How much should I...?

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine bought a game by the name of Recettear. It is a shop sim/hack and slash game. I was interested by it but didn't get around to playing it. I now hate that friend...

I've been playing the game pretty much since I bought it. It is a very nice break from the stressful highly intensive games that have been coming out lately. It is a nice laid back game that involves more thinking than action a lot of the time.

The aim is to buy low (typically at 50%) and sell high (typically at 130%) and reach a target at the end of each week. This sounds easy enough but each character has a specific buy/sell limit and if you go above or below them they will leave without buying/selling anything.

The other aspect of the game is when you team up with an adventurer and venture into dungeons in order to get items/ingredients to sell. This is a nice break if you get bored of the shop scene. You must fight your way through a variety of randomly generated levels and a variety of enemies each with their own type of attacks. After you defeat the boss on each fifth level you are able to leave the dungeon and return to town.

Overall this is a lovely game to play when you just want to relax for a few hours. I will definitely be playing it for a good long while to come, in between any other titles that come up.

The second Shock of Bio

I feel Bioshock 2 is a major improvement upon the first for several reasons as you start off as a Big Daddy, including attached drill, meaning you are not defenceless from the beginning like you were in the first.

This gives you a feeling of security that makes you want to progress on further, whereas in the first I found because I had no way to defend myself I had no incentive to progress into "darker" or "out of the way" areas.

There is also a morality type system with several choices throughout the game that can affect the outcome of the game. Not in any major way but it does feel like your actions are affecting the universe around you.

The good thing about the game is that it is genuinely scary, there is a constant ominous feeling as you traverse the levels. In the original it was not done in the same way, to its detriment. Due to the fact you were pretty much defenceless, monsters would often pop out of hiding and this was supposed to be scary, whereas it was actually just annoying. It is a lot harder to scare someone in a game when they are wielding a shotgun and the fact that Bioshock 2 does this is rather impressive.

The other part of the game that I didn't try out all that much was the multi-player. I felt that the universe just did not quite suit for a multi-player game (unless it was co-op) and had no interest to play it all that much.

It could be Magic!

A few years ago I used to play a game called Magic The Gathering. It is a collectable trading card game.

There have been several iterations of a Magic The Gathering computer game and each one has been completely unable to live up to the original card game.

I recently played the latest offering, Magic The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 (a year ahead but we'll allow it). This time I do have to say it was not the worst game I've played in the series. There were a few extra campaign matches that added some nice functionality to the game instead of the standard 'one v one' setup.

In the standard campaign there were Challenges with a predefined condition, hand and deck and you had to figure out how to succeed in the situation, which as the name suggests was challenging.

Archenemy is a 'three v one' layout where the solo player has a special deck of "schemes" that affects the gameplay in a certain way and makes the entire battle rather difficult.

Revenge is pretty much exactly the same as the campaign except it is a lot harder. The opponents' decks contain all the cards you can unlock throughout the campaign and the AI is a lot smarter.

All in all this is the best MTG computer game yet in my opinion but that is not to say it lives up to the card game in any way. You still cannot create a deck from scratch or alter the layouts in any major way. It is very difficult to search your deck for cards as they move really quickly onscreen and there is not really a huge amount of variety in the opponents you face.

If you are looking for a good computer based MTG game this would be your best bet but if you want an amazing next gen game then I'm afraid this is not it.

Not so twirly after all...

Steam recently released a bunch of Free To Play games as well as making Team Fortress 2 Free To Play.

One of the games I tried out was Spiral Knights a very simple and fun hack and slash game.

The premise of the game is that you are a group of Knights called Spiral Knights and your spaceship has crash landed on an alien planet. It is up to you to venture into the depths of the planet and find minerals and materials in order to power your ship and be able to build supplies.

The game is very very simplistic, not to say that is not actually challenging. There are (as far as I have seen) no skills or talents to learn. Instead you have a large range of "levelled" equipment that you can buy or craft, all of which perform the same function but with slightly different special abilities (such as resistance to fire or higher damage). The equipment has a star rating between zero and five, zero being your starter gear and five being the recipes you gain at the lowest levels.

You have the choice of three weapons; a Sword, a Gun and a Bomb. There are also three pieces of armour you can use; Chest, Helmet and Shield. Using any combination of these three weapons you can have a variety of styles with which to fight your way through the levels.

The deeper you travel in the world the tougher the levels and enemies get. You will receive less beneficial drops and it will cost you more energy to travel downwards but the rewards, both monetary and recipe-wise, get better.

The simplicity of the game as well as it being completely Free To Play, immediately makes it worthwhile. I can see myself playing this game for a long time to come.