Four in February: The Second Coming – Week 2-3

It’s a little late on the horizon but part 3 of this year’s Four in February Challenge is all done and dusted. With only 3 days left to complete the challenge and rein supreme over EA’s apparent player appreciation month, I’m one game short of a completed challenge unless I decide to call it quits early and class my end of January midnight marathon of Gears of War 3 as my final farewell.

It could count. It may not have been a February achievement but it would total 4 completed games over the 28-day period that makes up that particular cold, lazy month.

In a 28 day stretch I’ve managed to finally blow up the queen of the Locust in Gears of War 3 without resorting to a 4am walk around the streets and lucazade to keep me going; Jabbed a handsome man with the butt of my 322 capacity laser rifle in Borderlands 2, cruised around the planets in Mario Galaxy (and then toured his casual-use Spaceship in Fortune Street) and — spoiler alert — stabbed God with a pocket knife in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasty XIII. While all that might seem a bit much to cram into a single month, it was a welcome escape from the labours of being the one of the only Lalafell in a guild of cat-girl Miqo’te in Final Fantasy XIV’s Eorzea. I made the mistake of picking more that one lengthy RPG game and already feel compelled to either pick up Bravely Default or Persona 4: Golden or attempt to carry on from where I left off in Final Fantasy VI because starting VIII.

It seems like more and more these days I’m playing catch-up with the game’s everyone already played years and years ago. MMOs do tend to get the better of me whether I like them or not, and more and more do I notice myself rubber-banding right back to them whether I’m already pressing on with a single-player game or not. The calls to smite people down in the name of Damacia in League of Legends and carry on pushing through the Coil of Buhamut in Final Fantasy XIV are still too strong for me to resist for long. As much as I need a break from them, I need a break from single-players games even quicker these days.

Unless it’s Final Fantasy XIII.

My initial 4th game for the month was mentioned as being Crysis 2 — A game I started, loved, and quickly strayed from a few months back when I needed to test out my crossfired HD6870 GPUs. The near constant 60fps was a god-send and the joys of smashing down walls and choppers simultaneously with a loud THX-style bang wasn’t something I wanted to give up so easily. Why I did, I just can’t remember. But thank’s to Crytek’s lousy support with a certain scaling issue, I was practically forced to give it up unless I wanted to subject my PC to multiple crashes and hangs until I could isolate and fix the issue through a tonne of different config options. And that’s not something I really want to do right now.

Instead, I’m switching to Tomb Raider! My second decision was to complete Torchlight 2 — a game I reviewed for TGH extensively when it launched in 2012, but I decided another RPG was probably a bad idea, especially considering the learning curve I’d need to tackle to get back into it.

In the relatively short time it took me to write up this post (and slack around Facebook) Steam managed to pump Lara Croft down its pipes and onto my hard drive. It’s the final stretch, people.

I’ve never felt more lazy.

Four in February status — 3/4 Games Complete (Wildcard = 4)

1. Borderlands 2
2. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
3. Super Mario Galaxy
4. Tomb Raider
5. Gears of War 3 (wildcard)

Four in February: The Second Coming – Week 1

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year since I set out on the quest to beat 4 games from the regrettable waste of money that is 70% of my admittedly beautiful Steam account. 12 months have passed since I cried a little at the let-down that was Alice: Madness Returns and called it quits on Final Fantasy XIII-2 after my attempt to swap out the PS3’s hard-drive with that of an old laptop resulted in the loss of around 6 hours of gameplay — either way, it’s February now (who knew?!) and that means it’s time to try it all over again!

“Let’s gun down this pile of sh*t.” – Prophet

This year’s Four in February festivities are making rounds far more quickly than last year with the guys over at Joystiq taking the reins and getting the word out to an audience we could only imagine. Thousands of people are more determined than ever to mine through their backlogs, throw the disks out of window and bury the cases in the backyard far away from the eternal resting place of their long passed pets.

If this years efforts are anything like last year’s, I’ll probably just load up my N64 and sit on the floor in old-timely fashion never to venture onto the internet ever again.

Moving on, just before the start of the month I had the spontaneous idea to re-attempt the completion of Gears of War 3 in a single sitting that I’d attempted with my cousin back when the game first launch.

Loading up on sweet, sweet chocolate and cheap energy drinks, we pushed the couch close to the television, cracking the volume up (down) and pushed through the game from 23:30 all the way to 07:00 all thanks to the Hammer of Dawn that seems to have saved that game’s planet time and time again.

But that was January. It doesn’t count. I need a fresh list of games for this month and here’s what I’ve conjured up:

Borderlands 2 — With my weakness to MMOs mixed with Final Fantasy XIV sucking up all my time, I thought it was time to escape for a little while with another multiplayer extravaganza. Ditching Eorzea for a little while me and my cousin decided to shoot up the skags in Borderlands 2 and actually wrapped it up in about 22 hours. It was fun! Albeit pretty tough when we refused to complete any of the side-quests. We came to avoid that sort of stuff!

Crysis 2 — The main reason I decided to kit out my PC with a second GPU. I threw a couple of hours at this game a few months back and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent punching cars onto foreigners — that is, until the cloaking aliens showed up. Those things are exactly what ruined the mood of our Borderlands playthrough. I don’t want to have to play hide and seek with something that wants to gnaw on my throat.

Super Mario Galaxy — I started this one yesterday and will most likely be jumping straight back on it after this post goes live. I was once stuck in my ways thinking I preferred the traditional Mario formula over the 3D counterparts up until I decided to play the utterly fantastic Super Mario 3D World justover a year ago. After seeing Galaxy run on an emulator in glorious 1080p (but with no music) it was a tough decision over which version to play. I settled with neither. Now I’m playing with my Wii.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII — Confused as to why this is here? Don’t be! Although I bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 around 15 months ago, it took me until a over a year of owning it to finally get around to completing it. And I loved it! A lot of people tend to hate on the XIII formula, but I’m one of those rare types who actually prefers to the standard Final Fantasy set-up. I pre-ordered Lightning Returns yesterday and will be making a start on that as soon as it launches. If Mario is still having a bit of a Gravity moment at that point, he’ll be staying there until I’m done. Mario is the Italian George Clooney after-all.

And that, readers, is my pick of this year’s Four in February challenge. I don’t really have the facilities or equipment to stream this year unless Crysis 2 doesn’t mind letting up on the resources a little. I should have posted this yesterday (or maybe on February 1st) but got a little tied up in the… festivities; but I’ll try my best to follow up on the progress every Thursday of the month from now on.

Wish me luck and let us know whether you’ll be taking part and, if so, which games you’ve picked for the challenge!