I seem to get to the end of every weekend and think I'm a little bit wiser than I was two days earlier. Yes, this even includes the weekends where I drink everything in sight and end up asleep in a shower for 3 hours before my previously-sleeping girlfriend realises what's happening, gets out of bed and has to mop the ceiling because I forgot to turn the bathroom fan on before I collapsed. With this in mind, I intend to start of a series of blogs that impart my cache of newfound knowledge, if only to keep my blog ticking over between the times where I vomit up pages of opinion on some game that nobody cares about. So without much more ado, I present the inaugural "Things I learned over the weekend" blog for Monday, 13 September 2010.
...but it's certainly not as entertaining as I remember it either. I finished it pretty quickly last night on Easy when I got home, and I achieved that through using a couple of devastating moves. Pulling off the moves in this game is a lot more like playing a one-on-one fighter than a regular brawler, so there's pretty interesting depth there. But a lot of the other perceived depth in Cyborg Justice ultimately turns out to be perfunctory window-dressing. Also, the bosses can be cheap as hell, performing a manoeuvre that removes any and all remaining lives you may have, causing you to start the whole level again.
Invisible lions can really fuck you up if you're not expecting them.
I've already mentioned elsewhere that I've finally understood how to play Oblivion (thanks to Fallout 3) and so the wee hours of my mornings have been spent holding sleep at arm's length, as I explore "just one more dungeon." Last night, as I went to complete a quest to help an invisible man not be so invisible anymore, I was attacked by what sounded like an invisible lion. Unlike the invisible wolf I'd just seen off a couple of minutes prior, the invisible lion was a mean mofo and my health went south faster than my reactions could counter. You know when you're suddenly killed in the face by the surly offspring of the Predator and Scar, it's time to call it a night. Well, morning. Whatever.
My girlfriend is never not funny when she talks in her sleep.
Nothing more to add here without really boring people, outside of the fact that some of the stuff she comes up while sleep-babbling is so bizarre and imaginative that I can't even comprehend. Honestly, who thinks of Robert de Castella when they're dreaming? The girl's mad, I tell you.
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I seem to get to the end of every weekend and think I'm a little bit wiser than I was two days earlier. Yes, this even includes the weekends where I drink everything in sight and end up asleep in a shower for 3 hours before my previously-sleeping girlfriend realises what's happening, gets out of bed and has to mop the ceiling because I forgot to turn the bathroom fan on before I collapsed. With this in mind, I intend to start of a series of blogs that impart my cache of newfound knowledge, if only to keep my blog ticking over between the times where I vomit up pages of opinion on some game that nobody cares about. So without much more ado, I present the inaugural "Things I learned over the weekend" blog for Monday, 13 September 2010.
...but it's certainly not as entertaining as I remember it either. I finished it pretty quickly last night on Easy when I got home, and I achieved that through using a couple of devastating moves. Pulling off the moves in this game is a lot more like playing a one-on-one fighter than a regular brawler, so there's pretty interesting depth there. But a lot of the other perceived depth in Cyborg Justice ultimately turns out to be perfunctory window-dressing. Also, the bosses can be cheap as hell, performing a manoeuvre that removes any and all remaining lives you may have, causing you to start the whole level again.
Invisible lions can really fuck you up if you're not expecting them.
I've already mentioned elsewhere that I've finally understood how to play Oblivion (thanks to Fallout 3) and so the wee hours of my mornings have been spent holding sleep at arm's length, as I explore "just one more dungeon." Last night, as I went to complete a quest to help an invisible man not be so invisible anymore, I was attacked by what sounded like an invisible lion. Unlike the invisible wolf I'd just seen off a couple of minutes prior, the invisible lion was a mean mofo and my health went south faster than my reactions could counter. You know when you're suddenly killed in the face by the surly offspring of the Predator and Scar, it's time to call it a night. Well, morning. Whatever.
My girlfriend is never not funny when she talks in her sleep.
Nothing more to add here without really boring people, outside of the fact that some of the stuff she comes up while sleep-babbling is so bizarre and imaginative that I can't even comprehend. Honestly, who thinks of Robert de Castella when they're dreaming? The girl's mad, I tell you.
When you can enchant your armor, be sure to make armor that makes you completely invisible and able to walk on water. Also, create a sword that causes an area of affect fire/shock/ice spell, because it's always hilarious to do a HUGE EXPLOSION in a group of NPCs.
Hey if you find the power Detect Life, you'll be able to see invisible people. It's of type Mysticism. It's also useful for seeing random creatures in the forest as you walk.
DUDE, I LOVED Cyborg Justice, i was always afraid to replay it again lest ruin my rose-tinted glasses though. I do remember the bosses being a bitch-and-a-half.
" DUDE, I LOVED Cyborg Justice, i was always afraid to replay it again lest ruin my rose-tinted glasses though. I do remember the bosses being a bitch-and-a-half. "
I still enjoyed it enough to finish it, and it's got some aspects that are still cool, but it's not as impressive to me as once it was. I'll just say it hasn't aged as gracefully as some of its contemporaries, but it's still worth a quick bash anyway. I might try to finish it on a harder difficulty setting, now that I've got the game down.
Oblivion was the best broken game I've ever played. Invisibility, whether through crafted armor or spells meant you could kill whomever without ever taking a hit.
I never encountered any invisible enemies but I often found myself being 'sniped' by little flying imps from what must have been miles away. I could barely see them yet they were hammering my health bar down with fireballs and thunderbolts.
That game's charm comes from how weirdly 'broken' it felt. Makes me want to revisit it at times.
Great blog, buzz_clik. I take it this is going to turn into a regular (or at least semi-regular) feature? If so, I'm really looking forward to future instalments. You've reminded me how awesome Oblivion is, for one. I'd love to dive back into that game, but I don't have my Shivering Isles disc right now, so it's going to have to wait, I guess. When I finally do get around to picking it back up, I'm determined to go a different route than the "badass melee fighter with a ton of potent buffs" one I always seem to take with these kinds of games.
I'm not subjected to any inane sleep-babbling by my girlfriend, but she does have some pretty irritating night time habits. She's both a duvet-hog and a bed-hog, and I'll often wake up teetering precariously on the edge of the mattress, clinging onto a single corner of the duvet for sheer life. Mind you, I seem to have developed a habit of putting my hand on her head while I'm sleeping, so I guess it all evens out.
" Oblivion was the best broken game I've ever played. Invisibility, whether through crafted armor or spells meant you could kill whomever without ever taking a hit. "
That's the biggest thing that kept me going in Oblivion. Reaching 100% invisibility. Once accomplished, I was unstoppable.
" You say that as if the moves can easily be Hadoukened. I found that they were a confusing mess. There's no way that I'm letting this go. "
*laugh* I know you're not, and I'm loving that you're so fervent about the issue.
I didn't find it too difficult to pull off moves at all. Sometimes the game would even pull moves for me I didn't know existed but were perfect for the situation. For example, I wanted to bop one robot but there was another behind me. What'd my hodgepodge hero do? Punched both directions and gave the two foes what for.
But for every moment like that, I will concede that the controls are more finicky than you'd expect. This is definitely one game that would really have benefited from 6 buttons. You've had past grievances with the jumping, yes? Well, you're right there. The controls are thus:
Pressing C while standing still will cause you to block.
Pressing it while walking left or right will make you jump.
If you want to jump while standing still, you have to push up diagonally in the direction you want to go and press C.
Once I got the hang of it (which actually wasn't all that long) it was fine, but there was a short while there where I thought it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever had to do just to perform a simple task in a game. Actually, that may be eclipsed by the fact that you can't jump over that canyon at the start merely by jumping; of course you need to do a late jumping kick to make it across. Oh, and if you change direction really quickly without a pause your robot walks backwards, which is only intermittently handy. All up I'd say the controls in this game can be mad fiddly at first, but once you've got the hang of them, the game's a bit of a breeze.
On fiddly controls and the game being a breeze, the perfect amalgam of these concepts is seen in the way I finished the game. Through repeat use of the aforementioned late jump kick and another move (the latter of these especially effective against the bosses) I completed the game in a very short time indeed. That other move I refer to goes a little something like this:
Hold C and push down on the controller - your robot will crouch While crouched, Hadouken while pressing C - your robot will rush forward, knock the enemy over and remove a large portion of their health.
Done. There were times I was forced to punch and/or kick because mechanical mofos were getting too cosy, but for the most part those two moves were my staple means of destroying enemies. So, yes, the game can be repetitive, but that's brawlers for you. The fact that there's not a lot of diversity in the scenery (no, I'm not counting the three palette swaps per world) is also a slight bummer, and the music on the first levels a bit of an electro-dirge but... I still kinda enjoyed playing Cyborg Justice. I didn't love it, but it was an entertaining enough way to spend a couple of hours before popping Oblivion into the 360.
" I take it this is going to turn into a regular (or at least semi-regular) feature? "
Yup, it's going to be my Monday ritual. I need to get into the groove of writing regularly, and this smaller, more scalable format will keep me going between my more verbose outpourings.
@Bruce said:
" I had a great Oblivion game going, but I lost my save...UGH "
UGH indeed. Just the thought of that happening is causing bits of me to twitch uncomfortably. With large games I'm really into, I'm constantly flashing back to The Dreaded Far Cry 2 Incident.
Probably. It would've been a helluva lot cleaner that way. Hell, I was kind enough to make a separate review for it. It was from my GameSpot days, though.
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