TerinHD's 03/17/17 Update!
| 1,349 Achievements (+14) | 7 Perfect Games | 29% Avg. Completion Rate |
Very interesting week or so... Monday was a very relaxing day at work and then Tuesday a snow storm rolled through, giving me the first snow day of the season! pretty crazy in real life. I have also been thinking about my desires to get through my backlog and the issues I face with that. I think I need to stop entering for games on Steamgifts... woah drastic... I know, I guess I could just go for games on my wishlist after I really crop it. I just think it will stop the inflow of new games so that I can focus on what I have. I have probably thousands of hours of games to play just in my steam library. I think it will be hard to stop though...
I did want to talk about my review scoring system I am trying to work out in my brain a bit. To me it is a six point system (5 stars... 0 stars being a score as well), I do have to preface that any scoring system(including recommend or not - binary option) is not a really good way to understand a game. There are so many different aspects to games that to really try to understand a review you have to actually read the text. With that being said I still think scoring systems are relevant to show a quick look over a game, so my scoring system breaks down into the following ways -
The worst of the worst of all the games out there. These seem to not have any thought into the game and no pride in what the game is. They are full of bugs and just terrible ideas. There is no reason what so ever that I would ever in the course of my life recommend this game to anyone, unless of course to show them what they shouldn't do if they want to get into creating their own games.
These typically fall into they are bad. There is not much redeeming about the game, however there is an apparent attempt to try to do something with their concept. The other reason could be that there is a total game breaking bug of some kinda.
These are on the last of the bad games, they are typically bad but I can usually find some aspect of the game that I can call promising. They might have some bugs and I won't normally recommend these games.
This to me represents a fully functional game that seems to be up to par. These to me are the common games that I will typically only recommend if a player is a huge fan of a genre or there is something very unique to be experienced. Most games will fall into this range.
Here are the games I will normally recommend, they are good to great games. If I give a game 4 of these... they totally earned it in one way or another or I have basically fallen in love with it. To me these are the cream of the crop. I will totally tell anyone that likes the genre of the game that they should get this next if they haven't played it.
Platinum rank here... these are games that I think every gamer should experience even for a little bit, period. They are the basic foundations for whole genres or are essentially perfect. Very few games reach this level for me.
With all of that here is my question for the week, if you could select one game that every gamer should experience what game would it be?
My answer currently would have to be Kerbal Space Program. It is amazing and has so much educational value to it. It really helps someone experience the depths of our struggle as humans to explore even our solar system. Most of the time it is hilarious and ridiculous. Even if you never get your rocket in orbit, it deserves those few hours to purely experience the mayhem. But if you really get into it, you can lose yourself in exploring and learning. Of course it has its bugs and such, but the core gameplay is so rewarding when you figure out what you are even trying to do that it totally absolves the game of it's flaws.
Invisible, Inc.
Extra Playthroughs Needed Won on SteamGifts6 of 23 achievements (26%) ~ 6 hours
Wow... this game is really fun. There is so much to say... where to begin. So, Invisible Inc. is very much in the vain of XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within. It is very tactical and strategic in your decisions. You really have to think everything through in order to proceed through the game. The game does a really good job at building tension and making your choices matter in as far as which agents live/die/succeed/fail.
You control a team of agents that are part of a shadow organization that are trying to take down the corporations that have greedily taken over the world. The game starts off by a break in of the shadow organization by the corporations, and your hacking AI pal is taken mobile. This sets up the plot where the AI needs to be recharged after 72 hours (3 days). Through out this in game time you build your team back up to its former glory for a final raid. This has you breaking into detention facilities, stealing vault keys, and even enhancing your agents with cyborg type of modifications.
The game plays very well, it is not too hand holdy and lets you make some mistakes. On the beginner level of difficulty it allows you to rewind, which is great for starting to understand how all the mechanics work without a huge long multilevel tutorial, don't get me wrong there is a very basic tutorial at the start but it doesn't prepare you like a whole first play-through does. It is also one of those games that unlocks things as you play through it much like a roguelike, think how you unlock different characters in Binding of Issac. I feel as though this is one of those games that I can just sink a ton of hours into it if I am not careful. To add to this the game doesn't take itself too seriously and has a good sense of humor about it.
So... what are the cons to the game? Well, I feel as though there a bunch of small little things that end up hurting the gameplay enough to knock it down a bit. The first thing is the controls and UI, most of the time they are fine but on occasion I found them clumsy. For instance, in the previous image/video I was tabbing through my agents and thought I had Decker selected. But in reality I had Dr. Xu selected and made a huge mistake of a move that I ended up rewinding. The other thing that normally doesn't get me is video game logic. In the following video, you can see Decker taking out a guard right in front of another guard. The second guard then gets alerted and dumbly follows suit in the next turn. First off the first guard should have seen a guy right next to him and not been taken down that easily, and then the second shouldn't have just followed blindly through the door on the next turn. There are of ton of other instances of this fuzzy game logic, from doors magically opening to terrible patrol patterns that put a guard literally in a corner. But this may have been more of the level of difficulty I was playing at but it still bugged me enough to mention it here.
In conclusion, I absolutely love this game. It is right up my alley, the stealth is in a way I can digest it and process it. The game really feels like a spiritual successor of sorts to XCOM. I know it is exactly what they were going for, however, the bunch of mini issues brings this down to a 4/5 in my opinion. If I were to change my scale I would even put it up there at a 9/10 or 4.5/5, it is a great game and I highly recommend it to anyone that likes turn based strategy games.
I am looking forward to playing more of this in the future. But if you want to check it out a bit for yourself, I have my commentary free play through (once I get around to getting them all uploaded and published) up on Youtube:
So this is a fairly simple puzzle game, it has a great balance of trying to push you to make a decision and letting you take your time to figure it out. To me if fits the bill as a good basic puzzle game. The puzzles have been seen time and time again, but what freshens up this game is the turn based vs. real time mechanics. A good portion of puzzle are based around the interplay between turn based and real time mechanics. I found it controlled great, even though I did have some issues with the UI and menu selection. WHY CAN'T I JUST CLICK WITH MY MOUSE!?!? Bah... I think this might be because it might be a port from another gaming system.
The game is split into levels and each level has a few different sections that builds on the previous levels puzzles and knowledge, which really helps ramp up the difficulty as you gain skills in the game. It ranks you as you complete levels in time, turns, scientists saved, and secrets found. I think this for me would be way to hard to complete all the achievements, as one of them is to complete the game without taking damage. I would just run into something and get so frustrated. Anyways, the art style is fun and interesting. Overall, it performs good and I would recommend this only to people who really like puzzle games. It went into the common class of games at a 3/5.
A Virus Named TOM
In Progress Should Play Next Won on SteamGifts8 of 47 achievements (17%) ~ 4 hours
Almost done with this one, only 9 more puzzles out of about 60. I plan on beating this before I can move on to Space Run Galaxy. After I get those two done I think I will only have 4 more steamgift wins before I am basically done with all of my steamgift wins... with the exception of Bioshock 2. I really want to get and play the 1st Bioshock before I play the sequel.
Sid Meier's Civilization V
49 of 287 achievements (17%) ~ 164 hours
Played a bit of this with a real life buddy this weekend. He is really big into it and is trying to push to get all the achievements. He has something like 1,800 hours in the game... he is ridiculous. I have never had that type of commitment to a game. It puts me in awe. Anyways, I played as the Japanese. Tried to go tall... and failed pretty bad. I was always at the bottom of the score board... I was focusing on Culture and Science. Right before we stopped I unlocked the archaeologists and was going to try to get some artifacts. Eventually we will play the game through, hopefully.
Space Run Galaxy
Should Play Next Won on SteamGifts0 of 30 achievements (0%) ~ 0 Hours
Won this at SG this week... I am excited to get into it. I really loved the concept from the original game... and felt it was just missing some things. From what I understand they have added most of what I thought was missing to the game. But I even got to the point of getting all the achievements for the original game.
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Space Run
21 hours playtime
30 of 30 achievements
With all of that here is my question for the week, if you could select one game that every gamer should experience what game would it be?
That’s a tough question, I’m pretty hesitant of giving people recommendations in general. If I should think of a recommendation for every gamer, it should be something that fits for players with all levels of gaming experience. From a recent experience, one game that comes to mind is The Stanley Parable. I think it’s a game worth playing, even if the player wouldn’t end up liking it.
Huh, I’m playing atm quite a lot of Civ: Beyond Earth. Trying to beat all of that achievements (without dlc). And nope, that’s not the game you are asking for. I’m just mentioning it, because you played Civ V :]
So, a game I think everybody should play. I can’t put it down to one game. But I can put it down to two game series.
Anyway. About entering GAs: I don’t enter that much - guess that’s why I don’t really get that much either :D
So most of all it’s wishlisted stuff. And after that I keep an eye open for HOGs and some idle games that fit my genre liking. But if a game has no achievements (unless it’s a hog) I most likely won’t enter.
But yeah, preferably wl stuff :]
Have a great day :)
Man, how I wish Mass Effect stayed on the same level throughout the entire trilogy. I think gameplay got tighter as games went on, but it was like they took an ax to RPG elements and everything they didn’t want to fix. Oh, inventory was clunky in the first game? Just get rid of it! And now Andromeda seems to have a lot of bad hype riding along.
Ah, I didn’t mind the non existend inventory in 2 and 3 :D
But you are right, there is quite the difference between the 3 games. Like 2 being so full of combat and story suffering a bit under it, but I still liked it a lot :]
And please! Don’t say a thing about ME:A, I’ve soooo much tried to avoid everything about the game before hand. I just want to experience it without being influenced already ;) Like I was with the other 3 games. I just started them and experienced them the way they came to me. So no spoilers for me :D
And I’m sooooooooooo excited about it! bounces around the place