Rogue’s Adventures Season Six Recap

Detailed stats, rankings, and summaries of Season Six of my backlog gaming group, Rogue’s Adventures.

Season Six Schedule

Game	Estimated Hours to Complete	Start Date	Total Hours/Completion Date	Goal
Ori and the Blind Forest	9	7/14/2015	10hrs/July 22, 2015	Jul-15
Unepic	22	7/28/2015	21hrs/Aug 19, 2015	Aug-15
Child of Light	13	8/31/2015	11hrs/Sept 15, 2015	Sep-15
This War of Mine	13	9/22/2015	12hrs/Oct 2, 2015	Oct-15
Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse	12	10/07/15	12.5hrs/Oct 23, 2015	Oct-15
Gunpoint	4	10/27/15	4hrs/Oct 29, 2015	Oct-15
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine	14	11/03/15	10hrs/Nov 16, 2015	Nov-15
Hand of Fate	15	11/24/15	11.5hrs/Dec 7, 2015	Dec-15
Tales from the Borderlands	10.5	12/10/15	11.5hrs/Dec 24, 2015	Dec-15

Ori and the Blind Forest – 10 hours in 9 days = 7.77 hrs/wk
Unepic – 21 hours in 23 days = 6.39 hrs/wk
Child of Light – 11 hours in 16 days = 4.81 hrs/wk
This War of Mine – 12 hours in 11 days = 7.64 hrs/wk
Broken Sword 5 – 12.5 hours in 17 days = 5.15 hrs/wk
Gunpoint – 4 hours in 3 days = 9.33 hrs/wk
Monaco – 10 hours in 14 days = 5 hrs/wk
Hand of Fate – 11.5 hours in 14 days = 5.75 hrs/wk
Tales from the Borderlands – 11.5 hours in 15 days = 5.37 hrs/wk

Total Hours: 103.5 (Estimated 112.5)

Total Average Hours per Week: 6.36

Six hours a week doesn’t seem like a sharp decline from last year’s 7.25 average but over a 6 month period it definitely adds up. I’m surprised I still made it well over 5 hours a week, though Gunpoint‘s very short run time probably helped inflate that number quite a bit.

Thanks to some much shorter games on average, I was still able to complete the same amount of games as last season, despite spending about 35 less hours. Yay indie games!

Season Six Stats (with last Season’s numbers)

Tweets by @RoguesAdventure: 340 (501), Total tweets: 5, 449
Total Number of Screenshots Taken: 1,936 (1,984)
Average Number of Screenshots per Game: 215 (220)
Most Screen Captured Game: Tales from the Borderlands 669 – 1/3 of my total screenshots this season and a new record! (Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag 643)
Total Games Completed: 9 (9)

Season Six Rankings

Ori and the Blind Forest – Beautiful, poignant, challenging, and fun, Ori is easily one of the best metroidvanias I’ve ever played.
Tales from the Borderlands – The Telltale narrative adventure is brilliantly grafted into the zany Borderlands world, excelling with witty writing and fun action.
This War of Mine – Effectively combines the emotional toll and physical danger of war with a strategy layer of managing survivors and resources.
Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine – A brilliantly designed and cleverly themed top-down cooperative stealth game that’s much less fun to play by yourself.
Hand of Fate – Despite some frustrations, Hand of Fate successfully layers in 3rd person combat into a highly randomized card-based tabletop adventure.
Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse – A satisfying, if overly long, fifth entry that has the fun characters and varied puzzles of the venerable adventure franchise.
Child of Light – Ubisoft effectively distills all the best elements of a traditional JRPG into a fun and beautiful 10-15 hour package.
Gunpoint – Rewiring security in this 2D stealth-puzzler is a blast, but it’s too short to fully embrace more advanced levels.
Unepic – An interesting 2D action-platformer-RPG with a few too many problems that keep it from indie greatness.

Indie games are in a really fantastic place right now. Many of these titles started life as dreams on Kickstarter and blossomed into really memorable, fantastic, and maybe most importantly, compact experiences. As I get older and my game time becomes more and more precious, being able to play through an entire game in the span of a dozen hours (or less) becomes more and more attractive.

Both Ori and the Blind Forest and Tales from the Borderlands made my 2015 Game of the Year list. I like the trend toward playing more recent game – mostly afforded by the fact that I’ve gone through a good chunk of my older backlogged games in previous seasons of Rogue’s Adventures.

This Season was definitely punctuated by bulk sale purchases during Steam sales, particularly during this year’s Steam Summer Sale. Six of the nine games I played this Season were bought during the Steam Summer Sale, which is an incredibly satisfying turnaround.

As my gaming time continues to dwindle each Season, I’m thankful I still have time to play games. Between family life, running an online D&D campaign with friends, and my freelance writing career, Rogue’s Adventures has kept me constantly playing fun games. With so many awesome, big games this last Fall it has been a tricky balance, but I like the interaction and writing that comes from playing through these backlog games.

I’d like to keep Rogue’s Adventures going as long as I can, and hopefully next Season I can maintain a similar schedule and pacing. See you next year, and happy gaming!

Follow @RoguesAdventure for live tweeting and screenshots, join the Rogue’s Adventures Steam group for updates, and Follow me on Twitch and Subscribe on YouTube for videos.

Gaming Backlog Final Thoughts – Tales from the Borderlands

The Telltale narrative adventure is brilliantly grafted into the zany Borderlands world, excelling with witty writing and fun action.

I have finished another backlogged game via Rogue’s Adventures. You can read my latest Final Thoughts below and also on my gaming blog on Game Informer.

Developer: Telltale Games

Publisher: Telltale Games

Release Date: Episode 1: November 25, 2014, Episode 2: March 17, 2015, Episode 3: June 23, 2015, Episode 4: August 18, 2015, Episode 5: October 20, 2015

There’s a now-infamous puzzle in the first episode of Telltale Games’ 2012 The Walking Dead adventure game where you have to find and put batteries in a radio. It’s ridiculously simply to the point of insulting, but I remember thinking “Hey, at least we got a classic inventory puzzle in this otherwise very narrative-heavy game.”

Since then, Telltale has doubled-down in their unique subgenere of adventure game that tells an incredibly solid story filled with choice-driven dialogue and action-packed quick-time events – and almost no actual puzzles. Their latest adventure, Tales from the Borderlands, exemplifies this philosophy to the point where I feel like I’m watching a series of cutscenes at least half the time.

And yet, the story is good. Really, really good. It begins as a classic thieves tale and zany con-artist scheme and expertly weaves together a fantastic mix of cultures and players within the Borderlands world to create a truly memorable and fun experience. I ranked it #8 on My Top Ten Games of 2015.

For the first time in a Telltale adventure, we get to play as dual protagonists, Fiona and Rhys. Fiona is a native Pandoran, an orphaned thief with a good heart and a sassy sister. Rhys is a corporate stooge working for Hyperion in the orbiting space station Helios. Thanks to an elaborate con being pulled by Fiona involving a valuable vault key, Rhys tries to take advantage and the two become embroiled in a much bigger plot. Continue reading “Gaming Backlog Final Thoughts – Tales from the Borderlands”

My Top Ten Games of 2015: Full List and Awards

My annual Game of the Year list ranks my favorite games of 2015, as well as other fun awards and categories.

This year I wanted to do something a bit more fun with my annual Top Ten Games list. I wanted to give each game their proper due, with their own blog post for each of the 10 days leading up to Christmas. I barely kept pace but it was a lot of fun.

So if you’ve been following my blog you already know my Top Ten Games of the Year. This final list is important for other reasons: I directly compare the results of last year’s Most Anticipated list and 2015’s Mid-Year Top Five list, as well as assign various fun awards and rankings at the end. Continue reading “My Top Ten Games of 2015: Full List and Awards”

My Top Ten Games of 2015: #8

My #8 Game of the Year is Tales from the Borderlands, a brilliantly written episodic adventure in one of my favorite gaming worlds.

My Top Ten Games of 2015

#10 MASSIVE CHALICE

#9 Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void

#8 Tales from the Borderlands

I, along with everyone else in the gaming world got utterly sucked into 2012’s The Walking Dead video game by Telltale Games. This narrative-focused adventure game centered more on making important choices and leveraging relationships rather than traditional inventory puzzles. It was also harrowing and dramatic. It came in at #6 on My Top Ten Games of 2012 list.

Since then Telltale has exploded in popularity, snatching up several licenses to create more episodic adventure games along the same vein as The Walking Dead.

I’ve mostly stayed away. I watched a friend play the first two episodes of The Walking Dead Season 2, and I tried the first episode of The Wolf Among Us, but neither really grabbed me. I’ve also heard worryingly bad things about their Game of Thrones adventure, which also just recently wrapped up.

With Tales from the Borderlands, however, it was nothing but excitement and praise, even from folks who didn’t care about Gearbox’s quirky, goofy shooter world. I happen to be a big fan of the Borderlands games: Borderlands 2 was #2 on that 2012 list, while I gave Best Cooperative Game to the Pre-Sequel last year.

Tales from the Borderlands expertly weaves an action-packed tale among thieves and con artists on the zany world of Pandora. Dual protagonists Fiona and Rhys let the story split up and rejoin at key moments, while an expanding cast of excellent, well-written characters makes even the slowest dialogue moments a joy to play out. Continue reading “My Top Ten Games of 2015: #8”