A Green Mushroom

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.  ...

Laura Croft Go is a continuation of the Go series that Square Enix has started on mobile devices.  The previous Go game was based on Hitman. I didn't know what to expect going into Laura Croft Go, but I'm always willing to check out new games on my iPhone.  I do enough mobile gaming that I'm always trying to find the next game I can sink a bunch of time into. What I found was a puzzle game with a Laura Croft wrapping.  You move Laura around the level on a series of nodes and try to figure out the correct order of actions that will get you to the end of the level. If the level indicators on the main screen are accurate I played through about two thirds of the game.  In the end I stopped because of the difficultly curve.  It was honestly way too easy for too long, then there were a bunch of levels that had a good difficulty set, and then they started getting really hard.  I got stuck on a puzzle and the only way to progress was to pay $5 to unlock t...

Having finished up Arkham Knight I was browsing through my PS4 games looking for a new game to play while on my exercise bike and found Tomb Raider! I forgot I even bought the PS4 version.  I think I picked it up when it was on super sale the first week I had the system and then promptly forgot about it. I had played Tomb Raider on PS3 but I never beat it.  Hopefully this time I make it further through. It seems like a game where I can make some decent progression every day that I'm exercising on my bike, and it's not too story intensive.  That's important because I listen to podcasts and audio books while I exercise.  I get annoyed if I have to pause my podcast/audio book and turn up the TV to listen to story too often.  I'm actually using subtitles a lot these days for just that reason. Anyway, I hope I stick with it to the end this time.  There's some fun gameplay here.

I had a lunch meeting so I'm a little behind on E3 today, but I just blasted through the Microsoft conference and have a couple minutes to write before the EA conference starts. It was a solid showing, but not enough to get me to buy an Xbox One.  There are a lot of games that are interesting to me, but most of them are on both Xbox One and PC.  I much prefer to use my monster of a gaming PC instead of spending more money on hardware I don't need.  It seems like I won't miss out on too much. The Xbox One exclusives that did  interest me are Halo 5 and Thieves of the Sea.  Halo 5 is fairly self explanatory, but I really liked the ODST vibe it gave off.  That has always been my favorite Halo game.  Thieves of the Sea looks like a sweet stylized pirate MMO that I would play in a heartbeat if it were on PC, but for the moment it's staying as a Xbox One exclusive. They showcased a lot of games and hardware announcements, I'm still kinda decompressing....