DROGTURIST's Blog - Apr to Jun 12 (8 followers)

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Haven't been posting lately and now I can't sleep, so I guess I'll try to remember everything I've played lately... Today has been all about packing up for moving and playing Spelunky, though.

Spelunky
I hated this game at first, as evidenced by my earlier status here on TA... but I can't stop playing it, and after some 150 restarts I feel like I'm getting it. I just almost beat it - you have to replay the game from scratch every time you die by the way - but fell to a trap I didn't foresee. It's fun when it works, but the big problem is still how lazy the randomization is. There are some rules to it, like how you can tell that certain parts are never random and are pre-made level kits, but the rules are just far too harsh. I get that it's supposed to be a hard game and that's fine, but when the majority of the difficulty comes from the fact that the game won't spawn any good items, that's just not fun. If you get a jetpack, a shotgun and a compass, the game goes from impossibly hard to fairly challenging, but if you don't... Impossibly hard. This is going to remain one of the rarest completions on XBLA.

Joy Ride Turbo
Classic case of ruining a good game with poor achievements. I've been done with everything for days, but I still have to grind and grind and grind to complete it. So boring.

Jeremy McGrath's Offroad
Same here, except it's not very fun to begin with.

Magic 2013
I love Magic, and have for like 15 years. I get every installment each year and I still buy physical cards occasionally, though it's pretty hard to find people to play with when you're 30. They have Magic nights at my local shop but I just feel weird hanging out with 16-year-old geeks. Anyway, this one was probably the best yet with well-balanced decks and a neat campaign where you travel through the different planes. I wish they would've done a little more than just backgrounds for each plane, though, like maybe a mini-RPG where you go around a world map and have little side quests and stuff... Just something simple, like in Gyromancer, would've been fine. But it's by Stainless, so what can I expect? I should be glad they didn't completely fuck it up. Most notable aspect is the fact that the decks are actually well-balanced this time, and even though the Exalted Darkness deck is pretty powerful, it isn't as bonkers-overpowered like one deck was in both previous games (black/green elf deck in the first one, artifact deck in the second).

Hard Corps: Uprising
Played some of this to wash the fury from the first few hours of Spelunky out of my mind. It worked! This game is glorious - easily one of the best action games on XBLA. Everything about it is just awesome and, above all, well-designed and properly balanced. There's so much sloppiness and poorly tested ideas in games on XBLA that it's very refreshing to play an oldschool, tightly-designed and well-executed action fest like this. Can't praise this game enough. Too bad it's harder than a motherfucker!

Bang Bang Racing
I've got one lap left to get gold on the time trial, and I just can't seem to nail it. Doesn't help that I've had low concentration capabilities these past few days. Hopefully I'll be sharper this weekend.

Joy Ride Turbo
Sold my Alan Wake code for 800pts and wanted to pick up something fun, since most of the games on my plate are annoying me right now. This was a bad idea for that. The controls, actual racing and graphics are all great, but this game is a pretty classic case of the developers ruining the fun with the achievements. So much grinding for no reason.

Call of Duty Classic
I've played some frustrating games in my day, but I truly believe that this game, on veteran, takes and destroys the cake. I can't even begin to describe how fucking bullshit it is for an enemy to appear on your screen, within your crosshairs, and instantly kill you before you can fire. And that's every single fucking enemy in the game, so every checkpoint is just a trial & error slog to find out which super-aiming nazi cyborg from the future is going to jump out from behind what piece of cover so that on the next life, you can pre-aim before you pass the trigger point and stand some kind of chance at killing him. Cannot wait for this torture to finally end.

Bang Bang Racing
Still like this game, I just wish they would've put some thought at all into that last achievement and not just made it a cut+paste-based chore and pain in the ass. There's just so much about it that screams "we didn't really bother trying this ourselves," like the fact that on one track, the gold time for the slowest class is 30 seconds but for the next class, with superior acceleration and top speed, the gold time is 31 seconds. How the fuck does that make ANY sense?! This keeps happening over and over throughout the 216 time trials. So lazy.

Boulder Dash XL
I can't tell you how glad I am to be done with this game. I liked the game for the first 20 levels, then I started hating it and now that I've endured some 150 levels of it, I wish it was a person so I could violently stab it in the face 50 times. Every enemy or obstacle is annoying and player-hostile in the worst way; when they introduced the Hopper I instinctively and literally stood up from my couch and yelled "ARE THEY BEING FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW?!"

Would've loved to play some other games but BDXL took all fucking day. So not worth it. I recommend no one buy it ever. But at least I won PlayXBLA's "cheeve challenge!" Hoping I get something nice in an e-mail later today... I'll gladly take the PFX2 tables that everyone complains about getting!

Sam & Max: Beyond Time & Space
Fun as always, though a little weirder and less so than the previous "season." Not much else to say, except that I'm pretty glad that they don't have any more episodes. I love the humor and the characters but the controls needed some work...

Wallace & Gromit
...and improve the controls they did. Too bad I don't like this duo anywhere near as much as I like Sam & Max.

Boulder Dash-XL
Fuck this stupid fucking game up its stupid fucking ass! I'm only halfway through but I'm already murderously sick of having to replay 4 minutes, i.e. an entire level, only to figure out the obtuse, exactly correct path at the end of it. And I'm stuck on a level that the video guide on YouTube conveniently skipped. What am I supposed to do with a key that's below a metal ball that I have to drop to get the key? Oh wait, I figured it out as I typed that... I can grab the key with the long arm? Damn it. Now I have to play it again and try that.

Tower Bloxx Deluxe
This game is pretty sweet! I like the basic gameplay and the way they fleshed out the simple phone version with lots of modes and features. Barely scratched the surface so far, though.

Diner Dash
I only have five levels left to go but they're really kicking my ass right now. I just don't know what to do with levels where they keep giving you groups that don't fit your set of tables, yet the expert score is very high. How am I supposed to chain groups I can't seat?

0D Beat Drop
This game is annoying and stupid. Just the arbitrary, pointless way you get "hyper mode" is annoying and stupid. The music and the graphics are annoying and stupid. Wether you win or lose is almost random, which is annoying and stupid. The fact that I have no idea when I can combo up the enemy's blocks and when I can't is annoying and stupid. The fact that the game's "beat meter" goes by the song's overall BPM, not any specific drum track in the song, is annoying and stupid. Trying to come up with ways to call this game annoying and stupid is annoying and stupid.

Trials HD
Took a few hours, but I finally nailed Marathon. The challenge isn't actually each track by itself, but going 20 tracks without having some ridiculous bounce you can't save or an unfortunate wheelie or whatever. Oddly enough, I couldn't do it when I was in full concentration mode, but when I was just playing it on autopilot while having chatting away in a pilot, I pulled it off.

Trials Evolution
Didn't feel like I've had enough of Trials so I went back and golded most tracks I hadn't yet done so on. Doubtful if I'll ever get into platinums or golding Extreme, though.

Boulder Dash XL
Liking this game less the more I play it. I hate the level design where you can spend a full 5 minutes going through one, just to run into an obstacle that has to be cleared in precisely the way they meant you to or you die. Start over and play 5 minutes you already know over and over until you figure the last one. Really boring structure.

Blacklight: Tango Down
I know I sound conceited whenever I talk about this game, but I can't help it! It's just always fascinating and hilarious to me just how terrible people can be at FPS, and it seems like all of the worst players flocked around this game. I honestly can't wait to fix my disc drive so I can play some CoD again. Going Godzilla on Blacklight is fun and all, but I miss playing against people who do smart things.

Song of the day
Hopsin is going to be the next big thing.