Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Halo 3: OMFG

Halo 3: ODST
I finally finished stopped playing ODST. It's been a while and my memory is a little faulty so this might be kind of short. I remember liking the game. VISR mode was cool. The Audiophile achievement reminded me of ilovebees.

I was holding on to ODST so I could play the Halo: Reach Beta. After that I was trying to get all of the firefight achievements alone cause I have no friends and firefight has no hoppers. After getting 6 of them I decided to quit. I'm just not into it any more. These things take me a while. "Firefight: Windward" took me 3 days. And since you can't stop during a firefight I had to leave the 360 on the entire time. What I forgot was, being on Live times out. So I got over 600000 points and no one will ever know. My achievement isn't even dated. I hate that.

43/47a - 930/1000g

Monday, June 21, 2010

Legend Of Ruin: A War In The Future

Darksiders
The first thing I noticed about Darksiders was that it doesn't have the annoying quick time events (QTE's) that God of War does. If I want to open a door I hit (B) and it opens. If I want to open a chest I hit (B) and it opens. If I want to kill an enemy I hit (B) and they die. I don't have to furiously tap a button just to open a box. And I don't have to enter a cheat code every time I want to kill a boss.


I loved the controls in general. (X)=Sword, (Y)=Secondary Weapon, (B)=Grab, (A)=Jump, (RT)=Equipment. It doesn't have a lot of combos but I don't think it should. There are 3 types of third-person hack and slash games.
     The Devil May Cry type where the focus is on combat and you just tear into waves of enemies.
          Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden fall into this type. They should have a huge amount of combos.
     The God of War type where the focus is more on puzzle solving.
          Darksiders falls into this type. They should have a huge amount of items.
     The Infamous type open world GTA-style where the focus is on completing missions.
          Prototype falls into this type. They should have a huge amount of attacks.
It's why I think comparisons between Bayonetta and God of War are unfair. On that note I think I like Darksiders better than God of War.

I definitely get the comparisons to the Zelda games, specifically the "Get Item in Dungeon, Traverse Dungeon with Item, Kill Boss with Item". And the Portal Gun Voidwalker is just awesome. You get to shoot portals through portals.

Liked the story a lot. I'm a sucker for anything loosely based on religion. And then you get to the ending three "fireballs" come hurdling toward you and then the game ends that's not a cliffhanger that's giving me blue thumbs.

My only problems with this game are the statistics (see achievements) the ruin controls (they're too horse like, it floats on fire but still takes 5 seconds to turn around) and the leveling curve. This problem is not specific to this game but any game where you have to level up that is not a jrpg. If I've found all of the secret locations/collected all of the secret items/fought all of the secret bosses and there is nothing left for me to do but kill the final boss and end the game I shouldn't be less than half way leveled. I get it if I was blasting through the game and not finding any secrets but I did everything you could do in this game. I spent half day leveling up my weapons, 2 levels each. And that is after I already had the experience boosting items on my weapons. My wrath abilities were all at level 1 and I still had unused vessel slots. You need money to pay for all of these things. But when you beat the boss in an area the number of enemies greatly diminishes.

I'm missing 4 achievements:
     The True Horseman: I forgot to play on Apocalyptic my first time and I didn't want to play a second time.
     Improvised Kills: I have no idea how long it would take to get. Here's a gripe I have with these kinds of achievements. If I have to do something more than 10 times I want a counter in my statistics so I can check how much I have left to go.
     Dark Rider: See above.
     BFA: You have to get all of the other achievements to unlock this one.

850/1000g - 39/43a

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Proto Hype

[Prototype]
I was eagerly anticipating Prototype, especially since the 360 didn't get Infamous.

My favorite part of the game was the story, or rather the back story told through the web of intrigue events. The story told through the cut scenes was kind of meh leading up to a "sort of" interesting twist.

I liked the varied abilities in the game although I rarely used anything other than whipfist and blade for combat. Patsy is one of the coolest powers I've seen in a video game. While disguised as military you can can convince other military that any human target is "you" in disguise and they will shoot it. The power takes time to recharge but if you have patience you can kill all but one person in a base without getting caught.

I had problems with some of the controls. The air dash is not too accurate. When just traversing the city it's not too much of a problem but when doing movement events it can really screw you up. Also glide doesn't seem fast enough to get around the city and running is even slower. Think Crackdown without cars to travel long distances.

Collectibles AGAIN! There are three kinds of collectibles in this game.

-Hints: Orbs that give you the same hints given throughout the game and on the loading screen anyways. And there are 50 Hint Orbs but not 50 hints so the hints you get repeat.

-Landmarks: These seem like they would be kind of cool. I was hoping they would show you the cool places around the city, buildings and the like. Well New York, must have some famous trash because 75% of these things are between two dumpsters.

-Consumes: These are interesting. They fill up your Web of Intrigue and unlock the backstory of the game. And as I suggested in one of my previous rants about collectibles they have unique names because they're people. But they are almost as bad as the stunt rings in crackdown. They don't always spawn. Since they're normal people running around they can be randomly killed. Even before you get to them. They don't always respawn.

I didn't finish all of the achievements for this game.

-Revenge Revisited would require me to play the game on hard which I have no intention of doing.

-Hard To Kill would require me to play the game a third time on easy. Who does multiple playthroughs of a sandbox game?

-Pt would require me to get Platinum in all events. I got Au (Gold in all events) just to prove I could. It took me a couple days. Out of 50 events I have Platinum in 15, so...no. Don't get me started on Radical

-Trail Of Corpses would require me to kill 53596 infected. I currently have 8964 infected killed on an entire playthrough of the game.

36/40 a 790/1000g
I did break 30000 gamerscore with this game.