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Portal 2 Review and Analysis
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…
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March Video Games
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…
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Gaming in February
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…
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Greed Corp
This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy. At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up. This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect…
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Gaming in January
This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post. Assassin’s Creed II – 27 hours Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – 25 hrs blogged…
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Finishing Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Back at the beginning of January, I compared the first and second installments in the Assassin’s Creed main line of games. A couple weeks ago I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a continuation of Desmond and Ezio’s stories. I don’t have too much more to add to what I wrote about the second game…
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The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past. Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period. TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept…
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Recettear – First Impressions
It’s funny, growing up, I loved Square’s RPGs, but I really only played two of them – Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as 3 in the US). They just left THAT MUCH of an impression. And not just on me, they profoundly affected Dan as well. Alas, Nintendo losing the license to…
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80s Games vs Today’s Games
During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years. The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience. Pacman punishes you…
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Assassin’s Creed vs Assassin’s Creed II
Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back. As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between. (Plus, in the case…
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2010 Game of the Year
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all…
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Civilized
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that…
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Civilization V: The First Week
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest – a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started…
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Civilization V First Thoughts Part 2
Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that. So I actually like it better. It was far too easy to…
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Civilization V First Thoughts Part 1
The opening movie is AWESOME. Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great. Best intro thus far. I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise. I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese…