Zombies and Legos

I am an avid gamer. Okay....backtrack. I like to game, and while I play on a nearly daily basis, I usually only put roughly an hour (if that) into my gaming. I have tons of other stuff to do that needs to get done. Like say, my bazillions of fanfics. My original stories. Watching tv shows. Reading books. Other stuff.

If I play hour after hour, I end up feeling like I've wasted tons of time. Now with that said, there are some games, especially the ones I'm really into, I can crank out a couple hours of gameplay.

Here are the two games I've been playing lately.

State of Decay

What can I say? Zombies!!!!!

My uber-favorite game at the moment is State of Decay. The zombie apocalypse has hit the fan, and the survivors of Trumbull Valley fight to survive (including you). You can play as any character you add to your group of survivors, but in the end, your sole goal is to survive as long as possible.

The original game is a storyline where you try to survive long enough to fix up an RV and taking a select few, escape the valley. I have tried to play it twice now, and the first time around, I survived roughly seven days, before my group was decimated. I had just volunteered for a mission to see what the army was up to and save a few survivors. But, I had already lost two people that day (to zombie hordes) and I was killed trying to catch up to the survivors I had saved. After that, my group lost most of it's members, who fled for dear life, and I ended up getting into a rut where they kept having to deposit new characters for me to play because I kept dying and couldn't get any weapons or anything. Second time was only moderate better.

But when they released the first expansion "Breakdown" and removed the mission elements of the game, I have become a thriving beast. The whole point of it is to survive as long as possible. You can leave the valley, only to be deposited into a new valley, which is the same valley. And you continue to fight until you die out.

As a HUGE Walking Dead Fan, it sates my zombie blood lust. :P

I have made it to Valley #2 and I have gotten to a point that I haven't been killed once in a week. My only real gripes is how stupid the other survivors are. The higher hitting ones (which gain skills and levels only when you play them) are a bit more proactive on scavenging missions and defending themselves. But the less experienced ones are total morons. They stand around, waiting to get attacked. Scavenging missions are the worst. You might have six cars at your base, and they will send one person and they won't drive there! No matter how far.

I do hope that the second expansion "Lifeline" fixes much of the AI problems.

Lord of the Rings Lego

Lord of the Rings on Lego? YES!

The fifth Lego video game I've owned, it is the third for PC, my preferred gaming machine. And believe me, I've got a very nice gaming machine, personally built. I've put maybe six hundred dollars into it over the course of two+ years. But, that's beside the point.

I am a HUGE Lord of the Rings fan. This year will mark my sixteenth read of the trilogy. So when I discovered that LOTR was coming out for Lego (which I own Star Wars Complete Saga and Clone Wars for PC and the Harry Potter Years 1-4 and Gotham City for Apple) I knew I wanted it. But, despite my love for the games, these have taken me the longest to getting around to finish. Perhaps it has to deal with the fact that it is much harder to reach 100% than other games.

I also can't claim it's an improvement over the other games. The lack of a base area (which the Mos Eisley Cantina serves great as in the Star Wars ones) means that in order to get more people, you have to travel all of Middle Earth (which really isn't all THAT bad). The idea of side missions on the world map is an okay idea....considering you can figure out where ANY of the stuff is for these quests. I have yet to complete a single side quest.

What can compare to the Fellowship in Lego Form?

But I find it fun all the same. One vast improvement I find is the ability to not only swap through your small group during a mission, but the ability to switch with EVERY character you have purchased up to that point in time. That is a marked improvement over other games, where you only can change to a few characters at any time.

Now, don't get me wrong. I play many other games (I love the modern XCOM games, the Total War series, and the Call of Duty Games). But those are the two I have focused my efforts on the past little while.

Thank goodness for the Day Off!