I recently got up very early in the morning so I could finally beat Bloodborne. As I suspected there is plenty of reason to go back and continue playing from New Game +. So if I can find the time then I’m certainly not done with this game yet.
I’m a really big fan of the Demon/Dark souls series so I expected to really enjoy this game and I did. The world is interesting, the art/graphics are very well done with a more consistent theme than usual. The game continues the tradition of telling a lot of the story and world lore by subtle events and environment in which the user must be observant to take it all in. I’ve always liked this way of presenting the world and lore rather than being to direct with explanatory dialogue or non-interactive cut scenes.
In the tradition of the series, gameplay rules are changed considerably from the other games. Shields are no longer a common itemand changes in combat mechanics make overly defensive play the least viable strategy of all the souls games. I really like this and feel this is one of my favorite changes to the souls gameplay. Fighting feels much more exciting now. Especially PVP.
Here’s some footage of me playing a very early part of the game so you don’t have to worry about spoilers.
Here’s some footage showing why you want to make sure you don’t play in bright lighting conditions and accidentally walk into a hole.
You may have noticed that my site now looks different. It’s a new custom wordpress theme I made for my website.
I’ve spent the last 3 weeks working on the site with approximately 30 hours of development time. The reason I decided to make my own theme is the following :
This site has a lot of static content that’s not necessarily easy to organize without using a ton of WP plugins. Even with the plugins it’s hard to manage. - I wanted a chance to practice some web and graphic design. I do a lot of programming and technical work these days.Practicing visual design helps keep me mentally balanced. - The existing wordpress themes I’ve used are never quite what I want and modifying them is always a hacky mess. - I wanted my site to look unique.
I will be writing up a small post-mortem this week going over exactly how I setup this theme, what went right and what went wrong.
Overall I’m personally quite happy with how everything went.
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What I’ve been playing #003
2015-06-30
Dont Starve – PS4
I wasn’t sure I would be interested in playing this game for a couple reasons. FirstI felt I might be getting a bit bored of survival games. Second, relative to the games in my backlog it just wasn’t a priority.
Despite this, one Friday night before falling asleep with my partner I put the game on for a quick try and did and survived a couple nights before dying. My partner seemed mildly interested. Or so I thought…
The next day she picked up the game and started playing around a little bit. What I initially thought might be a half hour play session on Saturday morning ended up turning into a 7 hour Don’t Starve binge session. I kept coming upstairs to check on her only to get the response “I’m almost done playing, I’ll be down soon”. I remember how good it feels to get so immersed in a game like this that I felt happy for herto have found a game experience she likes this much. I was jealous too!
When she was ready to take a break at about 7 hours I started playing with her as my passenger seat driver. I’ve managed to make it about 11 days now. I think I’m at the point where I can see what I need to do to trigger the win condition which is make a rod item that allows me to escape the island I’m stuck on. It’s only a hunch at this point though since we are not using faq’s or guides at this point in time.
I think this game will continue to get quite a bit of play time over the next couple weeks so I will return with some more thoughts in the next article.
Here’s some gameplay from a playthrough the other night with my partner.
Marvel Vs Capcom 3 – Sony Vita
I have both a Sony Vita and Nintendo 3DS which I both love but statistically my Vita gets far more play time than my 3DS. There are a few reasons for this but the biggest reason by far is Marvel Vs Capcom 3.
The MvC3 port for Vita is amazing and fits the device so well.
MvC3 has 4 main buttons which fits the Vita’s responsive, well made buttons perfectly. The team tag buttons map to the Vita’s triggers which is fine for a game like this considering they aren’t really needed in any complicated, timing-heavy combo’s or inputs.
The very well implemented suspend feature works incredibly well with this game. What I mostly do is setup a training mode with my team and CPU at medium limited health and the rest of the standard arcade mode options.When the game is setup like this, immediately after a round ends the same match starts up again. It almost completely eliminates the wait and tedium or restarting a new match after the current one is open. In fact I don’t have any break from the action at all unless I want to change my team.
The end result of this setup is wherever I go. If I have to wait 2 mins or more I can just take out my Vita, hit the power button and have a match of MvC3 ready to go. No time wasting menus, no inter-fight animations or waiting. Just pure game.
There is an argument these days that games have too much non-game stuff you have to do to play them such as wade through menus, tutorials and even publisher splash screens. The setup I have going with MvC3 on my Vita is the antithesis of this problem.
Here’s a video of some high level tournament play :