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My PC died. Again. The first time it crapped out earlier in the year wasn’t a big deal as it gave me an excuse to replay Longest Journey on the battered laptop, and then dust off the 360 and smash through Dreamfall again. It was all a plan to help me out with Dreamfall Chapters that was insisting that I remember small details from games I’d beat a decade previous which I was cool with because I love those two games. Only now do I realise that with the PC dead, I’ll probably have to start Chapters from the start all over again. Crap.
This time around, I poked at some of the Steam games my laptop could manage, like Richard & Alice which I could review but won’t as it was made by a small ginger gentleman from Leeds known as Lewis Denby. Some of you will remember Lewis as that guy who would regularly out-pretentious me four years or so ago and even though we’ve fallen out of contact I don’t think I’m in a position to write about his game. So I’ll just mention that I enjoyed it, even if it is rigidly linear, overly easy and relies entirely on a big twist that isn’t that much of a twist. No I’ve read that back, I should stress that I really did enjoy my time with the game. I did! Honest!
The death of my PC put several projects in a shallow grave. I had a small run of 32X drafts on that I might have backed up or might be lost forever. That’s a blow, and I’ve lost progress on a few little indie games I was plugging away at like Haven and Coma. I put some of this time into building up the site’s Steam page which, if you not looked at in a while you should check out. It’s a little bit different. At some point I knew I would have to, urgh, play a console again. So I’ve looked at a few games that I never got around to beating.
Quake 4 isn’t one of them; I’ve beaten the hell out of Quake 4 but my planned Q review died with the PC. So I had to find something else and Quake 4 was on the shelf. It was an easy replay made annoying by the game’s awful save system which jumbles old and new saves alike together. It was nice to get hands on a railgun again, though. That one always made me smile. Review for that is now live – alpha score is 26/27. That’s the number I tapped out with last year. I had a V planned but, tell me if you’ve heard this one before, it crapped out with the PC.
I also finally finished Bioshock Infinite. I’ve had that game parked at Comstock’s house for over two years now but the autosaves had screwed up because the 360 has been inactive for so long that it’s reset all the dates on the system and the game continues from the most relevant date. To which, I replayed that entire stage where you’re fighting several stages of ghost mum convinced I’d done all this before. Then I found there was a level select. But that was all jumbled as well! So I looked up a chapter guide. And it turns out I was even further ahead than that. I ran the end-game airship and I’ve finally put that one to bed.
But what to run next? I’d got some ways into Alone on the Dark: The New Nightmare, but that was kind of awful. Darksiders was pretty good, but I couldn’t find it. Found Darksiders 2, though. I had slogged my way through a large chunk of the last Medal of Honour game (On hard from the offset. I really, really used to care about achievements once upon a time!) but didn’t want to FPS overdose after Infinite. Then I found Enslaved: Odyssey to the West sitting at the back of my shelf. Perfect.
I got most of the way through this game but, again, did it on hard and the terrible combat system made that a long running series of rage-quitting. I could have just started from where I left off and knocked the difficulty back down to normal, but screw that noise, I’ll just start again! Maybe do a chapter a day. I really like that first level.
I really like Enslaved, actually. It’s brilliantly realised and was one of the first games that didn’t equate post-apocalyptic with seven slightly different shades of brown. The game looks awesome; nature has reclaimed the broken cities with green. Green! Everywhere! It’s also excellently cast and written. The two leads are so much more than just an odd couple thrown together for laughs and there’s a real sense of unpredictability to everything they undertake together.
Still, I stopped. Because that bloody combat. It’s so clumsy and ineffective and then it’s paired with one of the worst cameras out there. I remember where I quit; it was a narrow strip of land wherein you’re attacked by two different groups of enemies from either side. I got repeatedly slaughtered and, in the end, wandered away. I think to play Silent Hill: Downpour. And that was the last game I had beaten on the console until last week. I hope Enslaved will be the next.
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wolfqueen001 - December 07, 2015 (03:51 AM) How dead is your PC? I'm wondering if a shop couldn't save your data by plugging in an external hard drive and installing a separate OS (e.g. Linux) on a disk and backing everything up that way. Of course, this may be a very specific "fix" to the problem I had with my first laptop where a virus totally destroyed the registry files controlling the operating system. You may have thought of this already, but still. Glad to see you've found other things to entertain yourself with, though. |
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EmP - December 10, 2015 (09:54 AM) I tried the Linux backdoor. It's a good plan; I've used it before. But it did not work. I'm all back up and running again now - which is good. Going to finish Enslaved, though. |
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