Currently been playing a variety of games to hit the new year. Some good, some... very much not:
THE GOOD:
- I don't think I've really stopped playing Destiny: The Taken King since its release, although thanks to work and a bunch of other games I've not progressed as much as I would have liked. Still, better late than never, and the utterly hellish Calcified Fragments pixel hunting quest is finally almost over for me.
- Hearthstone has developed a fair bit over the years it has existed and while it is still a pretty simple and easy-to-learn game at its core, the cards have become packed with increasingly crazy effects that makes the game quite a hilarious experience at times. I've become quite fond of the Murloc decks lately, designed to rush the opponent down as fast as possible with an army of gurgling fish men before finally delivering the coup de grace with the one and only LEEROOOOOOOOY JEEEEEEEEEENKIIIIIINS himself.
- When I'm not playing Destiny I'm probably playing Doom instead. Doom's a game that will never get old for me, even if you don't consider the sheer number of mods and level packs made by its sizable fan community. However, two days ago a former Doom level designer returned to try his hand after 21 years - the man himself, John Romero. He did a remake of the final level of Episode 1, and he hasn't lost a step after all that time as he created an amazing-looking and brilliantly fun and challenging level, challenging enough that after 16 years he finally may have succeeded in making players his bitch with some awesome FPS design.
- I recently happened upon the Hotline Miami duo, and the first game at least proved to be quite a simple but interesting and rather fun game. While the art/graphics style is, even by pixellated graphics standards, utterly repulsive and the controls leave something to be desired, it's quite cathartic to play through and employs a level of strategy at times that you wouldn't expect from a game of its style. Which makes the below section a bit of a shame...
THE BAD:
- ...because Hotline Miami 2 sucks ass. Pretty much everything that made the first game so good seems to have been forgotten for this one, and the multiple approaches strategy of the first game has been abandoned in favour of sniping all the enemies with guns and hoping some invisible enemy miles away offscreen doesn't decide to shoot you through multiple windows and unavoidably kill you - which happens once every two minutes or so. Combined with the (still) weak control setup carried over from the first game and Hotline Miami 2 is the worst game I've played in 2016, and a pretty dire sequel to the simple but effective original.
- I should have known better than to trust EA to release a game that wasn't shit but then again it is also just like them to capitalize on a big-name brand, release half a game for full price and then expect you to pay that price again for the inevitable "DLC" that should have been there in the first place. Combine with the fact that the barely-there game that we got was mediocre garbage and hey, Star Wars: Battlefront. How they managed to make this such a colossal step-back from Battlefront 2 on the PS2 is baffling, but then again it is EA - the last time they released a game I liked was never ago. Some things never change...
- Finally, Daikatana will always be around to be played by me and no-one else and it'll never stop being green and awful. I'm not even going to go into detail on this one, although considering I'm already quite used to how bad it is it's been a far less painful experience than the previous two games.