Some Thoughts On Video Games : September 2017

I've got all these thoughts on video games and they need to get out of my brain. Time to place them in the perfect format called a list. This month we reaffirm that shooting stuff is good no matter if it's modern weapons or space guns. Mix in some comedy along with surviving natural disasters and we've got a strange mix of games to look at. Most of the games I tend to play are short experiences that don't have to last 40 hours. Even Destiny 2 is short if I mainly focused on the story. Which is fine for me since I tend to just want play the core of a game. While occasionally getting sucked into doing everything. Which is certainly did do this month. Anyway lets get away from this intro and get into the main event.

List items

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  Destiny 2

  After putting so much time into the first game I needed to at least see a bit of this sequel. Sure I’m not seeing the full picture since I just played through the campaign to see if Bungie could manage hook me back in. They didn’t quite manage to do that but they did improve on what they started doing. The core of Destiny is still here. Shooting the different hostile lifeforms is still the highlight The gameplay remains the same with a few new weapon types to change up how you might deal with foes occasionally. The addition of the story line of the fall of the Traveller and one Guardians journey to reclaim what they have lost is fine. Other than adding some flavor and a few special moments I didn’t feel like it did anything with the world of Destiny. Yo that evil guy is kinda chaotic good is all I really got out of it. Other than that I got to see how the daily structure was laid out for a player that wanted to keep playing. Doing strikes, pvp and the weekly raid is still what I would be doing if I kept playing. After seeing it setup like that again I just can’t see myself putting in the hours like that right now. Doesn’t make it a bad game since I still think the core gameplay could be very addictive and fun.

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  Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series

  Telltale has really cornered the market on creating their style of adventure game. Constantly putting out a new series based on a different IP every year has to be getting tough. Yet they continue to pump out games at a constant rate and I keep playing them. Currently this series is only up to episode 3 but I was pleasantly surprised by the fact it’s another well written comedy with some action. The different writers at Telltale must have an easier time with this style since I tend to enjoy them more like their take on Borderlands. Even the story line goes in a direction I didn’t expect. Turns out getting something done correctly doesn’t mean the aftermath might not be a crazy ride.

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  Disaster Report

  The one thing going through my mind while playing through this was that the premise makes it more compelling than what I was actually playing. Surviving a natural disaster isn’t a setting you see in the world of videogames that often. Plus it’s a really focused survival game which is a lot more my speed than the brevity of open world games of this type. Along with a minor focus on needing water occasionally I never felt like the timer on that bar ever became an issue. In general the entire game is easy with a few minor instant death sections that don’t become a issue thanks to a ton of checkpoints. Maybe I’m not being harsh enough about the entire game just being about running around a city while dodging random things that can kill you. Because they spice it up a bit by never repeating different environments to often along with different survival situations I don’t think the game gets old in the 5 hours it takes to beat it. Certainly not a game for everyone but I think it’s cool.

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  Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes

  Everyone is playing the new game so I’m all let's just go back to 1999. Out of all of the VS games this could be the most like MvC Infinite since they both have only 2 fighters per team. While still maintaining the core of the series. Popping up fools for sick air combos that end in a super move. From the very start the simplistic controls makes it easier to do some crazy looking stuff even with the hour I spend playing through the arcade mode. Although the one thing I really don’t miss is super annoying AI that blocks 90% of all attacks even on the easiest difficulty. Input reading AI was for a time needed to get all those extra credits out of any arcade goer. These days it isn’t a issue anymore but wow that part just isn’t fun at all. Which leads to fighting other people being the real highlight which isn’t possible all the time but when it does happen I always have a ton of fun playing these older fighting games.

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  Shock Troopers

  After Commando came out a assortment of other games were released over time based on that style. Run and gun shooters made a lot of sense in a arcade because they could easily cause players to feed the game a ton of credits. With this visit I was surprised to note that Shock Troopers was more fair to the player than I expected. Beating this with less than 10 credits on the first try wasn’t what I expected going in. Must have been thanks to the all important dodge roll that saved me a lot. Additionally rather than sticking to one character you can pick a team of three to take on each mission. Other than looks the amount of shots you can shoot along with how fast the character moves are the main differences between each character. Other than the boss fights being a bit repetitive another note is that this game has replay value. 3 different paths can be taken to travel to the final stage. Each with their own theme and variations on boss battles. Which is a pretty awesome for a arcade game.