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Slayer's Chestguard

Grand Theft Auto 4 Impressions

I didnt finish the game, so by my own system i cannot write a review.

This game caused me to abandon my 360, and cancel my gamerpass.

There is like.. Diminishing returns, on GTA4. Its fantastic right off the bat, the multiplayer is (sometimes) pretty fun but (usually) pretty gay. But the kicker was that i got it home, played it for a couple hours, and went to bed feeling as though I had accomplished nothing in the game.

The following day i repeated this process, playing for a few hours.. Feeling like I had done nothing, and then stopping.

For the next few weeks, every time I played it, I dont think I felt the grasp of accomplishment once, and it took its toll on me, as I started to play it less and less.

This brings to mind the Penny-Arcade comic where they say that when given the oppritunity to do everything.. one chooses to do nothing.. its true. Soon I had no desire to even turn the game on..

I wanted to give GTA4 a 10 like every other ass-kiss site in the world, but Epic Fails are Epic Fails, and a game that reduces the players desire to play the game loses points.

conveniently though, since I did not complete the game (was on the last line of missions though) I can't say that i would give it a 8.5

maybe Chewspitt will write a review


-Rei

Oh, Hi

So the site died for awhile, due primarily to me being roped back into playing WoW by my Wife, Chewspitt's PC dying, and Fonny not writing anything ever anyway.

We came back because a friend of ours was running a guild and asked us to, but that fell through, i tried remaking my old guild, but didnt have the time nor energy to wipe peoples asses.

we xfer'd back to that shithole i used to play on (Underbog) and after the guilds fell through we picked a random server and xfer'd.

So since we stopped playing they added a shitload of stuff, the sunwell and the island dailies, various changes to classes, made the game much easier, cool.

Still playing My priest but Alden rerolled a rogue, she seems to like that better than her warlock, coolies.

So im going to come back to this, and start posting again. Most of my posts will be me theorycrafting or debating game mechanics, i think joe might write some reviews, and if i play a new game ill write a review.

More Later
-Rei

Dark Sector (360) Review

Dark Sector starts off to be a deep and involving tale of a man and his flying bladed arm extension of death, sadly though, the storyline turns out to be as deep as the episode of Captain Planet where capn and the gang had to stop them from cutting down the rainforest.

References to prior events riddle the game, almost every single chapter has at least one dark shadow from a previous history between the characters, but these events are never actually explained - at all - and half the time they are never even mentioned again.

The 'Nemesis' enemy, whom is supposed to be one of the main badguys, only appears in the beginning to infect you, and again at almost the end of the game to die in a pathetically easy boss fight. It then turns out that the nemesis was actually this chick that for some reason hayden is protecting, and he gets upset about her death. The player never actually gives a shit about the death of this bitch that only appears like 3 times in the story, because they never explain the connection between her and Hayden. The way the scene was handled leads me to believe that it was originally intended to be a huge blow to the player, but because of missing or intentionally left out storyline elements, this event comes and goes like killing any random grunt.

There was occasional references to something 'setting him up for the disease', but i never actually caught what the fuck they were talking about.. at all. Again it feels like necessary content was intentionally cut, maybe to hasten production time, but the only person paying for it is the player who just feels jipped by the experience.

Concept: A 3rd Person shooter in the style of resident evil 4, light on the storyline and puzzles and heavy on the constant combat.

Graphics: Dark Sector is pretty amazing looking, and the effects on the glaive and the evolution powers are pretty sweet too. But we learned from Assassins Creed that awesome graphics can only carry a game so far.

Sound: Nothing exceptional here, standard bullet noises and clangs of metal. The voiceover isn't all that great either.

Gameplay: The levels are just one gauntlet of guys after another to get to the loading screen for the next area, complete lack of any kind of roaming. The gun customizaion is a joke, i only used like 2 of each kind of gun through the whole game because a bullet to the head kills no matter what, and variety in the gun department was non-existant.

The glaive was pretty cool, Haydens tri-bladed weapon of death that you 'aquire' right after the prologue. 2 or 3 levels into the game you get an ability for the glaive called "Aftertouch" where after throwing the glaive you can manually control it, time slows and control moves to the glaive so that you can curve it around objects or walls into the intended target. This feature is pretty awesome for a couple levels, but when you realize you can go into any fight, find a place where the badguys cant shoot you, and throw the glaive around a corner and kill them all without any danger, it gets kinda easy. I did this practice for pretty much the entire second half of the game without any issue and between this and the pathetic 'bosses' the game is just stupid easy.

The elemental qualities of the glaive; ie: Picking up fire, electricity, or cold onto the glaive, adds a small but distinct amount of situational effectiveness to the glaive. Pressing in the joystick releases an explosion of the element, causing death to any around it, but this is only really useful for clearing out either groups of enemies or enemies behind cover.

The Damage: In the 15 or so hours that this game lasted i managed to squeeze 665 achievement points out of it, the rest were either for playing on 'brutal' difficulty or playing online.

Final Score: I feel that this game deserves a 7.25, there isnt too much to it and what is there feels rather empty. Like an empty box wrapped in bacon, the outsides look delicious but inside there isnt much to it.

My Recommendation: Kinda cool, but meh, really its up to you, non-stop action throughout but don't expect any kind of story.

Viking: Battle for Asgard (360) Review

Yea.. Viking.. I'm not even really sure where to start. This is a game I had heard absolutely nothing about yet i grabbed it anyway. Normally id recommend against this sort of practice but I had to kill time waiting for the GTA:IV release - and vikings are awesome.

This game though, is not awesome.

Basically not at all.




They had a good idea but they fucked it up in the implementation so it turned out to be a sub-par god of war ripoff, even though it wasnt really meant to be as such.

There are some golden moments scattered throughout, the battle scenes are rather interesting, although I believe that some of the other problems do hold you back a bit. Combat is uninspired and repetitive, and it seems like the main focus of the game was the brutality instead of other qualities - like you know, story.

Its pretty much a slasher, but without any broad stroke attacks, all of your attacks save one special attack only hit a single target. So in the aforementioned battle scenes where there is sometimes 2000 enemies in the area and you are fighting a bunch at a time, you have to go after them one at a time leaving you open for assrape from the sides.

I learned a combo a few minutes into the game and used that for pretty much the entire game, special attacks were used only situationally and I only ever used the magic (which just imbues your sword with one of three types of magic) in the battle scenes because your nearby allies also gain the effect, which would often result in the total raping of all enemies in the area. There was only one special attack that would hit multiple enemies, the greatest of the 'combo' line - but the highest level would actually be better if you would STAY ON A SINGLE ENEMY TILL THEY DIED instead of 1 hit and running to another enemy for another single hit.

The magic wasn't a great feature, 3 spells - lightning, ice, and fire: that do what you would expect them to do, lighting does additional shock damage, fire lights them on fire for damage over time, and ice freezes them solid and a 2nd hit shatters them. Since they are all the same cost as far as 'mana' ice was always most used on my playthrough, since with the combo attacks youd basically be shattering guys very quickly after freezing them. In the whole playthrough I only used a magic attack maybe 15 times because of what I see as a huge flaw in the magic system: The inability to turn the spell off. If you got into a fight with say 10 guys and blow your magic and kill them all very quickly, the ENTIRE REST OF THE BAR would burn off and you can't stop it, so if another fight came up where youd need it - but its gone.

Ranged weaponry are a joke and the only reason to use them is for the achievements, they either take too long to use effectively or they are a waste of money to buy them. The firepots which are like grenades get completely lost if you get hit during the huge animation, so using them during a fight is more risky than worth it. Also later in the game the axes just suck too much to use.

Finally I personally do not believe this game was either: A) Playtested at all or B) Playtested enough. I encounted a slew of bugs, ranging from the graphical to environmental to things that directly affect gameplay. Most of them looked like they could be easily fixed or removed, so this leads me to believe there wasn't enough playtesting at all, GG Sega.

Concept: Skarin the viking dies and is reborn by Freya the creepy viking goddess, using hairgel from her bad princess leia hair she gives him some crazy sense of immortality and sends him on a basically idiotic mission to free captured vikings from the forces of Hel (not hell, do you want to get sued?) , another viking goddess who happens to command demon-type things. Also idiotic sidequests.

Graphics: The models arent exactly the most detailed things i had ever seen, but they certainly werent bad - The only decent face in the game was on Skarin, the main character. Random_Vikings all looked exactly the same, and i didnt even notice that there was women in the game til the very end. The environments were very beautiful, well designed areas that efficiently fit alot of different combat 'zones' (ie: different areas to clear) into an overall small map. The detail given to the trees, plants, and waterfalls wouldve been better spent somewhere else, like say.. storyline.

Sounds: There is only like 5 or 6 different voices throughout the entire game, since everyone sounds like a rugged viking you dont really question it. The combat sounds are unoriginal and uninspired, but how many different ways can you slap a sword against a shield, really? None of the bad guys talk, the random_minions, the main evil god and her one single pathetic 'boss' underling talk a couple times, but thats it. The voiceover for the cutscenes between the islands is a guy pretending to be thor, comedic at best.

Gameplay: This is where it hurts the most. As i said before, the combat system isnt meant for a game with huge battles but instead is geared tward single combat. The in game minimap is a joke, its basically only there to guide you tward bags of gold, nothing of any fucking interest appears on the minimap, enemies or landmarks or basically anything other than gold, vendors/people to talk to, bosses/mini-bosses. WHY EVEN HAVE A MINIMAP, you cant even use the thing to gauge which way is north because you cant even fucking see the N on it 95% of the time, you have to hope you can swing your screen at an angle where you can have a very light backdrop and you can see the like 80% transparent N. The dragon support during battles is stupid, you have 3 dragons why do they all hit the same place... are they just flying around the rest of the time? Additionally they added a 'hop over' animation to skarin so that he can move fluidly over objects and up stairs and shit, my favorite being the one where he hops over a waist height wall as soon as you tap it. The drawback of this is that several of the towns are on top of massive cliffs, and said cliffs have.. halfwalls.. blocking people from falling off, they also have alleys with random objects that force you to move 'near' said halfwalls. I think I unintentionally touched a random cliffside halfwall like.. 6 times, and every time it resulted in skarin instantly hopping the wall, though there was no ground on the other side.. and falling to his death. Would it be so hard to add a 'check for landing ground' clause before he hops a wall? seriously?

And heres my favorite part..

Viking Gear Solid: I always assumed that the people who pitch ideas to the board of directors at a company were at least semi-intelligent, and would realise something compltely idiotic before it was released to the general population. But the guy who came into a board room, looked people plainly in the face, pitched a viking slasher game, and then followed it up with "and we'll add stealth elements, similar to metal gear, where you sneak around a city to collect various things" seriously just needs fired. Skarin has arms like fucking tree trunks, hes gotta weigh as much as a VW bug and hes like 50% naked, also hes a fucking VIKING. Why in the goddamn sam hell would anybody even consider adding stealth elements to a viking game is beyond me, the guy walks like a fucking T-rex, his idea of a 'stealth kill' is to cleave a guy in half. Why in the living fuck would you think it a good idea to have this bigass olaf 'sneaking' around AT ALL. Vikings dont fucking sneak, at all, ever - WHY WOULD YOU CONSIDER THIS ASIDE FROM SOME SORT OF PRACTICAL JOKE. In the first sneaking event, on the first island, the first time they even mentioned it, i spent an hour. There is so many fucking ways to get seen and thus end up fighting like 50 dudes by yourself, its a joke.

Final Score: Viking: Battle for Asgard gets a 4.5 for me, the battle scenes are pretty goddamn cool, and the game really isnt long enough to totally ruin the entire experience, but its not completed. The amount of bugs strewn across the countryside, from warping enemies to bad graphical bugs to shitty locking with the targetting almost ruined the entire experience for me, more playtesting would fix this. Graphically not bad but the story just doesnt seem to exist to keep you going, the combat system isnt that good for anything other than small fights. This game desperately needs a re-haul of the HUD, especially the minmap.

The Damage: a Short game, I only spend about 15 hours slashing my way through the lands of midgard, but i achieved 850 Achievement Points.

My Recommandation: Unless you are going for Achivements, pass on this one.