Gaming Weekend: Facing Your Fear Edition
Yes, well. I had originally thought that my purchase of BioShock would have to wait until Friday due to budget constraints (actual budget, not my imaginary $60 a Month budget). Fortunately my wife is gifty so she went ahead and bought it for me on Tuesday.
I was originally planning on going to PAX last week so I took a few extra days off to extend the weekend. Sadly PAX ended up falling through but I didn’t bother to undo my vacation time so I had a lot of opportunity to play through BioShock. You can read my full review elsewhere, but suffice to say the game is superb. It definitely earns its Mature rating, but it’s a horror-type game, after all.
The rest of the (new, abbreviated!) rundown after the hop.
I continue to put in practice runs on Geometry Wars, and according to 360 Voice I’ve now put in over 50 days on the game, making it my most frequently played game, ever, overtaking Oblivion. Hooray… I guess. I’m now ignoring the 9 bombs Achievement and trying to get the 10x multiplier; I figure once I get to that point even the lowly diamond enemies will be worth 1,000 points each so racking up the bombs won’t be too difficult. Sadly, I seem to have lost some of the touch I had even a couple of weeks ago and now I’m averaging a sad 300K each try.
After I finished BioShock I needed a little something to clear my head of blood-splattered dystopia so I put Viva Piñata back in for a bit and finally—finally—got a Pigxie bred which led to me taming the Sour Mallowolf at last. The interesting thing about this game is that once you get to a certain point in available funds you can more or less buy your way into any endeavor you wish unless it relies on the AI doing something it is supposed to. I’m not sure if this is by design but, as an example, I’m trying to get an Elephantilla to become a resident but he requires 16 blackberries just to visit and then he must eat four of those plus four ears of corn (and maybe more, I don’t know yet). Which is okay except he only shows up for a few short minutes a day and blackberries rot faster than they grow so it’s easier to just buy them at 100 coins each. That’s still 1600 coins to attract him and then four ears of corn cost 600 coins. I’ve payed this 2200 coin investment out at least four times and so far I’ve only been able to get him to eat three ears of corn because he passes it by more often than not and it only takes a couple days of him doing this before all the fruit and corn goes bad and I have to re-invest. I wish this game didn’t try quite so hard to make me hate it.
Not Just 360 Anymore
There was some older school action this weekend as well. I got God of War II from GameZnFlix which… well, it’s like bonus levels for God of War. I loved the first one but I’m not sure I was hoping for more of the same from a sequel. I also got Silent Hill 2 from Goozex which I played a bit more of. I’ve tried this game three times now and despite loving the original on PSOne and SH3, I never could get into the second. After reading an article on the game and finding that many consider it to be the pinnacle of the series I figured I had to give it at least a shot. It’s gotten pushed aside some in favor of other stuff but it’s looking like a nice one to own so I can pick it up when I’m looking for something scary after BioShock has worn off my brain.
I also just got Jade Empire on a friend’s recommendation via Goozex and installed the update. The graphics hold up surprisingly well but I have to say that the backwards-compatibility experience on the 360 is kind of weak. I’ve only played about fifteen minutes of the game so far but it looks like a good time. And since I seem to be visiting the past I also picked up, again from Goozex, Metroid Zero Mission for GBA. I love what they did with this game and I think it is far, far superior to the intriguing but ultimately disappointing Metroid Fusion.
We Have a Table; It Has a Top
The other big triumph of the weekend was that I finally sat Nik down long enough to play a game of Arkham Horror, the Fantasy Flight board game set in the Call of Cthuhlu world. I love this game and I’ve played it a couple of times before but this was the first chance I’ve had to play my own copy and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Nik actually liked it. Part of that may have been that she totally owned at the game and pretty much single-handedly won for us, but whatever makes her sit through a potentially grueling four and a half hour game is fine with me.
I also continue to play the schedule shuffle regarding my 40K match; I guess I’ll stop mentioning it until we finally make it happen, if we ever do.