Five days and three reviews, yes I’ll be getting some rest sometime before the weekend, but luckily my sleep schedule was unaltered by Terminator Salvation because I finished it in 5 hours. Before I start off I’d like to formally apologise to Legendary for accusing it of being dank, gritty, brown and short because clearly I didn’t know the definition of any of those terms before playing TS. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised playing this game, as I heard it was absolutely terrible. Keep in mind that the game is not what I’d call “good”, but there were moments of notable enjoyment that I won’t overlook simply to eviscerate it. And besides, even if you think the game is total crap and not worth your time, 5 hours for a platinum trophy is tough to beat. Yes that’s right, play through the game on hard and you automatically get 9 bronze, 2 gold and the platinum trophy, the first obtained within a few minutes. And really, there’s no reason not to play on hard, because the game isn’t very difficult. However, it is infuriatingly cheap sometimes, causing you to replay the same sections repeatedly, each time having to endure the menacing red eyes of the loading screen for longer than anyone should have to wait in order to be shot and killed yet again. Try to remember though as you read this that I played it the first time on hard, so some of my time with said loading screen may have been avoided on an easier setting while getting my bearings.
The game stars you, being played quite well by John Connor, leader of the resistance as he simultaneously battles robots called Terminators who have taken over the world post judgement day. Things don’t start off very well, with John and company getting their asses handed to them by some very large machines. People die, all air support is blown to smithereens, and the team consensus is to hightail it back to base. Once you get to the extraction point, somebody in no mans land radios the group to ask if they might journey into the robot HQ to save them. John being a big grizzled softie insists that they go on the rescue/suicide mission, and when his superiors deny him help, opts to go it alone. The only woman in the group, who I think just has her eye on the queen seat of the resistance throne room, tells John that she can’t possibly let him go die by himself, so she tags along. Along the way you meet some more survivors who are just trying to leave peacefully among the remorseless metal overlords and whom are probably better off with the union but still manage to complain about it. Fortunately for you though your party never feels bogged down because the amount of people you meet is balanced nicely by the amount of people that are mercilessly killed. Every time you get a new companion you’d better take a good long look at your existing friends, as someone will soon no longer be with us. Eventually you make it to the stronghold and the ending ensues, one that I must say was refreshing after watching Legendary’s yesterday.
Graphically, this game varies, but even the lower end of the spectrum is quite impressive. The opening cinematic is stunning, featuring a quality that I’ve only come to expect from the CG in movies, and the in game character models are great. The only downside is that they decided to use these character models to act out the cutscenes instead of making more high definition ones, and even more unfortunately is that they seem to develop stage fright when the camera locks on them and stiffen up. All of the fluid, human-like movement that occurs in game goes out the window and we’re left with characters awkwardly staring at each other while the dialog unfolds and struggles to keep in sync with everybody’s mouth movement. But like I said, there are very few instance of this, given that there aren’t too many cutscenes in the entire game, and the rest looks really good. Humans look like humans, robots look like robots, except for the type of robot that’s supposed to look like a human but I’ll let that slide. Seemingly the price the robots paid for being practically invincible to all ammunition known to man is a slight graphical downgrade from those futilely trying to take them down. They don’t really have much texture and in most locals their colour makes them blend in with their surroundings, making them seem quite flat compared to your character. This mostly applies to the endoskeletons, whose stiff walking animation just does more to shallow them out. I feel odd pointing out that the robots aren’t “lifelike” because that’s probably the point, but there’s a limit, the way they walk it looks as if they should be falling over, like they don’t shift their weight properly. Come to think about it, this is probably a good thing because if they moved any faster than they would be significantly harder to destroy. The only reason I killed most of them was because they were either feebly attempting to get around several obstacles, or had abandoned movement all together, instead hoping that their latest hardware patch had included some kind of teleportation device. The spider-like robots on the other hand have a touch more shiny depth and have much better movement, scuttling around the wastes eagerly scanning for something to machinegun into nothingness, and quite often that something was my slow ass. Lastly there are the “wasps”, which are small air assault drones that fly as if physics actually exist. Shooting these down is the most fun that you’ll have in the game based solely on the spectacle. When they die they’ll either jettison all of their main flight equipment mid-air and plummet to the ground, or they’ll spin around and take out another wasp or two before crashing into a nearby wall (and there is never NOT a nearby wall).
A gripe I have to touch on before moving on to the gameplay is the lack of variety, and what is should have meant for the graphics. There are four main enemies in the game, one just being a version of the endoskeleton only with skin. That being said, there’s no excuse why the time wasn’t put in to make the graphics and movement on these 4 characters absolutely perfect, especially seeing as you spend nearly the entire game encountering one or more of them. They can’t even claim to have been working on the other enemies, which I guess I would classify as bosses, since they come up rarely if not only once. It’s a short list, consisting of the Hunter Killers, the Harvester, the rail cars, and the motorcycles. It’s funny [sad] how this game can be accused of almost every flaw I had with Legendary, to a higher degree even, and I still had a much better time with Terminator. Now we have the almighty question of how entertaining getting from destroyed point A to repeatedly exploded point B is. The gameplay of Terminator Salvation is very repetitive. There are two types of action: run, gun and hide A.S.A.P. bullet-fest, and man the turrents while we run for our lives…fest.
The former can be summed up as very short jaunts through the rubble-laden streets that serve only to connect you from one extremely cover based firefight to another. It almost reminds me of Gears of War, but somehow being even more reliant on you getting your ass behind something that can soak up bullets. Cover is so important simply because of how fast your health drops off. Even the wasps, as the buzz around the battlefield accidentally bumping into each other, can knock off half of your health if you so much as pop your head up. Those are the weakest enemies as well, the spider-bots and the endoskeletons both have machine guns which can turn you from John Connor, full health hero of the world and saviour of mankind, into John Connor, grizzled meat shield, in a matter of seconds. Then there are the Hunter Killers who have these kinds of plasma cannons that can topple buildings, but are more frequently aimed at your face instead of just bringing the roof down on you. Still, the worst has to be the endoskeletons, simply because they aren’t concerned with playing fairly. Fed up with emptying their backpack of ammo into the wall, they will walk themselves slowly over to where you are crouched down behind cover, blind-firing an endless stream of bullets into their unimpressed frame which can take about 150 shots from the stronger machinegun, only to smack you upside the head with their guns, instantly killing you. And you can’t even attempt to run away, as the second you try, they will suddenly remember where the trigger is and fill you full of lead. Another thing you have to get used to is getting behind the spider-bots, as they can only be hurt from behind, and doing so while maintaining cover is often still dangerous. You can stun them for a fraction of a second by hitting their pixel-wide scanner on the front, but it serves little purpose. The only thing that seems to be on your side is John’s metabolism, allowing him to heal his body when he’s not under too much stress. Just as long as you’re not getting shot at, your health regenerates, and very quickly. This serves as not only an indicator as to when the fight is over, but helps immensely to get you ready for the next wave of machines, waiting just over the hill.
The later of the two gameplay types is a test in patience and tenacity as you die over and over again, each time learning a little more of the enemies movement pattern so you can kill them before they you. You will play these vehicle sections more than anything, simply because there’s no way to hide. You are getting shot at, and the thing shooting at you has quite a bit of health, meaning if you didn’t start shooting the second you saw them then your jeep is going to be a block of Swiss cheese on wheels by the time they blow up. Thankfully though, each section has at least one checkpoint, which upon death will not only start you off there, but will also refill your health, only for you to die again anyway. There really is little hope of getting through them one the first go. This being mostly due to the fact that the guns are super strong, but have the accuracy of a spread shotgun at 1000 yards. IF you hit something, it will be close to dead, still meaning you have to hit it again before it’ll actually go down, and even then, there’s probably six more behind it. The guns also have a little meter that goes up as you fire and down as you stop. This represents how hot the gun is, and will stall if the gun reaches all the way to the top and overheats. This is effectively a death sentence, meaning you can’t just hold down the fire button and sweep across the screen as I was inclined to do on my first attempt. All this makes for a very broken section of the level that pops up more frequently than I’d have liked it to.
The weapons in the runny gunny hidey section are varied, each with their own purposes. There’s the assault rifle for when you’re out of bullets with everything else as it’s the most common thing to find ammunition for, it’s the weapon you start with and is pretty weak, and then there is the machinegun, which can hold significantly more bullets per clip and does much more damage. Both of these are mainly for taking down the wasps and the backs of the spider-bots. There is also an all purpose shotgun which is usually a one hit kill for the wasps, and can chip away at the health of the others. It is however a one bullet per button press weapon, making it less practical for taking down heavier machines. For the spiders, skeletons and Hunter Killers, there are grenade launchers which do moderate damage, and rocket launchers which do heavy damage, although ammunition for both is scarce, the grenade launcher not even appearing until the 7th chapter of 9. Unfortunately, you can only carry two weapons at a time, so choose wisely. Should you take the rocket launcher with 3 shots just in case there’s a bunch of endos, or keep your machinegun and pray for a swarm of light hearted target practice wasps? You can also carry grenades and pipe bombs, which are better than any weapon and are found almost everywhere. Challenge terminated.
There isn’t much else to say about the game, it’s so short that there wasn’t any room for additional content. The verdict? Rent it, milk it for trophies and return it, only buying it if you plan on charging people to borrow. It’s not the tragedy that I heard it was, and for that it earned some points in my eyes, but the price tag is certainly not worth the moderate satisfaction and time you’ll spend on it. A good effort, but a few more levels and two, maybe three more enemies would have been appreciated. On a side note I still haven’t gotten back to Bioshock.
-AtomicPineapple
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Legendary – The worst thing to happen to mythical creatures since sparkling vampires.
On Friday I went out for a walk with my girlfriend and ended up renting Legendary, as being fresh off of my Disgaea 3 conquest, I needed something with a little more movement and I figured why not get a simple action game. There was a deal on, so I got Bioshock as well and holy crap, am I happy I did, because after playing Legendary for about 8 hours not only had I had enough of the game, but I’d also beaten it. Unfortunately, the game’s length did nothing to keep it from wearing out it’s welcome a touch prematurely.
To my dismay when I got home, Legendary was not an action game, but another FPS, not that you could tell from the back of the box (I suppose the guy on the front with the gun should’ve tipped me off, but lots of action games have them so I just went with it). But anyway, I began, not knowing what to expect and trying to keep an open mind even as the opening cutscene skipped around like a CD cleaned with steel wool. Afterwards, I discovered that the dank aesthetic of the previous cinematic seizure was to be with me for the whole experience, so I settled in for the long haul and here I am, ready to sink my teeth into the jugular of this legendary mess.
Lets start off on what got to me the most, the game’s individuality and creativity, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The overall design is bland and extremely shallow, utilising many shades of brown, grey and browny greyish. Gritty textures blanket the cramped environments, except whenever you’re inside a building, in which the rocks and mud are replaced by a dirty, shiny metallic glint. Lighting effects are poor at the best of times, save for a few moments where the programmers were actually awake, and only flatten the already dull presentation. That being said, there were moments when the game’s atmosphere got so intense that I forgot what I was playing and started to enjoy myself, only to be yanked back into reality seconds later as I turned the corner to find another bleak attempt at a setting. These mere moments (ironically the most enjoyable part of the game) are something that really annoyed me, because it showed what the entire game could’ve been if the effort had been put forth. I feel very conflicted ripping this game apart because I know that there is potential here, but it’s crippled by inconsistency, the mood shifting from wow back to irritated almost instantly.
The levels larger than the sewers or the several underground paths the game makes you traverse are littered with so much debris that it turns what should be some room for you to manoeuvre around into yet another tight corridor. These are usually far worse than the tunnels because at least in the tunnels, you know you’re trapped. Out in the “open”, the crap strewn about is always low to the ground, allowing you to see some free space, but never allowing you to access it because of your insanely short jump height. Also bland and repetitive are the enemies, having little by way of texture and even less in colour. More dull, flat shades of grey and brown to endlessly massacre, only highlighted by splotches of red and blue once the bullets do their thing. And to make matters worse, the selection of uninspired enemies is shorter than the aforementioned bunny hops. There are 12 types of enemies in the game, and that’s if you’re lenient. One is just a sac that spawns a different enemy, 2 are just harder versions of weaker enemies, and one is just a tentacle that occasionally comes out of nowhere and pretty much instantly kills you. So if you want to be picky, there’s actually only 8 different enemies in the entire game, and that still includes the only boss!
Now that I think about it, the non-existent colour palette is the least of Legendary’s problems, because the game could look like a clown college reject and it’d still be an artistic atrocity. Simply put, the graphics are not next gen. Legendary might (barely) make a list of PS2 games with good graphics, but off the top of my head I can think of several last generation games that look much better. The first thing that comes to mind is Black, which I thought about several times as I plodded on through another legendary sewer. Black was absolutely stunning. It was shiny, had great character models, was quite colourful even for a game with a lot of dark areas, and was still able to throw in a few levels full of grit. On top of that, I’ve yet to see a game with better explosions, which it handed out frequently with a smile. Even something like God of War 2, which isn’t supposed to have ultra realistic people, comes off feeling more human than the embarrassing characters of Legendary. Yes, Kratos, god of war, body and mind comparable to that of a brick shithouse, is more human than the guy from Legendary (I can’t even remember his name, and I just turned the game off).The weaponry, while having some nice gun designs, also leaves much to be desired being as bland as the scenery. You can’t imagine my distaste as the game still chugged under the graphics’ minimal weight.
All this and I haven’t even touched the story or gameplay, which are about as appealing as the already trampled over graphical fortitude. The game is about a guy, still can’t recall the name, who is tricked into opening Pandora’s box and receives a mark on his arm for doing so. When the box was opened, mythical creatures were released into the world and begin to wreak havoc. The guy who sent the main character to open it wants to use the box to control the monsters for some unexplained reason, presumably for world domination or another cliché. Once you get to the end the story attempts to wrap up, but stumbles into something that feels nothing like closure. The story is bad as is to be expected in a game that finishes before really getting started, but pacing is not the only issue. It’s boring, predictable, and I’m quite sure half-assed. I had no idea why I was in each level because I just couldn’t be bothered, you never feel drawn into it and the execution is poor throughout. And yes, I know I wrote like 3 paragraphs on how pissed I was that it’s all brown and 3 sentences on the plot but what do you expect given what I’m working with? I’m sure if I was reviewing a book with no pictures than I have significantly less thoughts on the palette and much more in terms of story, but as it stands Legendary is about as deep as my admiration for it.
And now the gameplay, oh dear god the gamepley. Legendary is not a fun game, and the moments that it goes from crap to halfway decent are not worth the uphill battle. The only things legendary does right are the things that can be said about most shooters, such as a few strips where you can either run in guns blazing or hang back and snipe everyone, and the fact that when you kill someone, the animation of them falling over is quite impressive, all feeling very real. This of course can only be said of the human enemies, since the monsters don’t take cover, and more often than not will unsatisfyingly blow up when you kill them. Come to think about it, I would have enjoyed the game much more if all of the monsters had been taken out, because I only ever enjoyed fighting the humans. This is probably due to the fact that the opposing army seems to have a limit to how many soldiers they can afford to waste on you, which leads us into a much more spiteful list of things that the game does wrong.
Yes, probably the worst thing about the game is that unless the goal is to clear out the room of enemies, than all the monster types will endlessly re-spawn, which should be illegal. Even while attempting the jumping “puzzle” in the second stage, you will have the same werewolf chewing on your ass every time you fall down, and then again once you make it back up. Just to make getting around with a room full of enemies that will never stop coming at you even more irritating, anything bigger than the 1 foot tall fairies will inevitably gang up on you and force you into a corner, rendering you unable to move as they rip you apart. And just to make matters worse, when anything with claws attacks you, for example every friggin’ werewolf in the game, you get big red claw marks across your screen, which stack with each attack by each enemy. This will effectively blind you, as you are made mincemeat out of by three or four identical baddies, again. And mincemeat you shall become, because if you aren’t facing the very fragile fairies, the exploding bugs or the squishy soft humans then you will most likely have to empty an entire clip into even a single unit of the endless horde of werewolves before it dies. Seriously, I've never shot at anything so much in my entire life and felt like it’d done absolutely nothing, and as you progress your ammo becomes less and less effectual. The worst instance is when facing a minotaur, which can take about 50 shotgun shells to the face before going down, and that’s if you’ve been hurling molotov cocktails at it during your reloading time. The only thing they did to try and remedy this was to make ammo slightly more obtainable than the inevitable rage that follows having to restart a section for the 8th time after werewolf clone number 458 chews your face off. Throughout the whole game I think I ran out of ammo 3 times, and that’s while mostly using the shotgun. The ground is littered with big glowing crates of ammo that don’t disappear until all the ammo it has to offer is gone, even in the most obscure places. With so much live ammunition lying around the city in museums and the sewer system, it seems the city has bigger problems than a few little monsters running amuck.
The only other gameplay mechanic I have any issue with (given how it is the only other mechanic in the game) is your health and the restoration of. You have a tiny little health meter, which doesn’t stand up well even to the 1-foot fairy attacks, and healing is a pain. It seems that the mark received by opening Pandora’s box has the ability to absorb what I can only assume are the monsters’ souls. You do this slooooowly. You can then use the soul energy to heal yourself a little bit, also done at a speed with just as many o’s. By the time you do get your health bar up to a liveable level, you’ve either lost health equivalent to what you restored, or are more mercifully dead. Because of this system, healing while fighting humans is impossible, as only monsters drop soul energy. As you can probably imagine, this leads to some complications. If there had been health packs laying around instead of this, I feel as if I would have had a much better time with Legendary, as you can quite easily be doing very well, and suddenly be dead before you know what’s gone on.
The verdict? Pass. Don’t rent it and for god sakes don’t buy it. Its playability is minimal, and a second run through is a definite no. I didn’t enjoy Legendary, and unless barely passable games are your forte, I doubt you would either. The only positive thing that came out of the experience is this review, and the knowledge that I can now play Bioshock instead.
-AtomicPineapple, August 24, 2009
To my dismay when I got home, Legendary was not an action game, but another FPS, not that you could tell from the back of the box (I suppose the guy on the front with the gun should’ve tipped me off, but lots of action games have them so I just went with it). But anyway, I began, not knowing what to expect and trying to keep an open mind even as the opening cutscene skipped around like a CD cleaned with steel wool. Afterwards, I discovered that the dank aesthetic of the previous cinematic seizure was to be with me for the whole experience, so I settled in for the long haul and here I am, ready to sink my teeth into the jugular of this legendary mess.
Lets start off on what got to me the most, the game’s individuality and creativity, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The overall design is bland and extremely shallow, utilising many shades of brown, grey and browny greyish. Gritty textures blanket the cramped environments, except whenever you’re inside a building, in which the rocks and mud are replaced by a dirty, shiny metallic glint. Lighting effects are poor at the best of times, save for a few moments where the programmers were actually awake, and only flatten the already dull presentation. That being said, there were moments when the game’s atmosphere got so intense that I forgot what I was playing and started to enjoy myself, only to be yanked back into reality seconds later as I turned the corner to find another bleak attempt at a setting. These mere moments (ironically the most enjoyable part of the game) are something that really annoyed me, because it showed what the entire game could’ve been if the effort had been put forth. I feel very conflicted ripping this game apart because I know that there is potential here, but it’s crippled by inconsistency, the mood shifting from wow back to irritated almost instantly.
The levels larger than the sewers or the several underground paths the game makes you traverse are littered with so much debris that it turns what should be some room for you to manoeuvre around into yet another tight corridor. These are usually far worse than the tunnels because at least in the tunnels, you know you’re trapped. Out in the “open”, the crap strewn about is always low to the ground, allowing you to see some free space, but never allowing you to access it because of your insanely short jump height. Also bland and repetitive are the enemies, having little by way of texture and even less in colour. More dull, flat shades of grey and brown to endlessly massacre, only highlighted by splotches of red and blue once the bullets do their thing. And to make matters worse, the selection of uninspired enemies is shorter than the aforementioned bunny hops. There are 12 types of enemies in the game, and that’s if you’re lenient. One is just a sac that spawns a different enemy, 2 are just harder versions of weaker enemies, and one is just a tentacle that occasionally comes out of nowhere and pretty much instantly kills you. So if you want to be picky, there’s actually only 8 different enemies in the entire game, and that still includes the only boss!
Now that I think about it, the non-existent colour palette is the least of Legendary’s problems, because the game could look like a clown college reject and it’d still be an artistic atrocity. Simply put, the graphics are not next gen. Legendary might (barely) make a list of PS2 games with good graphics, but off the top of my head I can think of several last generation games that look much better. The first thing that comes to mind is Black, which I thought about several times as I plodded on through another legendary sewer. Black was absolutely stunning. It was shiny, had great character models, was quite colourful even for a game with a lot of dark areas, and was still able to throw in a few levels full of grit. On top of that, I’ve yet to see a game with better explosions, which it handed out frequently with a smile. Even something like God of War 2, which isn’t supposed to have ultra realistic people, comes off feeling more human than the embarrassing characters of Legendary. Yes, Kratos, god of war, body and mind comparable to that of a brick shithouse, is more human than the guy from Legendary (I can’t even remember his name, and I just turned the game off).The weaponry, while having some nice gun designs, also leaves much to be desired being as bland as the scenery. You can’t imagine my distaste as the game still chugged under the graphics’ minimal weight.
All this and I haven’t even touched the story or gameplay, which are about as appealing as the already trampled over graphical fortitude. The game is about a guy, still can’t recall the name, who is tricked into opening Pandora’s box and receives a mark on his arm for doing so. When the box was opened, mythical creatures were released into the world and begin to wreak havoc. The guy who sent the main character to open it wants to use the box to control the monsters for some unexplained reason, presumably for world domination or another cliché. Once you get to the end the story attempts to wrap up, but stumbles into something that feels nothing like closure. The story is bad as is to be expected in a game that finishes before really getting started, but pacing is not the only issue. It’s boring, predictable, and I’m quite sure half-assed. I had no idea why I was in each level because I just couldn’t be bothered, you never feel drawn into it and the execution is poor throughout. And yes, I know I wrote like 3 paragraphs on how pissed I was that it’s all brown and 3 sentences on the plot but what do you expect given what I’m working with? I’m sure if I was reviewing a book with no pictures than I have significantly less thoughts on the palette and much more in terms of story, but as it stands Legendary is about as deep as my admiration for it.
And now the gameplay, oh dear god the gamepley. Legendary is not a fun game, and the moments that it goes from crap to halfway decent are not worth the uphill battle. The only things legendary does right are the things that can be said about most shooters, such as a few strips where you can either run in guns blazing or hang back and snipe everyone, and the fact that when you kill someone, the animation of them falling over is quite impressive, all feeling very real. This of course can only be said of the human enemies, since the monsters don’t take cover, and more often than not will unsatisfyingly blow up when you kill them. Come to think about it, I would have enjoyed the game much more if all of the monsters had been taken out, because I only ever enjoyed fighting the humans. This is probably due to the fact that the opposing army seems to have a limit to how many soldiers they can afford to waste on you, which leads us into a much more spiteful list of things that the game does wrong.
Yes, probably the worst thing about the game is that unless the goal is to clear out the room of enemies, than all the monster types will endlessly re-spawn, which should be illegal. Even while attempting the jumping “puzzle” in the second stage, you will have the same werewolf chewing on your ass every time you fall down, and then again once you make it back up. Just to make getting around with a room full of enemies that will never stop coming at you even more irritating, anything bigger than the 1 foot tall fairies will inevitably gang up on you and force you into a corner, rendering you unable to move as they rip you apart. And just to make matters worse, when anything with claws attacks you, for example every friggin’ werewolf in the game, you get big red claw marks across your screen, which stack with each attack by each enemy. This will effectively blind you, as you are made mincemeat out of by three or four identical baddies, again. And mincemeat you shall become, because if you aren’t facing the very fragile fairies, the exploding bugs or the squishy soft humans then you will most likely have to empty an entire clip into even a single unit of the endless horde of werewolves before it dies. Seriously, I've never shot at anything so much in my entire life and felt like it’d done absolutely nothing, and as you progress your ammo becomes less and less effectual. The worst instance is when facing a minotaur, which can take about 50 shotgun shells to the face before going down, and that’s if you’ve been hurling molotov cocktails at it during your reloading time. The only thing they did to try and remedy this was to make ammo slightly more obtainable than the inevitable rage that follows having to restart a section for the 8th time after werewolf clone number 458 chews your face off. Throughout the whole game I think I ran out of ammo 3 times, and that’s while mostly using the shotgun. The ground is littered with big glowing crates of ammo that don’t disappear until all the ammo it has to offer is gone, even in the most obscure places. With so much live ammunition lying around the city in museums and the sewer system, it seems the city has bigger problems than a few little monsters running amuck.
The only other gameplay mechanic I have any issue with (given how it is the only other mechanic in the game) is your health and the restoration of. You have a tiny little health meter, which doesn’t stand up well even to the 1-foot fairy attacks, and healing is a pain. It seems that the mark received by opening Pandora’s box has the ability to absorb what I can only assume are the monsters’ souls. You do this slooooowly. You can then use the soul energy to heal yourself a little bit, also done at a speed with just as many o’s. By the time you do get your health bar up to a liveable level, you’ve either lost health equivalent to what you restored, or are more mercifully dead. Because of this system, healing while fighting humans is impossible, as only monsters drop soul energy. As you can probably imagine, this leads to some complications. If there had been health packs laying around instead of this, I feel as if I would have had a much better time with Legendary, as you can quite easily be doing very well, and suddenly be dead before you know what’s gone on.
The verdict? Pass. Don’t rent it and for god sakes don’t buy it. Its playability is minimal, and a second run through is a definite no. I didn’t enjoy Legendary, and unless barely passable games are your forte, I doubt you would either. The only positive thing that came out of the experience is this review, and the knowledge that I can now play Bioshock instead.
-AtomicPineapple, August 24, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Disgaea 3 – Protecting the Netherworld, one square at a time.
My second favourite game in the series, Disgaea 3 stands out amongst its crowd. In a genre filled with games that are in essence identical, the Disgaea series would still be great even if it’s only redeeming quality was how different it is. What belongs in a fantasy tactical RPG? Ghosts? Goblins? Machete wielding, undead peg-legged penguins that explode when you throw them? Disgaea 3 has two of them and I’ve got to say, after 100+ hours playing the game, I’ve yet to see a goblin.
Thankfully though, difference is not the games only card. It features solid game play with a variety of in-depth mechanics, and has a charm and sense of humour that will pleasantly catch you off guard if recent games have left you expecting a super serious plot. The story goes as follows, Mao, the son of the overlord who is also dean of the Netherworld academy, begins his first year at school. I know, the plot sounds like various manga series with the high school for demons angle, which put me off at first too, but I promise it gets better. While attending the academy, Mao wishes to become stronger than his father so that he may one day defeat him, in retribution for stepping on his video games after he’d put four million hours into them (slightly less than you’ll have to play Disgaea 3 before you’ve unlocked everything). Okay, I know that isn’t really what you’d call “better” but it gets more in depth as you progress and I don’t want to give anything away. Besides, the game’s charm lies outside of the main story, manifesting itself in the quirky dialog in between the soap opera moments where something big is revealed and everyone puts on their shocked face as if they’d just heard the requirements for some of the trophies. One thing I can give the story, is that they looked back at Disgaea 1 and like it, found much (and I mean much) better ways of connecting the plot to the plot battles, giving you a reason to fight. This may seem a little confusing but if you played Disgaea 2, you know what I mean. 90% of the Disgaea 2 cutscenes played out as plot --> light-hearted joke --> plot --> sexual reference from the frog --> plot --> rustling in the bushes OMFG MONSTERS!!! I guess we better fight them. Think almost the complete opposite of that and you have the fluidity of Disgaea 3.
After hearing that the game has enough witty banter to excuse the overall premise then you’d probably think that its some kind of cinematic masterpiece in which to convey it all, in which case you’d probably be horribly disappointed. The game’s story is driven by fairly lack-lustre cutscenes is which a bunch of still character images are pasted to a background pertaining to the current location, and change when the characters are now screaming and therefore shouldn’t be smiling anymore. There are some instances of sprite animation, but it’s meagre, it’s mostly just the bad guy walks over to your party and the still images commence. This is apparently the standard for TRPGs because now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever played one that didn’t adopt this style, except for Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSX. Being from two consoles ago, it’s slightly embarrassing that everything lately is being shadowed by it. They are saved however by some truly masterful voiceovers which are really what bring the characters to life. While not as likeable as the original but much more so than that of the second, the characters have deep personalities which develop nicely as the story progresses. You get very attached to the main cast, and more than once I found myself trying to fly through the main plot battles just to see what happens next.
TRPGs are like FPSs in terms of consistency, if you’ve played one shooter, you can imagine it rendered in another colour and voila, a different game without having to shell out another 60 bucks. TRPGs are very much the same: you have a grid, a bunch of tiny players who vary in usefulness (perplexingly enough, based on how good their shoes are), and a group of monsters who have done their best to spread out so you don’t area kill them all at once. You move your characters (or character as I have found on many occasions to be more useful) from your base panel over to said baddies and start kickin’ ass one monster at a time using either swords, spears, axes, guns, bows, fists, staves, or monster weapons if you have monsters in your party. You can also use magic, which admittedly isn’t nearly as effective as Disgaea 2 and will have you running back to your warrior who can take more than a stern look’s worth of damage. Before long you get some very uplifting victory music and a variety of fairly un-useable items, along with some money. Simplistic concept, and yet often poorly executed. What makes Disgaea 3 so good is that it remedies the things that I have consistently found flawed in other titles.
Most importantly in my mind, is the speed. Oh my, there is a god, or at least a Santa Claus, because some higher power has granted my wish. NIS seemed to finally realise that these games tend to require you to grind levels ad nauseum so they decided to crank up the speed a bit. The battles flow quite quickly, but if you’re still too impatient or you are attempting to level anywhere past 100, then you can open up the options and change the speed to a level where the characters blur across the screen. Very few things invoke constant frustration for me that can be said about any game, but slow movement speed poisons the experience quicker than anything does. This being said, you can’t imagine the rejoicing as, while trying to adjust the picture so I could actually make out the numbers in my stats, I discovered that you can not only set the speed to “Blitz”, you can also forego all of the animations that come with special moves. Don’t get me wrong, the animations are pretty, colourful, and often pretty badass/hilarious but when you use specials much more often than you would use a regular attack, those animations can take up well over half the battle, and that includes time spent thinking of what to do. Needless to say, after seeing the same move done about a hundred times, it was time to switch them off. Put all of these things together and you can eventually make the aforementioned level grinding fights shorter than the “Battle Start” and “Battle End” messages that glide onto the screen like something out of a bad Powerpoint presentation. Seriously, the main stage you’ll use to level takes on average about six seconds to complete if you have the super awesome, surprisingly easy to obtain, game breaking special, “Big Bang”. It’s a fist technique, but worth the slight power downgrade from the sword you will most undoubted have equipped to anyone who can wield one.
Another thing that makes the game easily accessible, is the growth system that allows you to create a super hero from scratch in less than an hour if you already have a damage dealing behemoth and are just looking for some support. You are able to purchase skills and upgrade them buy spending mana, a kind of currency you get for defeating monsters, and can be transferred to other players by way of clubs (more on that later). Experience is also transferable in this way, although not in the same quantity. You can easily get a character to around level 300 without using them at all, but after that becomes impractical, as the required experience skyrockets as you progress. Characters can also be reincarnated, meaning that they can reset back to level 1, but retain a certain amount of their stats, allowing them to get much stronger. It’s difficult to explain how that aspect all works, and is really something you need to see for yourself, but bottom line is that the more you reincarnate, and the higher the level you are when you do, the more effective it is. By doing this often enough, you can create some truly frightening numbers. Levels go up to 9999, and individual stats can hit millions, my personal best being a 2.6 million attack stat.
When you aren’t endlessly doing the same level trying to create the uber characters needed for some of the challenges the game offers, you’ll most likely be delving into the item world. The item world is a series of randomly generated levels that exist inside each item. By going through them, the item levels up and becomes stronger, a little bit each floor. The number of floors an item has depends on the items rarity. Normal items have 30 floors, Rare items have 60, and Legendary items go all the way to 100, bosses occurring every 10 for each. This process is extremely simple, and can turn a legendary version of the first weapon into something stronger than that carried by the final boss. The strength of enemies in the item world are based on what the item is, and increase with each floor cleared, so powering up better equips is harder than the starter stuff but much more worth it. If the fight becomes too much for you to handle, as you can only return to the HQ to heal every 10 levels, you can exit using an item called the “Mr.Gency Exit” (sound it out to get the joke).
Also back from previous Disgaea titles, is the act of passing bills, and now clubs. In this case, you pass them by way of class votes (I still think the Dark Council from Disgaea 1 was a better idea, but what’re you going to do with a classroom theme?) which require you to get a majority rule based on the level of the voters. Weaker voters will contribute less to the cause, so getting on the stronger voters’ good side would help things along. This can be done by sending them bribes of things they like, each monster type having something they tend to go for (I believe the reapers prefer orbs for example). If all else fails, you can always opt to beat the crap out of anyone who disagreed. If you kill everyone who voted “nay”, then the bill is automatically passed, however this is often hard at the beginning of the game as the voters who are against you are generally a very high level, making it impractical until later on.
The last mechanic I’d like to touch on is throwing. As much as throwing things doesn’t seem to revolutionary, it’s one of those things where if you get the hang of it you can master the game far before you previously would have. Throwing enemies can either get them into position to be trounced by your main attackers, or, by throwing them onto other enemies, can increase their level, giving you the choice of several medium enemies or one hard one. You can also throw your allies, getting them to where they need to be, or out of the way of the super death move that a baddie would love to unleash upon your weaker and injured characters. And of course, there’s the Prinnies, those loveable penguins that are Disgaea’s answer to Moogles. These guys will explode when you throw them, dealing half of their HP as area damage and taking out any other explosives/penguins with them. Never has blowing up animals been so much fun.
Those crazy enough to attempt the post game will eventually unlock the X-Dimension, a much more difficult version of every story map. By beating these levels, you not only get some nice items, but you earn the right to face the Land of Carnage, a sick place where all of the maps are the same, featuring all of the same enemies in all the same locations. The difference besides that it’s run by the awesome penguins I mentioned before? All the enemies are harder. Not harder like I hope your healer knows the good spells, harder like I hope you filled out your will before you stepped off the space ship (apparently this place is faaaaaaar away). The Land of Carnage is the only place that you can obtain the best items in the game, so if you’re in this for the long haul, reaching here is your mid-term goal, and after that….I have no idea. There’s a bunch of trophies, which I do intend to eventually get, but as far as I’m concerned, by this point I’ve seen what the game has to offer.
As much as I don’t want to end on a sour note, I must address one thing that I don’t like about the game, and that is the constant reliance on randomness. Most of the game’s perks can only be unlocked randomly and really takes a lot of skill out of the game. I’d have a lot more of the elusive bronze trophies the game dangles above my head if it was just a matter of overcoming an obstacle instead of being able to overcome it, but having to sit and hope it comes along. It’s strange to find myself exploring the inner workings of a pack of gum, picking off level 6 monsters and thinking, “If only the borderline impossible enemies would randomly show up.” It makes getting to the Land of Carnage an even more impossible feat, as playing the X-Dimension levels require you to collect Illegal Tickets, which can only be obtained by either killing randomly occurring pirates, or randomly by going in randomly occurring portals on random floors of random items. It feels like the game doesn’t want to you get to the hard stuff, as if the programmers only finished about 4/5 of it and decided to try and keep you from coming across the unfinished bits.
The verdict? Rent it. I love this game, I don’t know why, but I do. You on the other hand may hate it, and I don’t see there being a lot of middle ground. So give it a try first and if you like it and plan to see it through, then I definitely recommend a buy, because if you don’t then the rental fees will amount to more than the price tag quickly. I’ve spent 130ish hours on the game, and have potentially many more hours to go to obtain some of the trophies which require obscene accomplishments such as dealing 10 billion damage in either a single move or to one enemy, I'm not sure which. I still prefer the original though, the story is better, the quirky humour is there without trying to be as the newer games were just trying to keep up with it’s predecessor, and overall I just had a better time with it. So if you like Disgaea 3 and have a PS2 kickin’ around, I wholehearted suggest picking up Disgaea, which you can get at about any EB now for 20 bucks.
-AtomicPineapple, August 23, 2009
Thankfully though, difference is not the games only card. It features solid game play with a variety of in-depth mechanics, and has a charm and sense of humour that will pleasantly catch you off guard if recent games have left you expecting a super serious plot. The story goes as follows, Mao, the son of the overlord who is also dean of the Netherworld academy, begins his first year at school. I know, the plot sounds like various manga series with the high school for demons angle, which put me off at first too, but I promise it gets better. While attending the academy, Mao wishes to become stronger than his father so that he may one day defeat him, in retribution for stepping on his video games after he’d put four million hours into them (slightly less than you’ll have to play Disgaea 3 before you’ve unlocked everything). Okay, I know that isn’t really what you’d call “better” but it gets more in depth as you progress and I don’t want to give anything away. Besides, the game’s charm lies outside of the main story, manifesting itself in the quirky dialog in between the soap opera moments where something big is revealed and everyone puts on their shocked face as if they’d just heard the requirements for some of the trophies. One thing I can give the story, is that they looked back at Disgaea 1 and like it, found much (and I mean much) better ways of connecting the plot to the plot battles, giving you a reason to fight. This may seem a little confusing but if you played Disgaea 2, you know what I mean. 90% of the Disgaea 2 cutscenes played out as plot --> light-hearted joke --> plot --> sexual reference from the frog --> plot --> rustling in the bushes OMFG MONSTERS!!! I guess we better fight them. Think almost the complete opposite of that and you have the fluidity of Disgaea 3.
After hearing that the game has enough witty banter to excuse the overall premise then you’d probably think that its some kind of cinematic masterpiece in which to convey it all, in which case you’d probably be horribly disappointed. The game’s story is driven by fairly lack-lustre cutscenes is which a bunch of still character images are pasted to a background pertaining to the current location, and change when the characters are now screaming and therefore shouldn’t be smiling anymore. There are some instances of sprite animation, but it’s meagre, it’s mostly just the bad guy walks over to your party and the still images commence. This is apparently the standard for TRPGs because now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever played one that didn’t adopt this style, except for Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSX. Being from two consoles ago, it’s slightly embarrassing that everything lately is being shadowed by it. They are saved however by some truly masterful voiceovers which are really what bring the characters to life. While not as likeable as the original but much more so than that of the second, the characters have deep personalities which develop nicely as the story progresses. You get very attached to the main cast, and more than once I found myself trying to fly through the main plot battles just to see what happens next.
TRPGs are like FPSs in terms of consistency, if you’ve played one shooter, you can imagine it rendered in another colour and voila, a different game without having to shell out another 60 bucks. TRPGs are very much the same: you have a grid, a bunch of tiny players who vary in usefulness (perplexingly enough, based on how good their shoes are), and a group of monsters who have done their best to spread out so you don’t area kill them all at once. You move your characters (or character as I have found on many occasions to be more useful) from your base panel over to said baddies and start kickin’ ass one monster at a time using either swords, spears, axes, guns, bows, fists, staves, or monster weapons if you have monsters in your party. You can also use magic, which admittedly isn’t nearly as effective as Disgaea 2 and will have you running back to your warrior who can take more than a stern look’s worth of damage. Before long you get some very uplifting victory music and a variety of fairly un-useable items, along with some money. Simplistic concept, and yet often poorly executed. What makes Disgaea 3 so good is that it remedies the things that I have consistently found flawed in other titles.
Most importantly in my mind, is the speed. Oh my, there is a god, or at least a Santa Claus, because some higher power has granted my wish. NIS seemed to finally realise that these games tend to require you to grind levels ad nauseum so they decided to crank up the speed a bit. The battles flow quite quickly, but if you’re still too impatient or you are attempting to level anywhere past 100, then you can open up the options and change the speed to a level where the characters blur across the screen. Very few things invoke constant frustration for me that can be said about any game, but slow movement speed poisons the experience quicker than anything does. This being said, you can’t imagine the rejoicing as, while trying to adjust the picture so I could actually make out the numbers in my stats, I discovered that you can not only set the speed to “Blitz”, you can also forego all of the animations that come with special moves. Don’t get me wrong, the animations are pretty, colourful, and often pretty badass/hilarious but when you use specials much more often than you would use a regular attack, those animations can take up well over half the battle, and that includes time spent thinking of what to do. Needless to say, after seeing the same move done about a hundred times, it was time to switch them off. Put all of these things together and you can eventually make the aforementioned level grinding fights shorter than the “Battle Start” and “Battle End” messages that glide onto the screen like something out of a bad Powerpoint presentation. Seriously, the main stage you’ll use to level takes on average about six seconds to complete if you have the super awesome, surprisingly easy to obtain, game breaking special, “Big Bang”. It’s a fist technique, but worth the slight power downgrade from the sword you will most undoubted have equipped to anyone who can wield one.
Another thing that makes the game easily accessible, is the growth system that allows you to create a super hero from scratch in less than an hour if you already have a damage dealing behemoth and are just looking for some support. You are able to purchase skills and upgrade them buy spending mana, a kind of currency you get for defeating monsters, and can be transferred to other players by way of clubs (more on that later). Experience is also transferable in this way, although not in the same quantity. You can easily get a character to around level 300 without using them at all, but after that becomes impractical, as the required experience skyrockets as you progress. Characters can also be reincarnated, meaning that they can reset back to level 1, but retain a certain amount of their stats, allowing them to get much stronger. It’s difficult to explain how that aspect all works, and is really something you need to see for yourself, but bottom line is that the more you reincarnate, and the higher the level you are when you do, the more effective it is. By doing this often enough, you can create some truly frightening numbers. Levels go up to 9999, and individual stats can hit millions, my personal best being a 2.6 million attack stat.
When you aren’t endlessly doing the same level trying to create the uber characters needed for some of the challenges the game offers, you’ll most likely be delving into the item world. The item world is a series of randomly generated levels that exist inside each item. By going through them, the item levels up and becomes stronger, a little bit each floor. The number of floors an item has depends on the items rarity. Normal items have 30 floors, Rare items have 60, and Legendary items go all the way to 100, bosses occurring every 10 for each. This process is extremely simple, and can turn a legendary version of the first weapon into something stronger than that carried by the final boss. The strength of enemies in the item world are based on what the item is, and increase with each floor cleared, so powering up better equips is harder than the starter stuff but much more worth it. If the fight becomes too much for you to handle, as you can only return to the HQ to heal every 10 levels, you can exit using an item called the “Mr.Gency Exit” (sound it out to get the joke).
Also back from previous Disgaea titles, is the act of passing bills, and now clubs. In this case, you pass them by way of class votes (I still think the Dark Council from Disgaea 1 was a better idea, but what’re you going to do with a classroom theme?) which require you to get a majority rule based on the level of the voters. Weaker voters will contribute less to the cause, so getting on the stronger voters’ good side would help things along. This can be done by sending them bribes of things they like, each monster type having something they tend to go for (I believe the reapers prefer orbs for example). If all else fails, you can always opt to beat the crap out of anyone who disagreed. If you kill everyone who voted “nay”, then the bill is automatically passed, however this is often hard at the beginning of the game as the voters who are against you are generally a very high level, making it impractical until later on.
The last mechanic I’d like to touch on is throwing. As much as throwing things doesn’t seem to revolutionary, it’s one of those things where if you get the hang of it you can master the game far before you previously would have. Throwing enemies can either get them into position to be trounced by your main attackers, or, by throwing them onto other enemies, can increase their level, giving you the choice of several medium enemies or one hard one. You can also throw your allies, getting them to where they need to be, or out of the way of the super death move that a baddie would love to unleash upon your weaker and injured characters. And of course, there’s the Prinnies, those loveable penguins that are Disgaea’s answer to Moogles. These guys will explode when you throw them, dealing half of their HP as area damage and taking out any other explosives/penguins with them. Never has blowing up animals been so much fun.
Those crazy enough to attempt the post game will eventually unlock the X-Dimension, a much more difficult version of every story map. By beating these levels, you not only get some nice items, but you earn the right to face the Land of Carnage, a sick place where all of the maps are the same, featuring all of the same enemies in all the same locations. The difference besides that it’s run by the awesome penguins I mentioned before? All the enemies are harder. Not harder like I hope your healer knows the good spells, harder like I hope you filled out your will before you stepped off the space ship (apparently this place is faaaaaaar away). The Land of Carnage is the only place that you can obtain the best items in the game, so if you’re in this for the long haul, reaching here is your mid-term goal, and after that….I have no idea. There’s a bunch of trophies, which I do intend to eventually get, but as far as I’m concerned, by this point I’ve seen what the game has to offer.
As much as I don’t want to end on a sour note, I must address one thing that I don’t like about the game, and that is the constant reliance on randomness. Most of the game’s perks can only be unlocked randomly and really takes a lot of skill out of the game. I’d have a lot more of the elusive bronze trophies the game dangles above my head if it was just a matter of overcoming an obstacle instead of being able to overcome it, but having to sit and hope it comes along. It’s strange to find myself exploring the inner workings of a pack of gum, picking off level 6 monsters and thinking, “If only the borderline impossible enemies would randomly show up.” It makes getting to the Land of Carnage an even more impossible feat, as playing the X-Dimension levels require you to collect Illegal Tickets, which can only be obtained by either killing randomly occurring pirates, or randomly by going in randomly occurring portals on random floors of random items. It feels like the game doesn’t want to you get to the hard stuff, as if the programmers only finished about 4/5 of it and decided to try and keep you from coming across the unfinished bits.
The verdict? Rent it. I love this game, I don’t know why, but I do. You on the other hand may hate it, and I don’t see there being a lot of middle ground. So give it a try first and if you like it and plan to see it through, then I definitely recommend a buy, because if you don’t then the rental fees will amount to more than the price tag quickly. I’ve spent 130ish hours on the game, and have potentially many more hours to go to obtain some of the trophies which require obscene accomplishments such as dealing 10 billion damage in either a single move or to one enemy, I'm not sure which. I still prefer the original though, the story is better, the quirky humour is there without trying to be as the newer games were just trying to keep up with it’s predecessor, and overall I just had a better time with it. So if you like Disgaea 3 and have a PS2 kickin’ around, I wholehearted suggest picking up Disgaea, which you can get at about any EB now for 20 bucks.
-AtomicPineapple, August 23, 2009
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