Impressions time again!

Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War is so far the only game this generation I had no intention of buying until I got my hands on the demo.  The demo was fun.  Instead of being one dude just mowing down enemies like in the other Koei games, you can control squads of troops, with a rock-scissor-paper relationship with the couple dozen types of squads.  Swords tear apart knives, spears eat up swords, all stuff like that.  The game is taking place, shockingly, during the Hundred Years' War, where you're a mercenary fighting for both England and France from battle to battle.  A few squads will run into each other, and you can switch squads at any time by walking up to the leader and hitting a button.  Use one squad to kill the squads that are weak to them, then switch to another one to take care of the ones your initial squad was weak to.  Go into a base, kill the commander, take it over, so on and so forth.  It's actually not bad!

What's the problem?  Well, if you've played the demo, you've played the game.  You're just doing that for the next 50 hours.  Sure, they add some new squads here and there, but the new specialized ones tend to be rather uncommon at the very least on the field, so you'll be facing the same staples most of the time.  They also padded the game length by adding filler.  At least 75% of the battles you fight in, which can take half an hour or more, are just random battles have have no real effect on the game.  You're just farming money/experience (you gain levels with each squad you use, so you can be level 27 with swords but only level 18 with bows for example), and fame (which is pretty much worthless because you're essentially always maxxed out before you hit the point where the game lets you advance to the next rank).  That's just too much in my opinion - too much of it felt like busy work.  But the story battles can tend to be rather entertaining, especially with the number of "hero" squads (squads commanded by a story battle character), not to mention most of the characters in the cutscenes were surprisingly likable.

Also, I found cavalry to simply be overpowered.  Not only are they strong against most infantry, which make up the majority of the troops you'll encounter, but their charge will knock them over.  Many enemies (like sword squads, which are the most common) are weak and tend to get trampled.  Even the ones that are strong against them, like bowmen, are still knocked down though take little damage, and arrows tend not to hit if you run across the archers.  Really the only things to really worry about are camels (which are rather uncommon) and especially longspears (run around them or rush from the back).  I usually didn't even need a squad, just a horse to ride on, and I was able to take down bases all by myself.  Just felt too overpowered when I can just hop on a horse, trample a couple of fort guards, then trample the commander (commanders are always swordsmen and weak to cavalry).  Played smartly, cavalry can take a lot of challenge out of the game, and make difficult missions a lot easier.

Still, I had fun, but by the time I got to the 50-hour mark, I was ready for the game to end.  Honestly, I was ready a bit before that mark.  Fans of Koei games will probably love this game, as it seems to be an improved formula for their Dynasty Warriors and such, but fo the rest of us it's probably not quite a full-price purchase.

I finally finished Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings after some serious grinding at the end of the game.  Most story missions were fine, but the bosses at the end of each chapter were rather tough at my level.  The one at the end of chapter nine forced me to work on my levels a bit.  Not only did I do almost every optional side mission, but I also had to grind a generic battle for a number of hours.  Silly game.  I swear it's a 15ish hour game that took me 24 or so when you factor in grinding and side missions that I did just for the experience.

Also, while the RTS factor kinda worked, I found myself just hitting X (which selects everyone) and sending them at a specific enemy, then letting them go on auto-pilot once it dies.  I'd use skills from the characters at times, but the espers were really just along for the line to throw punches at targets of their choosing.  It's just to hectic and cluttered to micromanage.  Still, the game was pretty decent I think, just the two new characters, Filo and Kytes, got annoying after a bit.

Burnout Paradise is a game I figure I'm finished with, only to come back to.  After getting my Burnout license, I figured I was done, with like 90 events to get to Elite.  Popped it in two days ago and just blew through all of them.  For all its flaws, it's still solid, and has this capability to just grip you with its claws and before long you've played eight hours without realizing it.  The races at the end were surprisingly easy; I won most on the first attempt which certainly helped the "drive all the way back to the start to try again" issue greatly.  All I have left now are some road rules to get 100%; hopefully the 60 in-game awards are going to be the actual trophies in the upcoming patch.  Just a few days from bikes too - even if you don't like the game, you have to at least appreciate all the major free updates to the game.  Most companies would keep stuff like bikes, day/night cycles, weather, etc. as major features to the next game in the series, but EA of all companies is allowing Criterion to patch in all of this for free.  I hope this trend continues.

Started playing Crash Bandicoot 2 on the PSP while on vacation, finishing 60% of the levels.  The save system alone makes this a huge upgrade over the original, which was pretty enjoyable on its own.

August, of course, was downloadable game month.  The Strong Bad game was pretty enjoyable, and I haven't even followed the series in years.  With Telltale at this point I think you know what you're going to get, and there one of the few developers still supporting the old adventure genre.  The theme song, "You Can't Handle My Style," is just awesome.

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty was good, but at the same time lacking something.  Sure it's a short Ratchet game with full production values and some new ideas, but it was also rather scripted and strictly linear, with very basic weapon upgrades, very little hidden stuff to find, and so forth.  Basically once you play through it, you're done; at least the other games gave you other stuff to go for and on your own terms.

Pub Games was a neat little free preorder bonus for Fable II.  Too bad they didn't test it well enough, as some people will be rich beyond belief when they start Fable.

Braid was awesome.  Little replay value, despite the time challenge mode, since most of the fun is actually figuring out all the puzzles.  It's still one of the most creative games in years and worth the price.

Castle Crashers is actually very good as a single player game, but it obviously was designed with multiple people in mind.  Now if only they'd, you know, let me play with my friends...

It's been a busy summer (I didn't even have time to start Bionic Commando Rearmed yet), between all the short downloadable games and me just starting to hop between games, which is odd as I'd usually devote 95% of my time to my main focus.  Right now it's technically Disgaea 3, which I'm early in the second chapter, but I'm always getting side tracked by something else.  Either Warhawk (jet packs are awesome), other games I listed above, or I even have Ikaruga in my Wii (which is otherwise being very neglected, though Super Mario RPG will temporarily fix that soon).  And we're only weeks away from like a dozen good games being released within two weeks...

Impressions time again!

First, I got around to Halo 3.  Yes, I know, late to the party.  I was late with the whole series, actually, just recently playing the first two as well.  Note that the impressions for these, thus far, are entirely single player.  Anyway, to sum things up, Halo 1 was very good mechanically, and the outdoor areas in particular was great.  However, a few things that especially bugged me popped up and really hampered a number of areas for me.  First was the cookie cutter rooms - at some points you go through the same rooms multiple times in a row, so you already know how to handle each room when you first enter it.  Next is the large amount of backtracking - if you like a level, don't worry, you'll be coming back!  Toss in the Library, and many parts just didn't appeal to me, while the other parts were great.  In fact, Halo 2 fixed many of the issues I had with Halo 1, and I enjoyed it a lot more.  Using two plasma rifles, and they were relatively plenty in this game, did mow down some enemies very quickly though.

Anyway, Halo 3.  Ironically the first thing that jumped out at me was the jaggies.  I never notice jaggies in games, but I did here.  I think it was the surprisingly blocky heads that really stood out.  The 540p was very easy to tell, and in many ways was barely a jump up from Halo 2 in some regards, but some of the large outdoor areas were great with a lot of great hectic action.  Hated the late-game Flood level though.  I think I just hate fighting the Flood in general, so I guess I just have to accept that and move on.  I did like the ending sequence, though.  Also, the one taste I had of co-op with Halo 3 several months ago was a lot of fun, so that should boost the campaign considerably.  As it stands though, from the solely single player aspect, I found that I enjoyed Halo 2 the most.  Odd, I know, but it contained the least number of aspects that I didn't like about the Halo series in general.

I then went back and played Uncharted: Drake's Fortune again.  I played through this game once on Normal back in November when it released, and enjoyed it well enough to place it in the top five 2007 games that I played (with God of War II, Persona 3, the TF2/Portal portions of The Orange Box, and Galaxy being the overall best).  I did catch up on 2007 titles and would add Call of Duty 4 and BioShock up there as the most enjoyable titles from 2007.  The trophy patch landed this past week and, well, why not?

I fired up a playthrough on Hard, and I enjoyed it a good deal better than my first time around.  The game is as beautiful as ever, and is probably still the best-looking console game out there.  MGS4 is a little slicker in the cutscenes, but Uncharted probably narrowly beats it elsewhere.  Toss in the fact that there's no install, and it takes 5 seconds to load up from the main menu then never has load times after that, and the game is a technical milestone.  People have compared the main gunplay to Gears of War and, well, fair enough, but I think Uncharted does a better job in that department.  I just feels more refined, more tactical, not to mention a hell of a lot more colorful.  Very good enemy AI too, and it just gets more impressive the harder the difficulty.

I started a playthrough on Crushing, its most difficult setting, and am currently about two thirds of the way through.  It's brutally unforgiving, but it's also pretty fair.  You always get the sense that if you execute correctly, you'll prevail, no luck necessary.  And oddly, I'm enjoying it.  I hate hard games, where you die multiple times each encounter.  Yet, I'm liking this.  It's weird.  Also, the higher the difficulty setting, the more the actual game design shines, and how the AI acts that much more intelligently.  Each encounter is tuned and scripted well, and enemies can get much more aggressive with flanking and flushing you out with grenades.  Just an enjoyable game, and certainly one of the top games of this generation so far in my eyes.

PixelJunk Eden is a game that I simply haven't gotten into yet.  Not sure why, since it's so interesting, but it could also have to do with Uncharted almost consuming me right now.  I'm sure I'll be playing more downloadable games for the rest of the month.

Braid is probably the best downloadable game on consoles today (that isn't a dump of a ROM of a 20-year-old game).  I'm still pretty early on.  However, that concern about how it's $5 more than you think downloadable games should cost?  Yeah, it's pretty much worth it in my eyes, without question.  Looking forward to finishing the later levels.  Basically, it's the Portal/Crush of 2008.  The question is whether people will buy it like Portal, or not buy it like Crush.  I also think that if it was sold on a DS cartridge for $30, people would think it's a bargain.  Ah well.

Geometry Wars 2 is pretty good.  I kinda like how short each game is, as you can get a full run in just a couple of minutes.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings off and on, with a bit of the "on" being recently.  I'm on the last fight of Chapter 8, and I think there's 10 in the game.  Some of the end of chapter fights can be rather tough.  Then again, I'm about a dozen levels under the enemies, despite completing every side mission.  Sigh, maybe I need to just grind a few map areas over and over, but I'm still somehow prevailing at my current level.