Year of the Backlog

I'll be honest, "Completing" a game like this is a nebulous thing. I called it after getting to the end of the last of the basic levels. I spent quite a bit of time unlocking Pro courses, but after playing them a bit I came to the conclusion that OllieOllie, while fun when it came to overall play, suddenly became not very fun when it started to demand precision from its controls. A lot of this feel for me came from the use of an analog stick for the tricks. Preloading by holding a direction kind of makes it hard to do immediate jumps, and the input is juuuust  spongey enough that pulling off specific tricks in succession was incredibly difficult. And I say that as someone who was a high ranked Dan player in Street Fighter 4 using an Xbox 360 controller. There was also the persistent feeling that the timing the game wanted for "perfect" landings didn't quite match up with the skateboarder's position. Always had to hit just a hair before what made se...

It's that time again. I pushed the button on the game slot machine, and after a bunch of buzzing noises and clanging the name that spelled out on the spinning wheels was OlliOlli . I've always wanted to be a skatesman, so I am very excited to bounce around and grind and stuff. Like the cool kids do. I plan to stream the start of this one, as I did the previous. And if I don't hate myself while playing it, might even stream more! Expect something on President's day, as the best way to protest is skating, or something.

I just spent probably 7 hours today just playing Grimrock, so it might take me a second to decompress enough to actually get my thoughts about the whole thing down. ... Okay. I think I am ready. HOLY COW WHAT A DISAPPOINTING GAME Everything about Grimrock, from the start, was screaming YO, REMEMBER THOSE OLD 3D RPGS?! WE MADE ONE.  And, as much as all caps and bold would make you think that I wasn't into that message, my actual response in return was a resounding OH HELL YEAH. For the first two hours or so, I was in love with the game. Moving around as a single unit, clicking on everybody's individual skills to trigger them in real time as their cooldowns expired like I am playing some kind of weird RPG adaptation of Simon; heck I was even into the weird flavor of the enemies. Just look at this little guy. His claws say "hello", but his armor class says "HAHA YOU FOOL, HOW DARE YOU ATTEMPT TO PIERCE THE HIDE OF CRABULON THE MASTER" But ...