I’m going to tell you right now, that title’s a little misleading.
I wanted to review Assassins’s Creed II and tell you what a great game it was, but after thinking about it I don’t really see the point. I mean, if you think about it. You could go onto Metacritic right now and get no fewer than 76 reviews. Maybe if the game just came out I could ride the hype, but not now.
You should really play the game though. It was really good.
While I’m at it. Batman: Arkham Asylum was really good too. Go play that as well.
And while I’m at that (”that”, being distinct from “it”) I think my reviews are going to be a bit different from now on. You’ll see was I mean soonish.
-Tony
I really love Tim Schafer’s work. Or rather, I really loved Psychonauts and wished I was into PC gaming enough in my youth to have played some of his other games. That and I love to read his blog posts Double Fine Action News. So I’ve been eagerly awaiting Brütal Legend.
And I liked it, for the most part.
I mean, it’s not amazing, but it’s a solid game. The things I knew that I would like I loved and the things I didn’t know anything about were still pretty enjoyable. Let’s start with the “positives” paragraph.
The writing was spot on, which it had better be. You can’t have a Tim Shafer game with mediocre writing. It just ruins the point. You’ll be giggling or all out laughing through the entire game. “Decapitatiooooooooooon!” The voice acting was also pretty great. Of course, this is the perfect role for Jack Black but the supporting cast is also pretty good. Even if it is weird to hear Kath Sucy play someone over the age of 10. But come on Ozzy was in the game as a merchant. It’s tough to beat that. On that note, perhaps the single most impressive thing was the shear amount of metal in this game. Riding around and looking for collectables is far better with a radio blaring the entire time. And the areas you are driving through are incredibly well stylized.
Now for the meh. It’s not bad per se, it’s just not as awesome as it could have been. As much as I liked the style of the levels, they still somehow felt generic. Maybe it’s just because I was expecting psychonauts where one level you’re on a giant chessboard fighting against Napoleon, and the next you’re in a 100 story tall circus tent, but the levels just seemed a little uninspired. Forest section? Check. Snowy mountain? Check. Again, they were all stylized with metal very well, but there was still a little blandness. The RTS sections were a tad slow I think. As much as it tried to not be an RTS, you still spend way to much time gathering resources (”fans”). It worked well in the main game, but somehow I don’t feel like doing it in multiplayer. Again, I think a little speed boost might have helped. Or, I would completely take out the multiplayer part and add a bit to the single player. But that’s just me.
So is it a good game? Yes. Is it an amazing one. Not really. Still worth checking out though. And while you’re at it, buy Psychonauts.
-Tony
In case you haven’t been on a game news site yet today, Nintendo announced their new DSi LL. Yeah, it’s a bad name. Yeah, it’s sure to piss off people who bought a DSi when it launched in Japan exactly one year ago, and in America like six months ago. Here’s a picture, courtesy of Famitsu:
And there are more images here.
So yeah, the screen size is ~93% larger than the DSi. That’s a 4.2 inch screen instead of the DSi’s 3.25. Just what you always wanted. Well, at least they used the bigger screen to increase the resolution, so things won’t look as blocky right? Wrong. Same number of pixels as the DSi. This means that the pixels will be larger, which means it will be even blockier. But hey, at least it will be able to make fonts larger. And they did improve the battery life to be back to near DS Lite duration. And they have two sizes of stylus, which is kinda cool even if it does seem worthless.
But look at the colors! There’s Wine Red, Dark Brown, and Natural White. Perfect colors for my kitchen!
So basically, they made it for older people. Thats the only explination I can find. Larger screen, larger size, larger stylus, kitchen colors-it couldn’t have been made for the usual target demographic.
Oh, and in case your wondering, apparently LL is a Japanese clothing size, like XL here.
So, what are your thoughts? As for me, I’m still waiting for a DS2.
-Tony
Recently, two things have come out whose cost are. . . questionable. Halo ODST and the new Left 4 Dead campaign. Halo ODST being $60, and the Left 4 Dead campaign being about $6. Note that you can get some deals for ODST, and buying it through Amazon, I got it for $50 with a $10 of code for my next game purchase, not a bad deal.
Both of these games have come under fire for just plain not being worth the money and I just wanted to put my two cents in. Consider this a mini review of each.
Halo ODST gives you a very well done campaign, some new maps for Halo 3’s multiplayer, and a brand new firefight mode. The campaign is great fun, even if the whole “mystery” theme that’s being hyped didn’t feel like much of a mystery to me. But the plot was engaging and the characters were likable, and it proves that Halo can get along without any Spartans. Truth be told, I didn’t think Bungie could make a campaign that was worth playing until Halo 3, and this surpasses that. Seriously though, the Halo 1 campaign was crap and pretty much turned me agains the series for years. That being said, I did like some of the gameplay conventions of Halo 1, and a lot of those have been revived for ODST. As good as the campaign was, it’s only going to take you ~6 hours for a playthough, depending on what difficulty you have it set on. I did two runs, one on Normal and one on Legendary, so thats about 12 hours logged in right there. Then there’s firefight mode, which drops you into an area and hurls enemies at you until you eventually run out of lives. Probably because a Brute hit you with a gravity hammer. The fun in this mode isn’t so much trying to beat your old score but is instead all about seeing what kind of cool medals you can get that you would never actually be able to pull off in Halo 3. The last match Orey and I played, I got 3 Killionaire medals. It was magical. All around though, the mode is a great twist and the maps are varied enough that each one feels unique to the point where it almost feels like it’s own mode. One will put you in a large outdoor base where you can steal vehicles and blow up enemy tanks, while another will put you on catwalks where and enemy might just push you off to your death. There are 8 maps, figure at least an hour on each of them, so our total is up to 20 hours. But really, I doubt you’d just play one hour on each. And the last bit of content is three new multiplayer maps for Halo 3. Also included are all of the old maps. So if you don’t want to buy Halo 3 for the multiplayer, you could buy ODST instead. If you wanted. For me at least, this was well worth the buy. Obviously, if you have no interest at all in Halo, it’s not going to be for you.
As for Left 4 Dead. I really still don’t know how I feel about this game so maybe my critiques are biased. I personally think that Valve released a tech demo as a full game. But it was a good tech demo. Then Valve patched it to “make it better” and just sucked a lot of the fun out of the whole thing. Combine this with the fact that there’s been for some reason a polarizing effect on the player base-people are either way to good, or just suck-and you’ve got a game that’s infuriating at times. The four initial campaigns were nice but if you really think about it, one campaign isn’t really any different from another. None of them have many incredibly unique features. So what did Valve do? They released a new campaign. But one that’s shorter than the rest. That’s something that I probably could have done without. But if you did love Left 4 Dead and have played all the other campaigns to death, then maybe it’s for you.
-Tony
No Gundam stuff this week. Although Strike Freedom came in the mail today from Tomopop user Stella (AKA Aiya). So there goes my productivity.
I was going to talk a bit about The Five Star Stories, which is wonderful, and you should really consider reading it. I was going to use this space to convince you to do so, but perhaps some other time.
So why did I change what to write about on the very day that I was going to write? Because I saw this on Kotaku. Create your own Sonic levels! I’m really not sure Sega is doing to the right thing here by charging for this service. What the should do is put all user created levels up for download on XBox Live or PSN. This way, when someone buys the downloadable version of Sonic The Hedghog, they would get the option to download extra levels for it. And the levels could be easily filtered by quality because of the rating systems on the services. Or maybe they’d just put up some of their favorite levels for download. Hell, they could even offer extra downloadable “campaigns” for a dollar or two. Get it? The same sonic engine that you loved when you were little, but with all new levels. Think of it as an expansion pack to Sonic. They’d make a killing.
You know what? Nintendo should do it too. Lunar Magic has been around forever and there’s quite a catalogue of levels now. I myself have played and enjoyed (despite the extreme difficulty) kaizo. Again, Nintendo could just create all new levels of Super Mario World. I’m excited by the thought. I should go e-mail Reggie.
Really, this whole idea is similar to what Capcom did with Megaman 9, but kind of taking it to another level. This here is an example of good DLC, unlike most of the crap they try to sell us.
On a slightly different tangent. This really says something about the longevity of these old games, as well as the fact that Super Mario World is on of the greatest games ever. Yes, I know I’m going off here a little bit but think about it, Sega made a Java version of Sonic that had a level editor but it was just some random guy that allowed you to edit the original Super Mario World. That is devotion.
Hmm, I guess this post was a tad short? Sorry about that. Hopefully next time you’ll have lots of pictures of Strike Freedom.
-Tony
