First Impressions: BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Super Meat Boy, Team Fortress 2 & Penny Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3

Now there's a mouthful.

I've been playing a lot of games recently since I picked up a controller for PC gaming.  Oddly enough it's an Xbox 360 controller.  Odd because it's me and I don't particularly like Xbox (I personally see it as the Sega of the Console Wars Era), but their naturally USB controller and it's a Microsoft product running on a Microsoft operating system, so I thought, why not.  Anyway, onto the games.

I remember first hearing about this game from Dr. Potts when he did one of those "30 Days of Gaming" posts on facebook, of which I did one as well.  Then I saw it in one of the Humble Indie Bundles, again which Dr. Potts got for me, which I previously mentioned was how/why I got a Steam account.  Anyway, my thoughts on BIT.TRIP RUNNER.  I really like it!

I can't state that enough.  It's an amazing combination of side scrolling, rail-platformer, rhythmesque-type game.  Basically you play as Commander Video who hearkens back to a style reminiscent of Atari 2600 characters.  You run, jump, spring board, slide and kick to the sounds of 16-bit-ish style music that progresses and develops as the level progresses and as you collect speed boosts.  It's a really fun and incredibly frustrating game.  In one sitting, it took me an hour to complete a level, albeit the longest level in the game.  Then, when I showed Conklederp how hard the level was, I beat it in less than 10 minutes.  There's just something about how the music develops over the course of a level that is a real incentive to not "die" and be thrown back to the beginning of the level.  Anyway, ti's awesome.

Currrent Time Invested:  5 Hours

Super Meat Boy is another game that I received from Dr. Potts in the Humble Indie Bundle.  Again, SMB is a platformer with a penchant for completing levels as quickly as possible.  There's even a timer that counts to a hundredth-of-a-second.  That's how frantic/fast this game can be.

For the most part, I thought I was doing alright, until I watched one of the trailers and that got me a little discouraged.  I don't think I'm that "agile" and "quick" for this type of a platformer, but that's not going to keep me from playing a couple of levels every so often.  So, due to my lack to pretty-word-forming, I just recommend watching one of the teaser trailers which gives a great example of how the game plays.

In game, I've made it through only 19 seconds of this trailer.  And the first 4 seconds aren't even game play.

I do really like that whenever you pass a level, the game shows you a compilation of all your failed attempts to pass that level along with your successful attempt, all stacked up on each other.  Depending on the difficulty of the level, it could end up looking like a mass suicide cult on acid.  To sum up:  this is a really fun/infuriating game, although I don't know if I'll be "able" to finish (not "complete") it.

Current Time Invested:  70 Minutes

If you haven't already figured out, I'm pretty late when it comes to specific games, especially PC gaming.  Again exemplified by the fact that this game is 5 years old and I'm just starting to play it now; or well, late last week.  Early last week, I couldn't even tell you anything about the game except that it was an FPS, there was a Tank with a huge gun, and a Medic that always seems to be behind him.  In it's most basic form though, Team Fortress 2 is an FPS with character classes.  I think that's a really awesome concept that I haven't seen in FPS games before.  There's no campaign mode, from what I can tell anyway, only multiplayer madness, which I was a little surprised about and something I'll have to get used to.

So since this game is 5 years old, there's no sense in me going into specifics about the game that pretty much everyone seems to already know about.  Everyone except this guy!  Which is cool.  I don't feel shamed.  It's a fun game that I'll continue to play, as long as people aren't bigotty-ass-hats when it comes to shit talking.  Shit talking is fine, just don't be an annoying 10 year old bigotty-ass-hat about it.  That's all I'm asking for, just a friendly game where we can try and kill each other like civilized people.

Current Time Invested:  2 Hours

So out of the four games that I've been dipping my toes into, with Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, I've sort of dunked my entire body in and only occasionally come up for air.  As of the writing of this, I've put in 8 hours of game play and I feel like I might be halfway through.  Maybe.  I'm not sure.

Precipice 3 continues with similar themes and styles of game play that were present in the first two installments, although there seems to be a serious lack of Fruit Fuckers in this game, but I think that was explained in the end of Precipice 2.  Either way, my reasoning for feeling that I'm at least half-way through the game is that since there are a pre-set number of enemy encounters (enemies are visible on screen), which means there's a pre-set amount of gold/gil/$ available and I just bought the highest level weapons for my party.  Maybe I'm farther along than I thought?  I hope not, because I really like this game, but since it's made by Zyboyd games (the same people who did Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII).

There's a lot of references to previous RPGs of the NES genre such as Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and there's a music cue that I swear sounds like the "Overworld" theme from Ultima III: Exodus, but maybe that's just me.

Current Time Invested:  8 Hours

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Parts of My Brain Fighting for Control

Also, this game comes out (again) in 11 days.
It will consume your life (again).