What we’ve been playing: Week of 26/6/2011

Wait that video just seems like a normal play through of Sonic 2, right? Well watch to all the way through and be prepared to witness the amazing secret route, which I certainly didn’t know about all these years. Is it me or did seeing that guy skip the purple gloop bit of that level completely blow your mind? Or am I being an idiot?

Anyway hit the jump to read about what we’ve been playing or something.

Stevie Grant- Writer of Top 10 Worst and Boss Attack:
I played Sonic Generations at Summer of Sonic. More on that another time. I promise.Also Shadows of the Damned. Which is awesome. In terms of writing however I felt it lacked the satirical punch of some of Suda 51’s previous work. But that’s just me being pretentious. Go buy it.

Oh I also finished all of Sam and Max ever now. Yep. I recommend them highly. That’s it from me. Woo.

John Doherty- Writer of Take Cover:
Not much truth be told. I’ve been working on my own game which has been eating all of my time. I did play a bit more Alice and am still loving it. I have Infamous downloading and sitting on my PS3, I just don’t have the time right now to play it. As usual I played some more League of Legends.

Also if anyone from Bioware is reading this, PLEASE let me into The Old Republic beta. I am extremely jealous of everyone who has gotten in.

Josh Newey – Writer of Sounds of Sega and Twenty Days of Sonic:
I just picked up Shadows of the Damned yesterday, and have been eyeing it angrily in between bouts of Sonic and The Black Knight and stupid Sonic 2006. Lordy, I can’t wait until this weekend is over.

I’ve also been playing “technology loves to watch you suffer.” Over the course of this week, webcams copped out on me, audio files just up and decided that I didn’t exist, and computers apparently thought it funny to confuse and frighten me. Oh, and my dog is still terrified of every videogame controller known to man and I’m supposed to play games for 24 hours straight tomorrow. Just. Goddammit.

Fun fact: As of now Josh Newey has completed his 24 hours of Sonic and is now clinically insane. Lovely.

Sven Wohl- Sexy new writer:
So I’ve been playing quite a lot of Alice: Madness Returns, FEAR 3 and Shadows of the Damned. I played all those games mainly for reviews and I’m having quite some fun with all of them. Outside of that, I’m giving Sonic and Sega All-Star racing a try and have been trying to get into Zeldo Ocarina of time 3D. I’ve had always my fair share of troubles to get into the Zelda series and I’m having the same here. Well, that’s pretty much all, still a lot of work to do, so my gaming is clearly focused on my review work…

Alexander Sargeant- Writer of Retro Reviews:
Sad that the first thing I thought of after reading ‘Oysters on the half shell’ was ‘Turtle Power!’

Anyway, new Majikoi route has been translated, but I apparently lost my save data along the way so I guess I’m going to be rereading the whole thing. For the first time in Visual Novel history I find this a genuinely exciting prospect. I love that game. Fear 3 is surprisingly smooth and solid, although I hear it ends incredibly abruptly. Finally got to the credits of God Eater Burst and realised the game carried on going. According to the wiki I only finished the ‘God Eater’ portion, and so I have no started ‘Burst’ the epilogue story.

And the Sonic Generations Demo, which is adorable. Some slightly iffy things I’d like to see fixed. It doesn’t seem to run as smoothly as I’d like and I have no idea why the rings bounce quite as damn much as they do. That asides it was a real joy. Anyone else notice that if you have over 100 rings you don’t lose them all if you’re hit? That HP buffer could prove to have some interesting gameplay ramifications.

Alex Riggen- Editor in Chief and Podcast Host:
I played a variety of games this week so to keep this short I’m just going to rate each of them with a type of seafood.

Alan Wake – Crab legs with paprika butter
Chakan – Catfish with a lot of bones and nasty grayish fishy meat on the bottom
Super Mario Land 3DS – Scallops simmered in butter and placed atop garlic mashed potatoes
Duke Nukem Forever Demo – Fish sticks
Sonic Generations Demo – Oysters on the half shell with lemon juice and tabasco

And that’s this week’s thing. Lovely. I’m going to go back to having awful dongle internet. Yeah I’m going to be on that for a bit. Let’s see how that goes. See you next week!