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Pokémon TCG Pocket (iPd) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:24:16) |
Hmm, still "playing" though I would very often forget to "check in" when I first arrived in Rochester. So, for a hot minute, I though I might have been done with it.
The other night I played the card game - demo at a store - and was surprised to learn that the card game is basically a super set of this game. I guess I didn't have a real conception of the difference between them - I thought that the cards were all the same, but they're not! This actually made me a bit less interested in this game, since it really is a watered down version of the regular card game.
I do think it's an interesting approach that I don't know of other examples? Because it really does seem like a subset rather than a "new" or "different" or "variant" version. I wonder if someone's looked closely at them?
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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (PC) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:19:59) |
I feel bad that I didn't keep on playing this one. At this point all of my handwritten notes and reminders and things I'd figured out are long gone...and this doesn't seem like the kind of game you can just pop back into. I think there's too many things going on. So, I'm just going to call it my loss and close out the game log...
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Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (NSW) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:18:03) |
Still playing! I'm surprised myself, to be honest. I usually hit some sort of wall with these games - usually a boss fight - I try for a certain amount of time, eventually give up and move on.
I'm currently on the 5th stage, right before another boss battle with one in the can already. The story is - I think pretty obviously - one of a character (Deedlit) in some sort of nightmare/dream hell...so I'm curious how this will end. Sadly, I don't remember how/when the anime ends, and I have no idea if this game is supposed to take place somewhere in the regular continuity?
The fire an arrow at a gear puzzles are still a bit annoying - mostly because timing is a bit tricky for some of them, but I've been able to get past without too much trouble even if there's a bit of frustration at times.
I also feel like I'm getting better - in general - at the boss fights. I've realized how maintaining distance is important, I'm also getting better at swapping between the yellow/blue modes because when you're at level 3 with one, you automatically heal, so if you take a hit, switching over is a way the heal up and it's saved me more than once.
The map is really dense and convoluted in a way that's quite impressive. I guess I'd describe the overall map like a giant rectangle and it seems like it's all pretty much filled in! I wonder how much more there is to the game. The 4th stage felt rather short, and looking at the map it doesn't seem like there's many more places it could go (I guess an entirely new map would be the obvious?)
Fingers crossed that I'm able to continue...
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Bridge Constructor Portal (PS4) by jp (Sep 12th, 2026 at 16:02:23) |
Oh, the main reason I got bored is because, once the levels start to get a lot more complicated, I found myself in the situation of having to painstakingly "rebuild" bridges from scratch because my first attempt just just off by a little bit...and you can't really do things like select a whole construction and, say, move it to the left a little bit...you just have to built it again from scratch, which got a bit tiresome - felt more busywork.
That being said, because the physics simulation isn't quite 100% predictable - there are moments of genuine surprise and laughter. Each level has essentially two goals - get one cart across and get a convoy (multiple, that come out at a regular rate) of carts across. The convoy part was definitely more fun because your bridge might work for one cart, but oscillate a bit such that the next cart barely missed, and then there's a whole pileup with carts flipping and getting stuck or the entire bridge swinging out of control.
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Bridge Constructor Portal (PS4) by jp (Sep 12th, 2026 at 15:58:36) |
I played 40 plus levels, it was fun, didn't take too long but began to get a bit tiresome (which is why I've bailed and moved on).
This game is a portal-themed bridge-constructing game in which carts move automatically and you have to build structures that will sustain/hold them on their way to a pre-determined exit. It's physics based, and having taken static mechanics as an undergraduate I appreciated the load-balancing/bearing principles behind a lot of the gameplay.
However, the game's gameplay is portal-themed and not portal-based. In the main Portal games (1 and 2), the cognitive challenge comes from figuring out where to place portals and how to navigate yourself (your character, in first-person view if I recall) around an area such that you can reach the exit. In this game, the portals (and later gels for speedy and bouncy effects) are already placed - you just need to build bridges. This is fair to the game's title - just an observation not a complaint.
In fact, the existence of portals arguably makes the puzzles themselves more interesting because it affords larger areas withing a single screen/area. If a level in this context is a large rectangular "diorama" - there are only certain ways to navigate from, say, the top left corner down to the bottom right. Portals allows the game's designers to create different navigational paths that violate the regular rules you'd have to follow in a normal space - Portaling around is basically teleporting (going from A to B without traversing anything in between) - so you can have more "interesting" routes you need to build bridges in.
I haven't played the other games in the series, which I assume have their own interesting mechanics and level-things to avoid/make use of, and I wonder if "teleporters" were used in their earlier games? If so, then this game is a lot less interesting - after all it limits itself to portal themed things (switches, sentry guns, the gels, etc.) while the other games could presumably have all that and much more.
Still, as a theming exercise, it's really well done - GladOs and more...and fun little interstitials every 10 levels (or was it 20?).
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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2323 registered gamers and 3383 games. 7922 GameLogs with 13431 journal entries. 5118 games are currently being played.
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Dispatch (PC) by dkirschner |
| Outstanding Telltale Games style narrative game, with unique "dispatch" gameplay. |
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most recent entry: Monday 17 August, 2026
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I was a little unsure about Dispatch because I typically don’t care for superhero media and because I doubted that it would be much different than other Telltale Games games (which had long since peaked). Luckily, my hesitation was unfounded. Dispatch is incredible, the best Telltale Games style game since peak Telltale era, even surpassing The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us in some areas. The writing is smart, funny, and it’s more adult than I imagined, also with more dick jokes than I imagined. I loved the extremely creative characters, their relationships, the voice acting, music, animations, gameplay mechanics, everything. It stumbled a little when some choices didn't seem to matter. For example, sometimes the game really wants to keep alive dialogue options that I didn't choose. Other characters will refer to something I didn’t say, not necessarily as if I said it, but as if I wanted to say it. And I had some issues playing this on Luna (choppy, lagging, freezing, and even crashed on the last boss fight) and with a controller (input lag, which was Luna’s fault, and it kept switching to keyboard input, possibly because of Luna lagging, all of which was very annoying during dispatch, hacking, and QTEs). Luckily, a narrative game is still playable with those issues. Thank goodness it wasn’t a soulslike or something!
The main difference between this and older Telltale games is the addition of the “dispatch” gameplay. The story (basically) goes that you are a superhero forced into a temporary hiatus, and you go to work as a dispatcher for a larger superhero organization. You get a roster of heroes whom you manage, upgrade, and send on missions from your office computer. The heroes have five or six character stats, plus a couple special abilities, and as they level up, you allocate points in character stats in order to have a well-rounded team. So, for some heroes, you’ll want to dump points into strength and vigor, while for others, you might choose intelligence and charisma.
Each stat is useful for a range of scenarios in missions. You don’t necessarily know what stats (and therefore which characters) will be ideal for each mission, so you try to figure it out by interpreting key words in the mission description. For example, a mission might say that there is a hostage situation and that you should send heroes to protect innocent civilians, reason with the attackers, and convince them to release the hostages. “Protect,” “reason,” and “convince” might be bolded in the description, which means they are key words that associate with character stats. If you ever need to “protect” people, keep people safe, defend, withstand an assault, that kind of thing, then you’re looking at the vigor stat. If you need to do anything that requires thinking, logic, reasoning, figuring stuff out, and so on, you are dealing with the intelligence stat. Persuading, convincing, making a good impression, being suave, that kind of stuff is the charisma stat. And so on. It’s not always obvious. Key words sometimes seem like they could be multiple stats. Part of the fun is getting better and better at figuring out which kinds of actions each stat covers. Anyway, you have 1-4 hero slots per mission, and after missions, characters have to return to base and rest. So, you have to use all your characters, and this part of the game really becomes about resource utilization.
Sometimes during dispatch, you have to hack security cameras and stuff. This minigame was pretty fun and has several challenging elements, such as “viruses” that kill you if they touch you, locked ports that require you to find and memorize key codes, etc. Hacking isn’t a really big part of the game, but you will occasionally have to do it. My main critique of the hacking minigame is that I would really like to be able to scroll and see the whole hacking map. Later on though, the game used "not being able to see ahead" as a challenge, which I appreciated, but sometimes it was annoying not to be able to see what was ahead. Also, that was the main part of the game that sucked with Luna’s issues, because you are moving around this grid and there are viruses chasing you and time limits. So the game lagging, or the input switching to keyboard, messed me up a couple times.
The verdict on Dispatch is that it’s a must-play. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, it’s available for free on Luna right now. Take advantage of it!
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