Friday, November 8, 2013

Weekly Report - 11/08/2013

Yeah, yeah, I missed four months. It's ridiculous. Actually, I haven't really been spending much time playing games. Ridiculous, and sad.

Cold weather is rapidly approaching again, though, so it's time to dig back in! I started gaming again a few weeks ago. I never finished Dead Island: Riptide when I bought it earlier this year, so I started where I left off, about two chapters into the main story.

Riptide is hardly different from its predecessor, except it seems enemies and items respawn every time the player turns around. It's much more difficult to play solo than the original title, but that's how I decided to roll through it. It's not that the co-op isn't fun - it most certainly is the best way to experience the game - I've just been feeling rather antisocial lately and wanted to experience the game on my own. Regardless, the game is absolutely best enjoyed with friends.

Maybe I'm just thin-skinned but the game sort of frightens me. Perhaps it's the up-close, personal, intimate nature of the gameplay. Encounters are far too invasive for my comfort. I'm used to shooting threats down before the enemy gets close enough to claw me with its diseased fingernails.

Is Riptide any good? It's fun, but the story is trite, predictable, and cheap. The "base defense" sections were my favorite: you set up defenses such as electric fences, mines, and the like and fire up some noise generator (e.g. an outrageously loud water pump) which attracts a large horde of infected. Fend them off, and you can move on to the next line of story missions that lead to the next base defense mission. You get the gist.

What's next? I'm pretty well out of titles. I finally found the DLC content in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, so I'm playing through that but at a pretty slow pace. I'd like to pick up a few more current-gen titles before diving into the next-generation consoles (more on the PS4/XBone to come). The Last of Us, Batman: Arkham Origins, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and GTA5 are all on my list.

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