New Game Archives | High Pressure

Retrospective: Sleeping Dogs

March 5, 2013September 13, 2017 xjph Leave a comment

While I was away I was gifted Sleeping Dogs and quite enjoyed my time with it. It was like GTA, but without all the silly adolescent pandering and with a much much better combat system.

Sleeping Dogs One thing this game did a great job of was in making you attached to characters. Characters that you only just met become important to you very quickly, and it just becomes that much more poignant when Bad Things™ happen to them.

If you’re a fan of GTA you owe it to yourself to try out this much improved take on the formula. If you’re not, but like the idea of the setting or the whole Hong Kong cop/Triad member story, I recommend it doubly so.

…there’s this one off-ramp on the high way though where the geometry of the guard raid can catch your car and bring it instantly to a stop. I was propelled through my windshield on at least three occasions when I got snagged by it. Be warned.

…The Abyss Gazed Back

September 3, 2012September 13, 2017 xjph Leave a comment

They Bleed Pixels I will admit that I have some trouble staying focused on a goal, as evidenced by the huge number of games I’ve never finished. While I’m still playing Darksiders 2 I’ve been distracted by a few things, most notably D&D and WoW’s 5.04 patch. Not to say that I’ve made no progress at all, but it’s been slowed considerably. Hopefully I’ll have it finished this week.

In the meantime… another distraction! I picked up They Bleed Pixels when it came out as the game appealed to me on couple of levels. I’m a sucker for smoothly animated pixel art, and the whole unforgiving platformer idea. They Bleed Pixels is a fun example of both. A somewhat dark platformer with a theme based on Lovecraftian horror. No idea how long this one is, but hopefully it will be finished soonish. With any luck I’ll have both this and Darksiders done this week, and will move on to Fall of Cybertron.

Next Monday, a video!

PROTOTYPE 2 or: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bioweapon”

August 13, 2012September 13, 2017 xjph Leave a comment

I was a big fan of the first PROTOTYPE and, while this one seems a little easier, I’m still thoroughly enjoying its sequel. I made it to the third area yesterday, the “Red Zone” a.k.a. Manhattan, and then decided that having the whole map finally available to me I would sit down, collect every collectable, and unlock every unlockable. Now that’s done and the game will likely be finished within the next day or two.

How Prototypical Of Me

August 6, 2012September 13, 2017 xjph Leave a comment

Well, it’s Monday again, my playthrough of Prototype 2 has begun, although I haven’t made much progress yet. My weekend was occupied mostly with seeing friends, and what time I had aside from that ended up with me fiddling around with a Ubuntu/Win7 dual boot on my PC which flubbed its GRUB install and rendered my system briefly unable to boot. 😛

Why does someone with a bajillion games to play want to install Linux? I have no idea. Seemed like fun. Working well so far though, now that I have a non-borked bootloader. I haven’t tried to get my games running yet though, that will certainly be an adventure if I decide to go for it.

Prototype 2 is good. I liked the first one, and this one is delivering so far on the promise of “more of the first one, but prettier.” I’ll try to post an update on my progress before the end of the week.

Also, because I just can’t stop myself, there are three more games in my Steam library. This time it’s the Exceed series of SHUMPs. They’re not long games though, so hopefully they won’t add appreciably to the already terrifying distance to my ultimate goal.