Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages Blog

Part three of my trip into Steam's Potato Sack sees the same formula as the last two. Three games; one I hate, one I like and one that comes in the middle.

Killing Floor
I suppose this might actually be quite a good game, but I hate it. The trouble is that you need to play it with friends and I don't have any that play this game. You can go on the Internet to find people willing to play with you but I've done this kind of thing before, going right back to playing Quake over a 28.8kbps modem back in roughly 1997. You can find people it's worth playing with, but it's much more likely you're going to run into a bunch of idiots instead. I tried to play it on my own and was overwhelmed after about two minutes, and quit. Sorry, but games need to have a decent single player mode so that misanthropists like me can enjoy them. This doesn't so it goes on my hate list. Tough.

Super Meat Boy
I almost put this game in the "Hate" category, but it's got just about enough going for it that I put it in "Meh" instead. The story is that you're Meat Boy and someone called Dr Fetus has captured your girlfriend, Bandage Girl. You have to guide Meat Boy through a series of levels and rescue her. It's a platformer, and I'm not a huge fan, but there's quite a lot of skill involved, so it's more than a simple Mario game where jumping around at random will usually get you quite a long way. If you're interested in platform games, the Wikipedia article will tell you more. Apparently the game has a rating of over 90% on MetaCritic, so there must be plenty of people who like this kind of thing, but I'm not really one of them. The music's good though.

Audiosurf
To be honest, this is a pretty dull game with a really good twist, but the twist makes it brilliant. The idea is that you are moving along a road that twists and turns, and bounces up and down, and you have to pick up different coloured blocks to form groups of colour that then count for points. The fun part is that the shape, incline, and length of the road, as well as the location of the blocks, is determined by a music track that you give the game. If you play some kind of thrash metal in the background you're going to be in for a pretty busy journey, while playing Clannad is likely to produce a largely empty one. When I gave it Yes' version of Simon and Garfunkel's America, the road bounced up and down like it was full of potholes. As one final twist, you get to see who else has played on certain tracks, and it's interesting to see that there are obviously a load of old rockers like me out there because even Yes and King Crimson tracks had been played before. So the idea is really basic, but I can see it being quite fun to play at parties, and it's a good excuse to bring out some old tracks from the ol' MP3 collection and hit the road. This is one of the few games in this set I can see myself playing again and again, so it's got to get a "Like" rating, hasn't it?