I finished Persona 4 last night (and may I say TWITCH regarding that March 20th “plot” “twist”; really anyone who cites jRPG’s as having “good stories” needs to have their head smashed in with a Russian novel) and since between holidays and playing very, very long games it has been several months since I just stocked up on a pile of cheap games and fiddled. So I took my thirty dollars and got:
No Romance of the Three Kingdoms games since they didn’t have any that I didn’t already own (even the ________ Warriors Empires games which are their more action based descendants).
I did get Ace Combat 4. I’ve been hesitant to play the series since a flight sim on a console, even a light flight sim, is something that I just don’t see the platform as ideal for. Still, they are popular so if I’m going to gripe about them I need to play at least one.
I found out the other day that the next Marvel action/RPG would be based on Civil War (sadly that’s Marvel’s Civil War not the US Civil War). Since I’m not looking forward to controlling guys who deport US citizens to hold them indefinitely without trial for not filing paperwork (and then force them into the military when they do) I thought I’d look at the alternative with Justice League Heroes for the XBox. I’ve heard it has problems but unless Superman goes around lobotomizing his foes with his heat vision it won’t grate as much.
For something other than trying out for a few hours and deciding that I don’t like it I got The Bard’s Tale. I’ve heard the recent revival was better than one might expect. Yeah it’ll be nothing like the old series but in retrospect the old series wasn’t really that good (played and beat all three so I can say that).
Finally I looked around for something that could be so goofy that I would laugh myself to death and settled on Dragonball Z: Budokai: Tenkaichi 2. There’s about ninety of those Dragonball games out there and I don’t have any of them so it fills that hole in my collection. All I hope to get for my $6 is a hysterically bad game.
XI? Pssh. I’m still hooked on RoTK X. I’m in the middle of a game where I started as a retainer for Ding Yuan, rebelled, and now I’m desperately trying to solidify my position in the north. It goes without saying that Cao Cao and Yuan Shao are total assholes.
If you can do DW4 in under 24hrs, even with an emulator, my hat is off to you sir.
I’m playing the DS version now (much more playable, mostly due to the fact that I’m not playing on a 20yr old NES) and it brings back memories.
Finally I got around to starting Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner. I picked it up when it came out 2.5yrs ago, but never got around to playing it. The gumshoe detective style combined with good ole’ MegaTen stuff makes for an interesting experience.
(Of course I’m playing NetHack and T.o.M.E. in the background. 'Cuz I’m hardcore and all. And this is a rather easy semester… )
I wouldn’t call the Ace Combat series a flight sim more like an action flight game. Even something like Blazing Angels is more action oriented than sim-oriented. And for that they’re overall pretty great games. Wouldn’t compare them to say a Microsoft’s Flight Sim or even a Jane’s WWII, just like I wouldn’t compare Need for Speed or Project Gotham Racing to a real driving sim (I’d reserve that for games like Gran Turismo and Forza)
I hadn’t even heard about the Justice League Heroes game. (looking it up I see it was XBOX, not x360 as I’d assumed). How does it compare to Marvel Ultimate Alliance?
I played a bit of one of the Budokai games, there’ve been like infinity-billion of them though so I honestly couldn’t tell you which one. A roommate back in college had it. It was a decent game for maybe 5 minutes until you realize every match is exactly the same thing and whoever got the first hit was bound to win simply because the entire game came down to player A doing a hit combo than ending with a special, which left him open so player B would do a hit combo and end in a special, which left him open so player A would do a hit combo than… you get the point. I’ll think it’ll be worth the $6 though
Lately, I’ve been playing Far Cry 2 on 360. Yes, I am experiencing the corrupted saved game bug. As of my last uncorrupted save, I am 54% finished with the game. It seems I can’t advance any further without getting corrupted saves.
Far Cry 2 is great fun, and I’m currently just roaming around experimenting with different weapons that are outside of my normal style of play (favorite loadout: Uzi, Dragunov, Carl G Rocket Launcher). UbiSoft is really slacking on the patch: there have been reports of the bug since October and UbiSoft finally acknowledged the problem on January 22.
If Ubi doesn’t fix their mess soon, I’m going back to finish Fallout 3.
Well a lot of the game’s supporters seem to think of it as realistic. In fairness I have noticed many discrepancies between what Joe Q. Gamer considers realistic and what normal people consider realistic.
Poorly. Ultimate Alliance still had some problems with different scale of characters (guys who could punch out Thor and still did normal damage to to Elektra, for example) but it wasn’t on show as much as in Justice League. Superman gets hurt by walking over fire on the ground, for God’s sake. Batman can punch out Brainiac robots. Putting Superman and Batman beside each other has always been problematic but it really feels wrong in the game.
The characters are pokey as well. I’ve only played the introduction with Superman and Batman but it felt like they were walking in molasses. There’s a lot fewer enemies involved and they take longer to defeat despite the combat system being very similar. And if one of your characters gets knocked down there’s no way to just go back to the beginning of the section except by killing off the other character; the menu option to restart takes you back to the very beginning of that section.
So: slower paced action, even more questionable character set up, and fewer characters in general (there’s about half a dozen unlockables; Aquaman, Green Arrow, Hawkgirl, Kyle Rainer, Hal Jordan, and the Huntress). If you’re really desperate for your superhero RPG fix then give it a whirl but I can’t recommend it.
Oh and the voice acting is terrible.
I haven’t reached that point yet where I can just exchange combos and the game strikes me as a surprising near miss. There’s some fairly good ideas (the fighting system reminds me of the Psychic Force series which I enjoyed) tied to a lot of bad ones (I’d love to sit whoever came up with the interface and force them to watch loading screens over and over again that don’t really lead anywhere). Unfortunately all the characters really feel the same. They’ve got the same punches, the same kicks, the same energy blasts (with different graphic overlays on them), and so on. The adventure portion is the best section of the game since you just go to a new arena and beat the snot out of the next guy with a few odd events to spice things up but I was getting worn out on it rather quickly.
My reaction was: “Hey, this actually isn’t half-bad!” and then as I spent more time with the game it became more “Hmm… it’s not half-good either.” There’s honestly some real wasted potential in the game. If I believed for a second that they could straighten out the fighters to make them more distinctive, perhaps clean up the fighting controls a little bit (you have to have the reflexes of a pixie stick addicted eight year old to pull off some of the moves), tweak the combat engine just a little to make it more cinematic (the best thing in the game, really; it could have used just a little bit more there), and cleaned up the interface so you don’t keep switching to slow loading pointless menus and barren landscapes every time you press a button then I’d get the new game. Unfortunately this is a cheaply produced licensed game series that just keeps running on its name so we know that won’t happen.
Oh, and Goku has an attack that if he misses and it hits the ground he blows up the planet. That made me laugh a lot.
The latest Prince of Persia. Fun game, and the creators should be praised to high heaven for coming up with a way of “dying” which does not force you to go through three or more load screens to get back to the game. Also, the prince is fun, and not an angst-ridden, “deep” and sad creature he was through most of the last trilogy.
Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven was just released on Gametap!
I love that game. It’s basically GTA3+ with 1920s-30s cars, clothes and guns. It’s not quite as open; you either play through the mission system (and you have essentially no control over what order to do them in) or you can play “Free Ride” which is like GTA without the story missions.
There are some incredibly difficult (and frustrating) missions, and only one difficulty setting. There’s one involving an auto race which was horrendously difficult in the first game- it took me something like 30 attempts to beat it, and driving games are My Thing- which is infamous for basically making 80% of the people playing the game give up in disgust. However, the version on GT includes a patch which allows you to change the difficulty for that one mission.
Wizard101 - an online, multiplayer, Wizard school adventure with collectible card magic, wizard duels, and far off worlds! Simply the most addictive game ever. Free to play, but option to pay for additional features.
Trackmania - Mulitplayer racing, for free.
(Curiously awaiting Shootmania (an FPS) and Questmania (an RPG) from the same people.)
I’m not currently playing any games other than an occasional baseball game with Wii sports.
Sorry about not getting back to you sooner. It’s okay. I was trying to play more with my wife, but she doesn’t seem to want to play long enough for it to get its hooks into her.
I’ve tried playing it on my own, and while it is fun, it lacks some of the zing without real people. The AI seems a little suspect, either the computer players gang up on you or they ignore you altogether. Dokapon Kingdom offers a lot of opportunities to influence the die roll, so that is good. They even have the opportunity to buy warps. Granted they’re mostly random warps, but this is a game based on chance movement.
Plus there are plenty of moments of whimsical humor (and cutthroat gameplay) to keep the game interesting.
TitanQuest on the PC via Gametap. Also playing through Gran Turismo 2 again using ePSXe, since my Playstation is in storage somewhere and doesn’t work anyway.
I just finished playing through Tachyon: The Fringe again thanks to PopeJewish’s thread.
Picked up Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge a couple weeks ago. I’ve played the first three chapters in Dead Space. Just finished X-Com: Apocalypse Monday. Debating whether or not to try another of the X-Com series.
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