Endless runners aren’t really my thing. I did enjoy Jetpack Joyride for several months, but most of the games in the genre get stale for me in a week or two. Pac-Man 256 got stale around the two hour mark.

Bear in mind, Pac-Man was one of the first arcade games to show up at our skate rink and movie theater, and it was the first game we got for our Atari 2600. Alongside Dig-Dug and Galaga, I’ve got Pac-Man on my PS4 whenever I need a quick pellet munching fix. I owned the Tiger Electronics LCD version of Pac-Man. You see what I’m saying? I love Pac-Man, and I don’t like this endless runner version of it. Not at all.

My problems with this game can be traced to the procedural generation and the blind spots created by the way the maze appears from the top and right of the screen. I might be aiming for a specific path, only to see that way is now blocked by several ghosts, and I’m dead with no chance of course correction. Continue reading

I hate turning this into a habit, but I have a choice of not writing about a game I can’t finish and moving on, or writing on my feelings up to the point that I stopped playing, and I’d really rather get new posts out for y’all, even if they’re incomplete opinion pieces on games I don’t want to force myself to continue playing.

This time the game is Cross Code, a somewhat nostalgic RPG/puzzle platformer that looks great, has a fantastic soundtrack, and an intriguing story premise. Unfortunately, it’s the puzzle portion of the game that’s dulled my interest in continuing. Where I stopped was a few hours after completing the second of four dungeons to acquire the game’s four elemental powers, ice, fire, shock, and wave. I can say that I rather enjoyed the combat, and some of the platforming sections. But the puzzles just drag on an on and on and on and on and…and if I haven’t made this abundantly clear, most overstay their welcome, pushing aside all other aspects of the game. Keep in mind, I’m someone who loves puzzle games like Portal and Portal 2. This is just too much puzzle for me.

From what I’ve been able to sort out from the story, Lea is a player in a unique VR RPG. Rather than log into a game server to play a virtual character, players log into a physical avatar who stays on a real island. Lea apparently had played this game before, but something happened to her that wiped her memory and left her in a coma. A scientist got desperate and decided to try logging her back into the game, and while Lea is still comatose in the real world, she’s got enough brain activity to play as her avatar. The other catch is, she can’t speak due to some kind of malfunction in her avatar, creating a charming reason for her “silent” protagonist shtick. Continue reading

Let me say that I really wanted to like this mod. I went and downloaded a fresh copy of the Prepare to Die edition of Dark Souls to play it, and the enthusiasm I’ve seen from some YouTubers certainly had me excited to try the mod out. I found the mod developer’s description particularly intriguing:

Dark Souls: Daughters of Ash is the original Dark Souls (2011), re-imagined and massively expanded. It’s my vision of what Dark Souls might have been if FromSoftware had been given an additional six months to develop content for the game.

But, this and several other quotes on the Nexus Mods page are either hubris or straight up lies. I want really badly to find something nice to say, like “there’s some interesting ideas here,” but even trying to use faint praise is hard because those good ideas are marred by bad execution. Continue reading

I’d like to apologize for my absence, but this time it’s not my fault. I’ve been sick, and am in fact still ill. All my plans and workouts fell flat as soon as the weather turned truly cold, and I had to drop a paying editing job in the middle of a week because I had an MS-related relapse. Right as I was recovering from that junk, I got a good old-fashioned cold, the kind that likes to stick around for two weeks and come in waves. It’s like every time I get up and say, “Oh, I might be better,” the cold shows up an hour later to go, “Psyche! Gotcha, bitch!”

While I don’t feel the need to apologize for being sick, I do want to say how sorry I am that I won’t be finishing Wizard of Legend. Every time I think to play it, I also think of a dozen other things I could do that would be better ways to spend my time. Like doing laundry, for instance. When a game is so tedious that I would prefer to do laundry instead, you know there’s a problem.

But, as I can’t finish it, this is not a review. I will cover what I liked about the parts I played, and then I’ll cover what I hated. (Hate is a strong word, but it totally applies in this instance, believe me.) But I will not give a score, so then it’s not a real, really real review.

What I liked can be summed up pretty fast, so first, let’s go over the story. In the modern era of the game’s world, your character is a young wizard visiting the museum of the Chaos Trials, where people admire all the many feats and spells of wizards of legend. It’s basically a tutorial area before an artifact sucks you back in time and into your very own Chaos Trial. You, yes YOU, are now being tested to become A WIZARD OF LEGEND! Wooohooo! Yaaay!

The premise is decent, the graphics are lovely, and the music is nice. Once you have enough funds to buy spells and find a mix that works for you, the visual flair of said spells can look quite spectacular as well. Aaaaand that’s everything I liked. *Deep breath* Continue reading