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Posts tagged Reviews
Unfinished Business
0775 days
One day... it shall be mine!
As I sit here writing this article about unfinished business; I find it ironic that I am listening to the soundtrack of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, simply because it is a game that I thought I would never finish. I played that game across two xboxes, and even two different discs (one stopped working). I did, however, finally finish it. After 100+ hours of play, I closed the last oblivion gate and thwarted the daedric invasion. It was a very satisfying feeling. Maybe not so much looking from the game out, but rather the fact that I had accomplished something that I never thought I would do. That game is MASSIVE, as I think we all as gamers know. As far as RPGs go it was just a giant time sink, with thousands of things to do, see, and well… kill.
Which brings me to the meat of this little piece: I have way too many games left, just from this year, to finish. As any gamer worth his weight in plastic peripherals knows, the couple months before Christmas is THE time to get big games. Last year the bigger titles were: L4D, Little Big Planet, Resistance 2, and the biggie Gears of War2. This year the list is probably twice as long and much more spread out over different genres. Games like Dragon Age:Origins, Assassin’s Creed 2, L4D2, and Modern Warfare 2 will satisfy the hardest of the hardcore. There are also games for people that are more casual with their games (not necessarily “casual games” however), games like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Forza 3, Borderlands, and even the New Super Mario Brothers Wii game. Needless to say, the shelves have been stocked for a while with quality games for pretty much any kind of player.
Anyway… I now have sitting on my shelf in the gaming lair: AC2, NSMB Wii, Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Left 4 Dead 2. Of those 6 titles, I have finished a grand total of ONE, and that would be MW2, because the single player is like 5 hours. Although, I have started to go back and play through it on Veteran, which is taking up even more of my time. Point being, I have a LOT of unfinished business with my games. I have played quite a bit of each title (save DA:O) and thought I would at least write up my impressions of these games so far. We’ll start with the oldest first…
"Boom! Head shot!"
Borderlands is one of those games that you can just jump right into and have mindless fun with for hours. I am sure to catch a lot of flack for this (should anyone actually read this) but THIS is the game that I wanted Fallout 3 to be, so very badly. Not that Fallout was a bad game, I don’t think that, but it just never felt right to me. If you put a gun in a persons hand, set the camera behind the gun, and give me lots of targets to shoot at, I NEED the game to be more responsive and the controls to be tighter. Sorry. Fallout was way too slow and methodical, as a regular RPG should be, but not one with guns and a first person perspective. I enjoyed the game; it just didn’t satisfy enough of either genre to keep me interested. Borderlands, however, is a very satisfying game for me. Having four classes to choose from (Sniper, Tank, Soldier, and overpowered Chick) makes it a game that could possibly be played through several times with different effect.
Speaking of multiples… there are thousands and thousands of guns for you to find or buy in this game; literally. Granted, a VERY large chunk of them are pieces of junk that you will never use except for padding your wallet, but the few that are rare finds are well worth the search. Searching is something you will do a LOT of. Chests, lockers, safes, piles of garbage, sometimes even animal carcasses will have weapons or ammo in them. This game makes the loot factor in Diablo seem tiny and insignificant. Seriously, it’s just that overwhelming.
The controls are easy enough to manage if you have EVER played a FPS before. Everything functions as you would expect it to. The visuals are done in an almost “cell-shaded” way that makes them look almost cartoon like. It definitely adds to the visual style of the game, and sets it apart from just about all the first person shooters out there.
The biggest and probably most fun draw for this game is the Multiplayer. You can grab three of your friends and jump into a game. The person that hosts the game is the one that you will follow the story line and quests for. So say, if you have already finished a certain amount of quests, but your buddy hasn’t, you may still have to go back and play them again if you are playing in his game. Also the game scales to that person as well. So be careful getting into games with higher level characters because you may get your ass handed to you.
The story in Borderlands is, hmm… we’ll just say, thin. Actually, to be quite honest, I have almost no idea what it is about AT ALL. I know that I am some sort of mercenary or something, and I am looking for pieces to the “Vault”. There is some chick in my head that keeps telling me I am on the right path and doing the right thing, but I couldn’t tell you who she is or why she is talking to me. What I do know, is that this game does a great job of give you a fuck-ton of quests to accomplish, as well as giving you a rather large world to accomplish them in. If you are looking for a decent FPS that blends in simple RPG elements then this game is probably going to be a good match for you.
Also, this game just came out with what looks to be a rather fun DLC. It’s an entirely new island full of new monsters (ZOMBIES) and a few new weapons.
Seeing as how this article is a bit longer than I first expected it to be, I will post it in parts. You have just read (obviously) Part One. Part Two will be coming up soon, on one of the other games that I listed above. Probably with less exposition and filler.
The Iron Mic vs. Dragon Age: Origins
0777 days
Kotor was rather popular, and also good, but it’s time maybe to try making an RPG that isn’t essentially another thinly-veiled ripoff. If you can’t, then just make Kotor 3 and let me get my Star Wars fix already. I realize that it’s easy money, but at least try mixing it up a bit. Try rearranging the bones to come up with a new animal.
How about some menus that aren’t wheel-based? How about a game with more than 5 towns? How about an rpg where every conversation scene isn’t about tiptoeing around your crew of opinionated crybabies? How about a storage system that I don’t have to pay extra for?
There is little that annoys me as much as having to stop in the middle of a dungeon and decide which of my items will probably sell for less than others (and can be dropped/destroyed) so I can pick up the gift/weapon/potion/whatever that I’m not sure if I’ll need later in the game. Yeah, yeah. Here comes the argument that the game has backpacks for sale that increase inventory space for in-game gold. You know what games that sentence describes? Mmo grindfests; which are the bastion of offensive game design.
There are a few ways for (benevolent) developers to handle this. You can go the Final Fantasy route and let me carry x99 of any existing item, but no more than that; or you can try the Jagged Alliance design and give me a limited personal inventory with persistent drops (dropped items staying right where I fucking dropped them and never leaving unless I intentionally move them). If you don’t feel like coding either of those, you could just stop putting so damned many items in the game. I don’t need twenty similar swords to choose from if I don’t have the ability to carry them all.
Now, I haven’t played Torchlight, but I hear that you can sell things while in the middle of a dungeon. Word up on that. Perhaps other game companies could take that under advisement and add something similar in the future. And no, I’m not willing to pay an additional $10 for the convenience, you greedy assfunchkins.
You know what else sucks? The targeting. I have lost count of how many times I’ve accidentally targeted someone on my team instead of targeting an enemy. No, I wasn’t trying to open your conversation screen, I was trying to attack/loot/freeze that evil demon right fucking next to me. This would have been an easy fix: d-pad left/right for enemies, and up/down for friendlies. (I’m guessing this is the part where guys playing the PC version laugh at me derisively.)
Bottom line: I don’t hate Dragon Age. I’m going to play it all the way through. I might even play it a second time and play as a different class. Its formula keeps getting reused because it makes for a decent game. I just think that, at this point, they’ve gone to the trough too many times to not be called on it. If I spend more time thinking “that’s just like in [earlier game]” or “god dammit not again” than I do “that’s fucking sweet” it tends to obstruct my enjoyment of the game.
P.S — What the hell is with Morrigan only looking good in the one outfit? Change her armor and an entirely different body model is loaded. Bullshit.
Quarantine
0830 days
This one was recommended to me by several friends, so I decided to add it to the list. Surprisingly enough, I am glad that I did.
#17 Quarantine
As the movie starts off, I got a bad feeling of deja vu. This movie felt much too much like the beginning of “The Blair Witch Project” and I was afraid that it would just be a cheap rip off. As it turns out, I was only partially correct. “Quarantine” is a movie that follows a “film crew” of two people that are shadowing a fire dept for a story they are doing for a local news show. Your main characters are Angela and Scott (nice name buddy). The entire movie is shot “shaky cam” style on a hand held video camera. The two go out on a call that appears at first to be routine, but turns out to be anything but. They arrive at an old apartment house to respond to a woman screaming, and find the woman has actually gone quite mad. From then on, shit goes down hill, and fast. Come to find out the buildings tenants are one by one being bitten and being infected with some form of advanced rabies. Think of it as like the virus in 28 Days Later, Rage. Super aggressive, and fast, almost zombie-like people. Oh and the building is sealed up by the CDC and other governmental offices so that the “infection” doesn’t get out. The rest of the film is all about them trying to do just that, get out. Save for one part in the end involving a baby, it wasn’t that surprising of a movie. Everything followed the path that similar movies follow. I was, however, impressed with the way that it went down this path. Taking out each character one by one was very vicious, and at times quite disgusting. I was satisfied with the movie as a whole though, and would probably recommend it to others. I know there is an original movie out there called [Rec] that this is based on so maybe I will watch that at some point. The ending wasn’t at all surprising, though what did surprise me was there was not epilogue, or “stinger” at the end. Maybe it is on the DVD release. Either way, it will probably fit nicely into the top five of the movies I have watched so far, and that’s gotta be worth something.
The Eye
0832 days
Well I can tell what my eye didn’t see, and that’s enough of Jessica Alba scantly clad in this movie.
#16 “The Eye”
This was one of those movies that I heard about when it first came out and thought instantly, this will be on DVD very soon. I was pretty much right I guess. It stars, as I mentioned, Jessica Alba as a blind girl that gets a cornea transplant to see. Once the operation is over, she almost immediately starts to see “things.” Not sure what they are and having not seen ANYTHING since she was a little girl, she freaks out. Everyone tells here that it’s just her body “adjusting” to being able to see again, but she knows that’s not what it is. The visions start becoming more and more vivid, not to mention violent. Jessica then finds out that the eyes came from a dead girl in Mexico. Upon getting the whole story she finds out also that the girl was thought to be a witch because she could see death. Her visions get more and more intense to the point that she actually sees and talks to the dead girl (how she was able to see what she looked like I dunno). Anyway she ends up stopping a bunch of people from being killed in a giant explosion at the US and Mexico boarder. Oh and in the blast she loses her sight again. This movie really was like a mixture of The Sixth Sense and Final Destination. She could not only see dead people but also the spirits that take the dead souls away, kinda like Soul-Taker (look it up). Not all that great of a movie. It had a few creepy parts, and mostly only made me want to see the Japanese original. If you are stuck watching this movie all I can say is, make the most of the shower scene. Other than that, it’s just not worth … crying your EYEs out over.
Uncharted 2:Among Thieves (PS3)
3833 days
The sun gleams off of the snow covered mountain tops. Birds fly by me with the freedom that no man will ever know. In the distance a train whistle blows, echoing through the valley below. I am truly stunned by the shear beauty of what I am seeing. I can hear bells ringing… ringing… ringing. OH CRAP! I have just been swept to my death by a rail road warning light, because again I wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on. Distracted yet again by the beauty of the game. That is a testament to how good Uncharted 2 looks, but it’s not the only thing that game does well.
Having been a huge fan of the first game in the series “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” I was naturally excited to get my hands on the second. From what I had been hearing from the legitimate gaming press, this would be one of those games that, as a PS3 owner, I needed to get. The last time I heard such hoopla over a game, it was about Metal Gear Solid 4, and I ended up buying a PS3 for just that reason.
The game starts with you again take on the role of Nathaniel Drake, fortune hunter, fighter, proponent of the “half-tucked” shirt, and generally all around smooth operator. The very second that the game starts you are thrust into danger. You are awakened to find yourself bleeding from an apparent gun shot, and seated in a railway car that is dangling off the side of some snow covered mountain. What better way for a game to start then right in the middle of the action (and the games plot as well). The first couple chapters flash you back and forth from the past to the present in an attempt to show you how you got in such a predicament. It was a little jarring at first, going from the mountain to being pool side talking to a couple friends about your next task, and back again. Once that smooths out and sets you on your course it really starts to get going well.
This time you are following Marco Polo’s trek back from Mongolia, where he started off with fourteen ships and around 600 passengers, but reached his destination with only eighteen passengers and one ship. The quest is to discover what happened to the other thirteen ships and five hundred some passengers. Eventually they discover that Marco Polo had found the location of the Cintamani Stone and the mythical kingdom of Shambhala. Drake and his “partners” Harry Flynn and Chloe Frazer make their way through Istanbul, Borneo, Nepal, and other exotic locales in search of clues to help them find their goal. However they aren’t alone. Also trying to find the realm of Shambhala is a Serbian war criminal Zoran Lazarević. He too wants to find the Cintamani stone but for more nefarious reasons. I will say this: This game had one of the more satisfying endings (story wise) to a video game I have played in a long time. Not that it was something that wasn’t expected or out of the ordinary story wise, but I just felt that it summed up the game nicely by the closing credits.
As I said before this game looks gorgeous. Drake goes through many different settings and each feels distinctly different, and thoroughly detailed. From lush rain forests, to frozen mountain tops, and blown out city streets and alleys. There were more than a few occasions that I was killed, or nearly so, just because I was distracted by the scenery. The sound as well is very detailed. Guns sound realistic, the voice work is superb, and several times I caught myself looking over my shoulder [in real life] because I thought I heard something behind me.
As far as game play goes, it has been refined from the first to feel much more tight and precise. The one glaring problem that I had with the first was the sixaxis controls for the game, period. Thankfully, they have taken them out completely. You no longer have to tilt back and forth when Drake walks across a log. Trying to stay hidden and alive in a firefight in the first game was made all together more hard by attempting to tilt the controller for a good trajectory to throw a grenade at an enemy behind a wall. Not anymore though, that has all been mercifully taken out. The grenade controls are simply done by pushing the left analog stick up or down. The cover mechanic seems a little easier to use as well, though I still had issues with Drake trying to jump off walls or over cover points when I didn’t want him to. Though in all honesty that could have been because of human error. Some of the gun fights tend to get a little tense.
Oddly enough for a game that I really figured didn’t need a multiplayer aspect, this one is actually pretty fun, AND well put together. There are several modes for you to cut your teeth on. There is the obligatory Death Match, but this version is more like the “Team” death match that you would find in other games. Play as either part of the “heroes” or the “villains” each with a team of five players trying to take out the opposing force. Plunder is played much like Capture the Flag, but instead of a flag you have to take a treasure from neutral spot and taking it back to their respective base. Also there is Elimination. This plays like a game of “Hard Core” team death match where once you are dead, you stay dead. The game ends when either of the opposing teams has no living players left. Finally there is “Chain Reaction.” This, again, is played much like capture the flag except flags have to be “captured” in order. One team has to take them from first to last, while the opposing team must take them from last to first.
There are also several cooperative multiplayer games to be played as well. One being “Gold Rush.” This is much like Plunder only the opposing team is made up of AI characters trying to stop you from taking the treasure back to the base. This is the game that I have played the most of. It’s a lot of fun to plan routes with your partner(s) and then execute them seeing how well of a defender or attacker you can be while your buddy tries to get away with the gold statue.
All in all, this game isn’t perfect. There are still a few graphical glitches, a couple of control issues I had, and the story was pretty predictable. That said though, it was very enjoyable to play through. I would gladly plunk down my $60 for a copy of this game. There are so many things that OTHER game developers can take away from this game and learn from. Naughty Dog through Uncharted 2, has some of the best facial expressions, and body language animation that I have seen in a video game, ever. It may not be THE reason to buy a PS3, but it sure makes me happy that I did.
Black Christmas
0838 days
As far as time line goes, I think this one is the oldest I have watched yet. This is what happens when you take an “Urban Legend” and make a movie about it.
#15 Black Christmas
What does that even mean?
When I first heard about this movie, I couldn’t have been more excited to see it. I love horror movies (obviously) and hearing that it was Directed by the same guy (Bob Clark) that did “A Christmas Story”… my jaw dropped. This had to be a great movie, for more than a few reasons. Margo Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, and John Saxon that played Roper in Enter the Dragon (and Deaney in Mitchell) were among some of the “stars” in this film. The movie revolves around a sorority house that is terrorized at Christmas time by a rash of obscene phone calls. Then one of the sisters disappears, then another, and another… Each time a murder is committed another phone call, and more crazy voices on the other end. The movie is only about an hour and thirty minutes but it felt like forever. The story drags on forever, and the characters aren’t interesting at all. By the time it ended I was completely bored with it. Oh and did I mention they made the entire movie based around the ol’ “The calls are coming from inside the house.” deal, because, yeah it was. If you couldn’t predict the stinger at the end, you haven’t watched enough horror movies. All in all, I was disappointed all the way around with this one. Though now I need to hunt down the remake they did a couple years ago just to see how bad THAT movie can be. Fudge!
