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.

Oh crap

So i skipped ahead to God of war 2, basically just to make sure that I got two games done this month I'm just hoping that I can keep it moving...I got one thing to say about this game "THIS ISN"T A GOD OF WAR GAME" this is a really good imitation but its not a god of war game. Unless I was wrong about the first one, I think after I finish this I have to play it again. That fear of a God of war without David jaffey is starting to creep in again.
Time to get pissed at God of War 2
Also TIME TO SMOKE

The Shame of Defeat and The thrill of victory, while playing Panzer Dragoon orta.

Panzer dragoon was one of those games that I got frustrated that frustrated the shit out of me and did until I finally beat it. This is the third time I’ve came back to this game, the first couple weren’t very successful I remember having a hell of a time just getting past the first board on my first attempt at playing. On a side note brother beat this game in a week, I guess he deals with frustration better than I do because he said he “Whipped right through it” and I’ll never forgive him for that. It was the second time I played the game that I really got on a roll and break through to the end but got stuck on the boss. So basically it took three times at stopping and starting to really beat the game, as far as I can tell nothing has changed sense I played this game the first time maybe I have a little more patience for this type of old school shooter, we’ll see about that when I start playing Mega Man again.

But enough about my lack of video game skill, this game is “Old School” it feels like a Nintendo game in the way that every boss/enemy has a pattern to how they move and the way they shoot. The reason I was finally able to beat this game is because I finally realized that fact and was able to figure out his patterns then it was like bam next thing I know he’s a puddle of shape shifting goop. Another interesting thing about this game is the way that your character moves around the world, they figured out a way to make it feel like your giving directions to the dragon your riding as much as your controlling the little girl on top who shoots at the enemies. Basically you’re the center of 360 degree ratios’ and the enemies are coming at you from all sides, using the triggers on the controller to spin yourself around on that axis and to burst forward or backward to dodge enemies attacks. Along with its beautiful art style that I can only describe as vibrant colors with seizer inducing flashes of enemies, this game was stylized before they started using that word for Wii games as a substitute for shitty art.

All and all I’m really glad I stuck it out and finally beat it because I had a better sense of accomplishment from beat this game this I have for any of the other that I finished on my to way to shrinking my pile of shame. Thats two pretty much in the course of a week, I might have to change shuffle the order of my "pos" to make sure that I at least beat two games this month. Kotor is taking a hell of a lot longer then I thought it was going to.

TIME TO SMOKE!!

Another one done, took me forever to write it.

I have finished “Jade Empire”, and in my opinion most of the time if you want to beat a game all you have to do is play it, Jade was one of those games it wasn’t that hard in fact I just sort of walked through it. It was pretty easy once I figure out the rhythm of fighting there wasn’t a man or women in the Jade Empire that could stop me. After I completed most of the quests I was so powerful that the last boss was a piece of cake, the only weapon I really used my first sword skill and I cut him down like he was a regular enemy.

While I was playing Jade empire it struck me that its was basically an American take on Japanese role-playing fundamentals, It seemed to follow the same formula that square uses to make a rpg with a few small changes that make a huge difference in the way the game flows. The option of being evil just for the sake of being evil is huge when you look at the way games are made, not everyone wants to be the hero all the time. The role playing stereotype is that you’re the hero and are unquestionably good regardless of how many times you just barge into someone’s house and rummage through there stuff, Where as in a Bioware game you wouldn’t just rummage through there stuff if you wanted to be evil, you can kill them, steal there stuff then burn there house down. I think that’s why rpgs from Asia are not getting a lot of love as of late, the people playing them want a little variety in there games. Squares vision of the hero has become vannialified over the years and they are pretty much the same character with a new paint job every time they release a new game. In a Bioware RPG characters aren’t some emo kid or a plucky youth that has a gripe with the evil empire, they are pretty much what you make them to be. Your not forced into a boxed hero type the character is YOU, weather your saving a kitty from a tree or setting the tree on fire it breaks down to what you as this character want to do. What Asian developers haven’t realized about western gamers is that they have grown up playing there games and most of them are now adults who’s gaming tastes have changed as they grew up, most of them don’t want to play through some jerk off characters teenage angst. Maybe that’s why I find Biowares stuff more interesting now because I’m not being spoon fed the same characters over and over again. A little variety never hurt anyone, considering I’ve been playing the same game.

Bioware does abuse the dialogue tree on a regular basis there isn’t really a question of that, but the side quests and the way they are implemented and the way the quests add in little bits of story and context of the world around you through out the game. I’ve started “Knights of the old republic” a day ago and I’m seeing some of the same patterns in both games, it might be because it’s a Star wars game but “kotor” grabbed me faster then Jade did. When I started playing Jade, I couldn’t stand the side quest they seemed like a huge waste of time and a way to lengthen the game. It was like they just kept sending them at me over and over again. Now I see that Bioware replaced the grinding of old school rpgs with those side quests, instead of making you grind for four hours so that you can go fight a tough boss you progress though the game basically by just playing those added bits of the story, which is really nice because I don’t really have time to grind a lot anymore. They also as far as I know there aren’t any random encounters, which I always thought were really annoying. The side quest are really what gets you to the next level because they feed it too you in small spoonfuls of it, the exp ratio is tight too there isn’t a huge gap between levels which is why these games flow so well. I made it through Jade problem only killing 100 enemies throughout the whole game, so the focus of the game is on the story and not the next level. When is the last time a Final fantasy game wasn’t about the grind? That being said I don’t have square but there last couple weren’t good or even pretty good, they were lousy. Its time for them to take back there thrown and to take the power back, they have a dynasty of great games, too many for me to even write out here. Bioware has maybe 5 or huge games under there belt and they all seem to be good games or have good intentions with everything they make. Hopefully square can pull it together with final fantasy because with the economy the way it is any misstep could mean trouble with there new risky aqusitions.

TIME TO SMOKE!