Leveling Down

It’s somewhat silly, but I mentioned to my wife the other day that I think my general mood seems dependent on what game I’m actually playing at the time. If the game is awesome, I’m in a great mood, but if it’s kind of boring, I’m “blah.”

It hasn’t been helping lately that I’ve been playing a string of mediocre games, like Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, Prince of Persia, and now Infinite Undiscovery. I guess coming off of better games like Call of Duty: World at War, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, and Dead Space just makes it all the more difficult.

Infinite Undiscovery – Seemed like there was a lot of potential at first when I started playing the game, but it ultimately isn’t delivering as much as I’d like in the end.

Burnout Revenge – Decided to pop this in to give myself a break from the mundaneness of Infinite Undiscovery. I stopped playing it before because the load times got too annoying, but now that I’m able to install it to the HD, it’s a bit faster. Actually reminds me of the Time Trials of Mirror’s Edge, as I’m collecting stars from doing well on courses but it’s also proving to be just as frustrating with restarts.

Shadowrun - Saw it on sale on the PC for $3 so I went ahead and bought it. It’s the first game that has cross platform 360/PC play, so I was actually able to log into Live when playing it on my new PC. For some reason, it feels more enjoyable to play it with the 360 controller though. Maybe that $3 wasn’t worth it as I’ll probably end up going back to the 360 version.

The combat system of Infinite Undiscovery is probably its best feature.

I’m little over ten hours into this Japanese RPG game and it’s actually not horrible. I remember how it got slammed in the reviews, but I figured that these days, most Japanese RPG games get poorly reviewed because they aren’t innovative enough or have enough marketing behind them. And I was kind of right about the reviews being overly harsh. Some of the things I heard were definitely negatives, but at the end of the day, it still had a certain appeal to me.

Infinite Undiscovery actually plays a little like a single player World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII. While I feel that Final Fantasy XII is much better game due to its game mechanics, its storyline was terrible and I wasn’t able to finish it because I just didn’t care enough about the characters to see how it concluded. Infinite Undiscovery doesn’t have the gameplay depth or length of Final Fantasy XII, but it makes up for it a bit by having a more interesting storyline and enjoyable characters.

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