ODST Setback

My review for ODST has meet a bit of a snag. While playing through the game, a little issue that Bungie must have overlooked caused me to have to start the whole game over, and I don't have the time to redo the other 80% of the game I had finished right now. Sorry, blame Bungie.

ODST update and a look at SAW!

I know ODST is short and all, but I spend so much time in the wondiferous Firefight mode that I can't get back to campaign, that and I have been working extra lots lately (haven't had an off day since monday) but don't worry, I plan on having a review up on or by Tuesday.

Also, on October 6th, I will be picking up the game SAW. I bought it for my boyfriend, but I will still play it and review it. While I won't play through the whole game, I will play a lot of it and I will watch him play the rest, so he will be my close associate on the review as well. I have been doing some research and, surprisingly, it looks like it may be a pretty decent game. I don't think it will win any Game of the Year awards or anything, but it definitely looks like it will be a good challenge. Check www.tinyurl.com/SAWPrev out for an interesting preview of the game.

Also, later today, I will post my first impressions of the Brutal Legend Demo.

WET Review

(Sorry I took so long to get this one out. Work had me busy, and then I got ODST and I am having a hard time getting away from Firefight)

WET is the video game answer to Kill Bill, it's violent, with plenty of grit and a lot of swearing and it is also one of the biggest video game letdowns I can think of.

To start on a positive note, when the levels aren't too busy getting you killed for using the acrobatic mechanics, the combat is an absolute blast, and it really makes you feel like an unstoppable killing machine. You have unlimited bullet time and the developers didn't even bother with making you reload your guns; you can keep on shooting uninterrupted until you run out of bullets. You can also shoot from anywhere: swinging on poles, sliding down ladders, running along walls... if you can go there you can shoot from there. The more acrobatic and fluent you are, the more points you get to purchase weapon and ability upgrades. It's also pretty violent and the bonuses for kills are pretty interesting.

The grindhouse aspect of this game is, in my opinion, very well done. The language is over to top (she even swears at doors as she tries to open them) and the dialogue is nice and corny, but not terrible corny. The film grit, which you can shut off, was a nice touch, but when you're almost dead it takes over the screen and you're basically screwed. There are neat little touches, such as one part where Rubi kicks a basketball into the camera and cracks the screen, and the music is absolutely superb. It's a nice mix of rockabilly, poppy grunge wonder that makes me wish I could get an official soundtrack. Another thing I like about the music is that instead of getting big name bands to use as a selling point, they picked some smaller (but still awesome) bands that are much less famous.

On top of that all is the story. In it's (very) short span, WET tells a pretty interesting story, and I tell you that if this had been a movie it would have been fantastic. It has intrigue, betrayal and interesting villains, as you would expect from a Tarantino-Rodriguez-style game, although I have to say they didn't play a big enough roll and you never really find out much about them. The first guy you chase has a bigger part in the game than my favorite villain, Ze Kollektor, who says "I'll see you again" and then never makes another appearance. Basically the material was there for a much longer game, more character back story and a longer main story for instance, but they cut it short.

So now that I made this game sound like a good overall game, let's go to the bad sides of it. WET is like a stranger with candy, and you're a five year old who likes candy more than listening to his parents. In other words, this game starts of looking great. It has a lot of appeal, the candy, and even though its graphics and character models look a bit rough, like the man with the candy's beard, you figure it's worth a shot. However, as you probably learned when you take candy from a stranger: it's usually not very good candy, like a peppermint or something*. At first, WET amazed me. I flipped around the levels with the ease and grace of a ballerina dual-wielding shotguns, the arena fights (where you have to disable doors to stop enemy reinforcements) were well planned and a good high point in the levels. The car-hopping sequences were a definite blast, and even though the character models are a bit dated, it was all worth it.

Then, a couple hours into the game, things took a turn for the worst. Using acrobatics, the main point of the combat, became an annoying and deadly game of chance, as you would be put on a 4-foot-wide bridge with death-pits on either side and then be forced to fight a bunch of enemies. If you don't do acrobatics, a) You don't get style points, and your upgrading suffers greatly and b) You die. A lot. However if you do try to dive at the enemies or jump off them, you fall to your death nine times out of ten. After your sixth time falling off the same bridge and dying, you are about to put your fist through your Xbox, which means you no more harm than a mosquito that bites you and gives you West Nile. Another (minor) gripe is Rubi's ability to grab things. There are a few times you see a ledge then it says you can grab onto, but when you jump to grab it, Rubi fails to even try and instead falls. Usually to her death. You see, some ledges can only be grabbed if you jump from something else, like another ledge, even though when you jump from the other spot she would be totally capable of reaching it. Maybe it's because she's a woman, women are pushy and they only want things done their own certain way**. Oh, and don't get me started on the airplane. If you do buy this, you will end up hating airplanes as much as Rubi, and I won't say any more than that.

Now we get to Rage Mode. Rage Mode is Rubi's "You've made me angry, no prepare to effing die" mode, and the concept is great. Rubi gets blood on her face, flies into a rage during which she is basically unstoppable, a lot of enemies are around and carnage thus ensues. However, like pretty much every other wonderful concept this game had, WET manages to kinda kill this by throwing in all kinds of required acrobatics and forcing you to rush and it just kinda kills the mindless overkill mode that this is supposed to be.

WET is a game that suffers from too much ambition. It tries very hard to be a lot of things, (acrobatic shooter, Grindhouse game, quick-time action thingy) and ultimately ends up feeling like it was stretched too thin, like Bilbo Baggins. Overall it is a see-saw between fun and just plain frustrating, and a game I wouldn't recommend you buy unless you can get a deal. Maybe give it a rent.

Overall Score: 73%

* Don't take candy from strangers!

** I'm definitely kidding here. Kind of.

P.S. (edit) If they make a WET 2 and iron out all these kinks, I will definitely give it a shot, because this had the potential makings of a fantastic game. That is all.

Finally picked up WET.

Again, sorry it has been so long. I picked up WET today at midnight, and I will play vigorously to have a review up in a couple of days. I also got GH5, but I don't really know how exactly to review music game, as it doesn't operate on the same mechanics as other games. I'll try though. I may be getting ODST next Tuesday and I have 3 games coming out next month, so this won't be such a barren blog. Thanks :)

An explanation!

Sorry I haven't updated. Of course IDK if anyone reads this but if anyone does, you are who I am apologising to. I was out of town to visit my parents. It was my little brother's 10th birthday and my grandparents were visiting from Texas. During said visit, I got a computer, a MacBook and it's nice and cute and fun. Anyways, I will post as soon as I can. WET is coming out soon :D

Arkham Asylum Review (Finally)

When this game was first announced, I was torn. It looked, and if you're watching someone still kind of looks, like a button-mashing, mindless beat 'em up kinda game. Well first off, let me say it is and it isn't. Batman has a wonderful combat system that takes seconds to learn and a lot of practice to truly master. While you can just sit there and pound on the x button until every enemy is beaten to an unconscious, never dead, heap on the ground, you can also gracefully and seamlessly dive around the map, countering attacks, breaking arms and throwing enemies into each other in a fluid and fun way I have never experienced in any other game. Of course getting all of these moves requires a little bit of playing and getting experience, but it doesn't take long and is definitely not hard.

You start off the game bringing in the Joker from one of his typical escapades he tends to go on, the little scamp. You get a mini tour of the first building of Arkham Asylum, showing you just how secure and cut off it really is. Then the poop hits the fan and Joker escapes, trapping you inside the Asylum and forcing you (like it takes coercion) to play his little game. Joker takes over Arkham and from here the plot unfolds into a wonderfully long drama including many villains from the Batman microcosm. Once you get out of the first building, the whole of Arkham island is open to you. No part of the island is blocked off to start with, although you can't go into all of the buildings, and you can either go straight on with the story or you can explore every "kook and granny" of the island to look for the Riddler's Challenges. The Riddler's Challenges are a series of riddles and findable items all throughout the game that you try to find for experience and unlockables.

Exploration and open-ness is a big part of the Arkham Asylum experience. As you go through the game early on you will see areas with some of the Riddler's trophies and so on that you can't get to. As you get farther in the game, you will unlock the means of getting to these items, which makes it so you won't get out of building x and then be done with it forever. Another thing I like is when you are presented with a combat situation, you have a lot of different options for overcoming it. You can run in and beat the snot out of the enemies in a single, usually short, brawl (unless of course they have guns), or you can go about it in true Dark Knight style, picking them off one by one using myriad fun and creative ways. If you can interact with something, you can probably use it to take your enemies out.

Interaction is where Batman's detective vision comes in. Any time you are playing you can switch between regular vision and detective vision. Detective vision is Batman's most useful tool. It bathes everything in blue, with interactive items, points of interest and enemies all colored and marked in ways that make them stand out. In detective mode you can find out everything from what an object is for to the heart rate and mental state of your foes. It is an important tool for progressing through the game, but at times it almost seems to important. With all the Riddler's challenges scattered around, as well as other things you might normally miss, you almost don't want to go out of detective mode, as the risk of missing something that you may regret later. This is only a minor issue, but it's something that bothered me nonetheless.

Speaking of spending too much time in something, there is also the issue with vents. The whole of Arkham is expansive, with floor space of at least a couple of square miles, but sometimes I swear you spend more time in vents than anything. Need to get to a room that's blocked? Get in a vent! Need to find a sneaky way around enemies? Well, head for the vents! Is there a Riddler trophy around? Check the vents! It's annoying and it kind of kills the pace of the game. Plus, with the fantastic graphics this game displays, I want to spend more time taking it in, not crawling through a square vent with square walls and the occasional cobweb.

Speaking of graphics, the cutscenes are wonderfully rendered, other than the fact that Batman's mouth looks a little slimy. Everyone in this game has gotten a makeover, but it almost seems like an attempt to make everyone sexy. Scarecrow has exposed abs, Harley Quinn's outfit is skintight with a bare midriff, Poison Ivy's outfit is... well an open jacket top and that's it. The voice-acting is also spot-on, but the dislogue can go from wonderful wand witty to downright gruff and corny in an instant. Batman sure likes to repeat himself. (e.g. "I'll never let you win.... never!", "There's always a way in... always." and, to mix it up, "There's always a way out... always.") but his lack of vocabulary is offset by the Joker's wonderful and amusing lines, as well as the conversations between guards. If you enter a room and hear guards talking, it's always worth the wait to hear them finish before wiping them all out.

The cast of Arkham Asylum is nothing to be ingored, either. Of course you have Batman and the Joker, but you also have a great number of other super-villains making appearances, both well-known and somewhat more obscure. Additionally, the boss fights with these villains can be a blast. No two bosses are alike, and they really worked hard to make it feel like you're fighting the person you're actually facing. In most games you could put boss a's outfit on boss b and it wouldn't be any different., whereas in Arkham Asylum when you're fighting Ivy, you feel like you're fighting Ivy, and so on.

Arkham Asylum also offers a bit of challenge. While the enemies may sometimes seem to be oblivious to your presence (you can literally walk up behind them and touch them and they won't always notice you), there are a lot of spots that still end up being wonderfully challenging. On the topic of challenging, there are also 16 challenge maps (18 if you got Dem Bones and Crime Alley DLC codes) that really put your skills to the test. Eight of them are combat challenges, which pit you up against an increasingly large number of various enemies in a number of different arenas. Every arena has it's unique characteristics, and using them to your advantage is the key to getting a high score. Then there are my personal favorites, the predator maps. These put you in a room with a number of guards and taks you with certain ways of taking them down. Some are easy, such as perform a silent takedown, and some are just devious, such as take three enemies out with three different explosive walls at the same time. They're a lot of fun and will teach you some of the less obvious ways you can take down your opponents.

With fun combat, fantastic graphics and voice-work and a decent story, Batman Arkham Asylum is a wonderful game and one you should definitely consider purchasing. It is one of the better games on the Xbox 360, and one that will pull you in for quite a while. The mission variety is fantastic, the non-linear gameplay is a nice bonus and it's definitely good to see a Batman game that's actually good.

Overall Score: 96%

Most of My Gaming Collection

To enteraint any of the few people who read this, and to show off cool stuff, I decided to post mine and my boyfriend's gaming collection.

http://tinyurl.com/WholeSetup
This is our TV, it's a Vizio 37" Full HD VO370M LCD TV.
http://tinyurl.com/TPConsoles
This shows all of our consoles and our Sony DAV-HDX285 5.1 Dolby surround sound receiver. The N64 is kinda messed up because an angry parent once threw it on the floor when I was 24 minutes late getting home and so a friend of said parent had to glue it back together. The NES I got in fantastic condition from an old work friend whom I, sadly, can't get back into contact with. I got it with the box and everything. This picture also has my DS games and the mics for Lips.
http://tinyurl.com/OlderStuff
N64 games and controllers, minus Perfect Dark which is in the console as well as games and controllers for the PS2 and NES. The one game in the GameStop box thing is Clock Tower 3 for PS2.
http://tinyurl.com/PrototypeBatman
That's the special edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum as well as the little poster tube that came with Prototype when I preordered it. You can also see two of our complete set of Left 4 Dead posters.
http://tinyurl.com/TP360Games
This is our complete game collection for the 360. Games: Alone in the Dark, Army of Two, Assassin's Creed, Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Beautiful Katamari, Bully, Burnout: Paradise, The Club, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, Crackdown, Dark Sector, The Darkness, Dead Rising, Dead Space, Devil May Cry 4, Doom 3 [Original Xbox], Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, Fable II, Fallout 3, F.E.A.R. Files, F.E.A.R. 2, Fracture, The Godfather, Gears of War 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Halo 3, Hitman: Blood Money, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic [Original Xbox], Left 4 Dead, Lips, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Forza 2, Monopoly, Ninja Gaiden II, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Orange Box, Perfect Dark Zero, Prince of Persia, [Prototype], Red Faction: Guerilla, Resident Evil 5, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Sonic's Ultimate Game Collection, Soul Calibur IV, Street Fighter IV, Stuntman: Ignition, TimeShift, Too Human, Velvet Assassin, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, Wolfenstein and You're in the Movies.
http://tinyurl.com/FO3RE5
These are our Xbox Controllers and the special editions of Fallout 3 and Resident Evil 5
http://tinyurl.com/OldNintendo
This is the box for my NES and the NES power pad. The box has all the foam in it and even the plastic that goes around the console. The power pad... well it is what it is. :P

At my parents' house I also have a Wii, which we kind of all own, a SNES and some games and a Dreamcast with some games. I also have a DS and, somewhere, an original GameBoy.