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!

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.

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.

Rated M for...Massive amounts of blood

God of War 3 seems like something you sort of have to play if you own a PS3. I had played both of the previous games on my first Sony system a few years back. The series has been so well done that it's sort of spawned a genre of God of War clones. So how would GoW3 hold up compared to all of the imitators? Pretty well, I'd say.

Minor spoiler paragraph:
I don't remember the first two being so much like this, but in GoW3 Kratos kills EVERYONE he meets except for the lady he gets it on with. Even people that help him end up dead. Also the ending was a bit strange, but seemed like a pretty good cap on the trilogy.

If these next sections are a bit disjointed, it's because it's pulled together from the few sentences I jotted down during the 8 or so hours while I played through this over a couple of weeks. The first annoyance that I ran into was that New Game was the top option in the main menu, even after I had a save file. I mention this since it meant I had to interact with the menus more than I wanted to continue my game. Once I got going I had to start over shortly after since the difficulty was a bit weird. I picked the normal difficulty thinking I could handle it, and I'm sure I could have, but it was just frustrating dying without really knowing why if I wasn't blocking or avoiding hits all the time. This is the type of game I just want to sit back and enjoy being a badass without really thinking too much about strategy.

I ran into a few very video-gamey things that kind of amused me. More than once I was on an elevator of some kind where an endless stream of dudes to kill dropped down from the sky until the elevator got to the top. I had a heck of a time with the double jump mechanic. It took me falling into a pit about 8 times before I got it right (hint, it's jump, jump--HOLD).

But the strangest video-gamey moment was what I like to call Music Box Hero. To open up some passageway you have to push buttons in time with symbols that scroll across the screen. The symbols are the 4 iconic PS3 buttons. Nothing too weird there, but the controls that Kratos sees in the world are also the 4 PS3 buttons. Odd.

A big improvement from the previous games are the quick time sequences. If you have to press the top of the four PS3 buttons, it's at the top of the screen. The bottom button is on the bottom, and so on. So you can actually focus on the action that's being presented for you and the interactions are secondary. This made the great looking cutscenes much easier to follow.

So it was an enjoyable ride with great graphics. The environments were well varied and you certainly feel like a badass as you dispatch hundreds and hundreds of dudes in a shower of blood.