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May 7th, 2012 at 23:35:21 - Assassin's Creed II (360) |
Finished up Assassin's Creed 2 yesterday. Interesting game, worth playing for some of its cool ideas. I played AC 1 a couple years ago and found it also neat, but very very repetitive. AC 2 is a much better game with much more to do. If you played the Prince of Persia games for PS2, it's a lot like those too, and I suppose also sort of like Mirror's Edge for more reference. Lots of climbing up buildings and running over rooftops. One thing that struck me about AC 2 is that it's not really about being stealthy. I spent most of my time running full speed through city streets, weaving in and out of crowds, or jumping like a madman across rooftops. Rooftop archers and other guards didn't so much not notice me as they saw me a mile away and I ran at them until my dagger found their faces. They couldn't do too much to defend themselves. Sure, you can play it stealthy, but it got boring for me to do that all the time. The game has a neat mechanic for blending in with crowds that I very much enjoyed, and when I needed to use it, I did with great success. Also, the addition of hiring thieves, fighters, and courtesans to distract guards so you could go steal treasure was pretty fun.
My first impressions of the game, however, were very much like the first, and it doesn't pick up for a while. You don't get to assassinate anyone or even get weapons until several hours in. But yeah, after the extensive hand-holding, you finally get to start running around and doing real missions. AC 2 has equipment you can buy at various shops, paintings, treasure maps, health potions, weapon poisons, smoke bombs, and all kinds of other things. It's awesome but I didn't use half of them. Like I ever even tried smoke bombs or poisons because I'd rather just stab stuff, and the menu to select different types of a weapon is annoying because it always defaults back to the default weapon of that type. So you hit up/right for different weapon types on the D-pad. So up is my wrist blade. If I want to select my poison, I have to hit R2, move a dial around and select poison. But if I want to switch back to my sword then back to poison, I have to do the annoying radial menu again to get back to poison. Every single time you want to switch to something besides your main weapons, you have to go through the radial menu, even if you were just there. My solution was to ignore it.
All the cool stuff you get to do in the game is doled out over its entirety. This irked me for the most part too. Two examples: (1) you get a pistol near the end of the game. A PISTOL! What assassin doesn't want a pistol to snipe with? This one does. But I get it at the very end of the game where I hardly have time to play with it, and you only want me to use it in a few scripted sequences? I could have been sniping from rooftops the entire game. Lame. (2) 'super jump' - Yes, you get a super jump. Actually it's a leap technique you learn from the thieves' guild in like chapter 8 (out of 14 -- actually out of 12 because 12 and 13 are missing, which is another issue). The super jump lets you reach higher places on buildings by getting a little extra height in your reaches while climbing. This was so so so so stupid...but useful...at the same time. So I'd been trying to climb this tall tower forever. It was the only lookout point I hadn't gotten to in the city, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to scale it. I just couldn't find anywhere to jump up at some point, so I couldn't progress. It was really annoying and I kept trying to look for alternate angles, coming back to it after doing other missions, etc. Wellll, a couple hours later I did this section with the thieves' guild and they teach me how to climb better, which, you guessed it, lets me get up that tall church tower. Bullshit man. Why bother not letting you climb just a little higher for 3/4 of the game, and then giving you this giant tower to climb that you can't even climb until you do this mission, which you have no inkling that you would ever be able to reach any higher during climbs. It was just dumb. And then to make it worse, after that button was unlocked (push A while hanging to make an extended reach), like 1/2 the time I climbed after that when I just wanted to climb NORMALLY (also by holding A) it would read it as pushing A, which yeah I was doing but then holding it, and Ezio would leap up and fall back down. Constantly. It was so annoying and pointless.
One of the best things about the game was your uncle's villa that served as your headquarters. You could upgrade its buildings, get discounts from merchants there, and generally pay for its upkeep. Then, you get to reap the rewards of your hard work there by taking profit from the coffers. The coffers filled up every hour and twenty minutes. I always like games where I get my own keep or something to maintain, like one of the Neverwinter Nights expansions.
There were a lot of different types of collectibles in the game -- feathers, statuettes, assassin's seals, etc. There were also 300 treasure chests (wow!) that you could hunt for with money in them. I spent most of the game unlocking and doing everything on the map, but near the end realized I had more money than I would ever need, so much so, I calculated, that I probably didn't need to open a single treasure chest, which would have saved me a lot of time...but opening them was still fun. I haven't had as much fun going and collecting things in a game in a while, so I'm glad I liked running across rooftops and stabbing guards. I upgraded all my weapons and everything to the best available, and got the special set of armor, Altaire's armor, by completing all 6 of the assassin's tombs and getting those seals. Those were some of the most fun and challenging areas of the game, complete platforming challenges and very Prince of Persia-esque. They were huge tombs that you had to navigate your way around, and you had to be precise about it because one misstep and sometimes you were back to the beginning!
AC has a cool story, complete with a database and conspiracy flowchart showing who you've killed and who is still around. The database was very cool. I haven't mentioned yet that this game is absolutely steeped in history from the time. I know nothing about 15th century Italy, and I can't say I learned a lot, but I read a lot of factoids about palaces and chapels and popes, and I found it compelling because the designers obviously cared about the historical aspect of the game. And of course, the cities and churches and other things were painstakingly recreated I'm sure. Lots of research went into this one. The descriptions in the database often had little jokes here and there, usually pointing out ironies of papal rule or making fun of the church's brutality back then.
What else...oh, there's no death penalty. You just restart at a checkpoint. That plus the insane amount of health you get and the simplicity of fighting (X, X, X, X, X, X) means the game was REALLY easy and you could do stupid things like jump off the tallest building in the city and die and it didn't matter. Kind of lame, kind of cool. The hard parts of the game involved getting jumps just right and remaining invisible when you had to. But yeah, a failure sets you back about 30 seconds on average.
And finally, since I was talking about endings earlier, the ending of this one is cool, but it comes pretty quickly. Meaning that you're assassinating some people in memory sequence 11 and then whoooooaaahahhahah hazy dreamy stuff happens and you're transported to memory sequence 14 to kill the main conspirator! What happened to 12 and 13?! I looked it up because I'm not a huge fan of gaps in my games. Guess what. DLC! Wow really, you mean I have to buy more to get story that should have been in this game? Awesome, thanks! This isn't 'extra' stuff that's missing. It's the stuff that happened between memory 11 and 14, the stuff that you figure should be there or else they would have just named the last two memories 11 and 12. Creative design or creative marketing? You decide.
Either way, the 12...or 14..chapters of the game are lengthy enough without dragging. Overall enjoyable experience. Definitely better than AC 1. I have AC: Brotherhood sitting on my shelf as well, but I don't think I want to play it any time soon. And I just borrowed Arkham City from a friend, which will be similar to AC, so I'll probably hold off a bit on that one too. Maybe squeeze a couple other games and a little vacation in first. Good times. Oh, and Brotherhood has the multiplayer I've been excited to try out!
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May 2nd, 2012 at 00:29:23 - World of Goo (PC) |
Finished World of Goo just now. This game has some serious charm. I really didn't know what to expect when I began, just that I've been hearing about it for a few years now and it was some sort of cute puzzle game where you build structures out of goo balls. Didn't know how it worked or anything. Anyway, I very much enjoyed it.
There are a bunch of different species of goo balls that you get throughout that have different properties. Like some you can light on fire and explode, others you can place in a structure and move them later, others stick to surfaces...one thing I liked is that the game doesn't hold your hand in explaining what all the goo balls do. Any instructions the game gives are these somewhat random and silly messages from 'the sign painter.' Sometimes they have to do with what you need to do in a level, and other times not. So you more or less figure out how each type of goo ball works, you pretty much explore the levels on your own by building to reveal more of the map on the larger levels, and you do a good deal of trial and error. In this sense then there were a lot of 'a-ha!' moments, like when I figured out what the pink balloon goo balls did, or when I figured out in the last level just now that I needed to build up, not out, and then cause the rickety upwards tower to fall just right with a balloon attached. The game makes you feel pretty clever at times.
It was never too too hard, a good difficulty, except there was ONE level that I insist was a cheap trick. I remember vividly trying to move this big vertical bar out of the way of a big bomb so that the bomb would roll down and explode what I needed it to. I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to move the bar. Finally I googled it and the solution I never would have figured out. You had to toss a goo ball OFF THE SCREEN over the top of the bar to the other side where the bomb was, then make the goo ball slam against the bar from that side to knock it down. There wasn't any indication that (a) tossing goo balls offscreen was any kind of valid strategy; (b) using a goo ball to hit the bar was any kind of valid strategy; (c) any reason to believe that that strategy was possible, especially given the fact that it was totally a precision thing where even if you tried to toss a goo ball off screen, you have no idea how high the bar goes off the screen, and 90% of the goo balls you toss up don't come down where you need them, so it would seem like it wasn't working anyway. /rant I hated that level. Oh, and you NEVER have to toss anything off screen or hit anything with a goo ball in any level ever before or after that one.
So as you meet your goal for each level, which is always moving x number of goo balls to the pipe at the end, any excess goo balls you save go to this sandbox level where you just try to build as tall a goo tower as you can. It's neat because it keeps an up-to-date world ranking of everyone who has the game and how tall their towers are. And it shows other players' towers' heights as little clouds with their name and the flag of the country they're from. So I had messed around with it earlier in the game and continued my tower today when I was stuck in the story. As you build, you always see other players' clouds above your tower so it kind of gives you an aim to reach for. At the bottom, you are in over 5,000,000th place for tallest tower. I got mine up to like 20 meters and went all the way up to like 30,000. After I beat the game, I went back to the tower and got it up over 30 meters and up to 1,000-something place. Pretty cool how it updates it like that! Then I got too gung-ho and started just building straight up and my tower crumbled :-( I'll probably reset it and see how high I can go at some point! I wonder if I can get below 1,000 or 500 even. I figure since I got somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 on my first try, I can dip into the triple digits. But when the tower fell, my ranking went back down to 5 million, so it's like who knows how many people have gotten it as high as mine and their towers just fell down. It's like half of those 5 million people could have been trying to get higher than just one more person, but toppled their tower in the process! Anyway, fun way to do leaderboards.
Totally recommend this one. I think the game is also on iPad and some other devices besides PC and Wii too. Check it out!
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Apr 30th, 2012 at 13:15:02 - Limbo (PC) |
This was an awesome game.
It throws you in a black forest with no instructions and no fanfare. You just have to explore and figure out what's going on. So when I started, I was like '...controls?' Then I was like, well it's a platformer, so let's try the arrows. Success. I did have to look up (it has a menu -- take THAT immersion!) how to interact with objects (CTRL) because I almost got mad at the beginning of the game because I couldn't figure out what to do because I didn't look for anything to drag because there had been no instructions for a drag button so I didn't even know I could drag. It made me think about what I take for granted when picking up a game, and also, unfortunately, how reliant I am on the game telling me what does what in the beginning. Limbo just throws you to the wolves, though thankfully these wolves only respond to one button and not 10.
Once I didn't get mad and didn't feel like a failure after not knowing what to do within 2 minutes of beginning, I took in the background and the wonderful music and sounds. The picture fades around the edges and focuses near your character. The background also gets very hazy. The world is dreamlike, and I think it's a dream that the character is stuck in. By dreamlike, I mean nightmarish. The woods/factory/waterworks/air ducts are just death traps. I died probably 100 times, but the dying never interrupted anything. You respawn within 15 gameplay seconds of where you died like every time. Death isn't a punishment. It's a learning experience. Oftentimes, I'd just die because I didn't know what was coming. Then I'd know what was there and I wouldn't die next time. Like, sliding down a hill into a pit of spikes, but while sliding down I see a good spot to jump fly past. Ah, next time! And there really are a lot of ways to die -- spikes, impaled from every angle, impaled by spider leg, crushed by boulder/box/falling object, fall to your death, drown, smashed by blocks, shredded by buzzsaw...I very much enjoyed dying.
The game's audio really works wonders to set the atmosphere alongside the visuals too. I was playing at first with headphones on and I could hear rain drops, flies buzzing, ambient forest sounds, etc. Very well done. I moved later to my TV, controller, and speakers, and while the game looked awesome on the big screen and felt better with a controller instead of a keyboard, the speakers didn't allow the same detail to reach my ears as headphones do. So I put the headphones back on but kept the TV and controller setup.
I enjoyed the beginning of the game more than the end. The beginning has more humanoids, and the humanoids are disconcerting. They creeped me out and always were laying traps or shooting blow darts at me. Or there were corpses, and that big spider in the beginning. The second half of the game turned into more of a platformer with gravity mechanics, which while cool, took a lot of the intrigue out of it. I guess I enjoyed figuring out how all the mechanics worked, the boxes, the rising water in that level, the cogs in those levels...and by the end I'd seen them all, and gravity mechanics are pretty handily used to death these days. I felt that the last handful of chapters were the weakest. It was also completely anti-climactic. There's no explicit story. You just think whatever you think is going on. But still, in the beginning/middle there is a giant spider and a mosquito character and other humanoids. But the middle/end there is nothing. No bosses. No mystery. No nothing.
Totally worth the few hours it'll take to play and the few bucks it'll cost to buy. More 2-D games should be unique and innovative like this one.
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Apr 30th, 2012 at 12:54:37 - Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (PS2) |
Finished Xenosaga 3...that's the entire series done. Started the first one exactly four months ago. What a great series! I was hoping the third one wouldn't end on some stupid cliffhanger for a 4th that never gets made, but it did a good job of not leaving 8000 threads hanging or promising anything specific in the future. The end did get a bit weird. There was a lot of Nietzsche in the end, started talking about will the way he did and not the way it's popularly talked about or the way X1 was talking about the will to power. So it turns out the master 'villain' plan was to use Zarathustra to begin eternal recurrence. I like this because the two bad guys in the end aren't necessarily bad. The world is going to end. Fact. They just want to go on and destroy it so it can start over. The 'good guys' simply don't want to destroy it now and start it over. They want to let it run its course and die for good in several tens of thousands of years because it's 'wrong' to cause everyone to suffer now. The weird thing is the way the..I can't say bad guys..I'll just say Wilhelm because that's the final one's name..the weird thing is the way Wilhelm talks about his desire for eternal recurrence. He doesn't mind sacrificing all life on the planet to begin the process of eternal recurrence. He thinks it's for the greatest good. It's utilitarian. It keeps things moving along. Shion and the party don't think that idea is for the greatest good. They reject the idea that the greatest good in the future means the suffering of everyone now. Its architects would have Zarathustra 'speak' on the basis of lies and suffering of others. Here is Nietzsche's anti-utilitarianism in Shion. Shion and the party, they're the ones who would like to live this life again, yet they're the ones who don't want it to recur. Wilhelm is the one who wants it to recur, but he doesn't want it to recur in the same way. That would mean that...Shion and the party's wills are powerful, whereas Wilhelm's isn't since he (and Kevin and the other Testaments) are looking to the other-world and escaping the present one. Yet both alternatives are ultimately selfish. Wilhelm's eternal recurrence because he wants to be God and oversee that, and Shion's because she is basically guaranteeing humanity's extinction in a few tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, she is saving everyone alive until then (though if eternal recurrence were set in motion, they'd come back again to live their lives anyway), and Wilhelm is guaranteeing everyone alive infinite life cycles. Hopefully they are happy with them. Ah but his plan didn't work, so it doesn't matter. Also, there's the whole bizarre story at the end with the re-awakening of Mary Magdalene...that shit was out of left field. And there was some cut scene with Jesus preaching to some folks, including Mary and Jeshua in the crowd. I have no idea what's the point of all that. The story then goes on presumably after the game with stuff to do about returning to Lost Jerusalem (Earth/Holy Land), so I figure this is some story about the search for the origin of [insert topic] in the Garden of Eden. Anyway. Ridiculously fleshed out and complicated sci-fi tale over 3 games. I'd happily read/watch/play more in this world.
Gameplay wise, there was a bit of a difficulty spike about 3/4 of the way through. Enemies get smarter and start breaking you and boosting, resulting in genuine ass-kickings of all my asses a handful of times. This is what I learned at this point: Breaks are deadly. Avoid getting attacked from the rear, avoid letting 4 enemies attack in a row, and for the love of god, avoid getting broken especially when there are several enemies. They will (depending on their targeting protocol) often just pick one character and absolutely murder him/her. When it's 4 enemies vs 1 broken character (or 3), you have no chance.
Worst moment of the game/storytime: Replaying the Durandal mission 3 times. I died the first two times on the LAST enemy before the save point. I got break/boost murdered each time. Break/boost murder is cheap as hell. If enemies get the jump on you in this game, you are screwed. They'll break all your characters in one round, then when you can't act for two more rounds, they will just boost and completely obliterate you. I mean they'll get like 12-15 turns before you get one, no exaggeration. Sucks. After the first death, I equipped break limit + items because I realized the 3 characters I was using had the 3 lowest break limits of everyone. So I fixed that thinking it would help with getting broken. It did, except I still got jumped right at the end and nothing I could do. So I pulled out my computer to find a walkthrough so I could just go straight to the items the third time through (because the Durandal residential area is a maze of doors), but there wasn't anything clear enough, so I did it yet again, the third time with music pumping in my headphones instead of battle noises from the game, which, after two hours of dying, get really irritating. The third time I went SO prepared into the end of the level (which is the beginning revisited) before the save point. I had traps, was completely healed, had boost stocked. Fingers crossed. I didn't even see the bastards who killed me first two times.
Bosses also got a bit cheap at this point in the game. Some of them had straight up kill moves that would one-shot me. I forget what boss it was, but she had an attack that knocks everyone down to 666 HP, and another that hits for 666. She did them back to back at one point (knocked all my characters to 666 HP then immediately hit them all for 666 HP, wiping me clean). How the hell do I stop that? Then I fought Margulis the other day and he has an Anima Awakening move that hits for like 130,000 HP. My max HP on the most maxed out ES was about 75,000. How to defend against that? So, I think that first one (the 666 one) was just a crazy fluke. The Margulis fight, I died (obviously) and looked up what type of attack he does. It's a fire ether, so I bought 1/2 fire rings for everyone and 1/2 guard rings. So when he was going to do that move, I just guarded and it essentially made his damage go down by 1/4 so it really didn't hurt too bad if everyone was mostly topped off. But the stupid thing about that type of battle is you're forced to wade through it once and have a mandatory death, THEN assuming you are able to figure out what type of attacks they do and defend against them, you can win. If you don't know that it's an ether, you lose again. If you don't think to put on 1/2 guard, you lose again. It's just dumb to make you lose to 'learn' how to beat it. It's not like a quick little oops, game over. It's like a 'dammit, I spend 30 minutes on this battle and he cheap-shot killed me, now i have to do it over until I figure out that it's a fire ether attack.'
I actually completed most of this one. I got most of the segment addresses, did a lot of the side quests...didn't kill either of the mega optional bosses...did get most everyone's ultimate weapons. I like that these were accessible to a 'casual' player in this game, as opposed to other games that make getting ultimate weapons super involved. I also did most of the Hakox puzzle game on my own...
Hakox puzzle game -- First of all, this was like a free game alongside Xenosaga 3. With little indie puzzlers being all the rage these days, whoever came up with Hakox could sell it or something similar on Steam or something. People would eat it up for real. It is VERY good and entertaining and challenging and unique. It basically works like this: You need to guide your characters to the goal. Each level is a 3-D grid-based map with a lot of moving parts. Your characters come in several different colors, and you generally need to get each color character to their respective goals (yellow goes to yellow, blue to blue, etc.) Easy enough. So there are four types of button (gimmicks, the game calls them) on the map corresponding to the Playstation controller -- triangle, circle, square, and x. Depending on the map, the pushing the button will move the gimmick to an end point along a path you can see on the map. Releasing the button moves the gimmick back to its starting point. So for example, Shion is walking in a straight line to her goal, but there is a gap in the road. There's an X out to the side. Push X and the X gimmick moves to fill the gap. She walks over it and continues to the goal. So imagine that, but like times 10 on the harder levels. You have to time multiple characters of multiple colors to reach their goals simultaneously to get combo points, you have to use all four buttons at once (people online suggest using two controllers to manage the complexity or begging a friend to help). Also, you have to keep in mind where all the gimmicks are all the time. Moving one in the path of a character may cause the death of another character. Anyway, this idea could really be expanded on and made into something even better, though it works really well with a controller the way it is now! Here's the best example of a level on Youtube, although the user has got it down to a science so it's not too too exciting to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn4un40TbsA I stopped right before this one, but this is apparently the #1 trouble level!
And finally, X3 features a Coconut Monkey. I took pictures and need to email the folks at PC Gamer to let them know their mascot is here.
Great series. Glad to finally (re)play it to completion.
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