Borderlands

Wow...  Once in a while a game comes along that works on so many levels and while at the same time challenges conventional thinking about how things aught to be done.  Well, friends that game is here and it's called "Borderlands" by Gearbox Software.

From the various animation cycles of the "claptrap" robot being silly at the main menu screen to the desperate cries of the unsuspecting victim of an incendiary round as he burns away in to nothingness, the level of finish in this game is quite amazing.  In a recent interview, Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox Software mentioned that it took his company more then three years to create "Borderlands".  The now well known "restart" of the project aside, the amount of time and care the fine folks at Gearbox Software put in to the game really shows.  The comic book graphic style really makes it a pleasure to play this game set in a rather desolate planet in the fringes of the galaxy.  It deserves comparisons to another game set in a rather bleak environment, "Fallout 3", another game I finished.  I recall the sense of depression which came over me wondering the seemingly never ending scenes of destruction in "Fallout 3".  By contrast, the whimsically dilapidated environments of "Borderlands" are a joy to look at and adds much to the enjoyment of playing the game.

This doesn't mean that "Borderlands" is just pretty to look at. It's really fun to play as well.  Earlier on in the game's publicity cycle, some critics were skeptical about the 1.7 million different kinds of weapons that are supposed to be in the game almost dismissing it as a gimmick.  Well, it's a gimmick but what a gimmick it is.  There is a certain pleasure in searching high and low for that one gun/mod/shields that will one up the one that I have equipped right now.  Comparing the hundreds of different items, most of which never repeat, and figuring out what would work best for the way one's decided to play the game engaged the pack rat in me like no other game since the Diablo series.  And that's another thing.  There are so many different ways to play this game, it's amazing!

I finished the game playing as "Mordecai", a hunter/sniper/gunslinger type character.  Notice how I gave three different types for a single playable character?  That's because each of the four playable characters' RPG style skill tree allows for three completely different styles of play which you can choose to pursue singularly or mix and match to your liking as you earn levels.  I ended up putting all my points in to the sniper category of Mordecai's skill tree.  By the end of the game I was headshotting bad guys from half a mile away with my incendiary sniper rifle setting on fire the guy who was standing next to the guy whose head I just blew off his body.  Sounds kind of sick but actually it's pretty "sick" when you see it happen and definitely makes you want to play some more so you can see it again. :D  Immediately after finishing as a sniper, I restarted the game as "Roland", a soldier because I sold so many cool looking rifles and shotguns while playing as Mordecai that I was jonesing to see what these awesome rifles could do.  Let me tell you I wasn't disappointed.  I'll be playing through again as a soldier, then as a siren, then as a Berserker, then maybe play through again using branches of each character's skill tree which I didn't investigate.  Yeah.  This game is that good!

There are a few minor things which would have really brought this game up to digital crack status.  In a way they should have gone "full Diablo" by offering randomized levels.  I suppose that could have messed with the graphic style of the game a bit but I think adding that extra level of replayability would have brought the game to another level, as high a level as the game is already.  Man, talk about never putting the game down if they had done that.  Another thing is the whole treking back and forth to the shop to sell off the mountain of loot one quickly gathers.  This isn't really a "Borderland" issue of course.  Even Diablo suffered from this "scroll of town portal" issue.  I guess I wish  someone would make a game where the shop owner gives you a transporter or something that makes it possible for you to sell the stuff where you're standing instead of having to walk over to some arbitrary place to do it.  Oh, and speaking of loot, it would also have been nice if there was weapon crafting in the game.  I mean, the game has 1.7 million different possibilities right?  Why not make it so a player can pay to have his dream weapon be made by some gunsmith?  Hey~  there is an idea for an expansion pack. :)

But again, these are minor issues.  I mean I can pine on and on about how much good there is in this game but I think you get the picture.  But, don't just take my word for it.  Go out and get it, rent it from Gamefly, what ever, PLAY IT!  You won't be disappointed.  A definite thumbs up from me, and you know I don't give those away easily.  And if you're able to pull yourself away from the game long enough to have an opinion about it then by all means leave a comment about what an awesome time you're having playing the game right here! :D

p.s. btw, I bought this game from Gamefly.  See, what they say works.  You rent it, you play it, you like it, you buy it.  Haha! :D

Resident Evil 5

Let me begin this post by saying I loved "Resident Evil 4". It was one of the few games I actually finished on my Nintendo GameCube, the other being "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess". Did I ever mention that I rarely ever finish games? Well, I don't. So it's a pretty big deal for me when and if I do because it means that I really really liked the game. Well, guess what? I never finished "Resident Evil 5", not even close. I barely got through the first level as a matter of fact, not because I couldn't beat the thing. No. I didn't finish it because I wanted to take the disk out and beat someone else over the head with it, namely the people who developed the damned thing.

What on earth happened?!? "Resident Evil 4" was so good, how can 5 be so bad while looking so amazing? Well, for one thing, they kept somethings I hated about "Resident Evil 4". Why can't I, the player, pull out my knife and stab the bad guys while running around when the bad guys are dancing circles around me with melee weapons in their hands? And the inventory system? To be perfectly honest, I don't recall exactly how the inventory system worked in "Resident Evil 4" but this is like the future! What is with only having nine slots in my inventory? Wait, it's starting to come back to me now... Didn't I have a suit case or something I can make bigger as I went along in RE 4? And to make things even worse, I can't pick up a new weapon if I don't have room in my inventory. Well, how about taking a clue from pretty much every shooting game out there right now and throwing away my current weapon so I can pick up the new one? Gaaahh!

But that, of course, is not all. Let me look down here at my notes here... Oh, yeah. Story and acting. Okay... This is a game we're talking about here but seriously, is Chris Redfield so stupid that he can watch a tentacly alien bug thing being stuffed down a victim's mouth then walk up to the victim and ask him if he's okay? NO, HE'S NOT FRIGGIN' OKAY! HE JUST HAD A TENTACLY THING STUFFED DOWN HIS THROAT! Geesus, man!

And the AI partner... Talk about an item hoarding medicine wasting stupid b... Well, lets just say that when I played, she constantly got in my way slowing me down, beat me to a bunch of ammo, then proceeded to waste all the ammo at what ever came her way. And you'd think, at the rate she was going through ammo she's actually hit something and be okay but no. She always ended up getting her ass beat and asked me for help constantly. Not that I needed to help her really since I could just leave her behind and she would "magically" be okay. So, I have to baby sit this dumb ass while I can barely move myself. Yup, I said it. The controls in this game blows so much chunks it's not funny. The player character is bulky and unresponsive. It almost feels like they've dumbed down the enemy AI because the player couldn't possibly control their character in time to effectively deal with any enemies which might attack in any realistic amount of time. They also seems to do this weird blur effect just as the character begins to finally respond to one's input, almost like trying to mask the fact that the frame rate is not high enough or something. And looking at this enough makes one sick. It certainly gave my stomach some trouble and according to some people I talked to I wasn't the only one.

But all that aside, the single most unforgivable thing for me was the very first level, or the end there of. Basically, you're trapped in this confined space with no possible chance of beating all the enemies because they keep re-spawning. The reason for this is because the first level is actually a kind of triggered timed event meaning unless you fight your way out to a certain spot and hang around there for a while you will not beat this level and there is no clear indication that this is the case. This is the first level for god sakes. You are literally mobbed by dozens of enemies, one of whom basically is a tank who can't be killed, who will not stop until you trip the timer and the timer runs out. What's even crazier is that an enemy could be seconds away from killing you but if the timer runs out and it triggers the "exit event", suddenly all enemies in the level will disappear and you'll be allowed to move ahead. I mean, the game is so inconsistent when it comes to communicating to the player what it expects the player to do, I'm not sure if the game designers are being condescending towards players or over estimating them. Maybe they're doing both but what ever they might've been up to, the game feels jarring and ultimately not fun. And a videogame that's not fun is not worth playing in my book.

So, you have been fore warned. I actually gave this game two tries to get through to me and it failed miserably both times. A big thumbs down from me. Try at your own risk. And if you do, by all means feel free to share your pain with the rest of us by leaving a comment here telling us what it was like for you. :)

Bond 007: Quantum of Solace

Okay... In a word, fail.

Let's see. So, right off the bat in the very first level, instead of being a bad ass, 007 can't even hop over a fence to get back to his car which is now mysteriously not there for some strange reason anyway. Yes, 007, can't even hop a fence. Right...

Then I get right up on a guy and am told to press down on the right stick to perform a melee attack then press one of four buttons to complete the attack. Ok. Cool idea, and maybe even a cool animation of 007 taking out some bad guy Bourne Identity style but... where is the gun 007 was holding just before he started kicking the empty handed ass out of the enemy? They didn't even try to have it somewhere on his hip or anything. It's just not there at all, not even on the floor. Not that that would have made any more sense for 007 to ditch his weapon every time he wanted to karate chop someone in the nuts but at least the weapon would not have disappeared in to thin air and came back again.

And then, for some strange reason, the opening sequence which plays after the intro level is this recreation of what I take are scenes from the movie. They have the movie license. Why didn't they just show me clips of the movie? Why am I being forced to watch cheap CG knock offs? Then it occured to me. If they actually showed you how cool 007 really is by showing you clips of the actual movie, it would make the barely B grade graphics of the game that much more unattractive to look at. So, show the player a bunch of CG reenactments who are on par with the actual game play and the player won't realize he's watching terrible graphics. Well, what can I say, it didn't work on me. The graphics were terrible anyway.

But, even with all these faults, I kept playing for a few levels after that just because I do enjoy shooting virtual enemies with virtual weapons even if the game as a whole may be a bit on the lame side. Then the game did something a console game must never do. It crashed my 360! Yup. right in the middle of a level, BAM!, dead stop. And that was it for me. Not only did they not bother to make a decent game, they apparently didn't bother play testing it much either. You know, it's moments like this which makes me happy that I'm a Gamefly renter. Bond 007: Quantum of Solace went right back in the envelope it came in and was in the mailbox on its way back to Gamefly never to be seen by me again. Thumbs down, Quantum of Souless, and thank God I didn't have to pay full price to find out. Woohoo~, Gamefly! :D

Star Ocean: Last Hope

"I don't know why I'm such a glutton for punishment..." That was the thought which went through my head many times as I "played" "Star Ocean: Last Hope" the latest in the "Star Ocean" series of JRPGs for my XBox 360. I say I'm a glutton for punishment because I tried to play other games in the Star Ocean series before and found them to be vastly underwhelming if not down right painful to sit through but I just couldn't help myself but give "Star Ocean: Last Hope" a try because, you know they might have fixed things, made things better, etc. Yeah, right.

Let me just start by saying this. If you "play" this game, you will not get to anything even remotely resembling gameplay until... 50 MINUTES after the game "starts"! Yes. 50 minutes and 53 seconds to be exact in my case. Oh, is there any interactivity? Sure. You get to run around on a ship and "talk" to people which really doesn't tell you anything, sit through a boring tutorial of how the battle system works, and what not but Once you've talked to the requisite people and triggered the actual intro, it's literally 30+ minutes before you get to walk around controlling your character and explore the planet you're headed for. So what's going on during the 30+ minutes I'm forced to wait before I "kick ass?" Basically some of the most cringe inducing badly written and directed spikey haired CG anime you've ever been forced to sit through. And the "Star Ocean" series is known for this. This is supposed to be part of the "goodness". I beg to differ and I'll bet you will too. There is nothing like being force fed sugar when all you want is some steak. :p

But tear inducing CG sequences aren't the only thing that makes playing "Star Ocean: The Last Hope" such a cringe inducing experience. Get this. You can't quit out of the game without forcing it to go to the dashboard by pressing the big "X" button. How do I know that? Because during my 50 minute "intro" I often tried to find a way to get the hell out of it but just couldn't. Call me stupid. I guess I could have just pulled the power on my 360. Or maybe that's how they keep you watching. If you can't quit the game then you must watch, no?

"Star Ocean: Last Hope" also suffers from the one thing which of all things JRPG drives me crazy. That's right, kids. There is no saving out of save points. Really? What is this, the 80's? This game was released 2009 for god sakes on a X friggin' Box 360! The only reason why there were save points in the past was because of technical limitations. Those limitations are no longer there now so why still do things this way? Talk about having their heads stuck in their asses... in the past.

But the annoyances don't stop there. For instance, there is this weird game design choice they made where after you've pressed "A" to get rid of all the post battle information, you have to press "A" again to get out of battle mode. Why am I being made to press the button again when I clearly showed that I was done looking at the information and wanted to move on. It's so unintuitive, I sometimes found myself waiting for the game to bring me back to the overworld since I pressed the button to get rid of all post combat data. And speaking of combat, this game has the combat rigged so that if I know an enemy down on its ass I can't attack it while it's on the ground and going through its "getting back up" animation. But that's the whole point of knocking the enemy down in the first place, so I can stomp the s**t out of it when it's down. If I can't stomp on it while it's down, why let me knock it down at all?

But the thing which really pushed me over the edge and finally got me to put down the controller and press the eject button on my 360 was this. The game does not make it possible for you to shop until three and a half hours in to the game! Yes, you have to finish the initial mission, with a pretty tough boss character at the end no less, just with items you scrounge off of enemies you beat and "harvest points" you "harvest". And there are no heal spells or anything to replenish your character's health except for a single refresh point towards the end of the mission which btw you loose access to since you have to "jump down" a ramp to get to the point which lets you close out the mission. So I was rather relieved when a totally new character showed up with a flying contraption because I figured, "great, now I get to go back to base and will at least get to save". Uh, uh. I get hit with the boss, nearly die several times, end up using all my items, then, THEN!, the idiot new character sends the flying contraption away(!) and I'm forced to run all the way through the level I've just had to fight my way through back to base while avoiding all enemies the whole way there because there hasn't been a single shops all this time that I could have spent the mountain of cash I'm sitting on which I collected off the alien monsters I've been killing along the way. Yeah, what a way to make any sense...

So back in the relative safety of the base was when I decided I'm not gonna take it anymore. Maybe it's their way of weeding out the true believers from the riff raff like me but really, after finally getting to the point where the game actually "starts", I was done. Hey, what can I say. I tried but in the end, it just wasn't meant to be. I swear there will be no more "Star Ocean"s in my future. A massive thumbs down from me.

Modern Warfare 2 campaign changed in Japan?

According to this story on Joystiq, they actually changed the same so if you shoot anybody during the Russian airport mission you... lose? Who? What? Why?!?

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/12/04/modern-warfare-2s-poor-translation-censorship-in-japan-draws-i/

Btw, last.fm on XBox Live ROCKS!

If you're a gold member and haven't downloaded the last.fm app you're totally missing out. I'm writing this with last.fm going in the background and it's amazing! So, what are you waiting for? Go get it already! You'll be hitting kicking youself in the ass yelling why you didn't do it earlier~!

Halo ODST

Oh, Halo, how the mighty have fallen...

Halo O.D.S.T. might have had a nice live action ad on the television but it's at best a "Meh" in my book. I mean, making me run back and forth in the same map as different characters just so I can unlock the next part of some "I've heard it before" storyline? Not cool. Not cool at all.

The fighting is the same ol'Halo we've all grown to love and maybe that's the problem. We're in the "Modern Warfare" era now and being unable to run just seems so odd to me. And I kept holding down the left trigger to look down the sight making myself loose grenades for no reason. Then there's the whole "Brutes fire then sidestep" A.I. which makes fighting pretty predictable to the point of being, well..., boring.

I guess there were some "improvements", like the combat view or whatever it's called. The thing about this view is that it makes everything look like its cartoon shaded with lines all around it and I don't necessarily want to see the Halo world in this way. If I wanted to play a cartoon shaded game then I'll go find a cartoon shaded game. Then there's the fact that the combat view is basically useless during "daytime" making everything blow out. So you get used to being able to see the enemy outlined, then all of a sudden you can't. Why? Because some asshole game designer said so. Oh, yeah, I'll definitely mention more about asshole game designers in the future. My theory is there is always at least one asshole game designer at each game company who thinks their mission is to torment the player because they have nothing else that gives their life meaning otherwise. I'll definitely be pointing these out in future reviews.

Anyway, I normally stop playing a game because games make me mad but in the case of Halo O.D.S.T., I just got bored of it and, at the end of one of the story segments, I just put it down and didn't feel the need to pick it up again. And since I didn't pick it up again and is about to return it to Gamefly, I won't even get to try the multiplayer. This to me is indeed very sad since I stayed up all night to play Halo 2, and used to own 2 Xboxes and six controller just so I can have an extra machine to play Halo on when my friends and I used to get together for LAN parties. Sorry, Bungie. It's not quite a "Oh, hell no!" but a no it is. Ahhh, how times have changed...

Wolfenstein

As you may have read in the previous post about why I started this blog, Wolfenstein... has problems.

First off, it's very muddy. Yes, muddy like it looks muddy, there is very little contrast in the lighting. Everything is like a shade of brown, some reddish, some yelloish, all ugly. It all looks the same. In a word, boring.

And the game handles very sluggishly. Now, I've shot my share of MP40s in videogames and I gotta tell ya, this was the slowest most sluggish MP40s I've ever shot. The Kar98s were down right unusable. Perhaps it's more "realistic" that way but really? I'm going to be shooting supernatural Nazi zombies or whatever and you're worried about making the gun more realistic? I'm sorry but not on my time.

And the enemy AI is dumb as F***. The same goes for friendly AI too. Oh, yeah, let me just charge right up in to enemy fire and die on you. The friendly AI which was supposed to "lead" me to the truck to get to the next level died half way there. Now, that's story telling there for ya. Realistic~. Again, sorry, not on my time.

Then the game expects you to sneak around and take guys out quietly. So I crouch and sneak up on a guy and press melee. What does B.J. Blazkowicz do? In stead of taking the Nazi out all cool Splinter Cell style, he pistol whips the Nazi on the butt and kills him. REALLY? ON THE BUTT? Sorry, again, not on my time.

This is all on top of grenades that bounce around like they're made of rubber and the constant swaying from left to right because, again, it's more "realistic" for your view to sway left and right like that. After all, you do that when you run for real. Really? You wanna know what's real? The lunch I just barfed up on my carpet because of your "real" sway is real, not the arbitrary way you're making your view sway left and right.

So, yeah. Literally thirty minutes was long enough for me. "Wolfenstein" gets a definite "Oh, hell no!" from me. Try at your own risk.

Why start reviewing videogames?

I was just playing the latest, as of the end of 2009, "Wolfenstein". I take it that it is a game running on one's ID's engines, Doom 3 perhaps?, and just couldn't help myself but compare it to another game running on one of ID's engines, "Modern Warfare 2". Now, I own "Modern Warfare 2", and after playing through maybe 30 minutes of "Wolfenstein", I couldn't help myself but see why I own "Modern Warfare 2" but rented "Wolfenstein" from Gamefly, a service I much adore and after, especially after a game like "Wolfenstein", is much thankful for.

Then it occurred to me, there are games I play straight through the night and there are games I play for thirty minutes. Why? Because the games that I only play for thirty minutes makes me mad and more stressed out where as games I play straight through the night relieves my stress even after I lost out on a night of sleep. This fact is very important for me because playing games, in my opinion, should be about relieving stress, not causing more. And that's why Gamefly is so great. Let me explain.

Gamefly is great because it lets me weed out the chaff from the wheat of videogames letting me only reward those game developers who crafted wonderful gaming experiences which relieves my stress by then paying full price to buy their games which I always do while leaving those who obviously wasted my time by making a game which only added to my stress with what ever tiny fee Gamefly pays them. Hey, I personally don't think they don't even deserve that but a deal is a deal, right?

So, go get Gamefly. And while you're at it, let me help you out while helping myself by venting. Let me share what games relieved my stress and what games added to it so you'll have one more thing between you and your wallet being emptied of your hard earned money and you left more stressed then you were before you played some game.

Enjoy! I know I will, some of the time. :p