Black Friday Haul - Marlow Briggs, Enslaved, State of Decay PC and More

Most of my loot acquisition consisted of graphic novels and video games, nothing unusual there. I haven't bought much in the way of new RPGs, and none this weekend....I'm saturated with games that I don't have time to read or play as it is, and these days graphic novels, video games and books are a bit more accessible with my limited free time than RPGs are. Hell....my backlog just for Pathfinder is about twenty books strong (including Ultimate Camaigns and Mythic Adventures!) so there ya go. If I add more to that pile I'll never get anything done...

On the Steam sale I snagged Dark Void for $2.49...I've tried it before, but it seemed intriguing enough to have on hand should I get a chance to play it some day. I also grabbed State of Decay for PC plus it's first DLC, as well as Alien Rage Unlimited. Alien Rage looks great and I want to play but a cursory opening shot left me dying two seconds after I meet the first enemies, consistently. Not a good sign.

State of Decay is the first successful open-world zombie apocalypse game, and well worth checking out. I have previously played it on the Xbox 360, and am looking forward to a playthough on the PC, along with the release of the expansion pack which provides more open-world, infinite survival goodness. I'll probably talk about it more, later.

Green Man Gaming, Impulse and others also have their weekend Black Friday sales. I grabbed a severely discounted Enslaved: Odyssey to the West for PC edition, a fantastic game which I enjoyed on Xbox 360 years ago and like to replay. It's as fun and engaging on PC as it was on Xbox and looks much nicer now. For those unfamiliar with this game its an action-adventure style game with a lot of climbing revolving around a post-apocalyptic future in a tale derived loosely from the Chinese epic Journey to the West.

I also found a hidden gem: Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death. Holy cow is this game fun....it's a classic action-adventure that feels very much like the "good old days" of this style of game from the PS1/Dreamcast/PS2 era, when you could still get unabashedly fun adventure titles involving fighting, jumping, leaping and endless killing, all wrapped in a glorious display of crazy storytelling and over the top characters. Most of the industry abandoned this style of game ages ago, but it is very nice to see something like that back again, and extremely fun and playable. Marlow Briggs is a rough and tumble fellow who just wants to visit his archaeologist girlfriend at the shady dig site she's been working at, when the evil Bad Guy decides to off him with an artifact weapon. No sooner is Marlow on the trash heap of dead bodies than does a Lord of Xibalba resurrect him to become the instrument of destruction against the infidels....a job Marlow is absolutely suited for. I love this game!

More on these as I get time to play through them. May be a while, as I am currently on a massive Assassin's Creed kick (blasting through AC: Brotherhood now, so a ways to go).

A Quick Overview of the Recent Cornucopia of Survival Horror and Zombie Games

There have been a lot of fresh zombie and survival horror titles hitting the PC and consoles lately....the last few months have been a veritable banquet for the undead vs. hearty suvivors! We all know about Resident Evil 6, which was released for the PC a month or two back...and of course I'll be blogging more about it's final campaign (and multiplayer) soon enough. In the meantime, some others worth mentioning (or warning you about):

Resident Evil: Revelations

I'll be properly reviewing this, but RE: Revelations is a fantastic upgraded port of the same game from the Nintendo 3DS lineup. I almost bought a 3DS to play this title, but then I remembered that Nintendo only releases one "mature" themed title on each of it's consoles to sucker older gamers in; the rest of their offerings are aimed squarely at 13 year old girls and emo boys for as far as the eye can see.

Either way waiting paid off; this is an amazingly fun game and truer to the spirit and style of classic Resident Evil than any of the recent offerings; it's proof you can upgrade the controls, spiff up the gun mechanics, and take the same general engine from RE 4 and RE 5 and make something that looks, feels and plays like classic RE. The multiplayer raid mode is amazingly fun, too!

Dead Island: Riptide

This was clearly intended to be a second DLC expansion when someone at Deep Silver realized they could make it a bit bigger, package a new island to explore, and chuck it out as a full title in its own right. I've played it for a few hours, but if you (like me) found yourself more or less burned out on the Dead Island style by the end of the first game then this one has exactly nothing new to offer. It's not the proper expansion everyone was hoping for, instead just being an effort at milking this particular engine for a bit more cash. PCGamer's review says it all, I feel.

The Last of Us

This PS3 exclusive from Naughty Dog has been all over game site news so if you haven't heard of it you must not be a console gamer or you come to my blog by way of the paper and pencil side of the equation. The Last of Us, in the time I've had to play it, is an amazing game and it's intro/prologue chapter is actually one of the best gaming experiences of this sort I've ever played, hands down. It's a very compelling title, perhaps even a bit too much so; I've been playing lots of Resident Evil just to wait for a time to properly savor (and wrestle with) the stark what-if reality of the apocalyptic world and its incredibly likable survivors The Last of Us imposes on our psyche.

State of Decay

An Xbox 360 exclusivc, and only $20 to boot, is an amazing zombie apocalypse sandbox adventure in a very rich, deeply explorable package with tons of interesting options. I hope it doesn't remain an exclusive forever; it feels like a title that more properly deserves attention on the PC. The fact that no one until now has made a full-on zombie apocalypse sandbox experience in third-person mode is kind of amazing, really. "Grand Theft Zombie" is a fantastic concept, and State of Decay fills this space very well. Sure, there's DayZ for Arma....but here at least you can worry properly about the zombies and not griefers!

So, final consensus? Get RE: Revelations, State of Decay and The Last of Us if you happen to have the right hardware for each. Get Dead Island: Riptide if you find it on sale for cheap and wanted more of the same from the original game.