Wow. It's been almost a year since I "properly" blogged. A review and my year-end list don't quite compare to my preferred method of rambling, and because I've missed this so much, here we go on some subjects from the last few months on which I can throw some words out. Without further ado:
PSN outage of 2011: This has been talked about to death, but in (finally) throwing in my two cents I'd like to remind my future self that I barely played any games at all during the outage.
I had the "bad" luck to rent Assassin's Creed Brotherhood in late March and played it here and there: I would play it for hours on one night and then not touch it for days (more than 2 weeks at one point, apparently). It's a fun game but I found it a bit too similar to AC 2, which in hindsight isn't a surprise given that Ubisoft dropped any numbering scheme. I would do things obsessively like the courtesan side missions and massive amounts of city renovations, but once I tasted the multiplayer I was wholly absorbed. The problem was that I was playing it in April and I'm certain I was going up against players who'd been playing since November. Not a new problem, I know, but one I tend to know little about since I'm not a big FPS or sports games player. Out-NPC-ing another player is great fun, and after a little while I was able to pick up on a few subtle hints as to whether a character was a human or the AI (even if it was the moment immediately prior to my getting killed by said human player). However, mere days had gone by when I couldn't sign into PSN. This had happened before: login issues were usually resolved in a matter of hours, maybe a day. Well, as we all know, six days later Sony acknowledged the problem and the debacle began. Couple the PSN outage with the apathy towards potential multiplayer grinding and I found that I...
Stopped caring so much about trophies: Some of ACB's online trophies are insane, such as "Take the lead 10 seconds before the end of a session and go on to win," "Score 750 points or more on a single kill," "Get all the Co-op bonuses in 1 session" and "During Open Conflict, kill your target and escape." Not impossible, but the amount of grinding and / or boosting required phased me. (Let's not even mention stuff like finding all the damn Borgia flags or the Animus Virtual Training Program.) Thing is, had PSN not gone down I would've tried boosting and would've gone completely nuts. With PSN gone, I had no impetus to play anything, preferring to play games on my iPhone (more on that later) or watch my TV backlog. Being unable to sync any of my game progress with an online profile got to me, but in hindsight I'm kinda glad I had a detox. Here's why:
This was the game that broke the proverbial camel's back for me. I rented Up (a.k.a. Disney Pixar's UP: The Video Game), Tomb Raider Underworld and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs all within a week of each other in January and managed to get three new Platinum trophies within the space of less than a month, but by the end I felt like I had just wasted an entire month. "What have I accomplished?" I though to myself. Yes, that little number on my account screen had climbed higher, but I could've played games I truly gave a damn about: it took seeing Video Games Live at the end of April to finally make me pick up and start re-playing Symphony of the Night, but I was too busy playing two competent-but-still-sh!++y-feeling kids' games to play "better stuff!"
In all fairness, all three of the above are well put-together games that were good for killing some time. Meatballs really chafes me if only because it has a rep online for being "THE" trophy whoring game, and Up isn't far behind it, but all three (and Tomb Raider especially) weren't bad to play in and of themselves. Still, was I ever glad when Dead Space 2 arrived in the mail!
I still like hunting trophies, but I won't go completely nuts. Take ACB again: once I decided to send it back in favour of finally playing Portal 2, I sought out all of the feathers, killed a guard with a broom, finished Subject 16's puzzles (with a video walkthrough of course, those puzzles are bat$h!t insane), completed 10 guild challenges and jumped with the parachute off the top of Castel Sant'Angelo for a total of 78% complete (66% after the DLC is factored into the number). Overall I had fun with Brotherhood and completed a few silly trophies, just the way it should be.
And for the record, I picked Dead Nation and LittleBigPlanet on PS3, along with LittleBigPlanet (again) and Killzone Liberation on PSP. Wish they'd offered FFIX or RE2, but Sony cost Square and Capcom enough during the downtime, I suppose.
iPhone gaming: For my 26th birthday in April I received my very first smartphone. My mom couldn't wait to give me my new iPhone 4 that morning, so much so that she'd only bought it earlier that morning so as not to give it to me early. After getting a little accustomed to the touch screen after years of buttons and being reassured that my previous phone number had been transferred over (another reason she only bought it right before giving it to me), my thoughts turned to iTunes and the App Store. Ever since John Davison did his "iPhone Game of the Week" on 1UP Yours (or was it Listen Up? I can't remember) I've half-listened to people on podcasts talk about iPhone gaming, but much like when I got a PS3 2 1/2 years into ITS life, I had a massive amount to sort through when it came to he iPhone marketplace. Thank goodness for demos and "free" and "lite" versions of games!
I had to start with Tetris, but I have to say that I'm disappointed with the iPhone version if only that it's completely touch-based. The Game Boy version will always be the top version in my mind, and the several mobile versions have always gotten the job done, but the imprecision of the touch controls paired with the fact that you often can;t see the pieces behind your fingers make iPhone Tetris just another pretender to the Game Boy game.
I've also fallen hard into the Angry Birds camp. AB seems like such an obvious concept, but it's done with such charm, humour and legitimate (if simple) gameplay challenge that I get such a kick just out of hearing the theme song or hearing the birds celebrate when I've cleared one of the many, many, MANY levels. To me, smiling at/humming a game's theme is a sure sign that the game is really good.
Most other games have been hit or miss. I downloaded a few EA games during their Easter sale like Dead Space, NBA Jam and Mirror's Edge, but they all have the Tetris problem of your fingers getting in the way. It annoys me in NBA Jam so much that I don't even currently have it on my phone. Mirror's Edge, beautiful music intact, has been converted to a side-scroller and somewhat works, while Dead Space looks really pretty but lacks finesse in a major way; if you get swarmed by enemies, good luck figuring out what the hell is happening on your screen and how to fend them off. Rock Band iOS and Rock Band Reloaded are both all right, with RBR actually having vocals support, and mobile game staples such as chess and sudoku work well if you can find the right app. I also highly recommend Cut the Rope, Gravity Guy, Fruit Ninja, Contract Killer and Robo Sockets, the latter being a very good puzzle game I found while I was searching for free games that have Game Center support (ah, me and my need for achievements). Sadly, it's now being sold for 99 cents, but even then you should give the free version a shot.
Recent games: Dead Space 2 was pretty awesome. Both it and Infamous 2 took the cores of the first games and simply polished and added to them, and while the end results were games that some people felt were "too similar" to their predecessors, bite me! Calling it [Insert Game Name Here] with a 2 on the end usually means that the games will be largely the same!
Anyway, I played through Dead Space 2 twice but I highly doubt I'll get the Platinum anytime soon, since Hard Core mode seems like too much of a timesink for me and I don't have the patience to re-play hours of a game because of one misplaced bullet. I finished both Infamous 2 and Portal 2 twice and got both Platinums, with all three games in high contention for my personal GOTY. Granted, the year is only half over, but if I can send a game back to GameAccess without finishing it (3D Dot Game Heroes, LBP) or have any level of buyer's remorse (Fallout 3, NHL 11, GoW III) then I know it isn't particularly interesting to me. And that's coming from a non-FPS player who's finished every Call of Duty game.
Alright, back to Black Ops. Until next time, Internet!