Beaten: Reconstruction Zero: I Miss the Sunrise (on 6/3/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Reconstruction Zero is one of those games I randomly found while looking for good free RPGs. It really doesn't play like any RPG I can think of, and it deserves a good look if you are at all interested in interesting or unique RPGs. The story of the game itself is quite good, and I won't go into any detail on it beyond that for fear of spoiling anything. To put it quickly, the game manages to craft a wholly unique world and setting to house the great gameplay, and a story that really doesn't lend itself to many cliches.

The gameplay itself takes place in a sort of strategy RPG setup. You command fleets of various ships (all of them characters you recruit throughout the story), and arrange them in small groups to perform objectives on a larger map. When in combat, you have a few abilities based on the race of the character, as well as having it be important how close/far away you are from enemy ships (and allowing you to 'push' the field of battle to prevent turtling). Each ship is equipped with various pieces of equipment, such as guns and protective assets, which you design yourself through the games crafting feature. As such, the setup of your ships will change dynamically, allowing you to adjust them for new encounters or new tactics you devise. Each ship has three health bars (as seen in the above image). If any of them is gone, the ship is destroyed. At the same time, every weapon in the game drains one of those life bars for their own attacks, and does damage to one of the lifebars on the enemy ship with a certain damage type. As such, its nearly impossible to create a perfect defense for anything, and a lot of the game revolves around having a wide variety of weapons to make sure you take advantage of enemies weaknesses.

The game is very tactical, and it takes some getting used to, but you never truly feel the game is unfair. With the exception of some special events, I was able to figure out what needed to be done, reconfigure my ships, and get it done. It is certainly an RPG everyone should at least try, especially since its free.

I finished the game, but have some alternate endings and optional bosses to defeat.

Beaten: Sid Meier's Civilization V (on 7/23/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Civilization is one of those giants of gaming...that I've never had the privilege of actually playing until recently. To be fair, I wasn't much of a PC gamer in my youth, since my PC tended to be pretty low end, and console games were a much more consistent factor (didn't have to worry about the games running properly on those).

Civilization V for me personally, is a great game that I tend to get lost in for hours. I have put innumerable hours into this game, playing different Civs, different difficulties, trying for various achievements and the like. Even when I set it to the fastest game speed (which I always do), it will easily chew up a whole afternoon on its own. I only recently got the two expansion packs, which added whole new dimensions to the game. I can honestly say if you own Civ V, you need to get the expansions despite the price. It is more than worth it for the amount of extra gameplay they add to the base game. There really isn't much more to say about the game that others haven't, I can't compare it to previous games since I haven't played them, I just know this one is extremely addicting.

I have beaten it numerous times on various difficulties, though I am now just working my way up past the 'normal' range. I still have plenty of scenarios and other things to do to 'complete' this.

Beaten: Zombie Driver (7/7/13/)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Zombie driver is a strange little game, but I found it quite fun, once I got used to the camera style making me a bit ill. In all the game modes, you drive a car around a city, running over zombies while trying to reach certain objectives. It is very arcade-y in execution, which isn't a bad thing. It is quite fun to play for short stretches, and isn't too frustrating in any particular aspect.

The game helps the variety by having three game modes. Story, which has your character going through a fairly short campaign, rescuing civilians from places and doing side objectives to get new cars. It isn't too difficult, though the rarity of healing items makes some parts a bit frustrating as you really can't avoid damage from zombies at times. The only part I really struggled with was the last mission, where you have to race at blinding speed through the city with a time limit. It was very easy to make small mistakes and have to start over.

The small mistakes at  high speed problem also applies to Blood Race, which makes the mode itself a bit more difficult than it needs to be. It is very easy to get stuck on a piece of scenery and have to spend precious seconds backing out and around to get back in the race. Blood race mode has more than just racing though, though the other events are basically 'Go fast because of X', such as 'Go fast because you have a bomb on your car'. Overall though its still a fun mode to play, just might be a bit frustrating for me to ace it for completion.

The last mode is slaughter, which basically gives you a circular arena and zombies to kill. Each wave you finish upgrades your car or weapons. Not too difficult, other than the exploding zombies, which like other modes, can take a huge chunk from your health if you run them over (you are supposed to run right beside them, so they explode after you're gone). Again, the mode is very short, so any frustrations are temporary.

I finished the story mode, and need to finish and complete both Blood Race and Slaughter modes, along with some achieves from the story mode itself.

Beaten: Endless Space (on 6/29/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Endless Space is a 4X game that I found last summer on sale on Steam, and while not the most ingenious or innovative game of the genre, it holds its own at least in my opinion, as an interesting diversion when I'm in a Civilization mood, but don't actually want to play Civ.

The same basics apply of course for any 4X game, you select how big your play field will be, how many players/AI, pick your race and what victory conditions you want, and then go. The game itself is set around various planetary systems that you work to colonize, building colony ships to get to new systems while exploring and finding your opponents on the map. On each planetary system, you will gain population, which will produce science, construction, money and food (FIDS is the in-game shorthand), which is used to help other aspects of your empire.This is generally improved upon by creating improvements in each system, which boost one aspect or another, though all of them having upkeep in the money department. Unfortunately, since you are supposed to rapidly expand as with any 4X game, this means a lot of the time you spend on each turn is building advancements in all the new solar systems to improve their output, so you spend a lot of time tabbing between systems, making sure they have all the upgrades they need (and remembering why you didn't make a certain improvement in a system, since in some cases an improvement would be terrible given the cost vs gain).

The combat itself is...more detailed than civilization, given that you can choose actions which have various rock-paper-scissors bonuses versus other actions, but it tends to only really matter when your military is very close in strength. You can actually custom create every ship your civilization makes, but most of the time you will make one or two designs, and just upgrade them as you get new technology. Nothing really heavily changes the ship designs later, other than the occasional space saving technology which you might need to slide in as it isn't an upgrade. In a long-term war with any other player, the combat gets very repetitive, as the AI will tend to send swarms of ships at you, even though they know they will lose.

The tech tree of the game is very deep and well laid out...which unfortunately means jack-all, since you don't really have any true choices in the tech trees. Each race starts with a basic tech already learned, which might save you a few turns learning it, and has certain special techs they learn higher up in the tree that give unique advantages. The trees are split into science (mostly new material discovery), war (duh), exploration (lets you colonize new planet types), and management (lets you have bigger fleets and lots of new improvements). However, there really isn't any strategy to your research or any true decisions to be made. No matter what strategy you are using, you need to research all the trees about equally. Choosing what to research first may give you a brief advantage in a certain area, and if you go deep in a tree you might get a heavy advantage with it, but the cost to your other research will cost you more in the long term. For example, if you are planning to conquer the galaxy you might think you need to research the war tree above all...which will bite you. You need to research management to field more than a few ships in a fleet and keep your people happy, and you need to research science to get materials that make those shiny new weapons, and you should research exploration to let your fleets move faster and give you more planets to work with. Spending 6 turns on a new war tech when you have a bunch of technologies that would only take one turn or less is a serious mistake.

Other than those quibbles, the game is fun, though probably decidedly average in the grand scheme of things. I tend to only boot it up when I want something Civ-like,  but don't want to play Civ.

Finished with normal AI, need to work my way up the AI difficulties.

Beaten: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (on 6/27/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Unfortunately I don't have a lot to say about Episode 2. Not just because I finished it over a year ago, but because nothing about it really sticks out in the mind, other than the fact that it kept the story going for a bit more than the last episode. If you aren't interested in the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman, episode 2 is basically the same game as episode 1 and Half-life 2, physics based shooting, aliens, rather smart AI for the human parts, and some decent set pieces that are fun/frustrating depending.

Really, no part of the game sticks out a lot in my memory, other than the last set piece, where you are defending the rocket installation from hordes of giant walkers that you can only destroy with bomb devices you attach to them. I must royally suck at this, or it was insanely hard compared to the rest of the game, because I found this part furiously frustrating, and had to crank the difficulty all the way down due to constantly being torn apart by all the mechs little friends. If I go through the game again, I'll likely need to look up what I was doing wrong, because it shouldn't have been that difficult.

Finished it on the easiest difficulty, so to complete would have to crank it up some, along with completing various achieves and challenges.

Beaten: Portal 2 (on 6/24/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 6/24/13)

Portal is one of my favorite puzzle games, for the sheer basic mechanics and taking the puzzles as far as they can go with those mechanics. Portal 2 really doesn't change the mechanics much, other than adding some gels at about the midpoint of the game that add new dimensions to the physics puzzles. However, Portal 2 definitely focuses more on the story aspects, where the first was pretty limited to voice overs, 2...still does voice overs, but its  more in depth, with many voice actors and more of the same dark humor.

Overall, the game is better and somewhat worse than the first game. The new gels add new dimensions to the physics puzzles, but in the end it really doesn't change the dynamics too much, and in the end, they are kind of forgettable. The story is definately the best part of the game over the original, but with a longer plot, the game does start to drag a bit, and some of the puzzles end up being a bit unintuitive, a problem I never had with the original.

Still, the gripes with the game are nitpicking, overall it is amazingly fun to play and I highly recommend anyone who can to do so.

I finished the main story, which leaves the co-op things, and small achievements in the game itself.

Completed: Borderlands (on 6/22/13)

System: PC
Status: Completed (on 6/22/13)

Borderlands is certainly a well reviewed and looked at franchise, so I doubt anything I say will be too new to people looking into it. On the surface, it certainly fills a niche that feels like it needs to be filled, an FPS RPG with randomly generated/dropped guns and equipment. The game fills that niche very well, and the game has a very unique sense of humor to it. It does an extremely good job at characterization of the world of Pandora, and I tended to mostly play through just to see what the next crazy thing to happen was.

Where the game does tend to slow down is the combat itself is very samey for most of the game. No matter what upgrades or new skills you get, they tend to not change the basic game mechanics very  much. You'll run up to an area of huts and houses, enemies will spawn from doors or be standing around, and you'll find cover, trying to get headshots for criticals or using your class skill to do extra damage, and the enemies will die. The strategies the enemies use change a bit, mostly when you get to the Crimson Lance enemies, or in the expansions, but most of the time you're fighting bandits, and everything tends to go the same way. You're not relying on your own skills too much though, as a huge factor is what gear you get in random drops, and sometimes you'll be scraping by on a too-low level gun, or find one that is so much better than your others that you'll only be using that gun for a long damn time.

Still, that was a long paragraph that basically boiled down to me as "I needed to take breaks from the game at times." It is still an amazingly fun game, it just tends to wear on you a bit when you go from place to place shooting the same guys. The personality of the game goes a long way to alleviating the annoyances.

The game and all of its expansions are completed, finished on second run. Don't have all the achievements, but many of them require multiplayer on the old Gamespy network, so...no dice there.

Completed: Xenosaga I, II, and III (beaten/completed on various dates)

System: PS2
Status: Completed (all of them)

The Xenosaga series is one that certainly aimed high, and ended up being completely forgettable (at least for me anyway). I loved the semi-predecessor in Xenogears, despite the utter wreck that is the second disc of that game, and this series seemed to do the same on a multi-game scale, they had high ambitions and designs, but ran out of steam/funding and ended up with much less. It certainly didn't help that all three games are very different in style and design, and their systems don't stay consistent, leading to no actual refinement, but wild swinging of things a game does well, and does poorly. The story between all of them stays consistent, but is basically inscrutable to anyone who doesn't read the supplementary materials, and likely suffers a great deal from the series being cut short(er) than the designers would have liked. I'll go through each game individually though.

Xenosaga I feels like the most direct successor to Xenogears. The combat system is very similar, in that you pick various attacks that add up to larger special attacks. The mix of mechs and ground combat works pretty well, though in general the special attacks of the characters fall far short of their normal attacks, so you generally won't use your spell abilities (not to mention the character that is focused on healing/special attacks can't take a hit). Overall game wise, the balance works out well, its fun to play, with only a few frustrations gameplay wise. The best part of the game is the side card game that is actually very fun to play and well designed, but doesn't make an appearance in any other games, and doesn't impact the main game in any way other than being an inefficient way of getting money. Overall, the first game is average, a decent RPG but nothing absolutely amazing, nor does it stand out in any particular aspect.

Xenosaga II is...much worse than the first game. They changed the art style around majorly, where the first was very animesque, the second shoots right to 'realistic' and is pretty jarring in the transition. The worst change though is the combat system. They take the 'combo' attack system, and remove most special attacks entirely from normal fighting. Your characters get only a few moves per round, and need to hit certain combos on enemies in order to start doing real damage, any damage before that is mostly scratch damage. So in any combat situation beyond common enemies, and sometimes even then, combat is a few turns of 'waiting' to build up attacks, then one huge combo boosted between characters to do as much damage as possible. It is very jarring to have to spend combat turns waiting, because if you don't get at least X number of attacks in to break their guard, you do nothing. What makes it worse is some enemies are immune to certain attack types, weak to things only one character does, and the like. In the end, you end up using a certain short list of characters because they can hit the most weaknesses and do the most straight up melee damage. If I had to score this game individually, I would put it way below par, the only real reason to play it is to see the story before the next game in the series.

Xenosaga III is a nice medium of art styles between the first two. Its not full on big-eye'd anime style, but not fully realistic either, and ends up looking the best for it. The combat system is a good medium as well, and it is quite fun to work through and doesn't make combat a  bore like the second did. This game seems to be where the designers finally settled down on one thing to do, and it works out quite well as they hit their stride. The sidequest system they shoved into the game though, is completely awkward. They basically formalized sidequests, but they did so in a way that if you aren't following a guide 100% through the game, you won't get everything from the sidequests, and will spend hours looking for random characters with no hints from the game itself. Thankfully, its not required to get to the bonus bosses, so no big deal there. The bonus bosses end up being cakewalks though, and the entire game does, once you get the robot summon spells near the middle of the game. The only limiting factor there is your MP, otherwise they will utterly wreck every enemy and boss in the game. The bonus boss is specifically designed to be killed by only those summon spells, leaving the otherwise well done combat system lacking...why bother, when you can one shot everything?

So overall, the series is...ok, the biggest problem is the utterly lackluster second game, which was a big hurdle for me to get through to the rather well done third game. I feel if they had made more of these games and finished the story it would likely be a more positive memory, but the problem is that audience isn't going to keep buying games if they suck in hopes you'll get better.

These are completed, all bonus bosses wiped out the first time around, so they are off my list fully.

Beaten: Dragon's Dogma (on 5/30/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten

For all the flak Capcom gets for its treatment of its older franchises, they have recently come up with some pretty awesome new ones. Dragon's Dogma is one of my favorite new ones they have made (the other being Monster Hunter), and its certainly a unique entry.

Where Monster Hunter could be defined as Bossfights: The game, Dragon's Dogma doesn't go quite that far. Dragon's Dogma still has amazing fights and set-pieces, but the key is that the game's engine from the very beginning is designed for it. The very first fight is against a giant dragon, the size of a castle, and when you fight it again later, the only thing that has changed is your gear. The game makes great use of the grab mechanics, sort of like Shadow of the Colossus, in that you need to hang on to monsters and stab/cut/whatever to do some serious damage. The difference between this and Shadow, is that you have allies who can also be away from the enemy, shooting arrows/magic/etc, or you could be doing that and leave your allies jumping on them. The game has a lot of very cool mechanics for different classes working together, such as knights using their shields to fling characters into the air to grab enemies, putting elements on weapons, and the like. The only problem with it is that you are only ever allied with AI characters, so you have to rely on them to act appropriately. They aren't stupid, since the game actually has mechanics for them 'learning' certain monsters and what works...its just too bad they'll remind you that 'Fire works well!' every five minutes, because its certainly true for almost everything.

Still, the game's mechanic treats bossfights almost as incidental...not that they aren't important, but you only a few times get a quest that says 'go kill this big  monster', usually you'll be going somewhere else, you'll see a nasty thing, and you want to go kill it. The game rewards you with pieces of the monster to upgrade your gear with, so you are urged to go hack off bits and stab them. Still, sometimes the reward is the awesome gameplay that happens just from the mechanics, launching from a melee fighter's shield, landing on the wing of a flying griffen, and stabbing them in the wings until they do a death dive and carve a furrow in the ground with their sudden crash landing, while the rest of your team proceeds to hack them apart. There are some reskinned monsters, but they tend to put different spins on them, so that you'll get killed if you assume all drakes or griffen styled enemies are the same.

The game's story is pretty barren, and NPC interaction is really loose. Since you custom make your own character, and interaction is purely determined by doing nice things to people, you can be utterly surprised when the game picks your 'lover', whom you just did quests for.

Still, overall the game is very enjoyable, the only major drawback being that you are walking almost everywhere, and it can take a long while going from points, fighting the same spawned enemies every time. The bigger monsters are more random, but chimeras, wolves, bandits, and the like spawn in the same places every time. Definately a game to pick up though for a unique experience, though perhaps you should find the director's cut, entitled 'Dark Arisen'.

Lost my save due to the PS3 crashing dead, so need to replay the whole game and do new game + plus some achieves to complete.

Beaten: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (on 5/27/13)

System: GBA (played via emulator)
Status: Beaten

Fire Emblem, at least the older ones, are games that are simultaneously amazingly fun and frustrating for me. They are strategy games in the purest sense of the word. There is emphasis on building your characters up, and the character's themselves, but even that requires some strategy, as over utilizing some characters can leave you vulnerable to some things later, and almost every character can be one shot by something if you aren't careful (or brought down by a lot of enemies running onto their blades). The frustrating part is naturally, the games permanent death feature...you will constantly have to restart a map from scratch, because you get through the entire thing...and have an enemy get a lucky critical and take out a character.

Sacred Stones is a bit more lenient about the overall difficulty since it is a Gaiden game. You can actually walk around the map and kill random enemies, or go to a tower and farm there. This lets you level up characters without having a limited number of maps like most of the other games, so you don't 'waste' experience by letting a less useful character get some kills in. Its still difficult as sin, as you can't farm too much, you will break your weapons and you need to spend money replacing them, and the random encounters can still kill characters, but at least it eases off some with some leveling up. Otherwise? Its still a Fire Emblem, and very rewarding when you do get through it, along with a decent story and great challenge.

I finished Eirika's story, so that leaves Ephraim's, hard mode, and the 'monster' mode.

Beaten: Front Mission 3 (on 5/18/13)

System: PS1 (Played via PS1C on the PS3)
Status: Beaten

Front Mission is one of my favorite series of all time, mostly because it combines two things I love, giant military styled 'realistic' robots, and turn based strategy. It is too bad that we never got most of the main-stream games in English, and the series has kind of died off (don't mention the action-game thing they released recently, that's not Front Mission).

Front Mission 3 is a pretty standard game gameplay wise. You control each character piloting a mech, trying to kill your enemies piloting mechs. There is not much innovative about the base gameplay, though the fact that your pilots can eject from their mechs (or be ejected if hit right) is interesting, because it lets you hijack other mechs mid mission, or even non-mech vehicles like helicopters. In practice though, its so dangerous to have them running around on the ground that you likely won't have them there if you can at all help it. There are a few missions where you protect ground-pounders and they can shoot mechs for a little damage while walking around.

Story wise, the game actually splits into two different stories entirely based on the first choice you make in the story, with significant differences, so the game is at least playable twice for that alone. The story I played through this time was ok, typical Front Mission fare of geopolitics and people trying to stop a super project of some sort. It was forgettable, but that doesn't mean much, I forget a lot of good games' stories.

The game has an internet function, where you can browse the in-universe internet, go to websites and access things. You get passwords for places from missions or by sleuthing around and downloading programs, and that lets you access more background and information, and sometimes get access to gear. I'll be honest, after looking around it a bit, and not being able to figure out clues, I just looked up all the passwords that did anything. It was an interesting idea, but actually playing with it is not fun in the least, and requires way more use of note taking than the main game ever does. If you do play it, just look up the passwords, and only the important ones, the little bits of story aren't worth the effort to read through all the text.

I finished the 'Rebel' storyline, which leaves the 'Chinese' storyline for completion.

Beaten: Silent Hill 2 (on 4/24/13)

System: PS2
Status: Beaten

Silent Hill is one of those franchises that the story is good...but the gameplay itself is lackluster. I don't understand what it was about Playstation one and two era horror games that felt that bad controls and overly complicated/frustrating puzzles were a necessity for horror.

On the positive note, the tank controls in this game are easily fixed by changing the control scheme. The puzzles and combat can be fixed by cranking both to easy (They actually have separate settings, which is nice), allowing you to enjoy the game without too much frustration. I know it feels weird to say such for a game, but you don't enjoy Silent Hill 2 for the gameplay, you enjoy it for the story.

Talking about the story goes too much into spoiler territory, so I will just summarize in general what everyone who has already played the game knows: It is a well put together, subtle story of personal horror, dealing with one's demons, and with multiple endings that are not caused by specific A or B choices, but by small actions through the game, such as looking at items repeatedly, staying close to a character, spending too long in an area, and the like.

It is a classic, and it is really sad the later games have gone more full action and ignored the story-based horror for more visceral big scary monster horror. Every monster in the game symbolizes something (as it should for Silent Hill, this isn't Resident Evil), yet later games tend to repeat the monsters without any care for their original symbolism.

I finished the game only once, so I  have one ending out of many. I'm not going to count difficulty to completion, just finishing all the endings.

Completed: Breath of Fire (on 4/21/13)

System: SNES
Status: Completed

Good lord American box art was horrible around this time. This is another Super Famicom game we own that I played on a ROM, and this one was much better. Given, it is the first Breath of Fire, and the series had yet to work its way into its own little niche, but at least it was a decent RPG.

The game is very cookie cutter in story, your village is destroyed, you must save the world, etc. The fact that your character can turn into dragons is barely used beyond spell-like abilities. In fact, in the early game, the story-line related keys do more damage than your character's dragon breath. You have a wide variety of character's to choose from, all different animal-people, which becomes a common theme later on, but you quickly realize some are completely useless. The more useful ones get even better when you fuse them to other characters, which is one unique feature the game has going for them, and once you figure out who is best for this, you'll likely stick with them for the whole game.

The main annoying feature of this game, beyond the utter requisite to grind (seriously, Final Fantasy IV had near perfect balance around this time, why must I walk around outside town for hours in nearly every other game?) is the fact that all the bosses half a health bar...that you can see...and when it gets to zero, the boss changes color, and keeps fighting for what feels like a full half of the fight. If you are going to give the bosses health bars, don't make them lie. If you don't want us to know how much HP is left, just don't give them a health bar.

Otherwise, it is an ok, somewhat forgettable game, nothing unique other than character fusions, which mostly helps you get some use out of utterly worthless characters. No hidden bosses or challenges, so complete with just finishing it.

Completed: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (on 4/04/13)

System: SNES
Status: Completed

When the wife and I first moved to Cheong-ju, she found a little game store that had a Super Famicom for sale, along with a ton of games for it. Naturally, we snapped these up. Personally, I could always play these via roms, but actually owning them gave me reason to actually finish them. They are now basically the full list of SNES games on my backlog, since my actual US games are back in the states. However, given my Japanese skills are lacking, I actually played these via roms, translated if necessary.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is one of my friend's favorite Final Fantasy's...and I don't see why at all. On its face, its an ok RPG. There really is nothing special about it, and really barely anything that makes it an RPG in the first place. Your selection of items basically is null, you find better gear, you put it on, working your way up to the best gear. There really is no choice in the matter, no benefits/loss or anything of the sort. Even your weapons are basically defined by what kind of damage they do, so the biggest choice you will make in the game is what weapon to use on what enemy. Your allies always use the same gear and can't get better, and you can't choose them either. Boss fights tend to be a matter of luck only, either you deal enough damage to kill them, or they kill you. Leveling helps some, but isn't generally worth it, you could just get a bit luckier next try.

The story is even worse than the gameplay. The original Final Fantasy can be forgiven for its rather base story because it was one of the first (and it still had a better story than the original Dragon Quest, which consisted entirely of 'save princess, kill evil dude, game won'). This game has basically the same story, with less steps and twists than even the original. You can't even explore the map, you're stuck on highlighted paths to areas.

On a positive note, no optional bosses or challenges, so when you finish this game, you never have to touch it again.

Beaten: Star Wars: Dark Forces (on 3/30/13)

System: PC (via DOSBox)
Status: Beaten (on 3/30/13)

For a while in the spring of 2013, I started on a small retro-PC game spree, mostly kicked off by a list of worthwhile DOS games I found (Link). I actually for a while was seeking to mark most of them off as played and beaten, though a few of them are not my sort of game at all, or are so dated compared to modern versions I likely won't bother. Dark Forces was one I actually got through, and have been meaning to ever since I bought it at a flea market in ages past...and it wouldn't run on my PC.

Dark Forces holds up in some aspects ok, it is still a decent shooter, and the story itself holds well as a Star Wars story, though not so much as some other games set in the universe (Force Unleashed, etc). However, a lot of the levels suffer from rather unintuitive design choices, and though you have multiple 'lives' so to speak, you'll find yourself save scumming so you don't waste them and ammunition, since often the stuff you need to get through a level are through tricky jumping puzzles, or completely strange and seemingly suicidal paths. This game has a lot of issues the original Half-Life has, they wanted to do something more, but the controls and design don't hold up to it.

I finished the game on normal, which leaves the harder difficulty for completion...which will be a long time in coming, that final boss is an asshole. At least you can replay individual levels on the higher difficulty, so when I get back to it I can check off levels.

Beaten: Darkstalkers Resurrection (on 3/20/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten (on 3/20/13)

Darkstalkers is a series I've always liked in concept and art style, but never had the chance to actually...you know...play it. The concept of various movie-monster beings fighting it out was interesting to a much younger me, and I still find the concept cool in a fighting game. The problem being, the series is basically unknown in the states, since we only got a few of the games, and really hasn't existed at all since the PS1 era.

Darkstalkers Resurrection really doesn't fix that. This is basically a port of the two arcade games, with a bit of window dressing on the outside. You can pick which arcade game to play, and there's some art and achievements attached, but otherwise the games are left entirely untouched and original. This is likely great for those who want to play the original versions, but naturally, this leaves the fighting games themselves feeling like...well, a PS1 era fighting game. You get an arcade mode, and a 'challenge' mode where you have to do specific combos for each character (a huge pet peeve of mine, its not actually a challenge mode).

I went through the game and beat each one on arcade mode, and really don't have any incentive to play it any further. Completion is out of the question for all the achievements, since the challenge mode is a rude joke. The sad thing is, I keep a large fighting game library to have plenty of options when I have friends over...this likely won't even register in my mind as an option when that happens.

Beaten: Journey (on 3/9/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten (on 3/9/13)

There's really not much I can say about this game that hasn't already been said by numerous other actual games journalists. From my experience, the game is more of an experience than anything else. The gameplay is sparse, and tends to be more looking around for the next thing to activate. It is however a beautiful game to look at, and it is more beautiful for the set pieces that the game manages to string together to show off that beauty.

If anything, the thing this game does perfectly is it is an amazing introductory game. Most modern games have a lot of different controls and assumptions that you've played similar games before. Journey has none of that, you move, and you jump/fly, and that is about it, everything else is just exploring the world with a vague (but firm) goal of reaching that light at the end.

To my mind, completing this game will be getting all the achievements, or at least the white robe (for collecting all the white symbols), but that would require me sitting down and doing so with a guide since its so easy to miss them.

Beaten: Half-Life 2: Episode 1

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 2/11/13)

Now this is more like it. Half-Life Two is a major step up, and the episodes after do so much to improve on what they do with the story telling and action scenes. Half-life is a series that puts a lot of emphasis on set pieces, and this game has plenty of memorable ones. The main issues with the episodes being that they are well, episodic, and thus short. My only complaint with the half-life two line is the rather strange streaming content they do to make it run smoother, which causes my PC all sorts of headaches. I typically have to exit out after an hour or two of playing to let it clean itself out of memory, otherwise I get tons of stuttering. Have yet to find a way to fix the issue.

Beaten: Half-Life

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 2/8/13)

Let's face it guys, fifteen year old shooters do not usually hold up well...and this one especially does  not. The game was groundbreaking in its time for how it approached storytelling, and the AI for the humanoid enemies not being as dumb as a box of rocks. However, this game has basically no indication of right path vs wrong path, or really what you should be doing/where you should be going next. That wouldn't necessarily be so bad, except that a wrong decision that you survive making can truly screw up your game. For example, for the longest time I was stuck in the launch center, where large tentacles swing at you when you run through. If you run through and go to the wrong place, or think that you could maybe kill one of them, you waste a lot of supplies doing so. I had to read a step by step fact to get any idea what I was supposed to do or where to go.

The platforming in the game is atrocious, and made only worse when you get to the end. Someone apparently thought a game with terrible jumping mechanics deserved an entire alien world where you have no indication which way to jump, and the slightest mistake kills you. You're not even sure whether you should save after each jump, as it might mean you saved in a spot where you are now stuck and have to die. I do not feel the least amount of regret in admitting I cheated my way past the last section of the game, as it very nearly ruined what little appreciation I had for the game. Thankfully, the sequels got way better.

Beaten: Fate/Extra

System: PSP
Status: Beaten (on  1/27/13)

My love for the Nasu-verse and all its related properties are no secret to those who know me well, so of course a big reason I even got a PSP was to play this game. The Fate/Stay Night series is one that is so well done in concept and execution in the original visual novel sense, and yet so hard to really translate into a video game. This game does it very well, and it should be commended for basically translating the feel of the original into a new idea entirely.

The basic concept of the game is that you are an amnesiac person in a computer system that runs a tournament to determine who gets the holy grail. You pick one of three possible summoned spirits, and develop that character through trips into the system grinding out levels, while researching your next opponent. The original concept that information tended to be more important than sheer power when fighting for the holy grail actually works out well here. The whole thing is integrated well into the combat system itself.

The combat system is glorified rock paper scissors, with your character getting special attacks to 'cheat' the system at times. Naturally you can only do this so many times, so its not very useful for basic enemies, but is immeasurably useful on fights with other summons. The battle rounds are set up several actions in advance, and most enemies have a pattern that they follow most of the time. The more often you fight a random enemy, or the more research you do on your next opponent in the tournament, the more that is revealed ahead of time. This is invaluable for the boss fights, since for most of them, a few wrong choices can kill you.

Out of combat, the game is heavily based around time. You have so many days to prepare for the fight, and each day there is some clue to find or event to handle in order to research your opponent. This can cause it to be rather stressful, as you worry about going in to the arena to level, since once you do your investigation outside it is finished for the day. It is highly advisable to have multiple saves, as it can be easy to screw yourself out of a clue or screw up a day and not know it till the match.

The replayability is a bit lacking, as other than changing spirits, the story mostly stays the same except for a few choice you can make. I finished it with saber, and started archer but got a bit bored midway, I need to get back to it, finish the two other spirits and the optional boss in the last dungeon.

Beaten: Persona 4: Arena

System:  PS3
Status: Beaten (on 1/7/13)

Fighting games tend to be quick turn-arounds for my list. Its really easy to get the credits screen since it only takes beating one character for that, and for my criteria that counts. For this one, I at least went the extra mile and actually finished every character's story mode when I was playing it. Unfortunately, I haven't touched it since, and my PS3 being replaced cost me all the saves I had on the old one, so that means doing the story again. At least I actually have a TV big enough to see the whole screen now...

As a review, the fighting game aspect is alright. It reminds me a lot of the Jojo's fighting game on the Dreamcast, where you have your main character and then a summon that you can call in to do extra attacks. The summon can be broken by others attacking it, and the game has RPG-like status effects that can be applied. I didn't spend enough time to really learn the system innately, it was a little slow for my taste and the character sprites take up a huge section of the screen. I tend to prefer my fighting games small and quick.

Story wise, it is interesting to see characters from the two recent persona games interacting and seeing how the story works out between them and in addition to the original stories, but it gets forgettable fast. It doesn't help that in order to see the true ending, you have to see the same scenes over and over from different characters. I ended up skipping over most of the dialogue because it was the same conversation from different angles over and over.

Fighting games are always hard to complete, especially when they include trophies for online play, which in all likelihood no one is doing anymore. This one also has the issue that 'challenge' mode is glorified 'learn this combo' for all the characters. What ever happened to challenge modes that were challenges? Guilty Gear did that rather well, each was a fight with special conditions and challenges, and I haven't played a fighting game that has done that well since. Rather sad.

Beaten: Yakuza: Dead Souls

System: PS3
Status: Beaten


Ah yes, this is the reason I stopped blogging about the games daily. I enjoyed this game so much that I didn't want to stop playing to blog about it. That and it was a welcome respite from a horrible job.

My love for the Yakuza series is no secret, it has a definite charm with how it goes about telling stories with complete seriousness, mixed with absolutely goofy side quests, and ultra-violent street combat. Dead Souls is an offshoot, not cannon with the main story, mostly for reasons of zombies.

I have seen reviews of this game that discuss the wonky mechanics for shooting and aiming, which for the most part are correct. The aiming stick switches depending on whether you're looking down the sights or running and gunning. I do think a major issue with people playing this game is they play it like Resident Evil or similar over the shoulder action games. The difference is that the zombies in Dead Souls are fast, and tend to not just let you aim and head shot them at will. The game also gives you infinite pistol ammo, and plentiful ammo for other weapons, most of which tend to be fully automatic or have an area to their shots. Your character also auto-aims while running around, so its perfectly viable to run through a horde gunning like crazy.

The game play as said before is very quick, most of the time you're gunning down hordes and hordes of zombies without much hesitation. Once the game starts introducing special zombies, you have to change things up when you hear their signature sounds or see them from a distance. After a while, there is little surprise, while in free roam the special zombies appear in the same locations every time, maybe adjusted a bit by the free roam area changing between main characters. It is interesting that the game keeps track of total zombies killed for the entire game...usually ending up in the tens of thousands after a single play through.

The story is treated with surprising seriousness, and you can see the city going to hell as the quarantine zone keeps getting forced out further and further. Though the concept is a bit off, the main character's treat zombies running around the city like you would expect them to given their personalities from the previous games. There are references to previous games, though enough explanation is given that its doubtful anyone would be too lost. With how well they treat the story, its hard to believe its a side story. Unfortunately, it seems it'll be the last one released stateside, since they don't plan to release five in English.

If I had any issues with the game, it would be the repetitiveness. Its easier than other games in the series to complete all the side quests and various minigames, but it gets very annoying to have to go in to the free roam zone, do part one of a quest, step back out, go back in to do part two, rinse and repeat, each time fighting the same zombies over and over.

Progress wise, all I need to do is grind my level up to ninety nine for a trophy, then its time for Dead Souls mode.

Been a long time...

Over a year in fact. Since the last time I posted on this blog, I have gotten a new job, one that stresses me out significantly less, and have had far more personal time to game. For some reason, that translated to less of a will to blog about every game I have played, and thus me not touching this little section of the web in so long.

Not that I have many/any loyal fans, but over the next few weeks, I will go over the various games I have beaten over the last year, and discuss what I recall about them and various opinions relating to them. It won't be as detailed as my previous posts for the most part, but probably a bit more neutral. Easier to be more rational when you aren't just off the high/low of finishing the game.