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Sep 7th, 2012 at 13:09:57 - Journey (PS3) |
I have always been a bit skeptical when it comes to playing indie games. I don’t mean that the quality is lacking behind the games, because in most cases, indie games have more quality to them than AAA games do. I often just hesitate to toss out money for them when they tend to be on the shorter side and they aren’t filled with testosterone-flowing and mind-exploding action.
I eventually caved in and decided to give Journey a try since I had only been reading amazing reviews for it. I will gladly throw down my cards and admit that this was one of the most amazing gaming experiences I have ever had. I sat down and played straight through this game in a little over an hour and the whole time I stared at my monitor, dumbfounded and exploding with joy like a child who scored a jackpot on Halloween. It was absolutely beautiful.
In terms of gameplay, it would be quite the challenge to make something simpler than Journey. You essentially walk, or glide your way towards a mountain across a seemingly endless desert, gigantic caves that emulate a world underwater, and a deadly snowy mountain. However, it wasn’t entirely the simplicity of the gameplay that kept me open-mouthed throughout the entire game, it was the way everything looked. Never have I ever played a game where I stopped and stared at the perfection in front of me for such a long time, dreading a move forward that would take me away from this paradise (they even often followed the rule of thirds!). This isn’t Battlefield 3; it is something so much more stunningly beautiful. Journey is the Taj Mahal video games. I applaud the art director and everyone who pour their love for art into this game.
Overall, Journey is something completely different. thatgamecompany took a step away from modern first person shooters and action games to create something entirely different and amazing. From the music to the level design to the overall feel and look of the game, everything about this game fit together like the most well thought out intimate silent film I have ever seen. Props to them.
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Sep 2nd, 2012 at 17:15:14 - Mass Defect 3 (360) |
I don’t think I have ever gotten so emotional with a game as I have with the games in the Mass Effect trilogy. I have never played an RPG that connected me so well with the character as I did with my Commander Shepard. My morals became his morals, my wishes became his. I have basically been playing Mass Effect 3 non-stop since the day it came out. Needless to say, I loved every bit of it. However, after playing countless hours of the game, I dawned on the fact that it wasn’t the game that I loved, it was the stories and characters. In my own opinion, despite all of the controversy, I very much enjoyed where the 3rd installment of the series took the story and how it finished the series. However, travelling that path to the end was possibly one of the most painful experiences I have ever endured while playing a game. It is a broken game; a fantastic and emotional story buried beneath everything else that makes a game. The voice acting particularly was never very good in the Mass Effect games, but Mass Effect 3 took it to a whole new level of ear-bleeding blandness. I sat through and listened to countless hours of forced, unemotional dialogue that made me cringe, but I continued along the path. To add to the abominable excuse of voice acting, the animations brought me to a new level of disappointment. Oh how I absolutely loved when my Shepard kissed Liara passionately on the eye or how he stared deeply into the wall when he told her how much he loved her. It was the little things that got to me. The weapons clipping into the armor or Shepard’s “I’m a badass” poses which normally would lead to everyone dying of laughter if they saw someone stand like that. That said, once you get past the cheesy remarks, stuttering animations, and other bumps and bruises, it really is a fantastic game. I just wonder why they couldn’t make the whole game like the Mass Effect 2 DLC “Lair of the Shadow Broker”, which by itself was in a completely different league of awesome than the rest of the games are combined. I want humor, I want mind blowing emotional content, I want sceneries that I could stare at for hours just to soak up the beauty. But as it stands, the game still stole my mind for many days after finishing. It was hauntingly good.
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Prodimator has been with GameLog for 12 years, 2 months, and 25 days |
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