Kevin's Watch

I've had so much studying to do lately, when I get done I don't want to think much, so I haven't been playing Starcraft 2. Instead, I've been falling back on my old standby, Unreal Tournament.

I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum on Saturday.

Great game, though if I have one criticism it's that the combat could get repetative. The majority of the "boss" fights involved some combination of multiple ordinary henchmen and bigger ones that would do a charge attack and which you had to stun during the charge before you could do any damage to them.

The highlights of the game were the Scarecrow platformer sequences and the build up to them, particularly the final one.

I do have to question at least one element of the plot - in the final scenes Joker says Batman has ruined everything by getting as far as he has, but if that was the case, why all the build up and preparation surrounding his "party", as if he intended Batman to make it there?

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Murrin wrote:I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum on Saturday.

Great game, though if I have one criticism it's that the combat could get repetative. The majority of the "boss" fights involved some combination of multiple ordinary henchmen and bigger ones that would do a charge attack and which you had to stun during the charge before you could do any damage to them.

The highlights of the game were the Scarecrow platformer sequences and the build up to them, particularly the final one.

I do have to question at least one element of the plot - in the final scenes Joker says Batman has ruined everything by getting as far as he has, but if that was the case, why all the build up and preparation surrounding his "party", as if he intended Batman to make it there?

I absolutely loved this game. The combat did get repetitive, but there was usually a new way to do things, especially when you are acting as a predator. The usual fistfight stuff was pretty average though, but I loved finding new ways to be sneaky, and being able to depend on brute force when needed. That's why I didn't enjoy the extras so much as it was either sneaking or brute force. I played through the majority of the sneaking, but barely played any of the other.

The Scarecrow scenes were absolutely the best, and I had the misfortune of always coming across those moments by myself at night, and being good and creeped out.

I have no answer to the plot question. I barely paid attention to the plot, to be honest. I'll have to replay it now to see what you are talking about.

News about the sequel is starting to come out. Can't wait!

Finished Borderlands. Meh. It was alright.

I really need to return to Fallout 3 and finish it. I'm not getting much gaming time at the moment though. Next is probably Tenchu Z, or maybe a replay of Jade Empire.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Easily the scariest game I have every played, and I have yet to encounter any creatures.

Loremaster wrote:Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Easily the scariest game I have every played, and I have yet to encounter any creatures.

From some of the scarier games I've played, the instant you do encounter a creature, it tends to lose its scariness.

I'm close to getting 100% on The Saboteur, but then yesterday... Civilization V came out.

So long, console games, it's back to the PC for a while

Halo Reach! If you have a 360, you should play with me! GT: JazFusion

Though I usually only play after 8 EST 'til about 10 EST. Gotta get the kiddo to bed and then get up early for work. :\

DO EEET DO EET C'MON GET TO THE CHOPPA

I just finished Halo Reach on Legendary. There are some moments in that game that I wanted to ram my car through the front of the house of the guy that programed the Covenant Ai.

Mostly playing Left4Dead 1 and 2. Finished the Sacrifice and loving the Taaannk Mutation game.

Mainly a combination of Tenchu Z, Left 4 Dead 2 and the dreaded Modern Warfare 2. Hmm.

The Medal of Honor reboot is out in a few days. I decided to get it based on my faith in DICE.

Tried out the multiplayer in the new Medal of Honor. I haven't had chance to try the campaign yet because I haven't had time.

Medal of Honor's multiplayer suffers from most of the things that make Call of Duty annoying: excessive sniping, camping, spawn-camping, victory going to whichever team has the fastest trigger fingers or the most snipers, and a reward system that means the winning team just gets further and further ahead. I just played a match where I died twelve times in two minutes, each time within a few steps of my spawn point, because of a combination of snipers and mortar strikes.

On the bright side, it doesn't have any form of kill-cam (which I've always found to be an annoying feature in CoD) and the maps are mostly quite good.

Overall, I think MoH tries to bring together the best bits of Call of Duty and Bad Company 2 but ends up spreading itself too thinly and failing on both fronts. I'll give it a week so I can play the single player campaign, and if the multiplayer doesn't become more appealing in that time I'll sell it. It isn't worth full price.

Ok, the revised (and concise) verdict on Medal of Honor: 10% of the time it's good, and is as enjoyable as an above-average FPS. 90% of the time it's ass.

Half Life 2: Epsiodes 1 and 2 on PC. For four to six hour games, they're really addictive. Been trying to get all the achievements, the ones on Ep2 are crazy hard. Stop a dozen striders from destroying ANY buildings??

Then my PC had a spaz, so I've been revisiting Ninja Gaiden on my Xbox, playing Very Hard for the first time. The first couple of levels haven't been too bad, but I have a feeling there will be tears when I have to fight Alma.

Back to Fallout 3. Finally finished the main quest, and downloaded Broken Steel so I can press on.

I was in a used CD shop and stumbled across a copy of Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver for the PSone. I used to own it and missed it almost as much as I miss my PSone Tomb Raider games.

I picked it up for three bucks. Quite the deal, but it cost me three times as much and a search of five Gamestops to score a PSone memory card.

The game is living up to my fond memories of it. Incredible story, Awesome music, and Difficult puzzles. I HAD forgotten about the balky controls and camera though.

Ah, Soul Reaver Have you played the rest of the series? The plot becomes increasingly tortuous.

Just finished the solo campaign in Call of Duty: Black Ops (it arrived a day early). It was pretty awesome, to be fair. I don't want to say anything at all in case I give something away, so I'll just say that while the influence of Modern Warfare 2 is clear enough, Black Ops does very much do its own thing in many ways. Sadly it suffered from Call of Duty's usual brevity.

I had a quick peek at zombies and multiplayer, and they've both pleasantly surprised me. I'll leave zombies for people to discover themselves, but I want to comment on a few nifty features in multiplayer. For the first time it's possible to practice! Yes, you can now go into as many training matches as you choose, against AI-controlled characters (who, amusingly, bear the names of people in your friends list. JazFusion got me a few times :p ). This is invaluable for CoD newcomers to get the hang of things, and it lets all of us explore the maps with less danger than we'd suffer from real people. The other thing that stands out to me is the addition of 'contracts': you can use CoD points (a new addition that has been fairly well documented in the gaming press, so I won't comment on it) to buy contracts such as 'get X kills with shotguns' or 'get X headshots' which, when fulfilled, will reward you with more CoD points.

I like Treyarch now. I think they do CoD better than Infinity Ward does.

Fable 3, Reach, Black Ops and Kinect games.

Cov: I promise to write more entries soon! I have the "Add A New Post" window open and some Daft Punk playing, so hopefully something will be fruitful this evening.

The Legend of Zelda... NES... what? I've never played it before...