My Week of Gaming March 21-27

Monster Tale (Nintendo DS)
I’ve been excited to get my hands on this game for quite a while once I learned it was like a Metroid style game from the creators of Henry Hatsworth. Hell, I really liked Henry Hatsworth for a while until the difficulty got a bit too much for me then decided to put it down. I feel like Monster Tale will be the same way but for a completely different reason. The game just has a bit too much backtracking for my taste.

Before I get ahead of myself, I’ll clarify a little about Monster Tale. The game is about a young girl who stumbles upon a bracelet that lets her shoot shit. Then, along with the badass bracelet, she finds an egg which miraculously hatches at that moment and becomes her little creature named Chomp. Chomp can fight alongside you and level up abilities, and even morph into other crazy creatures which helps bring variety to combat. Exploring is fun, you can approach combat in a number of different ways, and the game world is varied and interesting. Also the game feels like it is constantly rewarding you with new upgrades to Chomp and new abilities to play around with. But sadly, the backtracking is a bit much and I really hate the characters.

This is essentially a kids game, I understand that. But the main villain is some whiny princess bitch that finds it okay to torture animals; her motives are quite unclear though so I’ll skew toward the more adult theme and believe she is hoarding these creatures for some crazy sexual pleasure. Anyway, the boss battles are about as fun as you can make a boss battle but are mainly a pattern recognition instance that you must cross. Like I stated above, the game is really fun but it is forcing me to backtrack quite a bit more than I really want to. The game has no sort of fast travel system that makes it any quicker either. It forces me to travel out of my way about ten minutes to pick up a key to open the door I’m standing in front of. I’m around the 35% mark (it tells you) and I’m hoping it can keep me in until the credits.

Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II (PC)
I started this game a while back, late last year, and thought it was awesome. Played through the first level then got caught up with holiday titles like Fallout: New Vegas and completely forgot about I even bought it. An internet blackout one night had me scrolling through my Steam list of games and I decided to boot this game back up. I’ve played around five hours of Dawn of War II and am really enjoying it so far. It’s a challenging RTS that I think could be one of my favorite RTS games I’ve played. It’s getting fairly challenging and forcing me to approach large battles with tactics which is great. Won’t talk about this one much since it’s older but I see myself playing through the expansions once I complete the main quest.

I’m playing it by myself right now but would love to co-op up with someone if your interested. I have the main game and Chaos Rising; gotta love Steam sales.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (Xbox 360)
Me and Rich are still playing this game but I’m not too sure for how much longer. It’s been great so far but doing a quick scan on an internet walkthrough shows we still have seven levels left. We are already getting kind of bored of this game and am ready to move onto Dead Nation but still want to completeLara Croft first. Still a great game but maybe a little long or not enough variety.

Lead and Gold (PC)
Played several matches of this over the weekend due to Steam hosting a free to play weekend. This game is great but with all multiplayer games gets old after a bit if you aren’t playing with friends. Also Lead and Gold seems to be more on objective based modes in which nobody was paying attention to; we were all just running and gunning then bitching at why we lost when we had more kills. The game was only $2.50 but neglected to buy it because I’m not really that much into online games if I don’t have people to play with. I say this but am still pumped for Battlefield 3.

Angry Birds Rio (iPhone)
Bought this game then forgot it was just more Angry Birds. There was a time that I was really into Angry Birds but fell out after I got my fix from it. They are great games but you can only fling so many birds before the novelty wears thin. This new game sports updated graphics and a new story about monkeys and caged birds but just know going into it that its just more Angry Birds. I’m sure that’s enough for many people though.

My plans for the week include playing more of what I played last week but also maybe hopping on theCrysis 2 train. Reviews have been pretty stellar so far but I’ve played multiple shooters already that I kind of want a break for a bit. Need to finish Pokemon White, and also my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2.

Have a good week of gaming!

-Mau