What I Played and Read This Week - '26/01/11

I'm going to be real: I spent most of the week playing Arc Raiders. Sorry. 

Games

I beat the hardest version of every stage currently available in Megabonk, and I intend to stop there until more are released, despite having barely touched the roster and still being missing about a third of the unlocks. The trouble is that it's simply monotonous; it's better than Vampire Survivor and most of its clones, but with Risk of Rain's ability rotations replaced with a bunch of autofire weapons, the gameplay never really changes; you're just zooming around the map as your character kills things. It doesn't help that all the bosses feel the same: they draw from the same small pool of MMO raid-esque attacks, and, infuriatingly, all of the final bosses have the same annoying clear-pylons-to-progress gimmick. It doesn't help that the unlocks have been a slow drip: rather than unlocking items by meeting specific requirements or buying them from a store, you must do BOTH, first meeting an item's requirement and then paying a frequently exorbitant amount of silver for it; this frankly insane design decision had me unlocking eight or ten items in runs that earned enough silver to afford two or three of them. Not great! Oh, and the wacky text is cloying and insincere.

Mighty Bomb Jack is a really cool game with a bizarre yet ingenious and intentional control scheme; it's stymied any attempt to make it past stage thirteen or so, even with all the weird tricks it has to skip levels. I'll talk more about it when I beat it or give up.

[HERE LIE THE GAMES THAT WERE NEVER PLAYED, CRUELLY SLAIN BY ARC RAIDERS]

Books

Anne of Green Gables continues to be excellent and I really should've finished it this week but I was too busy playing— you know how this sentence ends.

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