Welcome to Press Start! This is a weekly segment that dives into what we here at The Game Fanatics are currently playing. Feel free to leave a comment with what you’ve been playing or if you have any questions about the games that we are currently involved with.
Jeff: After the announcement of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, I absolutely had to go back to my favorite series of all time. I reviewed the first game, which still holds up very well, but I had to take care of one blind spot that has been gnawing at me for some time now: Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops. I’m less than two hours in, but I’m already intrigued by where the story is going. I’ll definitely be playing this one all week. I jumped back into Gran Turismo 5 to knock out a few challenges, and I’m also putting some time into my 3DS. I’ll be reviewing a new eShop release later this week, but here’s a preview: I’m very impressed.
Jen: After coming home from PAX, the first game that I played was Transformers Fall of Cybertron. I had about an hour left of the game that I wasn’t able to finish before leaving for Seattle. Amazing game! If you’re a fan of Transformers, you need to play FoC. The story alone is better than both of the live action movies that were made. I then got the Leviathan DLC for Mass Effect 3. Not bad, but it did prompt me to want to get all the achievements for ME3, just as I had done with the last two games in the series. I was holding back from getting all the achievements in ME3 because I didn’t want to play multiplayer. And Bioware did mention that you don’t have to play online to get all the achievements, but you have to for one of them. So I caved in and started to play online and I actually enjoyed it. The ME3 multiplayer is a lot of fun and I had the chance to play with two fellow TGFers, John and Enis. Now I’m only one achievement shy from 100%, which is kill 5K enemies. I have little under 500 to go. I also picked up Rock Band Blitz via XBLA. It took me a little bit to get used to, but now that I have a feel for the game, I’m really enjoying it.
Joel: I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 as an elemental which is by far my favorite MMO toon since a fire blaster in City of Heroes (#savecoh) and have gotten deep into Dead Island open world zombie mayhem. Leveled up a few times in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and started Just Cause 2. Too many games so little time.
Enis: I noticed this week I’m starting to get my Halo urges back. I took a small hiatus from the game because I just got tired of leveling. Some reason, it’s back though. I’ve always been a hardcore Halo fan though so I’d never really stop playing. Been focusing on leveling up in Halo: Reach and still trying to complete Halo 3: ODST 100%. With the Operation this weekend for Mass Effect 3, I got the chance to play with Jen and John for a while. It was super fun and relaxing (I even dozed off one round). My main focus still right now is getting achievements completing them fully. I finished my Insanity run through of Mass Effect 3 with the Extended Cut and Leviathan DLC, won’t go into details about it, I’ll let my review speak for itself. Glad to complete that games single player, for now.
Ben: After PAX I got right back into Dark Souls and it still blows my mind how much I like it. It’s easily one of my favorite games of all time and I can’t wait to get to the new content.