I haven’t actually beaten a game in a few months. I think the last game I’ve played all the way through was Tengami in June. Part of the reason is it was a busy summer and the other part is that I can never seem to stick with a game very long. I like plaing he beginning and then somewhere through the middle I walk away from a game intending to return and then never do. By the time I want to play it again I’ve forgotten where I was in the story or how to play and end up starting it again and the cycle continues.
Unepic is one of these games that I really enjoy playing and have gotten a few hours in and walked away coming back almost a year later and having no idea how to play. I picked it back up again this week. There’s something about the art style and the game play that are really hooking me in right now and it has a great sense of humor.
The whole idea of my personal backlog challenge was to play more of the games I own all the way through. Now that things are slowing down in real life I think I’ll get back to playing through my steam library. Though I had a system of playing games from the shortest playtime to the longest I have no interest right now in playing any of my games on deck.
I’ve always been a little envious of people who played single titles for a long time, really getting their money’s worth out of a game. I’m trying my hand at the whole one game at a time thing or as close to it as I can with Final Fantasy 14 in the mix. But I want to avoid the trapping of playing games to play them.Sometimes I get this way with books where it becomes more about finishing it and checking it off the list than actually getting into the story. I want to beat the games in my backlog while actually enjoying what I’m playing and appreciating it.
I spent all of this week trying to down the second boss in Furi, one of July’s PS Plus freebies. I don’t normally play games in the “so hard it’s fun” genre. I like some challenge in my games but I’m not a fan of the all challenge all the time style. But after playing Dark Souls 2 last weekend, I was in the mood to test my difficulty limits.
The story began with a pretty cut-scene. I escaped from my cell,and picked a fight with my captor, the Warden. The fight, which was basically the tutorial, went well. I lost some lives but overall I beat him on my first try. Brimming with confidence, I started the long walk down to the next level and the new boss all while a man with a rabbit head filled me in on her. Upon arrival I was thoroughly trounced again and again by the Hunter.
In this twin stick shooter/hack and slash game, each boss has 6 phases and each phase you are given full health and 3 lives. If you lose a life during a phase the phase starts over and the boss gets their health back. Lose all three lives and the whole thing starts from phase one again. Starting over and over had me yelling at my TV more than I’d care to admit. Everything you just did for the past 20 minutes didn’t count.
That’s what I thought at first. But as I came back to challenge the boss once or twice a day I noticed I was getting better. Taking the approach of playing it a little each day instead of trying to power through it for hours definitely helped make it least frustrating. I was dying less during the early phases, I started having more health on my last life on the later phases, my parries were getting better and I knew the attack animations and how to avoid them. I was getting better as a player. What surprised me was that even though I wasn’t going anywhere in the game, I felt like I was progressing.Finally on Friday I kicked the second boss into a pit with a cry of victory and was on my way to the third. Maybe this one won’t take so long to beat.
I tried, I really tried to get another 5,000 blocks placed in trove this weekend but my heart just wasn’t in it. As the two week long anniversary event drew to a close so did my interest in doing anything in the game. So I threw in the towel at 6,000 and decided I could live without the extra 5 Golden Ticket Chests.
I don’t know what this is
This morning I opened my new shiny 13 Golden ticket boxes and got a whole lot of nothing. I wasn’t really expecting anything out of them but there’s always a chance with lock boxes, part of the excitement of opening them I suppose.Honestly, I just wanted some new mounts to ride around on, that would have been nice not sure I’d be all that excited for a full year of patron subscription.
While it was fun for a short period of time, I got bored of the endless zerg in the higher level portals. Plus it always crashes when I launch Spotify along with it. If I’m going to mindlessly grind I want some music to grind to. I’ll definitely try it out when it comes to consoles though.
Dark Souls 2
I’ve played Demon Souls, I’ve played half of Dark Souls, I finished Bloodborne, but I never got around to playing Dark Souls 2. It’s my friend Jay’s favorite game and he’s been bugging me for years to play it. For years I’ve been telling him that if I ever found it for 5 dollars or less I would get it figuring that would by me sometime. Well I walked into my local game store a few weeks ago and found Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin for exactly 5 dollars and, keeping my word, prominently bought it. Which,means yet another game to add to my backlog
This weekend I started playing and streaming Dark Souls 2 partly because I had some friends who wanted to watch and partly because I wanted to try streaming solo. Me, Jay, and some other friends had been streaming Diablo 3 as a group which was a blast but I wanted to see what it was like by myself. It was a fun time, I’m sure my more experienced friends had a good time heckling me very time I died as well as giving me a few pointers.
I sunk about 4 hours into it Saturday night. I played Demon Souls and Bloodborne mostly Co-op so this is the first time I’m trying to complete a Souls game completely by myself. So far it’s been difficult but fair and I had a good time with it.
World Of Warcraft-Trial Edition
I never played WoW at all. Ok that’s not true, I played a few private servers in high school with friends but that wasn’t fun. You were too powerful and gained everything too quickly. It probably wasn’t the best way to be introduced to a game. Of course, the game was around when I lacked any sort of disposable income of my own and my parents didn’t understand why I needed to pay monthly to play a game.
With all the hype around Legion coming at the end of next month, I wanted to sit down and try for myself the king of MMO’s. I started my exploration into Azeroth as a Draenei Monk. It was a pleasant way to pass the time doing quests, killing things, looting things, leveling up. All of it was great, the quintessential MMO experience. I managed to get to level 15 this weekend and plan to get to my account level cap of 20 next weekend.
I like games with a lot of classes. With 13 classes to choose from it looks like it would keep my attention for a while.If it wasn’t for the inability to delete my character I would have re rolled countless times and probably not made it past level 10. But I like my name and being a blue space goat felt right so I stuck with the Monk for the weekend. Plus,those hooves look like they’d hurt to be kicked by.
Though strangely enough, playing World of Warcraft over the weekend actually made me miss Final Fantasy 14. If it wasn’t for No Man’s Sky coming out in a few weeks I would have plunked down some cash for the starter edition of Wow or Heavansward and upped my sub to FF14. I have a feeling most of my gaming time in August will be taken up by my quest to explore the universe and name some plants and creatures. Maybe even fly some spaceships or something.
I finally pulled the trigger and checked out my cart on Steam. In total I bought 5 new games and spent around $15 dollars. This is way less than I’ve bought or spent in previous years.Hey, I’m not complaining.
So Long and Good Riddance Flash Sales
This is the first Steam Sale I’ve been through that didn’t have flash sales. I know a lot of people were upset that these flash sales wouldn’t be appearing this year and at first I agreed with them. But as the week went by, I realized I’m really glad they didn’t make an appearance.
Sure, it was fun to check back every 8 hours to see what the new deals were and to see if that one game I really wanted would go on sale for cheaper, but that was rarely the case. Most of the time, the games I bought from the flash sales were things I didn’t even have an interest in at first but the price and the time limit had me scooping up game after game. A lot of these games I still haven’t played two years later.
No Rougelikes 2016
My first steam summer sale I discovered this lovely genre of game. I had never heard of or played a rouge like in my life. Randomly generated levels? That sounds cool! The game is different every time you play? Wow that’s crazy! If you die you have to start over? SOunds like a fun challange! I promptly bought all of them I could find. I really like the genre but my steam library is drowning in rougelikes and rougelites. I refrained from getting any this year as I haven’t actually beaten any of the ones I’ve gotten.
Single Player Only
I have a friend who I game with on a weekly basis, we play anything and everything together. So when my second Steam Summer Sale came around, we bought a ton of multiplayer games. We have tried out almost everything we bought for multiplayer over the next year, but a lot of the games either don’t have a single player mode or don’t have a very good single player mode. When we didn’t play them together anymore, they just sat in my forgotten.
This year we both realized that we had so other games to play through that we didn’t need anymore filling up our co-op backlog. We stuck to buying only single player games that we wanted to play and I think that’s saved us both some money.
Avoiding Early Access
I don’t really have anything against Early Access as long as a game is still being developed and is not just an excuse to make a quick buck on a half finished game. I’ve bought few early access titles in the past and they have all eventually made it to a full release. This year I decided to avoid them.
I wanted to spend my money on games that are complete this year.There are certainly a lot of early access titles I’m interested in like Project Zomboid, Software Inc, Factorio, and Secrets of Grindea but a lot of these weren’t even on sale. I want to play a complete game, I don’t want to pay to beta test a game and wait for updates to fix things and balance the game. I’ve realized that I have so many games to keep me occupied that I can wait for release before adding more to my library.
More Demos Please!
I love when I see the Demo download button on a steam games store page. Every game should have a demo, it has helped me decide whether to buy a game or not on numerous. Before buying any game I usually meticulously research it to make sure its what I want and the kind of game I want to play. Having a playable demo to get just a taste of the game is extremely helpful. There were a few games I had in my cart ready to go this year and then tried the demo and promptly removed them.
The Final Cut
At the beginning of the sale I put everything from my wishlist that I wanted into my cart, as the days went on I thought about which games I really wanted and which games I could go without. At the end I was left with 5 games.
Aquaria– Metrovania set underwater
The Cat Lady-Point and Click horror/thriler
The Secret of Monkey Island– I keep hearing about this game and I’ve been really into Point and Clicks lately
Monkey Island 2– I’m a sucker for bundles…
Siralim– It’s like Pokemon meets Dragon Warrior and it’s suprisingly addicting
Space Pirates Aliens Zombies– I’ve been wanting a top down space game for months and this one looked pretty
Hello, hi, and welcome to my very first post here at I’m Not Squishy! This blog will chronicle my adventures through my backlog and serve as a platform to write about my unyielding love for MMOs,RPGs, and video games of every flavor.
Now I know what your thinking, having a backlog of video games is probably the biggest first world problem right next to the Starbucks running out of whip cream. Why does it matter if these games go unfinished? Well the truth is it doesn’t, but it sounds like a whole lot of fun trying to beat as many as I can!
Meet the Backlog:
It’s always best to know what your up against when you start a project. I took the time to actually look through my Bin O’ Games and see just how many games I have left to complete. The break down looks something like this:
PlayStation 4: 9 unfinished games*
*Digital Download: Tom Clancy’s The Division
PlayStation 3: 32 unfinished games*
*Digital Downloads: Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3, Ni No Kuni Wrath of the White Witch
3DS/DS: 7 unfinished Games*
* Digital Download: Little Battlers Experience
Things didn’t seem so bad until I opened up my Steam Library. When I did….oh god, the horror! I’ve only had steam for 2 years and only discovered Humble Bundle last year. This has resulted in a whopping 79 unfinished games, many of which I never even started up. According to http://www.howlongtobeatsteam.com, it would take about a month of playing 24/7 to beat the main story in all of my games.
I’ve decided to tackle my Steam Library and my PS4 collection first because I can take pretty screenshots easily. (Full disclosure, my laptop is 4 years old and runs an Intel 4000 integrated graphics chip so the screen shots from steam may not be so pretty.) For Steam I’m going to start with the games that take the least time to beat and work my way up. For PS4, PS3, and 3DS I’m going to play whatever I’m in the mood for.
I’m going to consider the game beaten once the credits role and/or the last level is beaten, the main story is over, the goal is obtained at which point there names will be immortalized on the Games Beaten page. Actually after sitting down and going through the collection I have found some games to add to the games beaten page.
Many Welps 