It’s now the year 2010 and the Christmas break has been awesome for me. Tomorrow I return to my university dorm for a week of exams and that means that far from the ridiculous number of hours I’ve put into games over the past week, there’ll have to be a lot more time spent revising. I’ll be back down with my family from Friday onwards though and so that means plenty more opportunity to make some progress on my many games.
I also got a late Christmas present on Boxing Day, Lumines. It was less than £2 on Steam and it’s another game I’d recommend for the price it’s currently at on Steam. It’s not a game I’ve become overly absorbed by but it’s a fun game to play in short bursts.
The game I’ve poured the most time into this week is Garry’s Mod. I’ve been impressed by the amount of user-created content constantly being released for the game and I’ve found the quality of the user content I’ve downloaded somewhat mixed, but it’s always been an interesting experience. There is the disappointment of finding the little glitches and shortcomings in something you’ve downloaded but there is also a large amount of content out there which is of a professional quality. I’ve found the multiplayer can often be a dull experience, but I’ve spent an amount of time on the single player I never dreamed of spending with the game.
I made one brief attempt to get into Counter-Strike: Source but I must admit that having no idea of what each weapon was like and feeling severely outclassed by much more experienced players did push me into putting the game to one side for now.
I’ve also played a lot of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 and that is a great strategy game! I played a lot of the original Dawn of War and didn’t know how I’d find a campaign experience where they’d completely removed all base-building aspects and the idea of commanding large-scale armies. I’ve found that the focus on a controlling a small number of troops on the battlefield gives you the satisfaction of having very powerful units which can decimate entire armies of opponents at the same time as being a very refreshing experience for anyone who is used to playing real-time strategy games. The constant movement of troops and the utilisation of each units special abilities makes the gameplay more akin to that of games like Torchlight or Diablo in some senses. On the normal difficulty the game has been challenging but fair so far and I’ve enjoyed being able to have the freedom of being able to choose from a number of available missions at almost all times. The real strength of the game is its unconventionality.
I’ve also started systematically going after all the puzzle pieces in Braid. Somehow I struggled my way through getting all the pieces in world two and three and it’s been actively going after each individual piece which has truly made me appreciate the genius of the design and programming of each of these puzzles. It’s mind-blowing that they managed to come up with these levels and I’ve really surprised myself by the way I’ve been able to solve the seemingly impossible problems set before me by Braid. I have a long way to go if I want to finish the game though.
I’m still holding off on starting Dragon Age: Origins and continuing Borderlands while I’m playing everything else. Bayonetta is also coming out this month and more importantly so is Mass Effect 2. I might just be able to get at least one of those games to add to my hours of backlog.
Thanks for reading, I’m gonna leave this blog here with a great video from Kotaku (scroll down). Enjoy 2010 everyone.
-Gamer_152
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