Dam it feels good to be a Jedi.

So another game is done and Knights of the old republic is out of my pile of shame, only thirty some games left woot….what the fuck was I thinking buying all these games. I really need to find something better to spend my money on.

The final fight with Darth Malak was I thought impossible, for awhile I didn’t think I could beat him he was a lot more powerful then I thought he was going to be. . There weren’t any guides online that were anywhere near the build of my character, turns out I was supposed to have saber throw and so I wasn’t really prepared for him.. So basically I had to wait until he was done absorbing the captured Jedi and there’s nothing like getting you ass kicked by a guy who can pretty much heal himself to full life. All I can say is it must have looked like a Benny hill skit with me running for my life while being chased by the Lord of the sith, I still beat him in the end but it was ugly as hell. I feel kind of cheap trapping him with adhesive grenades and then hitting him with thermal detonators, which worked really well. Then I ran until I could heal myself then hit him with force wave after I ran out of grenades, its still funny that I beat the lord of the sith without using the force pretty much at all. My next game is going to be a bitch, why am I torturing myself with a game like State of emergency….going to follow it closer on this blog until then

TIME TO SMOKE!!!

Tension in Video games and the lack there of

What makes a game good? A good story line? Decent play controls? Tension and the threat of death? All three of these make a game good and when you have all three of these you have the perfect combination. A perfect example of this is Bioshock. I can't really call it a first person shooter. It's first person perspective but it has so much more going on for it. Great story line. Tension. Above average controls.

Now, here's where I am going to go off. Story line is always THE most important part of a video game. I am sorry but if it doesn't have a story line that I am getting into within the first half hour I am probably going to end up dropping the game and losing interest in it. Play control is also very important but some games have such a great story line that you can forgive the controls. A good example of this is the first Resident Evil games. For the most part the controls were fine but the camera angle ended up shafting you so many times that you may as well have been a whore working in the red light district yet you were able to move past that fact because the story was original and very well done. There was also one other thing that Resident Evil had going for it. An amazing feeling of tension. It was the first game where I was openly shitting my pants. It made me jump. It gave me chills. For me to say this says a lot because it takes a lot to get me. I don't think I have ever jumped because of a film. Why is this? It fully immersed me into it. This spawned a fascination with the survival horror genre for me. I will say that if you want to get the most jumps, chills, and over all creepy feelings you have to play Fatal Frame. I am so upset with myself that when I sold the PS2 and all the games that I included the Fatal Frame games with it. I wish I would have kept those.

Now, here is my current gripe with the video game industry. I am playing all of these first person shooter games like the Call of Duty games, Resistance games, and Kill Zone 2. I like first person shooter games. I like them a lot but there is one thing that is clearly missing. It took me awhile to put my finger on it too. I was playing these games and there was no sense of tension. Why was this? Here you are in a gun fight pinned down behind a wall or lurking through the water towards someone to slit their throat and there was nothing. I finally put my finger on it. The tension wasn't there. In older first person games you had a life bar and the only way to deal with your life bar was to be more careful with your movements, use a med pack, or die and start over. Newer games do not do this though. I was discussing this with a friend and he said that I can thank Halo for this. What I am talking about is this. Instead of having to use a med pack or find a medic to heal you all you have to do is duck down for a few seconds and your life replenishes. I don't know about you but if I get shot I am not going to be able to just duck down and start healing. It really takes away from the action. It removes the tension. Here I am in this gun fight and I am low on life so I duck down behind a wall for like 10 seconds and then pop back up and start firing. They have managed to dumb down the first person shooter to the point of taking something away from it. It's a lame trick to involve in any game. Bioshock doesn't do this. Bioshock you actually to press a button to use med packs or find a healing unit on the wall. It keeps the over-all tension of the game.

Here is my unheard cry to the video game industry. Quit thinking we are not capable of handling a life bar that we have to figure out a way to raise ourselves. Please, PLEASE hear my cry. I want to be challenged. I want to feel the tension. I don't want to play another game where I love the story, the play controls are good, but leaves me feeling unfulfilled.

Games with great tension that I love.

1. Fatal Frame
2. Bioshock
3. Resident Evil 2 (shoot me because I liked the second one better than the first one)
4. Silent Hill
5. Dead Space (Best Survival Horror game for the Next Gen systems so far)

Great games that missed on the tension level but are worth playing.

1. Resistance: Fall of Man (Resistance 2 totally missed the mark and didn't feel right)
2. Call of Duty 4
3. Call of Duty: World At War
4. Killzone 2
5. Fallout 3 (This didn't really miss the mark because the story was amazing)

Alright, I realize that the games with tension that I noted mostly are not first person shooters. I realize this. I am okay with this. I want my games to suck me in and most first person games don't do that. If you have a PS3 and want to actually put a bullet in me add me on the PS Network. My user name is Astral_Complex. You can take your frustrations out on me.

God of .....wait what?

About a month ago I beat and didn’t really enjoy God of War 2 very much until it was over of course. That sentence didn’t make much sense, but if you think about it and high sight is 20/20 after it was over it dawned on me that I like the concept of Gow more then I liked the game itself. The feeling of power and the way krotoses power is represented, every time Kratos hits an enemy the earth shacks and you can feel the power and rage that consumes him. That’s why I loved the first god of war, the problem that I have with Gow2 is that it feels really generic like it was made from the suggestions of a focus group. The levels feel like they were left over from the first game and they just added more enemies because some guy in that same focus group decided there weren’t enough enemies on screen. With all its problems, I’m still a little torn about playing the third even with THE DAVE giving his blessing, but I finished it and have sense moved on to Knights of the old republic and my next couple post will be about it.

Until then TIME TO SMOKE!!

God of War 2

I hate it.