Brace yourselves for the October Wallet Apocalypse is coming! But before you start playing the dozen or so new AAA titles soon to be released, what was your game of the month for September?
I was splitting most of my time between 3 games all of which are really fantastic, Endless Legend , Wolfenstein The New Order , and Defense Grid 2. All of them get big thumbs up from me!
Honorable mention going out to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I am not very far in and already have a ton of screenshots, it is a great looking game.
Septembers standout had to be Monster Hunter 3U on my 3DS, love it so much I already have the collectors edition for 4 ordered on Amazon. I also played through The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The combat was pretty fun but the story was awful and there was a huge difficulty spike in the last fight that just made me say screw it and wipe it off my hard drive. I’ve also started working my way back into WoW. Need to knock the rust off before the big 6.0 patch.
GotM: Nameless Excellent JRPG, AKA The Legend of Heroes - Trails in the Sky. No angsty teen heroes here! Also, PC support with Steam Cloud means that I can play this in my living room HTPC, then on my laptop at night before sleeping.
Honourable mention: Don’t Starve on the Vita. I started this 10 days ago, and lasted a week before finally breaking down and looked for FAQ or wiki. I’ve now got that QT3 page up permanently on one of Thrag’s posts.
I wish I had more free time. I wanted to join all the recent classic games playing spree! Fallout, Sacrifice, …
Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition. Never played it before, and it was a fascinating look at the beginning of third person shooters. So many games are direct descendants of RE4! Great game in it’s own right, too, with great enemy reactivity, and awesome level and encounter design. On the other hand, if I had to cut to one more separate full-screen notification that I had picked up 100 coins, I would have gone insane.
Did a surprisingly large amount of gaming this month.
Game of the month has to be Wasteland 2, even though it debuted relatively late in the month. I’m not sure I agree with all the design decisions they made, but in terms of being a sprawling, multifaceted old school RPG it is absolutely delivering on its Kickstarter promises and I could not be happier I backed the project.
I also finished off Assassin’s Creed Revelations, well over a year after I started, though I spent most of my time with it when I first started it and this month. Basically pretty decent, but definitely the least essential Assassin’s Creed so far and I did not much care for the light bridge puzzling that they introduced on Desmond’s end. Hopefully that particular mechanic does not recur. (I suspect neither it nor the tower defense, which wasn’t great but was also hard to trigger deliberately, much less inadvertently, will.) Then I moved onto Assassin’s Creed III, which was a notable improvement in pretty much every way. I know a lot of folks seemed pretty disillusioned with it after the first blush, so we’ll see if I end up feeling that way myself, but so far I dig it a lot and I got to almost the end of sequence 5. But then Wasteland came out.
Honorable mentions:
The fantastic Choice of the Deathless, by Max Gladstone. Not a lot more than a choose your own adventure book but the writing’s great.
Closed out Walking Dead Season Two - weaker than the first season, still great.
And the Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part Two DLC, which on the whole I liked a lot.
Oh, and World of Warcraft, which I’m probably on the verge of being wholesale hooked on again. I certainly get tired of it after a while, but my god, there’s so much fun stuff to do and it just keeps expanding.
I played some Fallout for the game club, but not as much as I’d have liked. Have read the manual for MoO for the same reason.
Really this last few weeks have sucked hard. Work has been insert massive rant so my time has been extremely limited. So considering I’ve gotten home with a headache most days I wasn’t in a mood for a game that would make me concentrate too much, so I’ve been playing Rome: Total War (yes, you read that right). I’ve played enough Total War games over the years, and as mentioned in the gaming comfort food this is totally mine, that I can play without too much effort.
So I’ve been playing as the Scipii, and have taken out my frustrations on Carthage. And Gaul. And Numidia, Spain, Greek Cities, and now Egypt. My only real problem is that the Brutii have swallowed most of that sweet sweet rich Greek lands, as well as anything else in the Balkans. They will be trouble.
But the campaign will be shelved once I read the MoO manual, once I have time. Stupid 12 hour days.
Destiny for me. Started out the month playing Assassin’s Creed 3, but haven’t really touched it since Destiny. Also started Kirby’s Triple Deluxe on the 3DS.
Puzzle & Dragons and The World Ends With You. Hyrule Warriors, Elminage Gothic, and Theatrhythm Curtain Call would all be here as well if I had put any time into them, but I’ve only had a few days to play Hyrule Warriors, and I didn’t get around to Elminage or Theatrhythm during the month.
It seems like I played even more than usual this month with my son’s return to school. I tend to go a bit crazy in the beginning pf the school year before I start to fill in my time with more productive activities - like exercise.
My hands down winner this month is Endless Legend. While still a 4X game at heart, it manages to shake up the formula enough to make it feel fresh. The AI could do a better job at defending itself but my time spend with the game was worth it.
For some reason lately I’ve been bitten by the nostalgia bug for the 1978 -1980s Yankees. I was a huge baseball fan and played a lot of baseball in my youth. During high stress 9th inning moments I would change the channel in the middle of the pitch and switch it back to see what happened because I couldn’t bare to watch the play unfold. I’m just about done reading Willie Randolph’s book and have Mariano Rivera’s reserved at the library even though Mariano entered baseball just as I was leaving it. So I’ve been playing some solo Out of the Park Baseball with me running the helm of the 1978 Yankees. Guidry isn’t quite capturing his 1978 magic, but is still my ace. My goal is to play at least through the 1980s, but I never have played more than a season or 2 of OOTP before quitting.
Wasteland 2 made a strong entry at the end of the month, but when I heard about some bugs that rear their mutated head in later parts of the game I decided to hold off until a couple patches clean things up. I’ve loved what I’ve seen so far. I’m liking it so much more than Divinity Original Sin.
Early in the month I played a lot of Steamworld Dig. I never would have tried it if it weren’t for the praise received here and I have to say I’m glad I did. I had a surprisingly good time with it. There was just enough danger to provide some excitement, but it was mostly just about digging and making sure you mined enough stuff to keep upgrading your equipment.
I didn’t start Defense Grid 2 until yesterday, so I suspect it will play a more prominent role in October. I’m a sucker for chancing high scores. jpinard’s level 2 high score on hard has been particularly frustrating for me!
My favorite Time waster is still Race the Sun. I tend to get a couple races in per day.
Honorable Mention - worth playing Sina Mora - beautiful and hectic Space Run - an interesting twist on tower defense Electronic Super Joy- a weird platformer that gets really tough Galaxy On Fire Full HD - decent enough so I didn’t uninstall it like I did with SPAZ
Could have lived without
S.P.A.Z.
Last Knight: Rogue Rider Edition
Gothic III
I think the games that hit me most last month were:
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time - I tried this when I first got my PS3, but my unfamiliarity with both this genre of gameplay and the controller turned me off to it. Some friends convinced me I needed to revisit it since they were sure I’d love it, and they’re right. This game is amazing.
Runers - An amazing twin-shooter roguelike thing that has you combining runes to get new spells. Freaking amazing and fun.
Endless Legend - Given how much I couldn’t stand Endless Space, I can’t get over how awesome this game is.
Starpoint Gemini 2 - The run up to release had me playing this quite a bit. It’s just so good.
Enemy Starfighter - It’s a shame we’ve been asked not to stream or record the latest version because it is SO FREAKING GOOD.
Still Payday 2. Still trying not to buy the new DLC until it goes on sale. Still waiting for the chance to break Old Hoxton out of prison. Still ensuring that Harvest & Trustee is the least solvent bank in the continental US.
