30 Days of Gaming : Day 10 (Part 1)
By aurahack 3 Comments
Early entry! An hour until my class gives me plenty of time to write some today's entry so I can get home and spend the entire night free of homework and writing. Know what that means? ... That's right. It means You Don't Know Jack.
Edit: Turns out I got busy D: Sorry for the really late update. Part 2 will come later today.
Yakuza 3 / Call of Duty: Black Ops
Okay so, before I get beheaded, I should point out that I am in no way comparing the two. I am just naming both of them because I can't decide which one I think I like more. I like them both a whole lot for very different reasons. I'll just make a neat little section for each.Yakuza 3
The vast majority of your time will be spent running around the streets of Kamurocho and Okinawa, fighting dudes and picking up side-quests. I say this because while the game will directly tell you "GO HERE TO STORY" on the map, it'll only be a matter of seconds before you're distracted by something in the environment. See that Club Sega on the street corner? Go play in it. There's a killer 2D shoot-em-'up if you decide to. Shit, is that an indoor baseball practice range? Hell yes, it is! Go play! Try to beat the high score. That man wants to get pictures of some lady in her apartment? Well goddamn, you best help the guy! The side-quests are varied and there's an absolutely staggering amount of things you can spend hours upon hours doing. It's, honestly, pretty intimidating the first time when you're introduced to all this shit you can do.
And what do you do when you're going from place to place? ... Well, run, mostly. That, and some serious fighting. As you run around, thugs will come up to you and try to threaten you for walking around on their turf, because they want money or some other poor idea. Either way, it always ends with you seamlessly going into combat and BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF THEM WITH ADVERTISEMENT BILLBOARDS. The combat system is fairly easy to learn and gets a ton deeper as you progress through the game. You'll learn combos from dojos and random events in the game world and experience is spent in a set amount of categories that'll affect your character in different ways, so there's a lot of creativity to how you want to fight in there. Just about everything in your immediate environment can also be used as a weapon and the environment itself is interactive, allowing you to pick up dudes and pull off special moves on whatever is closest to you. A wall, a pole, a car, a bench, a bike, a sign, a door... just about everything is there for you to smash someone's head in.
And all of this is done with technically-great controls. Movement is super-responsive and the combat is intuitive and fluid. You'll more-often-than-not be surrounded by enemies and dealing with them by combo-ing moves off one onto another is never a problem. They've only refined the controls since the first game and it gets me very, very excited to see what Sega has in-store for Yakuza 4 this March.
I need to restart my computer now. Part 2 will be up later today.