dsheinem wrote:
Ryan, do you have an Xbox One? I feel like you'd love FH2.
Are you kidding? I know I'd LOVE Horizon 2.
I had the choice between an Xbox One and a PS4 and ended up going for the PlayStation. Seemed like a safer bet for the future. I really want for Gran Turismo or Forza though. DriveClub is fun but it is definitely not a replacement for either of those series.
Anyways, Mordor has a lot of fan-service for Tolkien heads like you on top of being a really fantastic game on its own. Tons of lore to read for just about everything in the game. I think you'll really enjoy it either way.
Beaten for together retro. Copy paste what I wrote there.
Slightly late but I beat the game. I got what this game considers to be the good ending...eventually. It took being vapourized a few times to get to that point.
This is one of those games where I enjoy the story and setting over the actual gameplay. I liked the creepy vibe and the adult themes (minus Ellen's story which has some questionable subtext) but I don't really like the rigid nature of point and click games so much. I find them to be like the Phoenix Wright games: you know what to do and have the means to do it but the game makes you jump through hoops to actually let you do it.
For a 1995 DOS game though it's very impressive from a lot of perspectives and the art design is fantastic. I liked Gorrister and Nimdok's stories the best, though they were all interesting. It's a surprisingly human game even if it does deal with some very dark and heavy themes. And AM is a tremendous enemy, extremely malevolent but also somewhat pitiable. It reaches for and alludes to greater works of fiction and I think it mostly pulls it off.
Great game for halloween but not for everyone.
Final Fantasy (GBA)
Classic JRPG goodness with a Snes style facelift. This port is way too easy but it's still a very enjoyable entry in the series all the same.
Its almost total lack of story or character isn't really as much of a hindrance as you'd expect as you end up sort of filling in the blanks for yourself. It's kind of like early Zelda or Mario: FF is a fairy tale more than a story.
The GBA Dawn of Souls version that I played upgrades the graphics and sound quality to SNES levels of nice (and there isn't much GBA tininess either), replaces the MP charges of the NES original with the now standard MP and lets you save anywhere.
That last point certainly is a plus for a portable title but also goes some way to making the game as easy as it is. It is kind of strange why Square didn't at least add a difficulty option. Maybe they felt the newly introduced chaos dungeons went some way to correcting this? Who knows.
Anyway, easy as it is I had fun and it's nice to play a JRPG that doesn't expect you to devote your life to it.
Muri (PC)
This was a pleasant surprise. Muri is a scrolling shooter for PC done in the style of old school DOS games like Duke Nukem or Commander Keen. Seriously look at this.
The framerate is clocked at 16FPS for that authentic early 90's feel and you control the titular heroine with the directional arrows and ctrl/alt set-up. The game is also split into four shareware style episodes that you can play in any order. Sometimes this level of faux-authenticity can come across a bit pretentious in other games, with Muri it's charming.
Now, while a lot of these retro looking games can get the visual and audio down, a lot of the time they're let down by some subpar gameplay. Not so Muri which is an absolute blast from beginning to end. It doesn't just look like a DOS game from 1991, it feels like one and in the best possible way.
It helps that the control while basic is absolutely spot on and the level design is excellent. The levels are fairly short (the whole game can take less than an hour to beat) but they pack in a lot of action. It's got loads of little sneaky hidden areas and while getting a 100% score on a level isn't necessary to progress it is very satisfying to do.
There's also a nice difficulty curve with the newer and tougher enemies being introduced just before the older ones outstay their welcome with each episode ending in a fairly inventive boss fight. Muri is masterful in the way it keeps things ticking over, never opting to over-complicate itself with unnecessary game features or twisty level design. It's very elegant in its simplicity.
Muri is one of those game where it presents nothing you haven't seen done before but it just does those things so great it doesn't matter.
Best 29p I've spent all year.
9.03m (PC)
Another in the "Walking simulator" genre of PC indie titles, 9.03m is a game made for charity to draw attention to the March 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan's eastern seaboard.
Honestly, I don't want to sound like a twat towards a game that is ostensibly for a good cause, but 9.03m is extremely light on things to do even by this genre's dubious standards, while the message it conveys is simultaneously trite and obvious.
Basically you shuffle along a admittedly very pretty watercolour shoreline picking up and examining various objects left, presumably, by victims of the flood. The examining portion of the game just involves spinning the object (a la Resident Evil) to find a butterfly symbol, clicking said symbol to transform the item, before trudging slowly along the beach to next item. Do this for about 20 minutes and you're done. (Spoiler alert! The items turn into a pretty stars. Aww. )
Listen, I don't have any problem with these sorts of games but if you're going to do something in this style, some twinkly piano and a dreamy graphical style simply isn't enough. Dear Esther's long peaceful walk was contrasted by the increasingly manic voice over. Curtain used its aesthetic to convey the queasy and confused state of an alcoholic in a abusive relationship. Both built slowly but steadily to a powerful dramatic reveal. 9.03m however just kind of stops after a few objects are examined draining any emotional connection you had from the game.
It's like it's for aimed at kids; the game is too scared to show the true human devastation left by such a terrible event so it just wraps everything up quickly in a pretty bow before you start asking questions.
Like a Simon Cowell produced charity record, the cause is earnest but the end product is lacklustre and empty.
I think it's less the save anywhere that makes it easy (since Tents save you in the original, so you could save outside every dungeon) and it's more the MP system. The game was balanced against the Vancian system of the original which made things like status ailments much more of a pain and kept you from stacking the better buff spells in every fight; you only had enough charges for boss fights.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
True but saving right in front of a boss does vastly reduce the frustration of replaying dungeons over. Not that you'll actually die to those bosses mind.
MrPopo wrote:I think it's less the save anywhere that makes it easy (since Tents save you in the original, so you could save outside every dungeon) and it's more the MP system. The game was balanced against the Vancian system of the original which made things like status ailments much more of a pain and kept you from stacking the better buff spells in every fight; you only had enough charges for boss fights.
The fact remains that you didn't need to stack those buffs except in boss fights either way. Every enemy died in one hit to my Fighter or Red Mage's swords.
Limited magic would have helped the difficulty a little, but honestly all it would have done is make me spam potions more - I literally didn't use one healing item the entire game, but I had 99 potions and hi potions and like 30 tents ready to use.
It's definitely one of the easiest RPGs I've ever played. Even really easy ones like Pokémon Red and Golden Sun were notably harder than Final Fantasy 1 on PSP.
57? That's another change in the non-NES versions. On the NES you cap at 50. It sounds like they changed some of the damage formulas as well. The Black Belt gets insane damage at high levels (2 shot Chaos) but a Fighter in a four person party shouldn't be doing crazy damage, just good damage.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
Sload Soap wrote:I don't know about the PSP version but it seems you level really quickly as well. I got to level 57 without ever grinding in my entire ten hour run.
Wow. I was level 45 when I beat the game and thought that was high.
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