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My Hero: Doctor (DS) by jp (Mar 6th, 2026 at 18:01:32) |
From the back of the box this game looks like a "western realistic" Trauma Team game - use the touchscreen to do medical stuff like bandage a patient's arm or give them an injection. And it is...sort of? Weirdly every single "case" (mission) I played began with (and sometimes also ended with) a driving section - an ambulance of course. Here you have to dodge other vehicles and obstacles to avoid damage as you travel to a location where something happened or back to the hospital. Roads are full of other vehicles that have no qualms with suddenly changing lanes in front of you and such. You can collect "energy" (not what it's called in the game, but I don't remember the name in the game), and when you have enough you can turn on the siren - and this causes other vehicles to get out of the way (sometimes not fast enough). It's kind of a bizarre gameplay addition - and it doesn't help that the controls are kind of wonky and, from my experience, it really out stayed it's welcome even as the background locations you're driving through change.
I even unlocked a better ambulance (better driving stats)...and there's more to (eventually) choose from. I mean, the game's basic structure is pretty standard, there's cut-scenes with stories (everything so far seems to involve college kids of some sort). It makes me really wonder who the intended audience/age group for this game was. The name of the game would imply children (it's aspirational!) but the story seemed a bit more "grown up" - i.e. adolescent, but the gameplay was also quite simple..skewing younger again in my mind.
The more games of this kind I play (not top-tier first-party DS games), the more I wonder about the conditions in which they were made. Was this a game that was knocked out by a small studio in 6 months?
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Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PS4) by jp (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 19:08:07) |
Decided to quit suddenly because I realized I was just starting to grind for achievements and not actually having fun or enjoying the game. Which, in the grand scheme of things sounds like a bad thing other than I think that I quit in time BEFORE I got super tired and bored. So, leaving on a (little past) the high of the fun experience.
I was grinding the Dream Doors - and apparently there's a nice monster at the end that can be a real challenge - but, I didn't have a sense of WHY I'd want to do that. Here I mean motivation within the game's story. I was hoping for a nice story payoff if anything? It seems like there isn't, it's just a grind for resources and stuff and so...time to bail!
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Vampire Survivors (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 15:38:02) |
I first played this a few years ago on Game Pass and loved it. I rebought it on Steam because there was so much extra content. (I have since learned to avoid long games, roguelikes, and stuff with tons of replayability on subscription services; buy those instead!). Last summer, I replayed the game and started to dig into the DLC. There is practically an infinite amount of stuff to do in Vampire Survivors. I still feel this after sinking another 30 hours into it. The achievements and unlocks are extremely compelling and I could chase them all day. But it has finally started to feel repetitive. Longer 30-minute runs that result in like one unlock or just some progress through a map feel more and more like a time sink, especially as I have other games to get to, including newer games in this genre.
The DLCs (so many!!) have been interesting in that they alter the base game in interesting ways. The maps have rooms, islands, and more geographical features; they are not just massive plains with the occasional obstacle. Contra has a different kind of boss fight. They have new characters, weapons, evolutions, and secrets. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is massive, about the same size as the entire base game! It also has unique boss fights, and an even bigger map to explore, including different spawn points so you don't start over every time. I mean, really, I could just keep playing this forever...but I can't keep playing this forever! I must delete it. Maybe one day there will be another DLC that really piques my interest and the game will rise like a vampire from the coffin of my Steam library! I did see that they are releasing a first-person card battler roguelike, so I am sure I will get sucked into that too!
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Fabledom (PC) by jp (Feb 28th, 2026 at 18:37:25) |
This one is in the "sim" sub-group "city building" bucket for this semester's critical game design class. I'm generally not a fan of city building games since I find that the simulation part often runs away from me. I think I'm doing well, but then everything falls apart.
This game was surprisingly chill - it almost feels like the game you'd just keep on playing? As in, you start - and then just continue. I'm 6 hours in and I've just hit the point where I should be building palaces and having nobles prancing around. The game is basically a "Sim-City FairyTale Edition", but I've really liked the pace of it. At times things were going wonky, but I just kept going and slowly things have recovered (I took too long to build the hospital, so people died - once it was finally built it was funny to see a huge swarm of sick people mob it).
The economy is rather complicated with lots of different resources and I find it really hard to know if things are going well/poorly - there's time delays on everything of course, I just don't notice when "production" happens and whether or not it is sufficient for the demans of my populace. Basically though, it's always "make numbers go up" and then you run out of people to work - so make houses for them, and so on.
Here's the things I've particularly appreciated in this game's design (or that I thought were neat).
a. People live in houses (and bigger residential buildings), but there's always ONE person who is the head of household. That's their job.
b. When you pay for a new building you basically pay money, and decide where it's going. But you then have to wait for the resources for the building to be delivered/transported there. I often ran into an issue where I paid for a bunch of stuff, but no construction was happening because I didn't have enough planks or something.
c. My village has a cyclops that wanders around making people happy. So much better than terrorizing.
d. In winter, lots of things shut-down, this felt like a "vacation" for the farmers, which I let them have/enjoy.
e. I thought it was funny that Commoner's really don't like living next to peasant homes. So, a peasant home could be super desirable - but only for other peasants. It's the complete opposite for commoner's (highly undesirable). Basically, there's a class system and they don't like each other when it comes to living close by. (I'm assuming the same will apply for nobles, but I don't have any of those yet).
f. A common driver of unhappiness in the people is how far they have to walk to work (you can manually assign different people to different buildings). It makes sense - but this is all walking anyways...but still - distance from home-to-work matters! Apparently this is because workers go home to eat!
g. I liked how you could chop down trees but also have a little add-on forester hut so they grow back.
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Fear the Spotlight (PC) by dkirschner (Feb 26th, 2026 at 17:49:42) |
Dang, another kickass random freebie from Epic sometime in the past year. I remember being drawn to it because it was published by Blumhouse, which has had some horror movie hits, and which is apparently getting into game publishing. This is like a PS1-style survival horror game, but without combat. Gameplay is straightforward. Without the combat, it is more linear, simple puzzles, play some hide-and-seek with the monster. It builds a great atmosphere though--still manages to be tense--and has a unique story.
I think the narrative is where this really shines. It drip feeds you the story and peels back layer after layer. You think it's this straightforward high school romance drama, but then no. And then the second layer, the second thing you think is happening, but then no, another layer. And another layer. Some taboo shit that made my skin crawl. It was really good. And it was really...sweet. It's an atypical choice for a horror game, but it works. In the end, maybe it is a high school romance story after all. Definitely worth playing.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
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2320 registered gamers and 3350 games. 7884 GameLogs with 13374 journal entries. 5124 games are currently being played.
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Soul Calibur Legends (Wii) by neoyaku2 |
| Weak Game, as a whole, but provides some insight on Wii-motion-control combat potential. |
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most recent entry: Saturday 5 January, 2008
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Soul Calibur Legends. The Soul Calibur Beat-em-Up/Linear Adventure Game.
I've been playing this game in small bursts, for 3 days now...
It's only managed to maintain some of my attention, because of the controls.
The controls are not very responsive, or accurate-- you swing the wii-mote horizontal or vertical, thrust forward, or pull-up (as if scooping with a spoon) to do different moves-- but MOST of the moves from MOST of the characters match the motion that you perform.
Despite the issues, That's not to say that this control method is not interesting. The problems arise only when you want to do specific attacks.
Since I've played every Soul Calibur up until this point, I like to try and do the moves from the previous games that I liked the most. For example, I love Ivy's move where she pulls an airborne character out of the air with her chain-whip. This move IS in Soul Calibur Legends, but is SOOOO difficult to do because the game doesn't read motions that well. The motion to perform the move itself is not hard at all--thrust forward, then LIFT UP-- it's just that the game can't pick it up as accurately (or INaccurately (?!)) as I would like.
I was impressed to see, that the game DOES read left-to-right horizontal slashes differently than right-to-left horizontal slashes. It was a small touch that won BIG points with me. I also appreciate the number of attacks possible with each character-- nearly every distinct/easily-recognizable move that each character has (from previous Soul Cal games) is in this game.
You can also move the Nunchuck to perform defensive/evasive manuvers (Guard Imapact, Side Stepping), as well as to cancel/charge offensive attacks into other attacks to perform near limitless combo strings. I was surprised to see so much attention given to the Nunchuk, as left, right, forward, and backwards motions (and in combintation with the Z (block) button and C (Soul Charge) button) yeild different results. There is truly alot going on here, it's just not as intuitive or as responsive as it should be.
The Nunchuk and Wii-mote can be used in combination to access even MORE moves.
These kinds of touches let me know where the developer's focus was; translating the 6 Soul Calibur characters into a competent motion-controlled adventure-game fighting system. (By no means, does this system work as a full-fledged one-on-one fighting game... as experienced from playing the last-min-addition 2-player Vs. Mode)
The rest of the game is abysmal-- Repetitive levels, weak story, bad dialogue, forced character interaction, easy enemies, and the half-baked 2-player Co-op, Competitive, and VS play. But the combat options per character is really intriguing, to me at least... Especially since each character is adjusted appropriately to fit the motion controls in harmony with their native fighting style. (Taki comes to mind, as she utilizes the Nunchuk's evasive manuevers more than any other character, being the "ninja-fighter"... Ivy has some cool two-part whip-pulling manuevers that only she can do; i.e. Thrust forward to extentd the whip, then PULL-to-the-LEFT/RIGHT to have her pull the whip in that direction as it retracts...)
I can only think of this game as a window into the possibilities of wii-controls and fighting-based games. There's a lot that CAN be done here, I don't know if it's the Wii Hardware's fault, or lack-of-time for the developers, but there is some really new and fresh ideas for combat with the Wii-mote and Nunchuk.....
Another game that utilizes the motion-controls very well for combat is DragonBall Z Budokai: Tenkaichi 2 or 3. Those games made me believe that fighting IS possible on the Wii...but that's for some other time.
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