Wot I Think: March 20th

Cleaning out the cobwebs in the gamer’s mind is a must sometimes, so here’s some quick hits on my thoughts about Mass Effect: Andromeda’s release, OOTP18 and more.

First off, March Madness is going on, and the first weekend of the tournament was.. well madness. We already have four top 4 seeds out of the tourney in the first week, including Duke, Louisville and Villanova. Only one regional had “chalk” (that is, the 4 highest seeds advancing). Going to be a fun tourney.

We’ll have the review Wolverine Studios Fast Break College Basketball up some time this week, probably by Thursday, but spoiler alert: the series is good, and this game is a worthy follow up.

We’ll have a full review of OOTP18 this week, but I’m beginning to sense there’s a fundamental disconnect between my sphere of gaming (text-sim grognards) and where OOTP is right now. I mean, for those people who’ve played the pre-release of OOTP18 on a “grognard” board I hang out at, you’d think the series is coasting on past laurels, and can’t do much right, then you look at the metacritic scores from the general public (Out of the Park 17 won the game of the year award from Metacritic), and you get confused. Maybe there’s an element of hipster-ism and shooting down the popular game because it doesn’t hit the grognard’s buttons that want an absolutely perfect financial model and has hinky things about expansion at times.

I will say this however for the OOTP folks: It may come from having released so many versions, but one thing I have NOT run into at all, is crashes to desktop or anything similar. It happens to a lot of games, even big names like Football manager (which is one of the reasons why people want a rolling save, just in case a file gets corrupted.

Finished Mass Effect: Andromeda’s trial on PC, before switching over to PS4 for now. It feels very Mass Effect:ish, and I mean that in a good way. They do a very good job of making you feel like “There is no safety net for the Andromeda Initiative”. You’re six hundred years from home, and the writing does a good job in emphasizing that for the people on this project, it’s you or nothing. There are some animation glitches, and at times the character models go straight into the uncanny valley, but I’m really enjoying it.  In fact, I’m cutting this post short because it’s 12:04 am on the east coast, and the game should have unlocked a bit ago. Time to go play!