What We Played #145: Threes!, Ni No Kuni & Beerio Kart

Counting beyond two is finally beginning to take its toll on poor Stefan and his time with Threes! is being impacted as a result, with his points haul stalling around 10,000. He’s sought solace in pinball via Zen Pinball 2’s new football-themed table followed by a flipper-rattling spate of Pinball Arcade. The odd score into the hundreds of millions, depending on the table, means he’s been able to sleep despite his current Threes! score.

“A little bit slow and imprecise” is the working title for Peter’s autobiography how Peter describes Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare though he nevertheless reckons it is “still quite enjoyable”. Continuous action and “the ability to have someone in the tablet- or Kinect-enabled Boss Mode meaning that less able members of the family can still have fun and join in” are what keep the enjoyment ticking over.

Predictably, my least favourite part of it is the online multiplayer, which obviously suffers from all the same problems I find in almost every other online multiplayer shooter – lack of pacing and rhythm and unclear objectives. Co-op mode is a lot of fun though.

He’s also the latest among us to succumb to Threes!, a game that joins the long list of those he’s “not very good at”. His low scores are all so far the fault of things like “a sequence of five red 2s coming in a row or something equally as impassable” or so he reckons.  Perhaps the real cause is something else? You might think that but I couldn’t possibly comment…

Dan has spent an octet of hours playing Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, which sounds like a court case the former is bound to lose. “It’s an enjoyable crossover so far, despite the large chunks of little else but talking!” South Park and the Stick of Truth is currently under his reviewers gaze and while he can’t say too much now he did let slip that “those who have it on pre order shouldn’t be disappointed”.

Even before our regular readers finish reading the words Killzone: Shadow Fall you’ll know we’ve reached Tuffcub’s gaming exploits. He’s feeling quite chuffed with himself after “Hey, are you Tuffcub from TSA? I read that site all the time!” was shouted across the multiplayer battlefield at him.

Despite the tribulations previously recorded within these posts he says that he’s “finally got to grips with Don’t Starve. Well, sort of.”

Managed to build a fire pit and an Invention Engine thing but that was about it, I couldn’t find any of the other bits I needed to build other stuff. Got bored. Turned off.

There’s no update to his PS Vita gaming this week as his handheld has taken an inadvertent holiday on the Isle of Wight. Instead he tried Syndicate on his PS3. “It looks AWFUL now, so blurry compared to PS4 games. Did a bit more in Ni No Kuni instead, which is just a joy to play.” Additionally he’s still generating umpteen cookies per second in Cookie Clicker and still doesn’t have the faintest idea why, or how to stop.

Dom has a tail of woe to report that ends with an imminent silver lining:

I was deeply enjoying Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition. However I managed to discover a game breaking bug which corrupted my game save, losing me my seven hours playtime and making me very very grumpy. Even more annoying was that when I went online it turned out I wasn’t the only one and both the PS4 version and the Xbox One have various issues.

Either quality assurance departments are getting worse, or publishers just don’t care any more about putting out finished games! It makes even less sense when it’s a port of a year old game! At least Game gave me all my money back, and as it turns out I can replay it when it’s free on PS+ next week.

‘Oh noes too much LEGOs’ has become something of a refrain for him as the repetition required to get to the next humorous cutscene in LEGO Marvel Superheroes is getting to him. Only the fact that his son is still enjoying playing it is keeping him persevering at the moment.

If your own interpretation of the regular ‘Don’t drink and drive’ campaigns is that it means that you should always pull over to the side of the road to take a swig before driving off again then you’ll understand the rules of Beerio Kart which was a big feature of Blair’s birthday celebrations this week.

Before that, while still fairly sober, he’d been enjoying Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros.  with his friends. Said birthday did deliver him an iPad and of all the amazing creative uses you can put that slice of technology to him opted for playing Threes! on a bigger screen than usual. Puts the kibosh on the “older and wiser” saying as far as Blair goes, huh.

Have you played any video games while drunk this week?