A person who is seriously interested in games, game studies, and game design should play a lot of games.
To the right you will see the latest GameLog (diary)
entries I have recorded for the games I'm currently playing and my thought and feelings on the game, the experience of playing it, and so on.
If you want to see all the games I'm playing, or the ones
I'm no longer playing you can follow the "List of Games I'm Currently Playing" and the "
List of Games I've Finished Playing".
During the summer of 2003 I started a little project to keep track of the videogames I had been playing. I also wanted to keep track of my thoughts as I played them.
Thus, GameLog was born as a blogging tool for gamers. If you are interested you can hop on over and register. I personally enjoy reading about other people's thoughts
on the games they play and the more the merrier! www.gamelog.cl
I'm 7 and a 1/2 hours in...and the game gets more interesting the longer I play. By interesting I really mean stylish and with cool effects and ideas.
I had been lamenting that we hadn't played a "typical" point and click adventure game when this one came up on the docket. (previous game was Creaks, which I thought was a point and click in that sense, but it wasn't). So, lucky me! This one is a "traditional" point and click. At least in the sense of having an inventory and having to figure out when to use which items. But, there isn't really much in the way of conversations with characters and you get the items mostly as a result of solving a puzzle (like opening a locked door and the room inside has the item) and where to use the item isn't really a challenge...it's just getting the items in the first place that is tricky!
And wow is this game tricky. LOTS of puzzles - all kinds, logic and word, and visual, etc. The hardest thing so far is not knowing when you have all the info to solve a puzzle and when you don't..which sort of sucks and it's been sort of trial and error for me so far. There IS a logic to certain kinds of rooms and things like that - for example the wonky movie posters are all clues to a number lock that will open the door. So, those are all nearby. But, I just solved a year room - and the insides of that room were clues to a puzzle box that's in a totally different room. Id forgotten about that so it took a while to figure out where to go. Sigh.
Curiously I feel like there's never a MILLION open threads to pull on - I seem to get stuck and can then pull on a different thing, or am able to open a new door, then open some shortcuts and so on.
The biggets "mega(?)" puzzle/theme so far is this giant maze I need to solve - and I've done it three times! First as the main maze (the red maze), then in a portable videogame cartridge I bought in the game (even in videogames I buy more videogames, lol), and the third was when I found quiz club - which has the same maze again - but in 1st person view (the first time was 3rd person, then 2nd person, and now 1st!).
Cool stuff, and creepier the more I play. Supposedly it's an almost 20 hour game? I'm not sure I'll have the brainpower to keep going! But, maybe so? We'll see...
After trekking across the entire map (that took a while) - which was fun in that I ran across a bunch of new creatures...I decided to give up. Not out of boredom or frustration, but mostly because I think I've seen most of what the game has to offer systemically, I'm not particularly engrossed in the story, AND I have a drawer full of other PS4 games I really want to get into... I feel like I played enough of this one (over 12 hours I think) that I gave it a fair shake and can say I played it well enough.
And yes, I was having fun - but I feel I have to find new fun elsewhere...the pile of shame has slowly continued growing...
I finished this in one sitting! (literally, because I played it on PSVR while sitting down).
I enjoyed it. Didn't get nauseated (from the VR, not the game...) and also had some fun. I think it helped that I recently (last year?) played some Psychonauts - and that the platforming experience there was...pretty bad, so perhaps I wasn't expecting too much. But that seems unfair, and this game was clearly designed in a thoughtful way with regards to the common issues in VR. So, there's no locomotion - you jump from character to character by "possessing" them (I forget what it's called in the game), and the entire first area (you're on a plane with some of the characters from the first game) serves as a tutorial for the different interactions (read, powers) you'll have to use later on.
The plan you're on crashes - and everyone is scattered so you need to make your way around (outside of your own brain, because you're captured/tied to a chair) and rescue them, all the way until you get to the final baddy. As expected it's all puzzles, and there's humor (it wasn't terribly funny, but that's not a complaint), and a few clever uses of VR - for example there's a moment when you need to lean forward to peer into a periscope - and from there you can see another character you can possess (and thus continue making progress).
Most of the puzzles were pretty straightforward with two exceptions. One took me a while - you had to possess a flea and "get inside" (I don't recall how this worked - but I did it) inside the music box to fix it. The second I had to look up - this was partly a UI thing I didn't understand, because I knew what I had to do, just not exactly how to do it. It involved a cow. And a haystack. Used separately.
I think what I enjoyed the most - again, this is not a complaint, I thought it was really nice - was the intro. It's done in a James Bond intro style - with different creators names projected onto fish and stuff... the theme song is even done in that style - it's not the Bond theme but it evokes it.
Curiously the game ends - in the final credits - with a message stating that Psychonauts 2 was coming. Huh. No cliffhanger thankfully, which I appreciate. I also appreciated the game being short and not overstaying its welcome. I'm going to guess that some people complained about it being too short..but whatever. Short and good is better than longer and less good.
I love pinball. I'm not a particularly good player, but I do enjoy playing on real (and virtual) tables. So, I really enjoyed browsing around in this collection - there's lots of old tables, weird tables that are hard to play on their real-world counterparts, and more.
Favorites? Ugh. It's so hard! Playing Black Hole was neat - though I think I had the chance to play it in Las Vegas? (or maybe that was another one).
I am surprised that this collection has games from four different companies - I have no idea if that's because of current-day rights consolidation or if whoever put this together was able to convince lots of people? I don't think it's that common to have a (legit) pinball collection with tables from Bally, Stern, Williams, and Gottlieb! (of the older companies, who's missing? I'm not sure)
I have been keeping track of this information for the past 22 year(s), 3 month(s) and 13 day(s).
