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[drupal=471]Currently Hurling Controllers / Mice At… iPhones, Prototypes, and Tennis![/drupal]
At three weeks, E3 is now officially far enough in the past that it’s once again safe to talk about games that are already out. We’re totally exploiting this with the latest edition of Currently Hurling (which is incidentally what you’re reading now), shamelessly looking at what games we’ve played recently.
In this update, Paul dominates Monopoly, John tries to play horror games with a tennis elbow, and Neil goes for some double bass action. Also, [PROTOTYPE] and inFAMOUS bring us lots of spare uppercase characters. Richard ‘Rahdo’ Ham (Creative Director):
Very much enjoying inFamous! Great game overall. And I checked out the XBLA Magic the Gathering title the other day, and it stirred… rumblings, of a time long past. I’d best walk away, best not open the box in the attic. That way lies madness.
Prototype was good fun, though getting the platinum events was a bit of a hair tearer (got to get those 1000g’s!) If I ever have to run round central park via the rooftops on the edge of it again it’ll be too soon!
Waiting on Red Faction to turn up from the rental service, so I tidied up the flags in Assassins Creed to top that off after I’d done Prototype. Played through Wolverine last month but skipped a couple of the releases due to the 360 dying with the e74 and being away.
[QUOTE=Ging;193358]Prototype was good fun, though getting the platinum events was a bit of a hair tearer (got to get those 1000g’s!) If I ever have to run round central park via the rooftops on the edge of it again it’ll be too soon!
[/QUOTE]
I got all the gold challenges, but I think I’d only be playing for the sake of achievements if I played for platinum. That said, there’s a few low hanging achievements I could snap up (web of intrigue… maybe even “mr. nice guy”).
There’s distinctly nothing entirely wrong with playing just for the sake of achievements, I think wrapping up the platinum events took all of an afternoon (all but the movement events are relatively easy to platinum once you know what you’re doing). But WoI and mr nice guy are pretty easy to do (mr nice guy is even easier if you do it in an easy + game, with all your powers)
This is sort of interesting. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Personally, I feel this weird sense of sadness if I start to feel like a game is grinding, and the only reason I’m continuing is because of some tantalizing gift at the end of the run. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything. I feel more like I’ve been asked to play a game longer than it naturally deserves to be played.
But people play games for as many reasons as there are people who play games. I certainly wouldn’t criticise anyone for any of those reasons. Just, personally, I tend to enjoy the intrinsic joy of core game play, and exploring the depth and breadth of the possibility space. I can only enjoy achievements which compliment that. If an achievement effectively makes me cover the same ground over and over (Kill 1000 rats!) and there’s not 1000 equally interesting ways to kill a rat, I’m going to become fatigued at repeating things over and over. It’s just personal preference, I guess.
This is in no way a criticism of prototype, whose core gameplay I’ve gotten more out of than most any other game in recent times.
I’m finding it really hard not to kill loads of civilians in Protoype. Does it get easier to avoid civilian deaths later on? They seem to be positively suicidal.
I tend to avoid grinding out the longer, more arduous achievements unless I’ve already got a load and the 1000 is fairly close at hand - while I do nearly always lookup 'chieves to see what might be “easy”, they don’t stop me just booting up a game and running around in it for pure enjoyments sake.
I always, always cringe when I see MP achievements though, most of them are horrifically poorly thought out (see Far Cry 2 and RF:G wanting you to achieve some stupid amount of play time to get to the top rank or Fight Night 4 requiring you to be online champ across a series of title weights) - sure, they’re achievements, but only really for putting in hours and hours of play time to grind out the results. That makes me a sad tapir, as odds are, the MP won’t hold my interest for that long!
I’ve got a couple of guys in my group that have silver live accounts so they can play any game they want, they reserve the primary gold accounts for MP and games they know they want to 1000 point. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs!
They’re pure fodder and as such it’s nigh on impossible to avoid clipping them as you fight actual enemies - I was able to finish my normal run through with about 2 civilians consumed, both of which went down in one of the more hectic missions towards the end when I was trying to grab infected and dodge a load of pain.
At three weeks, E3 is now officially far enough in the past that it’s once again safe to talk about games that are already out. We’re totally exploiting this with the latest edition of Currently Hurling (which is incidentally what you’re reading now), shamelessly looking at what games we’ve played recently.
