Part two of this little series should be a bit smaller in your feed, mainly because I don’t remember exactly why I played some of these games, or how enough hours/achievements were logged in Raptr to qualify for whatever metric “Experienced” falls under. Regardless, here’s another 10 of the 30 games I played long enough to hit that mark. Enjoy!

1.  Final Fantasy 7 (PC) – Yeah, you read that right. It’s the old classic Playstation game that basically cemented the series into 3d. There was a re-release of the game sometime over the past year and because it was by far the longest RPG I’d ever finished, I felt the need to re-live it. Well, I don’t think I ever got to the world map which is a couple of hours in, but I got the jist of the nostalgia that I was looking for. They added in a cheat option that gives you 9999hp and some other things, once turning that on all will to play the game left me. Killing things in one hit is not a good alternative to needing to skip a tough fight. There’s a fair bit of grind involved to advance far enough along in order to keep up with the story. I couldn’t do it. Back in the day, FF7 was top of the line stuff. Now, it’s a curious memory that I should have left to fade into obscurity.
2. Vessel – This is a platformer indie game in which you use liquid physics to solve puzzles. You’re stuck deep in your lab and… ah, I have no idea what you’re doing really. You have this weird backpack thing on, there’s little minions that you create by squirting different sorts of goo onto their pods that you carry around. It was pretty challenging, but I think the thing that stopped me was not being able to find the next objective. Another one of the indie games I picked up this year for no real reason other than the low cost of entry.
3. Fallen Earth – Apparently the barrier of entry to this MMO to be HARDCORE is a mere 8 hours and 9 achievements. Fallen Earth is the post-apocalyptic MMO if you’re not familiar with it. I must have started playing it at some point after it went F2P. I always had a mild interest in it, but never enough to shell out money for a box and the time that came with it. The HARDCORE moniker that Raptr gave me is laughable. I barely scratched the surface (I hope) but ultimately left after running a couple dozen quests over a couple of days. The post-apoc is cool and all, but it reminded me of the EQ2 quest hubs. Lots of busy work with nothing really rewarding under the surface.
4. Ys Origin
5. and Ys: The Oath in Felghana – Ha! I cheated! Okay, so I’m mushing these two together because they are essentially the same game with different stories. Same 2d sprite on 3d environment engine, same combat. I burned through 4 hours of Felghana and only 45m of Origin. You’re a hero, things happen, you run around beating up bad guys. It was pretty bland. I remember the Ys series from my childhood (not really anything specific, just that it existed). Turns out you can’t turn blurry nostalgic memories into a fascination with a mediocre game.
6. Legend of Grimrock – This is one of those indie games that had a lot of people talking this past year, and even today I see people popping on for a couple of hours at a time. I remember games like this, the old school D&D dungeon crawl games. They were full of little puzzles and battles that you only win when patient or tricky. I got about 8 levels deep and ended up shelving it because I got into a situation where I was running out of torchlight and I spent way too much time trying to figure out puzzles, where it seems knowing the answers in advance is the best way to get past them. In a different time I might have gotten heavily invested in a game like this, but that time was back before the age of AAA games that can do so much more when I’m willing to pay for it. I would still say LoG was worth the money I threw down, it just wasn’t a whole lot to begin with.
7. Smite – It’s a Hi-Rez production, so the amount of stuff you can pay for is extensive. Smite is a full 3d version of the MOBA’s I like to play. It’s also based on loosely on ancient mythology. I still haven’t seen Jesus the Zombie Lord, but I’m waiting for it. There’s the 3-lane standard match with minions and jungle buffs like you’d expect, and they also have an arena match now where you go head to head in a big circle. That seems to be the preferred game of my group at the moment. Back when I picked it up, it was to try it out and I couldn’t really get a handle on it. After a couple hundred League of Legends matches later I’ve picked up some of the finer points of MOBA’ing and seem to have a modicum of skill at it. Still in beta though, so don’t bother getting your hopes up on quality. Probably best to wait for an actual release on this one.
8. Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
9. and Assassins Creed 2
10. and Assassins Creed – Ha ha! I cheated again! Even harder this time! Between these three I spent a little over 60 hours straight getting bored with the series. The premise that you’re using a device to travel through your DNA based memory looking for some ultimate weapon is kind of cute, but it just keeps dragging on and on. I have to say of the series I enjoyed the first one better. I preferred the combat and travel in it, and the UI was a bit cleaner. Seems like 2 and Broho clutter it up quite a bit in making sure that everything you need to do is well documented with UI. The series does slow down when you switch games and end up needing to not only relearn the basic controls again, but go out and collect all the things to rebuild your arsenal of interesting tools. When a series is continuing one right after another, could we please just skip that part? Especially as it got later into the series and it seemed like they needed to stretch out the game by adding in little grindy elements. When it’s obvious that I’m missing 15 other objectives on a map, I WILL go and find them, which ultimately left me with the burnout to skip AC:Revelations and AC:3 altogether. I’ll probably pick up AC:3 eventually, but now I’m waiting for it to drop below the 50% mark.