Potentially controversial opinion time: I don’t like Might and Magic:Legacy very much.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Thoughts: Metal Gear Rising.
I use a controller to play my console ports these days. Sure, modern ports are usually good enough that you can wrangle the mouse and keyboard into some semblance of an acceptable control scheme (unless they’re Dark Souls), but I do think they lose something unless played with a controller. Most of the time my controller is used for Spelunky Daily Challenges, and while that’s pretty much the opposite of a chilled out experience my hands come away from it feeling rather relaxed – limber, almost. By contrast after playing Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for an hour I physically have to uncurl the fingers of my left hand from their claw-like grasp because I’ve been clutching the controller so hard, such is the intensity of this game. It’s pure distilled action from start to finish that takes the developer’s experience with action games (Revengeance was made by Platinum Games, who were previously responsible for the reputedly-excellent Bayonetta) and Hideo Kojima’s wonderfully off-kilter Metal Gear Solid universe and pursues the resulting combination to its logical conclusion to produce something that’s almost beautiful in terms of how insane it all is.
Thoughts: RAGE.
Never has the noble intention of reducing the size of my Steam backlog gone so horribly awry.
Thoughts: Hearthstone.
I wrote this just before Christmas but held off posting it until Hearthstone hit open beta, which it did just last week. Aside from some card tweaks the game has not changed at all between now and then.
Let’s talk about Hearthstone.
Thoughts: The Banner Saga.
The Banner Saga is proof that fantastic art and atmospheric music do not a decent game make.
Thoughts: Legendary Heroes.
I’m honestly not sure where to start with Legendary Heroes. It’s no less than the third iteration of a game born in an environment of extreme mediocrity: Stardock Corporation, they of incredibly bland 4X1 ‘em up Galactic Civilizations fame. The original Elemental was savaged on release for being both unfinished and terrible; that Stardock keep trying to make the concept work probably has less to do with their faith in that concept than it does the Elemental series being the CEO’s pet project. Still, Stardock have persevered, and for the second and third games they hired one Derek “Kael” Paxton as their lead designer. Kael is the man responsible for the popular Fall From Heaven mod for Civilization 4 which I played five or six years ago and liked very much, not least because it let me cover an entire continent with monuments to Cthulu. He clearly had some promising ideas and a talent for game design, and I wanted to see if any of this had managed to bleed through into Legendary Heroes.
- The term “4X” comes from “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate”, which was no doubt dreamed up by some bored marketing drone to save them the trouble of having to write “It’s like Civilization” in all the promo material. ↩
Looking Forward 2014.
And we’re back with the quasi-traditional list of upcoming releases in 2014. No doubt I’ve forgotten something obvious, so feel free to add your own contributions in the comments.
As one of my New Year’s resolutions I think I’m going to give up looking forward to videogames. As last years list proved, it’s a mug’s game: my most anticipated games turned out to be mediocre at best, while the best games of the year were as yet unannounced at the time that I wrote it. So this year I’m just going to talk about what looks reasonably interesting and try not to get my expectations up that these games will actually pan out.