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Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:20:24 - Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS) |
I played briefly today. Just doing my daily item collection and furniture purchasing. I tried to visit a friend's town over the Wifi Internet feature, but for some reason it didn't let me join his session, so I gave up in anger. I was already in a bad mood. The second day in a row the online feature of this game has glitched out on me. Oh well, I'm still a hopeless addict.
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Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:15:49 - The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (Wii) |
(A little background, I already beat the game before I signed up for GameLog. I'm not going to review it or anything, just provide my thoughts on whatever play session I feel like recounting)
I started out tonight at my last save point before the temple to the final boss, (which was completed up to the final boss). That's kind of how Zelda games have always worked; you can't save after you beat the game, just right up until before you beat it.
Anyway, I set out to find the final hidden skill. Which I will spoil for you here so stop reading if you don't want to hear about it.
I mean it, stop.
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Anyway, it's important that I divulge the skill because it adds a mechanic to the gameplay that I sorely missed from previous Zelda games: The charged spin attack! In Twilight Princess, you shake the nunchuck controller to perform a spin attack, and unlike previous Zelda games where you would just hold a button to charge the attack, there's no intuitive way to do a charged spin. I thought up until this point that Nintendo had omitted the attack as a cop out due to the motion controls, so having it after all was a pleasant surprise.
Furthermore, the method through which you execute the attack is clever and appeals to my sense of nostalgia: you have to have all your hearts. Similar to the sword in Zelda 1 for NES or the Level 2 sword in Zelda: Links Awakening for Game Boy, the attack only works when you're at full health. So by including the charged spin attack, Nintendo really killed two birds with one stone.
Once I got the attack, I just ran around the game world looking for stuff to do. I heard rumors on some gaming forums about a Cave of Ordeals similar to that in Wind Waker, but I didn't know where to find it. I spent a good amount of time exploring before I got distracted by the phone. Which reminds me, I left the Wii on in the other room. Time to save and quit!
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Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:01:59 - Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC) |
So I got my new graphics card. It's totally amazing. The best thing since sliced bread. I can't believe it really. I read reviews before I bought the thing, but part of me just couldn't believe it. Anyway, great graphics alone can't save a poor game.
With my second session, I went from frustrated to frustrated and bored. I'm really tired of fighting through the exact same environments I fought through in the original game. I expect more variety from an expansion pack. The game keeps reusing the same objectives over and over again as well.
We come across a hole in the ground. OMG! The ant lions are coming out of this hole! Quick, block the hole by pushing a car onto it with the gravity gun. Whew. Three minutes later, the same thing, only now there are three holes and three cars. Three minutes later, the same thing, only now the cars are hidden. Considering that I can't shoot the ant lions while I'm scurrying around looking for cars, these sequences become annoying fast. They're pummeling me from every direction and Alyx is no help at all.
After that part was over, there was an extended period of fighting in pitch blackness (darker than Doom3) with a flashlight that runs out of batteries after 30 seconds. I didn't really have much fun repeatedly waiting 10 seconds for the light to recharge while being surrounded and meleed by zombies. And Alyx could only see whatever I was pointing the light at, so if I didn't keep whatever she wanted to shoot illuminated, she would complain.
Once we got out of the pitch blackness, there was an impressive looking outdoor area, which was where a technical issue with my new video card reared its head. Apparently a bug in the game makes everything foggy. This is where I gave up in disgust.
So far I'm not seeing that this game was worth $20...
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Jan 9th, 2007 at 13:05:34 - Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC) |
I just installed the game last night. I'll be upgrading my video card later today (whenever UPS arrives), and I wanted something new to play with. I just completed my first session with this game, and after about an hour, I gave up in frustration.
I'm used to First Person Shooters having fairly basic and easy puzzles, so getting completely stumped (for twenty minutes) on one part of the second "chapter" of the game must mean either me or the game designers are stupid. I'll veer toward the latter, due to the nature of some of the earlier puzzles that I passed through brute force or dumb luck.
The puzzles on the first and second level revolve around manipulating orbs of energy with the gravity gun. You can grab a distant orb, and then "punt" it toward a more distant target. The object is to get the orbs into the targets, and to uncover targets when they are unavailable. For the most part the objectives are fairly straightforward, but some of them revolve around punting large numbers of orbs around a corner and hoping they meet up with the target as they bounce around the hallway. I assume the puzzle I am stuck on is of this nature, although after just blasting away with hundreds of orbs I gave up.
Another annoyance is how my current graphics card is struggling with this game. The visuals are quite beautiful, but the frame rate is constantly stuttering. After I install my upgrade later today, I'm going to go on GameFAQs for the solution to this puzzle and move forward with this game. Normally I don't consult GameFAQs the first time I play through a game as it can be limiting to my experience, but this is not the sort of frustration I have ever encountered from a supposed "first person shooter." I'm not going to be wasting any more time on this stupid puzzle.
If this game were of a different genre such as a Zelda or Myst-series game, I'd expect to be stumped here and there (and would be disappointed otherwise), but with run-and-gun shooters, I expect to run and gun, enjoy the graphics, and be only mildly engaged by the puzzles.
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| Zinn's GameLogs |
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Zinn has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 14 days |
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| Entries written to date: 16 |
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