Borderlands 2

I was a pretty big fan of Borderlands 1, except for the ending, which I will not spoil for you, in case you’re planning to play it and haven’t heard the countless masses complaining about what a shitty ending it was… Cause it was. …it was SO bad, that they actually poke fun at what BS it was, in Borderlands 2.

Despite the ending being ass, I still enjoyed the heck out of the game. Thus, getting number 2 was a forgone conclusion.

I found 2 to be a much better game than 1. However it still kept with the feel of game 1. I’m not entirely certain about this, but I think I spent much more time playing 2, I think it was a longer game.

Claptrap is… different… in 2. He’s still as obnoxious, but he’s got many more things to say, and he’s a little bit funnier.

What are your thoughts on Borderlands 2?

The Amazing Spiderman Xbox 360 Game Review

I was really excited to play this game, as I’d heard that it was supposed to be like Batman Arkham City. I put it in my Game Fly queue at #1, and waited. They sent me like, four other games before I finally got Spiderman.

I finally got Spiderman, and fired it up. I found it not a whole lot like Batman, to be honest. It had some mechanics that were reminiscent  but it seemed that IF their goal was to make a game like Batman, they stopped about 30% of the way there.

Now, let me preface this by saying, it’s a fun game. I enjoyed it. However, I felt that there were a lot of things they sorta just “phoned in”.

Credibility
First, and feel free to disagree with me on this, but I found it to be a huge distraction… I know this is a game, and a fantasy setting at that, so this might just be a hang-up for me… There were MANY times when you’re web-slinging around, and there’s clearly nothing the web could be attached to. I had this complaint as a kid watching the cartoons, and as an adult watching the movies. Some of the time, they didn’t let you swing, cause there was nothing above, but MOST of the time it was a non-issue.

Challenge Mechanics
My next biggest complaint is one that I have with most games… Repetition of task. The “boss” fights were very mechanical. Punch six times, dodge twice, then do a “thing.” The boss reels, and comes at you… Punch six times, dodge twice, then do that thing again. There was an awful lot of “Rinse, repeat”. Even the “puzzle” type things were similar. There’s one room that you go into, and in each corner of the room there are… things  Generators? and when you step in, the room electrifies. You retreat to an upper corner, wait, the come own, and break one of the generators. Rinse, repeat 3 times. Then there’s another of the same rooms, only this time there are also gun turrets. Same process, you just do it 8 times now, instead of 4.

Combat
It was way too easy to hit RT and retreat out of sight, get over someone, and “silent take down”. You could probably fight every single enemy who isn’t a boss this way. Also if they were standing next to a wall, you could just shoot webs and stick them to the walls, and be done with them. There were also many times when I hit the dodge button when the alert popped up over my head, and he still got hit.

Environment
There was a lot of the game that was very “on rails”. Once you entered a duct (which is another thing I’m really tired of… crawling around in ductwork. I used to install ductwork. Small buildings don’t have huge ducts like that, I’m sorry. If you were to try to crawl around in them, you’d fall through, or at least make so much noise it wouldn’t be useful.) you could only go one direction. You couldn’t even look around. Why bother putting that part in the game, why not just show me entering the duct, and then cut to me exiting the other end?

Aside from that stuff though, the game was enjoyable. I probably won’t bother playing it again, but it was fun.

Ruined Xbox Disks

Lost and Broken CD (Photo credit: Billie Hara)

I have an X-box 360 and a GameFly account. For those of you who don’t know what GameFly is, it’s basically Netflix for video games. Through this service, I have found some really great games.

One such game is Deus Ex Human Revolution. Excellent game, I’ve spent many hours playing this game, beaten it a few different times, etc. Another such game is Mass Effect 3, which I’ve blogged about before.

I bought Deus Ex through GameFly for something like, $17. Not a big deal. I also picked up Mass Effect 1 though not through GameFly. My problem is that in addition to an X-Box 360 and a GameFly account, I also have kids. This combo has resulted in my Mass Effect 1 and Deus Ex disks being scratched.

When we got the X-box it was a Christmas deal, came with a Kinect and a couple of games, but a small 4GB internal hard drive. I recently purchased a 360GB hard drive for it, but that was after the disks got scratched. Had I installed this hard drive before they were scratched, I could have “installed” the games onto the hard drive, and thus only needed the disk for the machine to check that I owned a license, and I’d still be able to play these games.

Alas…

I contacted X-Box support to see if they had a download service, I could just download the game and install it or something (they don’t.) I was told to put an old CD into the Xbox and let it run for five or six minutes, just to make sure it wasn’t the console that was creating the scratches. Good advise, but I am well aware of what’s creating the scratches. They also recommended that I get the disks buffed… I looked into this, and apparently there are places you can go to get CDs and DVDs and such buffed for a couple bucks. The problem is that the only place around me that does it is in the mall. I frigging hate the mall. Every time I go there, all I wanna do is buy appropriate clothes for the pre-teen girls who walk around with their crack sticking out of the back of their pants and slap the crap outta the Joe-Pro bad-ass idiots who follow them around like puppies wearing basketball shirts, jeans around their knees and baseball hats sideways.

Tangent: You youths of today need a good smacking around. Grow the F up, ffs. (…says the guy who blogs about video games.)

Anyway, my other option is to put these games back into my GameFly queue, have them send them to me, install them to my Xbox, and send them back and call it a day. But if something happens to my hard drive, I’d be back where I am now. I tried this already, put ME1 into first place in my queue, and they instead sent me item #3. About a week ago. It’s still not here. So going this route, I’m likely looking at waiting about four to six weeks before being able to play those two games again.

So, now I’m faced with having to go to the mall and deal with all that garbage, wade through the stench of “Brute” and underage pheromones, to get these disks buffed for a couple of dollars, or stay home and just re-order both games for a total of around $30.

What would you do?

 

From Looking for Action, to Loving the Story

A battle with pirates. (NES version shown) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always been one to love a good story, which is what my Dungeons and Dragons background was always about. I always loved the story, and would go to great lengths to tell it or make it more interesting, even if it was at my character’s expense. My gaming experiences were always a little bit different though, mostly starting with World of Warcraft.

If you’ve never played WoW there’s a LOT of story behind it. I played the game for 7 years, and there is a WHOLE lot of story behind it that I do not know. Not because there’s too much to learn though, but because I just didn’t want to learn it. When I read a book, it stays in my head for probably a week or two and I start to forget details… So too goes my memory for gaming… I have to do a quest four or five times before I remember it, and I found it extremely frustrating that now and then they’d change things, and the quests would either change or go away or whatever…

I simply downloaded addons that told me where to go, and figured it out from there. Most of the time when you moused over something you had to kill, it told you as much… so I’d do it, and follow the arrow to the next thing, etc. The story never interested me at all. Ever. It got to the point that when I was forced to stop and listen to story, I’d get irritated. When I had to go back and read a quest to figure things out, it made me not want to play.

So when I started playing X-box games this past January, I took a similar approach. Gogogo! Skip the text, just let me fight! ‘

I’d mentioned before that I had gotten Mass Effect 3 at the mis-construed advice from some friends, and started the ME franchise from the back end. When I started playing it, I went into the options and found that I could turn off the making of decisions. This took me one step further from the story, so that I could focus on the action. I enjoyed this for a little while, until I realized that you could greatly change the outcome of things. That was then compounded by the realization that decisions made in ME1 and ME2 would impact the action on ME3… I decided to turn the decisions back on, and start again.

Now, suddenly I find myself enjoying story lines in video games, all over again, the way I did in the original NES days with the first Final Fantasy, and Ultima Exodus. I find this a curious transition, to be perfectly honest.

So I mentioned (I think??) that when I found out how important the decisions in ME1 and 2 were, I bought them, and started playing them… Well, a kid of mine scratched ME1, and now it won’t play… Color me angry. I figured I’d go into my gamefly queue and get ME1 from them, and install it (now that I have a hard drive… Ididn’t before) and then maybe my disk will work well enough for disk recognition, and I could play off the install from GameFly… So I put ME1 at the top of my list, clicked “Keep” for ME3 that I had out…

They didn’t send me ME1… They sent me Gears of War… THREE… Because when I was taking the advice from my friends about Mass Effect, I guess I took the same advice about Gears of War… I haven’t gotten it yet, but I think what I’ll do is play it for a couple hours, and if I like it, I’ll get GoW1 and 2 from Amazon… And “Keep” 3 so that they might send me ME1 again… I’d really hate to have to buy ME1 again, even if it was only $17… Oh and by the way, I also played Assassin’s Creed 3 recently, having never played the first two. ALSO at the recommendation of those same friends… This was actually not misunderstood though. They told me to go with 3 first. I made sure of it… I may just stop listening to them all together though.

Anyway, like I’d said, I played all these games in reverse order, only to realize while playing Batman Arkham City, while I waited for GoW3, that I’ve never played Arkham Asylum… Another franchise I played backwards! I didn’t mind so much the first time through, but as I’m playing AC now, I’m picking up more mentions of old business that I am assuming had to do with AA… Yet another game I need to get, and play, and beat, before I can enjoy the games I have now! GRR!

Ah well… Too many games is not a bad problem to have, methinks! 😀

Mass Effect 1 vs. Mass Effect 3

Hipster Liara – Dialogue Wheel (Photo credit: scorp_stanton)

Christmas this year I picked up an x-box with the kinect, it was our gift to the family… We were thinking we’d spend so much time jumping around, playing games with each other.

The reality though is that I ended up getting Batman Arkham City and played it like it was crack and I was a homeless male prostitute looking to score. To say that I played that game hard is an extreme understatement. Anyway, this post isn’t about Batman. It’s about Mass Effect.

The little gaming group of friends I have recommended the Mass Effect games. At some point, someone said they liked 3 the best, although I though I heard “Play 3 first”. So I did.

Mass Effect 3 is a terrific game on its own. Having absolutely no understanding or basis for comparison going into this game, I didn’t feel all that lost. There were a few things that I didn’t really understand completely, but got the Gist, like “indoctrination” and what exactly is a “Spectre”… But at the end of the day, I got shit done, and love it so much, I played it through again, although that was mostly to try to get Liara T’soni in bed. I went with Ashley Williams the first time. Next I might go as a female and work on Traynor.

Anyway, I was kind of amazed at how generally easy Mass Effect 3 was. I died very seldom, and most of the time it was because my god-damned wireless controller keeps disconnecting. Yeah, sure the console pauses, but it’s still a total pain in the ass, and screws me up a lot. Now, the only games like this I have played in a while were Batman Arkham City, and Deus Ex Human Revolution.

“But they aren’t anything alike!” I know, I hear ya. But listen, I played World of Warcraft for 7 years. In comparison, they are similar. Anyway, those are the only first person shooter games I’ve played ever since Wolfenstein…

I died a lot in Deus Ex. I died maybe six times in ME3 on normal difficulty.

Mass Effect 1 was a total different story. I have it currently on “casual” difficulty, and my ass shows up on a plate in front of me All. The. Time. I probably die a dozen times per mission… Or, I DID anyway, until I realized, I probably just picked a really difficult place to do first.

My first mistake was not paying attention to the gear as I was getting it. In ME 3, you got different types of guns, and you could upgrade them, etc. but I really didn’t notice

Mass Effect 3 (Photo credit: JBLivin)

much of an impact if you were using a gun that wasn’t the best available. Also, the armor was apparently aesthetic. I didn’t even change my outfit and never had a problem in ME3.

My second mistake was, after getting the handle of traveling system to system, I went and found Liara, and then immediately went after her mother. Apparently these are missions are higher in difficulty than some others… I got Liara just fine, but her mother whipped my ass repeatedly. A few times I got to the point where she would be the only one left, and she made short work of me with barely a scratch. I backtracked outta that place, and quickly realized how much more important saving your game was in 1 vs. 3.

Twice I went most of the way through a place, only to fall off a ledge and go ALL THE WAY back to the last save point, which was in front of her. Now, I’m neurotic about saving. I move forty feet, and save. I kill a group of things, I save. ME3, like I said, I didn’t die much.

Driving the rover about was a big surprise, I love that thing. It doesn’t exist in ME3. I also had no idea that you could import your saves from one to the next. The thought that what I do in 1 will make a difference in 3 is pretty awesome. (Don’t gimmie and shit, I told you I’m new to the X-box and “recent” console gaming, as of December ’11.)

All in all, I can say I think the game play in 3 is better, Ashley Williams isn’t as bland looking, and the dialog is a lot better in 3 than it is in 1 so far., but that’s the march of technology coupled with a few successful releases under the franchise’s belt. 1 is still a great game though, and it has shed some light on my gray areas. I have yet to beat ME1, but there will be posts about it when I do, and probably a bunch on the way.

Oh yeah… I decided to pursue Liara in ME1, cause Ashley Williams looks a little strange… Yeah that’s right, strange enough that I put my capt. Kirk pants on, and go after the blue alien. She’s also a lot nicer than Ashley Williams, I think.

Thoughts?

That’s right, I needed another blog.

I have a lot of blogs, and as soon as I’m done with this post, I’ll start linking them in the sidebar or something… 

I started this one because one of the things I do in my spare time is play video games. 

As a kid, I spent ALL my time playing video games on Nintendo NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, etc. I mean, ALL my time that wasn’t eaten by school. 

I played World of Warcraft from day 1, and spent the next seven years in it, mostly as a mage, but also a warrior, a rogue, a hunter, etc… 

This blog is going to be able the games that I have been playing lately, which aren’t many now, but I imagine it could snowball. I’ll post thoughts, tips, etc, and reblog stuff I find from the internet that was helpful to me so that if I need it again, I know where it is., 

Feel free to enjoy the site, comment, contribute, etc… but if you don’t I don’t mind, cause this site is mostly just for me.