What I'm playing

Still working off the fall gaming orgy, here's what I'm playing:

• Fable 3. Sitting down to play this intensively, but 12 hours in I'm finding it pretty tedious. There's not enough choice in the main line and the side activities are boring. It almost feels like the last gasp of story-driven classic RPGs. But it's beautifully done and more fun than not, so I'll stick with it. I just reached the big inflection point in the game where you become the king and have to make hard choices for the health of your kingdom, it's interesting.
• Super Meat Boy. What a fantastic little platform game. Totally worth playing. The key innovation is that each level is very hard but also very short (5-20 seconds), with no penalty or delay for dying and trying again.
• Bit.Trip Beat. Pong meets Rez. Very simple gameplay but the music is great. It's also too hard on the PC. The iPhone version lets you resume midway through a level, but on the PC you have to start at the very beginning each time.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Only played a little bit of multiplayer so far, but boy is that interesting! It's much like deathmatch in an FPS only subtlety and stealth are rewarded instead of aiming skills. Interesting game.
• Lego Harry Potter. My partner and I played this together, a first for us, and had a great time. We finished the main story but I hope we go back to start getting all the extra collectibles.
• World of Keflings. I really liked Kingdom for Keflings, it's a weird game, sort of an RTS but without any conflict. Just building. The sequel seems to have more story and character, which frankly I could do without, but a quick look suggests they kept the parts of the first game I liked.
• Minecraft. I'm mostly bored with it, not to mention fed up with the hideous bugs, but it still holds my interest. My current single player project is building a mob tower: a tall dark building that spawns monsters, then kills them with a lava knife and collects drops via water currents.

 

Here's what's on deck:

• Civilization V. The big patch finally came out and apparently the game is more balanced and challenging. Time to go back to it.
• Fallout 3: New Vegas. Again, a big patch, this one fixing some of the horrible game-breaking bugs they launched with.
• Glitch. Not a traditional game by any stretch, a collaborative social game from the team that created Flickr out of their initial project, Game Neverending. Still in closed beta.
• Dead Space, Gratuitous Space Battles, Psychonauts, Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, Plants vs. Zombies, Hitman: Blood Money. These are all games I bought during Steam sales and haven't played.

 

And what's not on my list:

• Any sort of MMO. Warcraft Cataclysm has zero appeal for me. I hear they've made class mechanics more interesting with a bias towards priority queues, so the gameplay is more fun, but it's way too much of the same addictive game I stopped playing. And no other MMO out there now looks interesting to me. Rift is the new darling but I predict it won't last long.
• Any sort of Facebook game.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops. I played a lot of this in the fall, but I'm bored with it now.
• Starcraft 2. I never finished the single player game, and I never met my goal of getting competent and multiplayer. I've got such a love/hate relationship with RTS games as it is and SC2 emphasizes all the stuff I hate.

Comments

[Andrew]

When you get done with Lego Harry Potter, the Lego Indiana Jones games are also great.

[Ryan]

+1 to lego indy. and it's so fun to hear that coop with a non-gamer was so successful!

otherwise, I agree on fable 3, brotherhood multiplayer (check out gamasutra's recent interview with chris hecker on spy party) cod blops, and facebook games. I'm surprised to hear about cataclysm and fallout new vegas. and as an introvert, I'm jealous about glitch, since I know I won't play it. :p

the two on my radar right now are ilomilo, which is charming and fun so far, and ghost trick, which may be too much puzzle and too little exploration for me, but still looks fascinating.

[Nelson]

I tried Lego Indy #1 with my partner; we were having trouble with Harry Potter and I thought the simpler game might work for him. It didn't. He didn't connect with the story, didn't like all the jumping, and we both thought the environments seemed too simple compared to the Harry Potter games. Maybe I should try Lego Indy #2, or wait a few months for the new Lego Star Wars (Clone Wars). Meantime we're going to try World of Keflings next.

Ryan, I'm following on your heels in Fable 3. You have more STDs than me but I own more real estate :-) I may have just gotten screwed by save game states, though, we'll see.

[Ryan]

"You have more STDs than me but I own more real estate :-)"

win. just...win.

the only thing that could make it better would be a common unit of measure so we could compare them directly, on a pure numbers basis.