Away for a bit

So, going to take a break for awhile.  I want to catch up on alot of games I have lying around, work on some personal stuff, etc etc.  I'll be back eventually though.

Missing posts

I realized with stuff going on and my general level of being tired, I've missed a few posts here.  Expect some corrections and extra posts up to address this issue.

Dominion

So a few days ago a friend of mine brought over a card game that he bought called Dominion Main Page .  The basis of the card game is that your a lord trying to acquire more victory points then your opponents.  You do this buy buying parcels of land or acquiring cards that grant victory points.  Turns play out in a very simple fashion.  At the start of your turn you have 5 cards in your hand.  You can play one action and buy one card with money. Once your turn is done, you discard your deck and draw 5 more cards.  When your deck is empty, you shuffle your discard pile back into your library.  You keep playing until three piles of cards have been exhausted on the board, and then count up the total victory points everyone has.  What makes this game unique is there are around 50 different types of cards beyond money and land, and you only get to select 10 to play with.  So depending on the combination of cards you play with, the general flow of the game will change.  The first time we played, the cards gave extra points for the more cards you had in your deck, so we all focused on trying to acquire as many cards as we could.  The second time we played, the cards were more focused towards either making our opponent discard cards from their decks, or on acquiring more cards from the field.  So depending on the combination of cards you collect, the mechanics and strategies you employ will vary widely.  I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who is interested in a different kind of card game.

Games I'm playing right now

Working on a few games right now, so just thought I'd list them out.

1. Dragon age origins
2. Castlevania lord of shadows
3. Fallout New Vegas
4. Fable 3
5. Vindictus
   That's about it for now.

Scaling difficulty

Something I've noticed in a few games I play (Oblivion, Dragon age and somewhat as well Fable 3) is the concept of scaling difficulty.  This is different from choosing what the level of difficulty is at the start of the game.  What this entails is, as the game progresses and your characters increase in level, power and skills, the enemies around you scale up with you.  What this means in practical terms is that your characters never tend to be too overpowered for an area.  The enemies will scale up in terms of equipment, damage, armor etc.  This makes it so that your always being challenged by certain groups of enemies.  I personally find this to be somewhat of an annoying mechanic, as it tends to make it so after spending time finding new equipment, leveling and doing things of that nature, I walk into the next room and the guardsman are now wielding +5 swords of player slaying.  This is a mechanic that I have personally not seen that much in games except for the few I mentioned, so if anyone knows of any others they have seen, feel free to let me know.

Downloadable content

Downloadable content (also known as DLC) is a somewhat new feature to find in many games these days.  It's much more common on console games for the xbox and ps3, but is also found on some pc games.  What is is is new content for a game that is downloaded after the fact, more often for an extra cost.  This can include new maps to play with online, new items for a character to use, or even more levels.  Some good examples of this are Mass effect 2 and Dragon age, both by Bioware.  Each game had multiple releases  of new content that you could purchase.  This content ranges from some new weapons, to new missions and even advancing the story beyond what the original game offered.  Some people find this to be a greedy opportunity by some game companies to cash in on the popularity of the franchise.  They claim that the developers could have made all of this available in the game from the start, and that they should not have to pay for it.  Others see it as small expansion sets for games and are willing to shell out the extra money that is required to continue the adventures of their favorite characters, or to have a small edge in a battle coming up.

A recently new part of DLC has risen recently, and that is the advent of exclusive content for buying a game.  A good example of this is Fable 3, and also Dragon Age again.  Depending on which store you bought the game from, you got different in game items, such as different armors, weapons or even small trinkets.  This has led to some game stores (most noticeably Gamestop) offering exclusive items for pre-ordering the games from their store.  This has angered a lot of players, as the items being offered end up being as good, or even better then anything else you can acquire in the game.  This forces players to get the games at gamestop, so that they can remain competitive and not fall behind their friends in terms of power in games.  Personally I don't mind a bit of DLC for games if the original game was robust enough to stand on it's own merits.  If I can play a game from start to finish and feel satisfied, then offering me new content to play through will only make the experience better.  If a game was not that enthralling to begin with, offering me new levels for more money is not going to make me want to play it anymore.   

Halloween is over, back to other games

So, the Halloween season is over, so it's back to other games.  I've been playing Fable 3 some over the past few days, and feel ready to give it a review.  So, Fable 3 is a continuation of the previous Fables, where you control a hero and are set on some grand task (in this case overthrowing your evil tyrant brother and becoming a good king or a tyrant yourself.)  It continues the whittling down of the game screen, to the point now where almost nothing shows up on the screen, not even a health bar.  So one of the problems that you run into initially is that you are constantly going back to the Sanctuary (your basically in game menu) where you can change weapons, costumes etc.  The only indication that your getting decently hurt in the game is that the option to use a health potion shows up.  Combat is the same, one button per attack, so one for ranged, one for melee and one for magic.  You can roll around to avoid damage, and it avoids everything that comes at you.  So by just constantly rolling around, you'll never get hurt.  Overall, this game is not too bad.  The reduction of menus and the seemingly desire to have the player to do a bit of everything but not too in depth into anything makes it a bit annoying.  It's gone down I think from the previous Fables, as it keeps reducing the amount of things you can do.

So beyond that, going to do a review of Gamma worlds this Thursday, and working on some longer posts to make up some space this blog has been seriously lacking as of late.