Retail Therapy

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I’ve been a bit out of sorts recently. Maybe it’s because I was a little bit ill. Perhaps it’s a bit of the post-holiday blues that people get after having a lovely Christmas time. Maybe it’s just because work is busy at the moment (it is really busy). Who knows?

Well, apparently my subconscious has decided that a spot of retail therapy is in order because I’ve been a bit online shopping crazy!

In the past week I’ve ordered not one, not two, but three t-shirts (as well as a hoody), four awesome DVDs (Usual Suspects, LA Confidential, Kick-Ass and The Godfather Trilogy), a powerball (I’m trying to increase my drumming strength and masturbating just doesn’t cut it any more!), Dragon Age: Ultimate Edition on 360, some optical cables and an optical splitter.

I also picked up Civilization: The Board Game. Which is amazing.

I feel better now. Screw you austerity/holiday blues!

This Week in Gaming #5

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It’s a short one this week. My gaming activities haven’t really changed from last week, other than I feel like I’ve barely played anything. It’s probably because work was quite busy (as it is this week too).

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer is still a regular feature of my evenings. The servers have been completely ballsed up for the past week or so which has resulted in empty servers and one-sided games (yes, even more than normal). Strangely, vanilla BFBC2 didn’t seem quite as badly affected as Vietnam, so we did a bit of modern warfare too.

Last night I jumped into a game with my usual crew and found myself in a Hardcore game, where there’s no map, character health is significantly lower, you can’t enemy characters and generally things are a lot tougher. It was quite a different proposition, but it is good fun. I also picked up the co-operative Onslaught mode, which now seems to be permanently discounted. In Onslaught mode, you (and your squad of 3 teammates hopefully) progress through four of the multiplayer Rush maps, taking flags and fighting off hordes of AI enemies and vehicles. It’s great fun. The enemies aren’t totally stupid either and they seem to have a proper line of sight system as well, allowing you the opportunity to play it sneaky and flank them if you can keep out of sight.

I made a tiny bit more progress in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I think I’m still in Memory Sequence 4, so I’ve still got a way to go! Grabbed a few more games of Carcassonne, often in the 10-20 minutes where I’m waiting for my food to cook and the like. I tend to lose a lot. Disappointingly there still aren’t many people playing it, despite it having been on deal over Christmas.

And that’s about it. I’m going through a board game phase at the moment, but I’ll talk about later.

Top Ten of 2010 – No. 6

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Yes, they’re getting ever more irregular. I apologise. I’m still a little off my game. I will endeavour to be better. In the mean time, let’s carry on with another of my top games from the year that was 2010. You can find the previous sections here: 10 & 9-7.

6. Darksiders

Games released right at the start of the year tend to fair quite badly in end of year lists, so I’m glad my memory extends back far enough to remember that Darksiders was probably my biggest pleasant surprise of the year. I remember reading about it late in 2009 and it certainly sounded intriguing; a Zelda-esque adventure set in a post-apocalyptic, neo-gothic version of Earth where you get to play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War? AWW HELLS YEAH! I actually ended up pre-ordering it in a “well, the premise and what I’ve seen of it so far interests me enough to take a chance” kind of way. Don’t you just love it when a risk pays off?

Darksiders

This is War. You do not mess with War.

Before we really get into it, there is one major negative that I need to point out: The Start of The Game. No really, that’s it. The start of the game IS the negative. The first hour or so of Darksiders is shit. Unbelievably shit. I don’t think I’ve EVER played such a good game that has an introduction as shit as this one. It’s boring, slow, completely linear and not really any fun whatsoever. It doesn’t help that this is quite a tough game (more on that later) and I don’t recall getting much in the way of tutorials or explanations of the mechanics. Seriously, I had no real idea what was going on during the opening. I just know I was incredibly glad when it was over. Please persevere with it though, please!

I mentioned earlier that it’s quite Zelda-esque in its design. That is quite the understatement, because it’s almost a carbon copy of how Zelda works: enter a dungeon, do some fighting, solve some puzzles, kill the boss, get a new piece of equipment, use that new equipment to access new areas, repeat. Fortunately, once “that intro” is out of the way the game blossoms into a beautiful, expansive world, ripe for exploration. If you’re the kind of player that loves exploring every nook and cranny of a game, you will surely enjoy this game. For me, the key thing that makes Darksiders so good is the quality of the dungeons. With the exception of one, where you spend a lot of time fighting and riding your flaming (literally) horse Ruin, the dungeons are brilliantly designed chunks of adventure gaming, each with its own identity and style, smart puzzles, and plenty of levels to explore.

Darksiders

This is War's flaming horse, Ruin. He is summoned out of the ground. AT WILL!

Darksiders is a bit too easy on Normal difficulty. Actually, it’s very easy. All the forums and reviews I’d read had suggested to play it on Hard (“Apocalyptic”) difficulty for more of a challenge. And boy is it a challenge. There’s no middle ground here; either you fight and win all your battles easily on Normal or, on Apocalyptic, every single fight you engage in, no matter how seemingly insignificant the opponent, becomes a tense, sometimes infuriating battle for survival. There were quite a few difficulty spikes throughout the game. One of the early bosses is far harder than most you will fight later in the game and some encounters with standard bad guys will occasionally test your patience. It gets really silly when the “big” enemies you had trouble with early in the game arrive in packs as the small, minion-type characters later on! Combat is handled adequately but sometimes it can feel difficult to create decent combos – the controls are good though.

Lastly, it’s worth spending a bit of time talking about the characters. They’re excellent. Character designs are bold and exciting and with the exception of a few of the minor enemies, everyone helps add to the fantastic look and feel of Earth part-taken over by demons. The voice acting is brilliant, bringing the conniving, devious characters to life and there’s a reasonably good story, full of twists and turns. Oh and the ending is amazing. Seriously. I won’t spoil it, but I had goosebumps.