Video Game Roundup

As I’m currently awaiting knee surgery, I have a lot of time to play video games. Here’s a sampling of the ones I’ve been playing over the last little bit, complete with a brief review.

Minecraft

Latest project.

I have put hundreds of hours into this game over the last year or so. The first time I played it was at the insistence of a friend; we had been drinking and I bought and downloaded it after we split at like 3:00AM. I could not for the life of me figure it out so I gave up and went to bed.

The next day I tried again. I punched down a tree. I built a house. And then it spiraled out of control. Right now I’m working on a super-fortress and adjoining city. Not only do I have lots of free time, but Minecraft has evidently made me insane.

If, somehow, you have not heard of Minecraft, check out the website. I don’t know if one can even review a game like Minecraft, but suffice it to say it is amazing. Basically, you mine things — like trees, or dirt, or rocks, or iron, or whatever. Some of these things you can turn into other things — you could make an iron pickaxe out of your iron, for example, and mine faster. Other blocks you can just straight up place — you can mine cobblestone and place it to make a tower, for example. There are incredibly few limits to what you can do — using things like redstone and pistons, you could even make simple machines (people having even created in-game calculators and the like). Notch recently endorsed pirating the game if you can’t afford it, so if money is an issue, do that.

Dungeons of Dredmor: Realm of the Diggle Gods

Werediggles of London!

Dungeons of Dredmor is probably my game of the year for 2011. It is incredible. Gaslamp Games, this tiny company, managed to create an amazing game that, while simplistic, manages to remain endearing.  I wrote a bit more of a comprehensive review awhile back and stand by what I said there. It is an excellent game, but it is ruthless. Honestly, the deepest I’ve made it without dying is level 4. The expansion pack adds fifteen levels and, to be honest, I don’t know how many levels there are in the core game. All I know is that even though I keep on dying, I need to keep on re-rolling and keep on playing.

Realm of the Diggle Gods, the expansion pack, adds several floors and some great skills, including the hilarious Emomancy, the awesome Big Game Hunter, and the seemingly overpowered Werediggle. The first grants you magic abilities or whatever and stuff, the second makes you a lethal killing machine (particularly against the “Animal” subclass), and the last lets you turn into a diggle, which is hilarious and fairly powerful. The guys seem to have redone a lot of the monsters and taunts, added features like portals that teleport you to alternate dimensions and levers that port you around the dungeon, added a ton of extra skills to the core-game skill trees, added a ton of new weapons, fixed a bunch of bugs, and made the game a lot, lot more fun — and that’s a feat, because, it is still one of the most entertaining games I’ve ever played. If you haven’t bought it yet, you can pick it and the expansion pack up at Steam for the low low price of $7.49 USD. It’s definitely worth it.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

...someday you'll feed on a tree frog...

I cleared through MGS2 a few times and have turned my full attention to MGS3. I beat MGS3:SE several times on PS2, beat MGS3: Subsistence a few more times, and am working on it again, especially now that trophies are up for grabs. If for some reason you haven’t bought the HD collection and have never played either MGS2, MGS3, or MGS: Peace Walker, you should probably stop wasting your time and pick it up.

The HD edition of MGS3 looks quite a bit better than the SD version, and runs better, too. The addition of trophies is something I like: something that bugged me about MGS2 and 3 was that there were “challenges” that the game never really issued but that online communities were partaking in. And unless you belonged to these groups, you may have not known about them. You’d have to read strategy guides and message boards to even figure it out. Trophies/achievements are great because they do help give you a focus, something to strive for, and a way to prove you achieved what you did. As it stands, I’m working on the Peace Walker trophy (no-kills), the Markhor trophy (capturing every food item), and the Kerotan trophy, which requires a certain level of OCD that I am quickly approaching.

Final Fantasy VIII

I can't trust anybody, people will just abandon me, blah blah blah wah wah wah

There’s something about the Final Fantasy games VI-IX that makes them stand out. They each have their flaws, I think, but they’re all very entertaining. I’m working on playing through VIII — while I can’t stand the Squall/Rinoa romance because I’m not 16, it is nonetheless an excellent game. That’s all I’ll say, there.

Serious Sam

Why yes, I am firing several guns at once.

Transylvanilla alerted me to Indie Royale’s Serious Sam package yesterday. It’s still on. For several dollars ($4,46 USD as I write) you get Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam: Double D, Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack, and Serious Sam: The First and Second Encounter. Serious Sam is an old staple of the shooter world, almost, but not quite, as legendary as Duke Nukem. SS features the same over-the-top, self-aware, corniness. They’re games meant to be fun more than anything else. There isn’t a real story at stake, and there is no characters trying for emotional attachment or growth or anything like that. They’re games about killing baddies — old school kinda stuff, in the vein of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, which itself was a spoof of action video games… but Serious Sam does it much better (though Matt Hazard has one of the best trailers ever). It’s self-referential and self-aware, and well, just a cool video game — all of them. I’d recommend picking up the Indie Royal deal while it’s still up.

And rewatching the Matt Hazard trailers, I’d recommend getting that too. It’s fun.

Metal Gear Solid 4

This image says 1,027 words. More if you count contractions as two words. And count the bottom caption.

This is embarrassing. I only got a PS3 last September so maybe I deserve a bye on this, but I’ve only just beat MGS4. I hit a bit of a wall where I didn’t really want to play and took months off, but got back on and beat it. It starts off slow but right after the wall I hit, it absolutely picks up and becomes one of the greatest games ever and includes at least two of my favourite boss fights of all time.

Well played, Hideo. Well played.