Blah Blah blah, school, wedding anniversary, new job (career?), I have been busy so I missed updating September. Well, on to games!
I got a lot to say so it’s another one of those smorgasbords of thoughts month’s.
1. So I picked up a relatively rare game for the DS called Infinite Space. I have a love-hate relationship with this game so far. It’s about space travel and combat, and you do get to build your own starships in it, almost from scratch. Little things like placing officers in specific roles to give the ship bonuses to measuring the fatigue of your crew to watching your fleet of sips traverse through space make this title intriguing indeed. You know what doesn’t make it intriguing? The bare bones, phoned in plot. Seriously, for a supposedly 40 hour RPG (I am only 6 hours in and so bored with it) this story better bring it’s A game in the second half. Boy goes on adventure through space, recruits friends along the way, blah blah cookie cutter RPG story.
Also, the combat is a real let down. When you create and build a fleet from the ground up, you expect to have a plethora of combat options to make the game more interesting. Nope. The combat boils down to a timed game of rock-paper-scissors, or as Infinite Space calls it, Barrage attack, Normal attack, and Dodge. Barrage’s do heavy damage, but if Dodged, they are easily avoided. Normal attacks do…well…normal damage, but if the enemy Barrage’s you, you’re screwed. And Dodge works well against Barrage, but does nothing against normal. Oh, and you can move in on a linear battlefield to get into or out of weapons range. There, I just explained Infinite Space’s entire combat system in five sentences. That was seriously all there is to it. When a game lets you build your own starship fleet, exclusively for use in space, then it stands to reason why a simplistic combat system might not be what I signed up for. One day I will complete it, but lately I have had to work up the fortitude to sit down and play it.
2. I have been on an old-school game kick. I beat Metroid, then Metroid II, now Legend of Zelda is on the docket along with Zelda II: Links Adventure. Ahhh the benefits of buying a 3DS on launch day. So Metroid…
On this month last year Nintendo and Team Ninja decided to collectively insult every Metroid fan in the world by releasing Metroid: Other M. It is still the worst one in the series…wait shut up, YES, it is worse than Metroid II. I liked Metroid II: Return of Samus and I think its mechanic of killing every Metroid on SR388 is not only the most important plot element for the entire series. That, and the game is damn fun. Other M did do what no other Metroid game did before it; it gave Samus a voice, and a terrible one at that. It also gave her a personality, and a terrible one at that. You know, let’s skip talking about Other M, I really didn’t like that game…
But the first Metroid game, there is a classic right there. It’s you, as Samus, alone on a fortress planet and you must kill Mother Brain. This game is challenging, but fair. Graphically inferior, yet still way ahead of its time. Small tip for everyone that hasn’t beaten the gae yet: Ice Beam. Once you find it, keep it. Fu** the Wave Beam. The Ice Beam actually makes Ridley the easiest boss in the game.
Metroid II: Return of Samus, as I mention, is a small masterpiece. It doesn’t make you want to jump for joy at any particular element, and the music is the worst thing ever, but the game is still solid. Samus has a large character model, gains some mainstay weapons and items in this game such as the Spazer and Plasma beams, Space jump, shoulder-padded Varia suit, Spring Ball and the rarely visited Spider Ball all make their first appearance in this game.
OTHER M SPOLIER
If you were ever wondering why Samus jumps into the Queen Metroid’s mouth near the end of Other M play this game and use that tactic to kill the Queen Metroid in this one. Works wonders
Spoiler Over
3. Star Fox 64 3D! Yay!!!! Wait…it only supports LOCAL wi-fi play with multiple 3DS’? Back to Gamestop you go, Yayyy!!! Come on now, Nintendo, you can’t keep pulling that crap. It’s 2011. Everyone has an Xbox Live account because online play has proven to be “cool” and “convenient” and “smart”. Hope on the bandwagon already. While we are on the topic…
4. Monster Hunter 4 for the 3DS…looks pretty good. The slide on analog pad for the 3Ds…is kinda gimmicky, but if it does retail for $20 I suppose I could live with it. Now, hows about a US release date, eh?
5. Battlefield 3? Skyward Sword? Arkam City? Skyrim?! And AC:Revelations?!!! ALL IN THE SPAM OF TWO MONTHS!!! Where the fu** was all these games during the summer! Now I feel like I have to take out a bank loan just to…OMG SW: Old Republic gets a release date and it’s in December!
-Dear Game Companies: It is not a good idea to oversaturate the market like that, because believe it or not, I am only going to buy two games on this list. Yes, I wants them all, but the demographic this games are being marketed to have primary responsibilities and time constraints, what with our jobs and such. Like the whole thing with two companies releasing Battlefield 3 and Modern Warefare 3 in the same two week period. As gamers that like multiplayer games, we will chose. One of you will lose. Battlefield 3 could have come out in March like Medal of Honor did or vice versa, but noooo. You guys wanna fight it out with your most important asset, your sales figures and customer base. Activision, IMHO, I think you may be surprised…
That’s all I got for this month. Tune in next month when I wax philosophical on how much fun I am having playing Skyward Sword and Battlefield (yes, those were the two).
Showing posts with label 3DS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3DS. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Shoot, reload, Shoot, reload
Rapid Fire Time!
I have a lot of blog ideas that have been on my mind, so I’m just going to hit you with several at once, since none of them are especially important long enough to be full blogs.
1. A large amount of tech journalists are claiming that the 3DS will be a failure because the older PSP is currently outselling it and some people hate the concept of a 3D screen. Here, literally Game Design 101 (as in, this was a topic in my first Game Design class): Consoles don’t win console wars, games do. The 3DO, though powerful as can be, failed because of a lack of games and developer support. The Dreamcast was years ahead of it’s time with features we take for granted today: Online play, DLC, freaking’ voice chat in game! But, alas, Sega fu**ed over their third party developers by almost secretly releasing the Dreamcast only two years after the Sega Saturn, making third party developers sick of Sega’s constantly changing console BS and moving on to other places, like Sony and their PS2. As I said a couple months ago, the regular DS has been outselling the PSP year after year by almost double because it has a good library. This is taking into account that the PSP is twice as powerful as the DS.
Point made simple, the 3DS is a good console, but it was rushed to market (for what reason, I still don’t know) and it is a half-baked system. As of me writing this, the 3DS is still missing the following: An internet browser, Virtual Console support, and DSiWare support. Also, the launch line-up was, umm, lackluster. Street Fighter IV and Ghost Recon may be the only games right now worth playing on it. Nintendo should have released this console on the same day the Ocarina of Time remake was done, or packaged in Pilot Wings Resort as a free game, like Wii Sports, and then this console would have sold like gangbusters. Give it until this fall, and the 3DS will be in a lot more hands once decent games for it come out.
2. Speaking of consoles, the Kinect seems to me as a waste of time and money, right now. This thing was released on November 4th, and as of May only 25 games exist for this add-on, and 17 of them are sports, dance/fitness related. So far, it seems like that is all we have to look forward to from this item, Dance games and workout simulators. At my local Gamestop, I counted 10 used Kinects just hanging from the sales wall, waiting to be bought. My only guess why there wasn’t more is because the wall didn’t have any more space on it, but I am sure there was more in the back. Listen, I am all for game innovation, but motion control gaming is becoming a slight fad, like 3D TVs. The best games I have played in the last 4 months (Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 2, Dissidia 2) have all used standard controllers. The worst thing is the Microsoft has yet to announce any new games for this system. It’s like they are personally giving up on it. I realize it was the fastest selling console ever, but I wonder how many people kept the damn thing or were still using it after two months. Dear Microsoft: support games, not peripherals.
3. The Playstation Move is a failure in my view. First off, the cost of entry is expensive as hell.It costs $210 for a two-player set with one game, barring that one already has a $300 PS3 in their home. You know what you can get for $210? A New Wii, two-players worth of controls, and an extra game. Hey, and the Wii has a MUCH larger library of games with motion-control specific games, where as most of the Move games are Motion control OPTIONAL. This means their perfectly fine games without motion controls (MAG, Killzone 3, Sly Cooper Collection), but Sony wants you to feel justified for spending an inordinate amount of money on this add-on. Fair enough, since the entire collection of Move-specific games are Wii copies anyways. Dear Sony: Support games, not over-priced peripherals. Hell, just get the PSN system to NOT FAIL at every step of he way.
4. I love American Football (been a Steeler’s fan since I was 8), but nothing pisses me off more than a sports strike. I used to love the NHL, but when they struck for what seemed like years, I lost ALL interest. I haven’t watched an NHL game in going on a decade and I have no regrets. I may just do the same if the NFL teams don’t play this year. You know what the league minimum of the NFL is? $300,000! Since a football season is up to, and including the start of training day, about 7 months, that means that even a rookie player makes about $42,000 A MONTH for one season. The average American makes that a YEAR, according to the 2006 GDP. Here’s something else to boggle the calculator, the average NFL player makes 1.2-1.5 million dollars a season. Michael Vick, before he became an animal abusing douchebag, made 25 million a season, making him one of the highest paid athletes in the world. So, I think we can all agree, that when the players want to strike because they “aren’t getting paid enough to play two more games”, it screams ludicrous greed to me.
Don’t get me wrong; I think players deserve to be compensated for their time, but a strike? Gimme a break! At what pay ratio is it no longer the “love of the game” and it becomes “I am already making money hand-over-fist for throwing and catching a ball or blocking/tackling pretty well, I deserve thousands more!” It’s ridiculous to me. Sports athletes are overpaid, they know it, I know it, the whole damn world knows it, and yet we allow these strikes to happen.
SPOILERS OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES
5. My wife forced me to watch every Harry Potter movie made thus far so I can take her to the premiere of Deathly Hallows, Part Two and appreciate it. After watching every single one in secession, I have only one thought: I still don’t care. What the hell is the big deal with these movies/books? Yes, I am all for character development and I can appreciate it, but why is it every one of these 2 ½ hour movies dedicates 2 of those hours JUST TOWARDS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. All of the “good” parts of Harry Potter can be described in five words: first and last fifteen minutes. The rest in-between is tween middle-high school drama about “who likes who” and how unfair is this teacher!” and “even though he has killed people,is Voldermort real?” Am I the only one that saw Dumbledore being killed from, like, the first book on? These books follow the bare-bones basic archetypal models established years ago be Carl Jung almost to a fault. As a matter of fact, almost every archetype and every step of Jung’s “The Hero’s journey” is followed here, and maybe that’s why the books did so well, because they are formulaic and in plain enough English even kids can understand them. It’s not that I don’t think the movies are terrible, I just think they are woefully predictable. Heck, I enjoyed the first Deathly Hallows, for whatever that is worth. I actually want to see the second. As for reading the books, no thank you, sir.
SPOILERS END HERE
And so does my ammo count.
I have a lot of blog ideas that have been on my mind, so I’m just going to hit you with several at once, since none of them are especially important long enough to be full blogs.
1. A large amount of tech journalists are claiming that the 3DS will be a failure because the older PSP is currently outselling it and some people hate the concept of a 3D screen. Here, literally Game Design 101 (as in, this was a topic in my first Game Design class): Consoles don’t win console wars, games do. The 3DO, though powerful as can be, failed because of a lack of games and developer support. The Dreamcast was years ahead of it’s time with features we take for granted today: Online play, DLC, freaking’ voice chat in game! But, alas, Sega fu**ed over their third party developers by almost secretly releasing the Dreamcast only two years after the Sega Saturn, making third party developers sick of Sega’s constantly changing console BS and moving on to other places, like Sony and their PS2. As I said a couple months ago, the regular DS has been outselling the PSP year after year by almost double because it has a good library. This is taking into account that the PSP is twice as powerful as the DS.
Point made simple, the 3DS is a good console, but it was rushed to market (for what reason, I still don’t know) and it is a half-baked system. As of me writing this, the 3DS is still missing the following: An internet browser, Virtual Console support, and DSiWare support. Also, the launch line-up was, umm, lackluster. Street Fighter IV and Ghost Recon may be the only games right now worth playing on it. Nintendo should have released this console on the same day the Ocarina of Time remake was done, or packaged in Pilot Wings Resort as a free game, like Wii Sports, and then this console would have sold like gangbusters. Give it until this fall, and the 3DS will be in a lot more hands once decent games for it come out.
2. Speaking of consoles, the Kinect seems to me as a waste of time and money, right now. This thing was released on November 4th, and as of May only 25 games exist for this add-on, and 17 of them are sports, dance/fitness related. So far, it seems like that is all we have to look forward to from this item, Dance games and workout simulators. At my local Gamestop, I counted 10 used Kinects just hanging from the sales wall, waiting to be bought. My only guess why there wasn’t more is because the wall didn’t have any more space on it, but I am sure there was more in the back. Listen, I am all for game innovation, but motion control gaming is becoming a slight fad, like 3D TVs. The best games I have played in the last 4 months (Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 2, Dissidia 2) have all used standard controllers. The worst thing is the Microsoft has yet to announce any new games for this system. It’s like they are personally giving up on it. I realize it was the fastest selling console ever, but I wonder how many people kept the damn thing or were still using it after two months. Dear Microsoft: support games, not peripherals.
3. The Playstation Move is a failure in my view. First off, the cost of entry is expensive as hell.It costs $210 for a two-player set with one game, barring that one already has a $300 PS3 in their home. You know what you can get for $210? A New Wii, two-players worth of controls, and an extra game. Hey, and the Wii has a MUCH larger library of games with motion-control specific games, where as most of the Move games are Motion control OPTIONAL. This means their perfectly fine games without motion controls (MAG, Killzone 3, Sly Cooper Collection), but Sony wants you to feel justified for spending an inordinate amount of money on this add-on. Fair enough, since the entire collection of Move-specific games are Wii copies anyways. Dear Sony: Support games, not over-priced peripherals. Hell, just get the PSN system to NOT FAIL at every step of he way.
4. I love American Football (been a Steeler’s fan since I was 8), but nothing pisses me off more than a sports strike. I used to love the NHL, but when they struck for what seemed like years, I lost ALL interest. I haven’t watched an NHL game in going on a decade and I have no regrets. I may just do the same if the NFL teams don’t play this year. You know what the league minimum of the NFL is? $300,000! Since a football season is up to, and including the start of training day, about 7 months, that means that even a rookie player makes about $42,000 A MONTH for one season. The average American makes that a YEAR, according to the 2006 GDP. Here’s something else to boggle the calculator, the average NFL player makes 1.2-1.5 million dollars a season. Michael Vick, before he became an animal abusing douchebag, made 25 million a season, making him one of the highest paid athletes in the world. So, I think we can all agree, that when the players want to strike because they “aren’t getting paid enough to play two more games”, it screams ludicrous greed to me.
Don’t get me wrong; I think players deserve to be compensated for their time, but a strike? Gimme a break! At what pay ratio is it no longer the “love of the game” and it becomes “I am already making money hand-over-fist for throwing and catching a ball or blocking/tackling pretty well, I deserve thousands more!” It’s ridiculous to me. Sports athletes are overpaid, they know it, I know it, the whole damn world knows it, and yet we allow these strikes to happen.
SPOILERS OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES
5. My wife forced me to watch every Harry Potter movie made thus far so I can take her to the premiere of Deathly Hallows, Part Two and appreciate it. After watching every single one in secession, I have only one thought: I still don’t care. What the hell is the big deal with these movies/books? Yes, I am all for character development and I can appreciate it, but why is it every one of these 2 ½ hour movies dedicates 2 of those hours JUST TOWARDS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. All of the “good” parts of Harry Potter can be described in five words: first and last fifteen minutes. The rest in-between is tween middle-high school drama about “who likes who” and how unfair is this teacher!” and “even though he has killed people,is Voldermort real?” Am I the only one that saw Dumbledore being killed from, like, the first book on? These books follow the bare-bones basic archetypal models established years ago be Carl Jung almost to a fault. As a matter of fact, almost every archetype and every step of Jung’s “The Hero’s journey” is followed here, and maybe that’s why the books did so well, because they are formulaic and in plain enough English even kids can understand them. It’s not that I don’t think the movies are terrible, I just think they are woefully predictable. Heck, I enjoyed the first Deathly Hallows, for whatever that is worth. I actually want to see the second. As for reading the books, no thank you, sir.
SPOILERS END HERE
And so does my ammo count.
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