A Green Mushroom

Oxenfree is an interesting adventure game with cool ideas that doesn't quite stick the landing. You control a teenager in a group of teenagers who sneak onto an island after it closes for the night to drink and hang out.  Slowly you start to run into creepy but interesting things happening and the plot expands out from there.  It's not a horror game, but it does have some creepy atmospheric stuff going on. Initially I liked it.  But... then some of the execution started to bug me.  Everything is voice acted but it's really easy to accidentally trigger another whole section of dialogue and miss out on the topic that you were in the middle of.  The game never really explains when you're interrupting or when you're just contributing and it ends up making for frustrating and choppy dialogue. I got over that and got an hour or two into the game but then it hits a point where it opens up and slows way down.  Now instead of it being obvious where to go t...

This is where the series starts and where my sampling of the series begins.  The Legend of Zelda is a game I played and loved as a kid.  I've beaten it many time, but none of them recently.  But hey, when you're a kid and don't have many games on hand you beat all the ones you own multiple times.  A few years ago, my brother and I took a day on Virtual Console to see how far we could actually get in the game.  We made it through five-ish dungeons before giving up.  This game is really hard. I can't believe how much I must have mastered it as a kid to be able to beat it on more than one occasion.  Sitting down and playing it yesterday was an exercise in frustration.  Yes, the core of the series we love is here... but it's still gameplay from the 80s.  It's difficult to make progress and even using the save states on Virtual Console it's still full of frustratingly tough section. I played through the first few dungeons last night just...

Rise of the Tomb Raider is the latest Gamefly game I sampled and I actually liked parts of it a lot.  I definitely enjoyed it more than the first game in this reboot of the series. The first few hours of the game are full of action and adventure interlaced with story.  I loved the time I was spending with it.  But after the first couple hours I hit the main chunk of the game and suddenly they reintroduced the gathering/crafting/survival mechanics from the first game in the series... and then I lost all the steam I had built up for it. The gathering in particular changed the way I played the game.  Now, instead of just pushing forward and enjoying the ride I had to constantly stop and search every corner.  I had to wait for my special survival vision to recharge and then activate it as often as I could so I didn't miss anything critical to advancing my character and gear. I hate that advancement was suddenly tied to gathering in such a tight way.  ...

I was sick the other weekend and I got a chance to just sit down and consume some media I've been meaning to get to.  I finished up the latest episodes for two Telltale games.  Both Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands.  I also caught up on the two Star Wars comics series that I've been keeping up with.  That would be the Leia and Vader series. I thought about writing posts for each of these things, but I realized I'm just generally having fun with them.  I don't actually have any new insights or interesting thoughts about them.  They're all still good and I'm going to keep up with them until they're complete. Do you have anything that you keep up with as it releases?  Anything that you just enjoy and plan on continuing to enjoy as more of it becomes available?  I know TV shows are this way, but it's interesting to see some video games moving to this format too.