PixlBit

Happy cyber Monday! I'm done my shopping for the week. I went to Toys R Us late on Sunday, but didn't get anything. I was looking at Lego Dimensions Story, Level and Fun packs but aside from the Midway level pack, I didn't really feel strongly about any of the rest. The Level Packs were marked down $10 from $30 and that didn't seem all that special either. I'll get it later when I start playing the game. Onward to the week's gaming.

Severed:

I started Severed as my handheld game this week on PS Vita. This is by Drinkbox who did Guacamelee. It has a similar colorful art style but not Mexican themed. The shapes in Severed remind me of papercraft, like in the game Tearaway. It has a gloominess to it as well befitting it's story and gameplay. You move through a world in first-person a step at a time like Etrian Odyssey. You start in an outdoor area but quickly enter a building full of rooms and corridors - a dungeon you might say. Inside you have to solve some puzzles to open doors and fight monsters by slashing with your finger on the touch screen like in the phone game Infinity Blade. The difference here is that you can sever limbs from your enemeis and then use the parts to boost your stats. Basically, you just fill up a meter with solid hits and then, when you bring the monster's health to zero, you have a moment to slash in order to sever limbs. You can get surrounded by monsters too and then you have to switch views frequently to stop a monster from counter attacking. It can get pretty active. I'm only a few hours in but so far it's finger flicking good. 

No Man's Sky:

I only played a few hours of this on Thanksgiving day. You start on a planet in your busted up space ship and have to go collect matterials to fix it. You explore a wide, wide world full of plants, geology, indiginous life forms and strange floating robotic monitors. Generally things leave you alone, but when I first started, and saw a monitor, I blasted it with my laser drill and got into a fight. I beat one of them but another was attacted to the area and killed me. Later I got my stuff back, though. When you die you leave a kind of strange sarcofagus that contains everything you had at the spot of your death. There are a lot of materials you can mine and lots of plants too. You can also scan rock formations and life forms to record them. You get credits for doing this. I'm not sure by whom, or for what, but it reminds me of Beyond Good and Evil where the scientists send you money for pictures of sentient life. I got enough stuff to fix my ship, but I found a cave and couldn't help exploring it a little. I had to go to dinner before I could take off into space. I'll find out what's up there next time. I wonder when I'll get to name things, and whether I'll come across stuff named by someone else?

DOOM:

Yea it feels like old times: Mark and I on two P75 processor IBM computers playing Doom back in the mid 90s. Only this time, the graphics and gameplay features are turned up to levels undreamed of. After about 13 hours or so, I'm still astonished by the AI and the complex animations of the demons. This is a fast paced frag fest with guns and gore galore. What makes this game even more interesting, after the hectic battles, are all the various challenges that are thrown into the mix. When you level up a weapon, you gain that final level of mastery by performing a challenge related to that gun. There are challenge stones in the world which take you to a smaller environment and ask you to do a specific task. If won, you gain a rune which is leveled up by reaching some other challenge goal during regular gameplay. There is also stat tracking for each level and special challenges related to each. This makes fighting a little more interesting. Like, I was last trying to upgrade my super shot gun all the way. The last challenge was 30 multiple simultaneous kills. So I kept using it everytime I saw a bunch of low level enemies. At the same time, I'm thinking about glory kills for the related rune upgrade. I like being thrown challenges all along the way in the campaign. It gives the game a little more to think about than blam, blam, blam. 

My only beef with the game right now is I can't seem to figure out how to control both weapon choices. You can select your first weapon in slot one, but I can't seem to get slot 2 to stay the same. You want to be able to switch fast between your first two weapons. You can always get your chainsaw or BFG quickly on the X and Y buttons, but the rest of your arsenal is on a wheel that takes a second to access. Two weapons are assigned to the first two clicks of your RB button. The first slot stays constant with whatever you choose, but I want to change that second weapon. I almost don't mind, though, because I want to use every weapon and level them all to max. It's so much fun. 

I'll stop now because I could keep going on Doom, plus I'll be playing it again on Monday afternoon and make another blog about it that night anyway. 

Over and out.