Catching up
The end of the year is coming by and people have started calling out the best, worst, weirdest and most important games in the industry that appeared during the last 12 months – I am not going to do anything of the sort quite yet but I am going to reflect on some games I’ve played. Now, normally I don’t care to write anything down if I for one reason or the other cannot think of anything to say, but for the sake of my own record keeping I will mention some of the high notes.
Pid is a really solid platformer that’s not afraid to dial up the difficulty. It has gotten some complaints about the controls being floaty or downright bad – I disagree, the controls suit the character and mechanics well but there is a mismatch between the sort of clumsy boy and air-swimming functionality of the beam and the kind of really tight platform jumping the levels want you to pull off.
Assassin’s Creed, I have been neglecting the series since it first appeared – don’t really know why, but I figured I should remedy it. The first game has gotten a lot of criticism for being drawn-out, nothing but filler in between the real missions (which are not that different from each other either) – it was indeed tedious but in a way I found the busywork calming, almost therapeutic. At its best, it was a low-stress way of filling out a big checklist of objectives where you rarely get stuck – though the places you did get stuck were more the game’s fault than my own. Doing the rest of the games in short sequence should provide an interesting view of how game design has evolved over the years.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, it was technically more varied than the Modern Warfare series, but it also felt more drawn-out and the branching story made me like it less rather than more – the main thing I like about Call of Duty is that they are short, linear and intense games. What also bugged me about Black Ops was how the game seems to assume you played the first Black Ops both in terms of narrative and gameplay – I did not, and I would guess I would have given up on it altogether if I weren’t familiar with Call of Duty games in general.
Gears of War 3, was less of an improvement over Gears of War 2 than 2 was over 1, but a solid co-op shooter nonetheless. Going to be interesting to see how much of the series was Cliff Bleszinski and how much of it was the rest of the Epic people.
Little Inferno where as I did not have much to say about the other games, Little Inferno is a game where I can’t quite elaborate what I want to say. I really liked it, even though I did not completely agree with the moral of the story. Then again, I do not really play free-to-play games – or casual games at all – so some of the points went over my head. This in turn made me think a lot about what kind of media I consume – I have been avoiding tablet games since I did not feel like the market for them, an incorrect assumption but even if it were true I should have a better grasp of them from a professional standpoint. So that’s one new year’s resolution.