Sometimes I think what I want is Mass Effect: The Laserdisc game.  I love the story and I love the Codex entries.  Just getting completely engrossed in the Mass Effect world.  What I don’t enjoy is the fighting.  This isn’t because I’m bad at it.  My cover-based shooter noob days are long behind me with Uncharted 1.  But the story’s so awesome and sometimes I have to wait hours between story beats while I fight my way through the Geth.  That gets old pretty quickly.

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.

I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but was waiting for a sale price since I have tons of other games I haven’t even started yet. Having finished Final Fantasy X and the single player mode of Portal 2, I started on Mass Effect.

note: this game came out ten years ago, so I’m going to speak about spoilers freely

I finished Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago. I’d started playing it a long time ago, but the horrible voice acting grated on my nerves and I stopped playing. But, as I was making a list of games I owned but hadn’t completed, I decided to give Final Fantasy X another shot. And I ended up getting sucked into a story that I enjoyed for its uniqueness. Final Fantasy VI and VII are essentially the exact same story. In fact, the reason I have always been mystified about the love for Final Fantasy VII is that Final Fantasy VI did the same thing with a larger cast and more emotion. And Final Fantasy IX was essentially a love letter to Final Fantasy fans full of inside jokes and references. Final Fantasy X is, to borrow a phrase from The Giant Bombcast, a Japanese-ass game.

There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature.  Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot.  Yo, the princess got kidnapped again.  Run through a bunch of levels to get to her.  No exposition or reason for anything going on.  You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight.  Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going.  And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused.  Were you just working to unlock expository videos?  This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story.  The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.

It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to.  For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.

Science

The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity.  It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef.  This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA.  It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week.  (Approx 1 hour long)

Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) - I started playing this game again to get away from computer games.  It was hurting my back to sit at the computer.  I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that far in the game, so I wasn’t too lost.  (Unlike when I finished FF7 and didn’t even remember what the point was) I’m still not done, but it’s already knocked Assassin’s Creed II from long-time position as my #6 most played game raptr.  It’s already taken me longer than Final Fantasy IX.  There’ll be a review once I finish.  I’m so close, but the final boss keeps kicking my butt.  I may need to do some more grinding.

If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant!  I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot.  The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced.  It was an artform as much as any other movie or book.  And the puzzles were great fun and really got my brain going.  But I wasn’t hooked.  In fact, there was a two year gap between when I started and finished the game.

Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010.  What was the catalyst?  My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out.  Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight.  Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic.  Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise.  So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much.  It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI.  Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours.  (Finally surpassing Civ 4)  Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home.  The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours.  I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.

Again, just a small blog post to document the video games I played with throughout the year to make it easier to do a recap at the end of the year.

Assassin’s Creed II (30 min) - I booted this sucker up to get some of the easy trophies I’d missed while playing the game like the Red Light District and Ivory and Ebony trophies. Reviewed it here

Assassin’s Creed: Brootherhood (30 min) - I wanted to see what the online gaming portion of this game was like. Discovered one of the things you give up when playing games long after they come out is that it’s harder to play online. It took a long time for the servers to find people to put into our games. The games were fun. It’s very hard to hide and act like an NPC and also kill people so it’s a fun challenge. Not fun enough to get me addicted, though. Previously reviewed here