Sunday, August 29, 2010

Weekend Update (not with Kevin Nealon)

I played a lot of Borderlands this weekend. Even some (gasp!) online. I like it quite a bit. The quest system and leveling up is pretty addictive. Also might get back into Little Big Planet. Will post more later.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Zelda 2.5


I'm sitting here watching the credits roll on one of the strangest games I've played in a while, 3D Dot Game Heroes. It may have well been called The Legend of Zelda Tribute Game instead. But this is the most fantastic Zelda tribute game ever. They get the music right, the enemies, the story, everything! I made it to the first dungeon and got (of course) the boomerang. And I just KNEW that bats would be killed with one hit of the boomerang while other enemies would only be stunned.

There's some weird humor in there too, including a few caves where videogame designers toil away on a game that they hope you like. No joke. Of course, there's the thinly veiled Zelda references, but there's also the slight sexual references that catch you off guard if you get to thinking you really are playing an old 8 bit Zelda game.

Some Annoyances:
The not-quite-overhead-view in dungeons leads to you running into enemies or falling off ledges quite often. The ridiculous but badass huge sword is only available at full health and w/ temporary upgrades. Swinging your sword in anything other than a straight jab is tricky and hard to consistently do correctly. This is eventually helped by other swords with better "swing" rating. I couldn't quite decide if using the D pad or the analog stick to control the character is the right way to go. D pad feels more classic, but I end up pressing it really hard and my thumb ends up hurting, so the analog stick is a welcome relief. But it feels sort of "spongy" compared to the precise control of the D pad. Item selection is cumbersome. You have the traditional Zelda method of a pause screen and a grid, but you can also cycle through them with L2/R2. You end up getting quite a few items, and rather than use all the buttons of the PS3 controller, you're mostly stuck with the classic A and B configuration familiar in Zelda.

I hate Magis. I really really hate them.

Character selection is fun, but what I really want is a normal sized character that doesn't blend into any of the backgrounds. I ended up playing most of the game with the green dragon, partly because it reminded me of Link's green clothes and partly because there weren't any green dungeons that I could remember.


Going back the the 3D perspective thing, I was able to get it the way I liked it with an almost bird's eye view for the overworld. But you spend 80-90% of your time in endlessly repetitive and overly complicated dungeons which force you into a not quite bird's eye view.

I made notes as I was playing through this game and it made this post much easier to write. But I noticed that as the game went on my notes got more critical and less glowing. As a huge Zelda fan, the game blew me away at first. But once I got used to that I started noticing more annoyances. I almost quit on the last boss since he does ridiculous damage. Once I did some reading I found that if I did a quick little side quest to upgrade my shield I could block almost all of his ridiculously damaging attacks. And I did a lot of reading for this one. I think I had the GameFaq's page open in a tab on my laptop for over a week while I played through this. After the 3rd dungeon or so, the paths you have to take to get through the dungeons just get ridiculous. There's a lot of backtracking and one way paths that if you miss, you'll have to do all over again. Also, saving and reloading became sort of an art since you knew you'd start at the beginning of the dungeon, which might just be closer to where you needed to go next.

So anyway, it's a fantastic rental. Depending on how big of a Zelda nut you are, your mileage will certainly vary. Enjoy!

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Experiments with gravity, edition 2


Super Mario Galaxy 2 was my latest little diversion. I had actually forgotten that it was "Super" until I went to get that link. Nintendo kind of gets stuck with that sort of thing since they've been making these things for over 20 years. Anyway, it was basically the same game as Mario Galaxy 1 (and that's not a bad thing) with a different way to navigate the overworld map.


Wow, if this posts strangely or twice it's because my dog just bumped my laptop which apparently caused me to click the Publish Post button...continuing on...

You notice that Yoshi appears on the front of the box with Mario, right? I was pretty excited about that. It seemed like a perfect thing to add to the second outing. But I ended up sort of hating most of the Yoshi levels. Fortunately he's only available in certain levels and won't stay with you even if you finish the level with him, much like NSMBWii. What irked me was that the mechanism for using his dino-tongue was pointing the Wii remote at the screen to pick where to hit. I wasn't too thrilled about this since it meant you had to hold the controller in such a way that you were always ready to point it at the TV. And maybe it's just my setup, but it seemed to take a half second or so before it recognized that's what you were trying to do. Which is sometimes too long when there are goombas trotting all around you.

This game almost completely dispenses with any kind of story. There wasn't much in the first, but this has completely given up. Bowser steals Princess, Mario must go on a quest to get her back. Yada yada yada, you know the drill. I actually sort of missed Rosalina. She's my go-to girl in Mario Kart Wii.

I mentioned the new overworld navigation. While it made things simpler to find and navigate, I kept getting to spots where I'd have to backtrack and collect more stars than I really wanted to before I could move on. You see, I'm basically a tourist in this game. I just want to see all the nifty worlds and gimmicks. When you force me to go back through places I've already been and look for new things, I get a bit stabby. The worst were when it seemed like the only unfound stars were the ? ones. Which meant you had to replay a certain track of a level until you found the hidden exit. Well, more than once I never found the hidden thing and ended the level with a worthless clear star. So I went through this game fairly quickly, but not as quickly as I would have liked.

In summary, lots of fun, worth playing, but I found a few minor annoyances. Wow, all my posts come to that same conclusion don't they? Good thing I don't get paid for this.

RDR

I won't spend too much time on this since it was already covered pretty well by Matt here and here. I also thought it ended strangely. The last series of missions when you're back at your house are a bit boring but I liked the tranquility of them. They seemed like a tutorial type of thing that should have been at the beginning of the game though, not the end.

I really wanted Uncle and John to shut up when I had to tame 3 horses in a row. In fact, the scenery was so great throughout the game, I could have used a lot less ambient dialogue like that. The developers seemed to abhor awkward silences when another character was around.

This was a game like the next one I'll be talking about, Mario Galaxy 2, where I went back and forth between thinking "OMG, this is teh greatest game ever!" to "is this over yet? I'm about to quit playing." I think the thing that made me feel like this in RDR is that I never had a good sense of how many more missions I needed to do to find the next former gang member dude and eventually finish the game. And I only found the true ending by accident. I just figured I'd go clean up some of The Stranger missions and that were closest to the farm. I didn't realize the wild goose chase I got sent on would take me to the "actual" ending.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Mario Galaxy 2 and Red Dead Redemption

I finished both of these in the last couple of days. I'll write more later. I sort if just wanted too see if I could post from my phone.