Posts Tagged ‘ videogames ’

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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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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Not Worth Playing
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Driver: San Francisco Finished!

I went in and played through the rest of Driver: San Francisco the day after my last post. I have to say that the ending is one of the craziest endings I’ve ever seen. If the last post didn’t catch a person’s attention on this game, I hope this post will. I really enjoyed my time playing through this game and I wish a sequel could be made from this as I see some potentials for the developers to add more outrageous things.

Driver: San Francisco is a driving game similar to Burnout but with a story. Most of the game is in the main character Tanner’s coma. Events in the game are being played out by a news broadcast in real life. But the story isn’t really what this game is about. Honestly I didn’t really care for the story that much. All you really need to know is some terrorist name Jericho got you in the coma and you’re trying to figure out what he’s up to in the coma by putting the clues that you get from the news broadcast. Its your basic catching the bad guy 80’s flick story.

As I said, story is not the strong point in this game. The gameplay however excels at being a great driving game. Similar to Burnout, most missions involve you trying to take down enemy vehicles. However it is not really a race though there are some races in the game. What  the game gives you to take these enemies down is by far the most unique thing about this game. The game call it the “Shift Mechanic.” Using the Shift Mechanic, the player is allow to shift into any vehicles in the game. The player can then use these vehicles to ram into enemy vehicles or create roadblocks if cops are chasing you. The game even encourage this by giving out hints saying you should be doing this. It allowed me to keep the game interesting by changing into different vehicles like buses or gas trucks and see what kind of chaos I can do to accomplish this mission.

The Shift Mechanic also allow for some real interesting mission. As stated in the previous post, shifting from one car to another to try to drive under a moving semi-truck to disable bombs all over the city is something I never done in the game. Another one which I don’t want to spoil but I really want to say is pretty much allowing the player to remote control a car while the player is still in the car. This mission really caught me by surprise as I had no idea what I had to do to accomplish it. Not all missions are as unique as the ones I say and some are just the basic take down certain enemies or run away from the cops. Even though these might be the usual missions that I have played before, I found myself wanting to play them due the amazing voice works done by voice actors. Each of the side missions have their own stories and some of them even continue on to other missions. There’s usually a passenger in the vehicle so they are usually talking throughout the mission and the dialogues are hilarious. Most of the passengers don’t know that Tanner is possessing the driver so you can see what kind of dialog the game offers.

Aside from the missions, there are a ton of cars to unlock. I didn’t unlocked them all but I unlocked the cars I wanted to drive around the city. Driving around the city is also a nice thing to do in the game. Being new to the San Francisco area recently, I still found myself catching locations that I remember seeing in real life. Once the game was over, I even drove around the city seeing if I could find places like IGN building or even just the AT&T ball park. Aside from unlockable cars, there are challenges and also movie challenges. The movie challenges are awesome but I’m disappointed that you have to collect 10 movie icons that are scattered across the map to unlock one movie challenge. In the challenge, you drive through a famous scene from a movie. A scene like the last driving scene from Gone in 60 Seconds (the old one) in the game is perfect and it was really enjoyable to play those scenes.

Driver: San Francisco is a really enjoyable game. I love the whole “Shift Mechanic” game feature and the way the developers worked out their side missions and main missions to be as interesting and diverse as possible. It is a really relaxing game with no worries of death and all gloomy-ness in the game world. I found myself really engaged in the game and I believe it is really worth playing. Heck I bought it for 12.99 so it is a steal if you can find it for that price!

2012
04/07
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Finished VideoGames
Relaxing Game
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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
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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
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Finished VideoGames
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Mass Effect 3 Finished!

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I’ve been meaning to write this post as soon as I finished Mass Effect 3 but it seems really difficult when I finished it at 2 a.m. two days ago. Also being sick doesn’t really help motivate me to write my first blog. Anyways lets get down to the nitty-gritty of this game.

I wanted to get it out as soon as possible so here it is: Mass Effect 2 is a better game than Mass Effect 3. There are many reasons including the controversial ending this game had (will get to that later) that made me believe this is true. Mass Effect 3 was suppose to be the closure to a story of Shepherd and his team that we’ve been following and developing over the past 5-years. It was suppose to be an amazing end of a journey. What it turned out to be was a long chore helping out all the important species of the Galaxy. Not that helping out species in the Galaxy is boring but the way Mass Effect 3 handled it seems too ridiculous for what it is.

In this whole game, Shepherd is tasked with uniting the species of the Galaxy to form a universal army to take down the Reapers. In context it sounds like an amazing game. But the part where I’m uniting the galaxy seems too ridiculous. I know Shepherd is probably the most important living being in the Galaxy of the game but I can’t believe that he is able to solve all the problems the Galaxy had in less than a year. I say less than a year because the game does not tell how long Shepherd’s quest is but it is hard to believe that Earth is still alive from Reaper’s invasion after a year. Anyways, throughout the game Shepherd is solving all the problems like the Genophage of the Krogans, the war between the Geth and Quarian, the feud between Krogans and Turians, and even some Asari problems thrown in to the mix. I believe in the developer’s mind, most of these problems had to be solved. However I can’t see it as how everyone is asking for Shepherd to help them with their problems before helping him fight against the Reapers. Can’t they just wait until the Reapers are gone? If Shepherd can’t help them then does that mean that they won’t help Shepherd fight against the Reapers which means they are left out fighting the Reapers for themselves? Wouldn’t that mean they’re likely to be extinct with their problems still unsolved? Questions like these came up as I was playing the game and it really ruined my play time with the game.

Another thing I didn’t like was how useless and mechanical most of the decisions that were made in previous titles were for this game. They pretty much did the same thing as Mass Effect 2 where most of the decisions that I did for saving someone life is reflected by an email message. However, unlike Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3 holds a greater weight in using all the decisions that were done in previous games. Most importantly was who survived during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2. The way they handled it in Mass Effect 3 feels very mechanical. I had all my squadmates survive the mission in Mass Effect 2 so I clearly saw how it didn’t really effect anything in Mass Effect 3. Whenever you meet them again in the game, they fell like they could be replace with any new character in the game. I even was told that certain scenes were replaced with some random character if that character died in Mass Effect 2. It’s understandable that BioWare had to handle it like this. If only 50% of gamers had all the squadmates alive then the other 50% would not see that part of the story if they had created specifically for all the gamers who had those squadmates alive. It makes sense but games like Witcher 2 had branching stories where gamers who picked certain decisions would not even see unless replayed. I wanted something like that but it seems BioWare had limited budget and time to do something like this.

As for the ending, I didn’t really mind it. It wasn’t a great ending by any means. I hate endings that has obvious choices for you to pick which ending you want to see. The ending basically comes down to Shepherd picking three buttons to choose what kind of ending the gamer wants. They may not look like buttons but they are buttons. The ending also left a lot of questions too which I don’t think will be answered with whatever Mass Effect games that will be coming out later on. I’m not even sure if they will include what the gamer chose as an ending for later games. It was a bad way for Bioware to handle an ending that should have been the Swan song for Shepherd.

So with all this talk, what about all the pros? There weren’t many this time around. The graphics looks better than previous games. I tend to look at all the amazing Lens Flares that BioWare had created for almost all light sources in the game. It really brought out the SciFi aspects of the game. I also really like the combat of this game. I felt like I was getting more powerful as I leveled up. By the end of the game I was charging through every enemy and pulling enemies every 1.5 second. It was an amazing feeling to be so powerful to take down 4 brutes in less than a minute. Other than these pros, I don’t think there were much improvements from the second game.

As I said before, Mass Effect 2 was a much better game than Mass Effect 3. But as a gamer who’ve been following the tale of Shepherd for 5 years, this game is necessary to play if you want to find out how the story of Shepherd ends. It may not be a great ending but it is necessary to complete. BioWare is creating a new ending for this game but I would finish the game before the new ending comes to see what BioWare visioned for the game. You may come out disappointed but it is still a game that is needed to be played.

2012
03/30
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CATEGORY
Finished VideoGames
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