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daftman's Blog
- Page 22
On 10/29/2017 at 05:45 PM,
by daftman
Every year I try to play a scary game in October for Halloween. I don't always make it but I've been playing F.E.A.R. the last two nights. When the opening screens were splashing through before the title screen, I saw that the game has a 2006 copyright. I can't believe it's that old! The 360 had been out only a year and the PS3 was just launching and the game, well, looks like it came from that era. It looks like a really nice PS2 game that got up rezzed for the new consoles. Graphics have come a long way in 11 years! Plus it's mired in the typical grays, browns, and rust of the time. While the shooting is perfectly adequate, it's nothing special. But let me tell you, the sound design hasn't aged a bit. I'm playing with headphones and the use of ambient sounds and creepy music cues really do wonders for creating the atmosphere. So far it hasn't been a very scary game—though there have been a couple of really good jump scares—but it has been quite unsettling. I'm looking forward to see how the story plays out.
On 09/11/2017 at 08:56 AM,
by daftman
I'm not able to play as many iOS games as I used to but every now and then something pulls me in. Missile Cards, at first, did not. It is basically a turned-based card-based take on Missile Command. There is a deck of cards and four open card spots. A new card flips over every turn and moves down the conveyor towards being reshuffled back into the deck or going into play. Attack cards (guns, missiles, lasers, etc.) do the former if you don't pull them into your available arsenal (you have four slots of your own) and hazard cards (mostly meteors and missiles) do the latter. When a hazard enters play, it enters the top of the play area. At the bottom of the screen is your base and sub-bases. You job is to use your attack cards to keep your base from being obliterated. The weapons and hazards have numeric values and you have to meet or exceed the hazard with your weapon to destroy it, though you can whittle a hazard down with multiple weapons if necessary. (There are a few more wrinkles but that's the gist.)
On 08/05/2017 at 11:45 PM,
by daftman
July was a super slow month, not even warranting my usual recap breakdowns! For the first time in a several years, I did not finish any games over the course of the month 
I was busy! I also did not buy any games (that will certainly be changing in August), so I'd have almost nothing to recap if not for PS+. Even with that I only got four of the six games. Darkstalkers: Resurrection (PS3) is the most interesting of the bunch to me. There was also the Tell Tale Game of Thrones (PS4) game as well as a couple I'd never heard of, Element4l (Vita) and Don't Die, Mr. Robot! (PS4/Vita).
On 07/17/2017 at 03:30 PM,
by daftman
Lovecraft is a pretty big name in internet culture, and "Lovecraftian" is a popular descriptor to throw around. Cosmic horror! But while I have read some Lovecraft—most notably the fantastic "At the Mountains of Madness"—most of his work has remained a mystery to me. But this year I finally broke out the massive Lovecraft book I've had for a while and am slowly working my way through it. 110 pages and 19 stories so far. Since it lists the stories chronologically, I'm still in his earlier works. He obviously improves as he goes because if what I have read so far was the totality of his output, Lovecraft would merely be an interesting footnote in horror history. There have been some good stories, specifically those that deal with deteriorating sanity of the narrator—I especially liked "Polaris" where a man stares up at the North Star both awake and in his dream and anguishes over which life is the real one—but mostly the stories have been overly vague in their supernatural elements and predictable in their endings. Sometimes an unexplained mystery can be compelling, as in "The Temple" or the fantastic final line of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but stories like "The Terrible Old Man" I finished and was like...so? Too many of these early stories are like that, containing the germ of something interesting but failing to flesh it. But on the whole I have enjoyed my time with Lovecraft and, looking to the stories ahead, I'm excited to finally get to the famous stories I have yet to read.
On 07/09/2017 at 12:36 AM,
by daftman
The animated Castlevania series on Netflix debuted Friday and my wife and I watched through it. Let me start by saying my expectations were pretty low. I mean, when was the last time you saw something based on a video game that turned out well? And it was by the studio that brought us Adventure Time...so this seemed kind of out of their wheelhouse. But the one thing that gave me some hope was that it was written by Warren Ellis. He would know what he's doing, right? Well I'm glad to say that I was impressed with the show all around.
