Obviously I haven’t been around for a while. Due to the Chinese New Year holidays, a trip overseas and most significantly a family crisis, I’ve been busy. Hopefully I’ll slowly be able to settle back into my usual routines from now on. Before all this, I’d been spending a lot of time with Star Wars: The Old Republic so as I’ve just finished one of the class-based story arcs, I’m writing about it now.
When I wrote about Season One a couple of years ago, I ended by noting that it seems almost inevitable that Clementine would be the main character for Season Two and expressed disappointment that she must then either have plot armor or be killed like any other character in this franchise. So when this came out and it was revealed that Clementine really would be the protagonist after all, I managed to stay away from it for a long time, not wanting it to ruin the amazing experience I had with the first game.
I wasn’t a big fan of Cities in Motion, so I prety much just ignored its sequel. But this fully-fledged city building game from the same developers was so well received that I always knew I would have to play it. As it turned out, I liked it so much that about a dozen hours in I went and bought its DLC even though most of its changes have already been patched into the main game just to reward the development team.
This one was originally launched as a KickStarter project. I didn’t back it but I did read up on it since many commented that it’s like playing a character in an episode of Star Trek. It’s billed as a sci-fi RPG set entirely within the confines of a ship but really since there is no character development system and the combat is so bad you should really avoid it as much as possible, I like to think of it as more of an adventure game.
Yeah, this is a weird pick, given my usual gaming preferences. Thing is, multiple people whose opinions I generally respect listed this as their best game of 2014. Plus I haven’t played a straight shooter for a while now, so here we are. This one plays it so straight that it’s downright anachronistic, without even a multiplayer component. That’s unheard of in this day and age!
I was a big fan of both of the previous Shadowrun games so it’s no surprise that I backed their Kickstarter campaign for this. It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been two years since the first one. As its title makes clear, this one takes you to Hong Kong under the premise that you’re a native of Seattle who travels to the city-state in search of your adopted father.
Even my wife, non-gamer that she is, knows enough to remark, “Hey, this looks a lot like Portal!” It’s a puzzle game that takes obvious design cues from Portal and even overtly references it in a number of ways. There’s no portal gun in here and Elohim is no GLaDOS but this turned out to very worthy successor to what is one of the most famous puzzle games ever made, a state of affair that I still have some trouble wrapping my head around given that this was made by the same studio responsible for the thoroughly silly Serious Sam series.