Late To The Party: Forza Motorsport

I never got the chance or never got around to playing any of Microsoft and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport games until they started releasing them on Windows. And by “releasing them on Windows,” I mean making free versions of them available for me to try out — the free-to-play Forza 6 Apex and the recently released demo for Forza Horizon 3.

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LTTP Call of Duty: Black Ops III Campaign

And with the campaign of Black Ops III, I’m finally as caught up on Call of Duty as I care to be. A copy of the game actually came with my PS4, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. If I do keep it around the campaign will probably be the least of the reason. I’m not saying that to put the game down, but it seems like Treyarch’s style of COD has developed in a direction completely different form what made me enjoy the franchise back in the days of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Late to the Party: Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

My re-acquaintance with Call of Duty took me through the singleplayer campaign of Advanced Warfare this weekend after finishing Ghosts and rather enjoying it despite what a lot of people think about Infinity Ward these days. Seeing as Sledgehammer Games worked with IW on Modern Warfare 3, I guess I should have expected Advanced Warfare — Sledgehammer’s first lead project, to mostly glean from IW’s design playbook.

LTTP Call Of Duty Ghosts: In Defense Of Infinity Ward

With a PS4 I can start renting current games again, so I decided to take a look at the last few Call of Duty campaigns which I’d missed, starting with Ghosts. All I’d heard was that some people had panned it, but they’d also panned Modern Warfare 3 from the same team, which I actually liked a lot. It’s sort of an ongoing disagreement I seem to have with a lot of fans and critics of the franchise.

Basically, I think the games from Infinity Ward after Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare get a lot of undue criticism. I get why Black Ops became so popular, but there are things about the Infinity Ward games I feel a lot of people ignore, and Ghosts is no exception.

Late To The Party: Quake

This one is quite late for Quake’s 20th anniversary, but some things happened, and here we are. I tried to pitch a “first-time Quake player” anniversary article and couldn’t really sell an angle on it, so I guess I’m just gonna put down some of my general thoughts on the game here.

I’ve been trying to do my classic first-person-shooter odyssey more or less in release order to get a good sense of the technological progress that occurred. I had to skip a few planned games (to which I plan to return) when the Quake anniversary came up. Nonetheless I was still interested in seeing why this game seemed to be revered as one of the top FPSs ever made.

Late To The Party: Rise of the Triad

I’ve actually been playing the original Rise of the Triad on and off for weeks but never really got around to writing about it until now. Of all the old school first person shooters I’ve tried on this journey through the genre, this has got to be the goofiest.

Late To The Party: Blood

While on my trek through old school first person shooters I started getting suggestions for a(nother) 1997 game called Blood. Many seem to consider it the best Build-engine game over Duke Nukem 3D and the original 1997 Shadow Warrior. I can see why they think that, but for some reason I was only able to make it through the first episode (the first seven maps) of Blood before putting it down.

Late To The Party: New Super Mario Bros. U

After just completing the main portion of New Super Mario Bros. U, I think I can finally say I’m caught up on all the mainline Mario platformers. If you haven’t been following my posts, it’s not like I’d never played Mario before, I always had as a kid, but I never made serious attempts at completing any of the 2D games until the last few years or so. I’ve been anticipating the point where I can finally sit back and tally them all up.

I think I like Super Mario Bros. 3 the most.

Late To The Party: Alien Isolation

I ended up choosing Alien: Isolation as one of my October horror games for this year and I couldn’t really come up with anything else to write about today. I’m not done with the game yet but I think I’ve seen enough to do an LTTP post about it. I am of course almost exactly a year late on this game (I bought it on a Steam sale back in the spring), so maybe everything I’m about to write is pretty much what everyone else knew about the game by last Halloween.

Late To The Party: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

My quest to no longer suck at 2D Mario platformers continues as I’ve just completed New Super Mario Bros. Wii. This is only the second entry in the “New” brand of the games I’ve played or finished, the original New Super Mario Bros. actually being the first Mario side-scroller I ever beat. From what I hear the games are divisive and I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly their strengths and weaknesses are compared to the classics.