, because a lot of my free time has been spent playing that destroyer of careers, World of Warcraft. My main character is firmly in the Mists of Pandaria endgame now, working on Flexible raiding. I still enjoy it despite the repetition; it does help that I have a couple of toons just reaching Wrath of the Lich King content on the way too, so I can swap between them if I get tired of waiting 3 hours for another raid party.

No progress on any speedruns, I'm afraid. I'm still interested in running every game ever but I'm finding it very hard to actually pick one to go with. Either Blaze & Blade or Klonoa 2 sounds likely because they have the most planning done of any of the runs I want to do.