This is where you can read any of my irregular wafflings about computer gaming. The whole point of this blog is to help motivate me to properly finish games, whether they be recent ones or older ones I played when I was younger that I never managed to beat.

25th June 2017 - You Can Not Be Serious

There was a time, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, where I played quite a lot of FPS games. Somehow, a franchise that has always passed me by is Serious Sam.
Until now, that is.

Just got done going through the First Encounter with Scoob, and what a chaotic mess of bullets and rockets it was. Graphically, it was very similar to other games of that era like the original Unreal. The gameplay was also kind of similar, except that there was no alternate fire for the weapons, and the enemies attacked in massive waves.

Other than that, I'm not sure what to say about it. It was fun enough, but we were really starting to get fatigue near the end. Those monsters seemed damn near never ending.

Out of the blue back in April, I had a hankering for some more Saints Row action. Scoob was happy to jump back into Saints Row The Third with me to start a second play through.

Then as luck would have it, while we were playing through Saints Row The Third, GOG released Saints Row IV on us. I quickly bought and downloaded it so we could get cracking.

Unfortunately, we don't like this game anywhere near as much as the previous installment. It didn't help that the original GOG build had problems preventing the autosaves working, and would not remember any changes we made in the options menus. Though they have now fixed those issues, we haven't yet gone back to it. If we do go back, I think it will be just to go through the story missions, rather than go through all the extra stuff, which in this game seems boring and far too numerous.

The problems we have with it when compared to the previous game are mostly to do with the gun action. I know super powers are in this one, but they've really nerfed the guns, and we love shooting the bad guys. They just do less damage, take longer to reload, and take longer to level up to get some of that power back.
I also don't like how cars are pointless, as I enjoyed collecting and modding the cars in the last game. Worst thing of all: THERE'S NO HOT PIZZA SONG!!!

The two computers also sometimes disconnect from each other, which is something that has never happened when playing The Third. It was even more of a bitch at the time because autosave wasn't working. Hopefully they've fixed the network stability in the updated version, but I doubt it.

21st August 2015 - Who Doesn't Love Hot Pizza?

Just got done with one of the most fun games I've played while doing this blog, in Saints Row The Third. I know it's a bit old now, but I was super happy to get to play it after GOG released it on their website a few months back. So me and Scoob joined up with the other Saints to rid Steelport of other rival gangs, and it went something like this...

Because my 2nd computer is too old to run the game, we first had to figure out how to play LAN co-op over the internet, which was something we had not done before. We were originally going to try hamachi, until I read on several sites that Tunngle was supposed to be better for games. Whether it's better for games or not I can not answer, but I have not enjoyed using it for the last few weeks, and am glad I can now remove it. I don't appreciate any service that forces you to watch ads, which Tunngle does. What's worse, very often after waiting through the ad, the program would crash at the end of it, meaning I would have to reload and sit through another bloody ad to get into it. Grrr.

Once in the game, we spent most of our early adventures driving round and blowing shit up while playing the hot pizza song, and certainly had a laugh doing this. Because the game is so bat-shit crazy, even its many glitches and graphics bugs only made it more fun. There were one or two bugs that became annoying, mostly when you were trying to get in a car, or trying to get the NPCs to get in a car, but we managed to muddle through them.

I'm not quite sure what the writers were smoking when they came up with most of the story, but we went from fighting normal gang members to fighting zombies through to going into a computer game disguised as a toilet and a sex doll. Odd.

I guess the main problem with the game was that it was way too easy, especially by the end when we were levelled up. Hardly anything in the game can do damage to you when you hit top level, and I think that was a bad choice.
But overall, the game was a right laugh and gave us something to do outside League Of Legends for a while.

As expected we didn't play Star Wars The Old Republic for all that long. Me and Scoob managed to get through the starting world with our Sith characters, and I trudged through the first two worlds with my Jedi, but MMOs are just too boring, and it couldn't keep hold of our attention. I really wanted to continue the stories, but the game forces you to do all the typical MMO grind quests to get high enough level to do the story quests.
No thanks.

1st June 2015 - Let's Have A Butcher's

So I just got done with a game I didn't initially realise I even owned. Quite a while ago now I bought Assault On Dark Athena from GOG, and when I came to play it a couple of months back, I finally saw that it was bundled with a remake of an earlier game called Escape From Butcher Bay. Made sense to play the first game first, so that's what I've done.

You play as Riddick, the main character from the Pitch Black and Chronicles Of Riddick movies, in a story set before those films. Riddick must escape the eponymous prison after being captured and delivered there by Johns, another character that is in the Pitch Black movie.

I found this quite challenging in places, especially early in the game when I didn't really know what I was doing. At times, I was further hindered (though sometimes helped) by the very poor A.I. of the enemies, especially the Riot Guards, who are dudes in massive powered armour who can only be killed if you shoot them in the back. The worst incident was when a Riot Guard came down an elevator in the corner of the room, then refused to get off said elevator, keeping his back to the wall. I kept trying to lure him into the room by sticking my head out of cover and letting him shoot at me, but he'd take a couple of steps forward, do a weird stutter, then take two steps back. It took ages for him to finally wriggle free and start chasing me around the crates in the room, finally allowing me to take him down.

There are sections of straight up FPS action, but most of the game leans towards being stealthy and hiding out in shadows, which is not usually the kind of thing I like. The more I played of this though, the more I got into it. It was quite cool to pretend to be Riddick, especially after you become able to see in the dark. Vin Diesel's voice acting also helped, as it really would not have been the same if someone else had done it instead.

The story was freaking bonkers, as Riddick sneaks and kills his way through a prison which must be bigger than most cities. There were also quite a few weird graphics bugs, but they were easy to shrug off, and just made me laugh.

Along with the Scoob I've also just started up two multiplayer games. I haven't really played many MMOs while doing this blog, but we've just started a new one in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Though the game seems very much like any other MMORPG, it does focus heavily on story and conversation, so I hope that side of the game keeps me more interested. I've created two characters, being Imperial Agent Munkfish and Kreethen the Jedi, so I can experience both sides of the conflict.
The other game is one I've wanted to play for years, after seeing footage of it on Youtube, being Saints Row The Third. Recently, and surprisingly, it was released very cheap on GOG, and I swooped on it like a hawk. We've only played a little of it so far, but it's definitely gonna be fun, and I can't wait to sing along to the Hot Pizza song.