Just finished a play through of Mass Effect on Normal difficulty in about 30 hours. Probably could have bumped the difficulty up since it was pretty easy. As far as content goes, the main story line was good, but short. A lot of the side assignments were a little repetitive and just took a good amount of exploring and conversation with NPC’s to collect them all.
I’d give it a solid B, nothing revolutionary. I’ll probably pick up Mass Effect 2 once it’s on sale for $5 like this one was.
Steam is wrapping up a big sale and had daily deals for the past 2 weeks or so. I picked up some of the cheaper and older titles:
Now just need time to play everything.
Abe’s Oddysee and Abe’s Exodus are on sale in a pack for $3.75 this weekend. I’ve heard great things about these games, but have never had a chance to play them.
I’ve always had a soft spot for a good puzzle game. The Incredible Machine series was always one of my favorites and Portal is simply a puzzle masterpiece. I heard about World of Goo a while back and heard good things about it, but never tried it. Steam has it on sale this weekend for $5 and there’s a demo available to try out. I went ahead and bought it after playing the demo.
The gameplay is pretty darn simple. You have to connect your balls of goo into a structure to reach a pipe for your remaning goo balls to escape from. Each level has a goal to reach so you can’t go crazy building your bridges and towers. There’s a couple different types of goo that you have to use to your advantage. The physics and writing in the game are great. The demo only covered the first of four parts and I’m looking forward to the rest.
Pick up World of Goo this weekend if you want a quirky little game that requires a little more thought and problem solving than your average game.
The Star Wars franchise has collected a vast library of video games over the past 30 years. Every genre from real time strategy to MMORPG has been covered. How about Star Wars Chess? A lot of these games are just terrible (Rebel Assault anyone?), but there are a number of excellent titles. The space combat simulation games in the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series are the cream of the Star Wars crop.
I just finished playing through Tie Fighter for the first time in at least 8 years. I wore out several joysticks playing X-Wing and Tie Fighter as a kid and I always favored Tie Fighter for the simple reason that you were playing to serve the Emporer. 90% of Star Wars games are presented from the Rebel and Jedi perspective so this changes things up like playing as the Germans in [insert any WWII shooter here]. Also, you actually fly some ships without shields which adds a level of difficulty missing in X-Wing.
The Video Game Journey isn’t about long meandering reviews and I’ll get to the point quickly on each post. Star Wars: Tie Fighter is one of the best games ever. Considering it’s 1994 release, the game is still extremely playable and addicting. The X-Wing Collector Series release is playable right out of the box in Windows XP so if you want to play this classic let me know, I’ll let you borrow my copy and a USB joystick.
Tie Fighter = 9.5