What We Played #29

The other week in the What We Played six-month-iversary post I mentioned that each week when I ask the others what they have been playing I try and throw something else into the email in a desperate attempt to try and make it more interesting than just asking the same question every week. This week the ‘something else’ was inspired by one of Skyrim’s many oddities:

This week’s ponder-able: Why, when my Skyrim character has eight fingers, can I only wear one ring? You’d think it would at least be one per hand. It can’t be in case the ring’s powers affect magic cast with that hand as I can dual wield magic whether I’m wearing my one ring (note: not the One Ring, that’s a different fantasy world) or not.

Normally it’s all just an aside that makes the emails more entertaining for me to write and hopefully for the others to read. This week however, Alex replied, not with the list of games he’s been playing, but solely with a retort to my ponder-able. I liked his reply so much I thought I’d share it with you:

Skyrim 3.0 patch notes:

[UPDATED] You can now wear multiple rings. Please note that only one will be rendered using the full textures, others will be shown using low-res blurry vision and may be subject to lag, crashes, bugs and exponentially powerful attributes.

[REMOVED] Dragons.

Anyway, time to let you know what we have been playing. Kris has played his way through the CoD: Modern Warfare 3 campaign. “It’s silly and full of bombast”, he says, making his point about as subtly as MW3 tends to. “Whilst the story isn’t exactly the most emotionally charged thing in the world”, he continues, “at least it knows what it is and has no pretence about it”. An aspect of the game that does get a big thumbs up from Kris is how often you get to reach out and touch your enemy with a sniper rifle. “Love me some sniper rifles” he concludes.

[drop2]Aran has dialled down the dragon slaying as he nears the end of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s main story. He too has been playing MW3’s campaign, proudly noting that he played through on Veteran despite “a couple of silly checkpoints” that made it more frustrating than it could have been. He suggests that Activision should forego producing a MW4 as MW3 has tied up many of the series’ loose ends “in a satisfying way”. Do you agree?

Still crawling through the bleak underbelly of a cyberpunk future we find Toby. He is still “plodding” through Deus Ex: Human Revolution finding that stealth’s slower more careful path is the more rewarding one to take. He commends the scale of the neon-lit playgrounds, saying that “the city hubs are big enough to be immersive but not small enough to feel restrictive”. He has also enjoyed answering the moral questions along the way that challenge what it means to be human.

The only one of us to admit to playing a handful of games this week was Dan:

Over the last week I’ve played a load of Super Mario 3D Land. The game is Mario at his finest, and I didn’t think anything would top it for a good while. Then along came Ubisoft with Rayman Origins, which is utterly sublime and beats Nintendo at its own game. A game of the year contender.

Continuing on my platforming theme I’ve also been playing Cave Story 3D. It’s a charming little game, although I can see why many would baulk at paying £35-40 for it.

I’ve just started on the latest Professor Layton game too, and as a fan of the franchise it’s a case of “so far so good” for me. I have to agree with Peter’s review though when it comes to some totally obscure puzzles.

Setting aside a pile of games including Uncharted 3, MW 3, Battlefield 3, Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions and Transformers: War For Cybertron Chris’ gaming time has been consumed solely by his participation in the Starhawk Beta. “I’m not going to go too much into how I’m finding it as all my feedback is going in the relevant feedback forums”, he teases in a rare moment away from the game, “but it is awesome and yes it’s most definitely a beta with some stuff for the team to work on”.

You get no points for predicting that all I’ve played myself this week is more Skyrim and my regular weekly Gran Turismo 5 online meet-up with friends. This week a friend was particularly keen to have a race around Spa, so I duly obliged. He was less keen upon discovering I had set the weather to be suitably Ardennes-like. We certainly weren’t able to take Eau Rouge flat out in those conditions; just keeping our collection of RUFs and Lamborghinis pointing in roughly the right direction was tough enough!

I’ll leave you with a few more of my Skyrim ponder-ables based on my experiences:

• Why is there only ever one eye recoverable from a dead sabre cat for use in alchemy? What’s wrong with the other one? (cf. horker and mammoth tusks.)
• How long would it really take to eat a large deer antler?
• Is “run away screaming” really the only sensible way to deal with a Draugr Death Lord if your character’s level is less than 30?

All that remains is to ask what you’ve been playing this week?