Playing: Week of 02-06-2011
By Vitamin_Dei 0 Comments
Really applying myself to that blogging resolution. Really.
League of Legends
This past week's playlist is somewhat lighter than it might otherwise be due to having jumped into League of Legends with both feet. The game has really grabbed my attention in a way that few have in recent years, so I've been spending a lot of time playing, learning and generally absorbing the game and its related internet media fort he better part of this week. And y'know what? Despite having a single player backlog so deep that it could qualify for its own lifeguard station, I don't regret one moment "lost" to this wonder and incredibly polished game. Sure, it has its issues like any complex multiplayer pvp-based game, but as far as I've seen so far they're relatively few and far between. I expect that LoL will remain a staple of these weekly playlist blog entries for a long time to come.Monday Night Combat
Oh, MNC, sometimes you break my heart...As much as I'd love for Izzie to jump into League of Legends and play with me, she seems to have made up her mind about the game and dug in her heels already despite not having played it, so that prevents me from being all LoL all the time. Admittedly, that's probably a good thing. In the limited time that we have to game together between her getting home from work and my stupidly early bedtime, lately we've been playing Monday Night Combat. MNC has recently taken the place of Team Fortress 2, which has been our favorite competitive pick up and play game for a couple of years now. We cheat on TF2 a lot, but we always come back to it, with MNC being our latest mistress.
This is such a strange game. I can see its MOBA roots and I know some of its dev team worked on Demigod, I'm just not sure the ratios are entirely right on this game. There's too much peanut butter in this chocolate, if you will. The game often feels like it moves at much too fast a pace to do its formula justice. Towers are laughably ineffective and can be easily dispatched from safely outside of their aggro radius, a favorite character class of many players relies on an (often) one hit kill gank from behind, and often games seem to come down to locking down the higher ground outside of a team's Money Ball enclosure. That all said, when the teams are evenly matched and there's some sense to the class distribution this game can be amazingly fun. I've been in some real nail-biters where neither team felt badly about their performance or the balance in the post-game.
I'm no game designer, but if I were Riot I'd set up a bank of test servers, extend the game clock by a good five or ten minutes and lower the damage and range on many of the skills and weapons to necessitate actually entering a tower's aggro radius in order to take them out. Then revisit Juice, Tanks and Assassins. This is a really good game that falling just short of being great, in my opinion.
Chime
Do you like music? How about Charity, Moby, geometry and Lumines? Are you too poor to afford a combo meal at McDonald's? Have I ever got the game for you!Seriously though, Chime's great. It's just been a short chill out game for me lately, and as I slowly close in on more and more achievements I can see myself wanting to S-Rank this one. And if we want to talk real-world achievements, this game actually helped me overcome some of my lingering distaste for "Still Alive" from Portal after the internet and nerd culture completely beat it into the ground. Pat yourselves on your collective backs for that feat, Zoe Mode.