Token Female Gamer

When I find myself desperate for excuses to do anything but write a review, it’s usually because the subject matter ended up being rather disappointing. Borderlands 2 sadly falls into this category, as I have been struggling for weeks to come up with something praise worthy to write.

But I can’t let that stop me anymore, productivity must continue!! (Never give up, never surrender!!) With my house clean, laundry finished, caffeine and snacks at the ready, I am all out of excuses; its time to sit down and get this review done. Wait, what am I writing about again? Oh right Borderlands 2…hmm is that a spot over there that I missed dusting? Clearly my bout of Borderlands 2 induced ADD is persistent.

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Sometimes being evil is just plain fun, especially if it’s packaged with humor and limited to mild evil intent. To date my favorite excuse to be (mildly) dastardly has been the game Overlord.

Just like the title suggests, the main playable figure is an evil overlord who commands a hard of goblins to do his bidding. Having lots of sacrificial minions to do all the fighting and heavy lifting is of course one of the big reasons I love this game.

Even though minions get used up and replaced like tissue paper, the burning and pillaging of the nearby town is optional. Which means its possible to be a slightly benevolent evil overlord. Though the humorous goblin sidekick will frown upon showing too much compassion.

Overlord is an incredibly fun game that makes being evil funny and quite entertaining, while not requiring true depravity. This also means that when I did have a few minor slip ups, like accidentally burning a farm to the ground, I didn’t feel too badly about it.

My two runners up are ‘Dungeon Keeper’ and ‘Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as a Darklord’. Both are tower defense type games that let you play as the evil dungeon master. Build up your dungeon with traps and minions to defend against intruding heroes.

http://www.facebook.com/FeliciaDay

This Facebook Felicia Day post completely exemplifies how I have been feeling about games of late. Is there some sort of new holiday that I didn’t get the memo for, because games are coming out like its midwinter.

Borderlands 2 just released; I’m still deeply immersed in Skyrim (yes I know I’m just behind on that one); Guild Wars 2 is like a month old; Torchlight 2 is out next week, as is WoW: Mists of Pandaria; and the Marvel Heroes beta is going live any day now.

Its clear some of these will have to be relegated to the ‘will play in the future when I have time’ pile, which seems to just be growing and growing and growing. ~sigh~

Though I sound a bit whiny, I do think this is a wonderful conundrum to have, I guess I just wish I didn’t need so much sleep. Maybe no sleep at all. That would be a solid eight hours of gaming a day and awesome!

Only one? Nawwwwww. Sorry for poor screenshot quality. I have no screen capture stuff and I just broke my camera, so iPhone shots will have to suffice. =/

Skyrim

Super Mario 3D Land (Playing Luigi in the secret levels) and Professor Layton and the Last Specter.

Mass Effect 3 Mulitplayer. Super fun when I can find the time to play it. =D

Portal 2 is the much-anticipated sequel to the vaunted Portal, a small add on game, which hit the big time, due to its awesome power of humor and cleverness.

A rather tough act to follow, but Portal 2 manages quite well. Filled with the trademark dark humor and teleportation puzzles, but bundled in a much larger package. Portal 2 is a gigantic game, boasting a multi chapter single player story mode and a completely separate cooperative multiplayer mode.

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Remember that small game Portal? Well one of the creators (Kim Swift) of said small game left Valve to go make a brand new game and its called Quantum Conundrum.

It was also finally released yesterday and I would be off playing it right now, only we are away from home going to a friends wedding. (Yes I brought my lap top thinking I might just get some writing in, but I was absolutely wrong. Bleh. Which just means I was having too much fun to write which is awesome.)

But back to Quantum Conundrum; a game I haven’t actually played yet, but really want to. Granted I dont make a habit out of chatting up an untested game, but this is one I have been following and looking forward to for quite a while. I’m always interested in supporting women game designers; that it’s also a puzzle game ala Portal just makes it more incredible.

The bad news, yes there is some, beyond me not being home to enjoy it as soon as possible, is that its only been released on Steam so far. Xbox and PS3 will have to wait a bit longer.

Guess I’m getting it on Steam. This will be my first Steam purchase. Yes Valve you win again. /sigh

Also Penny Arcade had this to say about Quantum Conundrum. =P

One of my main focuses for reviews is keeping track of how long I play something. Personally I think this is tantamount to reviewing games. Playing WoW for 2 hours verses playing it for a hundred is a vastly different experience.

Which is why I’m surprised it took me to long to sign up for one of these tracking services. I finally have a Raptr account. I’m not sure if this is the best option, but I’m sticking with it for now. (Happy to hear about other sites that might be better!)

So I am a Raptr member as of May 8th. Not very long. When I signed in it logged all the games I played on the PS3, Xbox 360 and the PC, but it couldn’t track my time. Which means that according to the average Raptr member I’m a bit wimpy. Oh well. But it is tracking nicely now. Oh how I wish I had signed up for this earlier. I would love to see how much time I really spent on Portal 2.

Anyway here is my official Raptr thingy. (Sooo official!)

Yup, I finally got a gold membership. I feel like I’m slowly being sucked into a Microsoft pit of doom. First a new Xbox, now a gold membership and downloading games!

What prompted this conversion to the dark side? Friends.

Last night, I sat down to finally finish portal 2, when I noticed that I had a friend online. Never having seen a friend online before, I had to send a message (oh the novelty). Big mistake. Turns out other friends were online and Dungeon Defenders was on the docket and how could I not go play with them? Clearly all it takes for me to overcome my dislike of throwing money at Microsoft is pier pressure. Ten minutes later, I’m chatting with my buddies over a game of Dungeon Defenders.

Turns out the Dark Side is where all the fun is. Though I do feel a little dirty.

Santa brought me a new Xbox 360, which should be good right? It is, in that I can finally finish Portal 2. But I’m still bummed that our old Xbox which had so little actual run time, crapped out. I don’t relish giving more money to a company that made such a crappy product.

While the new Xbox is actually really great (pains me to say). It is far smaller, much cuter, and so unexpectedly quiet. But it also didn’t have any of my saved games on it. Get this, to get my saved games off of my old Xbox I would have had to purchase a special wire to facilitate the transfer. More money to Microsoft? Hell No! Thankfully a friend of ours offered to download all the hard drive content to a USB drive. So now I really can finish Portal 2.

Santa’s gift, though mostly necessary, wasn’t really what I wanted. Thankfully my family came through with these awesome Star Wars lunch boxes. I might just have to find some excuse to go back to school. Picnic maybe?

To go along with the lunch boxes, were Marvel and Star Wars cookie cutters. My holiday baking will obviously have to continue!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.

<3 TFG

So I might have been a bit hasty in declaring all my Xbox problems solved. It turns out that the warranty is expired, which means it costs $99 to send it in to have fixed. Plus they dont guarantee anything. Red ring of death happens a month later, gotta pay another $99.

Our Xbox is like first generation 360. It’s huge, it’s loud, it’s old. Not really worth fixing.

But then the husband came back with this trick. (The multitap guys told me about it too, but I ignored them so husband gets full credit.) Wrap the whole console in towels to overheat it, thus rebooting the chip (or something like that anyway.) The video is a bit long and has strange filler, but I can tell you that it works. =)

Xbox is back to functioning, for a while anyway. Enough for me to at least get my saved game off the hard drive. But this means we will still eventually have to buy a new one. Now I just need to figure out what to get.