The last game in the bundle of digital versions of board games that I bought so very long ago is good, old, boring Ticket to Ride. This is one of the very first board games we learned to play in Kota Kinabalu. Given that it has dirt simple rules and that I would only be playing against AI, I thought I’d just briefly check it out. The good thing is that this version comes with nearly every map ever made for the game. With the slight rule variations on each of them, it still takes a little bit of time to give each map a test run.

I put the year of release together with film titles here because quite a few films share the same title and some have been remade so many times that it would be confusing to know which version I am referring to without specifying the year. I’m now wondering if I should do the same for video games as franchise owners have been rebooting and renumbering them. This post of course refers to the 2016 reboot of Hitman but then it’s not really a reboot since it takes place after Hitman: Absolution. Whatever, it’s all just for marketing purposes anyway.

By dint of its commercial success and huge cultural impact this is one independent game that I consider a must play. It was even voted as the best video game ever made which made some people really mad. I held off for a long while as I wasn’t sure how well I would be able to handle the combat and I’m not a big fan of these Japanese RPG-type mechanics. As it turned out, I did indeed love the story but had a horrible time with the combat even after doing everything possible to make it easy for myself.

It has been a long time since I played the first Injustice but I still fondly remember it as one of my favorite ever fighting game and one of the very few video games to have a truly awesome story. So it was with a lot of anticipation that I wanted to play this sequel. In fact I even bought a fighting stick for it, my first ever, though it is the cheap and small Hori Mini Fighting Stick. I had a lot of trouble pulling off moves that require a quick backward-forward movement on the thumbsticks of the usual gamepads and thought this might be better and it really did help a lot. Unfortunately while this sequel’s mechanics are solid, the story is awful and really spoiled the experience for me.

I hate the idea of leaving games in my library unplayed so I’m determined at least to give a whirl to every one of the titles I bought a while back in the boardgames bundle. This one however is a worse candidate than usual because it’s one of those super social subjective judgment games. It does have AI and even comes with a single player Story Mode but this is really the kind of game that ought to be played in person with your friends.

So I’ve been racking up a lot of hours in this game and it’s been great. I remember playing the old Rollercoaster Tycoon games and I inevitably burned out on them after only a short while. With this one I actually managed to complete all of the scenarios in career mode though I did cheat by downloading blueprints for coasters and buildings on the Steam Workshop to make things easier. I also bought one of the many DLCs available, specifically the Magnificent Rides Collection, and though I didn’t realize it at first, it actually makes the scenarios much easier as well.

Five years ago I played Gone Home and ended my post about it by wishing that it had people you could actually interact with. Tacoma is of course the next game by the same developer, Fullbright, and while you still can’t interact with the characters in it, you can watch them interact with one another. It’s a rather neat solution to filling a space to explore with more things than just notes and photographs.