Coming back Report

So my gaming hiatus is slowly coming to an end. I've been following everyone's posts over the past few months but had too little on my side to update on anything. But no more! I finally seem to be enjoying gaming again but I'm still lazy af so gonna keep it as short as I can :P

The Limbo

• 
  ONE PIECE PIRATE WARRIORS 3
• 
  Bounty Train
• 
  Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders
• 
  Ray Gigant
• 
  Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
• 
  Loot Hound
• 
  Action Henk
• 
  The Age of Decadence
• 
  Flat Kingdom Paper's
• 
  Displaced
• 
  The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

On a gaming hiatus at the moment so updates will be very scarce for now. I’m still around reading through everyone’s amazing progress though!
Cheers~

Not much to write for the second half of June so no post from me now. I’ll just include everything in the mid-july one. Cheers~

Mid June Report

Summer’s here! And with it all the free time one could ask for his backlog assassination!
Had a mild case of LastM-itis(:P) these past 2 weeks, causing me to tackle quite the number of titles.

The constants:

• Armello
  

  105 hours playtime

  38 of 50 achievements

• Borderlands 2
  

  32 hours playtime

  20 of 69 achievements

Have cut down quite a bit on Armello. There was a double drop weekend though so played a lot then.
As for Borderlands 2 as I said on my last post this is a co-op run so not much done this half month. My friend we play with got a new job so he’s pretty busy with that but we still manage to steal a couple hours every now and then for it.
And the one that can’t have it’s own neat box, Fire Emblem Heroes, has been taking up a bit of time lately. There’s an event ongoing I’m greatly enjoying and needs a loooot of grinding so.. :3

The HOGs:

• Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink
  

  6 hours playtime

  11 of 19 achievements

• Queen's Quest: Tower of Darkness
  

  6 hours playtime

  0 of 22 achievements

• Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek
  

  5 hours playtime

  6 of 11 achievements

• Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood
  

  7 hours playtime

  27 of 36 achievements

• Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala
  

  3 hours playtime

  25 of 34 achievements

• Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart
  

  7 hours playtime

  9 of 15 achievements

• Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call
  

  3 hours playtime

  22 of 29 achievements

The monthly theme game me the incentive I needed to tackle the HOGs I had won on SG a long time ago and never played. I was never a fan of the genre and finally trying my hand on some titles I can safely say that hasn’t changed. But at least now I can say I tried :P

Most of them were okay-ish so won’t take them one by one but instead only mention the best and worst. The one that managed to pull me in the most and did the best job in telling a compelling story, with interesting characters and decent scenes was Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood. Sure enigmatis 3 is newer and more polished but I never once felt any connection towards Fang, she was merely there, making most of the game feel flat. Ravenwood on the other hand made me connect not only with it’s main characters but even with secondary ones like the Lady Clerk.
As for the worst there’s no doubt in my mind that this is Queen’s Quest: Tower of Darkness. A misplaced royal couple that looks like they were pulled out of Beverly Hills and thrown into a fantasy novel, a mediocre to bad story, totally non sense points(e.g. wizard has captured a fairy, put her in a cage, brought her to you as a gift, and she’s totally fine with it. In fact she’s so okay with it that the second you open the cage she announces she’s your baby’s fairy godmother and will help you. Like WTF?! Why were you in a birdcage then?), scenes and puzzles that can be solved with your eyes closed and absolutely no point in anything. And if that was not enough it bugged out and didn’t register my progress. I had even collected all the collectibles but when I closed the game and went back to Steam I noticed no achievement had unlocked even though they did in game. So I loaded it back up to get a screenshot of the in game page and what do you know? It asks me to name my profile like I never had opened it before. Everything’s erased… So yeah, f*ck me (-_-)

The rest:

• Octave
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Beastiarium
  

  5 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Access Denied
  

  4 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Beholder
  

  14 hours playtime

  13 of 60 achievements

• Press X to Not Die
  

  2 hours playtime

  6 of 11 achievements

• ABZU
  

  5 hours playtime

  3 of 12 achievements

• Swordbreaker The Game
  

  3 hours playtime

  27 of 67 achievements

• Overfall
  

  4 hours playtime

  5 of 50 achievements

• LiEat
  

  8 hours playtime

  20 of 30 achievements

• Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
  

  83 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Human Resource Machine
  

  68 minutes playtime

  3 of 16 achievements

Octave:Was gifted this game(Thanks Xelco! <3) so I decided to boot it up. Unfortunately it wasn’t what I expected. I had something closer to “The Lady” in mind than what I got. To be honest I have absolutely no idea what was happening. You’re brought to a forest/swamp to be killed by someone but he ends up killed by some horror lady-thing. Then you just walk around lighting stuff and solving puzzles while avoiding some alien looking monsters and ghosts until you die, somehow enter the afterlife I guess, or some monster realm, and beat the horror lady who saved you but now is trying to kill you(eh? why?). Generally WTF went down? xD
Beastiarium: Looked interesting so I entered some gibs for this. Lucky for me I won one. Unfortunately this is another game that disappoints. The visuals look good and you keep getting Bioshock vibes but that’s all the game has going for it. Bad puzzles, no coherent threats, uninteresting plot. Avoid.
Access Denied: Poor man’s The Room. It includes 30something puzzle boxes that can be finished in 10 secs each. However it suffers from the same thing the puzzle section on SG does, and the reason I dislike it so much(SG, not the game, the game was okay). Apparently part of the puzzle is figuring out wtf you’re supposed to do. Absolutely no instructions on what is being asked of you.
Beholder:I’m quite torn on this one. Although it’s a nice idea and the execution is nice it has a couple very major problems. First there’s times where you get tenants that don’t initiate any storyline but turns out they’re part of someone else’s yet you get them first so there’s a few times where to empty an apartment you get someone arrested but turns out you need them later. But that’s minor. The MAJOR problem is the lack of manual saves. Or at least multiple “checkpoints”. I had to restart my playthrough 3 times because I was screwed by the autosaves. They happened mere moments before a game-terminating event. Once I would load my game and like 2 seconds later a bomb would go off. Another I’d load up and a couple minutes later the police would come arrest me for something that happened before so no way to fix it either. Etc. So yeah, lots of frustration which could be easily avoided by the simple thing of being able to load a previous save.
Press X to not Die: Bad. Very bad. So bad it actually turns great! It’s sooooo much fun! The story is bollocks, the acting is awful, the special effects ridiculous… However when all of this bad comes together it becomes a great game :P
Abzu: I don’t think there’s anything to say that hasn’t already been said in the numerous posts about this one. Absolutely stunning environments, great relaxation value, amazing getaway. I’m not a fan of it’s controls but that’s quite minor.
Swordbreaker: Meh. Love CYOA games when done right but this is not one of those. The story is mediocre to bad, the translation bad at times and you get a feeling the game “autocorrects” your path cause 90% of the time you’ll find yourself at the same parts. At least the artwork is okay.
Overfall: My latest impulse buy. Turns out it was a good choice! It’s an interesting mix of rogue-lite, resource management and strategy rpg. It requires multiple playthroughs to be really completed but don’t wanna get stuck on one game too long now so I’ve marked beaten since I beat it once and will come back for more in the future. Oh! And be warned it barely explains anything(no tutorial etc) so it requires quite a bit of trial and error. Also includes a “Story Builder” where you can design your own random events/questlines and share them with everyone else if you want. My only complaint would be the battles feel a bit slow. If we could turn up their speed to like x2 or x4 that’d be awesome!
LiEat: Loved this one. It’s a rather short RPGMaker game, split into 3 chapters, roughly an hour each. They all play in the same way. Your two MCs arrive at a new location, investigate by questioning the others and fighting their lies(which are given form with Efi’s power) and confront a boss. The world everything is happening in, draws you in, the other characters are all rather charming and memorable and generally this is one game that makes you wish for more.
Watchmen: The End is Nigh: Still only at Chapter IV(out of 7) but meeeeeeeh. So far it’s just following corridors with different scenery and using the same combos on hordes of the same two enemies(dressed differently) over and over and over, time after time after time in each chapter, every chapter. There’s a small comic-styled at the end and beginning of each chapter and some banter between Nite Owl and Rorschach and that’s everything. Meh.
Human Resource Machine: Nope, not happening. It just isn’t. I should have guessed by the screenshots alone but this is Assembly. Absolutely hated Assembly when I studied it in my university, and I still do hate it so a game based on low-level programming is something very not enjoyable to me. If however you have no knowledge of low-level programming(low-level not as easy, but as programming languages closer to machine language like Assembly) then it’s a nice game to introduce you to the logic behind those languages. But if you already know Assembly just stay away. It’ll pose absolutely no challenge.

So that’s been my June so far. Tbh I feel a little burnt out so I don’t think I’ll game much more this week and next week is the Summer Sale so… yay! ;-;
Cheerio assassins, XOXO

Lazy End of May Report....on June

I’m veeeeeery tired from reorganising my Steam Library so nothing fancy for this report. Oh, and hewwo!

First things first as usual, Armello and Fire Emblem: Heroes are still going strong. Also had my first game ever in Armello with our fellow assassin ylil and it was one of the most enjoyable matches I’ve ever had! So once again whoever wants to play Armello together just hit me up on Steam, and completely disregard my status(unless I’m in the game I’ll cover down below).And a double loot weekend is coming in Armello so my weekend has already been decided :P

• Armello
  

  92 hours playtime

  36 of 50 achievements

Secondly I decided to revisit a game I had tried before and didn’t very much like but with a twist! This time around I’m not going solo but I’m playing exclusively co-op with a friend of mine when we can. The game is no other than…

• Borderlands 2
  

  31 hours playtime

  20 of 69 achievements

Ok, I’ll give it to the ones that told me so. This game is FUN. Serious fun! It’s just not the same solo as it is in co-op. Sections that took you forever or bosses that killed you a bazillion times before you managed to dodge enough are now just hard/easy enough and the whole game just feels right instead of a grindy/farming hell. Also the fact I’m playing as Maya this time around might be contributing to my enjoyment, she’s incredibly well suited for me! CC <3
So yeah, I’m sorry BL2 for misjudging you!

As for the rest, a lot of games started, very few finished. Here we go:

• Spec Ops: The Line
  

  4 hours playtime

  21 of 50 achievements

• Dead In Bermuda
  

  12 hours playtime

  28 of 36 achievements

• Oh...Sir! The Insult Simulator
  

  2 hours playtime

  5 of 18 achievements

• Midsummer Night
  

  7 hours playtime

  22 of 33 achievements

• Project Green Beat
  

  2 hours playtime

  5 of 32 achievements

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1
  

  2 hours playtime

  5 of 42 achievements

• BattleBlock Theater
  

  10 hours playtime

  8 of 30 achievements

• DeadCore
  

  12 minutes playtime

  1 of 29 achievements

• Monster Slayers
  

  71 minutes playtime

  2 of 22 achievements

• The Impossible Game
  

  52 minutes playtime

  4 of 12 achievements

Spec Ops: The Line: I had started this one a looooong time ago and I decided to pick it up again. Managed to reach just a chapter or two before the end and well… I’m still wondering why I’ve been hearing everything I have been hearing for this one. It’s just loooong long corridors with identical gameplay and a few story segments in between where you have near 0 control over the course of the story. I thought we were supposed to make some hard choices here but guess I had misunderstood something…
Dead in Bermuda:Thanks to ninglor I found out there’s a difficulty setting in the game so I went back to play it in Easy. And what do you know, I beat it on the first try. The story is…ok I guess. And once you’re done building most stuff all you gotta do is maintain a routine while progressing through the island. Apparently this game only has two speeds. “Walk in the Park” and “Blink and you’ll die”.
Oh Sir!… The Insult Simulator: I was gifted this one(thanks Cow!) and went to try it out immediately. It’s a fun little game where you pick words out of a pool in order to form something offensive. Although most of the time it ends up hilarious instead. There’s not much to play though. Once you do a couple AI battles they’re all the same afterwards. And unfortunately there’s noone online to just go and insult :P
Midnight Summer: My latest SG win. Interesting RPGMaker game although I have to admit I missed quite a lot of references since it is heavily based on Russian folklore, which I’m completely clueless about. Enjoyable nonetheless.
Project green Beat: An ooooold SG win I decided to try out. It’s a rythmic on-rails shooter, which is good for some mindless fun for a couple hours. It has a few issues(too few stages, only electronic music, stages are slightly off the beat) but it gets a passing mark. And well, there’s not much competition apparently cause I even managed to score in the Top10 globally in numerous stages. And I suck.
Battleblock Theater: Why? Why did it take me 2 years to play this?! It’s soooooo amazing! Love the humor, the artstyle is adorable and most of the stages are quite well designed. Also great for short play sessions, you can just go and spend 10-15 mins on a couple stages and then leave. Currently just 1 chapter left so should be done soon but definitely gonna play it with some friends next time they’re over! My only complaint is that specific stages are too much about timing and precision jumps(aka “git gud” stages)
Knights of Pen and Paper +1: Well it screams from a mile that this is an iOS game. It’s interesting enough but not enough to keep me around. I’ll probably revisit sometime but not now.
Deadcore: Always wanted to try this kind of “speedrun” games. 10mins in the game I had already regretted my decision. Definitely not my genre.
The Impossible Game: Well as it’s title says it’s Impossible. Only managed to beat a couple stages and only in practice mode ofc. No patience or time for the rest.
Monster Slayer: Darkest Dungeon lite. This would have had potential to be good but considering the lack of any kind of story/plot to it I got bored very fast. Don’t think I’ll go back to it.

And that’s the second half of my May. Doubt June will be as productive but I’ll still enjoy whatever it is I’ll decide to put my paws on next! Till next time assassins! XOXO

Mid-May report!

So here we are again dear assassins, the half month mark is upon us so time for another update!
So far I think I’m on one of my most “productive” months when it comes to gaming. Lots of free time certainly helped :P

First off we have the usual suspects, Armello, Final Fantasy Mobius and Fire Emblem: Heroes. All of them still going strong although I did significantly cut down on Armello time, it was just taking way too much. Also finally the mobile version of Injustice 2 is out so that’s been added to my online time killers ;)

As for the rest here we are:

• 
  Tales from the Borderlands
• 
  The Cave
• 
  Glass Masquerade
• 
  Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta
• 
  Belladonna
• 
  Costume Quest
• 
  This Is The Police
• 
  The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief
• 
  Dead in Bermuda
• 
  Epistory: Typing Chronicles
• 
  Scrap Garden

April Report

Hewwo assaswins, how you been?
I’m feeling super lazy today so I’ll keep it brief.
First of all I utterly failed the Monthly challenge! What little time I spent playing I used to play Armello. I kinda got obsessed with it lately :3

• Armello
  

  74 hours playtime

  32 of 50 achievements

• Firewatch
  

  11 hours playtime

  5 of 10 achievements

• Battle Fantasia -Revised Edition-
  

  7 hours playtime

  2 of 48 achievements

• The Raven - Legacy of a Master Thief
  

  4 hours playtime

  9 of 35 achievements

Armello: Well, I’m obsessed. Managed to log over 70 hours in just over 3 weeks. It’s a very well made board game, with enough elements to make it a nice mix of luck and strategy however it does suffer from 2 very major problems. The first is the Multiplayer stability. It’s not uncommon for a game to completely freeze because the main logical loop gets stuck, forcing everyone to abandon a game that has possibly ran for over an hour. It’s rather frustrating when it happens. Also LoG decided to make everything DLC. New characters? DLC. New rings? DLC. New board color pallettes? DLC. More new characters? Another DLC! Besides the character packs though everything is cosmetic so it’s not that major. For more here’s my review
If you also like the game feel free to add me and nudge me whenever you feel like playing together.

Firewatch is my only beaten game this month. Won it on SG(thank you Fnord!! <3) so I managed to pull myself away from Armello long enough to finish it. It is somewhat interesting but unfortunately I guess my initial judgement about it was right. After all the hype I was hoping it’d be something I’d love but unfortunately I only found it passable. Yes, it has pretty environments but we’ve seen better. Yes, it does have great voice acting but we’ve heard better. Yes, it does have a semi-interesting story but we’ve seen better. In short it’s a well made game but far from something mindblowing. It does however have a premise for a great movie if those rumors are true!

The Raven - Legacy of a Master Thief: I’ve only completed 1 out of the 3 chapters so far. It’s a very humorous point&click adventure game mixed with some of that classic murder mystery novel vibe. I love it! It does however have quite a few bugs you might or might not run into. I’ve got stuck in conversations that gave me no options and no “out” one too many times for my taste.

Battle Fantasia: Well it’s a fighting game with a fantasy theme. The story is fragmented in the typical way japanese beat em ups are where with each character you get a different version of a story that leads to the exact same spot and villain with the “canonical” plot being just a little bit of everyone’s. It does have some interesting and funny characters however I absolutely hated the battles. They’re way too heavily combo oriented, even moving on the screen feels tedious and in slow-mo if it’s not woven into the combo. Biiiiiig turn off for me, I prefer fast paced ones like Marvel vs Capcom.

So that is what my month was like gaming-wise. Let’s see if we’ll have a more “productive” May.
Cheerio~

Individual Report #1 | Mass Effect: Andromeda

So here we are.
70 hours later I finally beat Mass Effect: Andromeda!
I still have a bunch of side missions to do but the major ones are done and that’s what matters :P
I don’t usually make posts focusing on individual games however I feel a game as extensive as this really deserves the time, especially with all the controversy around it.
I will do my best to keep this first part spoiler free and get into detail down below. Don’t worry there’s gonna be a rather clear warning before that part ;)

Andromeda is certainly a bag of mixed emotions. Sure, it has its problems however it’s not without its charms either. My personal take is that it retains a very decent core, pretty faithful to everything the previous Mass Effects have established and is in desperate need of extra polish on it’s surface. If anything it gave me a feeling close to that of the first Mass Effect, visually subpar for its time yet the beginning of a great journey.

Story wise it’s a slow burner. The first few hours of the game, which also is the part most of the reviews are based on, aren’t really the best moments the game has to offer. They feel aimless and generic, just a lukewarm storyline progressing as you expect it to. I can’t really pinpoint a moment when that changes, it’s gradual and slow but as the pieces start falling into place, your crew is coming together, you start having the choice of where to go and how to proceed etc, you find yourself getting invested more and more, the characters you felt were flat and uninteresting start coming to life little by little and you see there’s actually stories behind them worth exploring and you start going down the rabbit hole that is the Heleus cluster. Sometimes that is very rewarding, sometimes it’s the birth of a meme.
The quality of the dialogue and plot is best described as inconsistent. In the span of a single interaction you can find some of the best dialogue in the game followed by the most awkward and badly written one. There are several cringe worthy moments during the game and there are also several awesome ones. You just never know which of the two is coming up.

Graphics wise I don’t think there’s anything left to say, the internet has made a good enough job of not leaving a stone unturned regarding this part. Character models and facial animations are atrocious while environments, armor etc are incredible. The good news is BioWare already committed into polishing that. In an upcoming patch they’re adding stuff to the extremely limited character creation tool, they’re changing hairstyles and eyes(crazy eyes, crazy eyes everywhere!) and improving animations here and there. I expect in a few months time it’ll finally be at the point it should have been before release.

The combat is for the most part familiar with a couple great additions. First of all you’re now not locked into a class when you create your character, instead you have access to every single skill and class profile and are free to spend your points as you like. You can be a biotic with Stealth and Turrets, you can be a shotgun bearing badass with flamethrowers, you can deploy turrets and finish off stranglers with mines and generally play however the fuck you like. The only limitation is you can only have 3 active skills at a time. BUT you can also save up to 4 skillsets/profiles and change freely between them, you’ll just have to wait for the skills to cooldown when you do, just as if you had just used them.
The second major change to both combat and exploration is the jetpack. It provides insanely more maneuverability allowing you to either get in fast and clean and just wreak havoc up close, hover midair shooting everything behind cover or dash out of hairy situations before you even have time to blink, making fights much more fun than they ever were in Mass Effect. They way it was implemented is actually pretty great and can’t think of Mass Effect anymore without it.

One element that also really divides the playerbase is the “turn” to an open world setting instead of a corridor like progression like the previous ones. For me it was a very good change as it really made the game feel like an exploration game and helped you get immersed in the world of Heleus. It’s true there’s a lot of “filler” generic quests like fetch this, fetch that, talk to that, track down this etc. but the vast majority of those are still available after you finish the main plotline and feel rather appropriate for that time. Hopefully BioWare learns from this and includes more interesting quests next time but also keep the open world setting.

All in all I’d have to say I find Andromeda to be a very enjoyful game despite its shortcomings and I definitely recommend it to anyone that played the original trilogy and like that. However know that when entering Andromeda you’re not entering a standalone game, but you’re entering the beginning of yet another interplanetary journey. Even though it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, it does leave a lot of plotlines unresolved with the intention of exploring those in sequels or DLCs. That’s as much as I can say without giving away details.

If you’ve played Andromeda already or don’t care about spoilers click below to reveal the next part. MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOWING

Mass Effect:Andromeda

Playtime: 70 hours / 34 of 55 achievements

See Review/Progress

So let's get into some more detail now.
First of all I'd like to say a few things about the cast of the game. Even though they all started rather superficial by the end of the game I felt most of them were rather interesting and we had once again built "a family". Sure, I missed some people from back in the Milky Way( especially Joker, navigating a universe without him at the helm was probably the biggest blow) however Andromeda introduced a rather interesting bunch. I'd like it if they included your non combatants a bit more though in a few missions, maybe have a couple ones where they have to come with you as NPCs following you, or they get captured or something, it would have added a bit more flavor to them.
The biggest surprise was Broder(mRyder) though. I was quite hesitant going into Mass Effect without my mShep but by the end of Andromeda I think I even like Broder more. I love his more relaxed and casual feel as well as the freedom the new dialogue setup provides for him.

And even though I very much enjoyed Andromeda it doesn't mean it is without fault. One of the biggest flaws I can find in it is a constant feeling of "been there, done that". We go into a new galaxy and what do we find there? 2 new alien species who surprise surprise, are anthropomorphic in the sense of having four limbs, 2 eyes, one mouth etc. And not only they look like us, they also live like us! We even use the same doors...
There was such a clean slate here, the freedom to design anything they wanted and yet they made something so extremely familiar. We barely got to explore the Angaran culture because it's just too similar to what we already knew. There are subtle hints here and there giving you more insight on them but it's mostly a bit of the same. Such a shame.
As for the kett we're still not sure what is happening with them and why they do what they do, since we know by the end that we've only met a rogue faction lead by the Archon in Heleus. We're sure to be seeing more of them down the line, hopefully dig a little deeper in their motives and social structure.

Which brings us to yet another point. Exaltation. The process of manipulating genetic material of a species to turn it into something else that fights for you. Ring any bells? Oh yes, the exact same thing Reapers did after they harvested the Milky Way species. And the Remnant technology? Doesn't that feel extremely similar to the Prothean Ruins? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of tropes that feel like plot elements of the OT have been repackaged and thrown back at us. At least they worked though, and didn't feel out of place. I just wish we had something original too.

However I liked the herrings the game leaves for you to follow in future titles/DLCs like not revealing the Benefactor which will probably play a major role in the next installments, alerting you to the existence of the Quarian ark, having Ellen Ryder remain in stasis etc. It sure makes me impatient for the next game when I haven't even completed this one :P

There are also a lot of choices I'm rather anxious to see how they're gonna play out like saving all the arks, having Avitus as a Pathfinder, your choice of ambassador, giving the AI to Angara, leaving Aksul alive, Reyes taking over Kadara while we're banging and so on. I'm already so psyched for the continuation of this saga. And I feel that's the role ME:A had and fulfilled nicely, to serve as a lengthy introduction of a new system, with new politics, new threats and new amazing moments. Hopefully the whole shitstorm won't prevent this from happening and ME will continue its journey.

Pathfinder out~

Also a request for everyone that will comment below. If your post will contain even a hint of a spoiler please add a line at the very top warning about it. I'd like everyone to be able to visit this post and comments section without fearing about that.

That is all from me for the time being, see you with the regular report in a couple of weeks.
XOXO

Edit: Patch 1.05 is now live and it significantly improved many things. I don't know what they did with the shaders but the game looks twice as marvelous now, the eye textures were replaced with a darkened top side which makes all the characters look less like playmobils and more like decent models and it's running a lot more smoothly! Seems like in a couple of months BioWare might manage to fix this after all.

March Report #2

It’s that time of the month again, the time you look back and see how little progress you made and promise yourself to do better next month.
Fell into a kind of rut somewhere mid March where I didn’t really feel like playing anything until I came back home and…well we’ll cover that below. First the list.

• MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY
  

  53 hours playtime

  14 of 21 achievements

• Card Dungeon
  

  5 hours playtime

  3 of 17 achievements

• SUPERHOT
  

  7 hours playtime

  10 of 26 achievements

• Supreme League of Patriots Issue 1: A Patriot Is Born
  

  3 hours playtime

  16 of 35 achievements

• Pregnancy
  

  14 minutes playtime

  no achievements

So this is what I played since my last post(almost).

Mobius and Fire emblem Heroes: Mobage, blah blah blah, kill time. Blah blah.
Card Dungeon: Fun little rogue-lite dungeon crawler. Not particularly hard but it’s an android port and it’s rather obvious. Had some fun with it but I honestly don’t see me going back to it, so many better choices for the exact same thing.
Superhot: This one was actually interesting. It’s short alright but there’s quite some fun to be had in that time. Also it’s quite the jab at how people act like sheep, so much that by the end of the game I don’t wanna recommend it to anyone just cause that verifies I’ve been “sheepified” xD
Supreme League of Patriots Issue 1: A Patriot is Born This was actually painful to play. I neaaaaarly finished it but I just couldn’t take it anymore. It is supposed to be funny but all the humour comes from overplayed stereotypes and completely juvenile puzzles. The characters are LITERALLY walking stereotypes. Also the puzzles often make absolutely no sense. I couldn’t get myself to even finish the first episode and I’ll gladly stay away from it from now on.
Pregnancy: Yes, I was feeling THAT guilty for not having an SG win among these so I cheated a little by adding Pregnancy, a game that literally has 15mins of content in it :P
And as a 15 min game it obviously fails to strike any chord, just fell flat all the way through.

As for the month’s MVP…

• Mass Effect: Andromeda
  

  48 hours playtime

  21 of 55 achievements

Mass Effect: Andromeda

This is where all my time since the 24th that I came back home went :P

It all started with a lot, and I mean A LOT, of frustration. I opened the game, pressed that “Customize Character” button and proceeded to do one of my favourite thing with these games. Make my own hero. Little did I know. No matter what I did I ended up with a monstrosity, and the couple that I liked while I was in the editor, once put into the actual game and seen under all the lights and whatnot looked horendous. So default Broder it is :3

Starting off the game the first thing you realize is the how bad the facial animations are. And they’re BAD! Alpha testing level bad. There’s the crazy eyes, the lack of head movement during conversations, the awkward squints etc etc. So right off the start Andromeda doesn’t give a good impression.

However soon after you realise that all that trainwreck of animations is limited exactly to that. Faces. Movement, combat, crounching, interactions etc all work fine, at least for the most part.

The combat is the same as previous Mass Effects, only mostly improved. It’s more fluid and you have many more options, all within the mechanics we already know. The only “downgrade” to it, is that there’s no option to customize or command your allies anymore besides a “go there” or “target that one” button. However BioWare did a good job with their AI so you rarely need that option, if ever.

Graphic wise when it comes to character models Andromeda fails to impress. For some inexplicable reason they look worse than DA:I even though they use the same engine and most NPCs feel like they were just randomly generated through the horrendous Customization tool the game offers. Even NPCs that have quite the active role in the story like Director Addison(oh gawd, Mrs. Tired Face…) and Reyes Vidal(hunkah hunkah!) look rather generic. And some secondary quest NPCs are outright ridiculous(Rhys for example).

The environments however? Those are majestic! From the lighting striken rocky fields of Habitat 7, the lush blue jungles of Havarl to the vast desert of Elaaden and the snowy wastelands of Voeld everywhere you go is a sight to behold. I’ve found myself stopping and just staring at these places on multiple occasions till I realise one more reason why I hate Origin. There’s no built-in screen capture so no shots to share :(

The above though is one of the things Mass Effect needed the most all these years and personally have been longing for forever. The open-world setup it has. In all previous games, besides the horrendous moons you landed on ME and took the Mako around an empty wasteland(ugh) most places felt like long corridors. Sure, it gave a vague feeling of a planet but still it was very limited. Now almost everywhere you land besides the hubs you are free to go in every direction you want and see what is there. And they’re MASSIVE! Also the Nomad(the vehicle you are given) is quite fun to drive in unlike it’s predecessor. I still haven’t tried to go from one side of a map to the other but even at a flat land I’m sure it’d take minutes to cross at high speeds. In fact I haven’t even hit a map border yet.

And now for the most important part of a BioWare game, the story! As I still haven’t finished it I’m not 100% sure about it(the bad guys motivation has not been revealed yet) but otherwise I’m very pleased with it. It doesn’t start very strong but a few hours in it really starts taking off. Sure, it has some overused tropes like suddenly being the most important person in the galaxy without having even trained for it but you know, videogames :P

It actually feels like an exploration game and is setting up a rather promising galaxy for BioWare to further expand with future installments, I for one want to go back to Andromeda. The characters that join you feel rather one dimensional at first however as you progress the story and their conversations they start actually feeling like people and grow on you. Even generic-boy 23478 Liam actually is a person by the end. Sure, when you compare them to characters like Garrus and Tali they feel they fall short but don’t forget even they didn’t have the same time to grow. I for one think the Andromeda characters are actually more fleshed out now than characters of Mass effect were in the end of the first game.


All in all it’s a rather enjoyable game despite all it’s shortcomings and it’s certainly a very solid base for another epic trilogy. And it really has a Mass Effect vibe(the game, not the franchise). Just hope that the other installments are more polished than this upon release. It’s a real shame for an actually decent-to-good game to be buried into oblivion because of exaggerated critics of mostly visual shortcomings.


So that’s it for this month. I’ll see you all mid-April again,hopefully with more stuff than this! Cheerio~

Mid-March Report

Hewwooooo assiswins~ How’s everyone been? Well the half month mark is here once again so report we shall have!

As some of you might know I’ve been stuck in a bureaucratic hell these past 10 days or so and had to momentarily say my goodbyes with my pc once more. Now I’m done with all I had to do and just gotta wait for a notice to come so I go get an exam and be done with this sh*t for another 2 years. The day we meet again my beloved is coming! And when I say “my beloved” I am being rather literal. My dazzling, quirky, flamboyant necromancer is waiting for me back at home ❤️️

Who am I talking about you ask? But why, Dorian Pavus of course! For the ones that don’t recognise the name he’s a character from Dragon Age: Inquisition, my first game for this month. The EA sale kicked in and I just couldn’t resist any longer. Managed to play for about 45 hours in just the first 5 days of March(yes, it’s THAT addicting!) before I had to leave my pc behind. Reached a couple missions before the final one but ignored pretty much all side quests that I didn’t need for Power to unlock stuff. Will have to take care of all those when I get home :P
All in all DA:I feels like the game we never knew we needed yet we so desperately did. Every other BioWare title just feels like a dress rehearsal and this is finally the real event! Everything about it is great, the characters are all rather interesting and fleshed out, the environments are insanely huge and beautiful, the gameplay feels like the perfect balance of simplistic yet in depth, the voice acting spectacular as always and generally loved everything about it.
The only reason I still hold the Mass Effect Trilogy higher than DA is that while DA does an excellent job in Origins and Inquisition(let’s forget II exists, mkay?) it still is a recounting of a world/era and not the tale of a hero. That’s what ME has over DA and at least for me, brings it on top. Playing the same character over the course of 3 games makes you much more invested in all the characters and situations, while in DA even characters you already know are new to the MC so the relationship you had with them is gone and you’re now building something new up. But either way DA:I is an excellent title, no matter how you slice it.

So, let’s move on to the other stuff shall we?

• MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY
  

  53 hours playtime

  14 of 21 achievements

• It's Spring Again
  

  4 hours playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

• Freedom Fall
  

  5 hours playtime

  10 of 23 achievements

• Stick It To The Man!
  

  6 hours playtime

  10 of 16 achievements

• FEZ
  

  27 minutes playtime

  1 of 12 achievements

• Evoland
  

  3 hours playtime

  20 of 29 achievements

• Legends of Eisenwald
  

  6 hours playtime

  4 of 45 achievements

So Mobius and Fire Emblem Heroes are still going strong as my little nice time killers with all the back and forth on public transportation this week. Not much to say here, typical mobage, blah blah, rng, blah blah.

It’s Spring Again: Ok, some pretty artwork and that’s it. Might keep your kid occupied for 15mins or so.

Freedom Fall: Scroll down platformer with infinite lives. Super fun, some hard parts but best part? Sociopath Daddy-Issues Princess! I love her! Her messages on the walls as you climb down the tower are hilarious. Definitely recommend this one!

Stick it to The Man! : Oh Man! This one was hilarious! It’s a stage platformer/puzzle game with very, very, very heavy emphasis on humor. It’s only 10 stages but Man, was it an experience xD

Evoland: And I finally understand why this is so highly praised! Very short and simple game that just nudges you gently with “Remember thiiiiis? Aaawwwww” stuff. If you played the old Zelda, Final Fantasy etc games you need to play this! There was one dungeon though that felt completely out of place, the one going the Diablo route :\

Legends of Eisenwald: Had this sitting in my wishlist for I don’t even remember how long. And now I can’t figure out why for the life of me. It’s a game following the Heroes of Might And Magic recipe with a much inferior story, very limited unit choices, mediocre graphics and generally meh. When you complete a chapter you move to the next just by yourself so any units you invested time in, any gold you amassed is gone, any items you had they’re all gone. And the cherry on top of the proverbial cake? It keeps crashing every 20-30mins. So goodbye for now, Eisenwald, maybe we’ll meet again someday but not soon.

FEZ: One of the titles I was challenged to finish for the “March is a month you play a SG win” challenge. Finished a couple stages on it but I just couldn’t get into it, maybe the fact I don’t have my Xbox controller with me has played a part in it since these games I usually play with it. Guess I’ll have to wait till I get home and finish another one or retry with the controller then.

So this has been the gaming part of my March so far. It’s once again not as extensive I hoped it would, but it’s an okay progress considering all the running around like a headless chicken I was doing the past days :P
Anyway, keep having fun assassins and I’ll see you again at the end of the month, xoxo~