Ok so I’m finally done a majority of my term papers (still two left but fuck it) and so I wanted to go back to talking about GAMES. It’ll be a relief to get back into the thick of it before these forums are crowded with everyone’s personal (and proper) game of the year lists. I’ll get down to my customary reasoning about why I’m writing these lengthy blogs (cause I wanna). The real motive behind the whole thing is the fact that I along with many other bombers I’m sure cannot afford or want to spend money on ten brand new games in order to make a proper game of the year list. So in reality I buy games on the cheap (for the most part) in order to maintain my carefree lifestyle (yeah right). However I still wanted to be able to talk about the games I played this year and discuss them with you bombrades. So I made this catalogue of the games I played this year and my opinions on them. Some of them have been better received then others but to recap this list is not in order of score or anything but just in the order I have played them this year. So far I have blogged about Resistance 3, Infamous 2, Rage, Twisted Metal, Mass Effect 3, Bulletstorm, Rayman: Origins, PixelJunk Monsters, Batman: Arkham City and PixelJunk Shooter. Looking at that mix of games I just have to say it has been a weird combination of gaming for me this year. Sorry if I’ve bored you to tears with this recap when you came to hear about a specific game. We’re into July of this year and Infamous: Festival of Blood.

So in my earlier blogs I mentioned that before 2012 I was very wary of PSN games in general. Not so much because of the whole credit card scandal, but because I wasn’t so sure about the value I would get out of the games from there as well as the terrible sales that didn’t really encourage me to buy anything. After I (finally) found a good sale on PSN during the PixelJunk sale (DO MORE OF THESE SALES!!) I decided to try out the whole short game thing. I had mixed feelings about Monsters and Shooter but they did open the floodgates so to speak about me wanting to see the catalogue of PSN games. It also helped Infamous: Festival of Blood’s case that it was a) on sale and b) a game from a series I enjoyed the crap out of and c) really well reviewed. So it was a no brainer even after I had somewhat recently played Infamous 2.

Dude I love the idea of Halloween chapters in games. It is such an interesting and fun Treehouse of Horror type of thing that it makes me miss Halloween specials of Home Improvement and Roseanne growing up (if you just went WTF feel free to leave lmao). Plus there was the whole this has the best traversal mechanic in Infamous so far which made me really excited because Sucker Punch has made me feel the traversal in their games to be top notch. So when I jumped in and it started with Zeke and his tall tale in order to get some lady attention I grew a big smile on my face and knew enjoyment was to come. Festival of Blood takes place over a night in which vampires appear, bite Cole and he must take down their leader before the sun comes up. Typical premise for a vamp story but I didn’t care, in Infamous I expect a decent enough reason to be given as to why I am electrocuting dudes and this was fine enough for me. One of the issues I had was just that I know it has no real connection to Infamous 2 but it would have been nice just to give people who did play that game to completion their full menagerie of powers or a perk or something. Also I found the length of the game to be good and I wasn’t expecting a super long game anyway. The history behind Bloody Mary and her defeat was done in typical Infamous fashion comic book style which is a choice I still love and the Zeke narration was also entertaining (I am much more Zeke friendly these days, I no longer loathe the dude like I did in the first game).

I’ll talk about the vampire powers now because the electricity ones that you remain with are the typical stuff from the other infamous games. I enjoyed biting people to fill up my vamp meter and felt like a dick every time I did it but it was amusing to go around being a menace in true “evil” infamous style. I also liked the finishing stake move to completely remove the vamps from the map. I cannot say enough about the bat swarm move which lets you burst into a cloud of bats and fly across the map until your meter is depleted. I fucking LOVED this move. It made the awesome ice burst jump move from 2 look like shit. Flying around the city was fast and fun. And when you combine it with the fact that you can you this move to burst into bats fly into a vamp doing an automatic stake takedown it becomes my favourite move in probably all of the Infamous games. This move was representative of this entire game, silly but a shit ton of fun. My only issue is that there weren’t enough of the new vampire moves to satisfy my interest. I wanted some other cool shit like mind control or something like that.

Alright on to the trophies section. The trophies overall were incredibly simple to get but that is sort of expected in a short fun game like this. I think my favourite one was staking the firstborn vampires. This is where you go into vampire vision mode (I guess this counts as another power but is only useful for this trophy really) and find the people with no heat signature because they are giant bat vampires in disguise as humans. I also thought it was hilarious when I was running around biting people and I would bite one of these dudes by mistake and they would subsequently attempt to murder me. The other trophies are standard but collecting the Mary teachings were cool if only to learn more of her backstory. My feelings towards the UGC missions are the same not my thing but cool that they are there.

Overall Infamous: Festival of Blood was a blast to play and is recommendable even without a discount (although if you are low on funds it has been one of the most discounted PSN games I have ever seen so you’ll find it on sale eventually). I had a lot of fun playing it and it has become my model for great PSN games good gameplay, retail level of polish and just fun to play. Alright guys I may write another one of these today if I’m feeling it, but let it be known that the next game I played was Yakuza 4. The only game that took up more than a month of my time and was my Everest as well as my required one JRPG (I guess this can be argued but it is J for SURE) a year. Til next time duders hope you enjoyed.