Gaming Report: Feb and Beyond!

This month, in terms of videogames, has mostly been about completing Red Dead Redemption. It's been pretty epic and I'm feeling a bit lost now that it's over - but it had to be done. My mounting backlog is starting to feel a bit oppressive. Steam is particularly to blame for me buying unnecessary games. This month I picked up Braid, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Freedom Force and its sequel, and Cthulhu Saves The World with Breath of Death IV. Along with this I reclaimed some old PC games which belonged to my brother when he was younger. I'm not sure whether they will all work on a Windows 7 laptop (I'm not sure I want to play them all to be honest - god knows why he bought Salt Lake Winter Olympics 2002) but there are some real classics here.

I booted up Deus Ex and that seems to work great - I've got right back into capping fools with the dart gun. The best of these games are probably: Homeworld: Cataclysm, SWAT3, Theme Hospital (I don't think this'll work), GTA3, Outcast and Star Trek: Elite Force. I'm quietly excited about  replaying Elite Force. This was a massive game for me as a kid. I was, to say the least, a little obsessed with Voyager and the promise of shooting Borg while cracking wise with Tom Paris was like a dream come true (in FPS form). If I remember rightly the game was actually pretty good - which is surprising for a Star Trek game. Working solely from memory I think there was a good variety of weapons and enemy types - and I think a half decent story. It was developed by Raven Software too which is promising. Anyway I'm hoping it'll install and run fine, then I'll report back on how it goes.

With the release of Mass Effect 3 coming up pretty soon I thought I'd play through the first two games in an attempt to hype myself up for the third game. I've said this a thousand times to my increasingly beleaguered friends, but I've never really connected to the ME series. This always seemed incongruous to my general interested - Sci-fi, Rpg, Bioware, etc.- so I'm determined to recap on the series and see whether I enjoy it more another time around. This is perhaps also an attempt to regain my grip on current game releases. Last year I found that I inextricably missed some great games when they were first released. Skyrim slipped past and I still haven't bought the game or even played a single hour of the 'Game of last year'. Similarly Portal 2 pasted without me picking it up, and only with coming of January did I finally buy and play the game (needless to say it was fantastic). Hopefully by forcing myself to enjoy Mass Effect I will be able to jump on Mass Effect 3 and subsequently feel more contemporary. Unfortunately I also realised that Freespace 1&2 are up on gog.com meaning that my I'm back to the old. As always too many games, too little spare time (too heavier a conscience).  

Freespace 2