Month: October 2017
Virtually Amazing
I now own an Oculus Rift.
The recent price drop was the tipping point. I’ve been wanting a VR headset for a while now but found them prohibitively expensive. Especially considering that my current PC specs just barely eked by the requirements for such a setup. It was a lot of money for something that might not work well. Now at least it was a lot of money for something that might not work well but would leave enough cash left over to upgrade for it if necessary.
As it turns out, my fears were unfounded. My five+ year old CPU and mid-range graphics card perform quite well in everything I’ve tried it with. Read on for my impressions on what I’ve tried so far!
More Tombs!
Recently picked up playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. I spoke highly of the 2013 reboot on this blog previously, and this entry continues to deliver on the same formula. It doesn’t deviate too far from what was previously established, but then sometimes you just want more of the same!
Don’t really have a whole lot to expound on here, just wanted to put up something to avoid going more than a week without posting. There’ll be a doozy of an entry coming soon though, I promise!
What’s a “Rabbid”?
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle kind of came out of nowhere.
If someone had told me a year ago that Ubisoft was going to be making a game using Nintendo’s intellectual property I would’ve thought they were insane, but here we are. To make matters even crazier, it’s actually good. Mario + Rabbids is a tactical game similar in style to XCOM. You move your characters around to try to maintain an advantageous position in combat and take turns shooting at each other behind varying amount of cover. Yes, shooting. Mario uses a gun of some sort in this game, which seems kind of strange at first, but you get used to it.
Taken as a sort of “XCOM-lite” the game is pretty great, requiring some legitimate strategic thinking as the stages progress, while throwing in a dash of slapstick or absurdist comedy throughout. The rabbids themselves manage to keep their antics from becoming grating, which I’m thankful for, and the expected charm of Mario and his gang manages to shine through.
Definitely recommend this for anyone who is a fan of tactical gameplay and likes the lighthearted style of the Mario games. If you’ve got a Switch, give it a look!
We choose to go to Mun not because it is easy, but because it is fun!
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this one, both figuratively and literally. In-game literally that is.
Kerbal Space Program is definitely more of a sandbox than a game. A sandbox in which the “sand” is parts of spaceships and the “box” is a solar system. Using a realistic — though simplified — simulation of space flight you hurl your creations to the sky, where they may soar gloriously to their destination… or not.
Few games, if any, leave me as satisfied or with the same sense of accomplishment as Kerbal Space Program does. Maybe it’s the real physics the game uses, or the real(ish) scale of the game, but achieving something for the first time feels better here than it does in any other game I’ve played, whether it’s just getting out of the atmosphere, reaching a stable orbit, or landing on another planet.
XCOM 2: The War Continues
I’ve continued to poke at the War of the Chosen expansion for XCOM 2 and have been on the whole extremely pleased with it. I was a little worried when I initially saw the first trailer as it did not really look much like XCOM, but the actual game has been improved in pretty much every regard by this expansion.