May Video Games

I forgot to check for the May video game play times before it was too deep into June, so I lost my FFX playtime.  The others are pretty accurate.

Final Fantasy X - finished the game.  Review here.

Portal 2 (3 hrs) - finished multi-player game with Dan.  That game is AWESOME.  I was only bummed that the puzzles never truly got hard.  There were only 3 (max!) that left Dan and I scratching out heads for a long time.  Perhaps they wanted to make sure everyone finished the story events and so they didn’t make it hard.  Or maybe they had as hard a thinking with four portals as we did when we were first getting used to it.  I can’t wait for the DLC as I hope we get some more challenges.  Heck, we didn’t even have any white gel in the multi-player games.

Cities XL (2 hrs) - This is the game I wish Sim City 4 with the transportation expansion pack had been.  I can actually set the routes for the buses and subways.  The citizens of my cities appear to intelligently use the transportation networks.  I get lots of information on what’s needed by the citizens.  That’s not to say this game is without frustrations.  While I enjoy a lot of the extra micromanagement of the routing of the buses and trains, I think it’s a bit odd that I designate the residential areas as low, medium, and high class.  Perhaps it’s the sensibilities of the European designer, but it just seems odd to me.  I preferred the Sim City model where the rich area can become the slums if the rich people end up wanting to live somewhere else.  Still, I look forward to spending more time with this game and Civ V when I finish up the others.  In a way, that’s the shame of getting back into video games, there isn’t as much time for these sandboxy type games when I want to finish story-based games before the story slips my mind.

• Cities-Xl
• Final-Fantasy-X
• Portal-2