Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded

Much like the first game, Alien Shooter 2 is all about putting you into isometric areas, handing you a gun and letting you destroy a ridiculous number of aliens. By the end of the game, I had killed more than 20.000 aliens; I'm not sure if I have killed more enemies in another videogame. Anyway...

I can happily say that Alien Shooter 2 is a nice improvement over its predecessor. Improved visuals, more open areas, a choice of 8 characters, some RPG mechanics like stats and a bigger variety of guns to destroy your enemies with. You also have an inventory, Diablo-style, which houses your guns, your emergency medkits (used automatically when you are close to death), your implants (they boost your stats) and your armour. Aside from earning cash that you can use to buy weapons, medkits, implants, ammo, etc., you also gain XP, which is used to level up and this, in turn, can be used to improve your stats. Speaking of stats, each of the aforementioned 8 characters begin with different stats than one another, which alongside the usage of implants and the many guns available, can extend the replayability of the game quite a bit. Another awesome addition is that you can now use vehicles in some of the stages, which offers a chance for improved carnage and I really liked the tire treads that the vehicles leave on the sea of the enemies' blood. >:D

The original Alien Shooter had some problems with the isometric view (namely, the fact that you wouldn't be able to see some of the opponents), but I never had any such problems in the sequel. It's also a bit easier than the first one, probably because of its increased array of guns. All in all, I don't have significant complaints about the game, other than the limited music, which could use a bit more variety.

Full list here.

I've been reading around the MtG site a bit, so I'm more or less aware of how the DotPW games are positioned. I was also completely unaware of what they cost, and I will agree that they are well priced for what you get.

The point is that regardless of the price, I don't feel it would be worth it for me specifically because that is not what I want out of Magic. For me, the joy of Magic is the deck building and design. Playing is fun of course, but what I truly enjoy is designing a deck from the ground up. DotPW doesn't seem to offer that. Doesn't mean its a bad product, it just means I am not the target audience.

Beyond all that, all I was really trying to get across in the previous post is my feeling of being torn between spending that boatload of money to play or just doing something else with my time and money.

Sword of Hope II
Sword of Hope II
Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed
The 39 Steps

I talked about all of these games at the time.

Dinner Date

I have very little use for the "not a game" crowd. Take Gone Home. You don't have to like it, but the game is absolutely founded on video game tropes. Exploring an abandoned house, finding notes, letters, and diaries that give the player insight into the situation and listening, essentially, to audiologs that do the same. I don't know of any movies, books, TV shows, etc that try to structure themselves like that [I'm sure they exist, and I suspect they're not very good], and if you tried to take Gone Home and replant it into any of those genres, the results would be disastrous. It is too fundamentally a video game to work as anything else, and trying to wave that all away with "No fail states, so not a video game," or whatever, strikes me as intensely misguided.

Dinner Date ... I'm not going to say that it's "not a game," because if it's not a game what is it, but it's not fundamentally a game like Gone Home is. It's a first-person experience where you listen to a pathetic loser who's getting stood up on a date whine about his sex life and his work for half an hour. You "interact" with the game by, for example, pressing the "Q" button to make him tap his fingers on the table. It doesn't take advantage of the medium the way "Gone Home," or "Dear Esther," or "Machine for Pigs" do, and the result is something that could just as easily be a one-man play or a short story, and frankly--divorced of the programming limitations that result in you watching the exact same animations twenty times--would have been better for it.

edit: 9.03m, another short game/"interactive experience." It was developed for charity and intended to memorialize the victims of the 2011 tsunami (9.03 was its magnitude). The Steam reviews wax poetic about how it is "truly beautiful" and "brought teats to my eyes and a chill down my spine." Maybe I'm a sociopath or something, because I thought it was just sort of dull. The proceeds of this game are donated to a tsunami-relief charity, so at least I was bored in a good cause.

Full list

Organ Trail (Android)
I completed the campaign on easy, played the endless mode and one of the unlocked mini-games as well. It wasn't bad, but after I've seen every mini-game, I'm not sure I'm motivated enough to play the campaign on a higher difficulty again. Somehow most of the situations on the road and in the towns are too similar and the decisions you have to make are not interesting and meaningful enough.

The controls on my touch-device worked very well though. Thought it would be much more annoying and complicated.

Complete list of finished games in 2014

Ys Origin

Beat it on Normal as Yunica. The other two characters seem to be quite different, so I'll probably go on to play as them at some point.

I enjoyed this one. The story is nice, while the combat isn't very in-depth, it's still fun. Too bad about the unskippable cutscenes which meant that if I quit the game after not being able to beat the boss, I might have to sit through several minutes of cutscenes next time before trying again.

The Walking Dead 400 Days

The Walking Dead Telltale game series is basically an interactive comic book, it's pretty good for what it is.

So far I do not like the characters introduced at all (but maybe that's intentional?) I'll report back as I finish The Walking Dead Season 2.

Just finished Bioshock and am not impressed.

It would have been decent if it would just have been something for real, but all the nonsense story distracting you all the time from shooting stuff and changing ammunition and weapon type for every kind of enemy just makes it tiring.

Bloody hell, decide if you want to make a shooter, an RPG or a movie dammit...

I certainly wont play it again only to see the other short endings, I'll use Youtube instead.

And there I thought that I wouldn't be able to squeeze another game for this month. How wrong I was!

Zombie Shooter

In some ways, Zombie Shooter is nothing more than a reskin of the first Alien Shooter. Same two protagonists, very similar locations, same weapons and generally very similar-looking overall. Differences have mostly to do with the mechanics of the game, which are more RPG-oriented and the looks and behaviour of the monsters, which are now zombies instead of aliens (well, duh). Other than that, I found the game more enjoyable than the first Alien Shooter, even if I can't scratch the nagging feeling that it feels very much like a mod of the first Alien Shooter.

List has been updated.

Not like the shooting in Bioshock was that interesting either...

Have played a number of shorter games over the past couple of weeks.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter - Enjoyable horde shooter, though it can feel overwhelming at times.

Shelter - Really enjoyed this one, wonderful art direction (it looks much better in motion, the screenshots don't do it justice). Can become quite tense later on as you struggle to keep your young alive when there is a bird circling over (I lost 2 this way, and 1 to the rapids).

Limbo - Good art for this one as well, the monochrome color palette helped sell the horror some of the events that transpired throughout the game.

Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded - This game takes what was enjoyable about the first Alien Shooter (mowing through absurd numbers of enemies) and improved it with the addition of some light RPG elements, more varied environments, as well as the addition of vehicles. The shooting is quite enjoyable and by the end of the game (with the right build) you become nigh unstoppable.

MANOS: The Hands of Fate - Picked this up from a Humble Weekly sale awhile back, it's short but some of the stages can be quite frustrating. Fortunately, unlike the old "8-bit" platformers it's modelled on, losing all your lives doesn't mean you have to start all the way at the beginning of the game, but rather just the stage.

So far:
Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Alien Shooter + Expansions
Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death
Waking Mars
Far Cry 2: Fortune's Edition
Splinter Cell
Mirror's Edge
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol
Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut
Metro: Last Light
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies
Sniper Elite V2
Sleeping Dogs
Another World
Serious Sam: The First Encounter
Shelter
Limbo
Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded
MANOS: The Hands of Fate

Finished :
- Blackwell Epiphany: an excellent ending to a good series. Puzzles were not to difficult while not being to easy neither.
- The Walking Dead Season 2 - Episode 5: the best episode of the season. We'll have to wait to see what they do with the different ending possibles in the next season.


Full list here.

Just finished Zombie Shooter myself thanks to your post in the One-Day Games thread. It is indeed a one-day game, took about three or four hours overall I think.

Not bad, but buggy as heck. Specifically the pathfinding and getting around edges. Also got trapped by the scenery a couple times and had to restart the level. Oh, and the boss battle is absurd. I had to find a piece of glitchy scenery to hide behind where I could target him but he couldn't hit me. Held down the mouse for what seemed like 5 minutes as I cycled through weapons until I did enough to finish him. No idea how one would beat him without the glitches.

But all in all it was still bloody fun. Massively, over-the-topperly, paint-the-levels bloody, in fact. Glad to hear that others from this studio are better, gives me some hope that when I fire up the next one it will be even more fun.

EDIT: Updated the list.

Here's my recent completions:

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition - Ah, Baldur's Gate. I've played this game so many times since it was first released, but for some reason I could never actually finish it. The Enhanced Edition seemed to polish up some of the interface issues and was a joy to play. I'm so glad to finally call it finished....but of course there's that sequel...
Pixel Puzzles: UndeadZ - I love jigsaw puzzles, so I picked this one up when it was pretty cheap. It was alright, nothing great, but oh well. The gimmick is that you're fighting waves of zombies and it was mildly interesting, but after the first few puzzles, simply became an annoyance. Luckily, you can turn the zombies off and just focus on the puzzles. Some of the puzzles were pretty big too.
The Plan - I guess this is sort of a game, not really sure! It took like 6 minutes to "beat", but it was interesting. It's free on Steam if you haven't seen it before (might be free elsewhere, not sure).
L.A. Machineguns: Rage of the Machines - This was the second game in a bundle I bought for the Wii a while ago (the first one being Gunblade NY, which I finished a few weeks ago). Like I said before, I'm a sucker for 90s lightgun shooters, so I had a blast with this.

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Full List + Details

I just finished my first game since April - Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II.

It is my first major experience with the Warhammer universe, and I am very intrigued. I would have liked to play it sooner, but I refused to buy it because it used GFWL. Luckily, Relic is removing it. The open beta has no trace of it at all.

I feel like I am getting closer and closer to finding my perfect strategy game. The game seems to blend real-time tactics with action-RPG, and I think it works very well.

The combat itself is similar to Company of Heroes (which I love) - the way you move and position your squads, use cover, throw grenades, and use abilities. But it has removed the things that I have gotten a bit tired of over the years - base building and resource management. So now I don't have to worry about how many X points I have, or my population cap. I just need to choose 4 squads to deploy to the battlefield, and only focus on infantry combat. I absolutely love it.

I really liked the customization. I probably spent as much time customizing my squads as I did actually playing the missions. Each of my squads has different skills and traits to choose from, and there is a very diverse collection of weapons and gear to make sure that I can build an army exactly the way I want to.

It took about 17 hours to complete, and I really can't think of anything I didn't like about it. I had a blast, and will buy Chaos Rising as soon as I can.

My full list.

Yeah, the pathfinding can be spotty, alright. Regarding the boss, there is an alternative way of beating him; there are two computers at the western and eastern part of the stage. When you activate them, the central computer becomes active too (changes its colour from red to green). The idea then is to lure the boss to the middle of the stage, where there is a platform and then go to the middle computer from the narrow passages, activate it and then the boss will be blasted by electricity, which will both damage and stun him at the same time, allowing you to do some more damage to him without fear of retaliation. Then the electricity will stop and you have to do this about 3-4 more times. Mind you, more and more enemies will respawn to try to stop you. Too bad for them because my plasma minigun doesn't understand numbers. >:D

Btw, here is a video of the boss battle, where the uploader uses the same method as I described above. The parts that should interest you are from 1:46-2:46.