The Gifts That Keep On Giving

It is only three days until my birthday and I’ve already received the large majority of my presents, all of which are awesome. For the Xbox 360 I’ve got Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption and contrary to what I said last week I can run Starcraft II on the PC and am installing it as I write this. It turns out that the technical limitation that was holding me back from running Starcraft II was actually a lack of hard-drive space but after deleting some unnecessary files, doing a little compression and uninstalling the original Dawn of War I managed to free up enough space for the game. I’ve also got an 8GB memory stick and new set of headphones, all great stuff.

 When in doubt deploy the flares.

I’ve already started playing Alan Wake, have made it through the first two episodes on normal difficulty and I must say I’m very impressed. The game managed to pull me in right from the start and the narrative and cutscenes in particular have been brilliant. The use of lighting throughout the two episodes I’ve played so far has been very well done and while the combat hasn’t quite matched up to the quality of the story-telling or the environments, it has led to some suspenseful encounters. It may sound crazy but I’m considering playing all of my sessions of the game at night with the lights out just because I feel like the game’s atmosphere deserves to be appreciated as much as is possible.

This week I’ve also started playing browser-based RPG Kingdom of Loathing. For those of you who have never heard of the game it is a rather simple RPG using almost no animations and mainly based around text and stick-figure graphics. While not the greatest RPG ever created it has been enjoyable as a game I can play a few minutes of a day as the game limits the amount of quests and battles you can perform on a daily basis. There have also been plenty of genuinely amusing moments I’ve encountered in the game, my favourite of which was the ‘Haiku Dungeon’ in which literally all of the combat text is presented in clever haikus.

I’m keeping this blog short so this is it for now. I may write another blog half way through the next week but if not I’ve still managed to get another review up recently. Thank you for reading and enjoy your video games.

-Gamer_152