Tag Archives: gamefly

What I’m Playing: Week of 15-Oct-2012

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Yesterday was reportedly the last flea market being held at Upper Darby High School, so I scoured the school parking lot for some good deals as I usually do when these things pop up. I managed to pick up Mario Kart Wii for a measly $2, and We Ski and Mass Effect for $5 each.

I rented Mario Kart Wii a while ago when I started using GameFly, and I had only managed to win all of the cups on 50cc when I chose to return it. I haven’t done that much racing online, and I watched my VR score plummet 100 points after two lousy showings with King Boo last night. The 100cc Star Cup still remains out of reach for me, but I’ll win it some day.

We Ski is a prequel to another game I rented through GameFly a while ago, called We Ski and Snowboard. I mainly bought it so that I’d have another game to use with my Wii Balance Board. Of course, when I actually went to test it yesterday, I forgot to start the damn thing up, and had to resort to just using the controller to propel myself down the mountain. Interesting, but I can’t really gauge it until I know how well the Balance Board works with this game.

And then there’s Mass Effect. I foolishly went ahead and bought the PlayStation 2 version of Mass Effect 2 so that I could skip out on going to the game store to buy it for myself, but after playing it for a bit, I found myself lost because it felt like there were people, characters and events that didn’t make sense to me unless I played the first game. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a Mass Effect-capable PC at the time, so I was lost, AND I had blown $60 on a game I simply wound up deleting to make room for other games. This time around, I’m gonna do it right, from beginning to (stupid, stupid) end, as both a male and female Shepard. Who survives? Who dies? Who will Shepard choose to “do the giggity”? I sure as heck don’t know.

See you when the summer’s through?

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If I had to pick my two favorite games from this year’s Summer of Arcade and PlayStation Play campaigns, I’d pick Bastion on Xbox Live Arcade, and Renegade Ops on PlayStation Network, with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (XBLA) and Street Fighter III: Online Edition (PSN) coming in closely behind. Shame on me for not actually dedicating enough time to playing all of them all the way through – I’ve only beaten one-and-a-half of them (full point for Bastion, and only half-a-point for SF3OE because I’ve only beaten it with one characters).

I think this year I played way more downloadable games on my consoles than I did with disc-based games, mainly because I rent from GameFly now instead of buying most of my games at Best Buy or GameStop. Catherine is probably the only other “summer game” I can say I really enjoyed. I’d also count Child of Eden, but that was released maybe a week or two before the start of summer.

I kinda wish that there were more WiiWare games to talk about so that I could have something to say about all three downloadable services, but it looks like MotoHeroz may be the best one to come out of that camp this summer (if you’re curious, it’s made by RedLynx, the same developer who made Trials HD on PC and Xbox 360). Unusually for a WiiWare game, it costs 1500 Wii Points (or, to put it in simple dollars-and-cents terms, $15), so I’ve been cautious about buying it until I’ve heard enough about it to justify the price. Maybe I should pick it up before summer officially ends tomorrow.

We are all Children of Eden

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Ever wanted to know what Rez would be like if you could play the game with your hands and nothing else? Yeah, Child of Eden is kinda like that. It is possible to play the game with a standard controller, but you supposedly get a “more complete experience” if you play it with the Kinect motion sensor plugged in. I rented my copy from GameFly, so I didn’t have any instructions on how to control the game using Kinect, and the short in-game instruction manual only shows standard controller controls. It seems that you use your right hand to control the lock-on beam (push forward to fire, and your left hand to use the tracer beam (the one that intercepts bullets). I still haven’t figured out how to use the Euphoria smart bomb yet, though.

I was able to finish the last level on Normal difficulty without missing a beat. It was the only one where I’ve been able to finish with both 100% purification (shooting down all of the enemies) and 100% item collection. I still only have 3 stars for that level, just like all of the others, so I guess I need to find ways to improve my score…I’ll probably need more than three to make progress in Hard Mode.

Eh…With Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dead Island out now, I think I’ll send it back and put it on my “to buy” list for later.