After replying to this man's blog on the topic of game world environments that you like the look and feel of, I decided to revisit the game I put up as a response: Guild Wars. Now, I haven't played Guild Wars since just after the Nightfall expansion was released. I remember being strapped for cash in those days, and playing through the campaign on a friend's account once before only logging in to watch GvG tourneys, which at that point were still fairly popular, even though the competitive crowds patience was wearing a bit thin with the over-saturation of classes and skills. So, I reinstall the original and the first expansion, and to log in I get slapped in the face with a 7000 odd file update. After an arduous wait before finally logging into the game, I find that so much stuff has changed and been added that it was all completely over my head all over again.
it was pretty overwhelming. I watched a couple of GvG matches, checked out my the birthday presents my characters had accrued while I was absent, got spammed with a billion guild invites, and got the obligitory naked guy running dangerously close to my behind, whispering sweet nothings to me. I had to log off for the night.
I finished Little King's Story a while ago, and threw a review of it up on the site. It's probably one of the best games on the system, and deserves a look if you, like Jeff, have a Wii, if not a must-buy for anyone who enjoyed the Pikmin series and hopes and dreams for a Pikmin 3.
Leave it to Little King's Story to put me in my place when it comes to knowing the national flags of different countries. It was one of the only times I've felt a little helpless in a videogame. I'm sure my faithful followers were low on morale when they kept being booted into penalty zones repeatedly with me flailing around thinking 'sorry dudes, I don't have a goddamn clue!' as they got assaulted by giant knives and forks and the scalding subterranean tears of a bawling baby.
Turns out that I rushed a little bit into the boss fight with King TV Dinnah. The fight takes place in an arena with a crude world map painted on the floor, with points on the map that can be turned into holes. TV Dinnah is inside one of these holes, and you have to match the country with the clues that TV Dinnah gives you, all while being bombarded by fighter jets and assaulted by army dudes. Most of them are pretty obvious (I'm not THAT sheltered), but my lack of knowledge of the flags meant most of the time I couldn't uncover the right one fast enough before I was kicked into penalty-land, where you'll be assaulted by some random knives and forks on the cooking show or attacked by a UFO on the sci-fi channel, among others. Turns out that you can check the flags for all the countries before the fight begins, something I missed out doing the first time around, and after I skimmed through most of them I could beat the boss pretty comfortably.
The main boss fights in Little King's Story are one of the best bits of the game. Playing pinball with the portly body of the fattest King ever, to racing up a deadly mountain obstacle course to reach the tallest King in the land, to knocking the drunkard King of his pile of empty beer crates, there's some good variety in the fights, and the cutscenes before each fight that introduce each king are funny, creepy, or both, and definitely worth slugging through some of the more esoteric and difficult fights to see.
I really should have finished Little King's Story by now, but between Battlefield 1943, Lost Odyssey (which I'll probably talk about at some point), and the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Complete Saga box set, my time is being thoroughly mauled as of late. I mean, who in their right mind buys the Wii's longest adventure, a Sakaguchi JRPG and a 24 disc box set of 130 episodes plus special features all in the space of a month? MADNESS
I have a Wii. Sometimes I forget that, because releases that I'm interested in are few and far between. I've been following Little King's Story for a while though, and I picked it up at the beginning of the week for a measly AU$60 new. Wii games are cheap here, apparently. I've been skipping past that isle at the JB for so long I didn't notice until now.
Little King's Story is a cool little game. It reminds me alot of the Pikmin series, Pikmin 2 in particular (of which I have a particular fondness for), mixed with some town building and expansion stuff. You start the game with a pokey little town, a ramshackle hut of a castle, and a few lazy good-for-nothings that make up your citizenry. The aim of the game is to TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD, but of course this is a gradual process. You basically do this by giving your citizens specific jobs that will allow you to access different areas and unearth certain treasures and defeat certain enemies, which earn you Bol that is used to upgrade your town, the amount of citizens in it, how many you can take exploring with you, etc. After you beat a boss that holds land, you will take control of that land, giving you more options to expand your town and citizenry in preperation for the next boss fight.
The first few 'days' of play are a tutorial of sorts, showing you what your citizens can and can't do, showing you how to add buildings to your town to give your citizens specific jobs, and rounds it all off with a mini-boss fight. After you defeat the boss and assume control of it's land, the next day is set aside for a festival celebrating your victory, where your town will be decked out with decorations and your citizens will be wearing a costume partaining to the boss you just killed and dance around an effigy of your benevolance, which is both adoreable and disturbing at the same time.
The citizens themselves are a character in Little King's Story. Each one is fairly unique, having different ages, health values, looks, and personalities when you speak to them (although some occasionaly give the stock hint as to what to do next or explanation of their job dialogue). Young citizens will generally have low health, but will eventually grow to middle age and gain more, then regress into aged citizens and have their health drop again, and eventually they will die of natural causes, and a day of mourning will be held much like the festivals when you beat a boss, except this time everyone will be dressed in funeral garb and moping around instead of partying.
You can probably tell by now, but under Little King's Story's cute and colourful exterior is a game with some pretty mature social themes. It's not the first game that's done this, and definitely won't be the last, but I find myself enjoying the use of these themes in otherwise unassuming games. From pretty close to the start of the game you sorta wonder, is this the right thing to do? My advisor isn't exactly tactful with containing his desires of ultimate power... My citizens seem pretty civilized, but regress into bloodthirsty tribals when I forcibly take land from someone... And why am I killing these black Onii dudes that were happily chatting and playing a few seconds ago and drop toys and candy as loot? And why is my queen segregated to a wing of my castle instead of the main hall where I make all my kingly descisions?
I'm sure alot more of these will crop up too, since I still have to take over the countries of another five Kings to finish the game.
It always seems that when I get to the point of finishing games and saying 'alright, ill get back to mopping up some achievements now', I get bored and throw down some money for another game or two.
Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition was always a given for me, so I just had to pick that up. I added 2k points to my XBLA account and downloaded away. You can read my thoughts in my review, but in shorthand, it's basically exactly the same game that looks and sounds better. It's also my first S rank on Giant Bomb achievements (when the site synchs them properly)! I know, it's an arcade game and the achievements are piss easy, but hey, at least it's getting me closer to the 10k milestone.
With 1400pts burning a hole in my marketplace account, I purchased Braid after alot of um'ing and ah'ing. Turned out to be worth it. The puzzles are really creative and satisfying, even though a couple (Fickle Companion, grrrr) feel a little buggy sometimes. I didn't get around to collecting all those secret stars, but completing the game was good enough for me. I'll add it to the ever-growing list of games I 'need to get back and finish off'.
In a move somewhat out of character, I was considering purchase of Battlefield 1943. I've never really been too into FPS over the years, but the demo sorta reeled me in. I wanted to play more when my 30 mins of trial time ran out, so I bunged on another 1k points and unlocked the full game. It's actually my first ever squad-based shooter, and it's quickly growing on me. After watching the Quicklook, I'm a bit surprised at how chummy the community actually is sometimes. Sure, there are dudes that steal all the planes only to pop up having suicided about a minute later, but for every one of those there are randoms that will reverse their jeeps so you can hop in. I don't know if there's a problem with the voicechat in that game, but I hardly hear anyone talking... Maybe that's a good thing.
All my friends are trying out Aion, and even though I have a beta key and got a toon to level 20 last preview weekend, I haven't played it much at all this time around. Aion is a Korean game, no question. the grind in the 1.0 version of the game they're using for beta is terrible, and it's made worse by the fact that it takes ten years to actually kill anything. I used to be able to play MMO's til I fell asleep in my chair, but I get the feeling that in the scant 5 months that I've had an XBOX360 that my gaming habits are taking a bit of a turn. I've become somewhat of an achievement whore and I downloaded a multiplayer only FPS...
I know, I know, it's a corny blog title, but you can't deny that the women of Mass Effect have some immaculately rendered ass. Shame about their faces, though...
I finished up a playthrough of Mass Effect yesterday. I ran an Adept with Assault Rifle as its bonus talent (thanks to this thread for the idea) and it was good fun. I didn't think the game would be quite as short as it is, but I guess it's a game that provides you with enough classes to warrant some more playthroughs. The achievements aren't very friendly, either, and I'm starting to notice why there are so many rares. I dabbled a little with an Engineer class for a second playthrough, but I'm still at odds to whether I should just play again on my old character to get it to 60 (I finished my first run at level 46). Somewhere in between thinking about this and getting a snack, I decided that I should get my pinata on.
I sat and played Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise for about four hours straight. I got my garden to max size, felt a little awkward watching some positively adoreable romance dances, and shook my fist IRL at the stupid sour pinata that got caught in the trap I set for a Flapyak. Also, I'm really really poor in the chocolate coins department. Anyone got any tips on how to make some fast money that doesn't include getting pinatas to stay at your garden, candy'ing them up and selling them off? Or is that the whole point?
On another side-note, is the DLC for Mass Effect worth it? Is it a continuation of the story, or some little side-story that won't really matter when Mass Effect 2 rolls around? I was thinking of picking it up along with the recent release of Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition.
After reading heaps of praise for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, I wasn't surprised too much at how it turned out, although I'm coming away from it a bit less gushy than most of the things I've read about it on Giant Bomb. It has some niggling issues that at times made me put it down for an extended period of time. I just finished up getting most of the single player achievements (except for 60 TT Trophies and collecting every last Jiggy), so I'm gonna move on from it for now.
It's a little ironic that one of the things that stuck out was the whole collect-o-thon aspect of the game that is made fun of by the characters in the game in reference to the previous games in the series, even though Nuts and Bolts isn't really all that different in structure and arbitrary tasks. Even though you're doing things with vehicles this time around, going from one Jiggy challenge to the next gave me deja vu of going through the motions of a 3D platformer. It's like the game is one massive troll to the series fanbase cleverly disguised as Rare kicking itself in the teeth for the players' amusement, since pretty much everything is just as arbitrary as it ever was.
Speaking of the vehicles, maybe it's just me but they never really feel like you want them to. Even if you have this awesome idea, the game tends to somehow penalize you for it in some random way. You can balance and weight a vehicle perfectly, slap on some jets for speed and a liberal helping of spoilers to keep it on the ground, but it'll still go airborne on the smallest incline and spin out from the smallest graze, and it'll still handle like crap regardless. It felt like making vehicles that are only slightly better than what your opponents were using was better than making a powerhouse speed demon, and that was a bit of a killjoy. Even for things that weren't races, it felt like you had to sacrifice alot of the cool stuff you get so your vehicle wouldn't spin out or overshoot marks or fall over or get stuck on geometry or whatever.
For what it is, K&B is pretty good. I didn't come away hating it, even though some of the vehicle stuff could be frustrating, and not for any of the good reasons. For now, I'm gonna move on to Mass Effect. Perhaps I'll review them both, along with Viva Pinata, once I'm done with all three.
There isn't much to say that Ryan Davis didn't say in his review, but the first episode of Tales of Monkey Island is really awesome. I think people who were worried can belay their fears of it being a total mess. It's an episodic title, so it isn't particularly long or anything, and the days of frustratingly inane pixel hunts are over (thank god) so it feels light and breezy, but the feel and humour of the series is definitely intact, and because of that it's worth playing. I might wait for it to be released as an individual episode if you're not a prior fan of the series or still on the fence, since you can only get the full series in a package at the moment.
The wasd movement/mouse interaction isn't really that big of a deal, even thought the wires that get crossed don't really uncross by the time you finish the episode. It's not the kind of thing that will frustrate you and put you off playing the game, it just feels a little bit weird, and stops you playing with one hand, which was a little bit of an inconvenience because I was eating at the time. That's probably the only sleight against it, really, unless you're the type that would be upset about the lack of difficulty or have your panties in a twist about the artstyle.
On another note, I put a little time into all the three games I noted in my last blog. Some thoughts:
Mass Effect:
Starts a bit slow.
Vehicle segments are terribad.
My character has a huge nose because the head in the face creator only tilts a little to the side and clearly doesn't offer quite enough perspective. Subsequently, he looks like a snooty French military officer, which doesn't fit the voice actor at all.
I died alot early because I didn't utilize cover.
I want to expect that dude who wants info on the Watchers to make some giant cyborg super-Watcher that starts shooting lasers out of its eyes and rampages through the Praesidium, but then I remembered this is a western RPG.
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts:
Don't overthink things or you'll waste alot of time making complicated vehicles that end up working terribly.
Rare kicking themself in the teeth repeatedly makes for funny dialogue.
I'm thinking I might leave Mass Effect til last, since it's gonna require alot more consistant playtime. The other two I can pick up and play whenever. The fear in my mind though, is that I may never get to the point where I get back to Mass Effect... 3 Comments
So the birthday comes around again, bringing with it a bit of disposable income to buy games with. Hoorah!
I went out shopping today, and apart from the obligatory bottle of Jack Daniels and slab of Carlton's I came home with three games: Mass Effect, Banjo Kazaooie: Nuts and Bolts, and Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. All of them were marked down to Au$44 each, which is a bit of a steal. Funny thing was, I had to scout around to three separate shops to find a copy of Mass Effect. Neither EB or JB had a copy, not even in their pre-owned piles! In the end, I had to settle for GAME, and was a little uneasy when the pricetag was 70 bucks. Turns out though, that their computer said it was only $44, so I got a hat trick. Nice birthday present!
Speaking of birthday presents, my review of Star Ocean: The Last Hope made the front page, on my birthday no less. Thanks Giant Bomb! :) Star Ocean is one of those games that if you go for it looking for an interactive movie, you'd probably be disappointed, but the game side of it is pretty damn awesome.
Time to dig in to some games... Which one should I play first?
...but I can't because the patcher is downloading the update at a painfully slow rate. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to play more Dawn of War 2.
Speaking of which, Dawn of War 2 is a pretty slick game. After hearing about how mundane and repetitive the single player is, I was actually a little surprised. It's not exactly groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it's still better than any RTS single player campaign I've played thus far due to the small unit count and RPG elements. I played the multiplayer beta, so I already know that part of the game is freakin awesome. I'm only up the the part where the Tyranids are first introduced, so maybe the campaign will wear itself down on me by the end, who knows? Gonna try co-op on the hardest difficulty with a mate once I finish it on the default setting myself before getting stuck into multiplayer, which I know will be competing heavily with Warhammer Online for my time.
In other news, I (shameless plug) put up a review for Eternal Sonata, since I put the wraps on that game a few days ago. Despite its shortcomings, I ultimately enjoyed the experience, mostly due to the combat system being pretty fun. In the end, I wouldn't have paid full price for it, but since I only paid 20 bucks or so for it I feel it wasn't that bad a deal.
I guess it finally had to happen. A game was going to come out that provoked me into buying an xbox360 or a ps3. That game is Street Fighter IV. Yeah, I threw down my cash yesterday and bought myself a 360 PRO bundle, which came with Lego Indy and Kung Fu Panda. I guess getting the bundle for less than retail price of the PRO on its own means that they paid me to get those games, so I guess I can't complain. I played Lego Indy for a little bit, and its cutscenes are genuinely charming. I haven't touched Kung Fu Panda yet... I'm not sure I will for a while. I also picked up Eternal Sonata, since it was marked for $29 (Australian), so I snapped that up.
That game is almost too pretty. It has one of the most lush, clean, vibrant sewers I've ever seen in a video game or otherwise. A little disturbing, when you think about it. People in Eternal Sonata shit rainbows, apparently. The game itself is pretty fun. I'm digging the whole dark/light mechanic for skills, where you have different skills available depending on whether you're in the light or in the shade. Being able to use dark skills in a huge boss's shadow, and light skills in the light of lantern-carrying enemies is pretty clever, too. The only knock that I can give the game at this point (other than some hammy voice acting, which is par for the course) is that bosses take forever to beat down. They'll probably get a little more interesting later when more tactics and characters are involved, but it feels like I'm wailing on the early bosses for way too long. More than once I've been repeating the same tactics over and over and muttering 'just freakin die already'. I'm still really early on in the game though, so things will more than likely get more hectic as things get harder.
In other news, I left my inactive guild in Warhammer Online and joined up with a more active one. I knew some of the dudes in there from ORVR'ing early on in the game, so I slotted in fairly well. Feels alot better actually doing endgame pve content regularly and doing ORVR and scenarios in a proper team way. The comparison between an organized party and a zerg rabble are pretty phenomenal, really. Currently working on finishing up my Sentinal set so I can go to Lost Vale. Luck permitting, I should be able to start going there pretty soon. I'm sorta excited about the two new classes coming out, so I'll be running on the test server for a little while to check them out when that comes out. Patch 1.2 looks really awesome, and I can't wait.
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