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The following post is part of a series of posts that are published every Wednesday to update readers on what I've been playing during the week (this also includes games on my "Pile of Shame"). The games to target are picked by Choicest Games contributors Choona, Luke and myself. As I'll be talking about my progress through these games, there may be spoilers ahead, especially for games containing a narrative. Consider yourself warned.
Battlefield 2042
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 57%
Numbers are still frustratingly low in this game and all the negativity hasn't helped. The game might not be as good as previous iterations of Battlefield but it can still be fun. I've managed to finally achieve Level 1 Mastery with Sundance meaning I unlocked the Hexmesh Triweave suit but I really want to get her Level 4 Mastery suit as it's not simply a different pattern for her default suit. In fact, it's the same with many of the operators, so I'm trying to do the same now with Falck, Paik and Mackay (the other Level 4 Mastery skins are meh)
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 100%
I've finally reached Level 50! So, now I can finally review this game. But what game to fill the void that used to be taken by Cook, Serve, Delicious!! 2!? Well, I decided I'd give an older game by Vertigo Gaming a go called The Oil Blue and we'll see how that goes.
Among Us
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 13%
Played this again and finally not receiving all the connection errors as I was previously. Such a relief! I managed to play a few games but still need to learn a bit more about these different classes. The game doesn't really seem to go into too much detail with respect to them so I may need to rely on wikis and such to fill in the blanks. Just like Town of Salem, vets of the game rely on their own vernacular with acronyms and nicknames. It helps to know the map though because if you don't this can make you seem quite suspicious. In fact, this is what happened to me in one game as I was almost singled out as an impostor by accident and it didn't help that I couldn't explain where I was when people accused me of being one!
VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 29%
Making more progress with this. It seems that the plot is starting to get a bit more interesting. The protagonist has just confronted a person from her past and she is apparently the bearer of bad news. It's still very melodramatic though. The game definitely focuses on love and relationships at its core so if you find that stuff rather boring, it's not going to appeal (but then again, this is what a majority of visual novels are like, right?).
Far Cry 4
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 3%
Since I finished Disco Elysium it was time to move on to another game that's been sitting on my Pile of Shame for a while now: Far Cry 4. One reason I decided to play it is because I still have the physical version of this game, meaning I actually have 3 DVDs in a DVD case with Far Cry 4 on it! Imagine installing a game in 2022 through the insertion of 3 DVDs! Hah.
I finished the prologue and my first impression of the game was that it felt very similar to Far Cry 3 although you can now climb ropes. You can also use bait to lure wild animals although I don't know how useful this is (since if you're trying to sneak past enemies, you've now got a very angry bear to get around instead). Seems like Kyrat is a country like Nepal and so far the story doesn't seem like anything terribly original. It looks like you need to choose which faction in the Golden Path to aid but I accidentally talked to one of them and now the other mission isn't available anymore. Oops. Or maybe it'll be available later? Who knows?
Anyway, I completed a couple more missions after that: one taught me how to use a bow and another was basically a tutorial on securing radio towers, as you do in just about every Ubisoft Open World Adventure (it removes the fog of war on your map and reveals new locations to visit). Along the way, you get to use the grappling hook which is something new, at least since the previous entry in the Far Cry series.
The Oil Blue
- Picked by Me
- Percentage Complete = 19%
So, since I completed Cook, Serve, Delicious!! 2! I wanted to see what an earlier game by Vertigo Gaming was like called The Oil Blue. It seems to be set in the future where you're going around the Pacific drilling for oil. You can start to see parallels between the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series and this game though as you drill oil by accomplishing a variety of mini-games each day and each of these mini-games are done at different stations, meaning you have to multi-task in order to achieve a good result (in this case, trying to produce enough oil to meet your quota).
This game is a bit rough around the edges though, when compared to more recent efforts by Vertigo Gaming. I can see how the developers refined the formula in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! games. While I can see parallels with the gameplay, the campaign is linear in this and it feels like you're more constrained about what to do. Yes, the mini-games are there, yes the different "stations" are there but each time you go to an island you're trying your best to efficiently produce as much oil before time runs out. The only thing similar to this in Cook, Serve, Delicious! are the medals you can earn by working at Cook for Hire restaurants, but they're very much optional in Cook, Serve, Delicious! and it only applies to one day, as opposed to The Oil Blue where you only see the results of your failure or success after several days. So, you definitely feel the full brunt of failure in this one as opposed to Cook, Serve, Delicious! where you only feel you've wasted a couple of minutes as opposed to an hour. It's like the difference between wasting a couple of hours in an RTS like Age of Empires as opposed to a few days worth of effort in a game like Civilization; also, you can sometimes quickly turn around your fortunes in an RTS whereas that's not usually the case in a 4X game, so you're sometimes just delaying the inevitable, and that's what this game feels like at times.
LINK: [ The Pile of Shame ]
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