With inFAMOUS and Heavenly Sword falling I think it’s safe to say that it’s been a pretty decent week in the world of backlogging. Neither game took a ton of time but both have been staring at me for a couple of years, begging to be conquered.
inFAMOUS: When inFAMOUS came out I never actually had a PS3. I remember it came out right around Prototype and I was in the camp that thought both were pretty much the same game. They were both 3rd-person action games that had you running around a city doing missions and wearing a hoodie. What I didn’t realize at the time was that inFAMOUS, while similar looking, plays about a hundred times better than Prototype. I had no clue this game was so great but finishing it and knocking it off my backlog has me wanting to pick up the sequel when it drops a little in price. Very impressed and very happy that I decided to give it another shot.
Heavenly Sword: All I can really say about Heavenly Sword is “WOW!” I remember seeing the commercials for HS when it came out in 2007 and thinking that it looked pretty awesome but since I didn’t own a PS3 I kind of forgot about it. About a year ago it dropped in price and I decided to add it to my collection for when I had nothing else to play, forgetting just how amazing this looked when it was released. This weekend I was reminded. In my opinion Heavenly Sword is one of the best looking games from this generation of gaming, which is almost impossible to believe considering it came out over 3 and a 1/2 years ago. The gameplay can get a little redundant but for a 6 hour game I feel that I got my moneys worth ($20) out of it. I’d love to see a sequel come out one day.
Now that I’ve notched off 2 quick games I think I’m going to check out something a little more robust – Yakuza 3, I choose you!
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was the first Zelda game I had the chance to play since 1992′s A Link to the Past. There really was no reason why I hadn’t played one of the many Zelda titles to come out over the years, I just never really had the time or the console to play them on. Since the Super Nintendo I had never purchased a Nintendo console off the shelf, so with that, never got a chance to experience any of the newer Zeldas. I can gladly say that that has finally changed.
This past Thursday I sat down in front of the Gamecube with the sole purpose of completing Wind Waker and after 5 hours of straight gaming, I can proudly say that I have experienced the magic that is Wind Waker. Over the past decade I have heard people gush about how underrated the game was and how if given a choice they would ask for another title in the same vein of the 2003 classic. I can now say that I agree with that statement. Sure it has cartoony graphics (which hold up amazingly over time) and a lot of people really don’t enjoy how much sailing you have to do, but WW has something that many games that come out today do not – heart. It set out to be a fun enjoyable journey and accomplishes it in a stunning fashion.
It took a little over 20 hours but I can say that I immensely enjoyed my time with Wind Waker. It actually made me feel like a kid again and when you get to be my age that’s a great feeling to have every once in awhile.
This video brings back a ton of great memories for me. Faxanadu was a very under appreciated NES game and it featured some of the best music of the generation. The password screen music is a tun that has always stuck with me and now it's made even better by some European looking dude and his guitar. Enjoy.
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Last week my Xbox 360 decided to die in the middle of a heated session of Brutal Legend so instead of sitting around waiting for it to get repaired I decided to dig out my PS2. I know it's crazy but up until last week I had never played Metal Gear Solid 3. Having beat the original PSX game and MGS2 for review in the early 2000s, I never really felt the need to see the series through. Last year I decided to fix that when I purchased the Metal Gear Solid: Essential Collection for the PS2.
In 2009 I revisited the original PSX title (which is still an amazing game) and MGS2 (I don't care what anyone says, it's a great game) but got a little burnt out and decided to take a break after close to 25 hours of tactical espionage action. Feeling the need to see what all the fuss was about I booted up MGS3 for the first time last week and a few nights later I found myself watching the credits roll. My only thought? What a great game.
MGS3 did so many different things and while I don't think any elements of it were executed perfectly, I would say that it's one of the most enjoyable games on the PS2. It's strange how Kojima can create a game that isn't a ton of fun to actually control and play but when you get to an end of a sequence you feel the need to continue moving forward. Like something is pulling you to see these characters through to the conclusion even if it means setting off a hundred "alerts" and getting killed over 4 dozen times.
I'm definitely going to play through Metal Gear Solid 3 again at some point in the future. I don't really feel that my initial play through was how the game was supposed to be experienced and my next time through I'd like to try my best to be stealthy. Also, I really have a thing for EVA and her.... umm... b... bike.
[I actually also played and finished MGS4: Guns of the Patriots this week but I'm going to take a couple of days to really let everything set in before I write about it.]
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Not a good quest There's a reason that Giantbomb is one of the best video game websites on the Internet and that reason is that they actually understand what gamers like. We enjoy interacting with everything we come in contact with and for the first time in a long time I actually feel like I'm interacting with a website. It's not just about creating blogs or adding friends or making lists, it's about turning a website that could have been like every other website out there into something that's actually fun to visit.
I'm not sure how the actual quest system will work in the long run but I'd love to see it expand and incorporate many more things. Add badges for users that cross a certain threshold. Maybe give the user titles that they can use every time they get a new level. Just thinking of all the places that Whiskey Media could take this makes me really excited and I think with this newest update they've guaranteed themselves many more repeat visitors and a ton of pageviews. Good on you guys.
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After getting to the higher ranks in multiplayer where people actually have access to the missile launcher, multiplayer becomes a complete fucking mess. At the lower ranks the game is a shooter that relies on you actually being able to use your weapon to get kills, at the higher ranks all that's required of you is to pick the missile launcher, spam 3 missiles, die, and then repeat. I don't think I've ever changed my opinion on a game so quickly but after about 4 hours of high rank play I'm officially finished with it.
I don't know if it's just me but it seems that many people have already forgotten how awesome Killzone 2 is. I never got it until this past weekend so I'm not really sure how it was when the game launched but it seems that while it does have a pretty healthy online community, it's missing something important that both Call of Duty and Halo has. The players' willingness to purchase additional maps to get more time out of the game.
As soon as I picked up the game and played a few rounds online, I logged onto PSN and purchased the map pack bundle that was recently released with all 6 maps. For the price I thought it was very worth it and I figured that many other people would feel the same. I guess I'm in the minority. Of all the games I've searched, I have found one game that actually had people playing the map pack and the title of the game was "Trophies & XP." Yeah it was nice to knock off 2 bronze trophies I was going for but it still seems kind of useless to buy them if no one is actually playing them in some kind of steady rotation.
Have any of you that bought Killzone 2 thrown down the money for the extra maps or have any interest in doing so in the future? It seems that the best option for most companies is to release everything in one big bundle with a single player addition and perhaps a code for a beta test to really entice people into buying them. Either that or a ton of people are starting to feel really burned by "Game of the Year" editions coming out 10 months later that include EVERYTHING that people had to buy over that time. Yeah, I'm still a little bitter about the Gears 2 maps and how I had to pay about $45 for all of them when everything was included in the Game of the Year edition for $40.
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Metal Gear?! Damn it has been a great weekend. My girlfriend is out of town this weekend so it gave me some time to really put some time into some games I've been putting off for awhile. More specifically, Metal Gear Solid which if you're counting I have been putting for for about 11 years now. Yes, while I attempted to finish the original MGS many many times, I would get bored and move onto something else. In other words, I'm an idiot.
Last night I cracked open the Metal Gear Solid Essentials Collection and said to myself "Self, before we get into that brand new copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 you got with your PS3 Slim, we need to beat these games." I'm very glad I did. Metal Gear Solid is amazing! While I had played parts of #2, I wasn't prepared for the story that was told in the original. It actually reminded me of the same style employed by Batman Arkham Asylum in that it tells the story of the events of one night and when it's over you really feel as though you yourself has just been put through the ringer. It really is a really awesome game.
And with that it's onto Metal Gear Solid 2. Many people really love it, many people really hate it. If it's anything like the first (yeah I know about Raiden) in terms of story then I think I'll be pretty satisfied.
OH! I'm also looking to start filling up my PSN Friends List. I don't have anyone on there and it kind of makes me sad. Add me up, my PSN ID is KimFidler (I'm not very original). I'm mostly playing Killzone 2 at the moment.
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