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Croik's gaming report!
The best part about working for Gamestop is without a doubt the game access >:3
I've been able to play a bunch of games lately that I wouldn't be able to otherwise over the last few weeks. And now I wanna talk about them!
The first is the Saw game (based on the Saw movies). My coworkers made fun of me but hey, as a fan of the movies how could I turn down a playthrough of the game when it's free? Anyway, the game was...passable. It had a genuinely creepy atmosphere and it kept me on my toes if only because there were about 20 bajillion shot guns set up in just about every doorway (a nice nod to the first film). I lost count of how many times I got my head blasted off running through a door, or disarming a trap only to arm it again accidentally and THEN get my head blasted off. The story started out okay but the ending (both of them) sucked. And the combat sucked too.
Despite that, I had fun. It was only a few hours and it had a few jumps. Though I am kind of pissed that they didn't reveal the identity of the Pighead and probably never will. I spent the whole game cheering for him thinking it was Hoffman, but it WASN'T. And the game did so poorly that they probably won't make another which means, no Pighead. Pfft.
Then there's BlazBlue. I was really interested to try it out because I used to be a huge Guilty Gear fan (I say "used to" because the change of direction in Overture annoys me, and I'm sick of the latest games, which are just XX with an extra character or too. Borrring). The style was great, just as I would have expected, and I still really like the sprite style 2D fighting. It was fun and even though I didn't have it long, I was able to get used to a few of the characters and their fighting styles.
The problem I had with it was I felt it was trying a little too hard without having enough to show for it. A lot of the characters felt like Guilty Gear clones that were tweaked only just enough, and the plot tried so hard to be complex and interesting that it didn't leave much room for getting to really *know* any of the characters so that they could hold their own. It's like they made Jin and Ragna knowing you would think of them as Ky and Sol and instantly accept that there's a deep rivalry between them, but even after 100%-ing Jin's story I didn't feel like I knew him any better, or understood the scope of his relationship to Ragna. The big spoiler about him came too late for it to be really meaningful and just leaves a lot of questions.
It's a fighting game, so any story can be considered more than most, but the game was determined to act like its story could hold its own--multiple paths and endings, a LOT of prose (most of it redundant)--and yet there isn't really a strong narrative path, just a promise of "it'll make sense later."
It may sound silly, but I think I would only buy it or look into the sequel if I thought the fandom would provide a lot of entertainment, but I'm not sure if the game has built up any kind of fandom momentum so far.
Muramasa I got to play when my brother came to visit for a few days, and I can safely say that if I owned a Wii, I would own this game already. As a huge fan of Odin Sphere I was really looking forward to Muramasa, and was DEVASTATED by it only appearing on one console. Still, I got to play through both stories and then yoinked my brother's save file to see all 6 endings. Some of them were better than others but none were horrible.
In all, Muramasa was great. The combat was faster and smoother than Odin Spere, and they really improved the item management. Forging was fun, though not as fun as growing sheep out of seeds, I have to admit. The graphics and music were gorrrgeous, the characters were for the most part likeable and interesting, the animations lovely.
The problem, I'm very sorry to say, was the presentation of the story. The localization was clearly a sub-par effort, with the bare minimum of translation and in the case of Kisuke some fairly serious character assassination. But even putting that aside, the story was not as complex and interesting as Odin Sphere's by far. Momohime's story was really one long fetch quest, even if her ending 3 was my favorite of the 6. There was a lot of telling instead of showing (Momohime's story literally starts with her waking up and saying, "I was walking with my husband, and then this man approached us and tried to stab him, so I leapt in the way and got hit instead, and now I'm here!" Why couldn't that have been a cutscene?). And having a cutscene followed by a few minutes to run around chatting with the boss you're about to fight really killed the suspense of most enemy encounters.
All in all the story felt like an afterthought. But they weren't very careful in some of the level design also (there is a LOT of backtracking) so I wonder if they didn't blow their entire budget and time on making it look awsome (and it does look awesome).
Despite that, I would buy it instantly if I had a Wii, and anyone who has a Wii should at least give it a try, because if nothing else it is a feast for your eyeballses.
And I would like to add that the scandalous artwork of Momohime being octopus-raped takes on a whole new meaning when you realize it's really Jinkuro...hehhehhehheh...
Oh god if only it could have been HD ;o;
Lastly, I beat Uncharted yesterday, and now I'm playing Uncharted 2. And holy shit, these games are BA NA NAS.
The first game has been out for a long time so I don't need to say again how it looks great and is fun and funny but is bogged down by incessant firefights and a somewhat silly plot. I enjoyed it and I really enjoyed Drake himself (just like you said I would![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scarbie :D). Though as a few reviews pointed out it is a little bizarre that such a dorky "everyman" can slaughter a whole army of mercenaries without too much trouble and not be bothered by it. But I think I like him for that, too.
I'm interested to see who they cast for the movie ;D
As for Uncharted 2, fuck it's amazing. Through the entire first sequence I couldn't help muttering "Oh shit! Oh Jesus!" until TK started making fun of me :<. They promised it would be "like an action movie" and they weren't kidding. I haven't sworn at a game so much in a long time (but in a good "I can't believe this FUCK SHIT IT'S A HELICOPTER AUGH GODDMAN EEEEE" kind of way. Mostly. I've had quite a few "FUCK I DIED AGAIN" swearing moments too. Christ there are a lot of mercenaries in Nepal).
The best part of the games is really the writing/acting. Even if the overall plot of "bad guy wants treasure and we're gonna beat him to it!" isn't terrribly original, the characters are really well written, and the amount of dialogue they have even when you're just running around really brings them to life. I love games when you have a partner with you that talks back while you're in the middle of the game, and it makes me wish that MGS4 and RE5 did it as much as U2 does.
Especially when it's hilarious like MARCO - POLO omg I almost died.
In fact, U2 does a lot that I wish MGS4 had done, especially in terms of integrating the gameplay better with the plot. MGS4 had a lot of really great set pieces, but there were a lot of cutscenes where there *could* have been more player interaction and wasn't. Unlike with Kojima's epic, U2 never forgets that it's first and foremost a video game, and you blend from controlling to not controlling so smoothly I've died once or twice just because I wasn't sure where the transition was, lol
I'd feel guity about buying it now because I really can't afford it, but maybe if I get some extra Xmas money and trade in a few games on top of my employee discount... Gah I really want to see it on my parents' 1080 TV when we visit them for the holidays...!!
Oh and I haven't finished the game yet so NO SPOILERS.
And that's it! But just in case it sounds like I've done nothing but game for the last four weeks, let me tell you my friend got me a temp job this week where I literally did nothing but photocopy documents for 9 HOURS STRAIGHT on Tuesday. That's with one bathroom break and one for snacks. I don't know how the copy machine didn't explode, but she and I are friends now (I named her "Alice"). My friend--the human one--is now trying to convince her boss that I should be hired as a part time assistant on a more permanent basis, which would be cool so long as there's no more photocopying. Wish me luck~
(btw I didn't *have* to stay for 9 hours straight, that was a result of my own stubbornness, so the lady's not a slavedriver or anything).
Long story short, that's why I haven't updated any of my fics lately lol
I've been able to play a bunch of games lately that I wouldn't be able to otherwise over the last few weeks. And now I wanna talk about them!
The first is the Saw game (based on the Saw movies). My coworkers made fun of me but hey, as a fan of the movies how could I turn down a playthrough of the game when it's free? Anyway, the game was...passable. It had a genuinely creepy atmosphere and it kept me on my toes if only because there were about 20 bajillion shot guns set up in just about every doorway (a nice nod to the first film). I lost count of how many times I got my head blasted off running through a door, or disarming a trap only to arm it again accidentally and THEN get my head blasted off. The story started out okay but the ending (both of them) sucked. And the combat sucked too.
Despite that, I had fun. It was only a few hours and it had a few jumps. Though I am kind of pissed that they didn't reveal the identity of the Pighead and probably never will. I spent the whole game cheering for him thinking it was Hoffman, but it WASN'T. And the game did so poorly that they probably won't make another which means, no Pighead. Pfft.
Then there's BlazBlue. I was really interested to try it out because I used to be a huge Guilty Gear fan (I say "used to" because the change of direction in Overture annoys me, and I'm sick of the latest games, which are just XX with an extra character or too. Borrring). The style was great, just as I would have expected, and I still really like the sprite style 2D fighting. It was fun and even though I didn't have it long, I was able to get used to a few of the characters and their fighting styles.
The problem I had with it was I felt it was trying a little too hard without having enough to show for it. A lot of the characters felt like Guilty Gear clones that were tweaked only just enough, and the plot tried so hard to be complex and interesting that it didn't leave much room for getting to really *know* any of the characters so that they could hold their own. It's like they made Jin and Ragna knowing you would think of them as Ky and Sol and instantly accept that there's a deep rivalry between them, but even after 100%-ing Jin's story I didn't feel like I knew him any better, or understood the scope of his relationship to Ragna. The big spoiler about him came too late for it to be really meaningful and just leaves a lot of questions.
It's a fighting game, so any story can be considered more than most, but the game was determined to act like its story could hold its own--multiple paths and endings, a LOT of prose (most of it redundant)--and yet there isn't really a strong narrative path, just a promise of "it'll make sense later."
It may sound silly, but I think I would only buy it or look into the sequel if I thought the fandom would provide a lot of entertainment, but I'm not sure if the game has built up any kind of fandom momentum so far.
Muramasa I got to play when my brother came to visit for a few days, and I can safely say that if I owned a Wii, I would own this game already. As a huge fan of Odin Sphere I was really looking forward to Muramasa, and was DEVASTATED by it only appearing on one console. Still, I got to play through both stories and then yoinked my brother's save file to see all 6 endings. Some of them were better than others but none were horrible.
In all, Muramasa was great. The combat was faster and smoother than Odin Spere, and they really improved the item management. Forging was fun, though not as fun as growing sheep out of seeds, I have to admit. The graphics and music were gorrrgeous, the characters were for the most part likeable and interesting, the animations lovely.
The problem, I'm very sorry to say, was the presentation of the story. The localization was clearly a sub-par effort, with the bare minimum of translation and in the case of Kisuke some fairly serious character assassination. But even putting that aside, the story was not as complex and interesting as Odin Sphere's by far. Momohime's story was really one long fetch quest, even if her ending 3 was my favorite of the 6. There was a lot of telling instead of showing (Momohime's story literally starts with her waking up and saying, "I was walking with my husband, and then this man approached us and tried to stab him, so I leapt in the way and got hit instead, and now I'm here!" Why couldn't that have been a cutscene?). And having a cutscene followed by a few minutes to run around chatting with the boss you're about to fight really killed the suspense of most enemy encounters.
All in all the story felt like an afterthought. But they weren't very careful in some of the level design also (there is a LOT of backtracking) so I wonder if they didn't blow their entire budget and time on making it look awsome (and it does look awesome).
Despite that, I would buy it instantly if I had a Wii, and anyone who has a Wii should at least give it a try, because if nothing else it is a feast for your eyeballses.
And I would like to add that the scandalous artwork of Momohime being octopus-raped takes on a whole new meaning when you realize it's really Jinkuro...hehhehhehheh...
Oh god if only it could have been HD ;o;
Lastly, I beat Uncharted yesterday, and now I'm playing Uncharted 2. And holy shit, these games are BA NA NAS.
The first game has been out for a long time so I don't need to say again how it looks great and is fun and funny but is bogged down by incessant firefights and a somewhat silly plot. I enjoyed it and I really enjoyed Drake himself (just like you said I would
scarbie :D). Though as a few reviews pointed out it is a little bizarre that such a dorky "everyman" can slaughter a whole army of mercenaries without too much trouble and not be bothered by it. But I think I like him for that, too.I'm interested to see who they cast for the movie ;D
As for Uncharted 2, fuck it's amazing. Through the entire first sequence I couldn't help muttering "Oh shit! Oh Jesus!" until TK started making fun of me :<. They promised it would be "like an action movie" and they weren't kidding. I haven't sworn at a game so much in a long time (but in a good "I can't believe this FUCK SHIT IT'S A HELICOPTER AUGH GODDMAN EEEEE" kind of way. Mostly. I've had quite a few "FUCK I DIED AGAIN" swearing moments too. Christ there are a lot of mercenaries in Nepal).
The best part of the games is really the writing/acting. Even if the overall plot of "bad guy wants treasure and we're gonna beat him to it!" isn't terrribly original, the characters are really well written, and the amount of dialogue they have even when you're just running around really brings them to life. I love games when you have a partner with you that talks back while you're in the middle of the game, and it makes me wish that MGS4 and RE5 did it as much as U2 does.
Especially when it's hilarious like MARCO - POLO omg I almost died.
In fact, U2 does a lot that I wish MGS4 had done, especially in terms of integrating the gameplay better with the plot. MGS4 had a lot of really great set pieces, but there were a lot of cutscenes where there *could* have been more player interaction and wasn't. Unlike with Kojima's epic, U2 never forgets that it's first and foremost a video game, and you blend from controlling to not controlling so smoothly I've died once or twice just because I wasn't sure where the transition was, lol
I'd feel guity about buying it now because I really can't afford it, but maybe if I get some extra Xmas money and trade in a few games on top of my employee discount... Gah I really want to see it on my parents' 1080 TV when we visit them for the holidays...!!
Oh and I haven't finished the game yet so NO SPOILERS.
And that's it! But just in case it sounds like I've done nothing but game for the last four weeks, let me tell you my friend got me a temp job this week where I literally did nothing but photocopy documents for 9 HOURS STRAIGHT on Tuesday. That's with one bathroom break and one for snacks. I don't know how the copy machine didn't explode, but she and I are friends now (I named her "Alice"). My friend--the human one--is now trying to convince her boss that I should be hired as a part time assistant on a more permanent basis, which would be cool so long as there's no more photocopying. Wish me luck~
(btw I didn't *have* to stay for 9 hours straight, that was a result of my own stubbornness, so the lady's not a slavedriver or anything).
Long story short, that's why I haven't updated any of my fics lately lol