Tying Up (Almost) All The Loose Ends

danielkempster

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Edited By danielkempster

Keeping a blog is a commitment. Much like playing for a darts team, staying on top of my University workload, working a part-time job, and maintaining a healthy relationship with my girlfriend, it's something that requires a great deal of both my effort and my time. Also much like those other things, it's sometimes difficult to keep things balanced. Such is the way things seem to have gone with my blogs of late, which have consisted of little more than "What I've Been Playing"-style updates punctuated by episodes of Enduring Final Fantasy VII. In the meantime I've played and finished with no less than five games, each of which I was hoping to dedicate an entire blog to. Unfortunately, a lack of time and a lack of effort has resulted in this not happening. This means that I have an enormous backlog of potential blogs waiting to be written. At this point, to devote a whole blog to each game would not only take up a great deal of my time, but by the time I'd caught up on everything outstanding, I'd have a fresh pile of finished games to write about, meaning I wouldn't be any better off than I am now. As a result, I've decided to sit down and cover everything I have yet to write about in a single blog post. Strap yourself in, because this is going to be a pretty long journey.

Viva Pinata

Horticulture has never been so addictive, or rewarding

People who've been following me for some time will know that I have a bit of a soft spot for the Viva Pinata franchise, having sunk a lot of time into the second Xbox 360 game Trouble in Paradise late last year. At the start of this year I decided to pick up the first Viva Pinata, partly to see where the series started, but mainly as an excuse to return to the garden. Whenever I recommend Viva Pinata, I describe it as 'Harvest Moon meets Pokémon', and I continue to think the comparisons are justified. While the original Viva Pinata plays pretty much identically to its sequel, there are some aspects which differ. Some of these I felt were problems that Trouble in Paradise fixed, but others seemed like things which might have been better off not being changed. An example of the former would be the game's Pinata challenges, which occur periodically and with random requirements for fulfilment. I much preferred Trouble in Paradise's more focused approach, which featured a huge number of specific set challenges that the player could choose to pursue if they wished. Another area where Trouble in Paradise comes out on top is with its streamlined menus, which make gardening less of a chore than it is in the original game. On the flip-side, though, Viva Pinata offers the better start-up, with its disheveled garden that has to be re-built from the ground up. It also seems a little easier than its sequel, with the various Pinatas being much less demanding to attract and romance. Other than that, it shares its praise with Trouble in Paradise - gorgeous, colourful visuals, a catchy soundtrack, and a compelling gameplay premise that's as rewarding as it is addictive. I'll definitely be returning to Pinata Island later in the year, to further my prowess as a Pinata gardener.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Much like a bus with a distracted driver, the platforming revolution may have passed us all by

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is perhaps the hardest-suffering victim of my blogging neglect. I tried to sit down and write up a blog containing my thoughts on this game multiple times throughout late February and early March, and every time I found myself unable to articulate my opinion of it. Right now, though, the prospect of condensing that opinion into a single sizeable paragraph doesn't seem daunting at all. On the surface, Nuts & Bolts has all the hallmarks of a well-produced game. It looks amazing, the music is memorable, the writing is sharp and funny, and the challenge-based gameplay is supported by a flexible, powerful vehicle creation tool. The problem with this approach, though, is that it's judging Nuts & Bolts using existing attitudes towards the platforming genre, when in actual fact the game defies almost every expectation I had going into it. What sets Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts apart from your Ratchet & Clanks and your Super Mario Galaxies is its approach to offering the player challenges. Most platformers will give you an arsenal of abilities or equipment and base its challenges around ever-more skillful use of those resources - that's where the difficulty curve comes from. In contrast, Nuts & Bolts sets the player a challenge and lets them decide how to approach it. By leaving this decision in their hands it is the player, rather than the developer, that has control over the game's difficulty. If a challenge in Nuts & Bolts is hard, it's because the player is making it hard for themselves. It's also a system that rewards creativity with entertainment - most of the fun I squeezed out of the game came from fiddling with the vehicle editor and experimenting with multiple different approaches to challenges. The direction that Nuts & Bolts takes with user-created content is unique, addictive, rewarding, and more successful than LittleBigPlanet's level editor could ever hope to be. That's not to say it's a perfect system, though. The challenges themselves are very limited in scope and type, which seems to go against the creative freedom that developers Rare are trying to encourage, and that can make for some pretty repetitive gameplay. With a little refinement, though, I think Nuts & Bolts' unique position within platforming represents a potential revolution in game design that, unfortunately, has passed the genre by completely. I loved the time I spent with Nuts & Bolts, and I'm looking forward to returning to it later in the year to check out the L.O.G.'s Lost Challenges DLC.

Borderlands

I think my opinion of Borderlands is already well-known amongst my followers. I've briefly mentioned it several times in my blogs over the last month-and-a-half, and collectively all those snippets of opinion do a pretty good job of summing up what effect Borderlands had on me. For those of you who don't know, my girlfriend bought me a copy of Borderlands as an early birthday present back in February. I picked it up after finishing Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and sank around forty hours into it over the next month or so (including time I spent with The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC). I kind of knew I was going to enjoy Borderlands before I even put the disc in my 360 - I loved Fallout 3, and the similar FPS/RPG hybrid premise was what gravitated me towards the game in the first place. Borderlands sits firmly on the FPS side of that combination, offering extremely satisfying combat that I still hadn't tired of after forty hours. The guns feel weighty and powerful, and not having to worry about dice-rolls dictating my accuracy was a welcome change from my last post-apocalyptic experience. That great gunplay is backed up by an RPG-inspired interface of HP bars and damage numbers, but the real RPG influences are felt in terms of character development. As an RPG player, I found Borderlands' levelling system and skill tree-based development to be one of the most compelling reasons to keep on playing. Also a major factor in my desire to progress was the constant promise of new, more powerful guns, and of course the incredibly well-written characters. On the other hand, though, there are a few issues that I couldn't get away from with the game. One of these was the flimsy story, which I found myself unable to care about from the start of the game through to the finish. The game's questing was also very weak, amounting to little more than fetch missions or assassinations for the first five sixths of the game. Admittedly things do pick up towards the end of the main storyline, when the game really starts to feel more like an objective-based shooter than a first-person MMO, but there's a lot of inane missions to complete before reaching the good stuff. On the whole, I enjoyed my time with Borderlands immensely. It's a lot of fun and did a great job of scratching a loot-whoring itch that's gone largely unnoticed since I played Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance eighteen months ago. While I probably won't be returning to it any time soon, it's good to know that Playthrough 2 will be sitting there waiting for me whenever I start to feel that itch again.

Just Cause

Despite my well-documented love of open-world and sandbox games, Just Cause was never a franchise that had featured on my gaming radar. It wasn't until the promotional trailers for Just Cause 2 started to surface that my interest was piqued, and I decided to pick up a cheap copy of the original game to see what I'd been missing out on. After a few hours with it, I realised I'd been missing out on a lot. Just Cause is an open-world game so over-the-top and crazy that it makes Saints Row look like Grand Theft Auto IV by comparison. In the fifteen hours I spent playing through the game's main story missions, I had some of the most fun I've had with a game of this kind in months. These missions are varied in style and structure, well-designed, and encourage some creative use of the game's parachute-and-grappling-gun gameplay mechanics. The story itself, told through pre-mission cut-scenes, is wafer-thin, poorly-acted and is ultimately little more than an attempt to justify the game's mammoth appetite for outlandish action. But that doesn't matter, because said action is so much fun. All this changes away from the main story, though, where the game's focus on repetitive side missions cuts out almost any need for the mechanics that make Just Cause so unique and enjoyable. Instead, they rely on a mix of shooting and driving, and it's in these areas that Just Cause really let me down. Shooting stuff simply wasn't much fun, and most of the vehicles in the game handled terribly. All this meant that after finishing up the main story missions, as much as I loved the world and mechanics of Just Cause, there simply wasn't enough on offer to keep me interested in playing. What I did play was a hell of a lot of fun though, and it's encouraged me to pick up a copy of Just Cause 2 the next time I'm in town.

Banjo-Kazooie

Every now and then I find myself overcome by an urge to "go retro" and pick up an older game to play. Last time that happened it resulted in a brief affair with Tomb Raider: Revelation, before the archaic controls became too much to bear. The most recent bout of this urge encouraged me to download a copy of the original Banjo-Kazooie from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace in late February. Over the last three weeks it's been my go-to game for some light-hearted fun, and I finally finished it this morning. it might a simple collection-based platformer, but there's a lot to like in Banjo-Kazooie. It features an endearing cast, not only in terms of its main characters but also the supporting NPCs that Banjo and Kazooie encounter in the game's various themed worlds. Speaking of those worlds, each one is unique in its design and all of them are full of puzzles that must be solved using the bear and bird's repertoire of abilities. Most of the fun in Banjo-Kazooie comes from working out how to obtain the Jiggies in each world. It's not all sugar and rainbows, though. While I was particularly impressed by the game's initial attempt to shun the conventional 'final boss' archetype with its quiz-show style face-off against Gruntilda, the false ending that followed really annoyed me. Being plonked back into the game-world after watching the credits roll and being tasked with the challenge of going back and collecting the Jiggies I'd missed was irritating to the point where I was almost ready to give up on the game, but I persevered and went on to take out the real final boss this morning. Or did I? Because upon knocking the witch off her broomstick, I was treated to a second false teaser-ending and told by the game to get all one-hundred Jiggies. At that point, I knew my time with Banjo-Kazooie was over and turned off my 360. I enjoyed Banjo-Kazooie a lot for the first twelve hours or so, but after the first ending everything took a nose dive and ended up feeling particularly laborious. This has left me in two minds about whether or not to download Banjo-Tooie from the Marketplace, for fear it might pull a similar stunt.

Wow, long blog. I think that covers just about everything that I'd left outstanding. All that remains is to clear up the status of Enduring Final Fantasy VII. I had intended to put out Episode Six on Thursday, and wrote up three quarters of the episode. I decided to leave the unfinished blog overnight and to complete it on Friday morning. Unfortunately, when I pulled my laptop out of standby to finish off the blog, the machine decided to crash on me. I lost all the progress I'd made on the episode, and I've lost all interest in continuing it for the time being. I know it's all my fault for not working in a separate document and I take full responsibility, so my apologies to everybody who was waiting for the episode. Hopefully I'll have regained interest in writing it by the end of next week, so you probably won't have to wait too long for it.

As for what I'm playing right now (besides my ongoing adventures with Final Fantasy VII), I'm putting most of my game time into Final Fantasy XIII. I'm currently thirty-one hours in, and I've just started Disc 3. I'm also thinking about starting something else up alongside it, but I'm undecided as to whether I should play Far Cry 2, Fable II, or Kameo. Curse my indecisiveness! If anybody out there is interested in making that decision for me, I'd be very grateful. Anyway, that's all I've got time to write for today. Thanks very much for reading, guys. I'll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Final Fantasy XIII (X360)

14 years ago

danielkempster

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#1 Edited By danielkempster

Keeping a blog is a commitment. Much like playing for a darts team, staying on top of my University workload, working a part-time job, and maintaining a healthy relationship with my girlfriend, it's something that requires a great deal of both my effort and my time. Also much like those other things, it's sometimes difficult to keep things balanced. Such is the way things seem to have gone with my blogs of late, which have consisted of little more than "What I've Been Playing"-style updates punctuated by episodes of Enduring Final Fantasy VII. In the meantime I've played and finished with no less than five games, each of which I was hoping to dedicate an entire blog to. Unfortunately, a lack of time and a lack of effort has resulted in this not happening. This means that I have an enormous backlog of potential blogs waiting to be written. At this point, to devote a whole blog to each game would not only take up a great deal of my time, but by the time I'd caught up on everything outstanding, I'd have a fresh pile of finished games to write about, meaning I wouldn't be any better off than I am now. As a result, I've decided to sit down and cover everything I have yet to write about in a single blog post. Strap yourself in, because this is going to be a pretty long journey.