While I’m bathing in a sea of games to play, I can’t help but notice the overwhelming number of cooperative games I have available. I love co-op games and I usually have to struggle to find any worth playing.
The heavy influx of cooperative games is timed quite conveniently. I haven’t been “busy” due to binging on games. No, really! This weekend, I’m getting married to someone who’s as much a gaming nerd as I. As it turns out, that’s a rather time-consuming endeavor.
I’m completely overloaded with games right now. A few of these are old ones that I picked up recently, but they’re all relatively new to my collection. Off the top of my head:
And soon:
And I’m tempted by Dead Space. And I keep looking towards an older PS3 because I love Ratchet & Clank and have a bunch of PS2 games I never played because of a dying PS2. Then there’s a new Castlevania. Oh, and Chrono Trigger on the DS. Then there’s all the ones I’m forgetting, and the maybes like Sacred 2.
I picked up King’s Bounty a couple weeks ago and I’ve been quite addicted. Despite being incredibly busy lately, I’ve still managed to find time to play it almost every day. If you’re not familiar with King’s Bounty, it’s essentially Heroes of Might & Magic RPG. The Legend is a Russian-developed update to the original.
Heroes of Might & Magic provided me with a lot of fun over the years, but I was always more into the exploration and development than fighting other players. That makes King’s Bounty almost exactly what I wanted out of Heroes.
I’ll probably write about it more in depth later, but for now I’m just going to recommend the demo.
I came across an intriguing F2P/microtransaction MMO yesterday that’s in open beta. It’s called Atlantica Online, and it’s billed as a strategic turn-based MMORPG.
Looking at the game, it is very similar to the typical MMO. The differences are in the combat and some of the mechanics. You have a main avatar, but then you recruit small to large armies of mercenaries to support you. There are monsters all over the world map like a typical MMO, but they function like enemies in Chrono Trigger - they just pull you into a little battle instance. Turns have short time limits (15-30 seconds), and all players on one side can take their turns simultaneously. Each unit builds up AP per turn, and various actions take different amounts of AP. It played rather smooth in a group and in a PvP fight.
There are quite a few interesting features. Their encyclopedia is rather cool, and it records just about everything. Encountering monsters adds them to the encyclopedia. Every NPC/quest mob is in there, and it fills in information as you complete the quests. When you talk to a quest mob that you don’t qualify for, he’ll tell you to go complete X quest from NPC Y. There are lots of little chests you loot that are fun slot machines.
I had quite a bit of fun controlling a party and grouping with one other player. Hopefully it lasts.