Well, UPS took their sweet time in getting my Street Fighter V Collector’s Edition to my door. It was late enough that by the time they finally arrived, I had a few beers in me. Despite all the hate on the Internet over this game, I was stupid excited to get this game installed so I could finally play as I did not touch any of the beta weekends. Let’s take a look inside and see what goodies await us in this box!
In Pursuit of Platinum: LEGO Batman 3 for Vita
I am not sure why, but for whatever reason, I picked up LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham on the Vita, even though I haven’t touched the game on the PlayStation 4. I assumed, and rightly so, it would be a great little couch game to play downstairs instead of staring at my phone and scrolling through Twitter or Facebook. Each little level took about 10-15 of my time, and none really required my concentration. I could put it down at any time, and it helped my eldest loved watching me play. He liked it so much, he used the last of his Christmas money to buy the 3DS version for himself.
It also gave me a chance to actually use the strategy guide Prima Games sent me (I know, I’m not worthy of their stuff sometimes…most of the time…fine, ever) to lock down each and every trophy, which I did Friday night, as you can see from the date above. So at least for the handheld portion of the strategy guide, the book is extremely helpful in finding every collectible and obtaining every Trophy. There were a few collectibles I could not find, and the collectible detector was less than worthless. There were also a couple of Trophies I couldn’t figure out, or didn’t want to spend the time to figure out like the lazy little bitch I am. One Trophy required that I obtain maximum studs on the tech hacking puzzles in each and every level they exist in. I knew I hadn’t done that in the beginning, since I kind of rushed through them, and if I had read the guide, I would have known not to do that. Instead of playing every single level again, I bookmarked each puzzle mentioned in the strategy guide, and replayed those levels. It cut out a considerable amount of time.
Platinum achieved in 15 hours time, and now I’m back on chasing that Platinum in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers in between reviews. I really wish that I didn’t have these Internet sinkholes in my house where I could use remote play to do the same thing on my Vita I did with LEGO Batman 3. Before you give me all this Internet advice, I really do have Internet sinkholes throughout the house. My bedroom interferes with bluetooth communication, and you can forget about accessing Wi-Fi in the kitchen, even though the access point is just behind one kitchen wall. Gotta love old houses.
Monday Gaming Diary: Firewatchin’
I looked forward to Firewatch, as it was supposed to be one of those unique games with focus upon exploration and solving a mystery. The environments looked beautiful, and I’m always excited to play games that don’t have the traditional gameplay. I mean, it’s a mystery game with exploration; where can I sign up?
The game is short; my Steam clock says I finished in 4.3 hours. And I was kind of bored three-fourths of that time.
The game is beautiful, I’ll give it that. I had a good time exploring the lay of the land, taking screenshots and photos with the disposable camera the protagonist found, and at moments, I was as tense as my character. But when the big reveal happened, when I learned exactly what this mystery was all about, I said out loud, “That’s it?”
I didn’t like Gone Home either for the same reason, but at least the story in Gone Home made sense and was believable. It was believable that this woman came home to an empty house, not because something horrific happened, but because
- She didn’t tell her family when she was coming home;
- Her parents made out-of-town plans; and
- Her sister decided to run away.
All of those reasons are 100% believable. If I didn’t tell my family I was coming home at a certain day and time, I’d probably come home to an empty house too. I mean, not for the same reasons, but the probability is high that they would be doing other things.
I’m not saying that the mystery in this case isn’t believable, because it is, but none of it makes sense as it why it’s even happening in the first place. Some time, when more time as passed and I feel more comfortable giving spoilers, I’ll go more into this one. For now, all I will say is that I feel like the developer created an emotional introduction for the sake of trying to jerk some tears, but the intro ended up being incredibly irrelevant. In addition, the mystery makes no sense as to why it was even going on. As a friend of mine said this morning, it’s like a novice’s stab at suspense novel. Everything was built up to be so tense and so dramatic, and the end result was, well, boring.
You want a great mystery built upon exploration? Here are some recommendations: Dear Esther, Murdered: Soul Suspect, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Those are great examples; Firewatch is not.
The Corner of Randomness – January Arcade Block Unboxing
My January Arcade Block arrived and I was pretty excited to tear into it as I remembered that there was supposed to be some more Mortal Kombat stuff in this one. Besides the kick-ass Mortal Kombat X item, there is some pretty fun items in this one! So, let’s get into it!
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Monday Gaming Diary: Old School Point-and-Click Without the Old School Rage
This weekend was once again a weekend of game reviews galore, and one was a small indie title that I decided to take on for reasons I still don’t know. Something about the press release grabbed my attention, or maybe it was wanting to throw this one PR company a bone because they’re super nice, I don’t know. But for whatever reason, I said yes to checking out Order of the Thorne: King’s Challenge. It’s an old school point-and-click adventure that goes as far as to include old school graphical presentation, which made me chuckle. It even has a narrator, so it’s a spiritual successor, or one that pays serious homage to, the King’s Quest games. However, there is one major difference here in comparison to King’s Quest: it’s impossible to get to an unwinnable situation. Therefore, the only frustration you will have is in solving the puzzles, not because you have to start over because you didn’t do things EXACTLY in this particular order.
It’s guaranteed!
That was really refreshing to say the least, and it made me venture rather stress-free.
The game was rather short; my Steam app says that I finished it in 4 hours, and there was a lot of wandering around as I tried to figure out who needed this item or where I could use that. That said, the area to explore is very small, so it was expected to be quite short when I realized how limited I was in exploration.
But you know, I don’t want a big, 20-hour-plus adventure right now that will just eat up goads of time in both exploration and puzzle solving. This was a nice sample, and from the end credits, it’s simply the start of a few games in this game universe. If that indeed comes to fruition, then four hours was more than enough for the first episode of Order of the Thorne.
Needless to say, I can’t wait for more. Now to write this review…
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