As with most weekends of late, there wasn’t a lot of gaming done. Two reasons for this: (1) I’m not particularly engaged with any specific game right now, and (2) it was an absolutely gorgeous weekend in NYC, and we were out and about for a great deal of it.
I’m still sorta playing Diablo III, though only in quick bursts – which is fine, actually, considering what the new endgame is like. It’s easy enough to go in to an Act, collect some bounties, enter a rift, and scoop up some nice loot and then hop out after 30 minutes or so.
Did I mention that I formally gave up on Mario Golf: World Tour? I won the first two tournaments but found the whole thing so empty and shallow that I just wanted it out of my house. There’s a country club filled with stuff you can’t actually do – including a fully built-out gym, and you’d think you’d be able to hang out in it and do some mini-game exercises to help train your character and improve your stats, but there’s literally nothing to do in there but talk to characters who offer dumb platitudes about hard work – but you still have to walk through it in order to get to the courses. It makes no sense whatsoever. And the golf itself is as uninspiring and rote as the rest of the game, which is depressing.
I am now starting to sink my teeth into my Vita, though. I played enough of my rented copy of God of War Collection to gather that it’s a rather uninspired and bare-boned port of the first two PS2 games, which were much better presented in an HD collection on the PS3.
But I’m also now a few save points into Final Fantasy X, which is, among other things, one of the main reasons why I finally bought the Vita when I did. Having never played the original game, I can’t really vouch for the Vita experience other than to say that it looks utterly fantastic, even on the Slim’s “inferior” screen (which also, sadly, highlights just how not fantastic the God of War Collection looks). I am very much looking forward to spending more time with it in the coming weeks, although how much time remains to be seen – Transistor comes out this week, as does Wolfenstein, and then Watch Dogs comes out next week.
And as long as I’m talking about the Vita, I might as well pimp my latest Gamemoir column, “Five Ideas to Help Save the Vita“, which is an admittedly hacky title but comes from a sincere place. I genuinely dislike those types of SEO-friendly headlines – which is probably why this blog is still pretty small – but in this case, it is what it is.
Shouts From The Couch 