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Monday Gaming Diary: Training the Kiddo to Shoot with Splatoon

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splatoon_ink_partyRight now, the eldest is on this tear to play Transformers: Fall of Cybertron with me, because 1) he discovered I have the game and 2) it’s the Cybertron game with Dinobots. I have said no for several reasons, one of which being that I don’t want to play an Xbox 360 game. Oh, did you think I wasn’t selfish with my kids? That’s cute. I know I’m a selfish bitch sometimes when it comes to playing with my kids.

The biggest reason why I have said no is that those Transformers games are not a joke. That second one had one level that was so hard, I couldn’t not beat it on Normal. If I’m having trouble with a game even on Easy, I know he will. In addition, I know he does not have a lick of training when it comes to playing a third-person shooter. He can’t handle the shooting sequences in the Skylanders games; always asks the husband or I to play them for him because he can’t get aiming down. I explained that he needs to work on playing shooters before I’ll play a Transformers game with him.

But what shooters are out there that are appropriate for a 7-year-old? I know I don’t own a single one.

I was ordered by my boss on Friday to go pick up Mad Max for review. I went to my local Best Buy to see if they actually had new games (my Best Buy is so hit or miss when it comes to new game releases), and while I perused the entire video game department, I came across Splatoon. The eldest has been begging me for weeks to play this game thanks to the commercials that constantly run on Cartoon Network. Here’s a paintball-ish game that has third-person shooter elements, no blood, no bad language, and my reviewer friends have just raved about. I picked it up as well.

Needless to say, Splatoon has been on our TV all weekend long. He’s still not great at the game, although the campaign is more difficult than you would imagine, but he’s willing to practice and work on his skills. He had a couple of friends over, and they played the versus game for hours. I have to admit, it was a blast watching him plan out his attacks and his friends do the same.  I can definitely see why this game has been so popular amongst my friends. I even have fun playing the versus mode and the campaign (because dammit, the campaign is TOUGH in some areas!).

So now I’m considering other Wii U games with can play together, such as Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros.
for the Wii U.

Monday Gaming Diary: Gonna pop that MMO cherry…

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mmorpgI’ve never played an MMO. Seriously, never. I have downloaded that Marvel Heroes game on Steam but never played it. I own Final Fantasy XIV, but I’ve never played it. Today, my part of the Destiny trade I made with Blake completed, so it’s possible for me to play and get into the Destiny craze. Emphasis on possible.

I haven’t decided if I will indeed play Destiny right now, but one thing is clear. My review schedule be damned, I WILL POP THAT MMO CHERRY THIS MONTH, DAMMIT.

I do have a couple of things I need to work on for, uh, work, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of picking one of these MMOs to play. I’ve been able to set aside one night a week for Halo for the last couple of weeks, so I know I can do this, even if it means it will take years for me to finish one of the games.

Like Robin, I BELIEVE in myself!

I’m mostly worried about having to play with others, as my time is about to get even more severely limited than it already is. I just have to remember my mantra of choosing what I do and do not have time for. I’m even more thrilled that my eldest isn’t doing any team sports this semester, as selfish as that makes me sound.

Speaking of that, I’m also happy I don’t have any guides to review until October-ish. I’m a terrible person, I admit; but this is why I have minions!

Monday Gaming Diary: I’ve realized why I haven’t played Destiny

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Destiny

Another week, another batch of gaming friends asking why I haven’t played Destiny yet. I constantly say I don’t have time, and in part, that is true. I haven’t had time to play a second of Final Fantasy XIV, and that’s one I really do want to play. I do find plenty of other games to play instead of Destiny, even though I can now say I legitimately don’t own the game. I gave my CE to Blake, and he’s going to trade it with his regular copy of the game. We haven’t completed the trade yet, and it’s not bothering me in the slightest.

I know I don’t want to play Destiny, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I realized exactly why that is.

It’s only partly because I have people hounding me to play it. True fact: if you want me to do/read/watch/play something, don’t bombard me about it every time we chat or even every other time. Pass along your recommendation and move on. Constant barrages of OMG YOU HAVE TO DO THIS will only put off my motivation to do whatever it is you want me to do. Most likely, I’ll never do it. I never said this is one of my better character traits, but it is what it is.

So my friends asking me about it is only partly to blame.

The big barrier is the fanboyism. My Twitter feed is constantly full of people tweeting OMG THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER! People proudly announcing how long it took them to grind to get enough light pants to reach level 30. I thought grinding was an annoying thing, not something to really celebrate. Then they talk about the emotes, Legendary gear or engrams or whatever, going on raids (but this is totes not an MMO!), blah blah blah and my eyes glaze over. I’m so glad you all love this game so much, but do I have to be inundated with frothing fanboy comments? This is just like Halo!

OH.

MY.

GOD.

OHMYGOD. I am having the exact same reaction I had to Halo. I refused to give Halo a chance, outright refused. Everyone I knew who was into Halo was a diehard fanboy and couldn’t talk about the game rationally. More OMG BEST GAME EVAR!!11!! crap whenever anything Halo-related was leaked. I never thought about touching Halo until I was assigned to review the Anniversary edition for Gaming Angels. I think my exact response was, “Well, fuck.” And I couldn’t get out of the assignment because I was the shooter gaming editor. You can’t not review Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary when you are the shooter game expert. Well, fuck. Fine. Give me the stupid game.

And as they say, the rest is history.

So there it is; I’m going against Destiny for the same reasons I went against Halo. Perhaps if I play Destiny, I’ll love it as much as Halo. My boss says that won’t happen. He swears I’ll quit after two hours because of the grinding and lack of story. That may be true, but what Chris said about the game also has me intrigued that I could like it.

Nothing I can do about it now, as I still don’t have a copy of the game and I still have other games I will play instead. But Extra Life is coming up. That could be a good time to play the game once and for all and be done with it one way or another.

Monday Gaming Diary: Game-Free Vacation

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This nightly view was ROUGH to put up with.

This nightly view was ROUGH to put up with.

I actually went on a bona fide vacation last week with my family. Every year we go to the beach with the entire clan, where we swim a lot, eat a lot of fish tacos, and drink too much wine. Last year, I hauled down my PlayStation 3 to get my Diablo III on and play some LEGO games with my eldest. This year I decided to leave all of the big consoles at home, and I only brought my Vita. I figured this would be prime time to play some Mortal Kombat IX either on the long drive down or at night when everyone else went to bed. I never turned on my Vita once, and I have no regrets.

Sadly, I didn’t really play any games over the week, and that does make me sad because I brought Uno and Exploding Kittens for everyone to play. The cards stayed in their boxes, because we all ended up crashing early every night. Who knew that sun, swimming, and chasing after kids all day would make you so tired?

However, I did get a lot of reading done. I finished Halo: Contact Harvest and I’m two-thirds of the way through Halo: The Cole Protocol.  As much as I am bummed that I didn’t play any card games, especially with my eldest, at least I got some me-time in with reading. And since they were Halo books, I suppose they were kind of like gaming.

No matter to me, it was kind of nice being completely unplugged from the gaming world. Of course, now that I’m back and therefore must return to the grind, all I can think of is everything I need to play and work on. As far as the massive RPGs that I need to play goes, I’m thinking of working on Final Fantasy XIV. If nothing else, even if I hate it, I can use it as a feature for work since it will be my first MMO. That’s me, always thinking how I can turn something fun into productivity!

Oh and by the way, I haven’t plugged this enough yet, but if you aren’t reading the Mortal Kombat X comics yet, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.

Monday Gaming Diary: Halo Woes

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Since Halo 5: Guardians is releasing soonish, a friend and I have a plan to play all four of the first Halo games together to get prepared for it. Neither of us have really played much of the Halo: Master Chief Collection, and this seems like the perfect time to burn through these games and get prepared for the upcoming awesomeness that is sure to hit our Xbox Ones. I haven’t touched the MCC since my review, where I mostly just played Halo 2 so I could check out the improvements and test the multiplayer functions. The multiplayer experience was absolutely abysmal and was the exact reason why I gave the collection the low score that I did.

343 Industries has released numerous patches to fix these server issues, especially those with matchmaking. Since the game has been out for nearly a year, we assumed like the fools we are that the issues have been mostly fixed. We just want to play co-op, so what’s the big deal?

We’ve tried to play together a couple of times, and each time has had the same result: we can’t join each other’s games.

Halo Co-Op Connection Error

This was us for over an hour before we gave up.

The first time we tried, Xbox Live was down so we didn’t think much of it. We tried again over the weekend, and we were both met with problems. I could connect to the Internet via the Xbox One, but the multiplayer connectivity was down. It insisted we had some ports blocked on our modem, blah blah blah. The only way I could fix it was to directly plug in the ethernet cable from the Xbox One into the modem. Goddamn the Xbox One is picky when it comes to Internet. I couldn’t set up a wireless connection when I first bought the thing because it insisted the signal was too weak despite sitting in the same room as the modem and router. Now it has to be plugged into the modem to work for multiplayer. Picky, picky, picky.

Once we both got our multiplayer connectivity happy, we still could not join each other’s games. It didn’t matter who hosted; we received the same error message that we weren’t able to connect. We looked at forums, and we weren’t alone in these issues. 343’s server issues are still not fixed, as ridiculous as that sounds.

We’re going to try again this week before we both go out of town, but we’re both rather frustrated. Our plan was to play the first two games together and then meet up with Blake and Chris to play the last two with four players. If we can’t get two of us to connect, how in the world can we get four?

It’s ridiculous, 343, to still have these kinds of issues with your collection. I hope to God you’re planning more Beta tests for Halo 5: Guardians, because you obviously need extensive strain tests on your servers.

At least that night wasn’t a total wash. I finished reading my current Halo book instead of playing Halo.

 

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