I’ve been riding a roller coaster of love and hate for this game since I started playing it.  It begins with a tutorial, as many games do, and eases you into things.  It seems to take a little too long to get out and start killing things, so by the time you get out to the field, you’ll run out and get yourself killed.  And that’s when you find out the first challenge of this game.  Even on easy mode, this game is brutal and unforgiving.  It demands you use strategy, because enemies will surround and slaughter you.  And if you die, it’s game over, load up your last save.

Oh, you forgot to save?   I’m sorry.

I’ve taken to saving after every encounter, because it’s too easy to die in the next one.  Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find some good loot, and the battles will go more smoothly for the rest of the stage.  But the next stage you start the grind all over again.  I’ve taken it in stride and have survived for the most part, but my main complaint is that I still cannot do what I was promised on the back of the box.  I’m level 18, have completed dozens of quests, and I am not a dragon, nor do I have a base.  I have all these items my craftsmen would take off my hands if the game would give me my base already, but as it is I stand encumbered and unable to manage my inventory because I’ll need everything.

I’m close to doing the whole dragon and base thing, and the game knows it.  The difficulty continues to ramp up, I must have reloaded the game a few dozen times last night.  I was confronted with a boss that could kill me in four hits.  Being that potions have cooldowns, I can’t drink them fast enough to survive.  I had to resort to a hit and run strategy in tight quarters (the exits to the hallway you’re in seal shut for the battle).  It took all of my potions, but I finally took him down.

Now I just have to figure out how to get some more poitions…

So, if you really love hack and slash games, and don’t suck at them like I do, then I would recommend picking it up.  If you’re more of a casual player that doesn’t like dying every five minutes, maybe pass this one up.  It can sense new blood and will kill you.

Zel-kun out.

But at least you have benefited from all the kills then, huh?  Afraid not, you likely lost more experience when you died than you made getting down there.  I finally gave up the game when I spent about three hours killing things for exp, then one death took all of that away, the game was turning into an exercise in futility.  Battles were a pain, I remember that the enemies were color coded for my convenience, from grey to purple.  Grey indicated that the monster was way below you and worth no exp, whereas purple indicated that you were about to be raped horribly.  In the middle of that was yellow, the ideal kill.  It was an enemy roughly your level, and worth decent exp.  Lower levels were easier to kill but worth a lot less, whereas anything higher you could not kill on your own.  Killing a yellow took all your strength, and left you bruised and bloody.  If you were unfortunate enough to get more than one, you were screwed.

So, after about a month or so, I canceled my subscription.  Awhile later I picked up a copy of Final Fantasy XI.  I figured I loved Final Fantasy, so their game should be awesome.  The game was a bit of a grind, just installing the damn thing took eight hours and I had to sacrifice a goat to get it to run.  So I started the game and began pawing at the screen, because it was pretty.  I started my character and began playing.  Even though I had friends playing the game, I couldn’t play with them, because they randomize the server you get to play on.  I apparently had to buy some sort of ‘World Pass.’  All other games call this feature the ‘click the server you want’ button.  Amazing… I had to install a giant resource-hogging browser to log into the game, and it didn’t have such functionality as a freaking server list?

I played the game pretty much nonstop for about two weeks, killing rabbit after rabbit.  Occasionally the rabbits killed me because I assumed a normal-looking rabbit was a normal rabbit, when in fact it was some sort of demon rabbit bent on world domination.  It took this long to FINALLY save up for my first armor upgrade… at like… level 5 I think.  I was excited at the thought of new armor, not just for the protection value, but because my character will finally look different than a starting character.

Oh he did, all right.  He looked like a damn prostitute.  I spent a week leveling up a character, then turned him into a prostitute.  WTF.

That was enough for me.  I clicked the uninstall button and canceled my subscription.

A few years after that, a good friend assured me that World of Warcraft was the greatest thing since cubed bread (croutons).  I had played Warcraft III, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I was amazed by how many problems it avoided, that seemed to be accepted by its predecessors.

Installation was a breeze, even though updating took FOREVER.  Character creation was simple, and within minutes I was playing.  I was shocked at how easy it was to pick up, even without the tutorials, it was pretty much a no-brainer:  Right-click people, accept quest, right-click enemy, hit blatantly-numbered key with your attack.  Repeat forever.

Quests made sense, and were somewhat varied (as much as an MMO can be, I guess).  I understood where I needed to go and what I needed to do.  And even in the days of vanilla WoW, leveling was pretty fast.  The game was conducive BOTH to solo play and grouping.  When you died, you could run back to your body as a ghost, so you didn’t have to fight your way back.  When you came back, you didn’t lose exp.  It was fun, with lots of goofy emotes and enough humor injected into the game itself to keep it entertaining.  In short, the game was good.

I fell in and out of the game several times over the years.  I would play for a couple weeks, then take a break, I would play for a day, then maybe not log in for a month.  This trend continued until about last year, while I was house-hunting, and decided I had neither the time nor the inclination to play, so I canceled my subscription.

A few months ago, we began itching for an MMO.  We figured that since we had finally escaped the clutches of WoW, we would try out Aion, a Korean MMO that had a whole Angels vs. Demons motif.  I’m really into the whole battle-angel thing, so we thought this would be a good things to try.  It was great at first, but as time passed, we noticed a lot of issues:

1.  Crafting and Gathering was ridiculous.

It seemed cool at first, with characters able to take as many professions as they wanted, but became overly burdensome very quickly.  For example, to make a sword, I would have to go out and get a ton of iron, smelt that iron into bars, then forge a bunch of different parts for the sword, then hunt down monsters with the hope of dropping ‘fluxes’, then buy the items that can’t be gathered or made, then craft it.

While a little burdensome, it wasn’t all that bad.  The problem comes in when you actually have all the materials and hit the ‘craft’ button.  First off, what you normally craft is garbage, any sword you can make will be of roughly same quality as anything you’ll get just wandering around killing monsters.  You want to make several swords with the hope of making a ‘noble’ version, which is higher quality and is actually something you are proud to have made.  So, barring all the other components, just farming the fluxes for one weapon you want takes hours upon hours, because you’ll waste them making the subpar weapons.

The second thing is that when you click that ‘craft’ button, you just might fail.  While it’s irritating at lower levels, I’ve heard stories of max-level smiths going to dungeons to kill bosses and finally getting the component to make their weapon, then FAILING in the craft and losing all the components.

2. Welcome to the grind

While not as bad as others, the grind definitely takes its toll, especially since your character is exceptionally vocal.  Every time you cast a spell, you get to hear them shout the name of the spell in whatever language they speak.  And even if you turn that off, your character still shouts constantly (Aaaah!  Yeeeeehaaaa!  Whaaaaa!).  The enemies were tough, and the fights didn’t seem like they could go any differently as you leveled.  The combination of moves felt very… samey?

3. Flying?  What’s that?!

In this game, every character has wings, and has the opportunity to fly around.  That alone could sell me the game.  I thought how awesome it would be to fly around, have mid-air battles, and explore the countryside in a fun new and unique way.  Except you can’t.  You can only fly for about a minute (an unnecessary limitation), and only in specific and tiny regions.  I’m puzzled by this.  You give me wings, and an open sky, flying SHOULD happen.  When you take away that ability, you’re telling me you didn’t design the game well enough to fly, because I would expose the incomplete continent designs.  This is the same reason you can’t fly in the original WoW lands after the addition of flying.  However this is understandable, because flying mounts weren’t introduced until years after the game’s release.  And also, because they ARE working on implementing it.  What this tells me, when I can’t fly in a game DESIGNED for flying, is that you’re just being lazy.  So, at least we get mid-air battles then?  Nope.  In the sky there’s nothing.  If there WERE monsters, you could fight, but there’s nothing but a few gathering nodes in the sky.  Well at least you can fly and fight the ground enemies with ranged attacks?  Nope, enemies auto-evade when you’re in the air.  So congratulations Aion, you took an awesome concept and did as little with it as possible.

4. Customization?

While it is great that there’s nearly unlimited options for visually customizing your character, things I would like to see implemented in other games, there’s nothing else.  As you level, there’s no skill points, or talents.  So your level 20 templar is exactly like anyone else’s.  I may be spoiled by WoW here, but you need to let your players define their own skill set, it lets them have more control over the game they’re investing so much time into.

So, I was playing Aion a few weeks ago, when I realized that pretty much every complaint I had about Aion, was addressed in World of Warcraft.  So now I have reactivated my account, and am delving once again into the largest MMO out there.  I would like another MMO to topple WoW, if just for the variety, but the fact remains that so far, WoW is simply the best at what it does.

Zel-kun out.

I’ve played Infinite Undiscovery for maybe ten minutes, and the fact that I can sit here and write an article about it really says something.  I’m not going to say if it’s a good or a bad game yet, way too early to tell.  But it did make a lot of strong impressions on me right off the bat.

So, the game boots up and tells me to push start.  Nothing new here, obviously, but it’s what comes immediately after that throws me:  It gives me the option of easy or normal mode.  It’s really strange to have difficulty modes in RPG’s, even action-orientated ones as this one is, but not entirely unheard of.  But when I click on the options… I am informed that most content is unavailable in easy mode!  And normal mode?  MOST content it available in normal mode.  This means I probably need to beat the game, unlock hard mode, then play through on hard mode to see all the game’s content.

This is such a backwards way of thinking that I am shocked a progressive company like Square, always seeking to innovate gameplay (not always good, but at least different), even considered this throwback to the 8-bit and early 16-bit days.  And you know what?  It wasn’t cool then, and it certainly as hell isn’t cool now.  Do you know why?  Let me paint you a picture…

Say you’re at a store.  You like video games but are by no means a hardcore player.  You see a game that piques your interest, so you hand over many of your hard-earned earth dollars to purchase it.  You take the game home, unwrap the cellophane, and pop the game in.  You see easy mode and say, “Well, I’m not that great at games, I’m going to play easy mode.”  You play, and halfway through the game, it abruptly ends (not saying Infinite Undiscovery does this, but a lot of games like this do), telling you to try out normal mode.  You try out normal mode and it’s way too difficult.  Congratulations, you paid 100% of the price of the game, yet only actually received 50% of the content.

Even casual players deserve all the content a game offers.  Mass Effect?  Casual difficulty was the same game as Hardcore, just easier.  Fallout 3?  Again, all the contect there for Easy and Hard.  Want to know what else?  They allowed you to change the difficulty at any time to suit your play style, so without having to start over new games, you can pick the difficulty that works for you.

Okay, so, I pick Normal mode and it shows me a prison cell, with some heavily-armored guard watching some kid.  The kid (it’s apparent that the kid is you) asks in the whiniest voice imaginable, “Ohhh, I’m so hungry, can I please get something sweet to eat?”  Predictably, the guard tell him to shut the hell up, then smacks him with a mace when he doesn’t comply.

The first impression of the main character shouldn’t be as a whiny moron.  You want to root for the main character, maybe even feel sorry for him.  This scene might have worked mid-game, but as your introduction to the character, it is not a good first impression.

As I’m waiting for a random person to bust in and rescue me, a random person busts in and rescues me.  Then an honestly intesresting thing happens, she starts referring to me as her lord, and drags me out by the arm to escape.  Suddenly I understand the pansyness, he’s some noble that got locked up as a political prisoner.  But he ruins that by repeatedly claiming he’s not the guy.  Finally, his rescuer gets the point, but decides that since she’s here anyway, might as well continue with it.  And he refuses.  Yeah, he refused to escape a cell where he was obviously left to die.  During this argument, a bunch of guards attack, knock out the girl, and you have to fight them off.  Time for fighting!

Not quite… First the game gives you a four pages full of words on how to fight.  I read, okay, a little wordy, but at least I know about combat now.  Soon as I finish reading, a SECOND book appears, this one five pages long.  Then, a THIRD book four pages long appears.  So before you even begin playing, you need to read a thirteen page tutorial on how to fight, and believe me, it is way more complicated than it needs to be.  After that, my father called me and I spent the last hour of my evening helping him out with his computer, so I didn’t get to play anymore.

Let’s hoping the game picks up… and that fighting is actually more streamlined than the thirteen page tutorial makes it out to be.

Zel-kun out.

The answer to that is a resounding ‘no.’  So I decided to finally get it together and get what I refer to as the ‘Vampire Epic’ going.  You see, I loved Vampire: The Masquerade.  Despite all their flaws, I played both video games that came out for the PC, I couldn’t get enough of the lore.  I used to play in a Hunter: The Reckoning game, and I did a lot of forum stuff using the Vampire universe.  But there’s something I always wanted to do, that was never touched upon in any of the games.

It always seems that someone picks an era (usually modern), and runs a game in it.  This seems severely limiting considering that the players are immortal.  Also, if you’re playing by the rules, and not starting off as virtual gods, means that you are invariably the weak pudwink vampires getting slapped around by the established vampire society.  So I thought that since I have all these books, why not run a game that spans the ages of civilization.

So I’m working up a plot in my head, and gathering characters.  I intend to start the game off with their origins in the Dark Ages, and then in chapter increments, the game will move through the history of the world.  This is a daunting task, an I am incredibly anxious to see if I can pull it off.  This is on top of the fact that I have never ran a Vampire game before, so there’s all sorts of room for errors.

Not to mention I still need to gather and read a few more books.  I have a player that wants to be a Werewolf, and possibly another that wants to be a Mage… and I’m never one to deny a player their creativity.

Zel-kun out.

Following that, I went on to the classics of Secet of Mana and Illusion of Gaia, action RPG’s that broadened the scope of video game storytelling beyond ‘You are good, the bad guy is evil, defeat him.’  This was a time when a game labelled with ‘Squaresoft’ was pure gold.  Also on the market was Enix, which seemed to push the limits of the SNES.  Illusion of Gaia had multiple cels for the main character, and even when through the trouble to animate his hair and clothing when there was wind blowing.  7th Saga had animated enemies in its encounters, which was unheard of for it’s time.  Then there was Brainlord, which proved that you could create difficult puzzles out of nothing more than switches, boulders, and giant iron balls.  And in a time before the internet, a puzzle could take days to solve.

The quality of games went up exponentially as Squaresoft and Enix duked it out.  Final Fantasy IV’s was an amazing adventure of betrayal and redemption, supported by one of the better soundtracks of its day  (Mysidia’s theme still one of my favorites).   Then Robotech came along and I could spend countless hours customizing robots.  Breath of Fire decided that it was perfectly okay to swap your party members even during battle, able to replace a fallen comrade with a fresh one from reserve.  Enix decided it would be fun to have you spend many brutal hours grinding, dying, and getting lost in 7th Saga, but it was so difficult and time-consuming that every boss defeated felt like an accomplishment.

Then there was Final Fantasy VI, a game so good, it is still in my top ten RPG’s of all time, beating out nearly everything else that came after it.  It had sound mechanics, interesting plot, and a beautiful soundtrack.  And it did something I loved which, for some reason, has never been re-attempted, either in the franchise nor in any RPG I’ve played since.  It not only dispensed with the ‘mute’ main character (which has fortunately never plagued FF anyhow, first one notwithstanding), but with the notion of a main character altogether.  Throughout the game the perspective shifts from person to person, each one acting as the hero of their own story.  With the exception of a few sequences, you can fully customize your team, and are not anchored to a main character.  This gave each member of the cast a chance to shine, not forced to play the supporting role.  In addition to that, nearly every character has at least one quest or event based around them, allowing them to play the hero.

Final Fantasy VII was the first game that went 3D, and marked a turning point in the series, and honestly not for the better.  The game itself was awesome.  Seeing the battle and scenes in 3D was visually impressive, the materia system was easy to understand and incredibly customizable, the characters were believable, and the story well-written.  The reason why I say it marked a turning point, is because it is at this point that the series became popular enough that even non-RPG fans were playing it.  This in and of itself is not bad, but I think it was Square’s desire to appeal to broader audiences that started its downward trend.

Along came VIII, a game so vile that I sometimes cry myself to sleep just knowing it still exists.  A game so bad, that the Spoony Experiment did an ELEVEN part review deriding it, picking apart nearly everything wrong with it, piece by piece.  Watching the series reminded me just how badly it hurt to play that game.  I’m not going to get too much into it, but VIII seemed to abandon everything that was good about the series.  The mechanics were clumsy and nonsensical, as was the plot.  It seemed that the plot existed only as a vehicle to show off the graphics, which were indeed incredibly impressive for their time.  The soundtrack was forgettable at best, and the characters were poorly defined.  The strangest thing about the game is the way it starts off strong, then devolves into a jumbled mess.  It even prompted a community to theorize that everything after Squall was stabbed through the chest with a gigantic icicle (which I can’t imagine is survivable) was a fevered dream as he lay dying.  This almost makes sense, as this IS the point where the plot takes a nosedive.

This betrayal aside, I was still loyal to the Final Fantasy series.  After all, the previous games were awesome, it may have been inevitable for one to suck.

Then came IX, which promised to return the series to its roots, with more defined character job roles and the return of crystals as a source of power in the world.  This would have worked.  In fact, the plot WAS decent, the soundtrack WAS well done, and the characters WERE better defined than VIII.  IX is an example of how one thing can destroy an otherwise good game.

I will never put graphics at the forefront of what I think a good game should include, but a game should be pleasing to look at.  On top of that, your design should match your story.  It’s hard to take the characters seriously, when they all look like cartoonish doofs.  And that was the problem, the cartoony design of the characters prevented immersion into the game.  And the strangest part is, it seemed to be fully intentional.  I mean, these characters were designed by Yoshitaka Amano, the same guy that did FFVI.

Well, Amano walked into the developers room and gave them this:

(Note:  For some reason, the images aren’t working… just do a Google Image search for ‘Steiner Amano’)

Look at that… I would not want to mess with that dude.  He’ll take that sword and mess me up.  Sure, not a big fan of the boots, but when you have a sword and armor like that, you can make sure no one laughs at your boots.

And the developers (or whoever) decided it should look like this:

(Note:  And again… just do a Google Image search for ‘Steiner’)

What the hell, boys?  This looks like a local drunkard who wandered into the armory and put on some random stuff.  In fact, it looks like he’s naked under that armor, guess he’s not afraid of chafing.  On top of that, his fist is nearly the size of his head, and the hilt of his sword is BIGGER than his head.  Do I even need to mention the shoes?  What Amano’s boots weren’t doofy enough for you?

So, Final Fantasy had two subpar games under its belt.  After that, it went off into hiding for a bit, biding it’s time making remakes of the old games.  They finally brought FFV to the American market, and retranslated and retuned IV.  They also did a terrible port of VI for the Playstation, loading times were horrendous and the battles were in slow motion due to a technical issue.

Then, finally FFX hit the market.  FFX had believable characters, decent design (with the exception of Tidus… achem), innovative mechanics, and a plot that made sense for the most part.  By all accounts, FFX was a great game, and worthy to follow in the footsteps of it’s great predecessors.  Unfortunately, it failed because it didn’t seem to like players actually PLAYING the game.  You are led around by the nose from cutscene to cutscene, let go only to maybe run through a dungeon or section of town, before the game scoops you up again.  All in all, most the time you’ll spend playing the game will be spent not playing the game, but instead watching cutscene after cutscene.  If the game focused more on actually creating playable content, it could have been much better than it was.

FFXI came along, which was an MMORPG.  I played it, but never got into it.  I know people that hate it, and others that swear it’s the greatest thing ever.  I find it hard to really consider this a Final Fantasy, so I can’t really hold it against the franchise.

Then… FFX-2, the first direct sequel to the series.  I felt the ending to FFX was fairly absolute, and didn’t really NEED a sequel.  I especially scratch my head when I think of how cool a direct sequel to IV, V, VI, or VII could have been.  FFX-2 seemed to exist solely to play dress up with the three female leads.  How sad is it that the first RPG to feature an all-female cast centers around changing into skimpy clothes?  The game wasn’t really bad, but it seemed to try to make up for all of FFX’s faults.  It had a lot of gameplay, a much more open world, and cutscenes were far less prominent.  Honestly, if they would have spent the time making FFX-2 simply remaking FFX with those elements, it could have been a fantastic game.  And yes, I would have bought it.

FFXII is the only one I never actually played.  It came out for the PS2 as I was retiring it in favor of my X-box.  Sure, it still sits there hooked up to my TV, but then I have to drag a CABLE across my living room to play, and make sure I have the proper memory card in… it’s something of a hassle in this modern age of wireless controllers and internal hard drives.  I took a look at the character design and description of the mechanics, and decided I would pass on it until I had some reliable reviews from my friends.  I never got beyond an ‘Eh, it was okay,’ so I decided I wasn’t missing out.

Finally (heh), there is Final Fantasy XIII, the game I picked up yesterday.  Its system is decent, and I love the design so far.  While it seems to be leading me around by the nose, it’s integrating cutscenes better than X did.  I’d say it was about a 3:1 gameplay to cutscene ratio, which isn’t bad.  The characters have strayed away from pointless exposition, while focusing on the plot at hand.  Plotpoints important to a character but somewhat irrelevent to the current plot are revealed in flashbacks, which makes sense.  Obviously, the guy you just meant isn’t going to spend twenty minutes describing how he proposed to his girlfriend.  The party doesn’t care, they just met.  But you, the player, do care.

Background about the world, places, and concepts, are dumped into a codex accessible from the menu.  More games are doing this, and I love it.  It allows the player to learn as much or as little about the world as he wishes.  It keeps the realism when a character doesn’t have to describe something alien to the player, but what SHOULD be everyday knowledge to all the characters.  After all, when I say I’m going to take a plane somewhere, I don’t have to describe to everyone in the room what a plane is or how a flight schedule works, we all know.

The battle system is fast-paced, and requires a minimum of micromangement.  All I have to do is set up the character roles, and save that selection as a ‘Paradigm.’  For example, if I want one person to attack aggresively, one to focus on protecting allies, and the other to heal, I set them up for those roles.  I can switch these Paradigms on the fly, so when the party is healed up, I can easily switch to an all-out offensive beased on roles I have pre-designed.  I might be making it seem more complex than it really is, but it’s actually quite simple.

So, in short, this most recent installment is showing a lot of promise.  If it opens up at least a little from the linearity I’m experiencing, this could actually be a very good game.

Zel-kun out.

Instruments:

The biggest difference in instruments is the drums.  Rock Band has four drums, and Guitar Hero has five.  Rock Band does have the expandible symbol and high-hat sold seperately, so it can feasibly be expanded to six.  And to finally put the argument to rest… YES, Rock Band drums can be used on Guitar Hero and vice versa.  The game senses which type is connected and will convert the song accordingly.

The guitars are slightly different.  Rock Band’s fret buttons are flush with the rest of the controller, so I find it easy to move my fingers across the buttons, and in a pinch, have one finger hit two buttons.  Unfortunately, that can also work against me when I mean to hit blue and accidently hit blue-orange.

Guitar Hero’s controller has raised buttons, which make it more difficult for me, but I know some people like that, so I would call the two styles roughly equal, but I prefer the Rock Band style.  The strum bar on the Guitar Hero controllers I’ve seen annoys me however, as they produce pronounced clicking sounds.  Seems it’d be more durable in the long run over Rock Band’s more silent strum bar, however.

Rock Band’s controller has a second set of buttons down towards the base of the guitar.  The game claims they’re for solos, so you can press them without strumming.  But I’ve found that to be difficult and pointless.  Guitar Hero has a touch sensitive bar that can be used to slide up and down special notes, which I think is actually pretty cool.  Obviously, these secondary features only work on their respective games.

Music:

There’s quite a bit of music in both games, but Guitar Hero definitely seems to have more modern music.  Being a big fan of classic rock, most of the music didn’t really click with me.  Rock Band, on the other hand, seemed to have more classic rock.  On top of that, it had other music that actually had a pretty good beat or good riffs that made me like the songs.  Rock Band made me like songs like ‘Float On’ and ‘Nine in the Afternoon.’

Again, it’s a matter of taste, but if you’re a fan of Classic Rock, you should definitely steer towards Rock Band.

Gameplay:

This is where the two really deviate.  In Rock Band, the scenario mode can be played either solo or in a band, which is nice if you only have other players occasionally, you can always work towards the same goal.  In Guitar Hero, there’s a seperate solo scenario mode for each individual instrument, and then another scenario mode for bands.  This means if you want to unlock a lot of things, you’re going to put in a lot of solo hours, THEN put in group hours.  Solo should be optional in a party game, not mandatory.

In Rock Band, when one of your band members fail out, you can activate your overdrive to save them.  In Guitar Hero, if they fail out, you lose.

The setlists in the games can be completed in any order once you unlock them.  Rock Band, however, has custom setlists in nearly every venue, which means that as you go through the game, there’s many opportunities to play the music that you want to play, which makes for a far more enjoyable time I find.

Things They Did Right:

Guitar Hero allows you to change difficulty in the middle of the setlist.

Rock Band has loads of outfits and you can change the color of all of them and add designs to select items.

Guitar Hero has a countdown after you unpause, allowing you to orientate yourself before the music starts again.

Rock Band has percussion parts for the singer during the instrumental parts (tamborine, clapping, cowbell).

Guitar Hero has fully customizable instruments.

Rock Band allows you to change the sound of the music both during overdrive (chorus, echo, etc depending on the setting on the controller), and with the whammy bar.  Yes, Guitar Hero has the whammy bar, but the whammy is far more pronounced in rock Band.

Guitar Hero has a beginner mode to let even the most unskilled get into the groove of things

Rock Band has ‘Big Rock Endings’ which allow you to hit as many notes as you can to rack up a bonus.

Guitar Hero has famous musicians come up on stage, and occasionally duel you.

Rock Band allows you to (for a few dollars) import all the songs from the first game into the second, so you don’t have to have both discs on hand to play all the songs.

Guitar Hero has a recording studio where you can make your own tracks, and then trade them freely on X-Box Live.

Rock Band let’s you create characters for your band, even if no one is there to play them.  When you play solo, you don’t have to play with randomized band members.

Things They Did Wrong:

Rock Band can make you play some excruciatingly long setlists.  As many as eight songs on the gig, following a theme.  If you don’t like the theme, be prepared for eight songs of suck.

Guitar Hero makes you play through the big rock endings.  You know that seven minute song you BARELY struggled through?  Yeah, prepare to die in the last ten seconds because Guitar Hero hates you.

So there you have it.  They are both terrific games, each with good and bad.  Guitar Hero definitely expects more out of its players.  It’s definitely more challenging in some respects, with the way it handles the big rock endings and failing out.  I wouldn’t call Rock Band easy by any stretch of the imagination, however, but it is easier to get into the groove, and is more forgiving if players aren’t perfect.

I truly prefer Rock Band, but maybe that’s just because it’s my first.  But then it might also be because it has ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’  That song is made of pure awesome.

Zel-kun out.

I first saw Bioshock long before it was released.  Pete sent me a link to a video where the creator was explaining the concept while he played a bit of the game.  I remember watching it and thinking that it was going to be awesome.  I remember that I couldn’t wait for it to come out so I could rush out and buy a copy.

When the game finally came out, I was deep into my World of Warcraft addiction, and decided that I really didn’t need to buy the game just yet.  After all, it was just an FPS.

When I finally bought an X-Box 360, I saw it on the shelves for about forty dollars, and thought about getting it.  I considered it until my eyes wandered over to games like Assasin’s Creed and Lost Odyssey.  So Bioshock once again fell by the wayside.

Not too long ago I saw it on the shelves of Gamestop for only thirty dollars, and considered getting it.  At this point, the memory of the video I watched was nearly gone, and I overlooked it several times.

Finally, last friday, I stood in Gamestop, and was just looking for something interesting to buy.  I got the bad news about the house, I broke my glasses, and I had a particularly difficult last few days at work.  It was all in all a sucky week, and I needed something to help take my mind off things.  Some men turn to alcohol… I turn to a new video game.

Take that as you will.

Gamestop was having a buy two, get one free sale, so I couldn’t walk out of there with just one game.  I went in and picked up a copy of Assassin’s Creed for $19.99, to replace the copy I loaned to a friend and wondered if I’d ever get back.  I spotted Blue Dragon, sitting there one the shelf for $14.99, so I decided to give it a shot.  I looked at Bioshock, which took up a good three spots on the shelf housing about eight boxes, each with a little $17.99 price tag.  I decided it was finally time, and took Bioshock home.

When I first started it up, I was mildly impressed.  There were some very nice visuals and unique architecture as you descend into Rapture, the underwater city in which the game takes place.  I finally get control of my character just in time to see some poor sap get eviscerated by some crazy woman right outside of my little submarine ball.  She looks at me through the window and decides she wants to eat my face.

Queue several seconds of her clawing at the windows and the walls, and the submarine shakes and shorts out.  She finally gets tired and seemingly wanders off.  That’s when the door opens and you’re encouraged to step out into that poor man’s entrails.

Afterwards, there’s a bit of a tutorial that doesn’t really feel like a tutorial, and that’s always a good thing.  A word to gaming companies everywhere: If you want to increase the replay value of a game, eaither really downplay the tutorial, or make it skippable.

The game is essentially a traditional first person shooter, with some special powers thrown in for good measure.  The gameplay is decent.  not outstanding, but definitely decent.  Take into account that I generally hate first person shooters, and that’s a glowing review from me.

Bioshock’s true appeal lies in its plot and ambience.  The game takes place in 1960, and you’re some poor sap that found himself in the wrong place at the right time.  Your plane crashes in the middle of the ocean, and you swim from the burning wreckage to the lighthouse you conveniently crashed right next to.

Once inside the lighthouse, you enter a little submarine and enter the city, learning that it was built by a man who was tired of having his ambitions thwarted by the governments of the world.  He built Rapture, where each man is allowed to persue his own interests, unfettered by ethics and morality.  It was a city filled with artisans, entrepenuers, and scientists.

The city’s architecture and style is trapped in the early to mid 20th century, the kind of place you’d expect the rat pack to roam around.  Although when you see the darkened and flooded halls, and flickering lights, you can imagine any number of Lovecraftian horrors to be roaming around.

For a reason I haven’t discovered yet, the population of Rapture went off the deep end.  The promise of genetic perfection through the substance known as Adam has gone straight to their heads.  As you pass through the rooms, you stumble upon insane ramblings, crazy conversations, and more than a few people who can’t wait to kill you by any means.  Each room seems to have a story, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to find a recording of that story scattered amidst the debris.  As you wander through the city, you get drawn in, just as a game is supposed to do.

It’s a terrific game, and at $17.99, definitely worthwhile.

Zel-kun out.

When I was wandering around Gamestop looking for something new, I was pretty excited to have stumbled upon Too Human.  After all, it was by Silicon Knights, who made one of my favorite games for the Gamecube: Eternal Darkness.  With it’s use of shadows and runes on the cover, and a name like ‘Too Human,’ I just knew it had to be another dark look at humanity, and how it might rise up against something malicious and far greater than it.

Well, I couldn’t have been further off the mark.  In fact, I struggle to find the meaning in the title at all.  Too Human is, in fact, Norse Mythology in a Sci-Fi setting.  This setting is, in fact, awesome.  I have, in fact, used the phrase, in fact, too often at this point.

The plot was decent enough, and the storytelling was done in a way that melded into the game without breaking the game play too much.  I especially enjoyed the character design of the Norse gods, and it was obvious a lot of time was spent polishing the graphics.

The best way to describe the game type is that it is your basic hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, with a bit of sci-fi thrown in.  Despite it’s unique setting, and beautiful scenes, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about going through long dungeons, hacking and shooting through long dungeons, levelling up, and collecting oddly-named loot (Elite Metal Boots of Anger, Somber Broadsword of Empathy).

The battle system is unique in that you use the right-analog to attack.  When I discovered this fact, I groaned and went straight to the control menu to change it, but I couldn’t.  But I soon learned about ’sliding.’  Basically, when an enemy enters your ’slide range’ (about 20 feet or so), if you push the right-analog towards that enemy, you rapidly slide towards it and slam it with your weapon.  If you’re surrounded by enemies (and you ALWAYS will be), you end up richocheting across the battlefield like a crazy Norse pinball.  This is fairly entertaining and is one of the key factors in living just a little longer in battle.  So, when you’re not dying, battle is actually quite a bit of fun.

But that’s when you’re not dying.  And you will be dying.  A lot.  The first time you die, you see be-winged metal-clad sci-fi Valkyrie descend from the sky in a pillar of light, scoop up your corpse, and take you to Valhalla, and you will think that was pretty cool.  You will then appear back in the room you died in, with all the enemies you killed still dead, and all the enemies that killed you still alive.  There was no progress lost, so no matter how bad you are, you will beat this game.

That’s a nice idea, it is, but it’s implemented poorly.  The developers essentially said to themselves, “Since there’s little penalty for death (other than a bit of damaged equipment), we can make it as hard as we possibly can.”  And they do just that, they make the game frustratingly difficult.  And each time you die, you watch that Valkryrie scoop you up and fly off.  You’d watch that non-skippable Valkyrie look at you somberly a moment, and then slowly fly off.  The sequence takes about twenty seconds from your death cry to your eventual respawn.  And this can happen every minute or so if you’re not careful.

“Oh, you just don’t know how to not die,” you’d say.  You’d say that because you’re a jerk.

That is somewhat true at first.  There is definitely a learning curve.  When I got past the beginning part of the game, I began dying constantly.  Everything killed me.  I could respawn and maybe not even kill one enemy before I died again.  But then I learned how to zip around the battlefield, to roll out of the way of attacks, and to build up combos and unleash area attacks.  By the time I reached the last level (two days after I bought it), I could normally clear a room without dying, and if I was lucky enough to find some health-ups in the cleared room, maybe even clear the next one.

I defeated three out of the five bosses in the game without a whole lot of difficulty, and they were pretty fun battles.  The other two are built from the same template it would seem.  The ‘teleport around the screen and pelt you with ranges attacks’ template.  During these battles, I spent far more time watching the death sequence than I did actually playing.  I even unlocked the ‘Die 100 Times’ achievement.  No joke.  An achievement for dying one hundred  times.  Because you WILL.

Despite that, I really enjoyed the game.  I think if it was released for the PC, a couple user patches to tweak a few things could have made this a truly outstanding game, much like the modders did to Oblivion.  Seriously X-Box, you should really consider putting some user-created content out for download for your games.

As an aside, I set out to find out why the game was titled ‘Too Human.’  What I read most often goes something along these lines:

The gods of the game, the Aesir, are cybernetically-enhanced humans.  Baldur, the hero, is insufficiently enhanced, and is looked down upon by the other gods as being ‘Too Human.’

Really?  That’s the reason?  Because I didn’t really see any of that in the game itself.  And here come some spoilers.  If you don’t want to see the spoilers, stop reading now.

At the end of the game, we find that before the game began, Baldur was shot in the face.  He was killed, and as per custom, brought to Hel’s fortress.  As I watched the scene where he was shot, he didn’t even have those blue lines in his face, which seems to me that he didn’t have ANY cybernetic enhancements, leading me to question if being cybernetically enhanced is what divides the humans from the gods.

Now, if the other gods truly looked down upon Baldur as being ‘Too Human,’ they would have just left him being dead, right?  No, they raided Hel’s fotress and reclaimed Baldur.  He was then resurrected through cybernetic enhancements.  Granted, he lost a bit of memory, and the other gods weren’t entirely truthful to him about what happened, but that was because they didn’t want to piss him off and make him go on a rampage.

But it seems to me that these are things you wouldn’t do to a person if you looked down upon him for being ‘Too Human.’

Thoughts?

Anyhow, it’s a good game, and if you can find it for $19.99 like I did, not a bad idea to pick it up.  It’ll keep you entertained for at least the weekend.

Zel-kun out.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, chances are you’ve heard of Fable.  Fable was the much-hyped RPG for the X-Box that was supposed to have revolutionized gaming as we knew it.  While it didn’t really do that, it was an interesting game in its own right.  Most missions allowed you to pick a good or evil side, and you really could lead an evil campaign if you wanted.  It had a decent battle system, and your appearance changed as you progressed, both getting older and more good/evil looking.

Fable 2 is an extention of that.  The system and gameplay is nearly identical, but with many improvements added.  If I didn’t know any better, I would say Fable 2 is the finished product to Fable’s beta.  Many of the little oddities in the first game’s system (such as not being able to buy a shop unless you murder the current shopowner), are corrected.  And many ways to legitimately earn a living (various jobs, real estate) are added.

I’ve been addicted to this game this past weekend, spending hours in town working and buying shops and houses, and impressing the townspeople with my emotes.  Eventually it reached a point where I convinced one the girls to marry me (which happens to be ridiculously easy to do), and I bought myself a house.

At this point, the game takes a detour into strange-land.  I was out actually adventuring, when an icon with a silhoutte of a person lights up at the bottom of the screen, and the message, “There has been an update on your family’s status” appears.  Thinking that I’ve been gone so long that my wife is divorcing me (I’ve been away for many game days at this point), I click on the status update.

There’s my ‘Family’ panel, detailing the household allowance, how much my wife loves me, and at the bottom, in bold red letters indicating the status change, is “Wants Sex.”

Wow.  Just… wow.  Admittedly, this would be a handy feature in real life that would surely make life easier.  I think people would take a lot more personal days if this was the case.

I can picture it, some guy is sitting there at work, doing whatever he does, and then a buzzer goes off in his head.  He stands up and walks to his boss’ office, “Hey Boss, the sex buzzer went off, I should probably get going.”

“That thing, eh?  Went off four times for me last month, I understand, go ahead and get out of here.”

The world would be a more peaceful place.

Anyhow, so I trek back home and commence what I’m sure will be a very pornographic experience, and am prompted, “Protected or Unprotected,” conveniently enough, my dog dug up a condom earlier, so I was prepared (you wish I was kidding).

Okay, seriously Lionhead Studios… way too much thought into the sex system.  But hey, your game.  Personally, I would have put more thought into  the townsfolk AI, which really is where my major (although to be fair, really only) beef with the game.  As I mentioned before, it is ridiculously easy to get townsfolk to fall in love with you.  In fact, there are now dozens of people with little red hearts over their heads indicating that they’d marry me, if only I’d give them a ring.

This was initially very amusing.  I was in a village where I inadvertently woo’ed a girl while I was trying to get a present from another villager, and she began following me around.  I took the woodcutter job and began chopping.  The job is pretty fun, essentially a timing game where a successful hit chops the wood and gives me money.  As I’m doing this, the girl occasionally walks right up to me and says, “If you REALLY loved me, you’d buy me a ring.”

This continued for the duration of my job.  I’d chop some wood, then get nagged, chop some wood, get nagged.  She even nagged me ABOUT chopping wood, “I hear you’re good at chopping wood, maybe you could chop some wood for me for a change.”  It was pretty amusing, and not too frequent, so I let it slide.  The true trouble started after I did some quests, got some renown, and had a kid.

There are ‘Renown’ points in the game.  The more you have, the more people like you, really.  It is now to the point where I cannot go down any road in the city wihout seeing hearts over men and women alike, which is beginning to have an impact on gameplay.  My dog sniffs out something buried in an alleyway, so I run down and dig it up.  When I turn to leave the alley, there are three admiring women blocking my way.  Try as I might, I couldn’t get past them.  Sure, I could have killed them out of my way, but I’m trying to be a good guy, and that would net me quite a bit of evil points.

Later, I’m in my house entertaining my baby, and four women AND the shirtless gay blacksmith come UPSTAIRS and start pestering me to marry them, and my wife stands there utterly oblivious.  I’ve tried to make them go away in non-evil ways, but even slapping them only nets a few scary points from them (meaning they become slightly more frightened of me), and oddly does not decrease the love meter.  I finally saved the game and decided I would kill the next person who wanders into my house.  Sure enough, some guys walks in, I draw my rifle, and fire.  He flies back in a shower of experience orbs as though I hit him with a car, and I obtained forty evil points.  Sure, I reloaded my last save, but it was immensely satisfying.

As far as the rest of the gameplay is concerned, I love the combat system, and actual quests are fun and interesting.  My hope is that they come out with a patch to tweak the townpeople AI a little bit, just enough so they down’t come into my house.  But other than that, good game.

Zel-kun out.

I held off on buying Eternal Sonata for awhile.  There were always other games to play, and the cover looks like every other Japanese RPG out there.  Not that I don’t like a goof Japanese RPG, but the back stated it had an immersive real-time battle system.  This usually means “Star Ocean Clone” and that battle system gets old fast.

After playing through the other RPG’s the 360 had to offer, I was wandering around Gamestop and saw this was pretty much the only thing on the shelf aside from a $69.99 copy of Fallout 3.  Being as I will never pay that much for a game, I finally picked up Eternal Sonata, encouraged by the Gamestop employee that it has some pretty good reviews.

I’m not going to lie, with it’s bright colors and love of chiming sound effects, Eternal Sonata is one of the girlier-looking games out there.  Heck, you can see that by the cover above.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I guess every game can’t be a blood-hued background with a severed head as a cursor.

I will say that the game has one of the best and most innovative battle systems I have ever seen.  It manages to blend turn-based and live action flawlessly.  It begins as calm and nearly completely turn-based, but as you progress and gain “Party Levels”, you can set the battle to be more active, and are rewarded for it (more moves and combos during battle, faster, but less time to plan your actions).  Unlike many other games that use a similar “active battle system”, you take turns controlling your party, so there’s no AI, which means that no one gets slaughtered while you’re too busy making sure the character you’re controlling doesn’t die.

Eternal Sonata also holds the prize for the only RPG I can think of that has better mechanics than plot.  I can think of dozens of games where I struggled with dull or bad mechanics because the plot kept me going, but none where a dull plot supported excellent gameplay.

This is not to say the plot wasn’t promising, it was just executed poorly.  I’m about to get a little spoilerific.  I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, but if you plan on or are currently playing the game, maybe you should just stop reading here.

The game’s basic premise is that Frederic Francois Chopin (yes, the famous composer) is on his death bed, and in his death throes, is dreaming he’s in the world the game takes place in.  Honestly, I’m interested so far, and combined with the orchestrated soundtrack, the presentation is very nice.  The story begins to build as you learn that magic is bad omen in the world, as everyone who can use it invariably dies of disease, and of course, one of the main characters can use magic.  The story further builds upon itself when you learn that the leader of the land (Count Waltz, because everyone and everything is named after music terms) is distributing a miracle drug called ‘Mineral Powder’ which cures every disease, but make people eventually use magic, go mad, then die.

It is at that point, about halfway through the game, that the plot takes a nosedive.  Because it was then that the writers, instead of continuing the growing plot, decide to read from their philosophy books.  The rest of the game is essentially drivel, and it answers absolutely nothing about the first part.  Why does magic make people die?  Don’t know.  What is Mineral Powder exactly?  Can’t say.  Why is the count bent on being evil?  Couldn’t tell you.  The game essentially tells you nothing besides nonsense until you finally defeat the last boss.  Then, over the credits, the characters decide to get quite preachy with their views on the human psyche, which is amazing being as the oldest one is about fourteen years old, and a few as young as eight.  Really… they should have an older cast for some of the feelings and ideas they’re trying to portray.

The turning point for me is when a character I just met was assassinated.  I had this character for all of one or two levels, and she’s had about a few minutes of face time.  As she dies she monologues about her life, she talks, and talks, and talks.  She even flashes back to the scene THAT JUST HAPPENED.  Literally, it’s a flash back to the beginning of the SAME SCENE you’re watching.  Add to that is that I basically just met the character, I don’t care about her.  Again, not that it would have been a bad development by itself… but without the proper timing and emotional connection, there’s nothing there.  It was a poor execution of a potentially good development.

Despite all that, it’s a very fun game to play.  Each character has a different feel in battle, and you can customize your party with any of nine members.  When you finally find that perfect combination of a character, move-set, and equipment that can one-shot most enemies you come across, there’s a definite sense of accomplishment.  So to that, I give the developers kudos.

So, final synopsis… play the game.  If you like RPG’s, and can find this for $20, it’s well worth it.  You’ll have fun, and that’s really what games are all about.

Zel-kun out.