It’s time for another edition of The Sandbox, the weekly feature in which the GamerNode team members reveal what we’ve been playing over the past few days and what we’ve got on our plates for the weekend. This week we traveled back to Greenvale, met a cybernetic protagonist, and learned the intricacies of Nightwing’s staff, among other things.
Mike Deas
I’ve finished Mass Effect 3, and quickly plowed my way straight through Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. Sly was pretty great, especially since I played it in its entirety on my Vita. Gotta love console level gaming on the go. Next up on my backlog is either Bully, Dark Cloud, Darksiders II (which I was 8 hours into when it launched, but a game breaking glitch brought me back to square one), or Kingdoms of Amalur.
Greg Galiffa
After punch-slam-punch-suplexpunch-slam-punching my way through Guacamelee, I’ve been replaying DmC: Devil May Cry for some maxxx c-c-c-combo counts, bro. Even without watching all of the cut scenes (which are still well-acted and thoughtful from the bits I did stop to watch), the game is a lot shorter than I remember. Though playing on Son of Sparda lengthens some battles by, like, 10 or so retries. My strategy during those fights is similar to what I’d do at a dance party with Junior Senior playing on repeat: CAN’TCAN’TCAN’TCAN’T STOP MY FEET.
In other news, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon looks like the whackiest jawn out there: half-robot man using a bow to shoot electric arrows while giant reptilian monsters tear people apart in a world that Major Lazer may have designed. Legit craycray. I’ll be reviewing that in the next few weeks. So look out for it.
Eddie Inzauto
Welp, thanks to a PSN code that fell into my inbox this afternoon, a re-jammed thumb from a particularly hard volleyball serve last night, and a fascination for both creepy thrillers and the rural Pacific Northwest, it looks like my weekend will consist largely of playing through Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut.
This will be the second director’s cut type of game I’ve played recently, having romped laboriously around Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen for my latest casual chat video review. I grew weary of Dragon’s Dogma fairly quickly, but I do still feel another time or another player could have found the obsessive dedication to that world in him/herself to turn it into a respectfully enjoyable experience. I liked the game, but didn’t like actually playing all of it. The whole was less than the sum of its parts, maybe?
Aaaanyway, the original Deadly Premonition release has been criticized for similar reasons, but I feel like the travel between locales in this title will prove to be more investigatory than the tedium of the irreconcilable grind that so frequently halted me along Gransys’s roads and open meadows. And yes, I’ve played a bit of Deadly Premonition before, so no, I’m not basing my thoughts off of mere internet hearsay.
Homey don’t play dat.
Aled Morgan
Recently I’ve been trying to get into fighting games, namely Injustice: Gods Among Us. I’ve never really ‘done’ fighting games before, and I mean that in reference to the combo-canceling, pro-tournament playing part of the genre. Sure, there was a brief stint with Soul Calibur 2 (mainly because it had Link in, admittedly) and I’ve always loved Smash Bros, but the likes of Street Fighter and Tekken have always eluded me.
First contact with Injustice (apart from its demo, many weeks ago) was confusing, and was all about pointing and laughing at me for being a newb to the genre. Bounce Canceling?! That part of the tutorial took me a full fifteen minutes. Venturing online was just confirmation. Competent players strung 25 hit combos on top of me, while I was only able to feebly poke at them with Nightwing’s electric staff.
So I resolved to learn some of those combos, and become the player who juggles their helpless opposition like a cruel clown.
Move input notation, multi-hit move cancels, THE TIMING REQUIRED! It’s mad, but I’ve also been hopelessly engaged with it. I’ve got the basics down, and now I’m poking out into the metagame, wielding Nightwing’s staff with a little more grace now.
Mike Murphy
The season is over for my Buffalo Sabers in NHL 13. In 2013-2014 we made the playoffs as the six seed and upset the three-seed Montreal Canadians. Then we faced off against the number-one seeded New Jersey Devils. It was looking like we were going to pull another upset into the conference finals going up 2-0 in the series. Unfortunately, we lost a heart breaker in Game 3, nearly forcing overtime, and never recovered. However, given our top two centers were hurt from the beginning of the playoffs and we lost one of our top defensemen after Game 2, we had one hell of a run. It was a good season, and now comes the difficult task of resigning my stars, getting quality free agents, and staying under the salary cap before the 2014-2015 season begins.
Aside from that, I’ve been playing Sacred Citadel. Fun side-scrolling, beat-’em-up action game that’s very reminiscent of those from the arcade and NES/SNES/Genesis days (i.e. Golden Axe, X-Men Arcade, Ninja Turtles). I’ll be writing up a review for it soon for the ‘Node, so you’ll be able to catch my full thoughts on that in the coming days.
