<<<<<<<<<<You know what? Fuck it. I can't put this piece of shit in the fucking center of this damn blog post. So fuck this fucking Whiskey Powered system. Piece of shit.
Anyways, now that my anger is out of the way: I'm not going to see the MS press conference on Monday, nor the awesome stuff before it (if there will be any). I have to go to school at 7:30 AM PST, and the conference starts at 10:30 PST. I get out of school at 2:35 PM, so my chances of seeing every single press conferences on live are demolished. Will there be normal streaming movie files involving the conferences? I hope so. I remember GameSpot not giving us a streamed session of the conferences until the next three damn weeks. Why? I have no damn clue.
Will GiantBomb save meh? Give me your opinion.
EDIT: Looks like my anger was pointless. The picture, and the text in general, are always in an orderly fashion when the blog is posted. Slap me for my stupidity. 1 Comments
Even if it's less then a minute and a half, the damn game shows promise. I love how the combat looks, and I also love the dark tone that Bioware is giving out toward the ME universe. If Bioware lives up to its promises by fixing the horrendous bugs in the last game while accomplishing what they failed to do with the predecessor, ME2 might just be the greatest RPG ever made.
I hate being hyped like this, God honest truth. But sometimes, you just can't resist.
Beat Mass Effect as Halary Shepard, female soldier from the Alliance. Now a Spectre for the Citadel, I chased down Saren as he chased for the Conduit. The mission became a lot larger in scale as I ventured across the galaxy, but this scale did not over come me nor my alien crew members.
I am at level 49. I have been a complete Paragon toward my choices, but a Renegade toward my actual personality. I am not a racist toward my alien allies, for they have fought by me and sacrificed everything for me and the galaxy; an example being Kaiden Alenko. He will not be forgotten for his sacrifice in defending the nuke on Feros.
The Mark of Kri is one of those unappreciated last gen titles that show their gameplay mechanics as outstanding commodities. Very rarely do we have a game that intertwines multiple forms of combat so well. For example; Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay mixed stealth and shooting in a first-person view, and it done it so well that gamers and developers will think twice when witnessing or creating a mindless shooter.
While Mark of Kri may seem like your basic beat'm up (according to the muscular man on the box art), it's far from it. The game is not simplistic, nor is it easy. The whole game moves forward through a linear, but not-so-linear path, that forces you to move with caution. You HAVE to plan what caliber and poison you have to use; and by that, how you're going to murder the enemies interrupting your progression. Most of them will be implanted by camp fires and social conversations, while leaving some of their buds on watch. Some will be forced to fight you, mono-a-mono. But either way, it's fun and challenging. Challenging enough to make you feel refreshed.
The story is a basic tale of good and evil. You play as Rau Utu; a mercenary warrior following the rules and combat techniques from a former mentor. He has a pet bird by the name of Kuzo, which has the ability of giving Rau foresight of what lies afterward within levels. Things start off small--helping civilians fight off bandits and finding treasures for them. These minor tasks lead to something much greater and more cliche then anything else. At least the story is well told, and has outstanding voice acting through out; especially the narrator that unleashed his deep, charismatic voice.
The two twists that the Mark of Kri brings to the table are the fighting and the stealth. To make things easier for the reader, I'll organize it in this way...
The Fighting
It's well done. Despite having a basic targeting system, Rau has the ability to mark enemies with the X, O, triangle, and square buttons, each indicating that if you press any of the buttons that an enemy has on it's head, Rau will attack that enemy. It makes things very cinimatic and simplistic... for the time being. As you progress later on, more weapons are founded, increasing the opporitunities in combat and complexity. You'll start to fight more then four enemies on screen, and the button targeting will have to be combined to eliminate the larger number of targets. It gives out a sign that Rau is only human, not a one-man army.
The Stealth
... This is why you have to be stealthy. Rushing into every dangerous scenario will get you killed. You will have to fire arrows at specific targets that won't blow your cover. Kuzo, your pet bird, can point out things that seem recommended for the player, but usually these are just hammered in to be either useless or unnecessary. Honestly, Kuzo is useless. Your weapon is yourself, your actual weapons, and your intelligence.
The game, like I said, is not easy. The challenging scenarios that are pushed upon you can take your breathe away. They can make you say, "How in God's name can I get passed this?!" Trust me, I said the former quote multiple times during my playthrough. But once you get passed these scenarios, you will be amazed that you got passed them. It's sad that the conclusion is so bland and mindless in it's design that it makes me hurl. You will do nothing but repetitively cut the limbs off of retarded zombies for at least more then a half-hour. Hell, even the story's conclusion was balnd in itself, lingering on predictable outcomes that disappoint the human mind.
But despite it's horrid resolution, Mark of Kri is an amazing title. If you don't know what game to get for your old, dusty PS2; look no further, because I highly doubt anyone has actually played this game. It's been forgotten in my head for a long while, and just to see the game finally pop in my head, I realized how great of a masterpiece this game really was. For the price that it may currently have now: buy it and experience it.
The original Bioshock was a solid game, packed with tons of action and magic powers that gave the player opportunities to toy with a bunch of idiotic, bullet-fodder psychopaths called Splicers. Many considered it to be a phenomenal game. Some say it's the greatest game of all time. I just thought it was a solid game, for I found it to be too easy--even on the hardest difficulty--and I also found most of the later plasmids, the magic powers that you obtain in the first game, to be rather useless and just a waste of ADAM.
What made Bioshock so loved was the story. It had an amazing plot twist, a believable world, and an actual theme--something that you rarely see in a game's script. My impression on the story was the same as the others. It-was-incredible. You only get these types of tales in a highly epic, overdrawn RPG. Just the fact that you have witnessed this tale in the eyes of the player shows the genius that of Kevin-fucking-Levine himself.
That was until I found out that it copied the same exact story structure from the game's sci-fi predecessor, System Shock2. While I found System Shock2 to be horrible, considering that it's outdated to today's standards; the story, plot twist, and idea were the same way. Just replace Andrew Ryan with Xerxes and the "Would-you-kindly" slave trigger with the genetic implants that SHODAN gave the SS2'S main character, then you have Systembio Shock2: The Escape of SHODAN in the Atlantic Ocean 3.
So really, Bioshock was a disappointment in my eyes. Not to say that it was a horrible game, it just wasn't the revolution that it was meant to be, as shown in Bioshock's pre-alpha phase...
If only the game was like this. If only it was about survival and choices, and not fast-paced fun. If only it was not a shooter, but an actual FPS RPG. If only there weren't a bunch of dim-witted, young gamers that ran the game industry and hated anything that was ahead of it's time. If only, JUST ONLY, it was System Shock2 without the gun jamming and tweaks.
Because of my lack of enduring love toward Bioshock, I was hoping if Bioshock2 would be built from the ground up so it can be in the form that I intended it to be.
Well, screw you 2K. You had to go to the route on obtaining more sells by impressing the little gamer kids and not the actual independent gamers.
From what I am seeing right now, Bioshock2 is a highly basic FPS with nothing special going towards it. It's more based on combat and less on making choices. It's all about the guns and the plasmids, and not the mechanics... I just lost hope in Humanity.
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Yup, it's lacking alright. But I'll just get straight to the point of things.
School is tough. Everyday, I must do homework for my Biology, Geometry, and World History classes. It's stopping me from playing some games on week days, and it causes me to totally ignore blog updating. Is this really a problem, though? It's damn school. A Human being should be busy eventually in his life. If not, then he or she is considerably not a good Human being; for many reasons that I don't need to state.
Anyway, lets get cracking.
I got my copy of RE5. It's a damn good game. Sure, it lacks the fear and tension of the past REs. But as an action game, it's incredible. It does the one thing that made me love RE4 so damn much; the developer placing the player in crazily-insane situations that look impossible to pass at a first impression. RE5 doesn't do that as much as RE4, but that's simply because of the game's length. I am on the last chapter, and I think I clocked in at least twelve hours of playtime. If the game was 20-30 hours long like RE4, maybe the placed-in-a-fucked-up-situation situations would be constant and would make the game better.
But really, who likes long games despite me? I am probably in the 1% category of the gamer population that hates the fact that games are short these days. I know, a game's length doesn't determine as to whether or not a game is good or bad. It's all about the level design, the story, the gameplay, and how the design and the mechanics intertwine with each other.
Which brings me to my future career after College. I want to be the head leader of a game company. I want to be like Hideo Kojima, Cliffy B., and Gabe Newell. I have ideas that I cannot turn into reality by myself, and I need to let my soon-to-be-made game documents go into the game console/PC as actual games. I have gameplay ideas that I hope will fix the problems of the modern shooter, such as the recharging health meter and the imbalanced weaponry. Every gamer should not be frustrated by trial-and-error and balance issues. I want the gamer to enjoy the experience and hope to never see it end. I want them to love the game and not think of the fact that they paid $60 (plux tax) for a shitty product.
As a 17 year old man, I want to be a part of the game industry. I am currently writing a script for a game that will soon be made in the long future. I can't go into details on what the game is or what it's about, for that would be taking it a little too far and would kind of make me seem childish. But I want to be a game developer, simple as that; and to do that, I am going to be a concept artist. That's how Hideo Kojima began, so I am following in his foot steps.
Wish me luck, I guess... Well, you don't have to wish me like yet. Maybe when I am in my mid 20s... or 30s... or 40s... Yeah, 40s sounds about right.
<<<<<<<<<<You know what? Fuck it. I can't put this piece of shit in the fucking center of this damn blog post. So fuck this fucking Whiskey Powered system. Piece of shit.
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