Battlefield Bad Company 2

I never was a big fan of military shooting games. I could stomach playing Counter-strike but for some reason other military games just didn't settle well with me. Until I played this.

Bad Company 2 is published and developed by EA and you can buy it for the Xbox 360 ($60), PS3 ($60). or PC ($45). We got ours for the PC. You can also buy it off of Steam for the PC ($50). It is a first person shooter game.

In singleplayer, you start off as a soldier in the past going to rendezvous with a mole/spy in the enemy camp.  Anyways, let's just say things don't go quite according to plan. It is here where the game designers decided to stick their tutorial on how to shoot/crouch/zoom/etc. Also, they made the very beginning kind of like a cinematic opening where the credits play during your lovely boat ride.

I think that is kind of cool because not too many people really notice who took the time to work on a video game. Kind of like how audiences didn't pay attention to the "little people" who have really important roles in movies.

The campaign mode has an interesting story that revolves around a military squad that call themselves "Bad Company". The characters are enjoyable and the storyline isn't too boring.

Plus the graphics are kinda pretty! Here are some screenshots:

The solo campaign mode basically prepares you for the best part about Bad Company 2: the multiplayer experience.


When you log into Bad Company 2, you can enjoy killing people using a whole array of weapons: grenade launchers, shot guns, revolvers, machine guns, and (my favorite) knives. There are three modes you can join: conquest, rush, and deathmatch . 
 

They are all pretty neat modes to play in. I think my favorite is blowing up the m-com stations. You get some really good "oh shi-" moments in multi-player.

 Also you get to do a lot of cool things like: fly helicopters, drive tanks, drive hummers across the desert, fly UAV's. There is no shortage of ways to blow stuff up in this game.

One of the few things I look for in a game is if the water looks pretty. Hmm, what do you think??


Anyways, this game is pretty solid. You can find a lot of videos online on gameplay. I'd rather you didn't suffer through my horrible playing and hearing me shriek madly into the microphone.

 The only complaint I have? It doesn't have lan multiplayer. Wah wah. So you HAVE to play on a server in order to do the multiplayer.

Good game! Great times! Fun way to kill people. I'd say overall this game is a good buy.

Transformers: War for Cybertron (PC)

Release Date: 06/22/2010
Developer: High Moon Studios
Publisher: Activision, Steam
Genre: 3rd-Person Shooter

This is actually a good game.
Wait, come back! I'm being serious!

Some background: a group of people (High Moon Studios) who actually are fans of the Transformers IP got a chance to make a Transformers game, and Hasbro even agreed to consider the game "canon" for the timeline involving the recently released movies. That's a pretty big vote of confidence for a brand that's ripe for milking from the likes of the publisher, Activision, who has driven quite a few brands into the ground as of late (See: Rock Band).

Now, I'm not the type of dude to mince words, so I'll boil it down like this:

The Good

• The graphics are great. I played on PC with no slowdown using a system I put together over two years ago. The game is capped at 30 FPS on PC, which will upset PC-gaming purists, but people who don't typically notice or care...won't.
• Co-op campaign for up to three people. Not available via split-screen, but it's in there! Oh, and difficulty scales with more human players, in addition to the difficulty you set at game start, so "Normal" with solo play is easier than "Normal" with two buddies.
• Class-based multiplayer with multiple game modes. This is what will give the game life after the single-player campaign's death: a Call of Duty style multiplayer game with abilities and templates to unlock, and a leveling system for each class.
• All multiplayer modes support live hop-in and hop-out, so if your power surges (like ours did the first night) you can rejoin a friend playing a game in progress. Just click their name and click join. Done!

The Bad

• The PC version doesn't let you change control schemes - you're left with finding third-party programs to rebind keys or gamepad controls. The default keyboard layout will probably be hell for lefties.
• Poor video options for the PC version; your choices are limited to texture quality, vsync, and resolution. No anti-aliasing, no effect customization, nada. It runs well though, so this might not be as important as it feels.
• Multiplayer has no host migration, so if the person hosting leaves, the game is over and your points gained for that match are gone.

Honestly, the "goods" very much outweigh the "bads" on this one. The game plays and handles well, the voice-overs are great, and I'm liking the story so far. For PC the game is only $40 too, so the price is right. If you're some kind of hardcore Transformers fan, you shouldn't even be reading this. You should be playing the game.

I'll close with some video of us playing multiplayer: our first match. The video ends where our power died, cutting our umbilical to the internets.

And a bonus video: all the class transformations for the multiplayer portion.

Hey guys!!

Expect a new post coming soon!

The Dig

About two weeks ago, I decided to play The Dig. This is another LucasArts adventure game that is point and click and I really enjoy them. About a week after starting the Dig, I went to the library and my husband found this little gem.

 

So I decided to read the book and play the game and not go beyond what I have played. 

I had no idea what this game was about. From what I gathered, it could have been about some ancient archeological dig that unearths some kind of crazy killer alien. Boy was I wrong!

 

It's about an asteroid that is on a collision course with our planet. The government decides to get a group of astronauts together and blow it off course. All the pictures I have posted so far take place during the opening credits.

 

Figures the dude who thought of this concept also did Deep Impact.

 

You play as the esteemed Commander Boston Low. You are on this mission with others, most notably Brink Ludger and Maggie Robbins. You go to the asteroid to plant some nuclear devices in it to detonate and blast it off course enough that it will be stuck revolving around Earth. After the blast, you realize that you can actually enter the asteroid.

Once you figure out all the little puzzles in the asteroid, you are transported to another world that is named by the astronauts as Cocytus. Tragedies occur while you try to figure out where you are and how you can get back.

 

These spires are all connected and hold valuable information on how the astronauts can get back to Earth. 

More pictures:

 

Some animations are cartoons.

 

 

The game took me three weeks to beat since I was being an extremely slow player. I bet it could be done in an afternoon. I also loved reading the book to compare with the game. The book generally follows the game's storyline, but there are quite a few differences. You also get to read more about the Cocytans who inhabited the world. 

I enjoyed playing the game. It's a great game for both kids and adults.

League of Legends

League of Legends, a game that I have played a lot of recently, has begun a referral program.

If you've enjoyed my blog and figured you would try out League of Legends based on my tiny blog post about it, feel free to click on this link to have me listed as your referrer. I would appreciate it a lot!

This is my referral link:

https://signup.leagueoflegends.com?ref=4b4e3b63f39bf

Penumbra: Overture

I had started this game when I was gifted it by my husband around the same time he gifted me LOOM. I had never heard of it or played it. (Geeze, was I living under a rock or something when it came to these games?!)

Anyways, the idea interested me because I do enjoy scary games and apparently this was a psychologically scary one.

The artwork is really nice in this game.

A lot of dazzling beautiful pictures do not make a game though so once the gameplay started, I was excited.

Just for the record, I find it amusing when games take this approach in introducing a player how to use the controls:

(I had to make this one bigger so you could read what it said)

Anyways, so you find yourself in a snowy cold area trying to figure out your father's notes. The game starts you in the middle of a snowy area looking for shelter. You get into the sheltered area and that is when weird stuff starts happening which adds to the psychological thriller aspect of the game.

Here are some screenshots I took:

By this point, I had been playing the game for 3 hours and I was only halfway through it. I had to keep taking breaks every 20 minutes or so because I kept getting sick to my stomach. I decided at this point I would take a break and return to it later.

Two days later I came back to the game to finish.

I had been stuck running around zombie dogs that kept killing me. It frustrated the hell out of me and once I killed the last dog, I kept swinging my pick axe at it screaming victoriously.

I was able to figure out the next couple of situational "puzzles" and then I had to quit because by this time I was feeling really queasy. My husband watched me play and said that it was probably the bobbing motion that happens when I moved my character (walking/running).

I haven't beat it yet because it makes me ill to play, but I figured I would update my blog this week to let you know that I am still playing different games.

My observations? The sound effects are rather nice and the graphics are very pretty to look at. It was hard at first to center the items I wanted to use in the middle of the screen, but as time went on I was able to do it. (You have to do this in order to manipulate them with an eyeball or hand). There are parts in the game where you use a weapon (like a pick axe for example) to kill some beasties and that frustrated me to no end because the swing would be erratic. One second I'd swing like a pro and then I'd try to do the same swing again, utter failure. And I can confirm I did the mouse tapping/moving the exact same way. Not a fan. After playing for 30 minutes, I started to feel sick in my stomach and had to take a break. The only other game to do this to me was Doom 3.

Overall, nice game though I probably wouldn't really recommend it to people unless they want to try a game that has a good psychological suspense/horror atmosphere in it.

LOOM

I've always been a big fan of adventure games. Growing up, I would watch my father play them on our old IBM Compatible PC. He would play them and then when he beat them, he'd let my sisters and I play them. I grew up playing classics like the Quest collection from Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest) and others like Leisure Suit Larry and Quest of the Longbow. I never really imagined that there were other games like them not made by Sierra.

Fast forward about 20 years. I'm sitting at home and I'm angry and upset for some reason. My husband decides to brighten my day by gifting me this game on STEAM.

You start off as this guy, Bobbin Threadbare, who has to go down to speak with the Elders about something. Then he finds out he is abandoned because he is special and one of the Elders named Mother Hetchel decides to help him.

You travel to many awesome places. Like....

A cool huge tent that has pillars! (the opening to it is a tent... and apparently the rest of it is underground... or something)

It also has many different tapestries.

You get to travel on the ocean with only a tree as a raft.

And get to see some green city called ... Crystalguard. Or something like that.

Anyways, the staff on the bottom of the screen is Bobbin's staff that he found at the beginning of the game. With this staff, he can weave objects around him to do different useful things. In order to do this, the objects give him a tiny little melody. The game shows the melody on the stick, ah-like so:

The voice acting is awesome and the storyline is pretty good. I wish I had played this game sooner! As a music educator, my ear training came in handy for the little melodies, but I still wrote them down so I could look back on them later. I am sure had I played this when I was a kid, I would have absolutely loved it!

It's a very pretty game and for $5, you really can't beat it. Entertaining story, great music by Tchaikovsky, and wonderful voice acting. I also didn't have too much trouble with the game mechanics (you really just use the mouse to click on items or where to go so it isn't confusing or hard to learn). Definitely recommended to play!