Tag: #gaming

Desert Island Games

Imagine you are trapped on a desert island and to keep you occupied you can choose any 5 games to play to keep you occupied. Let’s ignore the obvious questions like why would you have all the consoles and power for them, also let’s forget about making a choice like picking an online game to send help messages out. Now let’s go through what I’d pick.

Animal Crossing New Leaf

I’m a creature of habit so one thing I’ll need to do is establish some kind of routine for myself. Animal Crossing is the perfect game for this, getting up to go fishing as a job to earn my bells and doing chores to improve the town and help your neighbours is the exact kind of routine I’d need and with all the different date events there’d be enough variety to keep it interesting. Plus dealing with the animal residents will give me a false sense of community and conversation to counter the crushing isolation of island life. (There is a new Animal Crossing coming out soon but as it’s set on a desert island that might hit a bit too close to home).

Disgaea 5 Complete

Grinding has a bad name due to how badly handled and tedious it is in most games. Disgaea is different it is the perfect grind; the item world where you go inside equipment to level it up is randomly generated gives the grind a good sense of variety and between levelling up you characters, their special attacks and their equipment you always have a tangible feeling of improvement. I have put hundreds of hours into the series and while the first game is still my favourite, in terms of post game content Disgaea 5 is definitely the most abundant so will keep me busy the longest.

Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition

Devil May Cry is one of those series that defines me as a gamer, I even used varieties of Nero Angelo for online ID’s so I have to include one i this list. The 1st game has charm but was short and you can tell it was a first go at this gameplay style, we don’t talk about 2, but then we have t3 the great redeemer which has got to be my pick. The game has amazing combat and is overflowing with style but the main reason I have to pick this one is the variety, you are restricted to taking only one combat style along with a limited number of weapons, plus if you get the special edition version you even have another character you can play through the game as, due to these restrictions I feel that I could replaying the game utilising the combat system in different ways each time. 4 and 5 are also great but I think by letting the characters access all their tools at any time it hurts the replayability and speeds up the process of mastering the game.

Super Smash Bros Brawl

Super Smash Bros is an iconic series, despite being mostly praised for its multiplayer I spend a lot of time playing Melee, having all the different characters to go through classic, adventure and event modes with gave me a lot of fun plus there was the added bonus of collecting trophies that all provide short text snippets about large swathes of Nintendo game history which tended to be interesting reads. Though for the Island I’d pick Brawl instead, it has more single player content and trophies, plus I spend less time on it originally so a lot of the trophy text would be new to me. The next entry in the series decreased the amount of single player content, then Ultimate replaced trophies with spirits that lack the flavour text, so Brawl seems like the point in the series for this situation.

Rock Band 2

While I don’t talk about it nearly as much as games I love music, it would be a tough call if there was some strange situation where I had to choose between giving up games or music. So logically I have to include a game that contains loads of the music I love. Rock Band 2 was the peak to the plastic instrument craze for me, it’s on disc soundtrack is great including classics like Bad Reputation by Joan Jett & Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, along with a mix of fun more out their choices like Master Exploder by Tenacious D & Rob the Prez-O-Dent by That Handsome Devil, add in all the downloadable tracks as well and I’d be drowning in music. As a bonus for the Rock Band games I find drums the most fun to play so I’d be fitting in some physical activity I might otherwise neglect.

Well those were my picks for 5 games I’d want if I was stranded on a desert island, though given my total lack of survival skills I doubt I’d live long enough to play them. (They say it’s always good to end on a positive note).

Attack on Titan Game Thoughts

It Was the Best of Warriors, It Was the Worst of Warriors

When I first started playing Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom I thought it might be Omega Force’s best interpretation of their Dynasty Warriors style of games, but the problem is that as I played the game the more I saw that it also embodied the worst of the series.

Beor I get ahead of myself I should explain the oft misunderstood Warriors series. You play as some overpowered character wo obliterates hundreds of enemies and this is where the series gets its bad reputation, any individual enemy poses no challenge and you can easily get away with just button mashing to beat them. That’s all you need to make it through at a bare minimum but the real point is to excel and get high grades. The true point of a Warriors game is not just to win any individual battle but to win the battlefield, there are always multiple objectives such as capturing territories and beating bosses pulling you in different directions, you have to be efficient by dashing round all over the place and utilising the most effective combos to dispatch the enemies quickly. The real challenge of these games is to keep all the different plates spinning by playing at peak performance.

So what does Attack on Titan do differently to take advantage of this style? There’s two main differences to the norm; firstly there’s the omni-directional mobility gear which is basically a pair of gas powered grappling hooks that allow you to swing and propel yourself from buildings when combined with your twin swords it essentially makes you a murderous version of Spiderman, the other change is the enemies, their numbers are significantly reduced taking a quality over quantity approach with the titular titans being giant man like monsters. They are deadlier enemies but still quick to dispatch, a slash to the back of the neck at speed will instantly take them down (you can also target other body parts to make it easier to deliver that fatal blow, ie take out their legs to hinder their movement). By upping the speed of movement and the speed of killing the game feels far more frantic which perfectly plays into that challenge of efficiency and having to handle challenges all over the battlefield.

That’s all great so far but I did say it was also the worst. All I’ve described for the core gameplay is fantastic but the problem is there’s nothing surrounding that core. While in a good Warriors game you have a multitude of characters who feel different to play the different characters provide a sense of variety to counteract the repetitiveness the series is criticised for. In Attack on Titan while characters have different stats and some skills none of this particularly changes the way you play, regardless of who you pick how you play never fundamentally changes. The game just exacerbates this problem itself, once beating the story mode there’s additional post game missions that include new boss titans to fight, the kicker is to unlock these you have to complete the majority of side missions which are basically shorter rehashes of the story missions. Wading through literally dozens of these missions to try and experience something new just grows mind numbingly tedious and forced me to drop the game before unlocking all the post game content.

It’s a real shame what happened with the game, at its core it is fantastic but with nothing supporting that core it just collapses. Being burnt out from the game I never picked up the sequel when it came out, maybe enough time has passed now to give that a go and see if they learned from their mistakes.