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Tuesday 10 January 2012

I don't have a clever title: Games I've been playing

I'm bored and can't be bothered playing any games right now, so let's talk about games instead. (It's a very specific level of boredom.)

Last month I got a copy of Jurassic Park: The Game after hyping myself up for it for months.  I loved the films and was really interested in seeing how Telltale Games, the masterminds behind Tales of Monkey Island, were going to turn that into a game. Solution: They made a film.  Actually, it's a game based on quicktime events, much like Heavy Rain, which I was sceptical of at first.  From the trailers I got more of an open world adventure sort of feel, but now I'm sort of glad they went with this. It was a very linear story where you have little to no freedom in how the story progresses and you're just there to watch events unfold.  You know, like a film. The weird thing?  It works and I enjoyed every minute of it. Sure, walking around the park and exploring the labs would have been cool, but what I really wanted was a new Jurassic Park film and I got it.
(Full disclosure, I used my "sorry we delayed the game, here's a code for any item in our store for free" code to get the game so I didn't pay as much as you would normally. Whether this is shifting my opinion is up to you to decide. Though I still got the deluxe version (so right next to me I have a box of goodies like an InGen Security Pass and park pamphlet) so it wasn't totally free.)

Of course, like everyone else on the planet, I've been playing Skyrim.  A little later than everyone else but I'll be damned if it wasn't worth the wait. I didn't think I'd be all that into it since I could never play Oblivion or Morrowind for more than an hour at a time, but there's something about it which makes me keep playing. There's so much I don't like about the game.  The voice acting is, at times, awful, the interface is terrible with a keyboard and mouse, a lot of the quests get repetative really fast, and there's not as large a weapon selection as I'd like. However, it's still all I've been playing during any bouts of free time since Christmas.  I think it's the ability to pick a direction, start walking, and find something cool which has me hooked.  I did the same in Fallout 3 and New Vegas which I still say are great games which I've wasted so much of my life on.  There's also a ton of mods to help fix any problem I have while travelling through Skyrim. Every time I go to boot up the game I pause, head to the Nexus, and see if anything cool has been added in the last hour since I was last looking. Turn out most of the time the answer is yes.

I loved Minecraft when it first came out. It was easily my most played game for quite some time but then something else appeared.  It didn't look like much at first.  Out of nowhere people started mentioning Terraria, and it seemed quite quaint but like a 2D Minecraft rip off (which I was terribly wrong about by the way.). But then I started playing. Oh boy did I start playing. Soon I was taking frequent trips to hell to fight demons and summoning the Eye of Cthulhu just for laughs. After a time I'd acquired a sizeable amount of loot, weapons and armour and was getting bored. And then came the updates. Re-Logic knew exactly what I wanted.  I suspect they hid microphones in every copy of the game to pick up every "You know what this game needs?" uttered by the players since I spent Christmas fighting off waves of snowmen gangsters while dressed as a lightsaber-wielding Santa.

I've also been playing Farm Simulator 2011 recently.  There's not much to say about it except I'd make a terrible farmer. Too much to pay in damages once I try taking my tractor into oncoming traffic while laughing manically.