For a change I'm behind the times. With everyone I know wholeheartedly GUSHING about Mass Effect 2, I figured it was time to pick up the original. I can say I am pleasantly surprised so far. I'm only about 90 minutes in but the story has me hooked; not a single cliche` to be found (except maybe that the humans are a blight on the galaxy).
I'm not mad that I only have 1 achievement unlocked either, and I like the game so much I haven't bothered looking at the entire cheevie list. Speaking of, this game better be pretty fucking epic to expect not one, not two, but THREE play-throughs in order to unlock the full 1k, and there better be a new game+ option because you start off pretty crappy at shooting for a marine.
Keeping with the WAY BACK theme, I finally put some hours into Need For Speed: Most Wanted. I am a self admitted gamer score whore and I plan to 1k all the "Need for Speeds", since for some ungodly reason, I have them all. To be honest I don't think its entirely possible, because a few of them require participation in EA's "community race days" so I may have to settle for the high 8 or 9 hundred on those.
Project Need For Speed:
Most Wanted: 9/15 = 165/1000
Carbon 2/50 = 25/1000
Undercover 7/50 = 80/1000
Pro Street 40/50 = 865/1000
Shift: 8/29 = 325/1000
Gamer tag? LLiNRAC
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Gamefly + Anxiety = Gamefliety
There's always an akward anxiety for me in between gamefly games. The excitement of playing something new, the worry that it will suck, the fear that some titanic mail screw up will leave me liable for money. The last few games its been particularly brutal as things have seemed to take a little longer than when I first signed up, but how much of that can be laid on the holiday season or my natural impatience is open for debate. Either way, I'm in the lull right now, and that means frequently, often compulsively, I'll log onto gamefly.com and shuffle around a few titles in my queue like i can somehow predict when the mail will get there or what will be "now available" when that happens. Its maddening. Right now it says I have a shot at Borderlands, but failing that I fall nearly 10 games down my queue to Condemned or Rise of the Argonauts. I'm not really in the mood for a garbage game, but there's really no way to guarantee the gamefly game selection machine won't send one along short of taking all the garbage out of my queue and waiting even longer. And how do I feel about waiting longer? Well, see this entire paragraph.
I suppose its just. I'm sure there was some poor soul going through the same rigamarole during the three or four months Prototype sat patiently on my stack of games while I played through Batman and god knows what else. The solution is of course is to upgrade my account to allow more games at a time. A two game rotation would guarantee I always had something not mine to play, but that would also guarantee I had more games lying around my house not being played, which is the habit I'd hoped to skewer in joining gamefly in the first place.
Last time I had a break like this I had Shadow Complex. A gem of a game that turned out to be less of a Super Metroid homage and more of Super Metroid itself, not that there's anything wrong such a thing. Complex's only sin is that it vainly assumes bgm is optional, a demonic trend in gaming I wish I could exorcise. I will agree there are a few situations if not entire genres where the concept of ambient noise as music is passable, but it certainly isn't the 2d adventure genre. Imagine what a game like SOTN, or, in this case Super Metroid would be like without that rich soundtrack lighting the way for you. Kind of loses something, doesn't it? Thankfully, the xbox / zune tag team is adequately equipped to custom soundtrack any game with such an affliction, but that's a crutch not a feature.
This time around I have Mass Effect, which I will freely admit I am finally getting around to soley because of all the ME2 hysteria. Not that I'm much for the gaming "scene" anymore, I just don't want to be so far out of date when people start talking ME3. Nothing against ME of course, I've heard how good it is, first hand from trusted sources in fact. I'm just tired to death of RPGs. RPGs require a mental and often physical commitment I just can't make, not without dragging it out over 100 hours. I don't think there's a script in the world that I could feel good about 100 hours of digestion later. We shall say. Mass Effect makes the bold claim that it is worth not two but THREE playthroughs with its achievements, each time with increasing difficulty. I'm certainly not going to even try, but their hubris says a lot about how good my initial play through oughta be.
In closing, the more I listen to the Afro Samurai Soundtrack, the more I want to say about it. Find a way to defend it, maybe. Sadly, I can't. It's really a bad game. If I had anything interesting to say on the subject, it would be to somehow explain how I can play through Afro twice in pursuit of a 1k, but couldn't even do Mirror's Edge once. Puzzling moreso that when I tried Mirror's Edge, not only was my social circle's gamerscore competition much tighter, I even had a friend who stuck through it for 700 or so points. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood at the time for a crappy game. It was pre baby, and pre a lot of other personal life stresses, so maybe I just had a more discerning mood for what I did with my evenings. Now, burning the 1-2 hours on a crummy game seems perfectly acceptable, the exhaustion of the other 22 somehow numbing the crap.
I suppose its just. I'm sure there was some poor soul going through the same rigamarole during the three or four months Prototype sat patiently on my stack of games while I played through Batman and god knows what else. The solution is of course is to upgrade my account to allow more games at a time. A two game rotation would guarantee I always had something not mine to play, but that would also guarantee I had more games lying around my house not being played, which is the habit I'd hoped to skewer in joining gamefly in the first place.
Last time I had a break like this I had Shadow Complex. A gem of a game that turned out to be less of a Super Metroid homage and more of Super Metroid itself, not that there's anything wrong such a thing. Complex's only sin is that it vainly assumes bgm is optional, a demonic trend in gaming I wish I could exorcise. I will agree there are a few situations if not entire genres where the concept of ambient noise as music is passable, but it certainly isn't the 2d adventure genre. Imagine what a game like SOTN, or, in this case Super Metroid would be like without that rich soundtrack lighting the way for you. Kind of loses something, doesn't it? Thankfully, the xbox / zune tag team is adequately equipped to custom soundtrack any game with such an affliction, but that's a crutch not a feature.
This time around I have Mass Effect, which I will freely admit I am finally getting around to soley because of all the ME2 hysteria. Not that I'm much for the gaming "scene" anymore, I just don't want to be so far out of date when people start talking ME3. Nothing against ME of course, I've heard how good it is, first hand from trusted sources in fact. I'm just tired to death of RPGs. RPGs require a mental and often physical commitment I just can't make, not without dragging it out over 100 hours. I don't think there's a script in the world that I could feel good about 100 hours of digestion later. We shall say. Mass Effect makes the bold claim that it is worth not two but THREE playthroughs with its achievements, each time with increasing difficulty. I'm certainly not going to even try, but their hubris says a lot about how good my initial play through oughta be.
In closing, the more I listen to the Afro Samurai Soundtrack, the more I want to say about it. Find a way to defend it, maybe. Sadly, I can't. It's really a bad game. If I had anything interesting to say on the subject, it would be to somehow explain how I can play through Afro twice in pursuit of a 1k, but couldn't even do Mirror's Edge once. Puzzling moreso that when I tried Mirror's Edge, not only was my social circle's gamerscore competition much tighter, I even had a friend who stuck through it for 700 or so points. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood at the time for a crappy game. It was pre baby, and pre a lot of other personal life stresses, so maybe I just had a more discerning mood for what I did with my evenings. Now, burning the 1-2 hours on a crummy game seems perfectly acceptable, the exhaustion of the other 22 somehow numbing the crap.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Afro Samurai
Its truly refreshing to come across a game OST that's worth listening to, much less worth listening to outside the game. Unfortunately, Afro Samurai has one such OST. If you're into beats and hip hop that is. Afro Samurai actually makes a big deal of point out The RZA was involved with the soundtracks conception, but its clear no one was consulted for anything else.
As a result, everything else in the game from story to the gameplay is a mess. Oh sure, the graphics are delightfully cel-shaded, but the characters all betray their beautiful textures with sticky jerky animations. This may be somewhat intentional with the gameplay's focus on preemptive Matrix dodges, parries, and bullet slicing but all the stylish cuts and screen edits in the world don't take away from the fact that you very rarely have any idea if an enemy is attacking, dodging, taunting or recoiling. Not until they fall to pieces and fountain with blood anyway.
And in that regard the game proves itself fairly functional, slicing enemies to pieces is both easy and enjoyable. But Afro's combat options are unlocked almost randomly, and when you get them they're still sticky to execute with collision weirdness all over the place. He's got a ton of moves with posing and bloodletting and style and grace galore, but they all require between four and nine uninterrupted slashes to execute, a feat rarely allowed by enemies and their assortment of dirty ai tricks. Loaded with old school tactics like striking from camera blind spots, hiding beyond movement barriers, recovering spontaneously from stun, and ignoring the invincible properties of your defense altogether, group battles call upon every bad beat'em up memory I have. This isn't so bad most of the time since life is over abundant and easily recovered, but sooner or later you will be killed by the last enemy in a massive checkpointless melee because he ignored your ordinarily safe basic slash animations.
Now just in case you're saying; "All licensed games play like crap, I'm just here for the story" I assure you they've made steps to louse that up pretty good too. Using flowery nonsensical and totally unskippable dialogues between lifeless stationary characters the game poorly illustrates this tale of violence and revenge. When all is said and done you can comfortably say "Afro killed everybody" but the character relationships, even WHY most of them got dead are lost in a sea of flash backs and dream sequences and Ninja Ninja profanity. Oh sure, hearing Samuel Jackson curse at me can be entertaining, but it doesn't make the how and why any easier to follow. To make matters worse, I have since discovered (in desperately trying to reconcile the gaps in my understanding) that most of my confusion resulted from the games plot being outright changed from the canon.
Now I don't think a bunch of suits threw money at game-izing the Afro Samurai property because they thought its story needed work. I don't care what "approvals" were gotten, it takes serious stones to totally 180 key elements of somebody else's work. Granted, some of it makes sense to insert a level here or a boss fight there, but to fundamentally change the ending? There's actually a fairly amusing point in the game where right before something important doesn't happen Ninja Ninja remarks "I know you seen how this is in the TV Show, but this ain't no TV Show" but since at the time I hadn't seen the TV Show, so the significance was totally wasted on me. In fact, it seems as if the entire closing chapter of the story was changed for absolutely no reason.
So, the bottom line is. Afro Samurai is a pretty crappy game with great music. And I'm gonna have to watch the darned series anyway because the good people at Surge couldn't even be bothered to leave the story intact. Hours invested, with all the abilities unlocked and a full understanding of all the combats glitches, you can have a lot of fun precision slicing people to hip hop beats, but that feels more like an apologist attitude than an optimists. At the very least, its a (fairly) easy 1k addition to my gamerscore, but that still wouldn't comfort me 10 hours of my life later if I'd spent a single red cent on the game. It didn't make me physically ill to play like say, Mirror's Edge, but a number of times I did catch myself saying "Why am I still playing this?" So, I'm sorry Samuel Jackson, big thumbs down.
As a result, everything else in the game from story to the gameplay is a mess. Oh sure, the graphics are delightfully cel-shaded, but the characters all betray their beautiful textures with sticky jerky animations. This may be somewhat intentional with the gameplay's focus on preemptive Matrix dodges, parries, and bullet slicing but all the stylish cuts and screen edits in the world don't take away from the fact that you very rarely have any idea if an enemy is attacking, dodging, taunting or recoiling. Not until they fall to pieces and fountain with blood anyway.
And in that regard the game proves itself fairly functional, slicing enemies to pieces is both easy and enjoyable. But Afro's combat options are unlocked almost randomly, and when you get them they're still sticky to execute with collision weirdness all over the place. He's got a ton of moves with posing and bloodletting and style and grace galore, but they all require between four and nine uninterrupted slashes to execute, a feat rarely allowed by enemies and their assortment of dirty ai tricks. Loaded with old school tactics like striking from camera blind spots, hiding beyond movement barriers, recovering spontaneously from stun, and ignoring the invincible properties of your defense altogether, group battles call upon every bad beat'em up memory I have. This isn't so bad most of the time since life is over abundant and easily recovered, but sooner or later you will be killed by the last enemy in a massive checkpointless melee because he ignored your ordinarily safe basic slash animations.
Now just in case you're saying; "All licensed games play like crap, I'm just here for the story" I assure you they've made steps to louse that up pretty good too. Using flowery nonsensical and totally unskippable dialogues between lifeless stationary characters the game poorly illustrates this tale of violence and revenge. When all is said and done you can comfortably say "Afro killed everybody" but the character relationships, even WHY most of them got dead are lost in a sea of flash backs and dream sequences and Ninja Ninja profanity. Oh sure, hearing Samuel Jackson curse at me can be entertaining, but it doesn't make the how and why any easier to follow. To make matters worse, I have since discovered (in desperately trying to reconcile the gaps in my understanding) that most of my confusion resulted from the games plot being outright changed from the canon.
Now I don't think a bunch of suits threw money at game-izing the Afro Samurai property because they thought its story needed work. I don't care what "approvals" were gotten, it takes serious stones to totally 180 key elements of somebody else's work. Granted, some of it makes sense to insert a level here or a boss fight there, but to fundamentally change the ending? There's actually a fairly amusing point in the game where right before something important doesn't happen Ninja Ninja remarks "I know you seen how this is in the TV Show, but this ain't no TV Show" but since at the time I hadn't seen the TV Show, so the significance was totally wasted on me. In fact, it seems as if the entire closing chapter of the story was changed for absolutely no reason.
So, the bottom line is. Afro Samurai is a pretty crappy game with great music. And I'm gonna have to watch the darned series anyway because the good people at Surge couldn't even be bothered to leave the story intact. Hours invested, with all the abilities unlocked and a full understanding of all the combats glitches, you can have a lot of fun precision slicing people to hip hop beats, but that feels more like an apologist attitude than an optimists. At the very least, its a (fairly) easy 1k addition to my gamerscore, but that still wouldn't comfort me 10 hours of my life later if I'd spent a single red cent on the game. It didn't make me physically ill to play like say, Mirror's Edge, but a number of times I did catch myself saying "Why am I still playing this?" So, I'm sorry Samuel Jackson, big thumbs down.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)