Two games down

Hello

This week I actually completed 2 games. Two!!

On Monday night I completed the last level of Warhammer 40k: Kill Team. Thankfully no odd little glitches this time around, and quite a good final boss fight. I also ran through the survival stages just for the achievement. Overall I enjoyed the game a lot, but it has flaws like being a little too short and some bad camera angles. I would love a Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War game using the mechanics from this and a 5 team online multiplayer coop. At the very least adding terminators into a sequel would be good.

The other game I complated this was Odd Bot Out on Android (no pun intended). This is a great little puzzle game spread over 100 levels. The goal of each stage is to get your Bot from one side of the stage to the other by manipulating the bot and interacting with other bots or switches or building blocks along the way. It all has a nice simple interface and the touch controls work well. What I really liked about this game is that the solution to each level isn't exact and you can usually get away with bodging something together. Very enjoyable.

Everything else has just been the usual stuff (WWE Supercard, Split/Second Velocity and Hearthstone), but I have put some time into Hitman Sniper on Android.

That's it for this week. Just a short update.

Tomorrow is Halloween and I'm going to ComicCon. I'm excited!

Stuart

Relegated to the Kitchen

Hello

Just over a week left of October and the dark nights have come in quickly. Having the clocks go back an hour at the end of the month will only make the darkness start earlier, but at least the mornings will be a little brighter for a while.

This week I was relegated to the kitchen with my laptop as my wife was entertaining in the living room. I thought I'd take the opportunity to try using the inbuilt game streaming that Steam provides, but unfortunately it wasn't good experience. My first session crashed out on me, and my second session was very laggy. I think the game kept running on the PC from the first session which is why the second session wasn't great. I'll have another go with it at some stage as I think it is a really good feature.

As the streaming wasn't working I installed a couple of games on the laptop from my Steam library that weren't too graphically intensive and didn't have big install sizes. The first of these was Three Fourths Home - Extended Edition. I'd read some non-spoiler reviews of this game and thought it was an interesting concept. You play a girl that has had to move back home to Nebraska to live with her parents after flunking out of college. The game has you driving home through a rainstorm from your dad's childhood home. You talk on the phone to your Mum, Dad and brother during the drive making choices as the conversation progresses. Through two playthroughs the conversation choices didn't impact the ending I got, but each branch provided some more information as to the family dynamics at play. The extended edition on Steam includes an epilogue as well as some of your brother's stories, a photogallery and a radio player of the soundtrack. The epilogue is strange as it is a prologue that takes place before the main story, but it does have alternate endings depending on the conversation choices.

The other two games I played were Spelunky and The Expendabros (the free version of BroForce based on The Expendables films). Spelunky is randomly generated platformer/dungeon crawler that gets good reviews, but during my playtime I just couldn't quite get the hang of it. It looks good and plays well so I'll definitely go back to it and have another crack at it. The Expendabros is similar to Spelunky in it's look and feel, but was easier to get grips with. For it being a free game based on a movie licence it is a very playable little game that sees you running and gunning with members of the Expendabros to make it to the end of the level taking out baddies on your way. Each character has their own method of attack and special move and lives are generated through the levels by saving caged colleagues. Good fun action game just like the movies it is based on.

With it being nearly November it's time to start thinking about Christmas lists. With the amount of games I have, and the number of them that are unplayed, I think I'll just put Xenoblade Chronicles X on my list and see what else I end up with (fingers crossed).

I hope life is good to you

Stuart

Autumn Leaves

Hello

Wow! We're in October already. The nights are getting darker, the weather is on the turn, and we're heading into the Christmas push for retailers selling games and accessories.

As far as my game playing goes I'm still playing things I have had for a while, but haven't got round to playing.

In the last couple of weeks I've put most of my game playing time into Split/Second Velocity. I'm progressing quite well through the season mode races, and as I got the game for my birthday I bought most of the DLC for the game. The game is still good fun to play and very easy to have a couple of quick sessions of each week when I get the chance.

As for other games on PS3; I put about 15-20 mins each into Hunted: The Demon's Forge, Bulletstorm and Syndicate. Out of the three of them Hunted seems like a game I'll put a lot of time into as I like the game style and the mechanics seem fairly robust. It's also a nice change when a game actually allows you switch character during the game to switch up the play style of ranged or melee. Syndicate and Bulletstorm are both FPSs, but Bulletstorm definitely seems to have a bit more character about it.

On PC I've been playing the puzzle game Divide by Sheep which sees you trying to rescue a specific number of sheep on each level. The game takes a rather dark turn when you have to feed sheep to wolves, or fire them through a laser barrier which cuts them in half so that you can meet your quota. With 100+ levels to go through this will keep me going for a while as I'm only on 18 or 20. A bite size puzzler that I find hard to spend a lot of time on.

I've also been playing Warhammer 40K: Kill Team. It's a twin stick shooter where you take control of a Space Marine and shot your way through levels on an Ork battleship disabling systems on your way to an inevitable fight with the Ork leader at the end. The game is enjoyable enough and having a choice of Space Marine type (Librarian, Tech Marine, Assault Marine etc.) adds some nice reolayability. I would have liked to see a Terminator as a choice, but that is personal preference. It supports local co-op and while I haven't had a chance to try this the gameplay would suit it very well.

It's getting to that time of year where my PS+ subscription is due to expire and I've turned off the auto renew. I plan to complete Unfinished Swan and Hohokum before sometime in December, but after that I don't think I'll renew as I'm just not getting value from it due to the limited amount of time I have to play games. There are a lot of games that I got from the service that I would love to sink time into, but that's just the way life is sometimes.

Thanks for reading

Stuart