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Mar 17th, 2013 at 11:19:25 - Halo Reach (360) |
After finishing Far Cry 3 yesterday evening, I decided to just stay in and start Halo: Reach and thought if I played the rest of the night I could beat it by the time I went to bed the next day. Turns out I beat it by noon the next day. Short game! It took me somewhere between 6-7 hours only, which was from about 8-12 Saturday night and roughly 9-12 Sunday morning, max. So yeah, short, but whatever because it was awesome and is my favorite of the Halo games thus far. I'll rate Reach, 2, 3, 1. Reach is a prequel to the trilogy.
It's action-packed and epic as hell. There are epic space battles, ground battles, lower atmosphere battles...battles everywhere. The space battle stuff is all new as far as I know (never played Halo 3: ODST, so that might have some) and was a lot of fun. The vehicles handle better than ever, and the controls in general are tighter and more precise. The game is faster, something like the same leap from Halo 2 to Halo 3. One noticeable thing missing from this game is dual wielding, which turned out to be quite fine.
They also ditched Halo 3's item system, which I was very glad for, and this is genius, replaced it with ability pickups. You might say, Well David, that's the same thing, isn't it? No Dear Reader, it is not. You see, when you picked up items in Halo 3, you could still sprint, and as I recall, using items was an odd button that I didn't press much. In Halo: Reach, Sprint isn't a given. Sprint is a default pick-up. So the other pick-ups replace sprint. Since I LIKE Sprint a lot, then I'm going to use those other pick-ups because they're replacing one of my favorite things. Also, you can't sprint to checkpoints in Reach like you could in previous titles, so that helps. The new abilities are mostly awesome. There is a jet pack, which lets you fly around some and reach high ground, hover over enemies, and so on. Very useful. There is a hologram, also incredibly useful when dealing with tough/multiple enemies. You kind of shoot it at a spot in the distance and a hologram of yourself runs to that point and stands there, distracting enemy attention so you can flank and whatnot. The last one was some sort of armor boost where you kneel down and become invulnerable for a short time. You can't do anything while you're invulnerable. This was, in my play, useless, but I imagine it being great in co-op or multiplayer since one player could run out and draw fire, then become invulnerable, while the other player flanks or supports, sort of like a human hologram. But these abilities were so useful precisely because they replaced sprint. And you know you would encounter more pick-ups throughout the levels, so abandoning sprint for the jet pack or hologram was a situational strategic decision. Actually by the end of the game I wasn't thinking in terms of "abandoning sprint," but of sprint simply being another pick-up.
The story is excellent. It's a story of sacrifice and heroism, very sad (and happy?), sets the scene for Halo 1, and the end of Reach is a nice loop back to the opening scene of the game. Highly highly unexpected that I would enjoy this so much. I had no idea it would top the other games in the trilogy. Highly recommended.
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Mar 17th, 2013 at 10:55:11 - Far Cry 3 (360) |
Finished the main story of Far Cry 3 yesterday. It was a trip (ha, get it?) I'll not spoil much since this came out relatively recently and many people haven't played it yet. Thoroughly enjoyable game. Excellent story, a bit weird/funny/over the top at times, but still really good. I never made it far into Far Cry 2 so I can't say how similar it might be, but for my comparative purposes imagine some assemblage of Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed (esp. Brotherhood). Besides the story, you go around liberating the island by securing enemy strongholds and disabling communications towers. You can also do Wanted Dead quests, Path of the Hunter quests, Supply Drop quests, and various other non-quest but just-if-you're-interested activities for no relative reward. There are also additional quests, which the game calls 'story quests' or something, but which are just quests where you have to go do some usually trivial task for some personality void NPC. Anyway, all this extra stuff is totally optional and I quit doing it once I began feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere in the game and these extra quests started feeling repetitive.
These extra quests can get very dull, especially the 'story quest' quests. The mundane NPCs are really lifeless. They stand there, utter the same couple things aloud, repeat the same few conversations, and crucuially don't respond to you in the least. I was disappointed with this. Supposedly I'm their savior and they don't interact with me at all. Also, the game uses like 5 skins for NPCs. There were towns full of twins, triplets, sextuplets, octuplets...
The world itself didn't feel too alive in large part because of this. Pirates, for their part, were either guarding their posts or driving maniacally down the road (for no purpose I ever saw), gleefully stopping to hunt you if they saw you. The animals on the island felt more real than the mundane people, and many of my favorite parts of the game involved hunting or just watching animals. You need to hunt animals because they're how you craft ammo pouches, rucksacks, syringe packs, etc. You either stumble upon them haphazardly in the wild or hunt them by looking for their icon on the map, which is their general zone of habitation, and go looking. You kill them and skin them, in gross detail, while your character expresses accurate sentiments like "Eeew," "Ugh, gross" and "Fuuuck." Many times I'd be walking somewhere and hear a predator roar, and I'd start looking around trying to find it, only to see some deer or something dart past me with a leopard in hot pursuit. The predator kill the prey. The prey run from the predators. It's very cool. One time I was hunting deer by a riverside and I killed a deer, which fell into the water. I ran up to the water's edge and BAM! A giant crocodile attacked me from the water. I jumped out of my seat...then killed and skinned it. That was awesome and made nature feel so vibrant, and after that was really when I began paying attention to the predators around me because it dawned on me that I wasn't the only hunter on the island. Anyway, most of the hunting I did just to make everything I could, and I did it relatively early in the game, after only a few main story missions, just to craft everything I could. But after that, there was no point in hunting and I didn't do it the entire rest of the game, except for the odd Path of the Hunter quest, which asked you to kill a special animal with a specific weapon. These were sometimes challenging (especially using the recurve bow) and usually granted materials to make the final [crafting item] in a set, like the wallet that holds the most money or whatever, but ultimately hunting and crafting were over with too quickly. After that, I ignored all animals unless I could use them to kill enemies.
I wish some of the other activity types rewarded you instead of just gave you a high score, like the racing. I would have liked to race, if there were some reward to gain. But there wasn't, and there were rewards for tons of other things, so why bother? One activity was called Trials of the Rakyat, and was the part of the game where they forced multiplayer into your experience. Walking around the island sometimes, I'd see a bright red rock with something like [XxPWNYOUxX], who held the high score for that particular Trial. Nothing like that to break the fantasy. I played a couple to see what they were, and you just try and kill as many enemies as possible with the weapons provided. Fun, but just leaderboard type stuff. And I guess everyone can see your dumb Xbox Live name plastered over rocks in their game.
So the story, right, very interesting. You (rich white boy) and your friends get captured by pirates on this island. After an excellent opening scene, you escape and start on a journey to find and rescue your other friends. On the way, you meet a few important locals who help you out, one of whom gives you a tattoo, or "tatau," as the game insists, which has some mystical qualities and grows as you acquire skills and become a Rakyat warrior and champion of the Rakyat people. There are several levels to the story, and as I keep saying, it is quite good. You figure out later, once the game starts throwing Alice in Wonderland quotes at you, that your character has gone far down the rabbit hole, and doesn't want to come out. Your character goes through a transformation on the island, saying some pretty hilarious and typical rich white boy stuff about finding his purpose in life (which is, he now knows, to be on this island with the Rakyat, though I have no idea what he thinks he will do on the island once his friends leave and he kills all the pirates). For whatever reason, whether it's mystical and out of his power or because he wants to, I'm not entirely sure, he becomes somewhat power hungry and vengeful. This does make some sense since the pirates killed some of his friends and ruined his vacation, but the sense that it DOES make is made NONsensical by his clingy girlfriend who insists he is changing and keeps asking things like "What have you become?" and calls him on his cell phone in the middle of a mission to check in on him. SHE makes his transformation weirder by adding a relationship dynamic to it that, to me, was either overdramatic or unnecessary. Or both. Either way, I didn't like his girlfriend at all because I empathized with him. I wonder if people did like his girlfriend. I wonder if girls liked his girlfriend and empathized with her more while boys empathized with Jason. So yeah, the whole self-discovery/transformation thing was...interesting.
Add to that the hallucinogenic staple of the story. The island is filled with drugs, and you take them a handful of times, often in relation to the Rakyat and becoming a warrior. ALL of these trippy scenes were amazing. I loved them. To me, they clouded what was really happening between him and the Rakyat leader, I forget her name. I think she may have been using him (especially based on the ending I got where she goes all Species on him), but I can't be sure. I think the drugs muddled his mind and caused him to make, or led him to, poor decisions, and to think of himself as invulnerable, or more of a hero than he was (and he was a hero). So maybe because of the Rakyat leader and the hallucinations, and the tribal tale he was told, he became a bit self-aggrandized. I do need to watch the other ending on YouTube, that reminds me...
The main characters in the game are excellent, and I will remember them for a long time. The hippie doctor Earnhardt, the hilarious German/American spy, Vaas, oh man will I never forget Vaas, the Australian slaver...And the ending missions, wow, so wonderfully tense. You'll realized as you play the game that many characters die. The death near the end is one of the best deaths I've ever experienced in a game. I mean, not best as in I wanted it to happen, but unexpected, well-executed, fitting, etc. And speaking of deaths, I really like how Jason (your character) should have died about 5 times but didn't. I can imagine how pissed off Vaas was every time he thought he killed Jason but Jason came back. There were many, many, many authentic "holy shit!" moments. The action sequences also were excellent, from escaping burning buildings to getting free from being bound underwater.
One final thing is that since the game takes place somewhere in the South Pacific near me in Singapore, there are several references to Singapore, and I noticed some Malay (again like Just Cause 2, which was full of it). For some reason though most of the NPCs sound Hispanic or Australian. I think they're supposed to be like Maori, but it only sort of worked on that front. Anyway, according to a character in the game, in Singapore it's illegal to buy or chew gum. False! For the record, anyone who tells you that is misinformed. You can bring gum for personal use, just not large amounts. You can chew it. No one cares if you chew gum. You can also buy it here at pharmacies. Just go to a pharmacy and say you want gum. Easy. I wish people would quit perpetuating Singapore as a place with such backward rules. There are some to be sure, as there are everywhere, but the whole "gum is illegal!" thing is plain wrong. This same NPC also calls Singaporeans "ricepickers." There's no rice picked here. I didn't particularly like that character because he was the ultra-American patriot, but definitely was irritated by the Singaporean stuff.
So anyway, awesome game. Great fun. I'm going to hang on to it and probably go clear the rest of the outposts and disable communication arrays and whatnot before giving it back to J. Oh and also, multiplayer was fun. I did some team deathmatch.
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Mar 13th, 2013 at 03:32:30 - Suikoden V (PS2) |
Turns out I really dislike this game. Shortly after my last post about it, I got to what I thought was the end. "It's the final battle, Prince!" No, that was a dirty lie, and everything after that was terrible, terrible, terrible. The story goes so far downhill at the same ridiculous pace that you begin accumulating meaningless party members. How long does the game drag on? I'm at like 15 hours later and it's still a'goin, though I'm pretty sure I'm at the actual end now. I think. Or close. But I quit anyway, so it doesn't really matter. I looked on YouTube to see the ending, but there are hours of "ending" footage, which I assume means that if I did invest the rest of time to grind characters and complete the game, I would have to spend even more watching over-dramatic cut scenes with crappy voice acting to resolve a story that lost my interest a long time ago.
For starters, the story does turn to waste. This game was definitely front-loaded with goodness. After this 2/3 point or so, all.you.do. is go from town to town rallying the leaders of those towns to join your cause so you can build an army. Then there's a betrayal, which didn't make any sense and was really stupid. The characters in this game are all blind to their ideals and it's just unbelievably silly how steadfast they are. Like, this guy that everyone hates took over the throne and thus gets to command the Queen's Knights, and all this and that. And everyone's just, "Well he's the King now and I'll die for the King." And I'm like, yeah, but you hated him. And they're like "Well he's the King now and I'll die for the King." All the characters are like that, just blind with devotion or whatever it is they believe in, duty, fealty, country, etc. I tend to dislike that in people in real life, and I hate it when I'm subjected to it in RPGs.
So the deteriorating story goes hand in hand with collecting more and more one-dimensional characters. The more I collected, the more I realized the most decent ones were the main characters. Most of the additional characters are meaningless. Most weren't funny, charming, intelligent, or much anything positive. There were at least three of the males who were straight up womanizers. I understand one character for the stereotype, but three? Come on! Again, I hate that in real life, and I hate even more being subjected to it when I'm trying to enjoy myself in a game. 75% of the stuff out of Kyle's mouth was leering at women. 75% of stuff out of Roy's mouth was about trying to get Lyon to go out with him, and he about fights the Prince over her, and when she gets hurt, he's terribly upset about it. Oh, no, she never even talked to you Roy, why are you obsessed with her? Leave her alone maybe. And there was one other guy with stupid long sideburns who 75% of the time was talking about "babes." So obnoxious. I know my problem with this. It's not necessarily because there are men obsessed with girls. That's life, right. It's that girls are obsessed with men too, though of course this isn't represented in the game, unless the girl comes off as slutty, which does happen (Miakis or Lyon yelling at her calling her a hussy). And it's that sex and romance and relationships and attraction are handled in such a juvenile childlike way. "Tee-hee," "babes bro." Anyway, ranting...
The end end, or what I think now is the end, will require such a massive grindfest and is such a time sink that I lost whatever motivation I had left to stick it out. I have probably 40 characters, and the end is the first time in the game where you actually make use of more than 1 party (of 6 characters). So I went through the whole game (well, once I realized that you could choose more than the default party, which was about 20 hours in) went through the whole game only leveling like 10 characters. Why would I need more? Oh of course, at the end, I need EIGHTEEN strong characters who can hold their own to fill three teams of 6 that split up in a massive dungeon with no save points and surprise bosses. Fantastic! So much fun! I would love to go grind levels for characters that I don't care about with this boring combat system, and then grind money to purchase super expensive armor and weapon upgrades for all of them. That sounds awesome. God knows how many more hours I would have to spend.
I went through most of that ending dungeon once, which was fine, but then my weakest party, completely unprepared, unknowingly encountered a boss. There was no indication that there would be a boss there. No save point, after at least an hour of playing, at the end of this struggle to make 3 teams go through this giant maze. I just walked forward, and...oh...my...god. I can't retreat. It's a freakin boss. Utterly impossible. I looked it up online later because I thought it may be an instance of "you're supposed to die here" but it wasn't. Turns out EACH party has to face a boss, alone, without saving, after the 1-hr dungeon already. No thanks.
One odd thing about the game is that you can level up skills from E to S, and then you can learn special skills. So, I never figured out how to level up a skill past C. No NPC would teach me, and I highly doubt that I missed an item, or several items, to teach trainers to skill me up further, since they'd teach me up to C from the very beginning. I found a ton of special skills too, and no one could ever equip one. I couldn't figure out how to do it, and again, I know I didn't just miss it. Maybe a special NPC somewhere, I have no idea. But with the close attention that I always pay to how to do this or that in games, especially RPGs (I have to know all the systems), I find it highly problematic that there was no tutorial, no direction, no nothing about how to level up skills.
Anyway, that's all I can think of. Don't recommend, unless you know you'll like it. I did enjoy it about 2/3 of the way through, but the last 1/3 was torture, and I don't even know how much longer I'd have to play to finish.
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Mar 3rd, 2013 at 20:30:20 - Suikoden V (PS2) |
This is definitely one for the story. Still enjoying that aspect. Battles are tougher, but still usually just "auto-able." I did discover last night though why battles appeared to be getting tougher. I'm 26 hours in and I JUST realized that I had a reserve crew of like 15 other characters to fill my party of 10 (6 active members and 4 extras). I've been playing the entire game only with what story characters go along with me! I've fought entire dungeons with just me and Lyon, autoattacking. Turns out that this WHOLE time I could have had a full part of 6 characters fighting, plus 4 in waiting. Haha. Ooooh, Suikoden...
The reason I never knew this is (a) the game never told me, (b) the instruction manual never told me, and (c) the Menu is clunky and not very user-friendly in general. There is an NPC you get eventually who you can talk to to change party members. If you talk to her, the menu displays the members of your current party, say, David, Lyon, ---, ---, ---, --- where the --- are empty slots. Then on the left-hand side of the screen, it says Reserves or something like that, and it is completely empty, all --- dashes. So I just thought that I didn't have any reserves because the list was empty. But as I've progressed I've 'befriended' a bunch of allies, and I started wondering where in the world they were going. Were they in my castle? Could I use them? Did 'befriend' mean just in terms of the story or did they move to my castle? Where are they physically? What happened to all the items I gave them when they were in my party? So last night before heading off on a mission, I went to this NPC and selected one of the empty --- spaces in my party list. Lo and behold, THEN the list of reserves appears! So now after 26 hours, I have a full party for the first time. I imagine the game will go back to being super easy. Maybe I'll revert to handicapping myself for some challenge. But, I really wish the game had said something about how to add characters, a quick little tutorial once the option becomes available. My main characters are in the high level 30s. All these great new reserve characters are like...8..19...14. But on the plus side they gain like 5 levels per battle when they're that low, so they'll be up over 30 in just a few minutes.
I was also thinking about Japanese characters. Japanese games always have these wacky characters that oftentimes have baffling elements. Like this one guy I got, he has a bird on his head. Why? There's no explanation for it, just hey, he's a guy with a bird on his head. Another guy has a mohawk/rattail/mullet thing. No explanation. Just hey, we like 80s hair metal, so this guy will have really stupid hair. Then there is a race of beavers. Beavers. Why? Well, I guess because the world is penetrated by a river and they need dams, and beavers build dams, so we'll have a race of beavers. The Elder beaver's name is Fuwalafuwalu. I don't know where that came from either. I dunno, these kinds of things make Japanese RPGs just really...silly at times. I'm not bashing silliness. I like silliness, but maybe just the way they do silly in many RPGs like this is too far silly, where for me it crosses over into stupid range. Like really, I want to know why he has a bird in his hair. And why there are sentient beavers. Without explanations of these things, I just say...ok [sigh] and shake my head in confusion.
That's it for now. Dunno how long this one is. Howlongtobeat's main story completions are between 24 and 34 hours, so I may be coming up to the final stretch. Sometimes the site's numbers are low for me though, so I'm going to guess it'll be under 40. Probably finish it up by the end of this coming weekend. Then I dunno what to play. Either start on Persona 4 or clear out some computer games. A is coming to visit in 3.5 weeks, so I'd like to have nothing left hanging when she gets here. Smart planning...
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