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Cathryn

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Games played in 2014

Games I beat or played enough of to know I didn't want to finish them.

List items

  • Dropped after about 5 hours during the first week of January (PS3).

    By all accounts, I should like XCOM. The combat is fun and I like the strategic elements of the world and having to balance certain mission types, resources, and funds. I have two major problems with the game that made me want to stop playing it. First, the camera is terrible and it's difficult to tell where enemies and some locations are on the map. These problems wouldn't be as bad on PC, but I don't have a gaming PC. Second, there just isn't enough story in the game for me. There doesn't seem to be much of an overarching story, and the units don't have personalities. I need at least one of those things to make the game interesting, and I didn't find that here.

  • Completed 6 of 9 endings and 2 of 3 possible romantic routes in January (PC)

    And so my journey in to OEL Otome games continues. X-Note has a lot of promise and, unfortunately, it never really delivers. The overall story of Essi's mother's murder and the murders at the Xen Institute is quite interesting. Wanting to learn more about the overall story kept me playing through the various romantic routes since you get different information with different characters. Unfortunately, the romantic elements lack emotional depth and replaying the game is an awful chore due to the frustrating minigames, which, as far as I can tell, you are not able to skip. I don't think I would recommend this to anyone but staunch Otome game fans.

  • Completed the Main quest and Civil War quest and got some bucket list achievements in January (PS3)

    I picked up the legendary edition of Skyrim in late 2013 when I decided that I was going to pack away my X360. I was reluctant to do this because I knew I'd want to go back to Skyrim at some point, so I decided to just buy the Legendary edition for PS3. I hadn't yet purchased any of the DLC, so I figured this was a passable compromise. The game now works much better on PS3 than it did at release, though the load times are still pretty terrible and the frame rate drops down to nothing when first entering towns.

    I completed the Main and Civil War quests, purchased and upgraded all five pre-DLC homes and Lakeview Manor, and got a number of achievements I'd been wanting including 100k gold, 13 standing stones, and 100 locations discovered. This took about 60 hours, which I played mostly in the first two weeks of January, but started in December.

    I will likely blog about this, in which case, I will link to the blog entry here once it's complete.

  • Played about 12 hours of Fable Anniversary in February.

    I really wanted to at least complete the main story in Fable Anniversary, but I just couldn't muster the motivation to do it. I was a huge fan of the original Fable and played through it multiple times on the XBOX. It was the first game I really fell in love with after returning to video games in my mid-20s, so it it has a great deal of personal significance for me. That said, I think this game is best left in the past. Fable has a great deal of charm and personality, excellent visual design, and some decent, if a little samey, fantasy lore. It also has terrible load times, boring combat, a miniscule game world that you can't even really explore, and almost no story. Many games have come along since Fable's original release that make it look tiny in scope and horribly dated. I would like to finish the story at some point this year, but I'm not sure I'll ever go back to it. I am actually thinking about picking up Fable 2 and giving it a try again. I didn't like it at the time and gave it away to a friend and fellow fan of the first game. I'm wondering if the sequel might be more to my taste now than the original game.

  • Completed in March

    I have a lot to say about my relationship with South Park, but I'm planning to blog about this later in the month, so I will keep things brief. Overall, I loved this game. Consistently funny, even though some of the humor went a bit too far for me at times. I thought the combat was pretty cool and reminded me a lot of Costume Quest in a very good way. It's been said numerous times before, but I would strongly recommend this to anyone who has ever liked the show and likes RPGs. It's not enormous in scope, but I think that's probably for the best.

  • Completed Story and School modes in March (playtime roughly 44 hours)

    Despite having mixed feelings for Danganronpa, I spent quite a lot of time with it. I played the story mode all the way through once and played School mode 5 times in order to get all of the character endings.

    I am planning to write a blog post with some more detailed thoughts about this and South Park, so I'll go in to more detail there. Overall, I think Danganronpa's overall story is awesome, but the gameplay isn't all that great and the characters weren't very likable. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed 999 or VLR or any visual novel series.

  • Completed Gin's route in April (46 hours, played off and on from early January)

    I feel like 2014 is shaping up to be the year of Cathryn Has Mixed Feelings About Games. I enjoyed Devil Survivor. I think it's got an interesting story, good atmosphere and excellent mechanics. The combat is challenging but, in my opinion, sometimes unfair. Shin Megami Tensei games are usually described as tough, but fair, and while I think that's also true for Devil Survivor most of the time, some of its boss battles are a little ridiculous, requiring pretty specific demons and abilities to defeat.

    This problem is exacerbated by some of the changes made to Overclocked. The base levels of several demons (particularly Amaterasu and Garuda) that would have been useful against late game bosses were increased to make them virtually impossible to obtain on an initial playthrough.

    They also made some changes to NG+ that make subsequent playthroughs a lot less appealing than in the original version. I had originally planned to play the game more than once, but a bunch of ridiculous grinding toward the end of the route I chose and the thought that a second playthrough would also likely be a load of heavy slogging will likely keep me from doing so in the near future, if at all.

    Still, I haven't played many games that have given me the sense of satisfaction I felt when I beat some of the game's most intense boss fights. It exhausted the crap out of me, but I think it was well worth playing at least once.

  • Played a few hours of this with friends in early May

    I generally don't play games online. I tend to prefer single player experiences, but I recently made friends with a bunch of schmucks who are eager for me to play online games with them. Awesomenauts was part of a recent Co-op Humble Bundle and one of these schmucks was nice enough to gift the pack to me. Played a few matches against bots and didn't really enjoy the game too much. Without a really defined role for each player, I felt that it was a little too chaotic, and while it was nice to be able to use a controller, the platforming seemed totally unnecessary.

    I will probably play this again at some point, but only if persistently harassed.

  • Played a few hours with friends in early June

    I don't think I'll ever go back to Transformice, but I was in a Skype chat with a bunch of friends and someone suggested we try playing this. This game was a lot more fun to break than it was to actually play. Some players used their turn as Shamans to murder us mice, and others just created enormous clusterfucks of ridiculous. I found it most fun to just kill myself whenever levels looked too difficult. Laughed heartily the whole time we were playing, but I think I'm pretty well done with this game.

  • Played for several hours in April

    Bravely Default was on my currently playing list for quite some time since I had originally intended to go back to it, but I'm not sure that's going to happen now. I was excited about the game at first because I went to a convention and collected a lot of villagers to rebuild Norende Village. I had played just enough of the game before the convention to make use of the street passing features. I liked the combat, and I wound up rebuilding all of Norende village, but after hearing so much about the later stages of the game and how repetitive it gets, I lost interest.

    I may go back to this once I've played a few of the other games that I was more excited about, but I have been pretty busy lately, and some of my backlog priorities have changed.
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