Turn off the Lights

What We’re Playing (7/9/10)

Time for the inaugural edition of "What We're Playing", a new weekly feature where we explore the gaming habits of the maniacal writers here at PA. This week, Steven Beynon, Tristan Wong, and myself blabber on about what we've played, and what we will play in the coming week.

Steven - "After 4 hours of Crackdown 2 I realized that this is the same damn game as before. Animations, mechanics, location, everything. However, somethings like transforming cars and enemy factions have disappeared. With the evolution in the "super hero traversing open-world" sub-genre evolving a lot after the original Crackdown, just makes this sequel seem dated. This game is easy to crap on, but is still fun to play. I'm having a lot of fun co-oping the "story" with my friends, causing massive explosions and just fucking around. Oh, and orbs, ORBS!

Puzzle Quest 2
is the perfect game to chill out and relax with. The weird level of strategy combined with the level of randomness the board has makes this a great purchase for puzzle fans. The world-Diablo-map...thing...
let's call it the "exploration" of the world. Ok, that part I can do without. It's strange that an entire complex system was made just to break up the puzzling. I guess it's needed."

Tristan - "Right now, I've been fooling around in Company of Heroes--taking in the sights and the strategies that set's the game apart from Starcraft, both skirmish wise and singleplayer wise. Personally for me, I just don't see the big hype in Starcraft aside from multiplayer prowess. Yeah sure those Korean pro's can go three-hundred actions per-minutes, but can they actually take that and strategically use it within Company of Heroes? Yeah… thought so. I do like Starcraft in that broad sense where the action is fast-paced with intense scenes of just controlled chaos where marines and protoss duke it out in the middle of the map for shiny crystals of meth. Turtle strategists can decimate full-borne assaults, and even the most stubborn of players as such will rarely ever fall less you can probe the defence long enough--all the while we watch from a distance that makes the action look oh so much more appealing. The reason I play Company of Heroes more is how dynamic the action can be over Starcraft. You actually should be an innovative strategist where unit placement and suppression matter and as a result, makes my strategies more useful and more satisfying to implement. And yes, no more turtling for some out there… I hate them (if they do turtle, say hello to my mortar!). No longer will I be afraid of Korean pro's since this game came around. And ever since multiplayer, I won't be putting this down for a long time for my competitive ego.

This weekend I plan to play STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl after I recently got this mod known as 'STALKER Complete'. Aside from a graphical update, it also offers repair upgrades, a better shooting mechanic which directly mirrors it's real-life counter-part (now the AK-74 is more powerful and is just as useful as the G36K rifle you get later in the game). If you haven't played this game, get it now… get all of them… I mean, this game rocks my socks. If I had socks, and this game was in the room, my socks would be taken off and that game would be in my computer ready to be played. I mean, I can't stop not playing this game. I mean, I have to play it… but after this quick game of Company of Heroes. Ok, I should stop… peace out all y'all!"

Matt - "I've all but played out all I can stand of APB, so I'm just going to eat the $50 loss and move on. Since I'm still waiting for an exclusive on the 360 I give a damn about, I'm going to split my time between PC and PS3. I just picked up MLB 10 The Show and have had tons of fun with it. All the good things I'd heard seem to be true, and it's definitely overshadowing its multi-platform rival MLB 2k10. Next week I get my hands on NCAA Football 10, which looks to be the most refined game in the series in years.

On PC, I'll spend some time with TF2 and its new Engineer Update. I need to try the Leiliana's Song DLC for Dragon Age but I'm a bit afraid of it being a total failure like the Darkspawn Chronicles. Same goes for Mass Effect 2's Overlord DLC, but I think I'll hold off for now. Someone throw me a good recommendation for something to try on PC, and I'll review it...maybe."

We'll be back next week with more rambling insights, same PA time...same...PA url...or something.

Comments

Meet the Author

About / Bio
I am the Co-Founder and CTO of Entertainment Fuse. Thank you for viewing my profile. If you have any questions, comments or if you found any bugs with the website, contact me anytime. I love chatting with our community!

Follow Us