So I have never owned a Playstation 3 in my lifetime, so getting a chance to check out the free Playstation Now subscription free trial thing was a good opportunity to catch up on some games of last gen that I never got around to playing. Its a bit of a shame that my experience with the service was a little rocky, seeing I live with my parents and my sisters' children, who are constantly using the internet. Often times the game would have ridiculous screen flashes or parts where the quality would become terrible.Thankfully I'm not a person who cares too much about games looking great, so whatever.

I also had it happen where a message would come up saying that my internet quality sucks, the game is going to shut down and there appears to be nothing you can do about it. Having to replay part of a mission because of that is a HUGE BUMMER. This was the part of Playstation Now that made me a little frustrated but I guess those are the chances you take when using this service with variable internet quality. Anyways, onto the games. Rather than dabble in numerous games, I decided to buckle down and managed to squeeze in three full games during my time and to my suprise, I had fun with all of them, although some more than others.

And also... I haven't played Uncharted 2 & 3 yet. PLEASE bring those games to PS4 in some capacity. I'd really appreciate it -.-

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Enslaved came out in October of 2010 and was probably the game I had the least expectations of out of the three games I played. I still managed to somewhat enjoy my time with it. The combat and upgrade system in that game are pretty decent, and having some ranged abilities in there as well allows you to mix up your style of play. The story was something I fairly enjoyed, and the characters and interactions between them were well done (Pigsy is really weird by the way). I don't really have all the much to say about Enslaved other than "Hey, I kind of enjoyed it and I never really got stuck all that much, so that's cool".

Also, I couldn't find the image, but a collectible in the game gives you images of people and objects and stuff and one looked like it was just a dude in a pool wearing sunglasses. That's awesome.

The Walking Dead: Season One

I've always wanted to play the first season of the walking dead but every time I would look at the price it seemed like it was always just a little more than I wanted to pay for it. Seeing as I could play it for free this was the first game I played when I started my trial. This was definitely a weird game to play in 2015, considering the massive amount of praise it received in 2012. The heaps of awards it won in that year made me a little worried that it wouldn't be able to live up to its expectations. For me personally, I would say that the walking dead is not my favourite "Experience-driven game" I've ever played but its still fairly high up there. Its quite good.

I was really interested in how much I would like the characters in The Walking Dead, because I am huge fan of great characters in video games. While I felt like maybe they had a few too many people overall, I really got attached . While some of people in the game are just dicks (Eat a brick, annoying guy), a lot of them were people you could kind of relate to and each of them had their own unique flaws that made their character interesting. Lee is a pretty cool protagonist who has a lot to deal with at all times, it was really cool seeing him weigh his needs with the needs of others. Although its definitely a little cliche having a little girl placed in a tough situation, but Clementine was fairly effective as one of the main foci of the game. It was maybe kind of hilarious having to do all that messed up stuff in front of her >.>

Much like everyone else, I liked the decision making aspect of the game. There was a moment where I had to choose between two people and I gave a "..." answer. The next time I had to choose again Kenny said something along the lines of "You can't be on the fence this time you have to back me up" and I felt like that really put the pressure on me in a cool way. At the end of chapter 4 it was really cool seeing all the different party configurations you could've had up until that point and how many people had whom in their party. If you're a person who only had Lee at that point, I think you messed up :)

So yeah, I liked the Walking Dead. Its maybe a bit of a shame that this game follows the adventure game framework so close. There's a bunch of poor puzzles and bad combat that put a damper on my experience but hey, I was totally willing to look past that in order to get to the next part where things get crazy. And boy, there's definitely some crazy stuff in that game.

Darksiders

Here we go, the game I really want to talk about. First off I have something important to tell you before I discuss my thoughts on Darksiders: I've never really played much Zelda in my life. I messed around with ocarina and a link to the past very briefly and I watched a friend play through the entirety of Skyward Sword (Watching someone else play that game sure is a weird experience) but I know that to fully experience that series you have to play that game on your own.

A lot of people out there hold the opinion of "The legend of Zelda is one the best video game series out there, bar none". I wouldn't really say I didn't understand it, but I before I played one I really had no idea what exactly it was that made Zelda great. My original plan for 2015 was to get into The Legend of Zelda series by playing A Link Between Words over the summer. My plans slightly changed however when I saw that Darksiders was one of the games of Playstation Now and it was generally regarded as a good game so I thought "Hey what the hell why not make Darksiders my first Zelda game" and you know what? I would say I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Darksiders.

First of all, I think its so cool how they just went and made a dark Zelda game. Its pretty awesome how you basically have heart containers and they just put the hookshot and boomerang in the game. You can call it the abyssal chain as much as you want, I'm still calling it the hookshot. I never got tired of hearing that chime play whenever I solved a puzzle, its great. You even fight a shadow version of yourself late in the game... what a weird but kind of awesome callback. I could've done without the stupid helper minion and lame backtracking, but that stuff was mostly inoffensive and if you're going for that style of game you might as well go all the way, right?

The part I enjoyed the most was definitely the final dungeon. As a person who is REALLY into portal I can say that a portal gun is a fantastic addition to this style of game. They did a really good job of finding interesting ways to implement the portal gun in the last dungeon. Seeing as it was the longest dungeon by far out of all them, they were really able to keep my attention with having all sorts of unique puzzle and making you approach each puzzle from different and unique perspectives.

Stuff like the combat and story I didn't love as much but the combat had enough depth in it so that although I never used the tremor gauntlets at all, there was enough variety with the sword and scythe that I never thought the combat was tedious. As for the story, I always hold the opinion of "I don't pay much attention to the story, see if it hooks me and if not, who really cares" and I was able to follow along with the story, but it didn't seem like anything special.

By now I'm pretty sure you can tell and I hope its not too blasphemous to say this, but I felt like Darksiders was a pretty great intro into Zelda-style games. I can't wait to play ALBW and see how that game compares to this one. Who knows, maybe in future I'll end up playing all the Zelda games and loving them.... Naw I'm just kidding, I'm sure at least a few of them don't hold up in 2015 :D