It seems I've hit another middlin' slump

Ugh, I'm apathetic towards these...

By Joseph Shaffer · May 4, 2016

I've written three reviews over the last week or so, and all of them are getting that mediocre 3/5 rating from me:

The Howler
Operation C
NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's trying write a review for an average game that doesn't come off as a bare write-up. Over the weekend, I hoped to quell this issue by playing through Kraven Manor, as I had heard it was an actually well done first-person horror game. Honestly, I'm not entirely impressed with it. Its antagonists are creepy, but its puzzles are ho-hum. So it's official, then. I've hit a middling slump. Hopefully, my next review will break the cycle.

Given that it's Zombeer--a first-person shooter where you play as a man infected with a zombie virus who temporarily puts the symptoms in remission by drinking alcohol, all while making cheesy, American Pie-esque jokes--I doubt it.

Comments 6

Never3ndr May 4, 2016

The Howler...I've seen that game for sale on steam several times for under $1...but I've never picked it up since I have 500+ games that I haven't played :(

Yes, I'm a bit of a game-ophile.

LeVar_Ravel May 4, 2016

The middling slump--a bump in the road every veteran gamer must hit now and then!

Some games are so bad, I quit them early. Middling ones, on the other hand, keep me around longer so by the time I've lost interest, I feel like I've invested too much time not to complete 'em!

honestgamer Staff May 4, 2016

Heh. That's the problem with a lot of the free-to-play stuff. I inevitably find myself still going because I've already sunk 10 or 20 hours in the thing, and I want to see it through to something that feels like the end... which of course seldom comes, because those developers aren't stupid! So yeah, I rarely start anything free-to-play these days, just because I don't want to go down that road. As for the stuff with a definite start and finish, at least that usually ends pretty quickly!

JoeTheDestroyer Blogger May 5, 2016

Never3ndr:
Nothing wrong with being a game-ophile. If you do happen to pick up The Howler, it shouldn't last you longer than an hour or two, so it'll be easy to scratch off your backlog.

Levar:
That's exactly my problem with them! And I've played several that actually improved in the latter half, so I keep holding out hope that a middlin' game will suddenly impress me.

Jason:
Free and freemium games have a habit of hooking players and keeping them around for a bit. Free adventure and horror games (like 7Days or Cry of Fear) tend to go the opposite direction, I've noticed. They last only an hour or so and let you go.

overdrive Staff May 5, 2016

I've got another bit of a problem. As someone who works on a lot of projects at once, I'm playing so many legit good games that some of them are getting the "mediocre treatment" where I only work on them once every couple weeks just because they're only really good instead of great. So I'm playing 4/5 games with the enthusiasm I'd usually have for a 2/5 sort of thing.

Well, with a couple of them (made by Atlus, of course), their renown level of difficulty also might play a role. After a day in the office, it's just so much easier to cruise through a dungeon in Grandia than it is to struggle and grind my way to finally beat that one bastard of a boss in SMT IV who'd been beating my arse for a LONG time (the one who took over Ikebureko and eats all the freedom fighters before you fight it). I mean, part of that was my tactical stupidity, as a bit of time used to buff my defense or debuff its strength would have really helped in surviving its party-wide critical hit attack.

It's to the point where I don't want to start anything new (unless it's the sort of short thing which works for a quick turn-around review) until I've whittled a few of them away, or I'll just be making painfully slow progress through SMT IV, Bravely Default, Etrian Odyssey Untold: Millennium Girl, the Live Arcade port of Doom 2, Avernum I and Lunar the Silver Star because I'm more focused on Twilight Princess and Grandia. Speaking of Twilight Princess, a brief rant: I wish I'd owned a GameCube so I could have played this without the motion controls. I was doing the escort mission where you take the injured Zora prince from Castle Town to Kakireko Village and had to step back for a couple moments because I was about to chuck the controls through the TV during the part where you have to deal with goblin riders and bomb-chucking birds.

honestgamer Staff May 5, 2016

You could always buy a Wii U and play the updated version of Twilight Princess on that platform, Overdrive. I don't believe it forces motion controls on you, being modeled more closely after the GameCube original.