• 6Jul 12

  A few reviews for stuff I've been playing...

  I've written up a few game reviews this week. You may be surprised to see what I thought of Dark Souls after all my ranting. You may also be equally surprised to see what I thought of Diablo III. My thoughts on Transformers: War for Cybertron won't be all that shocking.

  I'm currently working may way through some Portal 2 achievements, and intend to get back on track with finishing up May Payne 3 after it briefly interrupted by Dark Souls marathon. So far I really like it, but I just wasn't ready to move away from Dark Souls at the time. Also, I'm FINALLY getting started on Assassin's Creed II. A little behind on that series, but I think I can get through a few of them relatively quickly.

  • Posted Jul 6, 2012 12:10 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 4May 12

  More Dark Souls...

  So yeah, STILL playing Dark Souls. I had something of a turn of sorts after my last blog post. It's amazing how therapeutic cranking out my thoughts on a game can be. After making that little rant of a post I went back and tried to see if my complaints had answers to them within the game, and as it turns out they did! I still have plenty of complaints, but right now I am definitely loving the heck out of the game.

  I still don't believe that the game is hard. There certainly are challenges, but the bulk of them can be countered pretty easily. Every single boss has some kind of method for exploitation that turns them into a laugh. At least up to the point I am now at (Just got the Lord Vassal warp thing). If you have no patience, the game becomes extremely hard.

  My gripes about the character animations are still valid. They can be really slow. However, you can avoid this by using lighter armor, or faster weapons. But.. I would have NEVER known this had I not gone to a Dark Souls wiki and read it. The fact this is not information given to you within the game, at least not outside of swapping armor around and seeing how it changes things, is pretty ridiculous. The huge number of different stats you get for your character are great, except for the fact you are given basically zero information on what they actually do. Context is an important thing to include when describing all this stuff, and the developers left it all out.

  I really really hate it when games REQUIRE the player to find information outside of the game (like visiting a wiki for example..) and simply do not have the info right there in the game to see for yourself. I can understand this with certain aspects, like where to hit an enemy for the most damage, but leaving out basic information about how your character functions is just stupid, and more than a little bit lazy. At least let me know what the puzzle pieces are when you expect me to put together a puzzle you made. Discovering the puzzle pieces through monotonous "play testing" is not fun. Not even a little bit.

  The repetitive aspect of the game is still way too strong. I appreciate that they bring you back to older areas to branch off in new directions, but it still feels like I am seeing way too much of the older areas over and over. The game at least introduces some quicker travel mechanics by opening short-cut doors and introducing warping, but it still gets old having to return to the same blacksmith repeatedly, and to chop through the same few enemies to get to him. Not to mention how utterly confusing the item upgrade mechanics are in the game. Why they couldn't have compressed all three "types" of upgrading into one menu is truly a mystery.

  What I have started to truly love about the game has been the sheer amount of discovery involved in it. It happens more than a few times that you will fight through a few new enemies to find an entire set of awesome armor that you really want to use, to then find yet another awesome set of armor immediately after. This may sound annoying, but it turns out that you will continue to use older armor just as much as you use the new stuff you find. You have a lot of choices to go with. Right now I am carrying around 6 different sets of armor that I rotate regularly for different situations. The same can't entirely be said for weapons though. I've used basically the same two weapons the entire game and will be shocked if I ever upgrade the sword I am using.

  The combat itself is still maintaining a high level of entertainment. From the very beginning I started off enjoying smacking enemies and seeing numbers pop-up during combat. This is still really fun. It's a little unfortunate that almost all the enemies are of the "hit them from behind" variety, but at least it is still satisfying to kill things. The only continued fun from killing older enemies over and over is that you eventually get to kill them a lot faster as you get upgrades, but otherwise I'd prefer to just not have to kill them for the 200th time.

  PVP is a total crapshoot. There are quite a few extremely high level players that are simply trolling the low level people for kicks. This effectively takes away a huge part of what the developers intended the experience to be. Getting your business pushed in without any chance what-so-ever of winning is NOT fun. It's just annoying. And, it can often be unavoidable. If you had to change to human form for any reason (and there is one very specific reason you might do this several times throughout the game) you can count on being invaded and killed very quickly. As I've upgraded I've managed to win a few more times, but most of the time it's over before I even know it started.

  I'm over 70 hours of gameplay in, and I am thinking I might be able to finish it up by around the 100 hours mark. This is pretty significant. There are only a handful of games that I've put that much time into!

  • Posted May 4, 2012 12:01 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 5Apr 12

  Getting started on Dark Souls for the 360

  This game is supposed to be "hard!" or something. So far I've found it to be monotonous. Do you die a lot? Absolutely. But, all that comes from the abscenely slow character animations where standing up off the ground takes a full 4 seconds and drinking a health potion takes around 2-3. It's cheap to ramp up the difficulty by making the player character so ridiculously slow.

  To top it off, you can't turn down the difficulty if you are interested in just playing through the game on a fun setting. And even if you could, it wouldn't matter much because the character animations probably would not speed up. Playing through the same area several dozen times, fighting the same enemies several hundred times (because so many are exactly the same) is the exact opposite of fun. That stopped being fun back in 1982.

  Everything about the so called "difficulty" in this game comes from an era of arcade games designed to suck up quarters. It's cheap. It's sluggish. It's repetative. And worst of all it's just down right ugly. This game came out in 2011 for crying out loud, why does it look like a PS2 game?

  Oh right, and you can't pause. Ever.

  • Posted Apr 5, 2012 9:31 am GMT
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