Beaten: The Witcher Enhanced Edition

Beaten

The Witcher Enhanced Edition

System: Steam
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat normal difficulty.

This may be an oddity considering my previous posts where I mostly nitpick games, but I truly have nothing negative to say about this game. It is a well balanced game, the story itself is well done gothic horror, and the only issues I had were more with my poor PC than the game itself (crashes, herky graphics, etc).

I can unabashedly recommend this game, mostly due to the fact that it feels like an old school PC RPG, difficult but not overtly so, with a well crafted story and a well balanced combat system. I was playing on normal mode, so the enhancements that make up most of the back end of your character creation were helpful depending on what you focused on, but not entirely necessary. I drank a few boosting potions and used weapon boosts before the last fight, and having done nearly all the quests, I curb-stomped the final boss(es). Through most of the game though, one boost or so is enough to get you through difficult fights, with none really required for standard groups of enemies. The chapters do have a sort of progression, though its hard to tell until you walk to do a quest and get slaughtered, but essentially there are a set of easier quests, and harder ones, and you should do them in a big chunk of each to get through. The game is set up so that if you skipped some stuff in an earlier chapter, you aren't screwed, you just have to focus more on the easy quests for the next chapter first. There never felt like there was any object that if I missed it I was screwed later on, it just made it easier...which is perfect, though I still felt I had to do -everything-.

The only downside of the action combat system is there really isn't much variety or strategy to the actual combat. Occasionally you might have to switch stances or swords mid fight, but usually you can go wading in. Victory is more determined by your prepwork than any actual skill in the combat, though if you constantly screw up timed clicking you might have issues. I can gather hard mode puts even more emphasis on prep, given the descriptor even states 'You will have to use alchemy to survive'. Should be an interesting challenge when I get around to it, but that won't be anytime soon. Long PC RPGs take it out of me.

Post-Move Quick Fixes

So yeah, moving really puts a kink in your gaming schedule. It's also really hard to play enough of one game to come up with a full post for any one in particular. To get back in the habit, here's some quick fixes for what I've been playing:

 

Man, I really want to like this game, mostly because of its status as a classic, but its getting really hard to keep playing this and even finish it with how bad its getting at times. I've never had to check a FAQ for an FPS game before, but I have to do it near constantly with this one. One moment, you're supposed to avoid a mined area, and the next a guy with a shotgun near one means 'clear it out'. There is almost no intuitive 'you should go here next' going on, and choosing wrong could either waste supplies (some of which you -need- to keep going), or get you some more depending on your luck. The movement is still slippery, and yet at the same time I keep getting caught up in corners. To top it all off, the game itself uses a weird memory load procedure, and thus my playtime is entirely limited to when it starts to get jerky, then I have to either quit out and reload, or just stop for the night. The bugs are really getting bad, I'm at a point where you need to cross in front of a sniper, so obviously you're supposed to toss a grenade up into his nest (his netting for some reason is bullet proof). Except A) Gordon tosses like a girl and its near impossible to get any distance on the grenades, and B) A total of 8 grenades went in, didn't explode due to some bug. This is about where I stopped.

This is almost entirely a guilty pleasure now, considering how long I have to get to 'complete' status and how random any progression is. Still very fun and challenging though. Trying to get through the challenge mode so I can have some more options in the main game. As with all rogue-likes though, I feel bad playing them because it is never definite progress. Means the game is truly fun though.

I actually beat this game a long time ago, but 'beaten' for it is only beating the Elite 4 the first time, and there's so much more to do. Over the past two weeks, I basically beat all the Kanto Gym Leaders, beat Red (the hardest match in the game), and re-challenged the Elite 4. That leaves re-challenging the gym leaders, which is a pain due to them only being available to get their numbers at a certain time...then you can only challenge them again at another time. I may just sit for an evening and screw around with the DS clock so I can finish it. Other than that, need to snag all the legendaries and I can call this complete.

To this games credit, its a near perfect mobile game experience. You can pick it up, complete one or two missions, save, put it back down, and when you next pick it back up you really don't have to remember where you were. I'll do a larger one on this one later because there's far more to cover, but essentially they improved on everything from the first game, removed a lot of the annoyances, and made the class system more intriguing (and way less broken). Still some small little quibbles, but I've been enjoying it. Mostly doing sidequests, I -think- I'm almost finished with the story, based on the quest list.

I actually try not to mention this one, and I'm kinda avoiding doing a full review since so much has already been said and its constantly changing still. I do have to say though, I love this game. There are minor quibbles, but I do truly enjoy booting it up, killing some monsters, having shinies drop (even if they end up not being upgrades), then logging out without any requirements to log back in. I put it down for a month or two, picked it back up recently, and had no problems swinging back in. I think its going to be a 'pick up at patch to see whats new' for most people though.

Daily Review: inFAMOUS

Daily Review

inFAMOUS

System: PS3 (PSN Download)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Almost done with the Warrens

I am very mixed on this game so far. So many elements of it to me are rather fun, but it is very telling when you stop playing a game due to frustration rather than at natural stopping points.

Guess I should start with the good first, so I don't forget to mention them. So far, the game feels very realistic, and does a good job of pushing you to play smart rather than just rushing in to enemies. Your character is very susceptible to bullets despite being a superhero, and the game reminds you of this. The powers you get are rather varied, though to be fair are mostly just different methods of 'electrical death', and I do find myself using the new powers to compliment the old, but the game makes sure to give you situations where you don't forget them (in example, enemies behind fences or guardrails where its a good idea to use that new electrical rocket attack). The parkour aspect is different, and while it takes you a while to get anywhere unless you ride the trains (and get motion sick), it does let you naturally discover the little items the game wants you to collect, and makes the city feel more realized than just something you skim past.

However, all that said, the parkour aspect itself is the most frustrating aspect of the game. Your character will cling to -everything-, which is good at some points, but you can never anticipate what he will cling to. Do the same jump twice, and you'll stick to different parts of the building for no apparent reason. Ostensibly you can see the 'lines' where you can grab and the 'knobs' where you can hold on, but the graphic style is so gritty that often times you start scaling to get to a spot, and wonder why you can stick to this ledge, but not this other thing that looks like a ledge. In addition, the thing will just glitch out on occasion, and while you're under fire, your character will dance around for a bit like he's trying to find a place to stand...on a perfectly level roof. This does seem more prevalent on angles and slopes, but it really detracts from the game.

The entire reason I quit today was due to a sidequest where you race rooftop to rooftop, connecting uplinks on them. So far, these have been difficult, but fair, you find the right path and rush, barely finishing after a few tries. This one was complete and utter bullshit though. The first two are seperated by wires you glide on, all good. The third one for some reason is on the other side of a ladder and a jagged outcrop of building, which requires about five jumps to get him to stop sticking to everything and just touch it. The one after that is across a gap too far to jump, so you end up clinging to the building and taking forever to scale up. The one after -that- is the same deal...and there were at least two more after it. Most of these tend to be one or two links, three at the most. I do get the feeling I'm supposed to have the 'flying' power before I do this, but there's no indication in game of that, and I make a habit to complete everything as soon as possible.

The other gripes are more in general. I hate silly polar alignment choices, in this game you're either a serial killer or a true hero, nowhere in between if you want to get the good powers and the trophies for being good and evil. The open world aspect has been fun in other games, but beyond little blue shards and quests that are marked on your map, the world itself is devoid of -anything- to do. All the sidequests are variations on the same subset of missions, and the combat while realistic, gets very frustrating. The game is only difficult because of the wonky controls, the normal difficulty is offset by very forgiving waypoints, so forgiving sometimes it is just better to die so you get ported closer to your next goal.

Still, I'm going to finish it, hopefully soon, but thoughts of beating it again on evil are making my brain twitch.

Completed: Dawn of War II - Retribution

Dawn of War II - Retribution

Completed

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Completed
Currently: Finally finished Extra Hard

Overall, I really liked this game, though looking back on it, I find it hard to recommend to others. The game itself is fairly good, though the single player campaign is definitely lacking.

It is worth playing once of course, the semi-RPG system to it keeps using the same heroes through multiple missions in a squad format interesting. Playing it more than once though, to do the different races definitely exposes issues with the game overall. The campaign is very short, and yet the different races really don't have a different campaign. The Space Marine campaign was clearly intended to be the main campaign and probably the canon one, and all the other campaigns follow the same missions, with minor differences. In essence, if you want to see every races ending, you need to beat the game six times, which means the same missions, same bosses, everything. The minor differences between the races alleviates it somewhat (the orks were notably fun due to their sense of humor), but they also highlight how unbalanced it is. I beat Extra Hard with the Tyrannids, mainly because they are clearly broken. You only get one hero, and their units are far more expensive in terms of resources, but they steamroll through every mission in the game very quickly.

Quickly is a debatable phrase though. The missions take forever to crawl through, since in essence after a point, your strategy is 'build the biggest units you can, roll to the next spot on the map, build more'. It may be a factor of my computer, but the loading times for some maps were utterly atrocious, and the unloading times were even more so. These two factors together mean you'll spend a lot of time going through the campaigns to do the same missions. The only factor that kept me from completing it much earlier is just how dull it gets to do the same missions over and over, and how long it takes.

The only thing I can really recommend (take note I have never even tried the standard multiplayer), is the Last Stand mode, where you team up with two other heroes and take on hordes of enemies, getting exp and wargear as you go. They realized this was probably the best part of the game, since you can buy that part as a stand alone. I would recommend that part of the game more than the overall, unless you are heavily interested in Warhammer. Its hard to recommend the main game over something like Starcraft 2 though. At least they finally got away from Games for Windows, which is the reason I didn't buy the first two packs of Dawn of War II.

Completed: Atelier Iris 2

Completed

Atelier Iris 2

System: PS2 (Playing on PS3)
Status: Completed
Currently: Finished everything.

So yeah, going to be a complete 180 on this from last time I posted, but I basically spent the last few weeks playing this solid (and Diablo 3), and at first, my hopes were rather high. The alchemy system in the game was very promising, the combat system was solid, they did a lot of things right in the game. The story wasn't the greatest, but it was passable.

Then the game just...died. The story went from passable to so full of glaring plot holes that I was yelling at the screen...to basically flipping the player off. The ending was a wonderful montage of 3 second clips that explained nothing whatsoever as to what happened, just showed the characters smiling then, roll credits. The game never followed through on any plot threads, and near the end of it, started doing things that just made me think 'Wow, my team is either stupid, or outright heinous'. It really does not make your team seem endearing when you destroy one character's wedding ring (albeit to save the world, but still), and then say he's being a baby because his wife will be mad at him. Two priceless objects (to the characters who they belonged to) are destroyed near the end, and its given about as much weight as stepping on someones toe. "Sorry for destroying this." "It does not matter, it was only a symbol to the entire kingdom." Practically quoted. The games story is so laughably paper thin you see where everything is going from the start, and any attempt at charecterization falls so flat it makes actually playing the game painful, because you know you'll have to listen to these idiots talk some more. Note to the creators, we do not need flashbacks for everything. This was a 20 hour game, there were upwards of ten flashbacks in the game, sometimes to events that happened literally five minutes before.

The combat system started out promising with all sorts of little options. Then as the game winded on, you realized rather quickly...that the designers didn't have any idea on how to make the game challenging, or to do a little difficulty curve to it. You are either curbstomping -everything- without grinding at all, or are up against something with insane amounts of HP. The post-game challenges seemed to be the most promising, but the enemies there (and the final boss) would basically one shot every character, so you learned to just keep tossing revives and not bother with healing. Most of the 'challenge' came from the fact that the bosses would heal themselves every turn naturally...which just made the fights even longer. I enjoy a good challenge, but the fights basically ended up being a challenge to see whether I would run out of revives first or win.

The item and alchemy system was by far the most promising part of it. Turning items you find into others with recipes you buy or find along the way. Certain items you could create more of with just mana, allowing you to make healing items as you go instead of buying them. The first thing you notice after a while though, is it is very trivial to just make 99 of all your healing items, and thus never run out. The second thing you notice is that everything pretty much uses the three or four most common mana types. The last thing you notice is there are about 15 types of mana, and some of them are used for one or two items. It felt like the designers just petered out on this part halfway through, and though you have tons of mana, you always need the most common ones, and almost never need everything else. The crafting system itself allows you to substitute different items to get different effects, but since most of the effects don't work on that item type, or are rather ill defined, you never really bother with this or even need to. The only time you do substitute is when the game points it out to you, and you realize you can make a truly different item...for the three or four items that actually works for.

The other aspects of the game are passable. The isometric view is interesting at first, but after a while you realize every dungeon is going to be square cubes going at angles, and it starts to look very fugly. The sprites themselves are well done, but battles are always zoomed out so far you can't see any details but for the brief moments it zooms in for an attack. The game is rather short, and that would have been fine personally, but near the end there's a very noticeable series of painful attempts to lengthen it out (fetch quests, dungeons with constant unending random encounters in a game that made a large point that after a while random encounters stop in an area, having to retread old areas constantly).

Most games leave me with a "Damn, I want to play more of that" feeling, even ones I'm somewhat ambiguous about. About six hours before I finished this game, I had the thought cross "I can't wait to finish this so I can play something else." While watching the ending, my thoughts were "Well, that is the game flipping me off." When I was finally finishing the post game, my last thought was "Thank god I never have to play this again."