Stevie Grant’s “What we’ve been playing”: Week of 21/11/2010

Throw your baby out the window, and dump your girlfriend immediately, because it’s time for What we’ve been playing! You know the drill by now, I spout off something at the beginning, crack a couple of award winning jokes and get adored by all you amazing fans. Well I can’t be bothered to do that today so just hit the jump to see what we’ve been playing, OK?

Stevie Grant- Writer of Top 10 Worst and Reviews of Games I Haven’t Played:
Recently I played Crazy Taxi for review. So go read that and stuff. Also Bit. Trip Fate came out here and I’ve completed it since. Such a great game. Get it. Oh! Also more Super Meat Boy, although you can probably guess every week I’ll be playing that.

Brett Hatfield- Community Manager and writer of Megadriving:
Barely played anything, to be honest, until yesterday.  Had Sega GT in for tomorrow’s MegaDriving, but… No, wait, spoilers. You still have to suffer through my writing if you want my thoughts on that. But yeah, let’s just say I quickly decided I’d be better off playing Gran Turismo 4 instead in anticipation for GT5 next Saturday (CANNOT WAIT. YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW MUCH I CAN’T WAIT). So I did. Then, Tekken 6, BlazBlue, WWE Smackdown 2010, and currently, Super Street Fighter IV (someone hooked me up with Sakura and Makoto’s new alternates. SO ADORABLE). Just wish people would accept endless battle lobby invites so I can get the damn endless lobbyist trophy!

Alexander Sargeant- Writer of Retro Reviews:

Still have a cold. I don’t know how This is ridiculous. Incredibly have not played a lot this week. Mostly Atelier Rorona, which I’m enjoying enough to be really excited at knowing there are two more entire GUST games coming next year having already released in Japan so. Although the increasing pleasure I have to playing teenage girl shopkeepers is no less distressing as the hours tick by.

The main game of the week was Sonic Colours on the Wii, which I thought was great until it wasn’t great. I don’t know what happened, but precisely halfway through the game, the level design turned to hell and it just became an absolute slog to try and get through. Really glad I finished it because the finale was actually pretty damn good again, not anything amazing but pretty pleasing as a Sonic outing. Weirdly, I actually thought the cut-scenes were some of the best moments of the game. They were just few enough and short enough that they never became bothersome, and there were genuinely funny parts. Maybe the solution for the next game is to take the Kirby’s Epic Yarn route and completely forget the idea of difficulty. Easily the worst parts of the game are simply whenever it’s possible to lose. If people are complaining about your levels being filled with bottomless pits and cheap deaths, then just take the damn things out and surely even if you can’t please everyone at least you’re not pissing any of them off.

Matthew Jay- Writer of 10 Things That Aren’t Sonic and Radvertisements:
Alex Sargeant is absolutely right about Sonic Colors. I was all set to finish it in two sittings but that second half is rough. The first half is fantastic and I sped right through it but then it falls right back into all the trappings of awful 2000s Sonic games. Still really pretty, but a tough slog.

I also picked up the DS version so I could get both hats but haven’t played it yet as I’m still playing Ys: the Oath in Felghana for a review. Aside from that and a bunch of retro games I’ve finally picked up Silent Hill 2 and am kind of in love with it.


Josh Newey- Writer of With Great Power Comes Great Games and Underappreciated Gems:

I haven’t had a whole lot of time for gaming this week. I played a bit more of Shenmue in the beginning of the week. Also played a few minutes of Chu Chu Rocket on my iPhone. It works out pretty damn well. It almost makes me wonder if the layout would have been a better fit on a handheld all those years ago. My only real gripe has been how small the boxes are in relation to my giant hands. It makes swiping to place arrow boxes a bit of a chore.

Picked up Sonic Colors, and have been greedily eyeing on my shelf it ever since. Despite the mixed response, I can’t wait to get a night alone with it. Take that how ever you want to.

Other than that, a whole buncha nothin’.

Pat Reddick- Community Manager and writer of Forum News and Not-so Classics:
After having a terrible week of sickness and suffering I recovered to find myself not that bogged down by homework (naturally my slow week is the week that I get sick), so I had a decent amount of time to play games for once. I acquired 2 of the Ace Attorney games and have been playing them quite a bit. That has nothing to do with Sega, so I won’t talk about them though. Also not really Sega-related by kind of almost is Super Meat Boy. Apparently I’ll play the bulk of a game, be satisfied and then take forever to finish it. I’m on the World 6 boss battle and I keep getting my ass kicked. I wish I were better at games because that game really deserves to be beaten. On the actually Sega-related front I’ve been wasting my time playing advergames galore like Cool Spot and Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool. My article on the latter should be up already, so go read that! I am thoroughly disappoint with Cool Spot because there is nothing wrong enough with that game for me to do a feature on it. In fact I’m disappointed with the fact that Sega consoles seem to feature a lot less straight-up advertising games than Nintendo did. Original games, you can’t do that with Nintendo…GENESIS DOES.

Tom Kyzivat- Artist and Podcast Co-host:
I didn’t get to play anything this week–I was too busy developing a Battle Monsters polio vaccine. Get it? It’s a running gag. Or, at least it would be if it was funny.

Well that was cool and stuff. Learn a lot didn’t ya? Well now you can teach me something by telling me what you’ve played in the comments!

Do that! Let’s face it, you aren’t important enough to do anything else.