P.S: I loved the jetpack sections. Those were fun!
Killzone 3 seems to answer a burning question that everyone has: What would happen if the military becomes incredibly disorganized all of a sudden? Well the answer is actually very simple. They will ignore orders in favour of blowing as much shit up as possible thinking that they are doing ‘the right thing’. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was all part of the plan, but really that isn’t the case. Everything good that happens to the central characters in this shooter is either completely by accident or because the enemy is actually less organized than they are. Being a story-based reviewer, I have a lot of problems with this as it leaves a lot of plot holes that are never filled. I will get into gameplay, but first I will fill people in on the general story. It takes place right after the events of the first game (or I would assume that as I never played the other entries). The good thing is that I really never felt like I was missing anything. The Helghast leader has been killed (against orders apparently) and now the ‘good guy’ army is being blown up by an even larger enemy army because apparently the direct approach was a suicide mission or something. So now the army needs to retreat. The story isn’t bad by any means even though every character in it could easily be considered an idiot who takes all of their knowledge of the army by what they have seen in the movies. So, you get a lot of people being ‘heroes’ at the worst possible times which does lead to the deaths of many in their squad and no one seems to really care about any of them and just move on to their next ‘heroic’ exploits. I did rant a little about collateral damage in video games in my Final Fantasy 7 review so I won’t repeat myself but the collateral damage is very apparent in this game. People who probably want to go home just as much as everybody else end up dying because of ‘main’ characters realizing all of a sudden that they are in a video game and something hasn’t blown up in the past three minutes and they need to ignore some orders so they can fill that quota! Good thing the enemies are also incredibly disorganized and torn between two sides or the heroes of the story would have died within the first two minutes of gameplay. There is a side story explaining why they are torn which is presented well (if not a little melodramatic) but suffers from ‘telling too much’. Any writer knows about showing not telling, but the writers of this game ignored that rule and decided to narrate everything going on by showing both sides. This ruins the build up and when it inevitably reaches a boiling point, the player is not surprised and it loses its effect. Personally, I would have preferred walking into a room and seeing a bunch of Helghast fighting each other for some reason or hearing some announcements about some infighting. That would have had a more dramatic effect. As for gameplay, it is a standard shooter and it plays well. The controls seem a bit awkward and I never really got used to the controls for aiming and ducking but it never got in the way of the game. It doesn’t take many chances, but there really isn’t a reason to. They take a ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ approach. The only problem with this formula is that it’s getting predictable. I am now automatically expecting an ambush when I walk into a room and there were never any surprises. Vehicle sections break up the pace a bit, but I hated them. They are on rail and there is no dodging fire and I found myself dying a lot for no reason a few times. Also, I don’t understand how glass can repair itself when a vehicle takes damage... Yeah, that is never explained. For a game that is supposed to well renowned for its astounding graphics, I never saw anything special. I still think Uncharted had better graphics (even the first one) and Killzone just looks like a slightly better version of Call of Duty to me. I never tried the 3D or the motion controls mainly because I find both to be too gimmicky and I can’t afford a 3D T.V or the Move. Nor will I really ever want to buy them. If the Wii ever taught me anything it’s that motion controls aren’t as good as the hype makes them out to be. I give it a 8/10. It’s good and fun, but it doesn’t stray far from the formula of a first person shooter.
P.S: I loved the jetpack sections. Those were fun!
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Let me put this bluntly. I had high hopes for this sequel. Almost anyone who played the original only had one major complaint, it was too short. So, seeing that the only thing that needed improvement was the length, how the hell did Lucas Arts screw up so badly was this sequel? Not only was this sequel shorter than the first (which was already short so that’s saying something) they also made it more repetitive, annoying and made Darth Vader a wimp which is unforgiveable in my books. Not only is that all bad, they also missed some massive potential and used the worst possible cliché ever to justify its existence. I am of course talking about the beginning. The end of the first game presented you with a choice of final battles (you know the choice that was all hyped up and turned out to not be that great). That choice either ended in your death or joining the dark side. Now, there was some downloadable content that explored the dark side choice (which I never played) so Lucas Arts chose to make a sequel about the choice that ended in your death. So Darth Vader becomes an idiot and clones you in hopes that maybe this time you won’t turn on him. Well, surprise surprise, not only does that not work, but there is apparently no cure for idiocy either as when you finally get to face Vader, he just stands there and takes all of your attacks. The battle with Vader in the first game was a stroke of pure genius. Not only was it a difficult fight without being cheap, his armour slowly chipped off and got more and more damaged as the fight went on giving what you were doing more weight. Almost as if you are actually hurting one of the most feared forces in the universe. And it felt good. You get nothing if that in this one. It was like fighting a brick wall. Vader wasn’t the only disappointing factor though, as all the boss battles seemed to be a massive step downward. Again, comparing the first that had you fighting other Jedi in a fight to the death, the hype for this game made me expect the same sort of battles with Sith lords. Well, the battles were with robots and weren’t nearly as epic. Just annoying in the worst possible way. I will conclude by saying Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 should mark the death of this series along with the animated series but I refuse to acknowledge its existence so I will say that this game was the last straw for me. I, as a Star Wars fan, have gone through a lot. I survived the prequel movies. I successfully ignored the animated series. I liked the first Force Unleashed game and the lego versions of the series but this was unforgiveable. Star Wars is dead to me now and it is because of this game. I give it a 1/10 for being worse than the prequel. And killing an entire series for me.
Okay, I shall level with you all about what has happened for the past few months in both Random Rantings and The Yellow Darts Reviewing Extravaganza. We are lazy. I can’t speak for the Yellow Dart, but when I am studying, writing midterm tests or doing homework, I’m not really feeling all that witty enough afterwards to post a review of a game that I either loved, or hated. Well, we are planning to get back into the swing of things and I invite you all to check out our joint review that is now up on our website. For now, I am going to review Call of Duty: Black Ops. Lucky me. I am going to be honest about this game. I was really not looking forward to reviewing it because I have very little to say about it. Call of Duty is a series that perfected its formula with the release of Modern Warfare and ever since then they have made no changes to it. Sure you can argue that the story was different, the characters were different, ect. But when you really look at the gameplay, it’s the exact same. So with that statement, I will say go look at my review of Modern Warfare 2 because Black Ops is the exact same game and I really don’t feel that it is necessary to repeat myself. Instead I will go on a rant about the gaming industry today. You see, the problem I have with games of this era is that it is dominated by 1 or 2 major companies that won’t stop releasing sequels. Think about it. When I say video game, I can almost guarantee that most people will initially think of either Halo or Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. Those are the three dominant games now. Halo and Call of Duty seem to be fighting it out over the top spot in the first person shooter genre and WoW is on a separate mountain and sniping off any other MMO that wants to come even close to sharing the top spot with them. That is great for the companies as they are always guaranteed a lot of money and publicity whenever they decide to release a new sequel but it is bad for gaming. Why is that? Well you just need to look at the Indy Games. What are Indy Games? Put simply, they are what the future of gaming should look like. They are made by developers who commonly don’t have much money but a great idea and the patience to pull it off. Sometimes they take off like Minecraft has recently and the final version isn’t even out yet. Most times, though, they don’t. What happens to Indy game developers is that they are always pushed away by the major companies who have the majority when it comes to games. So, what we get is people with the good ideas not getting the money they need to sustain themselves and they die off and we start seeing more Call of Duty and Halo clones come out from people who want to cash in on their success. That is never a good idea and they usually die off quickly but the amount of them on store shelves is just sad. I guess my point here is that I would like to see the major companies retire their games like Call of Duty and Halo (I think Halo did retire though, but we’ll see how long that lasts) and try new things. The companies can invest in Indy developers or try to make a new series themselves as long as it has a new innovation that will make the whole experience new to gamers. And no, I do not mean add motion controls. I hate those. What I mean is try a new genre like a platformer or RPG or an action game that does not have zombies for once. P.S: My review for Mafia 2 is as follows. DO NOT PLAY IT!
Call of Duty: Black Ops – 6.5/10 because of being the exact same as the others in the series. Mafia 2 – 2/10 because the game pissed me off when it gave me a speeding ticket. HOW DID THEY THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA!? What do you get when you combine Final Fantasy with Metal Gear Solid and add in men who seem to all take their shirts off at the drop of a hat or a weird look from a passerby and all seem to think that all problems can be solved with their fists... Or their feet. Problems that include business management and I swear to God, accounting at one point. Well, you get a game that looks good on paper, but in reality all we got was Yakuza 3. Luckily I never purchased the game, in fact for a discount price at Blockbusters I have unlimited game rentals for the next month and I am making the most of it, and Yakuza 3 is part of this shameless product placement that I have just made. I picked up the game confused. I heard some really good reviews of it, yet I was always hesitant to buy the game for reasons I still don’t rightly know, but I may have been showing some weird psychic powers because I would have immediately regretted the purchase. In fact, it was so bad that I went back to the reviews from Gamespot and IGN (the mainstream ones that most people, including myself, use) to see if I missed some sort of detail about the game but no. They both loved the game and didn’t even mention the fact that it had you running around trying to figure out what was wrong with some kid you are supposed to relate with instead of doing the fun things like punching people. With swords. And that isn’t even just the beginning of the game either. I gave it a fair chance and played through the entire thing. It had you doing the exact same thing in the last hours that you did in the first. Run back and forth figuring out how to solve the mundane problems of day-to-day living. Which could have also worked if given some sort of choice of words, but the game repeatedly takes complete control and it feels more like you are watching an incredibly boring movie rather than playing a game. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on one things... Let me try another angle on it and see why everybody seems to think that it is the messiah of video games. Okay. The combat is REALLY good. And I mean that. It is intuitive, fluid, challenging without being cheap and allows you to pick up the environment and smash it into someone’s face. The characters look good and are believable and I agree with not redubbing it into English and just leaving it Japanese with English subtitles. Gives it character. And... I guess you can’t help but feel for the characters when for the longest time you are running around seeing if they ‘finished their homework’... No, I can forgive a lot of things if the game was fun, but this was not for the most part. While playing the game and I mean WHILE playing it, I got a high score in Tetris. It’s pretty bad when a mainstream game can’t beat Tetris for my attention. The cutscenes make no sense from a formatting standpoint either. You will get one cutscene played out with actual dialogue (like Metal Gear Solid), then it pauses to give you some text boxes to read (like Final Fantasy) then it will switch back to the dialogue. Sometimes it repeats this. One time it repeated it 10 times and I am NOT exaggerating. I just skipped it all because I wanted to punch something. Which I was able to... 20 minutes later... In fact, I skipped most of the textboxes after I figured out that it just restated all that you already heard. I also skipped most of the cutscenes and still didn’t get lost, actually. In summary, Yakuza 3 had a great idea, but mauled it when the idiot in charge of gameplay decided that the audience would want to play ‘find the kid’ for 4 hours instead of punching things in the face. Or curb stomping someone. It could have had the exact same impact, no, more of an impact (just for the fact that I skipped everything) if it just cut out all of the unnecessary items that kept you from the actual gameplay. Also, I have decided that Gamespot and IGN are on SEGA’s payroll. SEGA is the maker of thegame, for those who don’t know. I give it a 4/10. Had some redeeming qualities, but falls short on almost everything else. Now, I'm off to play some Red Dead Redemption! P.S: Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but I have been playing some really crappy games lately, so maybe my torture makes up for it?
I have been putting countless hours into this game over the past week, so I really can’t do an hour by hour update. Just know that most of the hours I have spent playing have been spent getting killed by countless enemies, and in some instances, very high falls. I don’t have an exact death count at the moment, but I honestly think I’m nearing the 100 mark if I hadn’t already. Well, without further ado, here are some highlights on Demon’s Souls over the past week. 1. I have come to my senses and started a new character. I started with the thief class, but after beating 1 boss and then getting stuck, I realized that stealth really isn’t a viable option most of the time. Also, I wanted to try magic. So I went with the Temple Knight. More health, better armour and weapons and limited magic use. He starts with a healing spell, which was a good sign. After, I went ahead and kicked the first levels ass in half the time of my first run through! 2. After beating 3 bosses, I got stuck again... 3. I went through more levels to level up my character a bit. It didn’t help much. 4. I went online to find this particular boss’s weakness. It was magic. All I had was a healing spell... Shit. I found out about a weapon that deals magic damage that you get by winning a fight against some guy. I fought him; found that my weapon does 7 points of damage per hit which is shit, so I was still stuck. 5. I found some really good armour and shield in a pit on the first level. 6. I finally decided to try to summon help for the boss. It worked. Between the two of us, we took it down in under 5 minutes. Hoora!! Also, I bought a spell that puts magic damage on your weapon. Double hoorah!! 7. Due to a few weapon related mistakes I made, I had to fight the Dragon God boss with a shield, Soul Arrow spell and a bow with 60 arrows. For those who do not know, I was severely under-equipped for the fight. I still won. Possibly the best moment of my life!! Okay, that was a rundown of the highlights. To date, I have beaten 8 bosses, but that is only the beginning. My weapons are starting to show their age, so either I need better ones or I need to really grind a bit to level up the ones I have before continuing on. Despite all the deaths and frustration, I still seem to be going back to the game constantly. It’s a challenge, but a surmountable one. Every time you fail, you don’t make the same mistakes that lead to it again which means that every time, you do make it a little farther in. Well, ‘till next time, have a great weekend!!
I personally believe that gamers secretly don’t want complete freedom in a game. For every game that comes out that doesn’t involve a sandbox of some kind, we complain that there isn’t enough freedom while at the exact same time we shell out $60-$70 for it. Just look at the sales for any fighting game. The complaints are there, but people still buy them. We need some sort of story or goal to keep us interested in what is happening in the game. Personally, I have never heard of a game that didn’t have some purpose. The Grand Theft Auto series that pretty much created the open sandbox structure still had a storyline for every game. Oblivion had a story (though I found the side quests more fun), as well as Fallout 3. In fact, I believe Fallout 3 does the sandbox in the best way possible. I didn’t see that when I first started it. When I completed the whole introduction in the vault, I went out into the wasteland not knowing what to do. I started to wander aimlessly until I got killed by a large group of mole rats along with a vender I was talking to at the time and I put down the game and went on to play something else. But when I came back, I went with the story for a while until I got used to the game and then went off exploring and taking side quests whenever possible. That was something I liked. Though the freedom was there to ignore the main quest completely, it was still there to keep you going or to get you used to what you are seeing and the rules that the game world has put in place. Soon, I had completed the main quest and was a mole rat killing machine since I made my character have a personal vendetta against them. That leads into another freedom that can be daunting if people are used to it. The freedom to use your imagination to create a character to your liking. Sure there is still the morality system, which is limited between two extremes but that doesn’t mean you can’t make something with it. In my current play through, I am challenging myself to mainly use a baseball bat as a weapon and let me tell you, decapitating someone with a baseball bat is probably the most satisfying thing I have done in a video game. That being said, this is a role playing game, and not a shooter like what some people will think. If you play it like shooter, you will find horrible gun controls and aiming capabilities. That forces you to think. Also, the VATS system helps by pausing the game to let you pick your target and a slow motion action view will take over as you tear off limbs or decapitate enemies with your bullets, fist, or baseball bat. The level up system can be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with role playing games, but after a few levels, you can get the hang of it. The expansions aren’t perfect, and in my opinion the only one worth getting would be Broken Steel for the added main quest and new level cap and possibly Point Lookout for more exploration in another map. The other expansions seem to focus way too much on the combat which is too weak to recommend. Fallout 3 is an experience. It has its flaws in the combat, but overall is just plain fun to play which is a major selling point for me. A definite recommendation!
9/10 Yes, I have finally bought Demon’s Souls or better known as one if not THE hardest game on the next-gen consoles. When it first came out, I heard of its punishing difficulty and the fact that even with it, the game only ever really punishes genuine mistakes and never makes a cheap shot at you. As soon as I heard that, I made a dare with myself. I will not only PLAY this game, I will DEFEAT this game. The problem was, I was not prepared to shell out $60-$70 at the time, but now at $30 I was ready to. So instead of outright reviewing it, which may be a long time from now, I will detail my progress in the world starting with the first 2 hours and continuing every time I make some sort of progress in the world. Hour 1Okay, so I pop the disk in and sign onto PSN so I can take advantage of the online community I hear about. As the game is loading up and the first cutscene is playing explaining the situation, I get a message from one of my friends saying that I will love the game. Apparently NOTHING pauses as I write back, but at that point I really didn’t care. I guess that’s pretty odd considering I mainly ever focus on story when I review but for some reason the story doesn’t seem all that important. Sure it seems deep enough and slightly interesting, but it only serves to give you a reason for being in the world so I have decided to not focus at all on it since the game seems to not want me to. I created a character fast enough and decided to go with the thief class. I like fast movement in characters if I ever need to retreat and the high luck on him means that I get a higher item drop rate which I had a feeling I would be thanking God for in the game itself. Well, the tutorial was simple enough and it served to teach me the basics and then... I’m dead. I was expecting that from all that I have read about the game and the tutorial level, but I wasn’t expecting something so anti-climatic. I walk into the room, see the monster, charge with my shield ready to block and then... I’m dead and transported to the hub world. It all happened in less than 10 seconds which goes to show how easily you can die in the game. After being introduced to a blind woman and getting nothing explained to me except that I am now unable to leave and my health will be at half until I can defeat a boss monster, I decided to explore the hub world. At this point, I start to see blood stains that show the last moments of other people online. These blood stains are on the upper portions of the world and after touching them, they reveal to me that they died of... Falling. Actually, for some of the deaths, it looked more like a suicide. Needless to say, I am questioning the sanity of the online community at this point. Hour 2I finally went into the first actual world of the game. A massive castle that is said to house dragons or something. As I approach my first enemies, I see writings on the floor that warn me that I am unprepared for something ahead. I was a little confused about this seeing that it’s the first level, so I take an alternate path that leads to my inevitable death at the hands of a trap that someone warned me about two steps earlier. After re-spawning, I try to just go forward and try my luck with that path. I am surprised to find out that it was more manageable. Not easy by any means, but I made steady progress up the castle meeting zombie-like enemies (they lurch forward slowly and look a lot like them), and soldiers that throw fire bombs. Those surprised me, especially since I don’t like it when the enemy uses projectiles with more efficiency than me. I make it halfway to my objective before falling to a stronger soldier enemy that takes me down in two hits. I respawn and make it to him again and meet the same fate when I find out that he tends to use health herbs. The third time as I progress through the same enemies for the third time, I make a note that I am getting into a rhythm with the path I was taking. Walk, walk, kill, kill, walk, run, dodge, kill, ect. Finally, I kill the soldier that took my life on 2 occasions. Funny thing about that though, in the process I never completely lost my collected souls since each time I picked it up before I died so I had triple the amount. That triple amount was promptly lost when I fell down some stairs. At least I opened up the way to the boss of the level which was actually at near the starting point. The boss was... Well it reminded me of the BP oil spill in a way since it looked like sentient oil. And was weak to fire. Unlike the BP oil spill, though was that he is covered with smaller oil enemies that spawn spears from nowhere (probably wizardry). At first he looked like one mass covered in spikes, but in reality, the smaller enemies detached from him and he never re-spawned them, so when a good amount were taken out, I was able to wail on his exposed area to take him out relatively easily. As a reward for this, I get my body and full health back and I get a chance to talk to something that will explain things to me. At this point, I didn’t care too much, but I humoured the poor blind lady and went off to get lost. After about 10 minutes of being lost, I finally understood why I saw people committing suicide. Like me, they probably thought that something will happen. So I try. Nothing happened, other than losing my body, I was still lost. I used an item to get back my body, (a waste of an important item, really) and finally found it. It was hidden among many other similar bodies in a similar position. So obvious! After talking to it, I left the game for a while because I didn’t have the time to get involved in another level.
Here is Crackdown reviewed in one word: Meh. Now to elaborate. Crackdown is a game I owned once upon a time when the Xbox 360 was shiny new and not fucking dying on me multiple times. In fact, Crackdown was one of the first games I owned for the system so I really didn’t see the flaws until after I got over how shiny and beautiful everything looked on a next-gen consol. Like I said (kind of) said in my Naruto review, some games don’t really need an epic story to keep moving forward and give you an excuse for killing things and Crackdown does fall into that category, unfortunately it also falls into a category that Borderlands falls into. Without a cohesive storyline to tie it all together, Crackdown inadvertently creates a lonely world with no real motivation to do anything for anybody. Let me explain. The narrator fills in the story at the very beginning pretty much telling you to kill people that are making things go boom in a way that can make them go boom. He then gives you a car and a very fast tutorial and leaves you alone only periodically chiming in to tell you that there is an enemy nearby (which you probably already know by the amount of enemies around) or that your health is low. On top of that, the only time you are introduced to anybody else with a ‘personality’ and I use that loosely here, is right before you go in to kill them. There is no reason to sympathize with anyone in the game. Every character is annoying, mute or dead. Or all three. Crippling loneliness aside, screwing around in the city is fun and is also challenging which is something you don’t always get. Even with all of the upgrades, certain buildings will be tough to get to, but all are possible and the rewards feel worth it even if you really don’t need them. This is the sort of game that is easy to pick up for 20 minutes, but there is no lasting value. Once everybody is dead, there is nothing left to do. This is especially bad because the act of shooting them is repetitive, unchallenging and cheap. Every encounter consists of getting the high ground and killing everything below you who has the audacity to have a pulse. If the enemies have rocket launchers, forget about it. They will repeatedly knock you over and not give you a chance to get up. I cannot really recommend this game to anyone and if you need to play crackdown, play crackdown 2. I don’t really plan to, but I would imagine it’s more of the same thing. The city is fun to explore, but the act of exploring it is not enough to merit the game. With absolutely no relatable characters or reasons to massacre, the game feels unfinished, lonely and boring. You may think it is hard to see a game being ‘lonely’, but that is really something you need to experience to believe. When I say lonely, I just mean that the game feels unfinished or that something important was left out or is happening just off screen. I give it a 5/10
Finally! An original game that doesn’t have a number beside it! Sure it’s based off of a Manga series as well as a T.V show, but I can forgive it because... As a side note, I couldn’t find a picture of an actual list of the games online, but trust me, there are dozens and most of them are repeats of each other. It’s kind of ludicrous, really. Well, I will just focus on this one, since this is the only one I have played. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. This game is fan service. Really well done fan service, but fan service nonetheless. If you are not a fan of the T.V series (admittedly, I have not watched it) or the Manga (this, I have read), then you are most probably not going to understand the story at all. This is because the game does a terrible job at telling it. Not that many will care about that. When you buy a fighting game, you are generally not that interested in a deep well told story, because there generally isn’t one. Or the bare bones of one that usually involves a tournament of some kind. In the case of Naruto, however, this is a missed opportunity. The series is full of wit and is very deep in the way it is told. The set up for fights are rarely random and there is a strong emotional connection between many of the characters. It is a missed opportunity as the game alienates a whole audience that hasn’t been introduced to this. Of course, if you were a fan going into the game, you can fill in the blanks and forgive this shortcoming for the fact that the game (accurately mind you) goes through many of the best fights of the first half of the series and allows you to take control of EVERYBODY. That alone gets most fans drooling. As accurate and true to the story the game is (good storytelling aside here) there are a few minor changes that could be noted. Some fights are added (in the case of fighting a giant toad, this is welcome) and some are removed (near the end, you fight the same guy 5 times instead of 5 different people. This is less welcome), but all in all it’s pretty damn accurate and that alone surprised me immensely. As for gameplay, let it be known that it is a fighter through and through. You get full range of the battlefield which is good so that fights rarely turn into punch-for-punch and you get a wide range of unique moves for all of the characters. Even with all of this variety, most of the characters are well balanced except for a few characters that are noticeably weaker than others and some whose special moves are a bitch to pull off successfully, but not so much so that you cannot win any battle with them. The minigames, on the other hand are not that well done. There are exactly 3 that are recycled 50 times throughout all of the missions and sidequests. They aren’t terrible, but it is annoying to be playing the same games over and over and over and over and over again. Variety would have been nice, is all I’m saying. All-in-all though, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm is a rare case of well done fan service, but isn’t perfect. An entire audience is alienated through bad storytelling and the minigames get old after the 3rd time through but the game is just plain fun to play and that makes up for a lot in my opinion. 8/10 for fans of the series and 6.5/10 for newcomers.
P.S: I am determined to find a true original game. This is a game that is not a sequel/remake or will not have a sequel in the near future. Portal, you were soooo close... Red Dead Redemption is the newest release from Rockstar and is the spiritual successor of Red Dead Revolver which was apparently a bomb, but I never knew this because I had never heard of the game. In fact, from the research I did (which was very little admittedly) I found that Red Dead Redemption is so different from Red Dead Revolver that Rockstar could have just forgone the ‘Spiritual Successor’ thing and still have the same damn game! In fact, the only thing in common with the two games is that they both contain ‘Red Dead’ and that they are both set in the same time period. To this day I have no clue why they even bothered to go through the trouble of remaking Red Dead Revolver when they could have just made a unique game. They were already 99% of the way there. In fact, I was going to mention the fact that it is one of the only truly unique games on the market now-a-days when game developers are only focusing on sequels or semi-good remakes of older games, but no! The fact that it even shares a name with Red Dead Revolver just proves that Rockstar is lazy. I guess the point that I am trying to make is that I want more games like Shadow of the Colossus or ... Know what? I really can’t think of any new releases right now that aren’t a sequel or a re-make. It’s a dying breed of games and it really is sad. Well, rant aside (you may read more about it later) Red Dead Redemption is still a fun game. It is the only game to date that I have had the patience to 100%. That alone means that it is worth playing. The story is deep and thrilling (as well as shocking and sad near the end), the graphics are great, the map is huge and you can escape to Mexico if multiple gangs are chasing you in the States. Another good thing about it is that it’s long. Again, that is a dying trend in gaming. Gone are the days of satisfyingly long single player games in favour of more multi-player based tom-foolery. I have never been really into the online functionality, but Red Dead proves that a good game can have enough for the single player devotee as well as a functional multi-player community. The story is a long one with many false endings. There’s one at the 2-3 hour mark, one at the 9-10 hour mark as well as one at the 15-16 hour mark before it finally ends with a bang later on. All-in-all, you are looking at a game that is at least 20 hours long with many twists and turns that will keep you guessing as to how it will all wrap up. The final ending may not be the most satisfying one ever, but keep in mind that – once you think about it – it was the only possible outcome of all of the events that had unfolded. There are many things to do once the story is finished as well. Some are tedious like picking flowers, while others are more fun like hunting a bear with a knife. In fact, hunting is so much fun that you may never want to go into a town other than to pick up ammo or to sell the meat and furs you got from the animals. There are many types of animals and most are out to kill you. For the most part, your dead eye ability makes their attempts at your life laughable, but sometimes you’ll see yourself surrounded by four or five bears which is an almost inescapable situation. At that point, you can still go down the best way possible and that is with a knife in front of a family of campers. True story. Though it may or may not be true that Red Dead Redemption is just Grand Theft Auto with horses that should not deter you from a purchase. Even though Rockstar missed an opportunity at originality with the name, it is still a pretty original game with an interesting story and some fun to be had outside of it. P.S: I named my horse Liliana after the deceased pink Smart Car in 'Conspiracy!' to carry on her spirit.
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A Note from JoeHi! Joe here! Random Rantings season 2 is under way! Be sure to post rant ideas for the Thursday posts! Remember, nothing is off limits, I will rant about pretty much anything. Archives
March 2011
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