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Oct 11th, 2012 at 07:29:21 - Pokemon Yellow (GBC) |
These past few days I have returned to a great childhood pastime: Pokemon. I never played any of the games before when I was younger since for some reason it never really interested me. I’ll be honest, all of my friends were getting Black and White 2 and I felt extremely left out. So I pulled out my classic top view strategy game, Pokemon Yellow. I’m a bit confused as to why I didn’t fall in love with these games before. A lot of it probably had to do with the fact that this was a top view game, where you look down at the player from up above (see Zelda). This style of gameplay has always felt awkward to me so I steered away from it. However, as I throw down hours upon hours of Pokemon, this top view style is really starting to grow on me.
Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon Yellow, also implemented a leveling/difficulty system that made the game flow very smoothly. You start off battling low level Pokemon, often bug types, considering they are generally the weakest Pokemon (come on, Caterpie is a joke). As your Pokemon level up and as you progress through the story, the difficulty of the Pokemon that you encounter also increases. It is a system that works. It is safe to say that no one would ever want to battle a level 100 Zapdos with a level 1 Pikachu.
As far as the battle system goes, it is pretty straight forward. It is a turn based battle with the player choosing an attack which is then followed by the CPU attacking and then the player or vice versa. I’ve never really been a fan of this style either, but again, like the top view camera, I’m slowly being brought over to the other side.
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Oct 1st, 2012 at 12:50:34 - Crysis 2 (360) |
This past weekend, I finally got around to finishing Crysis 2 for Xbox 360. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about it. I suppose, at the current time, I could give it a solid “meh”. Crysis 2 is beyond beautiful, as was it’s older brother at the time, but looks do not make a game. I feel as though the quintessential Crysis experience is all about pretty graphics, big explosions, and a lot of shooting. That is totally fine if that is what you are looking for, and Crysis does a very good job at giving the player that. Maybe you have to finish the first game entirely to fully understand the story and characters for Crysis 2, or it is actually just that mediocre. When I finished the game, I was left with a few pretty big questions that should definitely have been answered before. I was really unsure of what exactly had happened the entire game. I really had no idea what I was doing or why, I just ran forward and blew stuff up, which I figured I was supposed to do anyway. Then I reached the end, stuff happened, people died, enemies died, and I was just standing there in the center of a huge mess utterly confused. To add to that, often during cutscenes, I was left wondering who the character that was talking to me even was. Most of the time, those characters were pretty important and had an essential role to the story…at least I presume.
Overall, I was left feeling really empty and confused after I finished it. Pretty graphics and big explosions (see Call of Duty, minus the pretty graphics) do not make a great game, mediocre at best, at least in my opinion. I want story, I want characters, not some silent dude in armor who doesn’t even know anything except that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Meh.
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Sep 24th, 2012 at 21:59:54 - FIFA 12 (360) |
This past week I have witnessed and endured countless hours of the popular sports game FIFA. I have never been a huge fan of sports games since they have always had a slight repetitive feel to them, and FIFA is no different. But then again, every game is repetitive in its own way. At its core, FIFA is simply a game where you kick a ball into a goal. That is pretty basic as far as sports go. My problem with sports games is that they do not add anything to that basic mechanic. Granted, there is not much you can add to sports games, but still, it is a bore. The whole time I played FIFA, I felt as though I was watching a very intense version of pong. The ball starts on one end, gets passed around a few times as it reaches the other end, gets kicked into the goal, gets blocked by the super good yet terrible CPU controlled goalie, and then begins its journey again as it travels back to the other end. Rinse repeat. The game is a continuous process of passing, doing a few “tricks” to throw off the defender, crossing the pass and then kicking the ball into the goal. There is even a pattern to the passing. The ball starts its path down the middle of the field, a few defenders being to come onto the ball holder and he is then forced to pass the ball to the left or right side of the field (top or bottom of the screen). Again, rinse repeat.
Games about games are strange in general. They feel awkward. Why are you playing a game about a game when you could just play the actual game instead? In the end, the actual game is so much more exciting.
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Sep 17th, 2012 at 22:56:48 - Halo 3 (360) |
I did not get much chance to play any games this past week except for the few matches of Halo 3 with my friend. I will try my best not to fan boy rant about it. Whatever Bungie did with this game, it definitely hit the spot for me. Halo 3 gives me a sort of blissful feeling, almost highlighting the games “perfection”, even though no game can be perfect. It just seems to me that they fit everything that they could possibly put into this game together in such a way where it just works. Right off the bat, they created a story, not the main story, but a smaller intimate relationship that is so much deeper than you could possibly imagine. Bungie had managed to create a connection between Master Chief and Cortana, two characters who could not really be considered humans, that resembles the strongest human bond possible. Besides sending the story of the Halo trilogy out with a bang, Bungie managed to form together gameplay that was pretty spot on. Granted, you are a walking war machine that wreaks havoc and casts fear wherever you go on easy difficulty, but as the difficulty increases, you start to feel more and more like an actual soldier. The high-ranking enemies slowly go from the pathetic gnats to the war machine that you once were. As with the previous Halo games, the radically different weapons were balanced in a way where no gun was the better all-around gun. Each scenario had its best option and vice versa.
It really is a shame people have stopped playing what was once a huge center for multiplayer on Xbox Live. Halo 3 is now being dwarfed by what it can do. Five years offers a huge amount of change in the gaming community. Halo 3’s multiplayer is lacking, I think for the best, a lot of the things that modern shooters now implement into multiplayer. For example, armor abilities in Halo Reach. Armor abilities are great in theory, but they are a poor addition to a game. It radically changes gameplay and most of the time makes the game favor one person over the other, creating an unfair advantage. Halo 3 was an even playing field.
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Prodimator has been with GameLog for 12 years, 2 months, and 24 days |
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