Rage

"I expected more"

Rage is a game that seems more like engine proof-of-concept than actual game.  The gameplay is along the classic Doom style, you are blocked off to areas where creatures spawn and you shoot them.  The character animations initially look great as in they have very realistic texture mapping, but they animate like Chuck E Cheese animatronics.

After a fairly stunning opening cinematic, the story devolves into everything you would expect - nothing that you haven't seen before.  It's a bad offspring of Borderlands and Fallout - the world is very static, your interactions consist of picking up ammo or touching the door buttons.  You are a "vault survivor", you help wasteland establishments, unlock weapons and shoot enemies where the mission givers tell you to drive and shoot them.  There are allusions to "The Authority" - and indeed you eventually fight against some mutant troops and tougher humanoids, but there was no overarching terror, no amazing cinematics and nothing really compelling you to be mission bitch for these other survivors.

All in all I get the sense this a game to showcase an engine, and would have been a great vehicle for some other company to make a compelling game with.

Painkiller: Redemption

  

When the most recent Painkiller game released (Hell & Damnation), I bought the full franchise because it was like $2 more ... I have now seen the error in my ways.  There is only so far Doom nostalgia can take you.

The best I can say about Painkiller Redemption is "it's the last one I have to play before the one I wanted to play".  This is another mod-turned-release game, given a new soundtrack but is again just wave after wave of the same enemies you encountered in the previous games.  Though the pitch is that the music is "metal", it's not songs - it's more of a non-stop metal loop.   Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. You'd be better off putting on your own music.

I played on easy mode so I could side-watch the end of Supernatural Season 7, but even with this worthy distraction and playing on easy mode - I won't be playing past the first level.  There is a lot of backtracking and no real intelligence as to why/what spawnpoints were working or where you need to go. 

The Shivah

Oy vey!

Rabbi Stone is a depressed rabbi whose congregation is failing.  When a police officer visits and tells him that a previous congregation member was killed and left him a sum of money, he goes to sit shivah with the widow.  He also feels guilty for having kicked them out of the congregation 8 years ago, and finds a few clues that sets him on a path of the killer.

Much of the game play involves dialog choices and clicking on various room objects, there are lots of red herrings objects and dialog choices though.

All in all it was a well put together story of rabbi mafia.  It was difficult at times to see what to do, specifically when fighting the evil rabbi - but in general giving the "rabbinical response" was the best solution (answering with a question).

Game play was pretty boring, I probably wouldn't have bought it if I had spent a little more time investigating - even though it was only a two hour commitment.

Nier

Nier is a JRPG with a fairly interesting storyline and mehhh gameplay mechanics.  I love crazy plots, and this one ended up being really good - but the effort in backtracking through quest areas, the lamesauce "shades" instead of cool textured bosses, countless load screens, the amount of sloowww dialog you had to suffer though made me almost put this down multiple times - and indeed put me asleep more times than it should.  The save system forces you to be at a mailbox to save, so if you do fall asleep - you have to wake yourself up enough to backtrack or finish what you were doing.  That said - and like Dune, it was worth trudging through to get to the meat of the story.

This will be chock full of spoilers, so play this if you don't want to ruin the twists.

You start by defending your daughter Yonah from a shade attack, but things go wrong as she invokes the help from a mysterious book.  Cut to 1300 years later (yes) - and you are in a town with your daughter who is sick with this shade-scum stuff and you befriend a floating book who becomes your magical fount called Grimoire Weiss.  Through a series of not-so-interesting missions that essentially boil down to "find the big shade and kill it", you meet your other party companions - Kaine (foul mouthed, scantily clad chick) and Emil (emotional 12 year old with Medusa powers).

When fighting off a giant shade that attacks the town, Kaine sacrifices herself to be turned to stone in order to block a shade behind a door and your daughter is kidnapped by The Shadowlord.  

 Cut to 5 years later (I assume you've been searching the whole time for clues as to where Yonah is), Emil finds some obscure letter on how he can unpetrify Kaine, but becomes a freakish skull boy in order to get the power to do so.  Back on your main quest, and in typical RPG fashion - you collect the keys to enter the Shadowlord's lair where you fight Devola and Popola - the town main quest givers and your previous helpers.  In the course of defeating them, they reveal what's truly been going on.  The shades you've been killing are the last vestiges of humanity that have been corrupted, and everyone "alive" is a vessel waiting for the reunion with these souls that have over time unfortunately developed a sense of self and purpose.  The shade that has infected Yonah is the actual Yonah, and the Shadowlord is you - trying to reclaim their bodies.

When you defeat the Shadowlord in combat, Yonah-shade stops you and runs to her father saying there is another girl inside that misses her father as well.  She sacrifices herself, you execute the Shadowlord and presumably live happily ever after.

In new game+ you are given additional cut-scenes to humanize the shadow creatures you must destroy.

Magic 2014

I've played magic the card game like a fiend, starting when the comic book store I frequented talked me into buying a few beta decks.  It depresses me somewhat when I search ebay and see what an alpha black lotus can go for these days, I had three (one mint).

This game relies on that nostalgia though, there is no story or incentive - just a few dialog blops telling you who you need to attack next. The interface works well, and might be a great vehicle for playing other humans.  I only played the computer opponents, who each had a perfectly crafted themed deck.  Most took two games to beat, the first to see how their cards combo-ed together, but the AI was pretty basic - focused mainly on performing the 'trick' to their decks and never reacting to the style I used the entire game built on the starter deck, a green trampler.

Was it fun?  "Sure" - I suppose now that I've beaten all the main players, I could try and beat each of these opponents with the different themed decks I unlocked.  ... Nah.

As a vehicle to multiplay with other humans, this game is probably good. -- personally I would love to have constructed one of the great old decks I had played in the past.  But I didn't want to buy or spend 100 hours making them, so I'm done and uninstalling until 2015+.