Long holidays, not much work, so i'm playing loads of games.
R-Type:
Lots of depth with force usage -- you can keep it as Gradius style option as additional cannon, you can use it as a sort of melee weapon, throwing it back or forward, or if you attach it to your nose or tail it will be like a shield of sort. Really loving it though i am very easily overwhelmed against bullet spam and die a lot.
Kid Icarus: Uprising:
hit 50 hours, almost cleared out first achievement wall. Work is kinda slow these days, so i'm mostyl just sitting in the office playing it.
Wonderful 101:
Got platinums on entire normal row. Went through entire hard mode (didn't care for ranks, so it's mostly silver and even some consolation prizes -- but whatever). Started 101% hard and honestly it's not as hard as i expected.
Punch Out!! (Wii):
Got to Soda Popinski title defense. Absolutely impossible. Soda in his first fight had some pattern in attacks that was the only thing that allowed me to bring him down, now his attacks are more unpredictable and he hits almost instantaneous. Very hard. So far i'm just practicing for his fight and doing exhibition matches with previous fighters for achievements.
Swapper (PC):
No controller support, huh? Played for twenty minutes or so until it became uncomfortable to play on keyboard and mouse that are placed sideways from my TV. I really need some kinda of table in my room, so i could put keyboard and mouse in front of TV and play more PC games, especially shooters that i almost stopped playing after TF2.
As to game itself: really like the look. Though spaceman running backwards looks kinda silly. My friend played this game and really loved puzzles in this game for how ingenious they were. I wasn't impressed when he showed me one. That's probably my main reason to play it: so i could compare my experience with his and with Toki Tori 2 which is an AMAZING puzzle platformer and one of the best games of 2013 for me.
Papers Please:
It's probably the first thing that was made in the west that treats this subject right. For someone who grew up in Soviet Union i know this stuff all too well: absurd bureaucracy, power abuse, complete dehumanization of the system. I might even say it's still very much there.
The music and sound effects remind me of
Kin Dza Dza (caught it on TV last week, rewatched it for like hundredth time, absolute masterpiece. Too bad it is completely inaccessible for most westerners).
What i appreciate the most about Papers Please is the humour: it really is the best thing to cope against the System. You could just paint an oppressive bleak painting but who'd ever want to play that?
Even the control system adds to the general feeling of clunkiness of the entire thing. All that papers cluttering your table and how you have to constantly move them around with your mouse.
By the way the best strategy is to keep your family hungry and give them food on each second day. That way you'll be able to save enough money for... for what passes in this game for a "good" ending.
Republia Times:
Precursor to Papers Please: simulator of newspaper editor. Has the same overall feeling and message. Also recommend it.
Hotline Miami:
"Beat" it, i guess. Played through entirety of the game with controller, which is probably not the preferred experience but whatever (it probably made bosses much harder that it should have been).
I mostly played with melee weapons: knifes, bats or just bare fists resorting to guns only when i had to -- against huge guys or if enemy placement just doesn't allow me to sneak in and kill him without anyone noticing. The only gun i liked to use was the one with silencer -- that way i could take almost anyone and no one raised an alarm.
Story is incomprehensible but who cares. Music is great, atmosphere is almost hypnotic and really puts into blood filled rush like nothing else.
Too bad about constant bugs, crashes, save losses, no steamworks support, no steam big picture support and other performance problems.
Hydroventure: Spin cycle (aka
Fluidity: Spin cycle, 3DS):
First wiiware game was so, so good. When they made second one "better fit for handheld experience" dividing one interconnected world into many smaller levels they largely destroyed a lot what made the first game so good. Now to collect everything you have to replay same levels doing the same stuff over and over again, oh and also you have to be perfect about it so you can get five stars.
Year after i got it i barely got through second world --
replaying the same levels to collect stuff is just not fun at all D: