Second week into 2012, and I continue to work my way through the pile of games I purchased in December for PC. I still have no idea how long this will take until I get through all of them, but I hope it keeps up for the first quarter at least. If not, I’ll still have multiplayer games to fall back on, or some new Shin Megami Tensei game. Now let’s get things started.

GAMES!!!!

It was around this time last year that I seriously got into the original Deus Ex. I bought it in the Steam Christmas sale the year before this last one, and I had trouble getting into it because of how un-fun Liberty Island was. Took me three tries to get through it, and as I went through the game I began warming up to it and by the end really enjoyed it, despite its flaws. And then suddenly, with no real reason I can think of for someone who has no large attachment to that original game, I went into the skeptics’ camp for Human Revolution. Later that year, the game proved to be very well made, and I decided the game would be great to pick up during the Christmas sale. It’s just unfortunate the game did not go on sale for 66% before the year ended and it probably would’ve had a legitimate chance of being on my GOTY list (it at least got an honorable mention).

I started playing the game for about 3 hours, just fumbling around and getting a hang of the mechanics of the game, taking side quests and doing them halfway and other stuff. Started the game over and began to do everything more thoroughly, and like many other action RPGs that have tons of detail in their worlds, that is the way to play it. Hacking into every computer to read people’s emails, sabotaging security systems, looking for every possible route into a situation and getting experience for it. What Deus Ex did in creating a world that was full of nooks and crannies and intricately designed, Human Revolution delivers on that. However, like the original Deus Ex, this game has some problems that feel oddly similar to the original, but obviously not the exact same.

Gunplay was horribly stiff and unsatisfying, even when you maxed out a weapon skill and didn’t need to wait for the crosshair to focus. Firing a gun and dealing with the inaccuracies that come from moving around makes shooting in the game tolerable. However, the enemies have some mediocre AI which allows for exploitation from the player. The biggest example of course is the pile of bodies that accumulate from killing a dude, hiding in an air duct, waiting for another dude to show up, then kill him, and repeat until all enemies are gone. I ended up using this tactic once so far in the game, but it was with a mine than a bullet. Aside from the gameplay, voice acting and in game cinematics aren’t that great either. Funny enough, the original Deus Ex didn’t have great voice acting or cinematics either.

Despite problems with the “game” part of Deus Ex Human Revolution, it accomplishes the same things Deus Ex was good at. I just arrived at Hengsha and haven’t done anything since, I don’t know, Tuesday (things have been really busy for me these past few days), but I’m anxious to get back into it. Again, really wish I was able to get it earlier last year and play through it all the way. Would have been a good GOTY contender.

You know what I love? Anime? More specific from anime? Giant robots. Hey, guess what, Shogo Mobile Armor Division has that and it’s great/terrible/whatever.

This was the one odd game I bought along with all the Ultima games I got from Good Old Games. I didn’t care about what the Giant Bomb crew had to say about this game, the idea of a first person shooter inspired by giant robot anime is pretty appealing to me. Although my interest in this game is a tad more specific than that. It sounds weird, I’m sure, but there are two things I have a bizarre fascination with: 1) things that came out in the early 90s, the years when I was too young to understand what was going on entertainment wise, and 2) games like Oni, Septerra Core, and Shogo that were designed before anyone had a clear understanding of what anime really was. Speaking of which, I should probably check out Septerra Core, but that’s for another time.

This game starts off really promising in regards to Monolith's commitment to the theme and style of the game. The opening video is straight up like a 1-2 minute anime intro with a Japanese song. Unfortunately there isn't really anything else in the game that matches that sort of commitment. The plot is pretty typical sounding, and it kind of doesn't matter much. Character models look pretty terrible. So much so I would say it makes the character models in the original Thief or System Shock 2 look passable. So yeah, graphics and story aren't really strong here, so what's so fun about the game? Giant robot action.

There are two kinds of levels in this game: on foot levels and giant robot levels. The on foot levels play like any other first person shooter from the late nineties. You move fast, you have no reloads, you have a health and armor system, and it is really unfairly hard, even on Easy. It got way to frustrating early on that I had to play the rest of the game in God mode. So yeah, those levels aren't particularly special, but there are the parts where you get to pilot a robot. At points in the game you get to choose which robot you want to pilot, and it boils down to how much speed or armor do you want. Once you get into a robot, it feels just about the same as the on foot levels, except way more powerful and more fun. You get some crazy looking weapons that can make things blow up, you can either jump or do a super jump, you can transform into a hover vehicle, you can step on humans and watch fountains of blood fly into the air. Actually, that's one of the things that is enjoyable in both kinds of levels. It's fun just to shoot at dudes and watch the obscene amounts of pixelated blood fly out of them.

Shogo isn't an especially great game, but it makes for a pretty good guilty pleasure. There's something cathartic about destroying stuff in a giant robot in this game, especially when there's blood involved. There are a couple bugs that can end up preventing you from continuing in the game, but consulting the GOG forums can help clear that up. Play Shogo if you want a great mediocre game and have some affinity for giant robots.

And the Rest

E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy

Played this game with a few friends last Saturday and was a good hour of fun. It’s extremely janky and weird and that’s why it is so amazing, so you should all be playing it.

Team Fortress 2

Also on that same Saturday I jumped back into TF2 for the first time in a long while (since late august, according to Steam). It was still absolutely TF2 and was a lot of fun. Well, except for a huge amount of lag and high ping numbers, which has never happened to me in an online game before. The numbers were as high as 800 or something.

Persona 3 FES

I picked the bad ending, just to see what it was like, but after realizing I locked myself out of two extra social links, I reloaded my save and continued on the path towards the good ending. And that means I have had to spend hours grinding in Tartarus in order to prepare for the final battle.

Ultima

Space. That’s where I last was in Ultima I, and I had no idea what to do next. I have not even played the game since last Saturday, but I’ll be getting to that this weekend. Hopefully.

Things Other Than Games

I haven't had much time for other fun things. I've had some major tests happen at school, first ones of the second semester, and I have been feeling extremely tired. And it's not from a lack of sleep, I swear. I'm positive it's the school itself. Just the act of being there is enough to suck the life out of me. I've got a study hall and a free period, which gives me plenty of time to do homework, but I'm barely motivated to get it all done during those two periods. Whatever, at least the week is over, and now I got a three day weekend. Even better, the rest of my family will be gone all day, leaving the house all to myself. Awesome.

In Conclusion

And that's it. Wish I could have written more on the two main games I had been playing, but again, school and fatigue got in the way until the last minute. I should probably say what next week's games will be, right? Well, one is a game I recently received as a gift from Good Old Games, the Last Express, and Katawa Shoujo, the free visual novel that has been in development for more than a decade, and also my first foray into the genre. That game I am the most curious about.

It’s 2012, and for people who have followed this blog on Giant Bomb for a while, welcome to the return of [insert title]. For people who are reading this outside of Giant Bomb, welcome! Here I primarily talk about video games and…well video games, and sometimes things other than that. For people who have already known me and followed my blog, this year I have changed things a bit. The order of things has been rearranged and modified, and I’ve also put a bit more effort into the banners. Besides that, it’s still the same deal. I talk about games that I have been playing for the past week or more, and sometimes briefly cover other games I’ve been playing.

Of course, if you’re reading this on Wordpress or tumblr, none of this really matters because it’s your first time reading. Well, maybe it does, since you might not know what I’m talking about some of the time. But that’s okay, because that just means you need to go to the greatest video game website in the world, Giant Bomb, immediately. Anyway, let’s get started.

GAMES!!!!

Even with all the other games I ended up getting during the two week break, I figured it would be good to rent another game from Gamefly, and I decided on one that I’ve wanted to get around to for a while. For the last almost three weeks I have played over 50 hours of Persona 3 FES. And so far, just speaking about Persona and not the whole Shin Megami Tensei, it reassures in my mind that this is the only JRPG series I can actually care about. Last year I had tried my hands at a few JRPGs on PS3, such as Hyperdimension Neptunia, Final Fantasy XIII, and Star Ocean the Last Hope. The last game I managed to complete, but even then I kinda hated myself for going through that, despite whatever fun I did have with the game. I’ve spent more time on Persona 3 FES than any of those other games mentioned, and it has remained interesting and enjoyable the whole way through.

Going into this game, I was already familiar with how Persona works, since I like many others watched the Persona 4 Endurance Run. The main differences being stuff like moon phases instead of weather patterns, one randomly generated main dungeon instead of several dungeons, and no control of your party members during battle. That last part is definitely a bummer, but it works well enough. So long as you assign the right tactics to your party members accordingly stuff that goes on in battle doesn’t feel too much out of your control. Based on how the story progresses, which involves preparing for an operation on each full moon, the idea of grinding in a dungeon comes to the forefront with Tartarus. There’s no saving anyone in Tartarus like there was saving someone from inside the TV in Persona 4. Oh well, listening to a podcast or two I’ve found out recently is a great way to get through grinding sessions. The more interesting parts about Persona aren’t the dungeons or battles. It’s the story and characters and social links.

One term that I can best use to describe the characters in Persona 3 FES is endearing, and I don’t mean that in the bad sense. They have good qualities, and offset by one or two kinda bad qualities. Junpei is a pretty good example of an endearing character in the game. He’s generally optimistic and friendly, being very quick to be friends with you when the game starts, but he does end up being sometimes annoying as his interactions with Yukari proves true. But since the game takes place during the course of a year, kind of like actual high school, you’re going to get stuck with people that you think you may not want to see every day (very true in my case), but over time you’ll get used to them and may even come around to appreciating them.

Probably the best thing I can say in this area is that I especially like the main character in this game. The protagonists in the Persona games are silent and tend to be pretty stoic and expressionless. Which is good, because I’m not that much of an expressive guy. I also don’t talk much, so like the protagonist I’m often the one listening to everyone venting their problems or things in their life. But when I get the chance, if there’s a dialog option that’s sarcastic sounding or just anything that will push someone’s buttons I’ll pick that one, because that’s how I roll. Lastly, because I already watched Persona 4 start to finish, I appreciate the protagonist in this game more because it’s my first time through the game and thus my experiences as the main character is much more personal.

There’ve been some really good moments, and then there are some bad moments, and some that are embarrassing for you as the main character to endure (school trips). It’s not really about all about those moments though. The journey itself is what makes it interesting. Much like in real life I don’t know what to expect of these characters I’m going to be seeing every day for the next year so I am generally untrusting and don’t really care much for anyone around me. As the game continues on, however, I become used to seeing these same characters over and over and watch as they change throughout the year. I’m close to the end, and I just know that I’m gonna miss these characters once I finish it. Well, maybe not, if I decide to do new game plus. We’ll see.

So yeah, Persona 3 FES. One of the greatest modern JRPGs. Forget everything else. Shin Megami Tensei’s all that matters.

There are things about Hard Reset that I really like. I enjoy how fast everything moves, I enjoy not having to reload my weapons, and I also enjoy just having to press one button at minimum to effectively shoot an enemy, instead of bringing up iron sights to increase accuracy at the cost of movement speed. The game is extremely old school in design, and it is fun to play, too.

The game was developed by a combination of former developers from People Can Fly (Painkiller) and CD Projekt (The Witcher). The Painkiller influence is pretty strong, given the style of gameplay, so that makes the influence from the ex-CD Projekt guys…I don’t know, graphics? Game looks pretty incredible. The more logical thing I suppose would be the upgrade system but that doesn’t feel like anything that would require those guys' help. You can put upgrades into your gun, energy gun, or yourself to improve performance and abilities. There may be two weapons by the looks of it, but each of them has five forms, effectively giving you access to ten different weapons. So yeah, your gun transforms. And you can blow up a lot with them.

Speaking of blowing up, there’s a lot of opportunity for environmental kills with exploding barrels or electrical devices. To some that might seem like it degrades the shooting since you don’t need to shoot at the enemies in order to kill them, but I don’t care really. The stuff blows up real nice, and when you can get a chain reaction going with them, the effect looks real nice, and sounds good as well.

There’s not that much in the way of story, well, at least anything really interesting. I didn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying since I just wanted to go shoot some robots. I don’t think I even remember how many levels there are; only that it took me three hours to beat the game according to Steam.

So yeah, the game is a bit mindless when you boil it down, and it’s also rather short, but that’s kind of good since that kind of game doesn’t overstay its welcome. For what amount of time you’ll spend playing through the game will be satisfactory enough. However, the game does incentivize you to replay levels with Steam achievements and the game ranking your performance at the end of each level. If you want, you could try and get through a level with no deaths, fastest time possible, and all secrets found or whatever. I might just do that sometime, but not anytime soon.

And the Rest

So what happens if I’ve been playing more than two games and still have something to say? That’s where this part of the blog comes in.

Saints Row the Third

Saints Row the Third is pretty fun, but there’s also some fun to be had playing with another person. I was fortunate enough to find someone who was looking for a person to play co-op with, thanks to the Giant Bomb PC Gaming Hub. Thanks a bunch to infamousBIG for diving into the madness with me.

Magicka

Once again, another game I played co-op thanks to the Giant Bomb PC Gaming Hub. Unlike Saints Row, it was definitely needed because from what I’ve played of the game in single player it wasn’t very fun for me. Even with a partner, it was pretty easy for magic to get out of hand and kill each other, whether it was intentional or not (I tried out a meteor shower, and it ended up killing both of us. Not what I expected). Thanks again to El Jefe, Paco for playing.

Ultima

I figured a great long term video game commitment I’ll most likely fall off of would be to play all the Ultima games currently available on GOG that I bough before Christmas break. Started with Ultima I, and so far it has been grinding to get my gold, health, and food supply up into the thousands. Before the week was done, I had completed what sounds like 4/5 of the game. Pretty short when you realize it.

Things Other Than Games

This segment used to be called Real Life but I decided changing it to this was better because even though some things I do are not playing video games, they still wouldn’t necessarily refer to anything in real life. Basically the Internet takes up the rest of my time during the day when I’m not playing games or other things.

Anyway, what else have I been doing besides playing all these video games? Not much. I’m now caught up on Persona 4 The Animation and hopefully I won’t have to play catch up again in the future. Speaking of anime, a few weeks ago back when the break started I got the entire series of Yu Yu Hakusho on DVD from a friend. All 112 episodes. Watched a couple episodes, and it’s still a really good show. However, I plan to save that for later this year, after March 17. If you don’t know the significance of that date, well, you’ll find out soon enough (turns out it’s a Saturday, so that lines up perfectly with my blog’s schedule). Oh, and second semester of my senior year of high school started. Almost free.

In Conclusion

And that does it. First entry of 2012. Looking forward to playing more of these couple dozen games to get me through the next several dead weeks of game releases. And those games will give me plenty of stuff to worry about. Next week I’ll be writing my thoughts on Deus Ex Human Revolution and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, as well as anything else that I think deserves a little mention.

Alright, have a good rest of the year.

Happy New Year, duders!

No, this is not the return of [insert title], that’s this coming Saturday. Instead, this is where I bring up to speed what I’ve been doing the past two weeks as well as my top 10 games of 2011. I’ll save the list for later.

Well, with the Steam Christmas sale and two weeks of no school, that meant plenty of time to play games. And as it turned out, too many games at some point. Before the break started I had bought all the Ultima games that were on GOG plus Shogo, and then the GBA games for 3DS came out. I even planned to keep playing tons more Skyrim but I didn’t. Games like Magicka, Bastion, Hard Reset, and Saints Row the Third took priority, especially when some of those games I was looking to consider for my top 10 list.

Of course there was Christmas, so I got quite a few neat gifts. I got the Skyrim 4 CD soundtrack autographed by Jeremy Soule, Reboot: The Definitive Mainframe Edition, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on Blu-Ray, and best of all, a new monitor for my computer. That’s great because I can have two monitors hooked up without any usb device or whatever to make two old monitors work. Plus, I can now full enjoy widescreen content on my PC. Yeah, for the longest time I’ve been stuck with two standard def monitors. Instead I have one widescreen monitor and one SD monitor. And the setup works pretty well. Depending on which thing I want to watch, I can put it on the appropriate monitor. Wish I could figure that out for some of the games I own, but I guess that just means putting them in windowed mode.

Other than that, it’s just been nothing but games. I’ll save the other details about that stuff for [insert title] when it starts again on Saturday. But for now…

Top 10 GOTY

I had to have this game mentioned somewhere, if only because Video_Game_King would never let me hear the end of it if I didn’t. Heck, this spot on the list was hard to figure out because the other 9 are kind of a jump up from the rest of the games I played this year. Ultimately, I decided on El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron as my #10 game of 2011.

The game is a rather simplified character action game, which is what kind doesn’t put it on the same level as the rest of the games on this list from a gameplay standpoint. However, the experience of seeing Japan once again taking ancient religious and mythlogical stories and putting it through its own perspective was enjoyable. The art style is like an evolution of the visuals in Okami, and some of the places you find yourself in as you climb the Tower of Babel are rather surprising breaks from what you think the game is based on the first few hours. Heck, the timespan that gets abstractly covered throughout the game is rather crazy when you look back on it (it takes Enoch hundreds of years to find the Tower of Babel. You would have thought God got fed up and just flooded the whole world).

It’s a simple game, and it almost doesn’t feel like it should be in the same league as the rest of the games on my list, but El Shaddai was definitely a fun, visual experience.

Two years ago, Uncharted 2 Among Thieves was not just my game of the year, but it was also my game of the last decade. It was so amazing that I still lose my mind just thinking about that game. It’s two years later, and now the sequel is near the bottom of my list (if I had gotten my hands on more games, this probably would have been pushed to the #10 spot).

That isn’t to say that Uncharted 3 Drakes Deception isn’t terrible. There are some small holes and problems in the story, but the formula Naughty Dog has constructed for this series is still excellent. The combat is like a more limited, animation heavy version of the Arkham Asylum combat system, but it was still fun to use, and ended up using it more than I expected to resolve enemy encounters. The set pieces are also fantastic, and are even better than most of the set pieces in Uncharted 2. The cruise ship during the storm that starts flooding and changes the geometry, as well as the burning chateau are the two standout action pieces, and the only disappointing thing that can be said about those is that they were already shown months before the game’s release.

Once again, the sequel to another game from 2009 that was high on my list from that year and is now in the lower five this year. It’s kinda funny thinking about it. Two years ago after hearing the amazing debate between the Giant Bomb crew over Uncharted 2 or Arkham Asylum as GOTY, we kinda joked that the same thing would happen again with these sequels. Not really the case in reality. But again, Arkham City is not a bad game. In fact, I like it more overall than Arkham Asylum.

Story wise, it’s once again Batman in a dangerous situation in the course of a single night with a lot at risk. In fact, way more is at risk than in Arkham Asylum. I still won’t say what happens at the end, but man…it left me sad, and amazed that Rocksteady would do that. Aside from the story, the amazing combat system from Arkham Asylum is expanded on with new upgrades and gadgets to use, making an already great system even better. The open world was well executed, there are plenty of riddler trophies and challenges, and plenty of Batman’s rogues gallery gets their due, even if it’s a short cameo. This game is packed with so much content. It just sucks I couldn’t play the Catwoman missions because I was renting it from Gamefly and it was an online pass deal. The first time I’ve been personally made upset by an online pass.

If there’s one thing I can think of that infamous 2 does to improve it from the original are not powers that let you cause destruction, but powers that makes mobility super fun. Grinding on electric wires and floating through the air was fun in the first game, but launching yourself into the air with a pillar of ice, shooting up sides of the building on an electrified pole, and an electrified tether to latch onto things makes mobility and traversal so much fun and so much faster.

Of course, inFamous 2 isn’t all just that. The city is more vibrant and colorful looking, the way the game handles stacking variations on your powers is smart, the in-game cutscenes are a major improvement over the Sly Cooper-esque stilted animations from the first game, and both endings to the game, well at least the good ending anyway, makes a possible 3 inFamous to be drastically different from what the series is now. Kind of a “screw you” to the idea of making Cole’s battle against the Beast drawn out into a trilogy.

I may have bought this game just a week ago, but it was worth waiting to get it to enjoy on my new monitor, because the art is so good looking. And it plays as good as it looks too. A lot of stuff can start filling up the screen all looking to murder you, and on top of whacking/shooting them, dodging and knowing when to time it makes combat rather methodical. Also, the game narrating the kid’s actions is well done and probably the best use of narration or commentary on what happens in a game without it getting repetitive. Man, this whole game is so good.

Nintendo continues its move to make 3D Mario more and more resemble 2D Mario with Super Mario 3D Land, and unsurprisingly, it is the best game currently on the 3DS as well as a pretty fantastic Mario game. It’s a slow starter, in terms of both movement and difficulty curves, but later levels in the game can get devilishly tough and very fun at the same time. There’s extremely limited control of the camera, but the angle and view works really well, and allows for some neat hiding spots that would have been easily spoiled by a fully controllable camera. It’s 2D Mario in 3D, and I say the blend between the two styles of Mario games works splendidly.

There’s just so much great stuff to say about Portal 2 that it is hard to start off where. The single player story is amazing, introducing new characters like Wheatley and Cave Johnson and Valve continues to use its environmental story telling on top of it all. The decaying halls of the facility give you more small glimpses at what Aperture Science was like, foreshadowing what would happen later in the game, and a neat easter egg or two to remind you just enough that Portal is still connected to the Half-Life universe.

And that’s only half of the game. The other half is the co-op, which I was lucky to find someone earlier this year to be my Portal buddy and go through the two player campaign. The co-op campaign was less focused on the story as it was creating new puzzles for you and a friend to solve, and thinking up how to solve puzzles and experimenting was a lot of fun. There are even some fun achievements out there for screwing over your partner. I was able to get one by fooling my partner to stand on a lightmass bridge and wave to me. Then I removed the bridge and made him fall. Didn’t think it would have gone that smooth.

I never thought I would get to play this game by the end of the year. For half of the year my Wii’s disc drive was busted but it was only a month before the game’s release that I had enough money to spare on setting up a repair order with Nintendo. The one thing that kinda disappointed me that wasn’t the game’s fault was that I didn’t spend as much time with it during the first week that I had it. It was a lot of short bursts with the rest of my time devoted to Skyrim.

Despite taking a longer time to beat the game, my time with it was very enjoyable. It’s a Zelda experience that makes slight variations to differentiate it from other games in the series, but it’s still identifiable as a Zelda game. The motion controls and their implementation are really outstanding, with only a few instances where it felt like a burden. Sword combat, controlling a flying beatle, solving lock puzzles, and other instances makes the experience just different enough to be enjoyable. I’m only on a second playthrough with the intention of completing all the side material, and it is fun looking for every hidden nook and cranny. Some slow moments in the beginning and after the third dungeons, with some minor motion control issues does not keep this game from being near the top of my list.

For the last month and a half I’ve felt the need to play this game, thanks to Jeff and Ryan’s insistence for everyone to play Saints Row the Third. I figured “all right, I’ll wait for the Steam Christmas sale and buy it then.” Bought it on the first day of the sale, installed it, started playing, and I was very quickly drawn into the insanity. Like Skyward Sword, as of right now I am on a second playthrough and still find myself enjoying it. Even more so now that I’m actively looking to acquire as much territory and raise my hourly income. I’ve not played many open world games, but Saints Row the Third has to be my absolute favorite.

It’s weird that I would ever say that I love Saints Row the Third, because I did not like anything about Saints Row at all. The first game, all I remember from it was almost every other word coming out of people’s mouths was an f-bomb, and the gameplay accompanying it wasn’t that interesting looking. I didn’t look at Saints Row 2, or even realized it existed, since I figured it wasn’t that much different from the first game. This game though, all it took was that trailer introducing Professor Genki and that pre-order bonus stuff that it finally caught my interest, but I still wasn’t sure. Now I’m surprised I even doubted this game at all.

So many things that Saints Row the Third does is all in service of giving you easy access to making mayhem as quickly as possible without making the consequences immediately punishing. You get access to UAVs in the third mission, and shortly after you can outfit your cars with nitrous and spikes that protrude and retract from the side of your tires. And even though I thought it was incredibly stupid the first time I heard about it, I had a bizarre amount of fun beating up people with the penetrator. Yeah, whacking people in the head with a giant dildo. Who knew?

The game shows you what it’s capable of doing early on, and it continues to ramp up the absurdity as you dive deeper into the game. In fact, I’m gonna get back to playing this game immediately because it is still so much fun. Everything around what you do is so ridiculous and funny, and that’s why it works.

Saints Row the Third is pretty good, and so is Skyward Sword and Portal, but nothing else I’ve played this year, and I mean nothing, compares to the game that is the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I already spoke about this game highly in my previous blog post, but I’ll continue to say this: Skyrim is an amazing experience that gives me what I’ve been wanting since I was first introduced to the series 5 years ago with Oblivion. Not just a more refined gameplay system, but a whole new world to explore. Oblivion and Morrowind stole so much of my time, but on subsequent playthroughs I found myself less encouraged to do it all again because I already knew what to expect, and even then, there was only a finite amount of content set up to cover a specific amount of area. Skyrim provides a new providence in the world of Tamriel to explore, but Bethesda created a new dynamic quest system and other refinements that I did not expect.

I’ve already talked about how amazing dragons in this game are, so I’ll skip the details and refer you to my last blog post (short version: they’re awesome. Wait, I already said that. Oh well). The Radiant Quest system works surprisingly well, and not because the quests themselves are truly amazing, far from it. What’s great is the game solving an issue with past Elder Scrolls games being that there is so many things crammed into a single one of those games that it is almost, or just straight up is impossible to find without consulting outsides sources and walkthroughs. Instead, the game designs the quests with some broad descriptions in the dialogue to point you towards a place in one of the 9 holds you have yet to explore. This includes guild quests, bounties, hunts for dragon shouts, anything. And once you start going on one of these randomly generated quests, they lead you to an area that has its own unique story and quest, and just like how many people play these games, everything starts branching out and you start going on a rabbit trail to see where it leads, not knowing where you’ll end up.

It’s really amazing that this and the other systems at play work amazingly, as well as this game feeling the least broken of anything Bethesda has put out. During the first few dozen hours of gameplay, I had experienced atleast one hard lock and one crash to desktop, and none of those instances where repeatable in the same area. Normally in something like Oblivion it would have been a spot where two much was happening as soon as I entered an area in the overworld, or for some other messed up reason. Here the most frequent bugs are things like backwards flying dragons and killing a bandit and having him immediately stand back up in a fists raised fighting stance (no joke, this just came up on me hours before posting this). They don’t break the game, and they may seem immersion breaking, but I just role with it, because it doesn’t prevent me from finishing something, and atleast it gives me a good chuckle.

The skill system has changed quite a bit, and the introduction of perks and skill trees kind of makes up for the reduction of skills from Oblivion, and before that Morrowind. Skill trees allow stuff like blade and blunt to be placed under the one hand or two hand skill trees. Although I have come to terms with it in this game, I miss having the traditional 8 attributes and picking from several preset classes along with the custom class option. The game works fine without it, since that’s how they built it, but the original system in past games worked just fine before that I don’t see how there’s any real reason to scrap it. But the game itself is so good that those things don’t cross my mind, so it’s only outside of it that I really think critically about it.

And while I don’t consider this a big factor in it being high up on my list, but even without the Creation Kit people have put out some really good mods for the game, making an already great game even greater. Some menu tweaks, post processing effects, even the 4gb patch, which is defunct now that Skyrim got it during an official update, have made the game so much more amazing ALREADY than what vanilla Skyrim offers. You know how I’ve had a couple moments early on where the game either locked up or crashed? Ever since I used the 4gb patch, and now the official Large Address Aware in Skyrim’s official executable, I’ve had nothing of the sort at all. I’m still amazed that it works this well because even with all the mods and fixes I’ve applied to Morrowind and Oblivion, they still crash on me every now and again.

I could probably go on to write a freaking song about this game, but I’m sure I don’t need to say that much else. Skyrim is amazing, far surpassing my expectations, even for all the excitement that I had for this game leading up to its release. I’m gonna keep playing it and I’ll be ready to by whatever DLC Bethesda puts out during the year. God…I love this game so much.

---

Now, those are my top 10 games, but there were others that I hoped would make the cut, but didn’t. Instead, I will give them an honorable mention. Here are the games.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I only got the game on the 30 because it was 66 percent off on Steam. Why couldn’t it have been that way a week earlier? WHY!?

Magicka

I like the magic system, but so far, playing it solo hasn’t been the most fun for me. Feel like I need to find a buddy to play with.

Hard Reset

Really love how fast the movement is and it looks gorgeous, but I’ve been playing it in rather small bursts and not enough of it.

Binding of Isaac

Also bought this the same day as Deus Ex. It’s fun, but I’ve played enough to know it isn’t one of my top 10 games of the year.

E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy

Ah, who am I kidding?

L.A. Noire

I don't even own this game and wanted to buy it during the Steam sale, but I had already spent my limit on everything else during the sale. Oh well, wasn't as big of a priority, but would've been nice to have.

One More Thing...

I’ve briefly described my Christmas break, put together my top 10 games of 2011, but I have one thing to talk about, and that is the return of my blog, [insert title].

I used part of the break to come up with some changes to the blog, primarily the images. Figured it would be a good idea to change up the design a bit, and unfortunately, I can’t decide what I want to go with. So I’ll let you help me decide. Basically which of these two pictures do you like better

The first is a pretty simple and easily reusable format, but from a more artistic standpoint I’m kinda leaning towards the latter. Only problem is whether or not I can come up with something visually unique for every single game I decided to play and write about. For the record, the latter image does have a format. It's the logo in the middle with a collage of images from the game in the background, inspiration coming from some of the old Toonami promos when TOM first came on as the host. If I don’t get any good opinions on which one to go with, I might just do a coin toss or something to decide.

The game you see in both pictures I intend to write about for my first entry of [insert title] this year. Consider it a little preview.

Also, I am expanding my blog outside of Giant Bomb, and once again, it’s another case of me trying to decide which of two sites I want to post it on as well. Rather than ask for opinions on which I should choose, I’ll just go with both. On January 7, this coming Saturday, [insert title] will be on Giant Bomb as always, as well as Wordpress and tumblr. Hey, the more people that see the stuff I slave away at, the better I’ll feel.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now. Hope 2012 is an interesting year, and something involving the end of the world or some crap.

And here’s Part 2 of [insert title] SKY edition, also the last entry of this blog for the year. By 2012, (hopefully) some changes will be made to how the blog is structured. But let’s continue.

Real Life

This past week has been very exhausting for me. Next week I will be having final exams for the semester, so my teachers have been trying to cram every last bit of material they can into this week. But now Christmas break is so close, and that means a crap load of time to spend playing video games.

GAMES!!!!

This game…

I’m glad I pre-purchased this game on Steam so I could play it the day it came out. I could have easily waited a year for the inevitable GOTY edition with the game patched up and DLC Bethesda will put out for this game. But I didn’t. I bought the game, started playing on 11-11-11, and I’ve logged almost 120 hours according to Steam. And I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. If you haven’t guessed already, Skyrim is AMAZING.

Where can I even start with this game? The quest lines are a whole lot better than the ones in Oblivion, and the dungeons all feel unique despite following a template for that particular dungeon, be it a cave or a draugr tomb. Exploring the world itself is really fun and I had more incentive to restrict the use of fast travel (although when I found myself going back and forth on the same path for things, I found it easier then to just fast travel). The game has been the least broken of all the other Bethesda games, even with the patches breaking new things upon fixing old things. That brief period of magic resistances not working didn't stop me from enjoying the game. But the best part about it all, no doubt about it, are the dragons.

I'll be honest, there are still some games that were released this year that I haven't played, so there might be a slight chance it might change, but as far as I'm concerned, dragons makes Skyrim my Game of the Year, on top of all the other great stuff this game has. There's no telling when a dragon will show up, even when you see one in the distance circling around a mountain, but when a dragon does show up bringing death and destruction, all priorities are dropped and the immediate focus is that dragon. Not just for you, but EVERYONE. Guards, villagers, giants, horses, EVERYONE. And when you are putting yourself into the role of your character and immersing yourself in the world, your mind just brings up the most amazing scenarios.

Allow me to share a few dragon encounters in the last couple of weeks that really stood out to me. I was at the College of Winterhold in the Arch-Mage's quarters when I looked at the stairwell leading up and I thought "I've never been up those stairs before, let's see where it leads." I go up the stairs, find myself at the top of the tower, and then I hear a dragon roar and it starts coming for me. And there's no one who can help me fight it, just a one on one fight. After using a few Fire Breath shouts, I decided to summon a storm, and the lightning grounded the dragon to the tower, allowing me to deal more damage with my sword and I got an awesome finishing blow.

Dragon encounter #2: I was on my way to the imperial legion camp near Markarth, and I'm passing through a Dwemer ruin in order to reach it. I hear a dragon roar and see its shadow pass by me. Unable to see the dragon from where I was, I quickly made my way to higher ground, and I saw the dragon heading for the camp. Feeling the sense of urgency I rush over to fight the dragon, but not only do I see it slaughtering the imperial soldiers at the camp, but another dragon came and joined in the fight. Needless to say, I slayed both, but not without the rest of the soldiers getting killed (except Legate Rikke. She wasn't involved).

And the most recent, dragon encounter #3: I'm speaking with the Jarl of Winterhold and I become Thane of the hold and receive the Blade of Winterhold. I head outside, and suddenly my Ebony Mail turns black, and then a dragon roar is heard. The guards try to shoot it down with arrows, but keep missing. I head to higher ground just outside of town and use my Storm Call shout to see if it would damage it. It only did a little, but suddenly he backs off and starts circling around the area, making me wonder what that dragon is trying to do. Instead of coming back for me, he starts attacking the College, and I rush over there as fast as I can, heading up to the roof to kill the dragon, with the help of a mage's flame atronach.

Those are only a small handful of amazing moments I've had in Skyrim, and I really don't know how any other game this year could top that. I just can't. Skyrim has provided something I've desperately needed, and that is a new place in Tamriel to explore, because I can only get so much out of Morrowind and Oblivion at this point, but Bethesda went far beyond what I expected of this game at launch. Even though I'm using mods now, the game was still surprisingly amazing by itself. I cannot give this game enough praise. GOTY.

In Conclusion

And that is it. This will be the last blog you see from me for the next three weeks or so. In the meantime, I'll be playing a bunch of games and thinking about how to change the format of this blog.

Also, one last thing. For the last month or so I've been a part of a website called The Nintendo Enthusiast, where I was invited by a friend to be the reviews editor. My content up there isn't frequent, but if you're interested, check it out. In fact, that will be the first change I make to this blog for next year, by having a link or list of links to other sites that I can be found on.

Peace.

It’s been three weeks, but I have returned to post my penultimate blog…of the year. This post and the one next week will be the last ones I post for this year, leaving me to play games all Christmas break with hardly any responsibilities. Until then, here is part one of what I call [insert title] SKY edition. You can figure out what that means because of this week’s game. Next week, well, I won’t spoil it, but you can probably guess what the second game I’ve been playing that has “sky” in the title (especially if anyone pays attention to my status updates that I only post with the intention of me being the only one who reads them).

Real Life

I’ve been doing quite a bit these last few weeks. I moved my computer up into my room temporarily to play some games, which was fun until my parents started to miss seeing me and demanded I move the PC back downstairs where it used to be. I also had enough money to send my Wii to Nintendo to get it repaired, which I never thought I was gonna do until I realized I got so much cash on my birthday. Went to see the Muppets on Thanksgiving with my family (probably wouldn’t have gone to see it any other way), turned in a rough draft of a term paper that was apparently a diamond in a sea of utter trash from my peers, and I got a stomach bug Monday night and lost precious hours of sleep dry heaving and feeling miserable.

And that’s probably not all I’ve had happen since my last blog, but seriously, do you really need to hear anymore? Let’s move onto the game at hand.

GAMES!!!!

I’ll admit, I did not see myself playing this game before the end of the year. My Wii’s disc drive got busted earlier this year in June and I didn’t have the money to pay for repairs and shipping. The thing could still play Gamecube games and I still had my virtual console stuff so it wasn’t a total lost, but still, the idea of not being able to play Skyward Sword was tough. That didn’t stop me from getting the game preordered for my birthday, because dang it if I can’t play I at least wanted that gold wiimote and carry that over to the Wii U. At the beginning of November I suddenly realized I had a bunch of money from my birthday that I could use to get the system repaired. I set up the order, sent it in, came back faster than I expected it would, and I was now ready for Skyward Sword. Except for the part that involved waiting almost a week for the game to arrive from Amazon. But again, totally worth it.

So with that anecdote all done, I have the game, and been playing it on and off with my file going at about 17 hours or so. How am I finding it? Pretty darn great. There are a lot of things about it I really like, and just couple of gripes, but I like it a whole lot. I haven’t finished it of course, so I can’t speak for the rest of the product, but for now, I will say that this game comes very close to being my Game of the Year.

I'm sure I don't need to remind you guys that the art style is great looking, but I'll go ahead and say it again: the art style is great looking. It looks great, but there are moments where you are able to view a huge vista and then it looks fantastic. It really does look like a painting when you see it. Nintendo makes the best of its asset to make a good looking game even in 480p.

This is also the first motion plus game that I own, because I got the gold wiimote bundle, and the sword controls are a lot of fun. It kinda sucks that you don't get to use it a lot at the beginning because it takes a good couple of hours to get going. The combat in the game is a lot of fun and engaging, and I've already died quite a few times from enemies I encountered for the first time and could not figure out. Dying once is one thing, but more than once in a Zelda game is surprising for me. But again, all those times that I died were in combat scenarios, so every other part of the game poses no real threat (falling off of ledges into bottomless pits don't make you lose a heart).

The art looks great, and the combat is a lot of fun, but what I really like are the puzzles and dungeons, or rather the entire surface world. Skyloft and the whole world above the clouds acts as your Wind Waker style overworld, but the world below the clouds is basically its own huge dungeon, with the actual dungeons just being mini dungeons inside those dungeons (I said dungeons a lot, huh?). Yes, there are the traditional Zelda style dungeons in the game, but the areas surrounding them have plenty of puzzles to solve and hidden things to find. The puzzles in the open areas aren't that tough to solve, but the ones in the dungeons are well done and feel fresh, something that Twilight Princess disappointed me in. As of this writing, I just finished the fifth dungeon, which was a lot of fun, as well as the areas leading up to that dungeon.

I did mention I have some gripes with the game. One of them is very minor that I'm sort of used to it now, but I still need to mention that the cursor movement on menus and aiming is really slow. It is nice that you can aim past the sensor bar and the cursor will still respond on the screen, but it is way to slow for my tastes. Again, very minor complaint. The other one I have is a bit more important however, and that is the pacing. It took me an hour and a half to get to Faron Woods, and throughout the game there are moments where you are sent on fetch quests that serve to pad out the game which left me impatient to go to the next main dungeon and continue the story there. One example in particular would be the time between completing the 3rd dungeon and starting the 4th. The going back and forth fetching items for people was a bit too much for me, but right now I haven't had much problems with that now. So long as the game keeps me going to new locations, I'm happy.

There's been a lot of great moments in Skyward Sword. There are some things that are disappointing, mainly the pacing, and I haven't finished the game so I haven't seen everything this game has. I'm going through my first run just doing the main path, but on a second playthrough I plan to throw in all the side quest stuff. Again, so far this game comes very close to being my Game of the Year. Could that change by the time I finish the game? It might. If not, it will still be pretty high up there on my list.

In Conclusion

And that's it. Check back next week for Part 2, and then that will be it for [insert title] in 2011. Christmas Break will be my time to play games and buy games from the Steam Christmas Sale, much like last year. I might also do some changes to the blog when 2012 comes along. Maybe. I'm not making any promises, because I could easily just not doing anything at all. But it's not out of the question.

Peace.

It’s 11-11-11, and this entry of [insert title] is being put up a day early because all this weekend I will be playing The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, and I won’t stop to do anything else. Well, except eat and bathe, but you know what I mean. So let’s get this out of the way.

Real Life

Wait, why am I wasting my time on this section when I should be playing more Skyrim? Get this blog done with!

GAMES!!!!

WARNING: Spoilers will be mentioned at random. Just ignore this whole section if you haven’t played the game.

Last weekend was well spent playing through Nathan Drake’s latest adventure in Uncharted 3. Didn’t touch the multiplayer or co-op, since that’s what I did with the last game. I’m already having trouble trying to formulate my thoughts on this game (I blame Skyrim), but I’ll do my best.

First off, the opening chapter is really well done. The cinematics at the start are brilliant, and when everything turns into a brawl in a pub, it gets really fun. The combat is the best in the series yet, especially with the different contextual finishers you can use. Then you get to fight against a really huge tough guy that requires you to use a lot of counters and break free of his grip (often times it involves kicking him in the groin). The only downside after that part is the game would throw different enemies that followed the same patterns as the big brute at the start of the game. I felt like it was one of those “game-y” elements that kinda soured the experience a tiny bit. Would have been tolerable if it was the same guy crossing paths with you over the course of the game.

The characters already in the series are as strong as ever, and the new ones are for the most part really good. Cutter is the absolute best of them. In fact, Cutter is tied with Sully for my favorite Uncharted character that is not Nathan Drake. Most likely it will be Cutter. As much as I love Sully’s cigar chomping, dirty old man personality, Cutter is witty in his own special way and is very British in a way that doesn’t make him feel like a stereotype. He’s got his own knowledge of history that compliments Nate’s own knowledge, and makes it pretty clear that phone contracts are a complete rip-off. After learning about how pay as you go phones are popular in the UK, I appreciated Cutter even more as being authentic, if the term suits him well. It’s too bad you don’t see him again after he break’s his leg in Syria.

Then there are the set pieces…oh man. The absolute best that Naughty Dog has created. The burning chateau was really spectacular and almost terrifying to think about. You’re making your way to the door and the floor collapses below you to reveal a lake of fire. Then there’s the ship on the stormy sea that starts capsizing and changing the geometry of the level. Basically after that point the even crazier moments start kicking in with the airplane crashing in the desert, trekking across the desert, riding on a horse to rescue Sully, to finally escaping the city of Ubar after Drake causes it to collapse with three bullets. I’m with Sully, how does Nathan manage to set off these crazy chain reactions with as little as three freaking bullets?

I already mentioned my complaint about the big brute enemy type being reused throughout the game, but then there’s a minor story issue that I have, and that is what about the killer spiders? They were in every major area that Nathan goes to in order to find clues about the lost city of Ubar, and they’re nowhere to be found in the city other than in a drug trip Drake goes through after drinking the water. Besides that, probably the only other thing I have to complain about the game and this is not anything detrimental to the game itself, but the entire game did not have the same impact as the last one. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, and I’m with them. The set pieces and combat are the best in the series, and there are some great new characters. However, the story is just a tad weaker than Uncharted 2’s, and even without explanation about the spiders the game gave a pretty could conclusion to Nathan Drake’s arc as “a guy who claims to be the descendent of Sir Francis Drake.”

Really enjoyed the game a whole lot, even with what complaints I had. Now that Naughty Dog is done with this franchise (hopefully, if the pattern remains true), I can’t wait to see what they will do next.

I was not aware that this game was not only already available on DSiWare, or eShop for 3DS owners like myself, nor the fact that it was available for free. I have never played any Zelda Four Swords before, and because this digital release is local multiplayer only, I had to play by myself, with a second Link to switch between. I know it’s not the ideal way to play it, but for the purpose of writing about this game for my blog, I figured I saw enough of the content to say something about it.

The game is obviously not built like other Zelda games. It isn’t long, doesn’t have the same kind of tropes the Zelda games are known for. You start the game in a tutorial dungeon that is split into several sections that show you all the items you have available for use. Only guess what, you can’t hold all of them. You can only use one at a time and have to go to an item pedestal to switch out for another one. This is where assigning who gets what item in multiplayer makes sense. When you get out of the tutorial sequence, you go to a world map that lets you pick three dungeons. A forest dungeon, a volcano dungeon, and an ice cave level. Each dungeon has two sections and a boss, the first two sections being randomized, so you can play through it multiple times and possibly come out with a different level. From what I’ve seen however, the randomizing dungeon layout is just a preset map that the game chooses at random, and there aren’t a whole lot of them for each dungeon. Once you beat those three dungeons, then you go to Vaati’s palace, go through the same process, beat Vaati, save Zelda, and watch the credits while grabbing rupees and junk on a small platform floating in the sky. Then you unlock the Realm of Memories, which is Nintendo taking the old sprite maps from past 2D Zeldas and putting them in the Four Swords framework.

I’m probably a bad person for saying this since it is just recycled material, but I really love the Realm of Memories. Mostly because those old 2D maps were not made with Four Swords in mind, so it’s fun to see how applying four player action changes or breaks the map. A nice touch though is that the original NES Legend of Zelda dungeon redoes the Link character sprites to match the era of the game. Neat.

By themselves, I really like the dungeons and their designs. While current Zelda games have the dungeons clearly tell you where to go, making it very linear, dungeon design in Four Swords is a lot more open. There’s no dungeon map, so you have to look around everywhere to find the keys to unlock doors and get as many rupees as you can. And it has to be a lot.

Ultimately, that is the main goal in Four Swords, and again it makes sense in the context of it being a multiplayer game. In the dungeons while getting to the boss and killing it is the primary goal, another important goal is getting as many rupees as you can and have more than your partners. So because I was playing by myself, the scoring at the end of the dungeon was pretty one sided. The rupees are clearly there for competition, there’s no other value to them.

I really want to find some people who’ve got a 3DS or DSi and this game so I can try out the multiplayer. I can imagine it being incredibly fun (and infuriating) with others, but on its own, hey, you can’t lose money on something that’s free. It’s a multiplayer game first.

Replay Challenge: Round 3

Day 6: Kogane Circus

Finishing up business in Kogane by taking down Poison Jam. I’ll admit, the missions where you have to tag the three gang members can be quick and easy or long and frustrating. You gotta spray each person ten times on their back, but you can’t touch them or else you take damage and get knocked back, losing any momentum you were building up. The plus side on this one? Very easy mission to get a Jet rating on.

Day 7: Benten Boogie

Finally, the city of the night, Benten-cho. This is tied with Shibuya for my favorite area in the game. I like Shibuya a lot because of how sunny it is and that one transition area with a ton people and you can skate right through the crowd. Benten’s got lot of tall building as and narrow passages, and this first area in Benten has some great wall grinding opportunities. Try circling around the perimeter without touching the ground.

Day 8: Graffiti High

Mew joins the GGs, and the police go several steps too far trying to apprehend them. Seriously, tanks? In a heavily populated area? Wouldn’t they think that someone might get KILLED? Of course, Captain Onishima doesn’t care, as he says so himself. He just wants those punks cost. But really though, tanks. That’s pretty ridiculous.

Day 9: Noise Reduction

Another gang fight. Still got the Jet rating, but man these levels can get frustrating easily. The hard part is when you’re following the opposing gang and they decide to do a 180 and dash right past you. Not only do you potentially run into them and take damage, but you also lose your momentum because you have to stop, turn your guy around, recenter the camera, and resume chasing. Here the Noise Tanks do a lot more of that than Poison Jam and I’m not particularly fond of it.

Day 10: Love Attack

Yo-Yo, my least favorite character in the game, joins the GGs after restarting his challenge several times because I messed up on where I needed to go. Besides that, there’s another gang battle with the Love Shockers, and this one I felt went the smoothest out of all the others thus far. And that’s it for the first chapter of the game.

Day 11: Combo & Cube

Combo & Cube from Grind City challenge the GGs to let them join the gang, and instead of the usual challenging the rival, the rival challenges the gang. After completing the GGs’ challenges, a bit more story is given, explaining weird happenings in Grind City. But really, the story isn’t that important.

In Conclusion

Skyrim.

It’s the fifth of November, and this week I have found a reason to use that middle screen on the main header. As a huge fan of shmups I’ve been playing the Gundmonium Collection of games on Steam, and this week I start Jet Grind Radio for the third round of the Replay Challenge.

Real Life

It happened. It was going to happen sooner or later.

It snowed.

You’re probably laughing about me making a big deal about it since I live in Alaska. I do like winter, but only if I can just look at it through a window and not go outside. Snow always looks good until people and cars start coming through and the dirt and mud underneath gets mixed in. Oh well, such is life up here.

Anyway, with so much money that I got on my birthday, I’ve decided that I’m gonna send my Wii in to Nintendo to get it repaired. I was thinking about fixing it myself because I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for it, but at this point, I might as well pay them. I won’t run the risk of breaking something, and there aren’t any other games I’m looking to buy until the Steam Christmas Sale. I already pre-purchased Skyrim and that’s going to last me for a long time. Also, I have Skyward Sword preordered from Amazon and I really want to play it. I don’t think I could wait a year just to play it on the Wii U.

GAMES!!!!

I am a big fan of shmups. You should probably know that by now if you’ve been following this blog for a while. I was pleasantly surprised to see three bullet hell shmups available on Steam as a 10 dollar pack, called the Gundemonium Collection. These three games include Gundemonium Recollection, the first game, GundeadliGne, the second game, and Hitogata Happa, the third game. Like with a lot of bullet hell games, I don’t often reach the end, but just the time that I spend playing one of these games is satisfactory enough.

Gundemonium Recollection is the first in this trio of games, and it is a horizontally scrolling shmup. There’s a story of some sort that is told in intermissions between levels, but that’s not really important. Who cares about story when you have a bunch of bunny girls riding on cannons and giant guns shooting at you? The design and look is steampunk, mixed with a lot of things like the bunny girls that I mentioned that will make you know that this game is from Japan. Actually, you probably needed to see just the title screen in order to know that this is a Japanese game.

In bullet hell games, you expect there to be a lot of bullets and projectiles, and there are. Most of their patterns are designed so that you maneuver them like a maze, but they don’t get very large and complex because your character sprite is so large, and the game’s resolution is only 640 by 480, so not very big. And even with a big character sprite, the hit box is incredibly small, and that’s crucial for these kinds of games. Recollection is a pretty solid and fun game, although I am not as fond of horizontally scrolling shmups as I am of the vertical scrolling ones.

GundeadliGne is the second game in this collection, and it is the only title among the other two that I have no real idea how to pronounce. Also, why is the second “g” capitalized? Oh well, doesn’t matter, as the game is Gundemonium Recollection part 2. Only in this game, you can change the direction your character shoots.

If you’ve played games like Deathsmiles, this is like that. It’s a horizontally scrolling shmup like Recollection, but you can shoot at enemies from behind. When you switch to the opposite side, the game goes into a temporary bullet time mode, and you can go in and out of it by switching positions. However, when the bullet time on the reverse side is done, switching to the forward direction activates the bullet time, and the process repeats itself. I don’t really have much else to say. Recollection and GundeadliGne are pretty much the same game. I believe both share the same universe and characters. Wait, what am I doing bringing up story in these games? That’s not the point!

Last game in the collection is my personal favorite of the three, Hitogata Happa. Best part about the game? I have a reason to rotate my monitor 90 degrees and play the game like old arcade vertical shmups. Mores games of this type need this amazing feature!

Okay, maybe that’s not the defining feature of Hitogata Happa, but the game itself is a lot of fun. For one, the game is vertically scrolling, which is already good in my book. Also, game is really hard, even on the easiest difficulty. That was something I was not expecting, and I kinda questioned it a little. In other games of this type you expect there to be a few seconds of invincibility frames after dying and losing a life. Maybe there are invincibility frames but the time window is super short, but it felt like there weren’t any.

Anyway, the neat concept behind the game is the concept of different dolls that you control. There are eight dolls with their own abilities, and you buy multiple dolls that you are allowed and those are your multiple lives. You can switch between the order of the dolls that you will spawn as if you die, but even better your doll will eventually be able to suicide bomb into enemies. The tricky part though is navigating the many bullets and projectiles, because if those hit you then you won’t take anyone down with you. Either way you still lose a doll so there’s some risk.

All three games have similarities options wise. You can choose the game to be fullscreen or windowed (but still no resolution options of any kind), lock the game at 60 or 30 FPS, and switch between either original or arranged soundtracks for the games. I just stuck with the arranged soundtracks since that is what the games default to, and they’re pretty good already.

Ten dollars well spent.

Replay Challenge: Round 3

Day 1: Starting the GGs

Figured I’d go through the tutorial level since loading my last save would make me miss out on the opening cutscenes. Oddly enough I screwed up on the Tab’s last challenge before he joins your gang. That should not have happened. Whatever, time to start painting the streets. JET SET RADIOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Day 2: Shibuya GG

Okay, so my original plan was to load up my last completed save and go through the rest of the game with all characters and graffiti unlocked. Turns out my last save was left off at the second chapter. So because the game only saves one file to the VMU at a time, I’m gonna go through this game on a clean save. Anyway, started the first mission of chapter 1, and finished it with the second highest rating. Would have gotten the highest if I went through the mission as Gum instead of Beat, but I’m not necessarily going for the highest scores on this run.

Day 3: Love Trap

Man, I just love how this game looks. A lot of games on the Dreamcast I like the graphics for the same reason, but this one in particular. It’s just so bright and saturated. There’s not a cloud in Shibuya-cho’s sky as I go around knocking over Captain Onishima and spray painting his back. That’s always fun to do. Also, it’s pretty ridiculous that the police would have to call in a SWAT team and deploy tear gas in order to catch a single vandal, but I guess that the game would be less interesting without something dumb as that.

Day 4: The Monster of Kogane

Now we are heading to the city of the city of the sunset, Kogane-Cho, and this time playing as Gum. Even at dusk, the colors are still bright and vibrant. Also, police dogs are perfectly reasonable means for going after a vandal, but a helicopter is overkill. Seeing it reminded me of the broad idea I had of making tribute to helicopters as enemies in games, spawning from Ryan’s hatred of helicopters. I may or may not act on that idea, who knows?

Day 5: No. 540

Garam has joined the GGs, and then I use him in the second Kogane mission at a huge junkyard. And guess what? The helicopter returns, this time with two others. However, I take them out by spraying graffiti on the windshield and let them crash. I assume that no one died in all three of those crashes. Man, the police are really pragmatic about going after a bunch of vandals.

In Conclusion

I'm running out of things to say for this as well as the intro. Gotta fix that or something.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm contemplating whether the next entry should be posted on Saturday as usual or a day earlier. I'm all set to play Skyrim the whole weekend and don't want to stop for anything else on Saturday. Next week's games are gonna be Uncharted 3 (so far it's fantastic) and Four Swords Anniversary Edition (which I had no idea was already out on the eShop/DSiWare and free).

See you next week.

It’s near the end of October, and I get around to playing some more games that I bought on Steam weeks ago and am (almost as of this writing) finished with two more games in the replay challenge. There’s quite a bit to say in this week’s entry of [insert title], so let’s go.

Real Life

So I already mentioned in my last blog that Thursday was my birthday. It was a pretty good day, got Batman Arkham City and was a guest on a podcast. This past Sunday I had family over to celebrate my birthday and that’s where I got gifts. Not a whole lot of stuff. A few chocolate bars, another pair of ear buds because despite my best efforts they always die, and most of all money. Like, 135 dollars.

60 dollars out of that 135 went towards pre-purchasing Skyrim on Steam. This is the first game I’ve pre-purchased on Steam, and it would have been easy for me to just hold off on the game until the inevitable bugs are patched and all the DLC is packaged in a GOTY edition. But come on…I wanna kill some dragons. More importantly, I really want a new game to consume all my time like Morrowind and Oblivion did. Those games I can only replay so many times that I don’t have the drive to explore everything all over again. I’ve already seen all there is in those games (mostly), so the sooner I can get my hands on Skyrim and explore the Nord province, the better.

GAMES!!!!

3 dollars for two indie parody RPGs is quite a good deal. Of course, two bucks was also an amazing deal for Alpha Protocol (and 5 bucks for Aliens vs. Predator). I had heard very brief things about these two games, that they were originally on Xbox Live’s Indie section, and then they were released on Steam and made more money than they were making before. And again, 3 dollars for two games. What’s not to lose?

So the first game I played was Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. This game and its successor Cthulhu Saves the World are primarily designed to be parodies of the old 8 and 16 bit JRPGs. Breath of Death’s story is very bare, but obviously the point behind that is just to boil the game down to “great evil is coming, find 3 other characters to join your body and defeat evil.” The main character is Dem the Skeleton, whose serious, silent demeanor would have you think he’s the typical emo Cloud Strife esque archetype that is ingrained in almost any JRPG out there. However, it doesn’t take too long for the game to show that Dem, almost like me, is rather annoyed by the main people and tropes of the genre, including dumb plot devices. Shortly after beating the opening dungeon and meeting your first party member, Sara the Ghost, she is very cheery and energetic to the point of annoyance, which Dem expresses. You later find Lita the Vampire, who is rather nerdy and has an interest in the technology from the civilization of the past, and Erik the Zombie, who talks in a horribly dumb French accent and tries to hit on Lita. Together the four must travel several confusingly elaborate dungeons and random encounters in order to save the world.

Now, this game is meant to be a sort of parody or satire of old JRPGs, but a lot of the time, the humor is a lot of referential material. You might either love it because that’s your thing, or you hate it because you feel it’s a cheap way out of coming up with actual jokes or humor. There are some pretty obvious ones, like “I am error.” There is some good stuff like a dungeon that is only a small room, and the characters after going through a bunch of long dungeons are confused if that was supposed to be one as well. Early on when you talk to Sara she starts singing her own version of the Pokémon theme, something I did not expect and rather enjoyed.

I also mentioned that the levels are super labyrinthine, and they really are, like needlessly so. You also go through tons of random encounters and go into a Mother/Earthbound style battle screen. Trying to find all the treasure chests and other items in a dungeon is nightmarish because of the extremely confusing layout and design. I’m pretty sure that because of this game being a parody RPG, part of that idea probably meant taking parts that are annoying and dumb about those games and breaking the experience down into just that. At least the game only took me three hours to complete, otherwise I’d have probably gotten fed up with it before completing it. It was still a fun experience.

The second game is Cthulhu Saves the World. It’s a good thing that I went through Breath of Death VII first, because Cthulhu Saves the World is a better game, and playing them the other way around would have disappointed me. Also, while the look and gameplay are near identical (the button layout and battle systems are the exact same), it almost feels like this game and Breath of Death represent different generations of JRPGs. Breath of Death VII is like to NES RPGs what Cthulhu is to RPGs on the SNES. The story is still a satire of old JRPG tropes (and some current, but I guess those clichés haven’t changed one bit in the course of two decades), and it breaks down what would normally be filler material and hour long cutscenes, but there is lots more story in this game than in Breath of Death VII.

For instance, you get a party of up to about seven people, so there’s switching out characters before entering battle, and the character’s archetypes are what you expect, including a Red XIII equivalent. Also, the humor is a lot less referential, and makes it clear that the game is about Cthulhu’s quest to become a true hero in order to regain his powers, rather than the super bare bones “kill the ultimate evil.” There is lots of breaking the fourth wall with Cthulhu talking to the narrator, to the point of even changing the story near the end so that it doesn’t finish with Cthulhu regaining his powers and the whole world getting boned. The whole game is very silly.

Despite the story having more substance and being hilarious, there is no noticeable difference between how this and Breath of Death VII plays, with the exception of more than four main characters. There is still the needlessly complex dungeon design and random encounters that I was not especially fond of. And it took me four and a half hours to complete. A little longer, but it was still worth playing just to see the next piece of funny dialog.

Both very short games, but for 3 dollars, can’t go wrong. That’s the magic of Steam, and these two games weren’t even on sale.

Replay Challenge: Round 2

So this will be the end of Round 2. Technically both of these games will be finished on Sunday, so just remember that I will have finished these games again, and be moving on to the next round. I’m actually gonna ditch my plan to play Shenmue along with Jet Grind Radio and just play the latter. It’s easier for me to break that game up into play sessions based on one level per day, whereas Shenmue is hard to find a good stopping point between play sessions, and how to fit all that in less than three weeks.

Day 34: Chapter 6 Intermission

With the Sneaky Parasol that I got from the last intermission, it’s time to do some…well, sneaking. To be honest, sneaking around the castle hasn’t been anything difficult to do at all. Whatever, do some sneaking, learn more about what Bowser is planning, get caught by Kammy Koopa who implies that niceness has a scent (a revolting one, in her case), and then control goes back to Mario. Now to take a special route in the Toad Town Tunnels to go to the Shiver region.

Day 35: Chapter 7 – Shiver City

We arrive in Shiver City to discover that there has been a murder *gasp*. MURDER!? IN A MARIO GAME!? WHAT OUTRAGE!! Okay, I’m just being facetious right now. Besides, the penguin in question just got knocked on the head and was unconscious. Now with that cleared up we can go searching for the last Star Spirit.

Day 36: Chapter 7 – Shiver Mountain

Here in the Shiver region are new born stars that have yet to ascend to Star Haven, as well as many other relatives of Merlin, including a dead one that gives you the key to finding the Crystal Palace.

Day 37: Chapter 7 – Crystal Palace

Man, this dungeon is pretty elaborate. There’s no new party member whose ability is necessary to complete the area. It’s just a lot of mirrors and rooms separated in two by a pane of glass. I remember using an old Nintendo Power magazine that had this section as a walkthrough in order to get through, but that was years ago.

Day 38: Chapter 7 – Crystal King Boss Fight

70 hit points on this guy, and occasionally little floating ice cubes surround him. This battle always took me quite a long time to get through. Whatever, plenty of healing items and spamming powerful attacks get me through this battle, and now all seven Star Spirits have been rescued.

Day 39: Chapter 7 Intermission

Peach isn’t playable in this intermission, because she’s been taken away by Bowser to the top of the castle, and will be waiting for Mario there (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar to another game?). I return to Toad Town, ascend to Star Haven, get granted the Star Beam, and fly off to Bowser’s floating castle. Closer and closer to rescuing the princess.

Day 40: Chapter 8 – Bowser’s Castle Part One

Many things happen here in the first half. A door with Bowser's head leads Mario and co. into a trap and they land in a prison cell. Too bad they break out immediately after. Stuff that follows after is shutting off the flow of lava and getting back to the door with the Bowser head, who decides that you can now go through.

Day 41: Chapter 8 – Bowser’s Castle Part Two

Fighting through more of Bowser's minions until we find the Koopa Bros. ready for another fight. However, they get kicked out of the way by Jr. Troopa who's going to fight Mario one last time. Such a persistent little guy. Anyway, we've reached the top, now to look for the princess.

Day 42: Chapter 8 – Final Battle

This part is tomorrow, but I guess you can figure out how this will go.

SPOILER: I win

I am having trouble figuring out what to write for this part, considering that the whole week in this game has been me wading through unskippable cutscenes as all three characters looking for every tribal and ship part. Besides, if I managed to come up with something to say it would probably be very short and uninteresting. Man, this game has been pretty tough to write about in this format.

In Conclusion

That's it for this week. That's five games completed (as of tomorrow) on the replay challenge, and next week starts Jet Grind Radio. Also next week is Uncharted 3, which I hope I have enough time to play a good amount before next Saturday, since I'm renting from Gamefly and it will no doubt come near the end of the week. If not, then I've still got other games to write about.

Thanks for reading.

I gotta come up with better introductions to these things. Whatever, it's Saturday, and that means it's time for another entry of [insert title]. Also, this is hopefully the last time that I put off writing these things ahead of time because other stuff was distracting me (so if everything feels very short, that's the reason why).

Real Life

Life has been pretty busy this week. I had a few finals to take for the first quarter, and then on Thursday was my birthday. 18 years old. Thursday was a pretty good day, I got Batman Arkham City from Gamefly and I was on a podcast that day. Maybe when the episode is finished being edited and goes up I'll post it here.

Not a whole lot else to say. Kinda crazy, considering my birthday was this week, but I don't usually make a huge deal out of it. If something good happens on that day, I ended up a little bit more happy than usual.

GAMES!!!!

I mentioned a while ago that I bought this game for $2 on Steam. At that price, how can you really refuse? So I bought it along with Aliens vs. Predator (already wrote about that one) and Breath of Death VII & Cthulhu Saves the World (expect stuff on those next week). Alpha Protocol is quite an interesting game, and at the same time, it is totally an Obsidian game. It is great for the story and characters but you have to wade through crap gameplay in order to see the best of it.

On my first playthrough I chose Recruit as my starting profession or class, the reason being I wanted to use the "Recruit" option in conversation whenever possible. And then after the first mission in Saudi Arabia, you pick your specialization and I went the custom route instead of the stock specializations they had available. Between that time my efforts to be sneaky and not start a big firefight were not very clean. There were somethings I corrected when I started my (current) second playthrough, such as buying every single piece of intel, and re-specing my skill points before starting the game. So my second playthrough has been a lot more fun because I know how things already play out and I can better anticipate situations and how to sneak past them.

It really does help to be as stealthy as possible, because the shooting is so awful. I was already aware that the game had bad dice roll shooting, but man, it sure is BAD. Mass Effect 1 used the same system as this game except that was better. It's always frustrating when a precision shot doesn't take out a guy immediately even after you waited long enough for the shot to focus. Really not fun.

The conversation system is very interesting, but it runs into problems that, again like I said earlier, disappear during your second playthrough because you know what will happen. You got three different stances or attitudes you can take during a conversation, and your choices are timed in order to keep the conversation flowing. I like that system, because it's frustrating to get hung up on a dialog choice in Mass Effect and completely stop the flow. The problem here is that the different dialog choices are super vague that it doesn't always give you a clear idea of how Michael Thorton will act. Actually, not just how he will act, but what he will say. Sometimes I would pick a choice that made Thorton say something that I didn't want and I lose a respect point with Mina. In Mass Effect, that system of conversation is better because you get a summary of what Shepard will say if you pick that choice. Here, there's always uncertainty with what you want Thorton to say or act.

Despite my issues with the conversation system, the story and characters are really great. Taipei was always my favorite area in the game, because of working with Scarlet Lake and Stephen Heck (who is absolutely brilliant). The way the story switches between interrogation and playing the events prior to said interrogation works really well. All that stuff is great, and it is unfortunate that stuff is hampered by really bad action. The mechanics they have in place here would probably have been acceptable in an Infinity Engine game or something like that. A third-person shooter with RPG elements like this game has just doesn't really fit. Quite unfortunate.

So I got this game Thursday, which had me a little bit worried as far as if I would be able to get enough time into this game before writing about it. Thankfully I got through the main story by Friday afternoon and spent a little time checking out the different side missions so I think I've seen enough for now. Anyway, Batman Arkham City. It's not really surprising of me to say that the game is really fantastic. Arkham Asylum was amazing, and it's great to see this sequel be just as great.

The beginning of the game is pretty crazy. I'm not going to say anything on the off chance people reading this haven't played the game yet. Here's what I will say though. You know how in Arkham Asylum the first several minutes are a slow build up to Joker's trap? Well, this game throws Batman into some serious stuff immediately. After the first several minutes in this game, everything will start to remind you of Arkham Asylum. The combat system is still there and is fantastic, Batman's glide has been expanded as a method of getting around the city quickly, and all kinds of little details. The main story has some really high stakes going on, and I chose to go through the main story and ignore all the side stuff. Not just because I had to write about this game for today, but because I wanted to find out what happened next. Everything ramps up to huge levels of craziness and the ending had me stunned.

Now, all though Arkham City has a much larger world than the first game, it doesn't make it an open world game in the traditional sense. However, the abundance of side stuff to do potentially makes it fall into the same pitfall of disrupting the main story, especially in this game because of the constant sense of urgency. Batman's gotta stop Hugo Strange from doing some nasty stuff, but first he needs to search a block for some Riddler trophies. Again, I saved doing that stuff until after I finished the story, but that situation I describe is one I'm sure other people would agree with me.

So yeah, I mentioned the Riddler trophies, but how is the rest of the side mission material? Well, there are augmented reality training missions, and completing the first four missions gives you the grapnel boost, which lets you launch yourself past the point that you grappled to and keep gliding. In hindsight, I should've thought about doing those missions way earlier because I was trying to do that but I didn't have the upgrade. Silly me. There are other missions, like rescuing "political prisoners" from getting beat up by thugs, and there's Zsasz's side missions where you answer a phone and then you need to find another phone and answer it or else Zsasz will kill someone. Basically it's a race from one point to another kind of mission. There are some one-off missions that involve some other Batman villains that are pretty well done.

Unfortunately I was not able to play as Catwoman because I rented the game from Gamefly, which as far as publishers care is not buying the game new and that makes me the same as a person who pirates stuff. This is the first game I've played where an online pass or any penalty for not buying the game at 60 dollars has had me upset, especially with how they decided to announce it just days before release. I won't go into any more of it, but you can already tell that I am rather pissed. Whatever, I'll just buy the game sometime after it comes out on Steam. Maybe during the Christmas sale.

I haven't attempted to get close to one hundred percent completion on this. In fact, I don't really have the time to do it since I need to send the game back to Gamefly soon if I want to get Uncharted 3. Not much else for me to say, the game is fantastic. I should never try to write these things up on the day that I have to post them. Stupid of me.

Replay Challenge: Round 2

You know what? I'm not really feeling up to writing every detail I can think of on the what parts I've played from Paper Mario and Jet Force Gemini from this past week. This is why I always write these things ahead of time as I'm playing the games. I'll just say that in Paper Mario I have beat the boss of Flower Fields, Huff 'n Puff, who was extremely tough. That rhyme was unintentional, by the way. Also, in Jet Force Gemini, I have reached the halfway point in the game, where everyone gets jet packs and now I have to go back through every world as every character looking for every tribal and ship part. I'm not quite sure if I'm about to regret picking that game for this segment or not.

In Conclusion

That's the end of a very brief entry of [insert title]. Sorry for making it as short and unpolished as it is, it's totally my fault. Next week's entry I'll make sure to be on track and write these things ahead of time like always. Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World will be the new games for next week, so look forward to that.

Peace.

This week I’m back on track to write about all the new games I’ve been playing in this entry of [insert title]. I don’t have much else to say besides that, so let’s get going.

Real Life

Next week is the end of the first quarter of school for me. No doubt I'm gonna end up taking a few finals, especially AP Calculus since everyone's required to take a final in that class. This coming Thursday is my birthday, so that's very nice. I'll be turning 18 very soon.

Also, I received from Nintendo a Wii lens cleaning kit, thinking that it might fix whatever problem my Wii was having. It can't play any Wii games, but Gamecube games work fine. After using the cleaner 3 times and no changes at all, I now either have to send it back to Nintendo and pay them money to fix it, or open up the console and fix it myself. I don't know which, but I really want it working again so I can play Skyward Sword. If I can't, then I'll just wait a year until the Wii U comes out and play the game on there.

GAMES!!!!

Two weeks ago I played through the new Aliens vs. Predator game. After not buying it initially because of the negative reception, I finally played it and found the overall game to be enjoyable, if not still disappointing. I kept thinking about how much fun I had (and how scared I was) with Aliens versus Predator 2, a game that introduced me to both the Alien and Predator franchises, even before the movie in 2004 was made. It was a unique and terrifying experience that was brief, yet left quite an impression in my mind. I was fortunate to have found this for 5 bucks at a comics/anime/used game store I frequently visit, and I also saw the expansion Primal Hunt for the same price. But no one wants Primal Hunt.

So I bought the game, installed it with no problems, unlike NOLF. Pretty much anything that isn’t DirectX 8 or above won’t install properly on Windows 7. Started the game up, and began playing my favorite campaign in this game, the Alien.

It was worth it just to go through the life cycle stage again, especially that Chestburster sequence where you control the Alien eating its way out of its host’s chest. So sick and yet so amazing. After sneaking around as the little Chestburster, which wasn’t so much sneaking as it was running away from the humans. Starting the next level as a full grown Alien, it was time to start pouncing at people and make them explode. Also completely bite their heads off with your second mouth.

The pounce attack I really like, but only when I’m the one doing the pouncing (I’ll explain later). Because this was the era before ragdoll physics were a standard, you had your regular death animations along with exploding into gibs if enough damage was done. In this case, the pounce does insane amounts of damage that the idea of people exploding upon contact is hilarious. And you know what’s also fun, running past enemies while aiming at their heads and biting. Though since I was playing on easy, there wasn’t a really huge penalty for letting myself get shot for being in the open.

Also, there’s one last thing the Alien campaign has that Aliens vs. Predator doesn’t. A satisfying end to the campaign. In this case, it’s going after one of the game’s antagonists, Dr. Eisenburg, who tries to escape from the planet with the Empress. Obviously as an Alien, you won’t stand for that crime, so you need to stop him. And not just stop him, but maim his synthetic body and cocoon it inside the hive and gloat as you successfully preserved the hive.

After that, I started the Predator campaign. One thing I really missed after playing Aliens vs. Predator was the focus jump. Without it, the jumping from tree top to tree top feels like “okay” jumping puzzles that you would expect in first person shooters at that time. But everything else in the campaign is really good. You get tons of predator weapons throughout the game, ranging from a razor disc that acts as a boomerang, the net gun, the plasma pistol, and the iconic plasma caster. The game gives you three vision modes, thermal, alien, and some weird photo negative vision I forget the name of, but it says that it can be used to locate predators. Basically use these vision modes in conjunction with the plasma caster to lock onto enemies.

You fight mostly humans in the first half, with only a couple aliens and one praetorian. But when you escape from the Forward Observation Pods the Aliens start multiplying. Running around in Alien vision with the plasma caster makes quick and satisfying work of them. When the Aliens aren’t around, you get an opportunity to hunt humans like in the movies, sneaking around with your cloak decapitating foes.

General Rykov serves as the human antagonist for the Predator, and fits that campaign as much as Dr. Eisenburg fits in the Alien campaign. The one benefit that the Predator campaign has over the Alien campaign is you get to see notes and logs left behind by humans on the planet to flesh out more of the story, which really doesn’t seem like it would be much of a concern for the Predator. Well, except to find where his clan mates were taken by Rykov.

Now the Marine campaign…For the record I have not completed the campaign, and I’ve probably told this story plenty of times whenever the game is brought up, but whatever. Several years ago when I played this game for the first time, the Marine was the first campaign I played since it was the most familiar. Back then, I never finished the first level of that campaign. Only after all the weird, scary moments the game sets up to build the atmosphere, when you encounter your first two aliens, I turned the game off immediately. I was a lot younger back then, and probably shouldn’t have been playing this sort of game to begin with, but needless to say, that game scared the living daylights out of me.

Several years later, I beat that first level, and it still scared the living daylights out of me. Well, maybe not exactly “scared,” but my heart was left beating faster than normal and was left filled with tension and anxiety. There’s one thing I do not like while playing a game in first person, and that is anything that pounces at you. It’s why I have an extreme hatred and fear for Fast Headcrab Zombies in Half-Life 2, and that stems from my initial experience from AVP2. Because I did not think to fire my gun immediately and let the Alien close the distance on me, I swore not to touch that campaign ever again.

Now I am halfway through the third level of the campaign, and I’ve mustered the courage to go through the ordeal. It’s still not exactly pleasant. Every time I finish clearing a room and look down the next hallway or air vent, I just take deep breaths and run. If I hear anything behind me or take a little bit of damage I’ll just fire blindly. Getting swarmed by aliens in a corner can mess you up a whole lot. Also, the whole campaign (and the rest of the campaigns for that matter) is super dark, hardly any lighting except for flickering lights that don’t illuminate anything. And I’m not sure if I’m not looking closely or it’s not there at all, but there are no brightness settings. Not that my monitor is super dark that it needs it, but I always have a habit of turning up the brightness just a bit above the default. Couldn’t find anything like that.

With two and a half campaigns complete, I can definitely say that this game is one that is worth playing. Although in my experience of replaying it, I found that some things I remembered fondly didn’t exactly hold up. Remember that this is coming off of what little I played of it several years ago. Stuff like wall crawling as the Alien feels very finicky, like as soon as you hit a right angle, you are immediately rotated 90 degrees in a snap. Kind of annoying and very disorienting in closed spaces like air vents. And then there’s the jumping around as the Predator, which I already mentioned earlier regarding the lack of the focus jump.

One last thing and this is something that upon looking at videos of this game I have not seen demonstrated. Apparently face huggers like to attack you in spots without warning or any indication of where they are. And when they do attack you, and you’re face is covered up with a walking vagina with a proboscis sticking out, it’s a game over. Not chance to try and shake it off, you get impregnated, and while it doesn’t show a chestburster coming out, you’re pretty much already dead. This happened to me near the end of the Predator campaign and near the end of the first level of the Marine campaign. Though the latter I guessed shooting the eggs doesn’t exactly mean the face hugger dies along with it.

Aliens versus Predator 2. It’s a great game.

This game was left unplayed since the summer, after getting side tracked by other games (and after getting through a stealth only section that wasn’t fun). It was not too long ago that I played through the original No One Lives Forever, and I had a good reason to finish this one as well. And this time I resisted the urge to start the game over as I always do with games that I take a break long enough for me to forget where I am.

I finished NOLF 1, and doing so made me appreciate the mechanics in this game a whole lot more. You have a compass that (sometimes) points you to your objectives. You can lean, you can move bodies, and you also have a bigger incentive to find intel throughout the levels (though they are still worth reading for the laughs). Finding intel gives you skill points, and you can take those points to spend in one of several categories. It can improve your stealth, your marksmanship, your proficiency with gadgets, and your health and armor amount. The best way I can describe all of these elements is it’s like Deus Ex, except built as a shooter first and not as a kind of messy hybrid of genres that is great for other reasons.

Story wise, some details make more sense having played the first game, but if I were to recommend which game to play, go with this one. The story is not critical on anything super detailed from the first game. You might not know the origin of some characters, or Cate’s arch as an agent at Unity (her gender being a big part of the first game), but it’s not hard to figure out that there’s an evil organization that is preparing an evil plan and a secret agent has to go and foil said organization’s plans and save the world. You know, spy stuff.

This game is only about 9 years old, and while the graphics do look like last gen, the faces on the character models still hold up really well. I don’t say this often, but for a video game lady, Cate Archer is a pretty looking woman. At the time the Lithtech engine’s big innovation was the independent eye and mouth movements on character models instead of the flat face texture with a mouth that moved up and down. Some characters faces still look kind of stiff, like Magnus Armstrong. His grimace seems permanently etched into his face.

Level wise, the game has varied, exotic locations, much like NOLF 1. My favorite locations in this game were game’s first two missions. One in Japan and one in Siberia. The first one I like because of all the ninjas. And not just ninjas, but female ninjas who either talk in stereotypical fake asian accents or sound like they came out of a bad anime dubbing, the latter of which I find hilarious. The mission in Siberia, with the cold war setting made me think a little bit of Goldeneye. Not only did I call this game like Deus Ex but with better shooting, but I also think of the game as Monolith going “hey, this game on the Nintendo 64 is pretty cool. Let’s make that type of game on PC but better because first person shooters are always better on PC.”

The game was very enjoyable, even after not touching it for 3 or 4 months. Good gameplay, great humor, it’s really a shame that this game (and the first one for that matter) isn’t on services like Steam or Good Old Games. I bought the game back in June for 5 dollars, and I would’ve easily paid 4 or 5 times as much for it. The game is fantastic.

Replay Challenge: Round 2

Day 21: Chapter 4 – Blue Station

The first part of Shy Guy's Toybox. There are a few items to recover for the citizens of Toad Town, the big one being a store room key. Also in this area, Kammy Koopa leaves behind a Mushroom under Bowser's orders to exploit Mario's weakness. Kammy questions it a little, but shrugs it off since Bowser's the king. After obtaining the key, it opens up a storeroom in a shop, and inside is a train. Just what we need to go to the next area in Shy Guy's Toy Box.

Day 22: Chapter 4 – Pink Station

Introducing Gourmet Guy, a fat Shy Guy that loves to eat but has no idea why he's called Gourmet Guy. The way to get him to move is to feed him a delicious cake, and watch him lose his mind and bounce across the walls. Getting past him leads us to the switch that flips the track and gives us access to the next area.

Day 23: Chapter 4 – Green Station

At the Green Station there are four colored boxes and four colored sections of wall along the track. A puzzle perhaps? Indeed it is. Retrieve the dictionary and the secret note for Russ. T. and he'll decipher the message: Hit Yellow, Green, Red, and Blue. Frankly, I wish I had remembered the combination before I went through this section and see if I could bypass most of this stuff.

Day 24: Chapter 4 – Red Station

Two boss fights and a new party member are found in the last section of the toy box. The new party member, Watt, is held captive inside a lantern by a big dude in a sheet that loves the dark. Go in there, kick his ass, save Watt, then go and do the same to General Guy. Nothing tough, and with the defeat of the Shy Guys Chapter 4 is complete.

Day 25: Chapter 4 Intermission

Gourmet Guy makes a return, and asks Princess Peach to make him something delicious. So guess what? We get to bake a cake! And not surprisingly, Gourmet Guy loses his mind once again when he eats the cake, and commits treason by telling Peach where the next Star Spirit is and to send the information to Mario. Meanwhile back in the Mushroom Kingdom, Kolorado makes a return and Mario and co. decide to ride a big tuna-I mean, whale to their next destination: Lavalava Island.

Day 26: Chapter 5 – Yoshi Village

Kolorado rushes ahead to only be attacked by Fuzzies and tribal Shy Guys. After getting acquainted with the Yoshis on the island, Mario goes to find the entrance to the volcano. They find it, but the entrance is out of reach. Well this is a predicament. And what's worse? The yoshi children just went missing. Great...

Day 21: {Juno} Goldwood – Outset, Interior

You can tell this is a N64 game from Rare when there are very detailed environments with unstable framerate. Oh well, it's tolerable. After the length opening cutscene, Juno becomes our first playable character, and go through the two of the four levels on the planet Goldwood. Sometimes it's easier to just run around and hold the fire button, or in some cases it's good to use manual targeting. Either way, no one except me would want to play this game in this day and age.

Day 22: {Juno} SS Anubis – Hold

After finishing this session I totally forgot there was another level on this ship that I could've gone through and got all the Tribals from. Oh well. Rescued all the Tribals in the hold and freed the second Jet Force team member, Vela. Now her missions are available to play, but we're not starting those yet.

Day 23: {Juno} Tawfret – Bog, Bridge, Castle

Can you believe I spent an hour going between these levels trying to rescue as much Tribals as I could? Some of them you have to backtrack to a previous level after getting an item in another. So yeah, and hour of just wondering and back tracking trying to find as much tribals as I could so I wouldn't have to come back here. Apparently I forgot that I will have to come back here later in the game.

Day 24: {Juno} Mizar’s Lair – Lobby

This is where all the team members will meet up after completing their other missions. And since I was the first one here, I got to use the robot Lyoid to open up the pyramid where everyone will meet up in. Juno's missions are done. Now to start Velas.

Day 25: {Vela} Sekhmet – Battlecruiser

This level is just one giant loop to get a key card that opens a door in the starting area. And the level isn't anything small, it's fairly big. Definitely a place that will be revisited, given some of the out of reach spots the Tribals have been put in.

Day 26: {Vela} Cerulean - Dune

Nothing fancy about this level. Get the Tri Rocket launcher after exchanging three bars of gold. All the Tribals were easily obtained. Easy level.

In Conclusion

Another blog finished. Next week I will write up my thoughts on Alpha Protocol, and if Gamefly sends it fast enough, Batman Arkham City. Really excited for that one.

Also, little personal project I'm doing for Giant Bomb. Because I love Aliens versus Predator 2 so much, I'm going to be giving the wiki page for that game a massive face lift. I've been playing through the game a lot getting every piece of story detail I can find. By the time I get done with it, I can expect the document I have this all saved in will be huge. Look for it sometime in the future, no clear date yet.

Peace.