Posts Tagged ‘ games ’

Ace Combat Assault Horizon Finished!

Ace Combat Assault Horizon is an interesting game. Writing this post is really conflicting. A part of me wants to really recommend the game to others while another part of me just want to say that it is not worth playing. Ace Combat does a lot of things right that previous Ace Combats failed to do. The combat, flying, and even the story is better. However it still falls back to it’s old roots by having long missions that gets really repetitive by the end.

Ace Combat would be an amazing game if the missions were just a little bit shorter. There were many times during the missions when I asked myself “Really? They’re making me do this again?” The missions are only about 20-35 minutes long but even then I wish they were only about 15 minutes long. Fortunately each missions are unique to each other. One mission requires you to bomb naval ships while another require you to use a helicopter to save ground troops from incoming attack. Even though each mission goals are unique, the game forces the player to repeat this task at least 5 times each mission. One mission where you have to take out incoming bombers before they blow up Dubai requires the player to take out 5 waves of bombers. Five! Each wave has at least 4 bombers with 3 enemy airplanes for each bomber. The first 2-3 waves are a blast but I got tired of doing the same thing afterwards. The weird thing is that the next mission would make the player do something fresh which would really get me pumped up and excited only to be let down by the repetitive structure of the goal. I really wish that these missions would have been shorter. I clocked in at 8 hours and I felt that the game cheated me on that because of these long missions. I would have liked more missions but shorter burst.

Another thing that really didn’t make sense is the aforementioned helicopter sequences. Though there are only 2 in the game, I felt that these missions were just dragging the game. They’re even longer than the airplane missions which I already mention that I didn’t like. Even worse is that the helicopter controls are horrible. They fly really clunky and some of the buttons are mapped weird. The button to shoot machine guns in a jet is the A button while you use the triggers to shoot the machine guns in a helicopter. I get that the developers wanted to make some kind of a shooter type level but it doesn’t make sense to change the controls. Another weird change was how use button combinations to dodge missiles. You press the RB+LB button to dodge missiles but you press the RB button to shoot missiles. I found myself shooting the missiles myself as I was trying to dodge them. Someone should have looked into the controls or at least let these controls be customizable.

One more thing that really didn’t make sense is the turret levels. There are two missions with this type of gameplay also and they both felt out of place. Using the turret is fine but it really gets tedious when you’re doing it for 30 minutes. It plays like a rail shooter but imagine a turret sequence where you’re in one place for 10 minutes shooting at the same stuff. Yea not so fun.

Aside from the long missions, helicopters and turret sequences, the game is a blast to play. Flying around the jets were always exhilarating. There were certain moments when I had my mouth open because of the amazing visuals the game had. Flying through a storm only to fly higher and see no more rain was a nice touch the developers added. The environments and weather effects they added made the flying so much more immersive. The missions as mentioned before were really different from each other. One mission in particular was so simple but yet really amazing. It involved chasing after a missile that was going into space to target the united states. All you’re really doing is chasing the missile vertically but trying to dodge the missile’s rocket flames as you’re trying to shoot it down is one of the most impressive part of the game.

The new mechanic that they added called Dog-Fight mode is also a great feature. It takes the flight controls away from the player and makes the player take aim and try to shoot down the enemy. Most of the time, the enemy will try to run away from you in some of the most amazing airplane chase sequences I’ve seen in a game. Flying through buildings and over stadiums as building are crumbling over you is an amazing feeling. You have to speed up to try to get a better lock on but enemies may sometime try to trick you and make you fly straight into a building.  Even though you don’t have much flight controls, the auto follow the game does when in Dog-Fight mode isn’t perfect that it’ll just follow the plane everywhere. You still have to keep the lock on to the enemy aircraft or else you’ll be taken out of the Dog-Fight mode. The Dog-Fight mode really makes the game much more interesting as you’re not just flying around trying to lock on to the enemy and shooting a missile. Though you can still do that, I found myself trying to get into the Dog-Fight mode as much as possible. The Dog-Fight is a feature that was really needed to Ace Combat games and I hope this feature goes over to the next Ace Combat games.

The multiplayer mode is interesting too as the Dog-Fight mode goes over to the multiplayer. It get hectic as everyone usually goes into this mode and you can clearly see planes trying to fly away from one another as there might be 4 jets chasing each other. Though I didn’t play much multiplayer, I was surprise to really enjoy the time I had with it.

Ace Combat is a conflicting thing to write about. I really want to recommend this game to people but the missions might get too long and repetitive for people. I stuck with it because I wanted to see what other unique missions that the game had to offer. I’m glad that I stuck with it because the end missions were one of the best in the game. They were also short too so that might had to do something with it. If you’re into flight combat games I would say to try this game out as it adds new features that you would think wouldn’t work in these types of games. Though they might have added too many features with helicopters and turrets, I believe the new addition of the Dog-Fight mode really makes the game worth playing.

2012
04/14
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CATEGORY
Finished VideoGames
Try It Out
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Currently Playing: Ace Combat Assault Horizon

This will be a short one since I briefly played Ace Combat. I was never really a big fan of Ace Combat. I always thought that the air combat was too slow and got a little repetitive. Everything also looked the same after a while and you’re mostly doing the same thing. However, after playing the demo of this game, I figure that I have to give this game a shot since it feels so different from a regular Ace Combat game.

The new feature they added is a mechanic called “Dog-Fight mode” where the player is basically locked-on to the enemy target. When the player is locked-on, the plane moves and follows the enemy automatically. What the player has to manage is the speed of your aircraft and the targeting for missiles and machine guns. Being close to the enemy allows the player to get a better lock on for missiles but also give the enemy a better chance to counter maneuver you. Most of these dog fights become very cinematic as planes are counter maneuvering each other trying to get lock on for missiles. I only tried one online match and I can tell you that it is crazy as there are usually about 6 planes locked on to each other back to back. Since the player doesn’t need to direct the aircraft when locked on, I was surprise to see some amazing enemy scripting as they take you through buildings and factories to out maneuver you. This got me interested to keep doing these dog fights in single player mode. I can see this dog fight mechanic getting old real quickly if it wasn’t for some shnazzy enemy scripting.

Oh and before I close this post, I have to say that the non-airplane parts are one of the most boring parts of the game. Especially the helicopter where you’re doing the same thing over for 20 minutes. It isn’t even a challenge at all and I hope there aren’t that many of those missions. I’m only 4 missions into the game so I guess we will see.

2012
04/12
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CATEGORY
Currently Playing
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Not Worth Playing: Xmen Destiny / Shadows of the Dammed

 

This is going to be a two games in one post since I played one right after another. Surprisingly both were not worth my time to finish playing through it. I know Xmen had a bad review but I really wanted to play a superhero game for some reason. I was giving it a chance since it was developed by Silicon Knights but I guess I should have known after all the bad reviews and Too Human. However I wasn’t expecting Shadows to be bad but it wasn’t my type of game. And as you can tell from my previous posts, my range in games isn’t very limited.

I’ll start with Xmen. In the game, you are asked to pick between three different characters: the jock, the average white American, and a Japanese girl. Whoever you choose doesn’t affect what kind of powers you get later on. You get to choose those powers afterwards. Speaking of powers, the game does not give you any access to your powers until about an hour into the game. An hour! What kind of an Xmen game does not allow you to get your powers in the beginning? Or at least one power for me to use so I can at least feel like a superhero. You do get to see this amazing cutscene in the beginning of the game of your character using all the powers you’ll probably get throughout the game. I was stoked when I saw that video. I was thinking “Sweet I picked Nightcrawler’s powers so I should be teleporting everywhere with this!” Unfortunately, I don’t even think I have that power. I stuck with the game thinking that it will get better when I get my powers but it turned out to be some cheap powers that wasn’t in that amazing cutscene. I don’t know what Silicon Knights guys were doing when they created that cutscene but I don’t think you should be showing a cutscene like that and then not even give the player any of those powers. What’s worse is that as you’re going through the level, you see all the other Xmen and Brotherhood mutants using their powers. You get to see Ice Man sliding around in the air making ice walls. You get to see Quick Silver running super fast like the flash as he is attacking enemies. Whenever I saw that, I kept wondering why they wouldn’t let me play as them? They have all the assets already. Why couldn’t they just map some controls to those characters? I believe the game would be much better if they had allowed the players to choose or unlock the real mutants throughout the game.

The game would be better but it still wouldn’t be great. The graphics in the game looks like it could be a Wii or even a PS2 game. Textures are blurry and things still pop out and slow down occasionally. Even the character designs look boring. I don’t know how they could get Xmen character designs to look so boring but they really accomplished it. Another thing that really bothered me was how you couldn’t skip conversations. Even if you accidentally replay that conversation, you’re tasked to wait until they finish talking. Another thing you can’t skip is the camera walk through of the level. Normally in most games, as the level starts, the camera would walk the player through the level so that the player would know where the end point is. The camera walk through in this game, however, is so slow and you can’t even skip it. I feel like the developers were trying to extend my game times with these annoying bugs and it doesn’t make the game any better.

As for Shadows of the Dammed, I didn’t get to play that much. Everything is fine with the game except for it’s repetitiveness. You play as Garcia Hotspur and you’re trying to get your girlfriend back from a demon in hell. The conversations between Garcia and his demon pal Johnson are hilarious and I wish the game was more interesting enough for me to keep listening to their conversation. The game mostly revolves around darkness filling the room and the player being tasked with searching for a goat head to shoot at. I know it sounds weird but imagine doing that in every room. Also the game heavily relies on get key to open certain door mechanic. Even the HUD has three slots for the keys. When a game has slots in the HUD for the same keys to be used, you should be expecting to do this same mechanic a lot. Some times you may have the wrong key so you have to look for the other key. Sometimes you might have to use that wrong key in some way to find the right key. There aren’t many ways to go find a key and I believe I’ve seen all the ways this game has to offer. The shooting is okay too in this game. The aiming feels iffy and while there are settings to change this, I didn’t want to spend my time figuring it out. I wish the game wasn’t as repetitive as it was. Otherwise, I think it would have been one of those unique games that I finished.

So there you go, two games I haven’t finished and probably would not finish because I believe that they are not worth playing.

 

2012
04/10
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CATEGORY
Not Worth Playing
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Currently Playing: Driver: San Francisco

Driver: San Francisco has got to be one of the most enjoyable and relaxing games I have played in a while. Yes there were Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim and such but those games were all so dark and gloomy compared to what Driver is. The game for me feels like a Burnout game with a story. The driving is fast and chaotic with newspaper flying everywhere, smokes coming out of the car and ramps created from San Francisco hills.

The game would have been a fun game already even if they didn’t add in their unique ‘shift’ feature but that feature really adds into the chaotic nature of the game. Using the shift mechanic, the player is allow to shift to any car they want to with a few exceptions like enemies and cop cars if they are chasing you. Using this feature, the player can take control of oncoming traffic and ram into enemies or cop cars. They even support this idea by giving the player a ram ability where the more you hold down the ram button, the harder the hit.

With all these features, the developers found a way to make certain side missions super interesting. The one I remember most recently is a mission where I had to drive a small car under a Semi-Truck to disable a bomb under it. But I had to shift into other small cars around San Francisco because there were more than one bomb. And I really like that these missions don’t repeat and it actually adds up to the story. Granted I’ll probably never play this game again once I’m done with it but the game really made me want to play all the side missions before even starting the main mission. I wanted to see what crazy things the game wants me to do.

I am about two chapters away from the ending so next post will probably be about my thoughts on the game. There are a lot more I want to say about this game but I think I will wait until the next post. However, the game has been very enjoyable and is a very nice change from all the gloomy apocalyptic bloddy reaper dragons. It is a game that you want to play if you just want to relax and play a video game for what they were created to be.

2012
04/05
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Currently Playing
Relaxing Game
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Skyrim Finished!

I’ve finished this game a while ago but I never got around to posting something about it until now. I want to admit that I did rushed things a little at the end of the game. This is mainly due to the fact that I got so powerful by the end that there was basically no challenges left. I will get to that later but lets start out by saying what an amazing game Skyrim is. I finished the game clocking in at 110 hours. This aside from certain MMOs is probably one of my longest game time in a single game. I also wanted to point out that you can’t really finish a game like Skyrim. There are just so much to do that it becomes overwhelming and will eventually become tiresome. I say that I finished Skyrim because I felt that I did everything that I wanted to do in the game. I finished the main story, all guild quests, deadric quests, and even most of the side missions. However I didn’t find all the locations the game has to offer and did not left the game with an empty quest log.

I want to start out by saying what Bethesda did right in this game compare to their other games. Not unlike their other games, this is a truly open world game where the player can traverse the world and do almost anything the game allows you to do. However unlike their other games, Bethesda really gave a reason to explore the world in Skyrim. In Oblivion, I found myself exploring for about the first few hours of the game but nothing about that world felt distinct or gave me a purpose. Sure there were caves and dungeons for me to explore but I began to see a similarity between them after going into a few of them. Skyrim fixed this problem by making each dungeons, caves, and temples unique to each other. One cave may have a waterfall inside while another will have a river that connects to another dungeon. Making each locations unique helped brought out the realism of the world that Bethesda has created. It also helped me keep exploring one cave to another without being bored due to similarity. It also helps that this game is beautiful. I took about a little over fifty pictures in the game to show them to my friends how gorgeous this game is. Other then Red Dead Redemption, I don’t think I found a game that was able to make me just stop and look around.

Skyrim is a Bethesda game in the line of a lot of open world games they created like Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Similar to those games, they brought back the markers on the game HUD that always tell you that there is a new location around the corner. I love that little marker. It made me want to explore and diverge off my quest path to go find out what this new location might hold. Sometime it may just be a dungeon with some loot in the end. Sometime it may hold a dragonwall which will allow you to get a new shout power. There’s usually at least one unexplored location around the corner and the completionist inside of me want to go explore everything.

Skyrim also improved on their melee combat from both Fallout and Oblivion. It is still not perfect but it is a major improvement. I love the kill cams and I love that they just released a patch updating it with more kill cams. Hits are also properly detected now unlike Oblivion where you were not sure swinging the sword did anything at all. However once you get a powerful enough weapon, most of the combat skills the game introduce become useless as swinging the sword would just do as well.

Speaking of getting powerful weapons and armors, Skyrim changes the way how enemies level up with you in Oblivion. In Skyrim, enemies have a set level so if you’re level 30, a level 10 enemy shouldn’t be a challenge. I finished the game at level 50 so I was pretty powerful already. I got the best weapons and armors early in the game as I improved my smithing skills. By the time I got the weapons and armors, I was pretty much unstoppable. I was hold the block button as an enemy attacked me for about 30 minutes to just increase my blocking skills. It is not to say that I want enemies to level up with me though. I hated that in Oblivion and I love that I am super powerful in this game but it would have been nice to get some challenge from an enemy once in a while. Sure they throw in some Ice Mages to try to kill you but they become nothing with some help from potions. This is probably one of the main reasons why I rushed it in the end of the game. I was just running through the dungeons without the need to worry about death. I would have liked some challenge but hopefully they can make up for that with DLC.

Some enemy variety would have helped also from becoming mundane later on. They were able to add variety to the places you explore so I don’t see why they couldn’t add a few different enemies. After killing thousand and thousand of the same enemies, I eventually just ignored them and ran past them. They can’t hurt me and I don’t want to kill them anymore. As I said before, hopefully the DLC will change that.

I have finished with Skyrim for now but I’m excited for DLC that will be coming later on this year. Bethesda promised that they will most likely be more expansion like DLC than they had done in the past so here’s hoping that they could add better enemies and more challenges.

Skyrim is a game that needs to be played by anyone who is even slightly considering about it. It is a remarkable game and a true testament to modern video games.

2012
03/31
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Finished VideoGames
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