Bought one of those crazy game bundles today.
I bought it because it had not one, not two, but THREE animal heroes do kung fu games! How could I resist?
Plus it was only five bucks. Five bucks for sixteen games! That’s like, 31 cents and a bit each!
At that price, even if I only get one game I actually enjoy playing out of it, I am still ahead by a mile.
I’ve tried four of the games so far. Here are my quick impressions :
Deployment. After a surprisingly complex and detailed opening about a cyberpunk hellscape, the game reveals itself to be a high speed top down shooter with somewhat primitive graphics and music.
I mean,it’s basically little spaceships made of geometric figures blasting each other.
And when they say “high speed”, they mean it. It is way, way too fast for my old ass. I spent the whole time I was playing it in shock and bewilderment, wondering what the hell just happened and feeling something akin to shellshock.
It’s seems quite fun if you are young enough for it, though. Lively, dynamic, and despite the simple graphics and high speed, quite a sophisticated power-up system.
All in all, a great arcade-ish battle experience I just happen to be too slow to enjoy.
Magrunner : Dark Pulse. After another surprisingly deep intro revealing that the game takes place in a crazy sci fi future where a generic tech billionaire type has invented some kind of magnetism based clean energy system and blah blah guess what, it’s a game a lot like Portal only with the ability to magnetize certain objects with one of two polarities. Like polarities attract, different polarities repel.
That’s like the opposite of how it works in the real world, but whatever.
This one is on the fence with me, because despite it being done in a 3D FPS style, it’s basically a puzzle game and those tend to do weird shit to my head.
Not their fault, mind you. It’s the fault of whatever weird wiring in my head makes me get super frustrated when I can’t solve the puzzle.
Like…. to the point it makes me feel like I am going crazy.
I suppose I have never been super good at handling frustration. I never had to learn to handle it because in school, almost everything came to me so easily that the few things that did not, like arts and crafts, made me feel so frustrated and defeated and that was such a weird experience for me that I just refused to do them.
Not proud of that. Wish I had kept on trying till I got it.
What can I say. I’m high-strung.
Anyhow. my point being that I am not sure I am going to keep playing this game. It might reach me a lesson in calm, methodical persistence. It might drive me nuts.
So we will see how it goes next time I play. I swear, I will try to take it slow and not try to do everything by an application of overwhelming cognitive force like I usually do.
Could teach me a lot of things.
Ninjin : Clash of Carrots. One of the three animal kung fu games! In this case, you are a ninja bunny fighting the forces of badness with your awesome ninja skills.
Sounds good, right? But no. Instead of being something normal, like a 2D platformer or a 3D action RPG, it’s this weird blend of classic arcade shooter like R-Type and ninja movies, and I am not a fan.
And it’s more than merely the shock of it not being what I wanted or expected. I just didn’t find the actual gameplay very fun, and I hated the controls.
How in the hell am I supposed to use the arrow keys, the mouse, and the spacebar at the same time? I only have two hands. And there was no way to change them, so I noped right out of there.
Which is too bad. It looks like it had a fun sense of humour and a cute style, but that’s not enough to overcome basically unpleasant gameplay.
I might give it another shot some time. At least to get to more of the fun story bits and see if they are entertaining enough to justify enduring the gameplay.
But as it stands, nope. Not my cuppa. Sorry, ninja bunbun, but you are not cute and/or badass enough for me to put up with that.
Super Panda Adventures. By far, my fave of the bunch. A colorful and cute platformer where you are a kung fu panda (what a great name for a movie) who is tasked with saving your world from an invasion of cartoonishly evil robots.
This is the game I wanted Ninjuin to be. The art is great, very colorful and appealing, and the storyline so far is a blend of silliness and seriousness I quite enjoy.
I didn’t like the original controls, but it had the option to change them so I changed it into the sort of “A is jump, B is attack” style setup I am used to.
But not with actual A and B. That would be super awkward to use.
I will definitely be continuing to play it in between sessions of Borderlands 2 (hella fun) and Pillars of Eternity 2 (deep and amazing).
Other than the gaming, I have felt ill and tired all day. I have slept so much and yet I am still tired as hell.
I’m trying ot keep it from making me depressed but it’s not easy. I want to be upo and doing stuff, not sleeping my life away dammit.
The end result is that I am not going to be going over to Felicity’s tonight to hang out like we normally do on Friday nights.
And that means no hanging out with my friends and being ignored by her kitten.
And that’s depressing.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.