In Defense of the Narrative

I am a gamer, but I’m a lot of other things too. I’m an engineering student, a member of the marching band, a writer, a game artist/programmer, and a whole host of other things. My time is pretty well divided up. This is not a problem in and of itself, and I really enjoy the variety.

Here's the problem: my favorite genre of game is the RPG. I love them and I hate them. I love the immersive storylines, the gameplay I can tweak to my style, the branching dialogues. But I start to hate myself for spending so much time playing them. One of my housemates even started poking fun at me this weekend for playing video games all day. I start to feel lazy when I see the hours played ticking upwards every time I save.

Just one more conversation....

REVIEW- Patapon 3

And yet another post that I should have written months ago while I was actively playing the game. Like with Terraria, I haven't actually beaten Patapon 3 yet, but I'm not going to mark this review with 'INCOMPLETE' because I have sunk a considerable amount of time into the game, and don't think that investing considerably more time to complete the game would particularly change my opinions. Also, when reading this review, keep in mind that Patapon 3 has a huge focus on playing the game multiplayer, but I've only played singleplayer. Anyway, here we go!

REVIEW- Terraria

Man, I wish I could write clever titles. But if I tried, I'd probably always get stuck on the title writing part and never actually write anything, so I'm going to stick with my simple, if boring, title method. Anyway, today's topic is Terraria!

Off the edge of the map: Here there be dragons. Or, treasure and enemies to shoot. Whichever.

Woo! Uncharted! Here I'm going to review the first two games, Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves, at the same time.

My driver's license should be revoked.

dude, check out that sweet car!

I am addicted to racing games.

Choice Systems

Oh boy. This turned out to be a monster of a post. Please try to bear with us, and not posting tl;dr would also be appreciated.

Up until now, the three of us writing here have all been working and writing separately, but this time we’re working together. Today we want to talk about choice systems in video games, with a focus on the popular ‘moral choice’ systems. We chose this topic after playing through inFamous a little while back. I’ve beaten inFamous on the good path, Shoofle has beaten it on the evil path, and Maggie has finished the good path and is working through the evil path now. Also, since we’re working together on this, the use of “I” at any point in this article could be referring to any of us. So try not to get too confused.

A word of warning, there will be a few minor spoilers for some games. We avoided all the big spoilers, but just letting you know.

Steam Summer Impressions III

Sadly, I'm going to have to remove one game from my list for now. I tried to boot up Magicka, and it was really pretty but running painfully slowly. I double-checked the system requirements (which I'm in the bad habit of not checking) and discovered that my graphics card is just slightly underpowered. :-( I'm researching workarounds. Otherwise, this may have to wait until I get a more powerful computer. However, on to happier subjects, namely, games I've quite enjoyed playing:

Steam Summer Impressions II

On to the next games I promised to review!

Steam Summer Sale = Impressions!

Let's get this straight from the beginning: I'm not a computer gamer. While I did get my gaming start on RTSs such as AOE and AOM and played my first Legend of Zelda on an emulator, hardcore PC gaming has never been my thing. I got a copy of Steam when they had Portal for free as a promotion, since I don't own an Xbox. Because I am more competent with a controller than with a keyboard and mouse, I ignored Steam for a few years. I got a real profile when Jeremy gave me Super Meat Boy (fantastic game, btw) and in the past few days, he pointed out to me the Steam Summer Sale. Now I have 11 games in my profile and am happily checking back every day when the sale games change. An addict in the making.

So, similarly to what Jeremy did over winter break, I'm going to give some initial impressions on the games I picked up. Here's the list:

1. Obulis
2. Chains
3. Vigil: Blood Bitterness
4. Gumboy: Crazy Adventures / Crazy Features
5. Braid
6. Magicka
7. Torchlight
8. Trine