What I Played Today: November 29

Alan Wake, Costume Quest, Dance Central

And…we’re back. I’ve been playing a few games today and yesterday, but they were the same games, so I’ll go ahead and count them both.

I received Alan Wake in the mail from Gamefly, and I’m liking it a lot. The story has a lot of mystery to it, and the atmosphere is great. I do find some of the shooter aspects annoying, mainly because shooters are somewhat obnoxious when they get long in the teeth, but I like the philosophy of breaking up each of the action shooter scenes by causing you to drop pretty much everything you’re carrying between areas. Of course it makes sense to hang on to the shotgun that you found in the woods, but whoops, some maniac started shooting at you and you had to leave it behind! So it’s pretty fun.

I purchased Costume Quest, and while it feels like a low-end RPG, the flavor of the game is definitely there. It has a nice low-key humor, the over world a typical suburban neighborhood, overflowing with Halloween trimmings, while whenever you get into battle, it’s high concept combat with giant robots and Lady Liberty versus giant goblins. It’s cute, and even though the battles are a little difficult after a bit, there’s just enough strategy there to make it interesting. Probably the most jarring part to me is how quickly the game starts rolling after you get past the suburbs, but I haven’t gotten much further beyond that, so there we go.

I completed Dance Central today, and yes, Eliot is a robot. A robot wearing a tie and a jaunty hat! So, I danced through about 15 songs worth of routines (it only took about 7-8 minutes, shorter than I expected, because it seemed like it would require doing bits from EVERY SONG, but not so), and then after that there’s a short cutscene that makes double-plus no sense, and then the traditional Harmonix ending, with the entire staff showing off how awesome they are, and then about six minutes of scrolling credits. I always like the pages of the staff showing off, mainly because it’s cool to see the people behind the game, and also because everyone who works there looks like they are having an awesome time. It also doesn’t hurt that a lot of them are fairly photogenic. So hurray for passing a game, now to try to get through all the medium level routines…and then the hard level…and then try a couple of no-flashcards…oh geez.