Video Game Diary 2013

It's not that FTL has flaws, it's that what I want when I play is so much different than what the game delivers. I want a game that lets me slowly build up a ship as I jet through the galaxy, taking on enemy ships and gaining technology, allies and crew as I build my strategy to take on the Big Bad at the end. But that's just not what FTL is. It's fast-paced, very random, your focus is using the cards you're dealt to make a winning strategy. I've gotten to the end but I haven't won it, and after 13 hours of playing I'm sort of ready to just stop. :P I can feel myself slowly getting better, but having to start from scratch each time kind of breaks my spirit. It would take me so many hours to get to the point I can win a game on normal, and the amount of fun I'm having is slowly dwindling to nothing, so I'll probably shelf it (so to speak) for a while.

BUT don't let me sway you from it, if it sounds like your kind of game, if you like challenging roguelikes, well-made games set in space, and games you can spend hours upon hours refining your experience and strategy, you might just loooove this. I have an extra copy on Steam if anyone wants to try it. :)

I was never into turn-based strategy when I was younger. I guess RTS is just easier to abuse and cheat in so that's what I preferred. But I took a chance on Zafehouse: Diaries. I really liked that you could upload your own friends and family (or just your own characters if you don't have/want to use friends or family) and your own location pics, and that turned out to be the major fun factor for me. I probably wouldn't care too much if I played with random characters from the game, but I get very emotionally involved when I have to save my survivor group consisting of both my parents, one of my best friends, her husband, and our dog (protip: add dog as a custom occupation, give them full strength and set economic status poor, it's a really great addition to the game). I play hours upon hours despite getting frustrated sometimes. It's so fun.
The only things preventing me from loving this are the things I hate about a lot of rouge-likes and TBS games: the sense of urgency, the time limits, the random events screwing over a previously solid run, and having to start completely from scratch every time. It's a delicate balance of fun and hate, but overall Zafehouse: Diaries is one that I'll play again despite my frustrations.

Thanks Sweet Shark for turning me on to this game!
I didn't have any expectations going in, and at first I found it kind of frustrating, playing the same parts over and over trying to figure out what I was missing. But it was all worth it. Actually, its difficulty made me appreciate the ending that much more. It plays like a dating sim at first, one of those ones that you go through the whole game picking text options, all of the graphics look similar to the pic above. I felt like the details were best left to the imagination in this type of story. What starts as a nice date turns into a trying tale of fate and the nature of stories. It was sooooo neat. I told a couple of my family members about it as I was playing and they ended up getting hooked as the story unfolded. It's a small and simple game but it's one I won't forget.

We have a new tenant and he brought with him an Xbox 360 and several nice games, and I won't deny that I've been hogging in to play Fallout for the last couple weeks.
People have been telling me for ages that Fallout 3 is amazing, and I have to agree. This game is very fun and there's a million things to do. I also like how much you can just explore- the map is huge (I wish it was bigger but games can only render so much without loading screens) and there's a ton of places to discover and people to talk to (and occasionally fight and kill).

I think the thing I don't like about this game is the Raiders, and they're supposed to be awful. I'm pretty much never gonna explore Raider buildings if I can help it- their revolting torture rooms are the worst. I hate how they string up mutilated bodies around their bases. I am not too far into the game (27 hours of exploring the map and collecting a huge number of incomplete quests) but if there's a quest to obliterate or otherwise get rid of every Raider on the map that would take #1 priority. Otherwise I steer clear and only kill them when they attack me- which is all the time but whatever, anyone who attacks me is asking for death. The only thing I haven't been able to kill is a Deathclaw- so far. Its time will come.



Love the leveling system, it's been a while where I played a game that I got to distribute skill points and I forgot how fun it is building up your own character. I am partial to melee weapons, explosives, missile launcher and flamer. I guess sneaking is tempting but I'm not really a subtle gamer when given the option, besides I've really started to get the hang of planting mines and tossing grenades, and there's nothing better than launching a missile into a group of 6+ unsuspecting Raiders.

Morality in Fallout 3 is a much better system than it is in Mass Effect. Mass Effect goes something like:

(Thanks Tumblr for the pic)
However in Fallout it's much less black and white, you can get karma or lose it from doing simple things like picking the lock to people's homes or giving a beggar some water, but your decisions through the game aren't clearly marked good or bad and there are often multiple ways to finish a quest that end up in different and sometimes unexpected scenarios, and sometimes you can just plain lie to people, and it's all just really cool. The dialogue, while not the best voice acting, feels pretty organic all around and I'm usually pretty impressed with it.

The scenery is dreary for the most part, a little variety would have been nice, but it is a wasteland so I guess I can't complain. Visually the game holds up pretty well. Besides seeing repeated patterns in the wasteland ground texture, everything else looks fine. The city areas are were the visuals are at their best. I love that tall buildings are visible from a distance, and all the important NPCs seem to be unique. Nice racial diversity as well.

Overall it's a really fun game. I now own it for PC and PS3 and I'm looking forward to starting new games now that I understand the skill points system (I don't think there's a single RPG that I didn't mess up my skill points on the first playthrough lol).

This is a great little browser game (and it's free so you should go play it right now) that does a lot with story in a very short amount of time. It's really simple, the plot and the graphics and the gameplay, but the moral choices you have to make are tough and made me pause a couple times. The characters are basic archetypes, but used very well to tell the little story, which unfolds neatly, letting you put together the clues that you get from character dialogue, and it does a good job of not repeating itself too much in the "reveal" at the end. I wish I could go into more specifics but it's such a short game, just go play it all the way through (finish all of the branches) and see if you like it.

I had a free 1 day rental from redbox so I played this whole thing in one day. I dunno if I would have liked it better given some time to enjoy it more, but I kinda doubt it. I was just totally uninterested in the story (never played the other games either so...) and the characters seemed super boring. I dunno, I've seen the thief archaeologist story several times before, that glorification of stealing cultural treasures in a very imperialist attitude, and Nathan didn't bring anything new to it.

And it was so damn serious. Come on, this is a game where I am thrown out of an airplane over the sahara desert, have to escape several sinking ships, running through a burning mansion in the french woodlands- it is so over the top and ridiculous in a great way, so why are the characters/story flat and boring?! Where is the humor and extravagance? It was so generic and watered down. Nathan's backstory was textbook streetrat and would have been much better suited to someone besides the same boring white male character who stars in most every AAA game.

Clearly it's just trying to be a "shoot everyone" game and it's very disappointing, because the scenery was beautiful, the levels were so well designed and a lot of it was actually fun. All of the boat/ocean levels were really neat, full of dynamic environments and cool visuals. All of the screenshots here are of actual gameplay and they look amazing. Everything was beautiful.

It would have been really cool if there was less of a focus on guns. Snipers, rocket launchers and the M32-Hammer were fun sometimes, but just shooting people kind of got old. I played on normal and easy for the most part and I found using my fists to diligently win a gunfight was a lot more satisfying than using a pistol on a harder mode. And why not add that twist to Nathan's character? Make him more averse to violence and killing, give him some actual depth. It would have added some great moral choices in the story too, made it more interesting.

Also, cutscenes. The cutscenes in this game are bullshit. They are the kind of cutscenes that are put in because if you actually got to play through them, none of the problems in the plot would happen. You can go into one area with an M32-Hammer or rocket launcher intending to blow everyone up and the cutscene gives you one pistol and then you get captured, or the bad guy gets away again. You actually don't even get to kill any of the badguys yourself, except for one at the very end. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I like me some boss battles you know?
OH and another complaint- the bad guys trying to shoot me in this gaming were really fucking stupid. I get that they're just random people I'm supposed to shoot, but it really breaks the immersion when fifty guys would rather stand and shoot at me than escape a burning house to save their own lives. That was just sloppy and shows how the focus of the game isn't at all story but actiony gameplay, just like the million other action shooters available.

I might play this game again for fun, I got through it by not trying to care about the characters and just enjoying the gameplay when I could, and that made it kind of fun. But I can't say I really liked it. But you know, it might grow on me. Maybe I'll try one of the other games in the series.

Thomas Was Alone... is a cute little experience and puzzle-type game, and it was surprisingly sincere and emotional. It's one of those games you finish in one sitting, but the challenge of the puzzles and the extra challenge of the achievements/collectibles makes this a good replay. That and the story, of course. The simple plot is so inspiring. You help these little characters, basically just rectangles, all with distinctive names and personalities, and flaws. They are so diverse, but one major unifying factor is their feeling of loneliness, of not fitting in. It's a story of being yourself and using your unique strengths to help yourself and others.

It's not as cheesy as I make it out to be. It's very liberating and quite challenging in places, I was getting frustrated in a couple levels near the end. All in all very worth playing.


"If Claire was honest (and she had to be because she was a superhero) this was a troubling turn of events."

I have never played a game like this before, no Zelda or anything for me, so this was a very new experience. For a lot of people who have been playing games longer than I have it will be full of nostalgia, at least that's what I get from some other reviews I've read. But even without that factor I really liked it. The game is full of humor and strange things, and it's got a unique atmosphere. Nothing felt silly, I thought it might try to be too serious like some fantasy games, but it wasn't at all. Also the amount of ambiguity in the actual plot made things interesting.

Gameplay was great, I love that I could die as many times as it took to finish things, because I die a lot. However it keeps track of your deaths so you will feel the shame as that number creeps up. The boss battles are okay, I could beat most without dying, a few of them dying only a couple times. The minimap itself was like a giant puzzle, that provided a lot of challenge. I used a gamepad and it worked great, it was a lot more fun than using the keyboard.

I didn't 100% this because it was getting frustrating by the time I got to the final boss. There is some real challenge here. Someday I will go and get the rest of the card collectibles.

There were some surprisingly thoughtful parts to this game. Here's one of my favorite:

Thanks to some other game diaries on listal, I tried this wonderful and strange game, and my life was forever changed. I just did not expect the journey that it would take me on.



It's just a frog learning fractions, right? Wrong. It's so much more. This is a game about the unexpected, going on adventures, and ruling the economy by exporting porn. Take life by the horns and go play Frog Fractions right now.

It would be a pretty funny game, if it weren't for the quote at the top of the page. That quote sets a backdrop of anxiety whenever I play.



That combined with my awful tetris skills makes me want to rip out my hair whenever I attempt this impossible game. It's very amusing.

If you like the universe, and you like sandbox games, buy this! Create, play with, and destroy anything and everything. You can start with our own little solar system or a number of premade models that include binary stars, black holes, asteroid belts, almost anything you can think of, or start with a blank slate and create your own unique model and see how long you can keep it going. Or do what I do and spend hours upon hours giving everything multiple sets of rings and messing with the gravity, mass, density, and orbits to warp the rings into crazy beautiful formations and then scatter like broken glass across the galaxy.

(not my screenshot)

According to the developer's posts on the Steam forums, what was planned as a major update has turned into the development of a whole new sequel game. So sometime within the next year a new Universe Sandbox will be coming out. I'll probably buy it as soon as possible.

Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone are a couple of those not-really-a-game games. They're interactive storytelling, using video games as a medium for something a little more artsy.

Even with that in mind I was a little disappointed in TFoL and GB, not because the games themselves were awful but because I was expecting more. I had seen reviews and previews and thought I'd be getting more than the 15 minute story bits that I was offered. Fortunately I bought TFoL on sale on Steam, I can't remember for how much but the full price is only $5, and Gravity Bone was included. That being said, I felt like I got a lot less out of it than I got for Home and $1.25 (see below). The quality was great but there was a lot less included.
However if you can get a hold of these games on sale I do think they're worth experiencing, but only if you're into non-games and don't mind that they're both so short.

I'm hesitant to describe too much of these games because of their length. Either you go play them, or look up some videos on youtube of other people playing them, so you can see what I'm talking about when I praise Blendo Games' quirky style. They have a lot of personality. From the music to the cube people to the great use of color and the storytelling style, it's all very fresh and fun, and at the very least is visually interesting.

Thirty Flights of Loving was, like Gravity Bone, very short. This was a bummer, but if you can still enjoy a 20 minute game, it's a good one.

Thirty Flights of Loving was more entertaining to me than Gravity Bone, despite the latter having more actual gameplay. I think Thirty Flights of Loving's story bits, given in a very wild, non-linear way, stuck with me a little more than the story in Gravity Bone. The characters and environments feel a lot more meaningful.

Both games have the signature Blendo style, and I really hope this guy keeps creating. Friendly reminder that he also made Atom Zombie Smasher, an RTS game I've put many hours into and highly recommend- the humor and music is all very amusing and entertaining, and he has a knack for storytelling through small vignettes with a very effective "less is more" style.

It might be relevant to know that since it runs on the Quake engine you can load Quake guns and maps into the game if you enter the commands. It adds some replay value to mess around with it.

Disclaimer: Home is not so much a game as an interactive story. Just calling it a game sets up a lot of expectations that are never realized. There's very little actual gameplay, very little interaction beyond exploration and decision making (think Dear Esther but with an interactive environment). However, as an interactive story it excels. I was hooked from the beginning and it's narrative is the real highlight. There is one path you can take from the moment the main character wakes up to the very end of the game, with a few branches every once in a while, but the end of the story ranges hugely depending on what you do along the way.

It's classified as a horror game, but actual horror elements are few. It sets up a brilliant atmosphere and has a few tiny jump scares, and the rest is up to how paranoid you and the main character become as more of the mystery is revealed. You probably won't be afraid so much as wound up in the story. Some say the pixel/retro style detracts, though I didn't have any problem getting into the story, and I found the limited vision from the beam of the flashlight an interesting factor in exploration.

This game only lasts about 2 hours depending on how fast you play; I took almost 3.5 to finish the first time (I'm a snail) but some can probably finish it closer to 1.5. It has some great replay value though, with many different outcomes. It's also pretty cheap, at full price on Steam it's $3, $1.25 if you catch it during a sale. The point of this being, it's very much worth trying it out, if it seems like something you would like. Short and sweet. HOWEVER if anyone here is interested, I have two extra copies on Steam, so send me a message if you'd like to try it!

Personally, I really loved Home. It was right up my alley. I played it 3 times myself and a couple times more with my sister, and then we spent quite a while analyzing the clues and thinking up possible scenarios. However you have to recognize this game won't appeal to everyone. It's closer to the art and story telling side of the spectrum than the entertainment/game side.

It's sort of like a casual, cute version of Portal. Not a copycat though, it's worth playing as far as I can tell from the demo. I didn't get far in obviously, but I can see the puzzles getting pretty complex. I'll probably pick it up when it has a good sale on Steam.

Symphony is a pretty cute little game. It's a very basic shooter, and you are... in a ship? Are the ship? And fighting off lots of music-themed creatures sent by a demon or some such- okay, the story is one of the downsides of the game, because it's pretty cheesy. Not bad really, just silly.

But the plus side is you get to add your own music into the game. The monsters do a fairly good job of synching with the music and getting more intense as your songs speed up. Personally I had to turn off all the extra glow and aura and reflections because in really intense parts of the game it's practically blinding. At a certain point it gets more chaotic than synched but the plus side of that is, there is some challenge in this game once you open up harder levels.

I played with some friends and we all took turns picking songs, and that was fun.
It doesn't hold my interest for very long but you will doubtless love the soundtrack if you decide to add your own music in (which is pretty easy to do).

So disappointed. :( Full disclaimer: nostalgia has blinded me and I can't put that aside and look at this game from an unbiased view. But before I can go into more detail I want to point out the #1 flaw of this otherwise okay game which is frankly unforgiveable: NO CO-OP. In a RACING GAME. There is only single player and online play, but there is no way to play with the people sitting in your own living room (the people most fun to play with in the first place). I am so disappointed. They sacrificed good gameplay for graphics power and it suffers for it. What the hell where they thinking.

So besides that hideous error which I cannot forgive, this new SSX game is okay. It's kinda nice when not compared to the others... sure it's more generic and gimicky and difficult and less fun, but I figure they are marketing this towards the more intence racing game enthusiasts and going for the darker and edgier approach. Which I dislike but a lot of people will enjoy for sure. And who knows if it does really well we could get another SSX game in the future. Since this is the only racing series I've ever been into I can't object to that.

Other nitpicky things:
1) Pointless new controls -fortunately you can select a classic control setup but you can't customize the buttons (is PC gaming spoiling me? yes I think so) and this leads to a lot of accidental rewinds.
2) Gimmicks like rewinds, which are kind of neat but only added in because of the ridiculous difficulty of several races, which you can skip anyway making advancing through this game incredibly unsatisfying
3) The comic cutscenes: awful art and very poorly written, losing what little character development we had through the last games
4) Shop/purchasing system annoying and weird
5) Complete lack of character (it's like SSX Tricky never happened at this point)
6) Shitty soundtrack. Dear god I never thought I'd be the kind of person to complain about a whole genre of music but the dubstep here really sucks! It's all so awful and they are pushing the gritty edginess too far, the music doesn't fit at all. I guess there's a way to put your own tunes in but...
7) Gotta sign up for EA's online thing... Origin? Or something like that to play multiplayer and add your own music. Make a full account and everything. Ugghhhh unnecessary much? What is even the point? And I haven't investigated this "online pass" thing yet, do you have to purchase that? I am not interested in playing online yet so I'll have to check that out later.


But here's some pluses since I did put quite a few hours into the game and I wouldn't have if I hadn't found something to enjoy:
1) My babe Elise :) Lucky I love the most popular character, I doubt she'll ever be booted from an SSX roster.
2) Some of the challenges are pretty legit. I hate the "snowboarding in the dark" parts, ice picks are kinda pointless, pulse goggles are weird. But not freezing in Antarctica, wingsuit gliding in Patagonia, and surviving avalanches and rocky terrain is all pretty fun, and adds a lot of fresh ideas to the series.
3) Beautiful scenery. Okay so their stupid insane graphics are the reason we don't get split-screen co-op but it does look nice. Antarctica is gorgeous and probably my favorite location. ICE CAVES. So beautiful.
4) Helicopters: quirky pilots and you can do tricks off them! It doesn't make up for the lack of character and craziness here but it's something.
5) Collectibles. Billions of achievements. I fucking love achievements. I love collecting things. I love earning money and buying every item in the shop.

So it's got some replayability especially for #3 and #5 on there. I bought my dad a PS3 for Christmas and he has so far enjoyed playing SSX a lot, even if the best co-op we get is taking turns going down mountains.

Okay, sorry this was so long, had a lot to say about it. It's one of my favorite game series after all.

Things I love:
-RTS games
-Killing zombies
-Blowing things up
-Indie games

If you like any of the above you should try Atom Zombie Smasher. I am easily sucked into playing multiple 4+ hour campaigns, and that's usually on easy settings. Depending on the many mods the game provides or the ones available online, a person could spend many many hours on one campaign. Or only an hour or two. The game basically caters to your playing style, so no matter if you like things slow and steady or speedy and difficult, there's a lot of potential in AZS. It's also got very amusing vignettes to give a backstory of your zombie killing, and a minigame that's pretty addicting in itself. It's not too expensive on Steam, I really recommend it. As a matter of fact I have an extra copy if anyone wants to give it a try, send me a message.