NGNY: Progress Report and the trouble with Resident Evil

While I got off to a strong start in January, in February various other projects got in the way of my playing video games. As such, in March I decided to set aside one day a week to play, and even stream if possible.  Here are just a few I managed to get to:

Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy - I played this one for a bit to discover it's yet another Sony made 3D platformer without much charm.  This one had a bit more jumping puzzles than the Ratchet & Clank game did, which meant I got frustrated a lot.  The game also kept throwing tasks at me, but had no good way to look through them once assigned to get a feel for where I needed to go to accomplish some of them.  Overall, just a little too mediocre of a game for me to continue with.  This was another free PS Plus game, so I don't feel bad crossing it off the list so quickly.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team - I've been continuing with the game, usually playing for about an hour before bedtime.  I've had a little trouble with some of the  boss fights, but I'm enjoying it.  I'm not great at the real time response moves, and that's generally what gives me the biggest challenge.  Probably the most exciting part so far was when I became giant Luigi.  It's got such a different feel from the rest of what happens in the game that it felt really fun.

Nights into Dreams... - This game thoroughly confused me.  Apparently you just sort of free float around levels and collect things? Maybe also kill enemies somehow?  It just didn't really make any sense and there was no real tutorial and I have so many other games to get through.  Another freebie, another deletion.

Resident Evil 3 - I had purchased 1-4 of this series at deep discounts a while back, interested in checking out the series after I had loved Silent Hill so much.  I played the first game and found myself really disappointed.  It has not aged well at all, and isn't so much about scares as it is Inventory Management: The Game.    In the meantime Jak had played through the second game and complained about similar problems, so I went ahead and jumped forward to 3.  It started out as a vast improvement over the first game, as the inventory is much more reasonable to manage and you get to explore the entire city rather than just one building for most of the game.  I really enjoyed the first four hours or so that I played.  I then decided to stream it and that stream started out by me dying a lot.  When I got past that part, I ended up in the clock tower which looks an awful lot like the mansion from the first game.  I'm not sure I really want to continue with this one.

This series continues to just be about making sure you have enough ammo and first aid to survive to the next storage room.  Don't get me wrong, Silent Hill had similar concerns, but it was much more reasonable in doling them out to you and not limiting you to inventory slots. Here you can die simply because each mixed herb takes up one inventory slot, and maybe you've got plenty back in storage but you can only carry one or two along with the other items you need to get things done.  Silent Hill let you explore a whole town, limiting your access by either collapsed roadways or broken locks; here you often get trapped in one building and have to constantly backtrack when you find a new key that lets you open a few more rooms.  Perhaps it's not fair to be harsh on a series that was around before the other one that could learn from its mistakes, but the fact is that moving backwards in this case was a very bad idea.  I also think a part of the problem is that the only scares you get are jump scares.  The music and images don't go very far in scaring you at all.

Obviously, all this applies to only the first three main games in the series.  I think I'm going to go ahead and jump ahead to 4, which I know made some dramatic changes in terms of the controls at least.  It's also not set in Raccoon City at all, which sounds like a plus to me.  We'll see if the changes are something I like or not.

Also, I'm sticking to my promise of not buying any new games, but I don't see any harm in downloading free games.  As such I've downloaded Brothers, Fallout 1 , 2, & Tactics, and Dungeon Keeper.