In the past few weeks, in between working at my Real Job(tm) and upgrading my PC (more on that in a later update), I’ve actually managed to squeeze in some game playing. Briefly, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been playing in July.
Dungeon Lords
I bought this game on a whim while I was on my mini-vacation back home. Big mistake. This game is easily one of the worst games that I’ve ever played. I only managed to play it for about two hours before I just couldn’t take any more. Just some of the problems I had with the game include:
- The UI is confusing
- The characters animate strangely
- My mage started out with one offensive spell that had 3 charges. It took at least two to down an enemy. The spells recharge after several minutes. I rarely fought less than four enemies at a time. I died.
- I died a lot. When you die, your character loses stats. Like Intelligence.
- The first dungeon that I managed to get to was a sprawling, confusing mess. There was nothing Lordly about it.
- Occasionally, you will be assaulted by a random mob of monsters (around four to six). Occasionally in this sense means ‘every couple of minutes’. So, you can’t take your time exploring or trying to solve one of the ridiculous puzzles without having to stop to fight hordes of monsters all the time.
- When you open your inventory, all the characters on the screen that aren’t you will continue to animate in place. It’s kind of funny to see goblins running full-tilt, but not actually going anywhere… The first dozen times
- I now miss my $40
That’s just a partial list. If I really felt like boring you, I could keep going, but I’m sure you get the idea. This game sucks. Nobody should buy it. Ever.
Mario Kart: Double Dash
I had never actually owned this game until just recently. Somehow I managed to both not get it and unlock everything on the various copies owned by friends. I went to my local EB and snagged the last copy they had. The good news is that after all this time, the game still holds up. I also have expanded my collection of games that use my broadband adapter to two.
Indigo Prophecy
Fantastic game, although a little on the short side (I managed to finish it in around four hours). Indigo Prophecy is kind of like an interactive movie/choose your own adventure kind of thing. There isn’t really anything terribly difficult about the game. The actual game play elements boil down to tapping the shoulder buttons, pressing directions on the analog sticks in time with the game, and gesturing with the analog sticks. I played this game on PC, and it does support the keyboard and mouse, but I very quickly learned that the game controls much better using a dual-analog controller. This is easily the best $20 I’ve spent in a while.
Fable: The Lost Chapters
Since I don’t have an Xbox, I never got to play this game until recently. The game itself seems to be well put together, but there are minor graphical anomalies all over the place that just bother me a bit (the hero’s hair clips through his head, for example). But I can generally overlook these things, since the rest of the game is decent. The game seems to be a bit on the easy side; I haven’t had a significant problem with anything yet. That keeps the plot moving along, I suppose. I foolishly took my hero into battle with a particularly vicious creature without the protection of any headwear, and promptly got slashed across the face. My hero now has permanent scars. Whoops. It’s kind of neat that your hero does go through permanent changes as the game goes on, but he isn’t going to be winning any beauty contests.
And that’s all. We’re in the Summer months, and there’s going to be very little in the way of new games coming out until sometime in the Fall/early Winter that I really want to play, so now’s a good time to go back and play some of those games that I had intended to play, but neglected to pick up when they were new.