Duke Nukem Forever

If they can publish it, I'm sure as hell going to beat it.

I probably should have played this normal difficulty, but whenever posed with the question of easy, medium, or hard. I usually go with hard, not because I want to hate the game, but because I don't want it to be overly easy.

Choosing hard was the wrong choice... Apparently hard means that either you know exactly what you're doing or your dead. For boss fights it means, you know how to avoid more than one successive shot or you're dead. Tip, there is just about always a good cover spot to use in a boss fight, so find it! The boss fights where this does not apply, are obvious. Also, if you're reloading your weapon when you didn't plan to reload, you're also dead. This last rule got me many times when I just so happened to run out of shotgun ammo as a pigcop lunged at my face.

The weapons were all unique and enjoyable such that I found myself constantly switching out for a different weapon as they dropped and weighing my choices against how much ammo I had left. My main focus was picking up the Steam achievements, in case any of those required a particular weapon. After that, I just went with the weapons that provided the easiest kills.

As far as story, it was good enough for what I was expecting. This game  was in no way trying to take itself seriously, and I liked that.

The only mechanics I didn't enjoy were the sudden quicktime events in the middle of a fight. This completely pulled me out of my mouse/keyboard sniping mode and into "beating the keyboard with both hands like it's a drum on Guitar Hero". Despite that, they did a good job of using this only when it makes sense (struggling to pull open a door, lifting weights, pulling a tusk off a pigcop's face to stab him with it, etc.)

For saving mechanics, this game chose to go with the checkpoint saves as you progress through the game. I did not find this nearly as frustrating as I did in Alice, but that's because there wasn't anything to meticulously collect in DNF. So for this game, I didn't mind it. Also, the automatic cloud save for this was nice, even though I only played it at home.

Would I recommend playing this game? Yes, especially if you're a Duke Nukem fan. Would I personally buy it for the $50 price tag? No, but I did pick it up for $25 when Steam did their Summer Sale.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Defense Grid is probably the best tower defense game I have ever played, and I loves me some tower defense games!

The game progressed very well, introducing you to new towers and mechanics as the game progresses. The voice acting is superb, and helps to lighten the mood. There are few things as gratifying as nuking the one straggler that got through your defenses with an orbital laser beam.

I did find myself leaning heavily toward concussion, gun, temporal, and cannons near the end, almost completely ignoring inferno, laser, and meteor towers, but to each their own. I'm love to hear how I could use these towers more effectively. I did start using tesla towers more when I realized they were great at knocking down the shields before they got to my fully upgraded concussion towers.

I am only two achievements from having all sixty-five achivements in this game if that tells you anything about how much I enjoyed this game.

Anyways, if you have a chance, I'd definitely recommend picking it up. Especially if you like turret defense games. I got mine on Steam, but it's also on XBLA.

UPDATE: I just finished the You Monster DLC for this game. It was fantastic, although a bit short. Each level added a nifty new mechanic that GLaDOS threw against you, restricting what you can build, while being a snarky bitch about it, removing towers she thinks are too useful, etc. I'd recommend picking it up. It only took me about 2-3 hours to finish it with a gold medal on each level, but they were fun figuring out how to win.

Trine

So I finally did it. I beat Trine.

It was a really beautiful game to play and lots of fun. The puzzles were just you versus physics with some skeletons thrown into the mix. The enemies were limited, but it wasn't about the enemies as much as getting to work out how to use the characters to solve the puzzles.

The only downside or negative points I could give to this game was the awkward ending. After performing tricky jumps to get at chests hidden from view, and slaughtering tons of skeletons they follow this up with a completely different mechanic that you were not prepared for that was extremely frustrating.

Aside from that, it was a great game and I would definitely recommend giving it a shot.

If you didn't get it as part of the awesome FrozenByte Bundle, then you can still catch it today for five bucks on Steam. What's Steam you say? Get off my blog!