I think I might have an abusive relationship with fighting games; I enjoy playing them vs other people (despite being arse at them), enjoy watching better players go at it, and I even enjoy the training room grind. But I also stress over playing them, and I somehow end up feeling guilty when I'm not playing or practicing, to the detriment of the long list of other games (old and new) that I want to play. So I think I think me and fighting games will have to see other people for a while. Speaking of which, I've started playing
ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West (no seriously, that's the title on Steam), a game that I've been wanting to have a go at for a long time. Turns out that I
should have done so a long time ago, as it is one of those games that make the post-apocalypse look like a good time, including the ruined remains of New York:
The game is a not very complex brawler with some light Sands of Time like traversal, and a character relationship somewhat reminiscent of that game as well, though the game-play is not as strong as SOT, making the story, characters, and set-pieces the main draw for me in this case. The story is based on an old Chinese work of literature (Journey to the West), though probably very loosely, and I've been enjoying this game enough to consider picking up a translation of the original work so that I can see just how much they took from it. However, the combat has gotten a bit repetitive after 5 hours, and both it and the traversal suffer due the the camera controls. But when the traversal flows it flows well, and I am enjoying the interactions between the (reluctant) main character, Monkey, and the other character.
As a side note, you can apparently unlock a "sexy" robot costume for the female character, though that costume looks more like some sort of
body horror than "sexy" (contains a few, slight early-game spoilers).