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...