Post-Christmas Wrap Up

I used to sit in this allergist's office with nothing to do. I get allergy shots once a week (though I can't tell if they're doing anything for me). After you get such a shot you are directed to sit in the waiting room for thirty minutes so they can verify you won't have an anaphylactic reaction. I never have (and in high school I went through this for over a year).

Until two weeks ago I had no smart phone. So I would sit here and play Vita (seldom) or read magazines that I'd already seen the week (or three) before. Sometimes I would just sit. My brother didn't want to come to keep me company today. Big surprise.

Since I didn't actually bring my Vita today (headphones related), I decided to write something. Since the internet exists, I get to put it on my blog. Do you ever think about how many blogs (or email addresses!) you've had in the past ten years? I don't even know how many I've had.

Anyway (my title is Queen of the Non Sequitur), let's talk about games. Christmas break means my youngest brother is home from school. He is almost exclusively into Nintendo games. Which is fine. But we had the PS4 all booted up and he wanted to play Spelunky. That game is crazy. I already knew that I was bad at it, but after he got me into it I was playing on the Vita too. He ended up buying it for his PC. I still die immediately when I get to the jungle. Still. I think it's a fantastic game though.

Since Christmas, though, I have been playing Hatsune Miku Diva Project F2. Or whatever it's called. Rhythm games are so much fun and it takes me back to high school parties playing DDR (because that's how kids at church events party). I love hearing that same music style again and the ridiculous pride from receiving an "excellent" score (on easy...have you tried this game?!)

I wish I could put a little more time into Destiny since it's a game I can play with Jesse, but he is a level 30 now and I haven't played in probably a month. Also, I don't like it that much.

My not-youngest brother got AC Unity and Last of Us for Christmas. I am hoping to steal some time on AC, but since I've seen my boyfriend play through most of the Last of Us multiple times, I'm not sure I'll get into that. My real hope is that he'll leave the PS4 at home when he goes to college next month. But come on.

Half-Finished Reflections on Finally Finishing off the Zombies (Except Not at All)

I can't write about the Walking Dead. It took me a year to finally finish that game [Season 1] on PS3. My boyfriend loved it and wanted to see me play it. So I started. I got through Episode 3 and then I just stopped.

During last winter (LAST WINTER), I played for seven straight hours on PC. This was great because I was working from home but there wasn't a lot of work to do (don't worry, I only charged them for the time I was working). It also led to my brother getting into the series.

Finally this summer I was able to sit down and play through the ending. I think that feeling of needing to finish probably diminished my emotional investment. So I didn't cry. (For reference on my ability to cry at things that happen on tv, etc.: I cried watching the penultimate episode of the Office today. This is like the third time I've gone through the entire series.)

Last week, Jesse bought Season 2. He started playing it that day and that first episode was pretty heart-wrenching. Since I watched him play two episodes, I started with Episode 3 on Saturday. I still gave myself that feeling of needing to finish. I seem to be that way with games and sometimes tv shows or movies, ...meetings, plays, parties. So I guess, as with many other things in my life, I just need to slow it down and focus on enjoying where I am--in this case, in the story.

In Which I Am a Good Girlfriend

The other night, as often happens in my current hyper-allergic state, I woke up around midnight. As the humans of the 21st century are wont to do, I quickly checked my email. In my inbox sat an email explaining that I had been selected to participate in the Evolve big alpha and including a coveted PS4 download code. I expressed my excitement by telling the whole world, via Twitter, perhaps before I even fell back asleep.

When I woke up several hours later, I texted both my boyfriend my brother to tell them the news. When I actually saw my boyfriend later that day, he said he thought that meant the code was for him.
Why else would I share this exciting news with him?

Later that night, he continued his argument. "Who would enjoy it more?" And I have to say here that I love having him talk to me about games. In the end, I relented. Sure, he would enjoy it more. But I still hope I get a chance to play. (And that he doesn't watch me because that would just be embarrassing.)

Sadly, it seems that I have confirmed my status as not a gamer, but as a girlfriend.

Destiny Alpha: Not a Review

I honestly don't know anything about Destiny. But my brother has been looking forward to it for months. When I heard that you could sign up for the alpha, I let him know right away. Today he asked me if I wanted to try it out, so I did. (Regardless of this nauseating headache I've had most of the day.)

It was pretty enjoyable, though I'm still not good at shooting things. I couldn't tell the grenades worked the first few times I used them, so maybe I'm bad at that too. The only real alpha-type issue I had was when the wizard shot me through a large column, but that's okay. I killed him in the end. Once I'd upgraded.

I really liked what my brother called the "force palm (to the face)." Of course, I always like melee move because I'm so bad at aiming guns. 

These are a few shots my brother took while I was playing. 

In Which I Brag a Little Bit

Read from bottom to top.

I Play Other Games. Promise.

(I'll even play Call of Duty with you if you want.)

I got my first legendary. BOOM.
Now I can kill all my enemies a little more easily. Of course, right now I'm as far as the game's story will go (new section to open shortly!). But PvPs are fun and that's the event that's on right now.

Okay, I'm really tired, but this was exciting.

I Don't Like RPG's Part II

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions

Emily: I really think rpg's aren't my thing
Boyfriend: How can you tell?
Emily: Because I feel like I'm drowning when I play them.

ENEMY DOWN

It took way too long for me to make this happen. But apparently pre-emptive Pokemon fighters are the key to success.

In other news, I got a silver crown during the last PvP event, which means I finished in the top 1,000 players in the world. Woohoo! Guess I can quit happy now.

Thomas Isn't Alone

So I spent a while the past few days playing Thomas Was Alone.

I liked it because it was simple and jumpy and puzzle-y.

Plus, there were things like this.

  

Getting references is great.

You start out with one shape and move up to several with different abilities. Eventually, there are shifters which allow you to change the ability a shape has. You use the distinct sizes, jump distances, and abilities to maneuver around a puzzle, sometimes pressing buttons that move the world or carrying a diamond to reveal another part of the puzzle.

Basically, it was my kind of game.

Platinum: Tearaway

Something great happened over the weekend: I got my first Platinum trophy.

Before that happened, I worked really hard to complete the in-game goals:

It took me a long time (and some help from the internet) to find all the presents and do all the extra activities. Some of the hardest ones were really simple. Both involved wearing the right sticker. A squirrel sticker, which was confusing because I thought it was a cat the whole time. The second time I apparently picked the WRONG skull sticker. The one I picked looked more like a skull, honestly. But eventually.

The other difficult thing was finding all the little bits of confetti. Most of it was pretty easy, right along the path, but a few I missed the first time around were hard to find on replay.

After all of that, I still had a few trophies to get:
Knocking down a tower of 6 scraps (difficult because I only remembered seeing 5 stacking ones at a time). The others were all getting through levels without dying. I worked on the last two of these this weekend. It took a good chunk out of my Saturday, but I was rewarded with my first 100% finished game and Platinum trophy.

As for this game, I really enjoyed this platformer. It gave me hours of enjoyment, working through the levels, finding hidden presents, and doing helpful activities for the NPCs (non-playable characters, yeah, I know you already know).

Some of the parts of the game I guess I just don't get. Maybe they're for younger players, but reading the Game Informer review, the author included liking the papercrafts you collect through your journey. "When was the last time a game got you to take up a new hobby?" Probably never. Including papercraft.

It's use of the touchscreen and rear touchpad were actually pretty good. (Better than Assassin's Creed....) Sometimes the bouncing via the rear touchpad was a little more sensitive than I would like, but that was my hand placement and something I just had to get used to.

So I would definitely recommend this game especially for non-gamers like myself.

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation Bugs and Fun

A little more than a week ago, I bought my first video game. Before that I had relied on the kindness and generosity of others to furnish new games that I couldn't get for free. I either played games that my brothers or boyfriend had or asked my brothers to buy me games (thank you for Portal, Portal 2, Walking Dead, Tearaway, and LittleBigPlanet, guys; you're the best).

It was kind of an impulse buy and kind of not. I had finished Tearaway and Call of Duty and was looking for something to do, especially for my Vita. (I really enjoy the portability.) So my sister and I walked into GameStop looking for nothing more particular than a Vita game. I had looked at a few of the lists of Best Vita Games and nothing really stuck out. But this was on at least one that I remembered, it somebody's Vita game of the year. Plus, my friend Kate had just been talking about working through some iteration of Assassin's Creed. So I took a chance and bought the game.

There were things I liked about the game, but it was also full of headaches for me. Somewhere dumb like this one:

See those vines? Those were my sworn enemy. I could not figure out how to cross them. I tried over and over. I consulted the internet, which was honestly no help. Some people complained, but then they inevitably replied to their own posts with "nvm, got it." I couldn't jump from the end because dropping means dropping straight down to death. I jumped to a side ledge which was also certain death or being trapped there forever. I finally figured out that in order to "climb across the vines like monkey bars" one need not only direct Aveline across, but also hold the R trigger so she will swing across the gap.

Another similar frustration was this little hiccup:

You're supposed to swim through caves and not get cut up by these booby traps. It's nearly impossible. Most of the time, I saw that I was not near them but swimming seamlessly through, yet there was a ripping sound and blood filled the screen as my life faded away. Eventually I guess I just got lucky, missing getting hurt one or two times so that, bloodied and near death, I finally climbed out of the caves.


This game definitely had bigger problems too:

I tried out one of the business side missions on a whim, and got extremely frustrated. I would sneak onto the plantation, kill my target, and be left standing there next to a body with a yellow diamond floating above it. Apparently I was supposed to loot his body, but the command never came up and I was unable to perform the action. When I got further than 30 m from my victim, the mission got desynchronized but didn't seem to reset to the main story. After reloading the game a few times, I gave up on this memory all together and have not tried any business missions since. I read about other people having this problem as well, so I don't know if these missions are worth my time.

There were smaller issues....

I'm holding this parasol with my voodoo magic

And other large ones.

This was a pretty bad glitch. I was buying up all the dressing chambers for the trophy and then I got to this one. Every time I bought it the screen just went black. Not the whole screen, as you can see, but I also couldn't get Aveline to walk very far this way. I tried reloading the game, restarting the memory, etc. When I pressed start I would see the world for one second, but inevitably it would go dark again.  Eventually I just bought this dressing chamber last, got the trophy, then started at the last checkpoint. According to the map, I still haven't fixed it up.

In general, I enjoyed playing the game. I liked finishing assignments and making it through the story, but that was the problem. I was slogging through the story. The story made little to no sense and was often boring. Ultimately I didn't care about Aveline very much because I didn't know what she was trying to accomplish. One day she's teaming up with smugglers and killing fake voodoo followers (weren't they just misguided? I don't know.) and then she's killing a former slave that she had helped to freedom because he's a Loyalist (I don't know. It just felt weird.). The story just didn't flow for me.

Neither did the ending. Ten seconds after she swears her allegiance to the Templars, she's killing everyone in the building. The Citizen E thing was weird too....

So, all in all, not perfect, definitely frustrating, but fun enough that I miss playing it. I've still been working on some of the side missions and trophies, but those provide their own frustrations, especially a seemingly unresponsive map.

I Don't Like RPG's.

For years, I wasn't really into video game. I guess that's obvious. When I played video games, they were mostly Mario games. In college, we somehow managed to get an N64, which meant reliving childhood by playing Mario Kart or Mario Party 4 with my roommates.

But now I find myself addicted to video games. I wonder when the last day passed where I didn't play anything at all. It was probably last September. On a whim, I guess, my boyfriend told me to download D.O.T. He did this for his own gain, of course, for the prizes he could get from inviting a friend (if you decide to download this game, use invite code rBTY after playing through the first level, thanks). Shocking him and myself, I have played this game continuously since then. He still would like to raid my account, I think, but I haven't gotten to the point of being able to let it go quite yet.

So I sign in almost every morning and send forth my minions to travel the world and defeat their enemies. Or my enemies. Apparently the story is not the important part of the game. I hoard nux bits and bitters in hope of using them some day in the future. But really, if you have any bitters you don't need, I could really use them to improve my fighters. Thanks again.

Right now, I have two epic fighters that I'm looking to upgrade to LEGENDARY fighters. Doesn't that sound like a great goal? Maybe that's what keeps me going. Or maybe I'm just addicted. We'll see.