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Feb 22nd, 2007 at 22:46:06 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
Well, I flipped a car and it blew up after I got out of it. That was my favorite part of playing this game. My second favorite was running down stoplights. Otherwise, everything seemed forced into the obvious stereotype of gang life, but it was being held back by the fact that this is a video game. I still can't tell if this game is supposed to be fun or serious. It seems serious when they talk about the "hood" being "all fucked up," but then it regresses into some strange MTV-like reality show. The game did have a redeeming quality of being anti-hard drugs, but still, I got busted by the cops for beating up a crack dealer. That makes no sense. They should have rewarded me. Not to mention I was in the middle of a mission that, if I wanted to keep playing this game, I would have to go back and restart. This game is the kind of game I would play if there were absolutely nothing else to do and no other game to play. Why is it on "the classics list"?
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Feb 22nd, 2007 at 22:22:48 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
Clearly, GTA-SA is a game created for the privileged non-gangsters who want to have a taste of that dangerous lifestyle that we hear about in rap music so much. I expected this game to be much like the older GTAs that I have played, where you go around and just do random missions, stealing cars and killing people for fun. But no, in San Andreas there is a real storyline that takes up most of your playing time for the first part of the game. It felt like I was playing Final Fantasy with all the cutscenes (although the character animations were good, I thought). The transitions between the actual gameplay and the storyline is not well done either, I think. The story is a sad one of your mother dieing because of gang violence and all of your family and friends being miserable and getting killed, and then you go out on missions to go mess with random people (I guess you're supposed to be fighting the other gangs, but still). The gameplay itself is rather choppy, but it might be that I am not as adept with the PS2 controller as some are. Obviously this game is not a racing game, but the driving physics seem very unrealistic and just bad. It was practically impossible for me to make any turns that I needed to make without crashing into someone or something that completely got in my way. Maybe this is the point of the game, but when I ran someone over, I had the cops chasing me! In my experience, when the cops are chasing you, it's bad, but apparently its kind of a good thing in this game.
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Feb 8th, 2007 at 21:09:50 - Mega Man (NES) |
The challenges are relentless in this game. I beat Iceman and Bombman, and the bosses are easy due to the nice addition of special weapons. After you beat each boss, you obtain a part of their power, so you can shoot a limited amount (rechargeable with powerups) of whatever that boss shot at you before you killed him. Each special weapon is extremely powerful against one of the other bosses, so if you know which weapon works on which boss, the boss fights become trivialized because they die in three hits. It's relieving to kill an easy boss at the end of a difficult level, though. I forgot to mention one of my favorite "features" of all the Mega Man games, and that is the fact that if an enemy goes off the screen, it is gone forever. To complement this feature, there is another feature that allows the enemies to respawn if you run backwards in the level and come back to them. This is a nice way to get rid of enemies you don't want to fight or spend time doing some 1987 non-RPG farming of health and energy so you don't die in a few seconds. One might call this cheating, but I really don't care, because the game is way too hard anyway, and replaying the same level over and over again just makes you worse at it. It would have been nice if the makers of the game had added a simple feature that would allow you to choose between continuing a level or going back to the stage selection screen instead of having to wait until your lives run out and continuing from there.
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Feb 8th, 2007 at 20:35:08 - Mega Man (NES) |
When I started up the original Mega Man, I was expecting more of a storyline than just title screen to stage selection screen. Just a little bit about who you are and who these monsters are that you are supposed to go kill. Other than the lack of a story, Mega Man offers a huge diversity of gameplay. Often the controls and physics of the worlds are a bit off. Mega Man slides a little bit every time you stop moving, even when you aren't on ice (although they did design the ice in Iceman's level very well, i.e. minimal glitches). Non-railed moving platforms tend to not go where they should go, or else there was some obvious secret I was missing. The shaky gameplay is even more evident because of the complex level design that require precise movements to be made in perfect timing with all of the enemies around you. I was surprised to see that the appearing/disappearing blocks that you have to jump on at just the right time in just the right place in order to progress. I was mistaken in thinking that the first Mega Man would be easier than any of its successors.
I've beaten three bosses so far (Gutsman, Cutman, and Elecman) and each level took me several tries/continues to beat. At least I did beat a few bosses though. The designers of this game did an excellent job making one of the first shooting sidescrolling platformer that is extremely hard and still beatable with time (thanks to the unlimited amount of continues).
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mat's GameLogs |
mat has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 14 days |
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