Scattered Thoughts April 2018: War Of The Gods + Vampires

A low key month for me on the gaming front compared to my usual amount of games I try to bring up in my monthly list. Been catching up on some other stuff I enjoy but that doesn't mean I don't have a assortment of games to talk about here. I'm also going to bring back something I did in the first few of these lists I made. Screenshots from each of the games. Enjoy!

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God Of War 2

It still looks nice in its uprezed form. Out of the 3 I played this is my favorite one.

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God Of War III

Sadly I'm not seeing any screen shots on GB of the stylish Greek pottery like backstory scenes. That was the main highlight for me other than the combat still being awesome.

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God Of War Ascension

Oh I didn't even mention the fact this game had a mutiplayer. Such a pointless addition I'm not even sure why they included it.

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Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth

I did enjoy how well this recreates the style of the earlier series without it being super hard. Yet that does mean it is easily beatable in about a hour

List items

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  God of War II

  I wasn’t in to GoW that much when they first came out. But I always meant to play through them since I enjoy character action games. The sense of scale feels like what these games really go for other than violent QTE moments. Which this game does very well for something that came out on the PS2. Combat is also nice with a counter move that keeps me on my toes and forces me to time when I block more than I remember doing. Much less dodge rolling than I remember doing before. The narrative in this one seems rather stilled with very little time spent doing anything interesting other than setting up the stakes at the beginning while doing a dumb twist near the end. Still a fun game to play for the gameplay and the spectacle

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  God of War III

  Someone brought in some more ancient Greek style into this one with the animated backstory scenes for all of the characters that get to be killed by Kratos. From that point Kratos has hit his speak some time ago. Seeing the tragedy of his own making continue to play out is not quite as interesting anymore. It didn’t help that my copy seems to be messed up so I didn’t get to see the ending. Fighting Zeus always ended up with the game freezing. Most of the gameplay is the same as before but it does look nicer. Still good since I like playing it.

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  God of War: Ascension

  The way they changed the gameplay had me baffled for a bit. Getting used to the simplicity of the first two games made the combat in this one feel really weird to me. It also didn’t help that this is just another pointless side story telling how Kratos managed to break the magical grip that Ares had on him before the first game. Shocking plot twist coming up. He stabs a lot of people. Truly hard for me to care about a side story like this one when it doesn’t add anything of value to Kratos’s character. Making this a pretty big low point for me in this series since it brought nothing to the table that I liked.

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  Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth

  I pulled my Wii out for a bit after it has been sitting around for a very long time. This is a remake of a game boy game. Not quite sure what Konami was thinking about when they greenlit this one. Maybe the first GB Castlevania was more popular than I would have thought. This is a full on remake compared to the original game that only had 4 stages and no sub weapons. It didn’t even have stairs apparently. So this rebirth feels a lot like a standard NES Castlevania game.

  It feels like the devs just based this remake on adapting stuff from the early games. Unlike the original game that just had a fire whip power up the 5 sub weapons like the cross are available. The addition of each level having different pathways compared to just having one level to traverse is a nice touch. Being able to control jumps is a welcome addition too. But overall it is just like every classic game in the series. Nothing more or less and that’s okay.