This is the first of a (hopefully) ongoing, down-to-earth series of posts which will describe my Backloggery progress each week. I normally try to post more thoughtful and philosophical content, but these reports are intended to be more concrete (and, perhaps, less interesting).
Last weekend a few friends visited from mid-afternoon until after midnight. We downloaded the Free to Play (F2P) shooter Tribes: Ascend. The vast majority of our time together was spent huddled around our laptops, reminiscing about Tribes 2 while playing round after round of this new F2P title. None of us earned much more than 20,000 XP which is barely enough to unlock a new character class, let alone some of the more valuable items. Naturally we weren’t inclined to spend any real money (Pay to Win). It seems a decent game and all three of us were productive members of our respective teams, but I probably won’t play it much more.
Late that night we discovered the Magicka collection sale for $7.49 was about to end, so we hurriedly purchased it with plans to play Magicka: Vietnam during our next gathering. I look forward to that.
Monday and Tuesday evenings I spent polishing off the last two achievements for Mass Effect 3 (5,000 kills for Veteran and weapon level 10 for Gunsmith). I’m 100% complete on the entire ME trilogy (minus a few DLC, which I rarely bother with).
No forward progress was made on GTA: Chinatown Wars or Torchlight, where I’ve been working on a very hard hardcore (VHHC) playthrough.
However, I did fire up the long-unfinished Call of Duty 3 on my 360. I plan a single frustrating playthrough on veteran to earn the worthwhile achievements and complete the game (multiplayer will be ignored given the age of this game).
Tribes: Ascend strangely had me in its clutches for a while after that weekend. I have logged 24 hours in the game and have unlocked all of the classes. However, I've become increasingly frustrated at the quality of the teams that you find. Most of the time in pick-up games you end up in a one-sided match, purely because the teams don't work together. It all comes down to one person who is better than everyone on the other team.
ReplyDeleteIn competition it could be fun, but I think I'm hanging up my anti-friction boots for now.
F2P games seem to attract this type of community for some reason. Just look at LoL.
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