Overwatch launched and immediately became super popular, but I wasn’t sure I would like it. I’d never gotten into Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive frustrated me, and my time playing DotA 2 and League of Legends was short-lived. Somehow, despite Overwatch being likened to all of these games, I love Overwatch alone.

I kept hearing about Stardew Valley on Reddit as well as seeing friends on Steam playing it. It was priced at $15 with an extra $5 to get the soundtrack. I very rarely dislike video game soundtracks so of course I had to get the soundtrack, too. I wasn’t sure how well I’d like the actual game, but /r/girlgamers was talking about it and it sounded cute, with $15 being cheap enough that I was willing to give it a shot, especially to support an indie game. The few screenshots I’d seen put Minecraft in mind because of the item bar across the bottom of the screen, and there was a pickaxe. So whatever, I figured I’d try it.

I’ve been replaying Okami HD recently; coming back to it after several years of not playing made me notice anew all the little details that make the game so great. I really recommend the game on PS3, and I hope they rerelease it on the PS4 or make a proper sequel. I found the game originally because I enjoyed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and saw Okami listed as being a similar game, at least in so far as you got to play as a wolf. I would say now I prefer Okami to Twilight Princess.

Jon got me The Witcher 3 as a gift on Steam shortly after it came out because I was replaying Dragon Age 2, again, and he wanted me to find a new game I might love. He had been watching Destiny stream it and thought it looked up my alley. I had heard of the game and had seen it getting rave reviews on Reddit, but I was dubious since it forces you to play as a set character. I’ve not had much luck getting into games like Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and even the first game in the Witcher series; I prefer games like Dragon Age or Skyrim that let you create your own character. However, the bits of The Witcher 3 gameplay I’d seen looked cool, and it’s a super pretty game, so I tried it. I’m so glad I gave it a chance.

I found SimCity Plus on sale on Origin for $20 last week. I checked on Reddit if it was worth it and was told that with the inclusion of the Cities of Tomorrow expansion, which came with the Plus version, it was. I bought it and was super excited to try it because I’ve been really enjoying Tropico 4 and wanted to experience the new SimCity.

It was the middle of the night. I was surrounded by four shirtless men bearing torches and deadpan expressions. One of them threw raw chicken breasts at me and told me to eat them, or they’d kill me. Maybe they’re being nice I thought. Maybe they can see I’m hungry and they’re trying to save me. So I ate a chicken breast and immediately began vomiting–I had been poisoned!

This is a tutorial that shouldn’t need to be written, if half the parties involved weren’t being ridiculous. My problem: I have Art Academy on my Nintendo 3DS and I want to post my paintings on Tumblr. I don’t want to remove the SD card every time I want to get an image off of my 3DS. The solution I discovered is a circuitous one.

I got Animal Crossing New Leaf on the day it came out in the US: Sunday, June 9^th. Jon and I have been playing it since. I’ve really been enjoying it, and I think it’s my favorite Animal Crossing game yet. There are more shops and more places to go, plus I’m finally getting to travel to other towns easily. I never had any friends on my DS so I couldn’t travel with Wild World. I think I maybe visited someone else’s town like twice in City Folk. This time around, thanks to Reddit, I’ve exchanged Friend Codes with lots of other AC players. Most of the time when I go to my town gate and try to visit another town, one to two people have their gates open. And when I’ve opened my own town gate, I usually get visitors. That’s been great, because I can find cool items for sale in other towns, and people help grow my own Nook shop by buying stuff there.

I got the Supernatural expansion pack the other day off of Amazon, for The Sims 3. I had been hoping for such an expansion ever since Makin’ Magic for the first Sims was so awesome. Supernatural has been pretty good so far, enough to where I’d recommend getting it. I can’t say the same for, say, the Generations expansion.

I found out today that one of my favorite games ever, Okami, is coming to the PS3 this fall in an HD remake.  I’m so excited about this! I was actually just recently wanting to replay it on the Wii, but my parents have my Wii right now because my dad started playing Zelda Skyward Sword, and I didn’t want to take it away from him. I was just scrolling through my Facebook feed today when I saw mention from the Okami page, which I Liked a while back, about some kind of Okami HD. “What what WHAAAAAT??” I thought, and had to research more. I found a post on the PlayStation Blog, so it seems pretty official. 1080p, Move controls supported but not required, coming to North America and Japan at least, new trophies, $20 on PSN. The whole thing sounds awesome. Check out the trailer below.

I started playing a new game of Dragon Age 2 last night after about five months of not playing it. As I play through it again, I can’t help but get frustrated all over again with the laziness shown in the game. I thought the game was okay, but like many fans of Dragon Age Origins, DA2 didn’t feel like a proper sequel. There are so many little details that add up to make it seem like the developers were either incredibly rushed or thought the fans were idiots. Lots of things in the game give the feeling of rushing you along, instead of making you want to pay attention to detail and immerse yourself. The lack of item descriptions, for example, along with boring item names. You find dozens of Rings, Belts, and Long Swords, items with completely generic names like that, and items in DA2 have no description, unlike in Origins, so I tend to disregard them as soon as I get them. In Origins, even if I got a plain amulet or a wimpy mace, it had a bit of descriptive text that I wanted to read. “This mace is deceptively heavier than it looks”, something like that, so that even everyday items encouraged a second look before confining them to the junk heap.

Arrgh, all I want to do is relax by playing Dragon Age II, but I’ve been struggling for twenty minutes plus with stupid PS3 updates. I wanted to get my free DLC stuff in DA2 that I got from ordering off of Amazon, so I registered my game online and it should just show up in-game. I figure it has to be online to do that, in order to see that I’ve registered and maybe download the content. But I couldn’t sign into the PS network because Insight is a shitty ISP and we constantly need to reset the router. So I do that, my PS3 is able to get online again, and it immediately tells me there’s a system update so I can’t log into PSN yet.

Hope you folks aren’t sick of hearing about Animal Crossing, because I’ve been playing the Gamecube version recently after a year of playing City Folk for the Wii, and I wanted to grumble about some of the differences. It feels like they left a lot of detail out of City Folk and I don’t understand why. Perhaps it’s because they based City Folk off Wild World for the DS, and they had had to leave stuff out of Wild World due to memory/space limitations. If that’s the case, then it seems just sheer laziness not to have ported things from the Gamecube to the Wii game, since obviously the Wii can handle whatever the Gamecube (GC) can. Here are some of the things they left out of City Folk (CF):

Talk of the new Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 3DS has gotten me thinking recently about if another Animal Crossing were made for a non-handheld Nintendo console, either the Wii or its successor. Jon had an excellent idea the other day: an Animal Crossing MMO. Now, I’m not thinking World of Warcraft but with animals, because that wouldn’t keep with the theme of Animal Crossing. But I think there are a variety of improvements that could be made to Animal Crossing that would make it more a social experience, which I think would be a good thing. A problem I have with all the existing A.C. games is that, after a while, they feel too small. The animals repeat the same things (if I have to hear about the Mayor’s connections in City Folk one more time…), the days run together, and it becomes basically an item grab: get Gracie’s furniture sets, get all the Mush set items, get all the clothing, get all the Gyroids, get all the fossils, get all the town upgrades, etc. I get that that’s the heart of the game anyway, but when that becomes too transparent, the game loses its appeal.

Though I hadn’t seen any reviews of Late Night on Metacritic, I went ahead and bought the expansion pack after reading a positive review on Cinema Blend. It took me a good two hours to be able to play the game, though, because it kept crashing. This didn’t really surprise me because The Sims 3 has got to be one of the most unstable programs I run, based on the number of crashes I get. I’m on a Windows 7 64-bit machine, which I’m sure contributes to it based on all the problems other people seem to have on 64-bit machines with The Sims 3. Why EA/Maxis isn’t preparing for the future (not that 64-bit machines are particularly futuristic anymore, but that just makes EA/Maxis look even worse) is beyond me.

So while reading about Animal Crossing: City Folk earlier, I tried to find a way to restore some of my grass, which has been wearing away to brown dirt everywhere. Turns out there’s quite a stink over the “feature” Animal Tracks that Nintendo built into the game. The idea was that grass would wear away where you walked most, but the problem is that it wears away pretty quickly and can take a month to nearly a year to grow back fully. If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, this might not seem like a big deal to you, but it’s actually a big part of the game. A lot of Animal Crossing is aesthetic value, and living in Mudville is not attractive. Also, you miss out on certain bugs that live in grass and, in the winter, snow only appears on grass so you can’t do snowmen.