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Jun 15th, 2012 at 03:03:46 - Orcs Must Die! (PC) |
Bought this game partly due to recommendation from T and partly due to quirky and interesting take on tower defense. I'd played a couple levels for a Steam winter sale achievement back in January, and just fired it up proper the other day. Overall, I dunno, I'd give it a 3.5 of 5 or so, 7/10. It was enjoyable enough. I did like the silliness of it. Watching the orcs get shredded, spiked, chopped, lobbed into acid pits, etc. is endlessly amusing. The main character is a dimwitted apprentice and I found him quite funny at times. He talks a bit of story (which is pretty irrelevant except to drive home that he is an idiot) before/after each level, and later on some of his conversations with the bad guy are hilarious, particularly when she insults him and he says "oh, the old man (his master, before he died) used to tell me that!" Then she insults him again like "I will kill you and drink your blood!" and again he says his master used to tell him that...when he was drunk. Then she laments, "Oh if you only knew the pleasures we could have had." He says, "Hm, he never said that." I restarted the level to listen to it a couple times. With the presentation, trust me, it's funny.
The game wasn't as innovative as I'd thought it might be. Sure, it's tower defense from a third-person perspective. But I've played Sanctum (first-person but same idea). Sure, you unlock a new trap each level and you can upgrade them with skulls and choose your traps each level and purchase them with money...but I've played Plants vs. Zombies, which was way more interesting. Sure, you have to stop the orcish horde from getting to the rift, but that's tower defense. And sure, you have a weapon to shoot/swing and spells to cast, but that's every hack n slash game ever. All mashed together, this stuff is fun enough, but it doesn't have lasting appeal for me.
I found Orcs Must Die to be less strategic and more hectic. The game is a mouse-clicker. It'll wear your clicking finger down fast because you attack with your bow/polearm/spells as fast as you can click. Also, it is easy to be fairly single-minded about traps. I had a solid strategy that worked for 90% of the levels no problem, and I developed this strategy early on. Here are the Useful Traps: spike trap, ceiling crusher, springboard, archers. I'm pretty confident I can go back and beat the game with those alone. Then always keep on your wind belt, lightning ring, thunder ring, and use your bow. The springboard is probably my favorite. You just make a gauntlet of crushers and spike traps and fill any height position with archers...then do your best to put spring traps at the end and just launch the orcs back to the beginning of the gauntlet. I did so many levels without hardly firing my bow. Granted there is still a nightmare difficulty, but I've got no real motivation to try it. I had fun at the orc slaughter. Other traps I saw no use for. Like the swinging ball mace trap. It takes up the same # of squares and costs the same as 3 ceiling crushers, but the orcs have to walk through it as it's swinging. With the crushers, they just crush whoever walks under, period. Then there was a ballista...I don't even know what that does. Some air vents, don't see the point except to immobilize enemies a second. Why immobilize them when you could just kill them? So yea, some traps seemed overpowered, some seemed pointless.
There are also some annoying bugs. If you springboard enemies into lava, for example, there's a good chance that one will get stuck alive in the lava and it can be hard to find him and kill him to finish the level. It just sticks until you kill the orc who flew in the lava that should be dead anyway. I had a couple crashes to the desktop for no apparent reason. Sometimes you can't place traps on tiles that you should obviously be able to place traps on. Like for some unknown reason you just can't place over these 3 bricks and it ruins your symmetry. Archers also bugged out when I'd try to place them sometimes. They'd spawn in another location. The first time it happened I'd clicked like 5 times, then I found later this stack of 5 archers on the other side of the map. Weird.
Sooo, neat game, fun enough. My final word is don't bother with it unless you really like tower defense or you are really curious and want to play a quick pointless story with an amusing cast of characters, but there are way better tower defense games out there.
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 12:32:46 - Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii) |
Never played a Fire Emblem game before, but I am a big fan of SRPGs. It looked challenging and epic and all those good things I like. Start the game, lots of political intrigue story going on, don't really care, pretty bad dialogue, introduces tons of characters and factions and all this, very confusing to try and follow. Ok, so maybe not playing for the story. Guess how many times I died in the FIRST TUTORIAL BATTLE? I think it was 3. And in the first few levels after? Yeah probably another 12 times.
Fire Emblem is HARD.
Fire Emblem enforces a fun little rule called permadeath. Sometimes if one of your characters dies it's game over. Fair enough. Other times though, if it's not a main story character, it's just dead forever. Fooorrreeeevvvveeer. And your characters literally get one-shot. Not even your weakest characters either. The mid-level ones still get one-shot. You cannot just send characters out into the field. You've got to plan to a really unreasonable degree to keep vulnerable characters out of the line of fire. I mean think about it. You can go the entire game growing a character and then screw up one time and have it gone forever. That sucks. So in my play time, I started on Normal difficulty since I like strategy RPGs and I'm not bad at them. Ok so Normal is like my Nightmare. I finally decided to switch to Easy after I'd been doing this one battle a few times, and was finally almost done with it. I went to attack an enemy with a normal full-health character, and she got counterattacked, crit, one-shot, dead forever. I was just like omg seriously? Putting it on Easy! So I restart and it really was easier, but just the fact that there is permadeath is just so lame. I had this level 1 priest, my only healer, who can only level up by healing allies. She was level one forever because on Easy (most of) your characters turn out much stronger than enemies, so she wasn't seeing much healing action. Then in this one level, some reinforcements came (enemy reinforcements come A LOT, from every which direction) and killed her because they spawned right near her and she couldn't get away. Permadeath, bam. That's when I stopped for good. And as far as I got, you can't just create a new character (maybe can later, dunno). So my healer died there and I was out a healer. Each character, no matter how minor, is actually a part of the story. Like she had a name and was a 'childhood friend' of another ally I had. And she died! Anyway, Easy was way better than Normal. You get I think literally twice as much XP and some other perks too, like again, literally half as many enemies. But yeah, permadeath makes me insane because that's all you're thinking about is 'ok is there any way they can kill any of my characters this turn?' Not fun to worry about.
So let's talk enemies. The AI is really lame. First of all, they completely target weak characters, characters who can't attack/counter. Makes sense enough, but I mean, it's freakin brutal here because they die forever. For this certain logic, the AI routinely is stupid as hell. Many enemies will just stand in one place until you attack them. Some you can draw out by moving into their attack range and others you can't. You never know which ones will move and which ones won't. I mean I did figure out that enemies standing in doorways and in front of chests don't move, but others will or won't too. So you can't like 'pull' them reliably. And in a game where your characters permanently die, you need some reliability. Also, like I mentioned earlier, reinforcements come quite often. There are WAY too many enemies on the maps in this game. Those reinforcements are chargers. They come straight for you. It's easy to be overwhelmed. In the beginning of the game, they keep giving you characters of wildly polar levels. So I had my level 1 priest and my level 12 mage...and my level 1 thief could go around one-shotting enemies and taking more hits than the level 12 fighter...???? Doesn't make sense. So you can kind of abuse these stronger characters, but your weak characters don't level as much because you want to rely on the strong characters who won't die because if you use the weak characters and make one miscalculation, they die! And even using the strong characters a lot, you'll still get a million reinforcements and they'll eventually die too because you can't heal them because your healer is level 1 and she can't move near enemies or else she dies! AAAHH!
Mmm, despite all the things I hated, the combat system is pretty cool. Weapons have durability, which I've never seen in an SRPG before and I kind of liked. I also liked the inventory system and the trading and how you can choose which weapon to attack with on your turn. So a lot of my characters had 2 or 3 different weapons by the time I quit, like a weak sword for when I just need to knock a few HP off, a strong sword, and a magic sword that can attack over 2 squares instead of only 1 for range attacks. Characters in this game always counterattack if they're in range. So if a swordsman attacks another swordsman adjacent, there will be a counterattack. So you have to be smart. If a swordsman attacks an archer (who say can only attack 2 squares away, not an adjacent square) then the archer can't counterattack. So I'd soften up enemies with non-counter-attackable attacks and finish them off with what could have been counterattacked if the enemy didn't die. There was also a neat rock-paper-scissors system for weapons and magic. Sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword kind of thing. Lots of skills to equip. Terrain and terrain effects. Seems like a cool battle system. But characters need some balancing and the game just needs to be less punishing and I'd probably eat it up. As it stands, I have had Disgaea 2 sitting in my stash for like 2 years, so I've got no time for inferior SRPGs!
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 11:51:21 - Dead Space: Extraction (Wii) |
I don't think I knew this game was a rail shooter, or really even what it was like to play a rail shooter, and certainly not how dizzying rail shooters with a Wiimote could be. I used to play Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, but that's about it...that was a great party game, for real.
So first of all...Dead Space on the Wii. Looks terrible compared to the PC games. The game is very dark. I turned the brightness most of the way up but then the contrast was obviously off and it just looked even shittier. I also watched a few short gameplay videos online and it looked dark and shitty on every one of them too. Like I had trouble seeing enemies until they were right in front of me. The character would turn like I was supposed to be shooting at something and I might see something barely, like BARELY, visible in the blackness. Then it would eat my face. And the Wiimote aiming reticle jiggled all over the damn place, and the character kept looking up and down and the camera was moving on its own and I know that's what a rail shooter is but noooo I didn't like it! If you want to pick up ammo, maybe you'd see it as the character turns, but I at least was too slow to pick much of it up. Definitely felt like it was moving too fast for me to keep up. Maybe if they'd had a slower difficulty or something would have been a little better there.
On the plus side, the story seemed neat. It takes place before the events of Dead Space, so it's about the discovery of the Marker on that one planet, and follows some of the miners and other people living on the surface there, just the beginning of Convergence, people starting to go nuts, all that. And I watched the ending on Youtube, and it's really cool how they tied the ending to the beginning of Dead Space.
Oh well! I tried!
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 11:41:37 - Red Steel 2 (Wii) |
Opened and closing a bunch of these right now. Funny story. P is out of town and I'm making use of his Wii. I figured I'd bring over all the Wii and Gamecube games I've collected over the years (6 in total, 4 Wii 2 GC). These were supposed to easily last me the month he was gone. But it's been like 4 days and I'm done with the Wii! What madness is this?! Turns out I didn't like 3/4 of the Wii games, this Red Steel 2 being the only one I enjoyed. And then I had bought a knockoff GC controller for my GC games, and turns out the yellow joystick is stuck to the right. I loaded up a Tales game and the camera just spun round and round and round...so both GC games are currently unplayable. Today I brought my PS2 over here. Glad I never bought a Wii. Wii is a weird system. I've played just a few Wii games, like these 4, MarioKart, Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports, maybe one or two others a little bit, and they vary wildly in how they make use of the technology! Some go all out with the motion sensor and nunchuck, for better or worse, some use a few features, and others oddly don't use a thing (Fire Emblem, I'm looking at you) and might as well have been Gamecube games. Anyway, will comment on some of this in other entries. For now, the one Wii game I liked...
Red Steel 2 is the sequel to the much-maligned Red Steel. I accidentally bought Red Steel instead of Red Steel 2 last year. I remember being excited when Red Steel came in the mail, then I went to look up a couple reviews again and get a time estimate for it and realized I'd mixed them up and bought the one with like a 60% on Metacritic. Woops! I sold it back and bought the one I'd meant to.
Red Steel 2 is a samurai Western shooter. Samurai clans hunt each other down in the wild west and the lone hero must find the villain who murdered his entire clan, retrieve his clan's fabled katana, restore his honor and get his vengeance. The story was simple and sweet, characters not too interesting. The art style is incredible. It's got a comic book look to it, less gritty than Madworld and with pretty colors. The animations are fluid and the game looks really good. I especially liked the backgrounds of the desert, burning oil, clouds and dust, and other slowly drifting/moving/blowing in the desert wind canvases.
As the hero, you wield both a katana and a gun, so there's swordplay and gunplay. The katana is definitely featured more and is more useful (although I annihilated the last boss with a gun, in a bizarre twist of simplicity). The game makes excellent use of the Wiimote and nunchuck for attacks. The wide range of attacks included A A DownSwing for a nice leaping charge attack that was my primary move most of the game. Later on you learn some moves that break enemy armor, A DownSwing and Back A HorizontalSwing. Another I used a lot was this defensive block move. You hold A when enemies attack to parry. If you push the Wiimote and the nunchuck forward while parrying just before an enemy attack, you kind of counter-stun them and can attack. The one I killed the final boss with was Cobra Strike, which is the very last thing I learned and it's just a gun charge by holding B and then moving the Wiimote to place 'marks' on enemies, and it just fires off bullets on targets for however many marks you put on each one, up to 6 I think. I'm still surprised I wasted the last boss with that. I was having a lot of trouble defending against him and hitting him, and I just tried shooting at him for the hell of it and it knocked a chunk off his HP. He was dead a minute later, yay.
So you encounter waves of enemies and you just kill them one by one. They start off very easy but get a bit trickier over time, and you end up having to deal with multiple enemy types at once, which depending on the mix could get interesting. There are 3 samurai clans and each had strengths and weaknesses. Ok well the first clan definitely had more weaknesses than strengths, but you have to figure out what works against each enemy type. Each clan also has a miniboss type enemy who comes out occasionally and could post a challenge, especially if they threw out two at once. Winning battles is all about keeping your cool, remembering which moves work best on which enemies, and executing. Again, the controls were phenomenal and so perfectly responsive. Obviously I have to compare these Wii games to one another, and Red Steel 2 just kills them for Wiimote accuracy and motion smoothness.
There are merchants and lots of gold, like any good Western game. The gold is in barrels and tables and boxes and...payphones and vending machines. These destructibles are scattered everywhere. There are also safes and lockers to open. The safe cracking minigame was cool. You put the Wiimote up to your ear and turn it like you're turning a safe dial. When you hear it click you push A. Get a few correct clicks and it opens. Safes always have $3000 in them. There are also hidden Sheriff's Stars and some kind of token that give $3000 and $5000 respectively. The Sheriff's Stars are always hidden somewhere out of range and you have to spot them and shoot them. The tokens are usually behind boxes and other out of the way places you have to walk to and pick up. The game progresses by quests on a bulletin board. There are main quests and optional quests like destroying wanted posters that all net you extra cash. You need all this money because there's a lot of stuff to upgrade. There are a few NPC shopkeepers who function as your allies, intelligence, support. You can buy guns, weapon upgrades, armor and health upgrades, new moves...I bought everything except most of the weapon upgrades, but I definitely had cash to buy most of the rest of them at the end, and would have done so if there had been a weapon store anywhere near the end of the game. There are 4 guns to switch between, but I used the pistol pretty much exclusively. When I bought the machine gun and shotgun, I immediately used up their ammo, but then oddly didn't find anymore ammo for them until hours later. I was wondering whether or not I had to buy ammo for those or what was the deal. Turns out it just...didn't drop yet. Only pistol ammo for like half the game.
One of the only criticisms I can level at the game is its linearity. There's 0 exploration, no NPCs to chat with, the side missions all involve just backtracking to look for wanted posters or comm stations or something. I didn't mind too too much because it was a fun ride, but the environment was so damn pretty I wanted to be let loose somewhere or just discover something interesting. Those side missions I said you have to backtrack because you can't like destroy the wanted posters or activate the comm towers UNTIL you get the quests for them, which are given linearly. So you might not get the wanted poster quest until like the 4th quest in the level, and by that time you've seen and been unable to interact with a few posters, so you have to go looking for stuff you already found if you want to do the quest. Quite annoying and not really worth the time, especially since I pretty consistently missed 1 thing in the side quests. 9/10 posters, 17/18 trucks destroyed, 5/6 bandit treasures...where are the last ones of all these hidden?! Also, as much as I enjoyed finding and shooting Sheriff's Stars, those things became annoying too because I was compelled to look for them everywhere I went. Walk into a new area, scan up down and all around for glinting yellow stars. Looking for those kind of killed the excitement of going to a new area after a while. But, easily enough ignored, and you certainly don't need to find them all.
Fun game, definitely recommend.
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