As you may or may not know, Taco Bell is currently running a campaign where if you buy a "Big Box" you can win a Destiny Branded PS4 and other goodies.
PS4(TM) Stand Sold Separately
I only heard about it over the weekend, so starting on Monday October 13th, I decided to buy a Big Box every day until I won, or until the contest was over.
So let's start by saying that eating Taco Bell every day is not something I recommend. It hasn't done anything to my bowels yet, but my stomach sure lets me know that it isn't a great idea.
I would say the boxes are of a middling size.
As you might notice in the image, one of those boxes isn't Destiny branded! Thats because my local Taco Bell ran out of boxes and had to give me an IOU on a box. So I missed out on today's chance. Needless to say, I haven't won yet. But my hopes are still high!
So here is my review of the items included in these "Big" "Boxes."
Crunchy Taco - The old standby. Still tastes like it always does.
Doritos Locos Tacos - I don't love Doritos, but its okay if you like salty chips.
Quesarito - Its not great. Rice in a burrito? Who are you kidding.
Cheesy Gordita Crunch - Oh man, this thing is pretty great. I highly recommend it.
Burrito Supreme - Not even the promotional images for this thing look good.
Now note that there are multiple Big Boxes. A Big Box only contains three of those items, and unfortunately you don't get to pick and choose.
I'll update you all again tomorrow! Hopefully I can win a PS4!
UPDATE: Thursday October 16th
Still going strong. Got my two box haul, thanks to yesterday. No win today. I'm going to start trying to enter at more uncommon times to get a better chance at a prize. Since I wanted to use one of them today, I did it at about 4:26 PM Central. I'm looking to do my Friday entry at about 2 or 3 Central. See you guys tomorrow!
UPDATE: Friday October 17th
I entered at about 1AM this morning. Nothing yet. I think more of a 5AM would be a better chance, so I'm going to do that tomorrow. On a housekeeping note, I think I'm going to avoid Taco Bell on Saturday and Sunday, for multiple reasons, but mostly for my own sanity. I'll pick it back up on Monday. Every weekday, here we go. Enclosed is a picture of all of the boxes from this week.
Hey! Welcome to This Week I Played. A dumb blog thing where I write up some things about some games I played. Mostly it's just to keep my writing skills at a tolerable level, but you may be interested in what I have to say. I have no qualifications for doing so, but I am pursuing a Computer Science degree. I also attempt to make games in my free time, but none of that is suitable for public consumption. But enough about me, let's get on to the games.
By all accounts, I love city builders. But if that is what you are expecting from this game, expect to be disappointed. This game is far from impressive. It has some solid story ideas, but the gameplay is incredibly disappointing. Buildings are built on their own, and you simply have to provide for the people’s needs and desires by providing them with food. Honestly that is all I know, because I only made it up to the point in the tutorial where it told me that chickens needed blueberries in range to have synergy. Only to find that upon surrounding the chickens in blueberries, nothing happened. So I closed it down and that was that. Not to mention I had some terrible performance issues, which seems incredibly absurd.
So it appears this blog post may turn into a rant about the quality of OS X ports, but that will just lead to the inevitable “get a real OS” posts that I have neither the desire, nor the time to deal with. This game wholly refused to enter fullscreen. Coupled with a menu that had alternate settings for windowed and fullscreen resolutions that had a (non functional) checkbox to activate full screen mode, I entered with low expectations. Presentation of this game is key. From the title, you are informed that this will be presented as a sort of cartoon, even including fake advertisements every time you load the game up. Maybe I was just frustrated with the whole settings debacle, but after I began playing the first few levels, I decided that this runner should just run along.
I enjoyed the main story of this game on a PC a built myself some time ago. That computer has since been retired and is now collecting dust with terabytes of data still inside. In retrospect, I should probably do something about that. But the main point of being here is a note to everyone considering this game on OS X. Don’t. Its hot garbage and I experienced a plethora of bugs within the first thirty minutes. Including getting stuck because Elizabeth refused to tell me: “Go on without me!” and then teleport to one of her pre-scripted story points. Maybe watching that GDC talk on how Elizabeth was implemented broke me. Maybe the Mac version of this DLC is just incredibly poorly coded. Either way, what I saw didn’t really leave me begging for more, so I’m not going to bother. (Just kidding. I started downloading this massive 34 GB game on my Windows partition. What have I done?)
Yup. Still complete garbage. If I am going to play a game that is hard, it’s going to be because it’s a challenging game. Not because some crazy Japanese dev team made an abusively hard game. Also, I love that you can’t hit those mosquitos that are flying just above my face. Apparently my character is just too dumb to slash a little bit higher to hit them, even when I’m locked on. Thanks video games!
I love this game, a lot. But I am so horribly bad at the early game that I keep getting attacked by raiders before I can get my army to a tolerable size, and then dying and being captured, rinse, repeat. So I’m taking a bit of a sabbatical from it this week to branch out.
Haha! Tricked you! No, not really. I still don't love this game. But I feel a real need to finish it. To some degree, it is just an attempt to say: "Hey. I played this thing all of the way through, and I still don't like it. And here is why." I finished Sen's Fortress and Anor Londo. I killed Sif and now I am in the Painted World. Still, I can't shake the feeling that the entire game is a grid. The combat just doesn't click with me, and the challenge still seems abusive. In the interest of full disclosure, the earlier bit about Dark Souls was written on Monday, and this paragraph was written after I spent most of my Friday playing it. So take that into account.
This one was a bit of a surprise for me. I, being the complete idiot that I am, missed the 20 dollar Diablo 3 deal. If anybody has some hot tips on Diablo 3 for cheap, message me. But the other day I happened to log into steam to "play" some more Dark Souls, and saw some of my friends boot up Torchlight 2. I joined up and then we were along for the ride. They took both of the ranged classes, so I ended up as a tanking Berserker. For a long time, these action and loot based games, henceforth referred to as ARPGs, never really "clicked" with me. But it finally did during that Diablo 3 Quick Look. In my previous experiences, I had put all of my skill points in passives, believing that this would somehow be a more optimal, simplistic experience. But I finally realized that active skills are where it is at. And, thanks to that, this game has been much more fun than any other ARPG I have ever played. The experience of playing online with other people isn't my favorite way to play the game. No one ever seems to want to wait for the others to set up their skills or sort through their inventories. I absolutely understand that sentiment, and I think this style of game would be better suited in a single player environment. Perhaps, I will come back and revisit this game in a single player capacity.
Some Closing Thoughts
So, I also like to do other things with my life beside gaming. I spend significant portions of my life coding, and I'm curious if there might be any interest in a sort of tacked on little "here's what I have been coding" section for this thing. This is a little sparse on images for now. I need to start capturing images from gameplay. More on that as this thing progresses. I said I would play Shadowrun Returns last week and didn't. So maybe that will happen this week? WHO KNOWS? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT THIS STUNNING CONCLUSION.
I find myself up, far too late, on a late Sunday night turned Monday morning. Class starts far too soon, and I should have gone to sleep hours ago. However, I find myself still awake thanks to one of the two games I played this weekend. Riddled with insomnia, I felt the need to write up how I felt about the games I played this weekend. Mount & Blade: Warband and Dark Souls.
Dark Souls: The First
I looked for a press image with the words "You Died," but all I got was this.
With the console launch of Dark Souls 2 well underway and the PC launch slowly looming on the horizon, I picked up one of the most talked about games on Giant Bomb, the original Dark Souls. Admittedly, I had been putting this game off. From what I had seen of the GB crew, I gleaned a sinking feeling of despair from the idea of this game. It presents a beautifully crafted world with incredible enemies and monsters with gorgeous vistas, and a very competent combat scheme. I found my self blocking, parrying, fireballing, stabbing, chopping, and slicing my enemies on a road to who knows where. Aside from a rather impressive opening cutscene, I failed to follow the story of Dark Souls. It didn't jump out at me, and at times, didn't seem like it could possibly explain itself.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to spoil the fun of this article and tell you that Dark Souls was the game that I didn't enjoy. From the start, the game promises you that you will die. From the minute I was picked up by the large raven and taken to Firelink Shrine, the game seems incredible. A game where I can fight my way to giant bosses and have incredible, fights? Sign me up! Unfortunately, this game isn't that. At least for me. This game is a struggle, a grind-fest if you will, to get a bit further in your quest. Specifically where I stopped, in Blighttown. I spent quite a bit of time streaming out the game to some fellow Duders, in hope that I would avoid the repetition that this game thrives on.
This was the sum total of the story that I noticed.
Now, you might find me idiotic for expecting to avoid repetition in Dark Souls. Most assuredly, it is the core concept of the game, and is often used in games to much success. Let's take for example Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy. I love Hotline Miami. I can talk about how much I enjoy Hotline Miami for days. The perfect music, the quick combat and, most importantly, the instant restarts. I didn't love Super Meat Boy, but that is probably because I don't love platformers. While that is a subject for a different blog, the main point is that SMB and Hotline Miami both have seamless restarts that create a real momentum to the game that never stops. When you die, you just keep rolling. The music doesn't even stop. You keep going. You keep trying. Music keeps playing. You can't stop. But in Dark Souls, its entirely different. You die, you wait for you character to drop to his or her knees, and then wait as the game proclaims to you that YOU DIED. Great, thanks game, I wasn't quite sure what that empty life bar meant. This entire affair takes a significant portion of time, only to pop you back out at an allotted save point, denoted by a bonfire. On my trips to Blighttown, the time it took just to get into the area was obnoxious, and then when I made it in, I quickly died and knew I would have to do it all over again. It's not frustration or anger that overtook me, but rather the boredom of these repeated trips.
You just see the same vistas, the same enemies, and fight the same combat encounters over and over again to hopefully get a little bit further than you did last time. The time just wore on me. Now by no means take this as an ultimatum that no one can enjoy this game, because I totally understand how this game might be enjoyable to someone. But it just didn't keep the momentum that I need from a game designed to make sure you die. Repeatedly.
Mount & Blade: Warband
To Battle!
This one has been sitting in my steam library for a number of months. I'm ashamed to admit that it had proven a little too obtuse at first blush and led me to put it down, and not return. I played a bit of it vanilla, but then decided to install the Floris Mod Pack. It adds quite a bit to the game. In fact, the mod pack is a larger download than the original game, so take that as you will.
The Floris Mod Pack adds a ton of new units to the game.
I played so much of this game, some of it streamed, some of it not. I can tell its not a terribly exciting game to watch, but the chat proved invaluable in teaching me the basics of the game. You start as a single adventurer, looking to make your way in the world. You can recruit special followers and nondescript villagers, as well as mercenaries and many others. The complexities of the politics in the word, combined with the incredible scale war can be waged on, got me hooked. I always have loved cerebral games, and this is definitely one of them. I know at some point I will find myself reading Sun Tsu's Art of War so that I can lead my troops optimally.
Mount & Blade: Warband is a game I will soon revisit. However, I have more pressing games that only warrant single playthroughs, so I will have to shelve it for now. Next week I intend on doing a couple school projects, and homework, so I may not have much to report, but I hope to get a bit deeper into the cyberpunk kickstarter game Shadowrun: Returns.
So long! I'll see you next week!
Edit: I should add some pictures to this wall of text. Maybe later! I will make sure I have some for next week though.
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