Today I bought the latest Humble Bundle, being number 15. I've purchased four Humble Bundles before this one, and was a bit angry with myself when I realised that I'd only tried six of the games from the previous four bundles. That is not a good ratio.

There are a few games from this bundle I quite fancy having a bash at, and I started with Q.U.B.E., a game I'd never heard of before but was immediately intrigued by due to its interesting looking puzzles.
In some respects, it's similar in appearance to Antichamber, which I also really liked, but the puzzles in this were far easier to get my head around. To complete the puzzles, you use special gloves to manipulate coloured blocks, which in turn allows you to reach new doors and elevators that open up as you progress.

It starts off really really easy, but a few of the later puzzles had me scratching my head for a while. Mostly because I couldn't see the end goal of the puzzle rather than not being able to figure out how to get there. Happily and surprisingly though, after two and a half hours of play, I reached the escape pod and the end of the game, all without looking at any help even once. That's pretty good for me I think.

Reading up, in the original version of the game that was released a few years ago, there was no actual story and it was just a puzzle game. This version though is the director's cut, which adds narration explaining that you are an astronaut with amnesia who must defeat the strange maze in order to save the world. Yes, it's weird, but whatever, I liked it. It was short and fun and activated what's left of my brain for a little while.

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 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.

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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.

Unfortunately, we currently think 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

It's taken a little longer than I hoped, but I've managed to complete the expandalone to Jedi Knight, called Mysteries Of The Sith. In this one you take on the role of Mara Jade, probably my favourite expanded universe character, as she goes about her business helping the New Republic and later bringing Kyle back from the dark side.

Unsurprisingly it's very similar to the original game, though with some advantages and disadvantages. The main problem was the different cutscenes. Not only were they rendered very badly using the in-game engine, it seems they were compressed with a different codec, and they would not play right on my computer. This led me to watching them all on Youtube afterwards, so I could finally see what the whole story was about. This in turn led to another issue: just why was the game called Mysteries Of The Sith? I don't seem to remember any mysteries concerning the Sith in the whole game, unless it refers to the puzzles you have to solve to make your way through the Sith temple in the last couple of levels, which I doubt it does.
Weird.

Other than a few rare times, I did not have as much trouble navigating the maps as I did last month playing DF2. This could be down to me actually paying more attention to the locations, but I'm guessing it was down to simpler map design, which I appreciated. My two staple Force powers from Jedi Outcast were also added in this game, being saber throw and push, but neither one of these early versions proved to be very useful at all.

Though I was happy to play these two games, the combination of them being a little old and frustrating, and my tastes being different these days, probably means I'll never replay them as I did with both Outcast & Academy.