Sunday, May 13, 2012

Play Delayed - Episode 3 - Part 2


The night I posted the last blog I was playing Resident Evil 5 on PS3, but things seemed to be a lot more difficult... The controls were a bit difficult but the biggest stand out thing was that the enemies were taking a lot longer to kill, soaking up more of my precious bullets. Then I finished that level (one of the earlier levels) and saw that the difficulty was turned up to veteran! What was I thinking when I set that?! As far as I can see, the majini are far more resistant to pain and Sheva is still useless! I think I'm going to have to mine for currency to buy more weapons in between levels - this is not ging to be easy...

My return to Resident Evil 5 is only because the 'gold edition' was going quite cheap one day and I have never played the Lost in nightmares DLC. There is a lot to unlock in this game, figurines, trophies, extra characters and now the Lost in nightmares level. On Xbox 360 I played the mercenaries mode online with a friend occasionally and got great enjoyment out of it but as a 'horde' mode it is not quite as good as the original. I shall continue to chip away at this until it is complete!

As I have mentioned before, arcade racers with an emphasis on massive destruction are my new flavor of the month, Split second being the game that I have been particularly focused on. When I played this side by side with Blur straight out of the box, Blur was most definitely the stronger game, but having played 3 episodes of the Split Second campaign (season mode) I have seen some very cool shit. My favorite so far being the mode where the big rig dropping barrels that explode on the track. The race takes place on the storm drain and it is mad fun! The air strike mode is also pretty cool but I am having trouble beating the developer high score in the airplane grave yard. I keep coming second and usually about 2.5 seconds short of the high score. It's a pain and I have come close to looking it up but I will have another few trys before I decide it's time to move on.

Tekken 6, scenario mode, I have put a fair amount of time in to this, recently going through the different stages of the story. Much like my time with this on Xbox 360 almost 2 years ago, this game is trophy full, if you can power through it. There is I think, a stage for each of on the roster, the characters themselves becoming the stage boss and once defeated, said character becomes selectable for the rest of the scenario mode going forward. In true arcade mode fighter fashion, you have temporary weapons, lead pipes, miniguns and flame throwers all featuring. You have power ups that temporarily grant you special abilities when you attack and you eat food, well, chicken and eggs to recover health. Actually, since the inclusion of the trophy/achievement system attached to the scenario mode, I have only now felt compelled to play it. I remember in previous tekkens not actually bothering to with the tekken force mode. The arcade and versus modes are solid enough (as always) but some characters forgot some of their moves going in to the new game (perhaps to learn new ones...), for me, Hwoarang only going through the first 2 stages of 'hunting hawk' is stand out, but his stance changing into different kicks for juggling are still devastating in the right hands... I love the tekken games and prefer them over the Capcom beat em ups, Tekken Hybrid I managed to pick up over my Christmas holidays off work. I have played a good bit of it but not as much as Tekken 6. I was bored a few days ago and played the bowling just for the strike trophy but overall I had never really played much of Tekken Tag Tournament and have to figure out how things work. The movie attached to the blue ray disc is pretty cool too. Tekken : Blood Vengeance. Just think 'extra-long Tekken cut scene and you are on the right track. The story follows Ling Xaoiyu and Anna Bosconovich who are both taking their orders from sibling rivals from Anna and Nina Williams to dig out information on a transfer student who just left Mishima Polytechnic High School, so the story is mostly their awkward interactions together and with the character they are both targeting, eventually leading to them fighting. Panda provides the comic relief and the battles are generally very cool! Not to spoil anything for anyone but the Mishima family reunion is very fucking cool. Even if you don't get the Tekken Hybrid disc, check out this movie as it is out now on a few other formats as well and is for the most part worth watching!

I gave a quick mention to Bulletstorm in the last blog. I am, at time of writing now finished the main story mode. The game has some cool stuff going on, for example in Chapter 6 (I think it was Chapter 6), the battle with the giant Godzilla like creature which you must take down from a helicopter. This battle, though rather short, is still really cool and one of the high points of the game for me - even if the camera does go all over the place! Overall, the gameplay never really strays from its original formula and I am ultimately glad that it’s all over for me and now I can move on to something else I have on the go. To be honest, Bulletstorm is nothing special and as much as some industry people working on the game say that it's not like Gears of War - it is, maybe not too much in gameplay but definitely in design, specifically character and weapon design. But can you blame them? They have a look that people are familiar with and this game, when released, had to have been to tie fans over until Gears 3 came out.

In its defense, some of the skill shots did provide me with cheap laughs and I did like the way the game rewarded you for participating in the quick time events but for the most part I was just slugging through the levels, patiently waiting for it to end and cursing the script and its one liners. Towards the end the characters, who throughout the game were at each other’s throats, become rather civil and complimenting of each other’s work on the battlefield, giving positive feedback for rather good shooting, which pissed me off very quickly because about 20 minutes before that they were threatening to "kill each other's dicks off" or something ridiculous like that...
A friend asked me how I was getting on with the game a few weeks ago, He having already played it and really enjoying it. I explained to him how much I was not impressed with it and its script and he went and accused me of not having a sense of humor... This weekend just gone he brought it up again and suggested that I don't play the game Shadows of the Damned, different strokes for different folks I guess..?

I have been dabbling in a game called Bodycount as well recently on Xbox 360. This game was not very well received in the enthusiast's press when it was released, receiving low scores right across the board (or at least where I read). It is supposedly the spiritual sequel to the popular FPS game Black from the last generation of consoles and much like Bulletstorm its rewards skillful marksmanship and is also repetitive and samey, but I am having a lot of fun with this. The game plays quite well so far, I have not encountered much in the way of technical difficulties, but I will say that there is some harsh enough check pointing and I have not seen any other weapons other than the machine gun I started the game with and the pistol that also has been with me since that beginning. I will have to look in to this and see if there are a variety of weapons; the start menu definitely suggests that there is. I am doing a mission in West Africa and I have check pointed just before a general runs off and you have to hunt him down and eliminate him, I have tried (and died) about 5 times and have started to set traps along the enemy ai's path to help me out when I am trying to make up the distance between myself and the general. From the beginning it seems like a massive achievement fest, I believe I have earned around 200g for less than 3 hours of play, so if that is what you are in to and you see this game cheap - there you go! I am enjoying this but I am not devoting heavy game time to it, I am more jumping in and out of it every few days just to keep the gameplay fresh in my head. I'm sure this will feature in this blog again soon.

It feels to me like Final Fantasy VIII will never leave this blog. It pops up here and there as I have been playing it almost every day since last summer for at least an hour a day while I am on my travels. I got as far as the doors of Ultimecia's castle just before the Christmas break and then began to grind up a bit, but then realized that I had not yet acquired Odin and the Giant Cactaur. I read in the guide that Diablos is rather handy to have on your side when you are trying to take these guys down but later learned that I missed my opportunity to get this GF as you get the magic lamp on disc one, shit! Diablos is useful in the later stages of the game for cutting down the larger, more stronger enemies and his 'mug' command is the equivalent of the previous game's 'steal' materia. So with this all in mind I restarted the game after another 70 hours of my life spent on it and acquired the magic lamp after a couple of hours or so of playing. Shortly after getting it, I went to the world map, saved and then initiated the Diablos battle. If I remember correctly it was around 6:30am in the morning and I was only my way to work when I had my first attempt, which was not successful but after another attempt or 2 I finally got him. Props go out to Selphi and her 'slot' limit break for saving me over and over as Zell kept on dying and after so many times reviving him I let him sleep. Every time my health went too low, I would get my limit breaks, Squall attacking repeatedly and Selphie using full cure on everyone left and I just kept this going until the demon passed out and joined me. So I have just finished the part at the Timber Tv station where Seiner joins the Sorceress and have gone in to another Laguna sequence - we are running around a mine in Ester, cutting down the local armed forces as I desperately try to remember where the exit is and at the same time not forget anything! This is now the second time I have reached disc 4 only to return to the start of the game again. It's going to be another long road ahead of me but hopefully this will be the last time I have to go through the entire game again. I have other games to play!!!

After I started playing FF8 again from the beginning I naturally got a bit fed up with it. I had, a few days before this gone a bit mad with the spending on the PSN and ended up buying the entire Persona collection for my PSP. I knew it was an RPG series, but I knew little else about it... So, out of curiosity I started the first game and once the basic story was laid down, the tutorial passed and the proper gameplay started I was pleasantly surprised! First thing I noticed was that all the exploration is done in first person. This is a bit weird, but in a good way! I have never seen this before, but I thought it was a nice touch! What I wanted to see the most though, this aside was what sets this apart from Final Fantasy VIII and other JRPG's in general. So the first thing that stood out at me was the dungeon exploration - it's all done in first person view, this took me a little while to get used to but I want to really get to know this series. The battle options are a bit different to Final Fantasy games too - in addition to the usual attack, magic, item option, this game also has negotiate and shoot. Characters can attack with their equipped weapon, but they also have a gun equipped, they can summon a "persona" through which they can use magic attacks. The negotiate command took me a while to get used to, there is a diamond shaped meter that appears when you select this and depending on what speech options you choose, you can either scare, piss off and or amuse the demons and this can cause difference effects on the battle, for example, if you scare a demon then they will have a status put against them, if a demon spooks you because you made it angry, then you will have a status effect against you, other things that happen include acquiring spell cards, money and even causing enemies to run away... Making personas from the spell cards is an important part of the game it seems, they unlock new magical and summon related attacks but at the moment my characters are too low in level to equip some of the newer persona I have created, apparently your character can go insane if they use a persona that is too powerful but I'm not sure if the game will ever let you go down this path... Speaking of paths, the dungeons (or different areas off the world map) get longer and more difficult to navigate as time goes on, I have started to encounter traps now which add to the difficultly. The floors with directional arrows and dead ends can really throw you off and I am finding that health items and other restorative items get used up very quickly when I am going through the longer dungeons. At time of writing I am in a mall dungeon and the owner of the mall won't let me and my team escape, I have descended 10 levels below the surface and I am a little bit lost... Perhaps I should not have gone in their just yet... One thing I found quite pleasing in the game design was the battle screen, I have found this easier to navigate than the Final Fantasy VIII battle screen - I'll explain why: When I have activated a summon in FF8 while the animation is going on or just in generally switching between characters I want to attack or heal, sometimes it is not that clear who the cursor is on and a few times I have healed or attacked the wrong character, in person if you are highlighting a character, there is a drawing of each character at the bottom of the screen that highlights yellow when the character is selected and when you are attacking an enemy, they will highlight on the grid, making it easier to navigate and plan attacks. The story it ‘self I’m not too big on and a lot of the cut scenes are of the butterfly guy, but with a different voice over, I am more interested in the gameplay. I will be switching between this and FF8 taking the odd break and going in to some short games, until both are finally completed.

Back to my dabbling... I powered up the Wii recently to test out a few games I picked up. All ambitious, I had a big cd wallet case full of Wii games but actually only managed to try out 2(vintage me...). The first is a game called MadWorld. MadWorld has a very distinct art style and reminds of the old joke: "what’s black and white and red all over?", well this game is black and white eventually turning red all over due to the comic book violence that you instigate in order to rack up points to move on to the next area. So what you have is a comic book, ultraviolent, score attack game with a main character whose voice sounds a lot like solid snake from Metal Gear Solid games (I have not yet looked up the cast of the game) but I'm hoping it is David Hayter! The game play reminded me a lot of Bulletstorm, you are using the enviroment to kill all the enemies and trying to rack up combos to increase your score and gain access to the next stage, this is achieved by impaling scumbags with road signs, throwing them in to burning barrels and even throwing them at a giant fan to slice them all up... I have to date only played the tutorial and so far it looks like a decent game, but I am hoping that there is a bit of variety in the enemies and traps, as well as the kills, because if not it will just feel like another Bulletstorm and the only beneficial thing I will take from it is the wrist exercise!

The other Wii game I got to play was called Muramasa:The Demon Blade. I was actually wanting to get this for a long time, I saw it out on PS2 in the game stores as well but it was always very overpriced for what it is and that format, but I managed to get the Wii version at a price that agreed with my wallet! This one is a little different to Mad World in the sense that it is a side scrolling fighter, not unlike a lot of XBLA and PSN downloadable titles that I saw come out last year. What it has in common with Mad World however is that it also has its own very distinct art style, a more colorful and prettier look. From what I played of the tutorial the gameplay is pretty good, I picked the female fighter for the tutorial but I will return to it soon...

Away from the Wii now, another game I got to try out recently was Total War: Shogun 2. It’s an RTS game from a long line of games in the Total war series. The first thing I will say is that there is that there is a lot of information to take in with this game. I have only completed 2/3's of the tutorial and the notes I was taking are almost as many pages as this blog... I am not used to RTS games and this one is as Real Time Strategy as it gets. It will take me a long time to get used to this and I know that it will be a difficult learning curve along the way. It is genuinely interesting though and I am looking forward to seeing what this game has to offer.

Myself and Player 2 have also been gaming a bit on our Old School Sunday sessions. We have mostly been playing beat me ups and competitive arcade racers. Games like Blur, Slit Second, Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament HD. To break away from the norm that I have mentioned in this segment over and over, we tried out some new games called Flatout: Ultimate Carnage and Full Auto. Full Auto reminds me a lot of Crazy Taxi, a game I have only had a few minutes with in my life, but take that and attach guns to the cars, take away the time attack game play and you have a destructive racing game! Today, the game looks quite dated but still an enjoyable looking title, I think we'll have fun with this one.

There was one Old School Sunday session where Player 2 came over but did not get up to much gameplay himself, electing to instead read all the newspapers I got that day, I was already playing the first Just Cause game when he came over and continued on with that. I just had too, Just Cause 2 is one of the best games that I played all last year and I wanted to see its roots. I was aware going in to it that it had technical issues, these are well documented in the video gaming press and so I loaded the disc in to the disc tray. The first thing I noticed was the way Rico walks and runs, it’s so funny, it’s like he has massive problems with his ass, which led to myself and player 2 jokingly calling him Rico "broken ass" Rodriguez. The second thing I noticed is that out of the box Rico does not have the grappling hook. I did eventually get it but it is nothing compared to the grappling hook in the second game. I guess I am only playing this just to get the back story but it looks like it’s going to be a long haul - hopefully it does not drag out too much and kill my love of the series...

As I mentioned (I think) before, recently I have been watching a lot of Vin Diesel movies between episodes 2 and 3 of this blog. I have watched the whole Fast and Furious series (except the third one - Tokyo Drift), Babylon AD and A Man Apart. The Fast and the Furious Series I really enjoyed, but the last one I only got to see recently but for the most part was very exciting to watch, some of the driving scenes in it are very exciting and the fight scene between Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson and Vin Diesel was really good! I was hoping they would fight and I was not disappointed! Tokyo Drift was the low point in the series for me, I got a little bit silly at times, so silly in face that I had to switch it off quite early on, it was at the point in the film when the American kid had to go in to the sauna to collect money because he wrecked a guy's car trying to drift style drive... It was cringe worthily bad and I had to turn it off...

Just before posting this blog (and even completely finishing the writing of it) I managed to finish Bulletstorm. What I noticed with it, but never really realized until the end was that you get rewarded for participating in the quick time events, you earn skill points for your responsiveness when they pop up, you can earn up to 500 skill points per QTE and this can be exchanged for ammo and upgrades, you will get an on screen prompt to hit the L1 button and if you hold for long enough - the points add up. There did not seem to be a penalty for not activating them but I needed the points so I tried my best with all of them! As expected, they left room for a sequel, which I am not sure I feel totally compelled to play, how could they remix that gameplay and make it feel fresh? After the credits rolled (which I ended up skipping), I tried out the echoes mode, you are just going through maps from the story, killing enemies as they are generated and doing it against the clock. I am not sure if I will return to this as I have more games on the go that I want to finish...

So that’s what I have been playing. I think Army of Two: The 40th day was the first game that I finished this year, Bulletstorm being the second. I still have to finish the likes of Dark Sector, Bodycount, El Shaddai and Resident Evil 5. Dark Sector I am a good amount through the story and this looks likely to be the next game that I finish but I might have a bit of trouble readjusting to the controls if I get back in to it, there was a lot going on this game. I have also dabbled in Sonic Generations on PS3. I really liked that game, what I had played of it anyway. I have yet to play a lot of the 2d levels in 3d but the first level in £d was amazing to look at and I look forward to fully exploring all the possibilities that this game has to offer. It is a fantastic game all round but I missed all of the 3d sonic games having only played the megadrive Sonic games in my time. I made a decision when I was very young, after playing Crash Bandicoot to not play platforming games again and went about this for the next 12-13 years without touching them and being strongly against them. But recently, well, since the first LittleBigPlanet game, I have relaxed this policy a bit a little and have tried a few of recent platformers out. I picked up the Dreamcast Collection on Xbox 360 for cheap recently and dove straight in to Sonic Adventure a little bit when I got the disc home. As I said - I missed all of these games, including the Dreamcast titles and with my Dreamcast having never worked, this seemed like the quickest way to play this, but I have yet to try out the other games on the disc, but the fishing game, I'm not sure if I will ever devote much time to this, I don't even like fishing for real... The reason I stopped playing platformers was because of the obviously repetitive nature of this genre, in particular, games like Crash Bandicoot, I understand that all games are repetitive in some way but when you play the first 3 levels of a game and then you hit level 4 and it looks like the first level, but with a slight variation on the enemies, I was not prepared back then to devote money to this, these games pissed me off and games like the Final Fantasy series and Metal Gear seemed much more appealing to me at the time (and still today!). Perhaps, the fact that trophies and achievements are present in these game make up for the repetitiveness and monotony of the platforming genre today, but there’s only so much of them I can take and I need more that a different art style of a new double jump mechanic to drag me in to one of these games, I still prefer to play for the sake of gameplay - rather than for the sake of trophies! But that is another argument for another day...

It looks like I'm starting to ramble on now; I guess for the next blog, the focus will be on hopefully trying to finish off a few of the games that are lying beside me only half finished. It would be nice to start a few games on a clean sheet and not have to think of others that are lying uncompleted... I will try and add a few more PC, Wii and 3DS games in to the mix to spice things up a bit and artwork as well, I have really been meaning to start including some fan art to this blog to break up the words a bit.. I have installed some new games on my pc - stuff like Super Meat Boy, Greed Corp, Civilization 4 and in the not too distant future I would like to do a feature on the Free to Play MMO scene, I had a lot of these installed before Christmas but a nasty virus forced me to do a full reboot from which I am still getting everything back to the way it was... not cool! Also, I may have mentioned the "Cheap Game Challenge"! I am hoping to get this up and running soon too, I have the games ready to go; I just need to get my shit together and play them! Most of the games featured in this will be arcadey and score based but very fun and very cheap as well! So, once again - thank you for readying and look out for the next blog!


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