Meanwhile in one of the Moscow houses...

TIME FOR DOTA2, SWEETIES!

8th day of the vacation - The Book of Unwritten Tales (PC)

The 8th day of my  vacation was spent playing that quite an old point-and-click adventure called 'The Book of Unwritten Tales'. It's a funny quest about three (well, actually, 3,5) good guys trying to find a mighty artifact and hide it from the forces of evil, because the one who holds that artifact will rule the world. One of them is a halfling seeking for the archmage to give him a magic ring. Another one is an elf princess seeking for the same to give away a magic book. And the last 1,5 is a human with some funny critter, they just love adventures.

So, together or apart, they visit different parts of the game world and do different funny things like 'hacking' the monkey server of the local 'MMORPG' with accountants, revenue inspectors, tax bills and overall fantastic world with no elfs, dragons or orcs, or take the mickey out of a gay paladin, or help a pink dragon-girl become a horrifying monster... that sort of things. And sometimes the puzzles were just exploding my brain, so inadequate the solutions were.

'The Book of Unwritten Tales' has a wonderful humor in everything, sometimes it's just stuggering with sudden actions or replies showing something really funny and laughable. The game contains tons of parody and 'easter eggs'. But there's another side of this humor and parody. We've seen this all before in 'Tales of Monkey Island'. And the BoUT is just a more modern 'version' of it, it doesn't show anything new.

But still the game is cute and funny, so if you like this genre, you gotta play 'The Book of Unwritten Tales'.

7th day of the vacation - Assassin's Creed: Revelations (PC)

After Dishonored, I've got a feeling that something was wrong and that I needed to know something more about stealth actions, and just luckily I had a spare 1k of money, so I decided to play Assassins' Creed: Revelations.

Well... now I'll think twice next time before trying to play any of the Uplay's games. Endless hours I've spent waiting for the game to self-update. It downloaded something again and again. again and again - for about 4,5 hours. When it finally stopped, I just couldn't believe my happiness.

About the game itself - well, after several hours of playing I still don't quite understand, why I am going to all of these places, following all these people, climbing all those buildings... no, for real, what's going on?

The gameplay... the gameplay is so laid-back. After running away like hell each time being noticed in Dishonored, here I just can calmly walk through the city streets and quite a lot of time can pass until the guard sees me and thinks that I am a bit suspicious. But I still don't understand, why is this happenning: if someone thinks you are a suspicious man, he grabs a gun or a sword and immediately tries to kick shit out of you. Why, savages?

The graphics is fine, the game looks like a slideshow on my crazy toaster D: The controls are killing me. After my 10 days gamer sprint is over, I'll play AC:R more.

Open World Exploration, or TES sucks

The more grown-up the world's gamedev becomes - the more I think about such a funny thing as the open world in video-games. I've suddenly been accused of not understanding anything about steampunk and the world shown in Dishonored and that's why I returned to this topic again.

We are all hungry for games that would make us wanna live inside the world shown. And the developer is trying hard to make a game that could make us simply forget that it's a game, not a simulator of the real life. I've had a boyfriend once, who was completely fanatic about TES III: Morrowind. He would spend endless hours building new houses, sorting books on the bookshelves, making campfires in the forest with his character eating and drinking near the fire and so on, just living his character's life. Gotta say that our 'love' didn't last long this way... And I couldn't avoid thinking that it's not normal. Meanwhiles, Bethesda didn't stop. And here comes the Oblivion. And here comes the Skyrim. And millions of people forget what the real life is like.

Don't get me wrong, guyz, I really like it when the game world offers me millions of opportunities and a huge variability of gameplay. But still, a game should remain a game and have some reasonable restrictions. Take the Elder Scrolls, for example. Huge open world offering the player to do what they want - and all of a sudden that medieval Sims seems to have a STORYLINE. For fuck's sake!!! Nobody wants to go through the story, because for the fifth time in this series the story sucks! And what happens then?

The world goes down in blight. Living corpses invade the spaces of Vvardenfell. Dagoth Ur wants to break Morrowind free from the Imperial reign. You wrap yourself  in pelage and run into a forest, make a campfire and read books, then you go to the Vivek, find some lonely ordinator and put a mace into his arse. Glad you're enjoying yourself, but the blight... no-no-no, put down that mace!!!

The world is invaded with daedra, the Oblivion gates are opened every 300 meters, everyone is suffering. You shut 1-2 gates, maybe even 3, then you say 'Oooh, screw that' and go exploring the seashore. Then you suddenly kill some goddamn fucking CHICKEN - and the next 20 hours of gameplay you spend hiding from the Imperial guardians.

Alduin rages? Well, we've got at least two identical games before, thank you and fuck all that shit in advance. I'm going to the Dark Brotherhood.

6th day of the vacation - A bit of everything

I've tried a bit of the New Little King's Story on PS Vita today and I already got stuck in that traditional 'WTF, Japan?!' game. First of all, I just don't feel very comfortable with the world's gamedev, which simply ignores PS Vita, and there's just a total preponderance of Japanese production.

Let's take this masterpiece of japanese game development. It looks like it's been designed for children under 3 years old, but the gameplay just kills my 25 years old brain. I've already read tons of text (it's so common for jap games), but I still don't get the plot. I even might need some kind of a walkthrough to cope with this game.

Just a couple of words about Dead Nation (PS3): I could do this all day. Run and shoot, shoot and run, throw explosive things, blow up cars and exterminate tons of zombies letting them go down in flame. I guess I'll need to spend more time with this game, and I feel ready for it, cause its gameplay smells like unrelenting fun.

Cliff Diving (PS Vita) is a third game to speak of today. It's something cute, funny and totally casual. The objective is clear: you're standing on a trampoline and you have a small area of water to dive in. The whole gameplay is based on QTE and requires perfect timing.

The game is playable only with an augmented reality card, if you have one (PS Vita kit includes a set of them), which should only mark an area somewhere in the real world to place the cliff. And it looks quite funny so see a freaky diver jumping into the ocean on your table smashing into objects, hurting his balls, breaking his bones...

But actually it's a bit bad for the game, 'cos it's really no matter where you place the card, the gameplay would never change, but the necessity to use the AR all the time makes the game impossible to play on your way to work or study or anywhere else. So Cliff Diving just buries itself alive with that.

To sum up everything mentioned above, I didn't play any worthy games today.

5th day of the vacation - Dishonored (PC)

And here comes the game most of us have been waiting for. Stealth action that people believe pretends to be RPG.I just wonder, when did that happen that people started calling an rpg every game that implies that the person has their own style own playing. That's what Dishonored is made of.

It's a stealth action game, as said above, which suggests that you reach your objectives leaving no dead bodies behind. And then you just decide for yourself whether you save each one's unworthy dirty life and crawl like a shadow, or just face your enemies, kill them violently and then be punished for not doing what the game wanted you to do.

Sometimes the game just doesn't leave any opportunities for you and you just have to kill. Especially in the beginning, when you have no special powers. And then in the end you'll have to suffer from swarms of enemies, and kill them all again until you exterminate the whole city. But let's be clear: actually, later you'll have a plenty of opportunities to avoid murdering anyone.

The game is exciting, it looks beautiful, but it's still imperfect. Dishonored AI is very stupid, and that's just what Bethesda always makes about the AI in their games. Like that: hey, sis', what about stunning this handsome dude standing all alone in the corner? Nice idea, huh? Right, that's it. Oh, look, the guardians from across the whole location noticed you, now die, you inglorious bastard. Or that: ARRRGH THERE'S A CROSSBOW BOLT IN MAH EYE U BIATCH I ALREADY SEE YOU I WILL DESTROY YOU BASTARD! Oh, no, it just seemed to me. Look, there's a butterfly! The same shit was in TES everywhere, and I don't know about Fallout 3 yet, but looks like the things don't get any better from game to game. When I play Bethesda's games, I just feel like playing the same shit just getting a bit older in means of the human civilisation growing up.

But Dishonored is ok. It even might be the game of the year.

3rd and 4th days of the vacation - Skullgirls (PS3), Of Orcs and Men (PC)

First come the Skullgirls.

It's a fighting game that most of you guys might not even notice, and so would I, if I didn't see some awesome cosplay of Painwheel last weekend. That's when I got interested (and let's be clear with it: I'm keen on fightings), and yesterday I finally bought the game.

So... what's it like? The first description that comes on my mind is 'FUCKING HARDCORRRE!' - 'cos that's what the game really is. Besides the fact that Skullgirls was released this spring, it smells like the deep-deep past of the game development, when the gamer could sweat themselves out to death before they finish the level. Not like now, when the gameplay is so laid-back.

Skullgirls is a very challenging game, which requires that you man up and try the hardest you can. Because you won't survive otherwise. Speaking about myself, first i tried the game at easy level of difficulty - and I was soooo close to smashing my gamepad into million pieces in rage... Well, that's the story mode that I'm talking about, and it's really unmerciful: sometimes you just have no chance to push a single button, while your enemy performs their 9000-hits combos.

And this may be pionted at as the worst component of the game. Many game developers say that they could make such an AI, that the player would just yell furiously feeling their own helplessness. But no one would do that, because the main task of AI is not to make gamers feel schmuck, but to lose gracefully. Maybe, except KONAMI, because Skullgirls' AI leaves not a single chance to the player. Most of the other fightings are desined so that we have a small, but still a chance to dodge the attack.

But still... when you play against a living person, it looks like a fair play much more. Well, that's what the fightings were originally designed for, I suppose. And I don't know who started spreading the 'story mode' disease in the genre. And now it's time to say that, beyond the rascality of the story mode, the game is really pretty. The fighters are cute and funny (except Painwheel, maybe), the game itself is full of a very specific humor. Beating your opponent with a naked men, for example, or ripping your own head off and playing with it like a kitten - it's hard to descibe verbally, but when you see it, you definitely say "DAFUQ???"

The game is funny, stylish ang challenging. What else do we need to enjoy the process? =)

Then comes Of Orcs and Men.

It's a new game that was released just today in our country, it pretends to be a role-playing game, but actually it's a brain-fucking and PC-breaking game, where you play the role of HULK. And HULK CRASH, HULK SMASH, HULK VERY ANGRY, ALL GET INTO THE CAR.

To be serious, it's a very, VERY specific game. And it's not even about playing with a huge green creature that's extremely aggressive and not very intelligent. It's more about the game being totally boring and monotonous.

The typical quest looks like the following: you find your self on the one side of the location and your objective is on the other one, and you go there getting into a fight around each corner. If you lose - and you are most likely to (I'll tell later why) - you start it again. If by any chance there was a long cut-scene before the fight, you watch it again. And thank the orcish gods for the ability to skip the scene! Otherwise I'd already have learned all the dialogues by heart.

Everything wouldn't be so bad for me, if the battles were designed in any other way. History knows loads of examples when monotonous gameplay wasn't a reason to give up playing (Darksiders 2, for example). Here the main problem is fighting in battle. The system looks like this: you learn some special attacks and build them up in a queue that can't be rebuilt at the specific moment when you need it the most. So if you are totally busy fighting, you won't be able to raise or heal you ally, when he's in trouble. He will just perish while your HULK stops one action and starts some another, like Windows '95 -_-

BTW, our Hulk can fly into rage from time to time, and this mode is supposed to make him give out tons of damage. But mostly in the moments of irrepressible RAAAAAAAAAAGE he just stands like a tree or starts killing everyone, never even thinking if that was an ally or something. Sad -_-' I just don't have enough patience to continue playing this. And the edition for our country is so laggy, even can't be described.

I can't say that the game is bad, but it's definitely NOT for me.