Well Damn, Summer is Over
By lead_farmer 10 Comments
Well, it has been a pretty good summer but it is time to gear up for another semester of college fun. Although this semester will be the most interesting since I get to run around on the first day to make a mad dash for classes and beg professors to fit one more student into their Statics or Differential Equations class, I do have some games that I am looking forward to once classes start (Valkyria Chronicles 2, that Spiderman game, Halo:Reach) that will give me short breaks from worrying about exams and labs.
But before I go thinking about my Fall plans, I thought I would go through what I played during the break, I did purchase some games, but many of them had been out for awhile. Some of the games I played were from waayy back and I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna play them again.
What is the Gamecube doing out?
My brother brought a box from his friends house one day that had a Gamecube and a bunch of games in it. Our Gamecube broke a long time ago, and at first I thought my brother was being an idiot for bringing another one home when we had a bunch of games that, y'know, came out within the last 5 years. Well, it did not take long before we were playing Super Smash Bros and Mario Party (which was just as dumb as I remembered). We couldn't find all of our old games, but some of the games I was able to really enjoy going back to. I even surprised myself when I put some hours away replaying Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader. I also watched my brother fail at playing Sonic and Knuckles on some Sonic collection for the Gamecube. It felt weird playing with a Gamecube controller, but I still got a little excited when I heard Flying Battery music.
Fun rating: 4 outta 5
Nostalgia rating: 5 outta 5
Sometimes, You Can't Go Back
One of the games we did manage to find was Conflict: Desert Storm. Now, this game was responsible for hours of time being put away while my brother, my uncle, and I played that mess of a game until we finished it. I remember having a good time sniping with Foley and his awesome rifle, my brother wasting loads of ammunition with Connors and his machine gun, and my uncle having to control both the rifleman Bradley and the specialist Jones. So I thought, why not give it another shot?
Poor choice.
Damn, that game looked so bad. Aside from the fact that the c-stick is poor for aiming, you could not see a damn thing thanks to the fact that an enemy didn't render at long range but could still shoot you. I'm not a fan of being shot at by ghosts. The point where I had to put my controller down and say "screw this" was when we reached a level where there was a friggin sandstorm. YOU CANNOT SEE SHIT.
Finishing What I Started
Persona! (4)I finally beat Persona 4!!! Hahaaa! After playing P3FES I thought I would jump right in and give P4 a try. A week later I realized that I did not have that kind of RPG stamina to endure another game that I knew would take me like 100 hours to beat. So I waited......for a year. A year of deciding not to watch anymore of the Persona ER so I wouldn't spoil anything for myself (luckily the Deadly Premonition ER started) and playing other games before I decided to play what turned out to be one of my favorite games. The story was great, most of the characters were very likable (How can you hate Kanji?), the battle system was an upgrade from P3, and the music and style of the game were fantastic.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
The last comic book hero game I remember playing was Spiderman for the N64 that had Stan Lee have a little narration at the start of most of the stages. The last Batman based game that I had played was for the Genesis. This game was probably the best way to dive into a comic book hero game. I don't know much about Batman and I didn't read a lot of comics, but I did watch the Animated Series back in the day, so hearing Mark Hamill as the Joker was kinda cool. I think my favorite part of that game was finding answers to the riddles in the game. Getting to see little bits and pieces of the fiction easily made me more interested in the game.
Valkyria Chronicles
This game is easily in my top five in my PS3 collection. Yes, the art style was cool. Yes, the story was nice even if it was a little predictable. What stood out for me was the combat system. The first step felt kinda like Advance Wars where you pick a unit while everything else waits. But then it goes nuts by allowing the other units to react and duck or return fire while you have to directly move a unit and aim to take the shot. A couple of those battles took me a long damn time and I would have finished it sooner had I not hit a wall in the game last year. Contemplating whether or not to do a new game+.
MAG
I guess you don't really finish MAG, but I wanted to mention it because I had a really good time playing it. I played a lot of Call of Duty before, and this game was a great change of pace. Playing with my friends was a lot of fun, but I found that you didn't necessarily have to to get the job done. Plenty of MAG players know ell enough that to win you gotta do your job, and sometimes that means you aren't trying to get kills. I think I'll be playing this game for a pretty long time.
Game of the Summer
Aside from playing a lot of good solid games (and some shitty ones) that came out some time ago, I actually played some games that released this summer. The game that I feel easily won my award for Game of the Summer would be Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Now, I am not the biggest MGS fan. I never got around to playing Snake Eater and only finished Sons of Liberty. My brother and I tried to do our own endurance run of Guns of the Patriots, but we didn't get very far.
For some reason Peace Walker just kept pulling me back in. The story was a little crazy, but I think that is a MGS requirement. What was great was all the missions that were available. There was a good variety too: sneak, demolition, monster hunting, and yes, Pooyan missions.
At this point I still haven't finished all of em with an S-rank, but that is because I need to team up with some buddies take some of these missions down. The controls work well enough with what the PSP gives it, and the number of things that you collect is pretty ridiculous. The recruit system had me scanning for wireless hotspots while I was in the car going somewhere(not driving). Yes Peace Walker was definitely able to join a group of games that kept me well-entertained while I tried to stay out of the heat.