|
Post by Draxas on Oct 12, 2011 11:26:42 GMT -5
Finished the main levels in LIJ, now I'm working on the standard end-game collect-a-thon and unlocking the secret levels. Fun times, all in all. Now that I've played through all the main missions, I can say that my inital gripe about the lack of world interaction was unfounded since they get a lot cleverer about it in later levels. The combat can still be excessively cruel, though. Also, I really wish they had made the mine cart stage from Temple of Doom more interesting, considering it's one of the most memorable scenes from that movie.
One of the nice things about having a 360 is that I can finally catch up with the games most people have been playing for the past 5 years, since my PC is underpowered as usual. Case in point: I acquired a copy of the Orange Box this past weekend, and tore though Portal for the first time in one sitting. Excellent time, clever puzzles, liked the bit at the end in the factory, yadda yadda. Missing out on this game for 4 years definitely lessened the impact, since so much of it was spoiled for me already, but I can definitely understand why it was so captivating for poeple who were going in blind. Anyway, I've heard HalfLife 2 is good (like 5 years ago), I think I'll try that one next!
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Oct 18, 2011 11:01:59 GMT -5
Swapped LIJ for The Force Unleashed 2 at the library last night adfter finishing the former 100%. Whoever devised the achievements for LIJ was a sadist, pure and simple; who wants to grind the same stage over and over again just to perform a certain action 50 times (which can only be done 3 times per stage)? Making a bunch of these grindy achievements secret is just insult to injury, really; it just means I had to spend 10 minutes looking them up on Gamefaqs, but come on. If I hadn't been so close to getting all of them (and if the game wasn't fun on its own merits), I probably wouldn't have bothered.
Anyway, Force Unleashed 2. I played it for a while last night, and it's a decent 3rd person action game. The controls feel a little stiff, and the targeting is a bit wonky at times, but it's fun to sling around force powers like they're nothing and tear up legions of stormtroopers (or mind trick them into jumping off tall objects). It's somewhat irritating not to know who any of the characters are (since the game assumes you played through the first one, which I didn't, and doesn't give you much of a refresher), but the gameplay is good enough to hold my interest, anyway.
Also started playing HalfLife 2. It's decent so far, nothing special, though I'm still in the airboat section (and just got the gun for it, so haven't even tried that out much yet), so I realize the interesting stuff like Ravenholm and the gavity gun are yet to come. I won't pass judgement yet, but the setup was pretty neat and its stayed interesting despite there only being 6 enemy types so far. I suppose I'll talk about it more once I'm further in.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Oct 24, 2011 23:23:35 GMT -5
Took me a while, but I finally found the post where I detailed some of my opinions on Half-Life 2. From what I can remember of the game, I wasn't very impressed with it, mostly because of "typical Valve complaints" where I'm always in a linear path in scripted events. Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two, however, were more fun for me, largely because of their shorter length and more-focused content, so if you don't totally hate HL2 by the end of it, those are definitely worth playing at some point. (Just bear in mind that HL2:E3 has replaced DNF as the industry's iconic "vaporware.") In the mean time I appear to have also finished FEAR 2, Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. FEAR 2 is an utter disappointment after the brilliance of the first game. The sequel lost all of the sophistication from the original, turning the gunplay into mindless run-n-gun shooting instead of the methodically tactical shooting with excellent AI and level design. The horror elements are watered-down and the whole game was decidedly "meh." ( more on FEAR 2) Grotesque Tactics is supposed to be a "satirical RPG" that "pokes fun at" the common tropes of the genre, but I found the game to be a real chore to play. Its only way of satirizing RPGs is to make you play exaggerated versions of the wearisome crap that it's supposed to be making fun of. So it's somewhat amusing at first but gets tiring very, very quickly. ( more on Grotesque) Amnesia is rather good. It's one of the scarier games I've played in a while (I've got nerves of steel, so my reactions were nothing like this, but it inspired some good moments of genuine terror and panic that I don't experience often in horror games. The atmosphere is great and the puzzles are all intelligent and satisfying to solve.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Oct 25, 2011 13:02:12 GMT -5
I returned Force Unleashed 2 last night. Final thoughts: It's OK. Competent platforming and combat, the controls aren't always spot-on but usually work fine, and once the novelty of wrecking anything in your path with force powers wears off, they become just another set of combat tools. The game loves its QTEs (most large enemies have one as an optional finisher, and every boss fight has at least a few, though some have quite a lot), but they're not nearly as obtrusive as some other examples (like, say, Resident Evil 4). Replay value is minimal; the game has 2 endings, but since you can use stage select to jump to any stage you like, this just means you can play the final battle twice and see them both fairly easily. There are also 4 difficulty levels, but the only difference I noticed in the transition up is that using your powers drains more of your force bar. Since the stages don't change at all, I didn't really feel the need to play through the entire game a second time, and so that's that.
I swapped it out for Plants vs. Zombies, which is a game I was interested in trying but didn't want to actually spend money on (since I don't particularly like tower defense games), so it worked out pretty well. In actuality the disc is a Pop-Cap 3 pack with Peggle and Zuma, so it should keep me busy for a little bit at least. I've played a bit of PvZ and Peggle so far. PvZ is... well, it's a tower defense game (or a variant, anyway). Not an especially difficult one, either, but that's fine with me since I'm terrible at the micromanagement many of the games in the genre demand. The game does exude character, though, which is probably why so many people like it. It's managed to hold my interest so far, in no small part because of the amount of variety; the game gives you a new plant after almost every stage you complete (I have 20+ plants already), whereas most tower defense games typically max out around 6 different towers. It allows you to mix up your strategy in ways that most genre examples don't even attempt, and helps keep the game from getting stale as quickly as most genre examples do.
Not much to say about Peggle. It's basically pachinko, but certain pegs are tagged as targets as the primary objective rather than trying to drop the ball into a particular catcher. They try to add some depth by putting special effect targets into each stage, but it's still about as casual as casual gaming gets. It's amusing enough for what it is, but I can't see it holding my interest for any great length of time.
I also downloaded Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, since it's on sale for half price. It's basically a multiplayer metroidvania-esque game, and a quick glance at my list of games over the past 5 years will show that it's an idea I might appreciate (though I haven't even tried the multiplayer aspect of it yet). The most interesting part, though, is the fact that they include 5 characters who each play very differently from each other, with playsyles and methods of acquiring new skills drawn from the game they were most prominently featured in. Between that and the ability to also gain different loot from chests depending on your character choice, it gives the game immense replay value. It's also TOUGH. It took quite a few tries just to complete the first stage, and I'm still stuck on the second; this is due in no small part to the typical experience and level mechanics of these games being entirely missing, so the only ways to improve your statistics are through finding better equipment and gaining temporary boosts from eating food. There are stacks of DLC for the game, including both new stages and characters, but so far that's too rich for my blood. Maybe I'll change my mind as I get more into it, we'll see.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Nov 17, 2011 11:49:31 GMT -5
Been a long time since this was updated.
Eventually returned the PopCap Collection after finishing Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle (or at least, the story mode on each). My earlier remarks on both still stand, pretty much. PvZ only gets wackier as it goes on, and there are stacks of bonus modes and grindy things you can do after you finish the main game, plus a sort of "New Game +" mode where you get to keep all your unlocked plants but the difficulty ramps way up. However, once you've gotten to that point, and played all the weird minigames, most of the appeal is gone. It's good fun while it lasts, though. Peggle is pretty much the same way; once you've seen the main story all the way through, you can still play bonus challenges or grind for high scores, but it gets stale quickly. And Zuma... well, Zuma is just a plain old bad game. It's quite obviously a much older game than the others, and much less effort was put into it. It's a fairly basic "match 3" style game, but there are only ~15 different board configurations which the game then endlessly loops, simply adding in more colors and speeding up the pace to increase difficulty, which means it gets very repetetive very quickly. To top it off, it doesn't even look good (unlike the other two games on the disc), the visuals are grainy and clearly a simple conversion from standard def. I didn't play the game more than once, and didn't need to because I had seen all it had to offer at that point.
Final verdict: Nice to rent, probably not worth buying unless you're really enthralled with tower defense or physics games.
Traded PvZ for Blur the last time I was at the library. Blur is an interesting game, almost as if it can't decide what kind of game it wants to be. The net effect comes off more or less as Mario Kart with the cartoonishness stripped away in favor of photorealism, but it still sort of works. It also has a Call of Duty style progression mechanic for both single and multiplayer, where you can unlock new cars and mods simply by playing the game (though you tend to progress faster by doing better, unsurprisingly). Single player is a fairly typical affair for a racing game (other than the weapons), the game throws groups of events at you, and you need to achieve certain performance targets to unlock more difficult events. Unfortunately, the AI gets fairly obnoxious fairly early, in addition to the goals becoming much tougher to achieve (or based on pure dumb luck, which is even worse). Then again, the real appeal of the game is multiplayer anyway. This is certainly the first game where I feel like getting a gold Live membership was worth it. Competition is fierce, of course, but fortunately voice chat is fairly rare and people are tame enough that I've never felt the need to mute anyone yet. Would I buy it? Maybe, if it was cheap enough; the $40 price tag for download is way too much, though.
Picked up a few other games as well. The new Professor Layton is exactly what you'd expect, which is fine by me and makes me happy. I also grabbed a copy of Mercenaries 2 on the cheap at a local flea market. I haven't made much progress yet, but it seems rather GTAish, so I'm not sure how long it will hold my interest. Still, it was made by Pandemic, and I really enjoyed the Destroy All Humans games which were also theirs, and similarly structured, so I won't give up on it until I give it a fair shake.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Dec 7, 2011 6:40:06 GMT -5
It seems that I haven't done much in the past six weeks. My laptop bit the dust on Halloween (the GPU apparently overheated in a critical way while playing a very un-demanding indie game from a few years ago), and then I tried to do a reinstallation of Windows XP on my desktop only to find that for some reason my license key is not valid. This was after I'd reformatted the hard-drive as part of a "clean reinstall" to start fresh, since I'd never reinstalled Windows in all those years, so it's been rendered useless as well. So I haven't been doing much gaming, besides a couple of indie browser games here and there. The one game I have been playing is Pathologic, which I may have mentioned before towards the end of this post. But for the sake of concision, I'll summarize it here again. The game is set in a city just a few days before a deadly plague breaks out. You play as one of three "healers" who come to the town for various reasons, and then get caught up in the middle of the quarantine, forced to get to the bottom of the disease while saving critical townsfolk and keeping yourself alive. The entire game takes place over 12 days with you completing daily quests and struggling to maintain various statistical meters like your reputation, health, immunity, hunger, exhaustion, and infection levels, in a tough economy where literally everything you do has some kind of consequence for those meters, and where sometimes you have to sell your only pistol just for a few scraps of bread or some antibiotics. The game has a lot of blatant problems. The main culprit is the wonky translation from Russian to English. You end up with some really strange phrases that are comically bizarre, and then phrases that make very little sense. Most of the time it's just weird grammatical issues that make it slightly more of a challenge to figure out what exactly a couple of sentences are getting at. The next somewhat major issue is the lack of direction at times. It's not always great about telling you where to go or what to do, and there have been a few times when I've been left completely clueless because characters would say one thing, then I'd try to do it and nothing would happen. On one occasion I was supposed to meet some characters at the "Rail Station" at 10pm, and the rail station is a huge place and I didn't know if they meant the north side, the south side, or near the rail cars heading out from the south. Not knowing, I did a hard save and went to the obvious spots and waited for people to show up, saw no one, then started trying to wander all around the premises. After consulting a guide (which is itself awkwardly translated from Russian to English), and it turns out they weren't even supposed to show up and I confront them later. There I was stressing out thinking I'd done something wrong, when a journal entry never popped up to clue me in that they had stood me up. Another time I ran into a situation where I was going to die at midnight unless I completed a quest. Well I'd done everything I thought I could/should, the day was winding to a close and my exhaustion meter was nearly at max. I went to sleep and got the "death cinematic," confused about why I'm dead, when I'd figured out who the murderer was and took care of him. Turns out I was supposed to talk to an NPC and then talk to another NPC to officially resolve the issue, and I was only barely able to get that done before midnight and before passing out from exhaustion. Other than that, there are more minor issues, like with the interface, which feels kind of weird and looks weird. The animations are often kind of stiff and rigid. The combat is not very fluid or consistent. A lot of the sound effects are kind of lame (the gunshots sound like cap guns). As a game it's really kind of a chore. Most of the gameplay involves walking all the way across town and back several times a day, talking to NPCs and doing odd jobs here and there. Most of the time that's pretty boring, but once the plague breaks out and you have to start going through infected districts, then you've got to dodge clouds of pestilence that sweep through the streets, stay away from droning plague-bearers looking to grab hold of you, and even dealing with thieves and criminals that attack you. So while that bit's more interesting, it also gets to be a little cumbersome the longer the game goes on. On top of that, maintaining your meters is itself literally a chore, because most of the time helping one will adversely affect the other. If your health is low and you need to take some pain killers, it raises your exhaustion. When you take antibiotics to stave off the infection, it damages your health. Eating certain foods to lower your health will raise your exhaustion. Money is always, always tight, with quests requiring you to spend more than you have while you're still deprived of sufficient funds to pay for your own meals, defense, medicine, and clothing, but you can go out at night and fight criminals for extra money and stuff, but you do that and you'll be exhausted in the day and will have less time to complete quests and stuff. Right now I'm at day 8 of 12 in the "Bachelor" campaign (the conventional doctor), though I can play the other two characters for different angles on the same story. There's the Haruspicus who's kind of like a folk-healer, and the Devotress who's kind of like a mystic. And I'm convinced that playing as another character would actually feel wholesome and worthwhile. As the Bachelor, I've encountered the other two playable characters and had to do quests that involved them, and there's things that are clearly happening behind the scenes with both of them that I haven't seen. So besides completely different quests each day, they go about tackling the plague in unique ways and go through different trials over their reputations and stuff. So even though the whole is pretty challenging and is almost quite literally a chore, with lots of micromanaging and being pretty rough around the edges, I'm really liking this game. It's a very unique premise, and I ultimately like the micromanaging, because it means there are consequences for everything I do, and that makes it feel pretty rewarding to get by each day. Meanwhile the atmosphere and setting is really exquisite, and it's just really cool to see the city transform day after day, watching the plague spread and seeing how things change, watching as people become more and more desperate and as violence and mania breaks out. So, yeah, consider that a recommendation for anyone man enough to play this game. I got it for $9.99 via Amazon Digital Downloads, which I think might be the most convenient and cheapest way to get it.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Dec 7, 2011 12:30:11 GMT -5
I read about Pathologic over at HG101 a bit ago, and they pretty much had many of the same comments and criticisms that you did. Personally, it doesn't sound like my kind of game, but it's a moot point since I don't have a PC powerful enough for it anyway.
Did pretty well for myself over Black Firday. Picked up the Arkham Asylum / Arkham City 2 pack from Walmart shortly before, and then got Blue Dragon and the Gears of War 3 pack the day of. My favorite of the lot is Arkham City (though both Arkham games are exceptional). Haven't got to Gears 2 yet, but the first is enjoyable enough, though I'm not sure why everyone is super-gung-ho over it (maybe it's the multiplayer? Haven't tried it yet). Blue dragon is one of a very small number of JRPGs for the 360, and considering how cheap it was ($10), I couldn't pass it up. It's fairly tpical of the genre, though they try to mix things up with some clever encounter stuff and an interesting setting. Also downloaded Ms. Splosion Man on sale from XBLA. It's a super wacky and fairly difficult 2d platformer (almost approaching puzzle platformer at times, even), and worth the $5.
What with all the new games I own now (not to mention the ones that aleready fell by the wayside), the weekly library game thing has been put on hiatus until I start working though my backlog.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Jan 4, 2012 0:55:14 GMT -5
Did a replay of Ico. Played and finished Metroid: Other M with Alt in a 100% playthrough. Turns out that game isn't that great. The three-dimensional third-person pseudo-sidescrolling combat worked pretty well, but there was a lot about the game that made it feel like a particularly bland Metroid game. - Exploration was kind of lame, not much opportunity to explore off the main path. - Maps were a little too bland and linear, most rooms only had 1 entrance and 1 exit. - Switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person was almost literally a juggling act. - The pixel-hunting "Where's Waldo?" sections were kind of stupid. - The pacing was all over the place, as if five team made five different portions of the game and mashed it all together. I wrote a super long criticism about it on my blag, but there's a lot that really bothered me with that game. I also played about an hour of Zelda: Skyrim Sword and wasn't very impressed with its introduction. I thought the tutorials were too hamfisted, thought the name "Skyloft" was totally stupid, was pissed off about that useless piece of fabric wrapped around peoples' waists (they brought it back from TP, ugh), and felt like they didn't establish much of the game's lore/culture at all in the very beginning. One would expect there'd be room for the game to improve, since I only played 60-90 minutes worth, so I'm not going to pass final judgment on it, but that intro didn't leave me yearning to play more. If anything else, I was left with an impression of the game being kind of shallow, which, again, may only reflect that I didn't get all the way into the game. Probably going to be a long time before I get the chance to play the whole thing, so we shall see.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Jan 4, 2012 11:35:03 GMT -5
Gah, I really hate Other M. Someday I'll go back and pick it up again, but every time I consider it, I remember that brutally stupid boss fight with the two giant worms, and then getting stuck in an inexplicable forced-first-person look-around-for-no-good-reason session and powering off the game after scrutinizing the whole room several times and failing to find the trigger to end it. It just didn't feel like a Metroid game to me, and seemed poorly implemented all around, which made me both angry and sad. For me, it's unseated Fusion as the Worst Metroid Game by a long margin, and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon. When will N learn that Metroid games don't need lots of plot, and that it actually detracts from the experience when they shoehorn it in there?
I've only played an in-store demo of Skyward Sword, so I can't really comment on it much. The bird flying competition gave me horrible flashbacks to Super Mario Galaxy 2, though, which wasn't a strong start. Once I got the the actual dungeon, I was brutalized by even simple monsters (damn you, skulltula!). All of that left me with a bit of a poor first impression. A friend of mine finished it, though, and he said it was quite good, so I'm still on the fence; maybe I'll get it eventually, or maybe just end up borrowing it instead, haven't decided yet.
Finished the latest Professor Layton game recently. While it follows the series tradition of developing plot-based insanity right near the end, it's nowhere near the level of rediculous from Unwound Future. As always, the puzzles are fun, interesting, and sometimes difficult to wrap your mind around, and I'm pleased to report a drastic reduction of the number of those infernal sliding block puzzles (at least in the main game, the postgame puzzles have bunches of them, and the ones you do have to solve are occasionally brutally difficult). The bonus game, London Life, is also kind of interesting, resembling Animal Crossing more than anything else. Pretty good for what will probably be the last hurrah for the series on DS before they switch platforms.
Picked up Bastion for half price during the one day sale a few weeks back. On it own merits, the combat is a bit floaty and clunky at times, but the sheer quality of the narration, atmosphere, and world building more than make up for any shortcomings in the gameplay (which are fairly minor anyway). Looking forward to playing more.
Finished Gears of War recently. While a somewhat amusing game on its own, I fail to see what makes people go crazy over the series. I suppose the cover idea was fairly smart and new when it came out, and the game does control very fluidly (for the most part). But the plot seems very disjointed and doesn't flow well (maybe because I don't have the manual?), and the gameplay tends to get fairly repetetive between the setpieces designed to mix things up. And then there's the stupidly difficult final boss; I was playing on the lowest difficulty level, and the entire game was not especially taxing up until that point, but I had to take advantage of a glitch in order to actually win (or even stand much of a chance during) the final fight. I'll probably start Gears 2 eventually in hopes that it fares better, but so far I've been a bit let down by what some folks have touted as the "greatest game series ever."
Started up a new game of Portrait of Ruin again. While Symphony of the Night is still my favorite Castlevania game, this one is a pretty close second. Maybe once I finish this again, I'll take another crack at Order of Ecclesia.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Jan 15, 2012 6:28:22 GMT -5
Gah, I really hate Other M. I remember that brutally stupid boss fight.... I would classify most of the boss fights as "brutally stupid." Almost every single one is just a matter of "charge shot and release" (with auto-aim) while pushing the directional pad to automatically dodge flurries of attacks as you charge your next shot. Then when the boss stops moving for a moment, switch to first-person and fire a missile or heal yourself with the umbrella stance. The boss fights have an annoying issue where you have very little input on the battle, realistically, and yet if you mess up on that little bit of input (ie, when the controls fail on you and Samus automatically rolls into the death beam, or you can't switch to first-person fast enough, or she doesn't do her auto-roll when she's supposed to, or the auto-aim doesn't work) you get destroyed by the stupid design mechanics. They're not challenging because of strategy or precision, they're just tedious. Don't forget that soundtrack. LINE BREAK! Played Limbo and find myself with mixed opinions about it. I like the atmosphere and style in it, but the gameplay is a combination of a fun, satisfying challenge and tedious affair of trial-and-error. Usually more of the latter. Some of the design elements are just not good, in terms of communicating to the player what has to be done and how the mechanics work, which makes it extra frustrating at times, especially when coupled with the input-lag that seems to afflict low or mid-range PCs. Started playing Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. So far I'm not fond of the dark world much at all, mostly because it inhibits exploration, which is the main point of this series. It's especially annoying when I try to explore outside of the light bubbles and lose almost all of my health, and then have to sit inside the light bubble for 3 minutes doing nothing, waiting for my health to slowly regenerate. Other than that it's feeling more linear than I expected, and I don't particularly enjoy retreading through the same areas twice as light world and dark world. The general gameplay is still miles above Other M, but so far it feels like slight step down from the first Prime. I'm also picking up where I left off in Pathologic. It's been at least 6 weeks since I last played it, but fortunately I put it down at the very end of a completed day, so that I can just start up a new day with fresh quests, instead of wandering around confused as to what I had already done and what I needed to do next. There's been newfound interest in my blog. Two weeks ago I was contacted by Adventure Lantern asking if I'd be willing to contribute reviews for their monthly PDF magazine. It's a very small group of people that traditionally only covered adventure games, but they were looking to expand their coverage and the owner/editor liked my reviews. It's not the most prestigious site ever and I'm not sure how many people follow their publications, but I'm looking at it as an opportunity to potentially reach new audiences and build my resume some more to hopefully (one day) make a living in VG journalism (while I try to put my BA to use, in the mean time). Right now they're just planning to republish some of the reviews I post on my own blog, which basically means it's no extra work for me. So if anyone wants to support my resume-building, I encourage you to follow my blog (RSS, email, Google Friend Connect, all in the left bar) and comment on articles I post, if you find anything of interest or have something to add/criticize. >.< I've ordered parts for a new PC with modest gaming specs. (Both my 2007 laptop and my 2005 desktop were rendered inert and useless, although I still might be able to get the desktop working again if I work up the motivation to deal with Windows customer support to solve the problem with my OEM key and lack of disc.) My new specs will be: Sapphire Radeon HD 6850, 1GB AMD Phenom 2 X4 960T, 3.0GHz 4GB G.Skill DDR3 SDRAM with Asus M5A97 mobo Seasonic S12II 520W Bronze PSU Western Digital 500GB Caviar Black HDD Cooler Master HAF 912 case Windows 7 Home Premium LG E2341 23" 1080p LCD monitor It's the cheapest computer I've ever bought and yet its specs are way better than my previous two. So that just goes to show you how fast the technology scene can change. This new build, although technically "mid-range" should handle all modern games at max settings, which one would expect should give it 3-4 years of playing new releases at least on medium or low settings. Hopefully I future-proofed the setup so that I can cheaply and easily upgrade it in a few years with a better GPU and more RAM. The CPU would be more of a challenge, especially in terms of Windows, but we'll see when it comes to that. I'll be putting it together myself in an effort to save money and to give myself a valuable learning experience. I've not assembled a desktop from scratch before, so I'll need to read a fair bit of stuff to make sure I don't overlook anything. The biggest challenge will be keeping the young kitten from jumping inside the case while I'm working on it and chewing everything up. And, as usual, despite some of the good deals I got on my hardware (after researching prices and specs for a week), within a few days of ordering everything I notice fluctuations in prices that could've saved me even more and gotten better service on some parts. My CPU at one point had a $15 discount on Amazon, but then they suddenly bumped it back up to normal price less than 12 hours afters after I put it in my shopping cart. And now it's on Newegg with a $10 discount, after I'd gritted my teeth and bought it at normal price. Likewise, I ordered my HDD from Amazon because it was cheaper than buying from Newegg (or anywhere else). It was from one of the "Amazon Verified" vendors and was the default buying option on the product's main page, because it was the cheapest. Well now Amazon's shipping it from their own warehouse for a few dollars cheaper with free (and what appears to be faster) shipping. So I can't win them all. Now I just gotta wait for all of the parts to get here and wait for something to go wrong. I'm half-expecting that HDD to be DOA and wait another two weeks for a replacement or something.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Jan 15, 2012 23:03:42 GMT -5
I would classify most of the boss fights as "brutally stupid." Almost every single one is just a matter of "charge shot and release" (with auto-aim) while pushing the directional pad to automatically dodge flurries of attacks as you charge your next shot. Then when the boss stops moving for a moment, switch to first-person and fire a missile or heal yourself with the umbrella stance. The boss fights have an annoying issue where you have very little input on the battle, realistically, and yet if you mess up on that little bit of input (ie, when the controls fail on you and Samus automatically rolls into the death beam, or you can't switch to first-person fast enough, or she doesn't do her auto-roll when she's supposed to, or the auto-aim doesn't work) you get destroyed by the stupid design mechanics. They're not challenging because of strategy or precision, they're just tedious. Agreed. The biggest challenge by far in that battle (besides the ludicrous amount of damage the boss could inflict) was getting the wiimote to respond to position changes fast enough to be useful. In general, I think the game really suffers heavily from failing to include a better way to replenish your health and missiles (I've said it before and I'll say it again, what was wrong with health drops from defeated enemies?), and just the fact that screwing up even once results in a monstrous chunk of your health drained away. Fusion had the same problems, with the finicky nature of chasing down X viruses and the amped up enemy damage, but at least that game didn't force you to fight the controls as well. YES. Very nice sound, and adds to the atmosphere tremendously as well. Not bad for a relatively small number of songs overall (that I've heard, at least). Depending on how far you've gotten, I heard there were some issues during development that led to the later areas of the game not turning out the way they wanted them, and in general not being as appealing as the stuff that came before. I'm personally waiting for the XBLA 3-pack disc to go on sale to pick that up, since it comes with this, Splosion Man, and Trials HD, all of which are supposed to be very good. And because I prefer to have a physical piece of media. If you're just starting out, I can understand your frustration. You should get the Dark Suit soon, which will help mitigate these problems somewhat. In general, though, I find MP2 to be the weakest of the Prime games (and the first to be the best); it's not a bad game by any stretch, but as you say, it starts feeling a bit repetitive when you have to cover the same ground at least twice. I just want to say good luck, and hopefully this will lead somewhere good for you. As for my list, I picked up Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon last weekend (less than $15 at Best Buy). It's a lot of fun, if fairly mindless, but the massive number of weapons on 4 armor variants should keep me busy for a while shooting up even more massive hordes of enemies. The story is nothing special, save for the incredibly anticlimactic conclusion, but that's not really why anyone would be playing this game anyway. A friend also loaned me Radiant Historia. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I'll report back when I do. OH! Also, this. Everyone must play this game, because it is pure, concentrated awesome.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Jan 20, 2012 10:50:26 GMT -5
Depending on how far you've gotten [in Limbo], I heard there were some issues during development that led to the later areas of the game not turning out the way they wanted them, and in general not being as appealing as the stuff that came before. That would make sense, and I even noticed that in my initial playthrough and mentioned it in my review. The first part of the game where you're in the woods has really nice, evocative scenery with some pretty clever puzzles, but then towards the second half you're in a machine shop or something and the visuals become more drab and the puzzles become mostly a matter of pushing blocks around. I saw this on RPS put it on my to-do list. I finally got around to trying it on Wednesday and found that it was part of the SOPA/PIPA protests, with the site just displaying an image of "Abobo Say Nope-a to SOPA!" But I started playing it today, and I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to appreciate it as much since I've only ever played a couple of NES games. But surprisingly I'm still catching a lot of references and enjoying it. Except for the balloon level. That level can go suck a lemon.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Jan 21, 2012 0:04:46 GMT -5
Except for the balloon level. That level can go suck a lemon. I have an original Balloon Fight cart, and that level is a pretty accurate representation of the game. It's also my least favorite level in the game, which probably says all you need to know about Balloon Fight, really. Finally started playing Gears of War 2. Not only does it help the plot make much more sense, it's a much better game overall. The mechanics haven't changed much, but the worldbuilding and setpieces are leagues ahead of the first. It also mixes things up a lot more, and there are whole sections of the game that are not "run to cover, shoot enemies until dead, repeat" (though the majority of the game still does boil down to that). It's been much more enjoyable, and I'm not even halfway through yet.
|
|
|
Post by N3B on Jan 30, 2012 18:34:37 GMT -5
Well folk(s), I turned to the dark side and got Skyrim. Worst game ever. But seriously. No it is pretty bad. Seriously. I've been playing for a week, and my first impression was that Skyrim was a vast improvement over the clunky awfulness of Oblivion, and that remains true, even 50 hours in. The terrible level-scaling got reworked so that specific enemies only scale within a certain range (e.g. wolves scale from lvl 1-15, giants scale from lvl 25-40, or something), thus getting rid of the obnoxious problem of being able to beat armies of daedra at lvl 1, or having every bandit in the realm equipped with super-rare daedric equipment. And the world is now a lot more interesting to explore; Oblivion felt like the whole thing was randomly generated with most everywhere feeling basically the same, but Skyrim feels more hand-crafted with things put in the world for a deliberate reason. They also re-worked the character creation and skill system, ultimately improving it for the better, in my opinion. You no longer have to make uninformed decisions about how you'll be playing the next 100 hours of the game by assigning major/minor skills and allocating stat points and picking star signs, all before you've ever had a chance to play the game. Now you just start playing, enjoying the meat of the game (questing and exploration), and you build your character along the way. These three things alone made the first ~20 hours of Skyrim seem miles ahead of Oblivion, but after a while I started to notice that, even though Bethesda learned some valuable lessons from Oblivion, their core design philosophy remains unchanged. That philosophy: "Quantity is better than quality." Yes, there is TONS of content to experience in Skyrim (there are literally an infinite number of quests), but it's all moot when 75% of it is completely shallow and inconsequential. I direct you to the quest journal that fills up with hundreds of one-line quests that give you zero context for why they're important, who's in them, where they are, or why you should care. Even the more important quests that get their own quest entry are often shallow and uninteresting. "Oh, it's another random NPC in some random part of the map wanting me to find some random item in some other random part of the map. Joy." You pick up so many of these things that it's impossible to keep track of them. Why bombard the player with 50 simultaneously active quests when they can only reasonably concentrate on maybe 5 at a time, anyway? All that's going to happen with this over-abundance of quests is players will forget the details and have no other incentive to get it done, other than to check it off their to-do list, thus making them a literal chore. The epitome of tedious quests came in a point where I thought I was working one of the more interesting and fleshed-out side-quests, which took me to a visually stunning and beautiful underground cavern. "This place is great!" I thought, but then it turns out that there's almost literally nothing to see or do in that area. And the place is huge. There are a couple of Falmer groups that you can fight, and you can mine geode veins, but otherwise there's minimal stuff to loot or explore, and the place is almost literally just eye candy. The one side-quest that I was able to pick up in this area: "Collect 30 Crimson Nirnroots," which are scattered over a one-mile area. TALK AN EXCITING QUEST TO MATCH THE EXCITING AREA! As always with an Elder Scrolls game, there comes a time when your character is basically maxed out, be it from having leveled your skills up to max, or having obtained the best gear you can get, which happens very early if you're a diligent gamer who explores everything they can and actually tries to complete as much content as possible. When you've reached the top, you have nowhere else to go; why bother with these tedious quests if I'm not going to get any kind of useful reward from them? Why bother exploring every inch of this dungeon when I know I won't find anything better than my max-crafted and enchanted daedric greatsword? Why bother fighting all of these random enemies when my skills aren't going to level-up and they won't drop anything interesting? In my case, over the course of maybe 40 hours, I'd leveled my Smithing skill to 70/100 just by crafting leather armor out of all of the animal pelts I acquired/found/stole in my adventures. I'd go out exploring, complete quests, come back with 15 animal pelts and craft them into something that I could sell for more money while also boosting my speechcraft skill (which is merged with Mercantile now). By the time my smithing was at 70 I figured maybe I'd craft stuff out of the tens and tens of metal ingots I'd acquired in my adventures, and ~15 minutes later I was at 100/100. Because you level-up at the same rate whether you're crafting a simple iron dagger or a daedric breastplate. Which makes no sense. So in general, TESV: Skyrim does not feel like an innovator, even though the back of the box proudly proclaims: "Skyrim re-imagines and revolutionizes the open-world fantasy epic," which is not true at all, because Skyrim, more than ever before in a TES game, is an archaic hold-out that really hasn't evolved. Sure, there have been lots of superficial tweaks, including some very crucial ones in regards to the skill system and the design of the world, but it's still basically the same game as its predecessor of 10year prior, Morrowind. It's just MORE OF THE SAME. Sigh.
|
|
|
Post by Draxas on Jan 31, 2012 11:11:13 GMT -5
Can't say I have anything to say about Skyrim. I fear open world paralysis, though, because I know I suffer from it.
Started playing Radiant Historia. It is confusing, for a lack of a better term. The whole concept of the game is to travel back and forth though time and create alternate histories in order to find the one correct path where everything works out how it should. The problem is that it's been very difficult to get a handle on how alternate timelines affect each other (even though by all rights, they shouldn't), and figuring out when certain events trigger in multiple timelines is really difficult to keep track of. Still, it's got an interesting battle system, and even though the plot seems pretty cliche at first glance, the kind of dark themes the game deals with even right off the bat make it fairly compelling. I'm still only a few hours in, so making a judgement call would be premature, but so far I like it.
|
|