Mass Effect 2

A solid sequel which improves upon the original in almost every way. I say ‘almost’ because instead of improving the planetary exploration so that it didn’t suck, they basically excised it altogether. That said, the combat is far better just by virtue of taking pointers from Gears of War. The enemies do far more than just bumrush you now – they take cover, and they try to flank you if the battefield allows for it. There’s also some decent enemy variety, between the different merc squadrons you come up against as well as species-based traits. I found myself deploying skills manually a lot more often than I did in ME1, too – switching your ammo powerups and weapons around depending on the situation makes a big difference, especially if you’re playing on harder difficulties (I finished the game on Veteran).

The sidequests are also better in general, partly because of the combat improvements and partly because Bioware put some effort into designing quests that didn’t take place in the same three prefab bases.

So yeah, two thumbs up from me, especially if the first game disappointed you.

Just Cause 2

I picked this up during the recent Steam summer sale, since I had heard good things about it. At first, I was trying to figure out why it was so hard to get around, as well as why I was dying so much.

And then I figured out how to use the slingshot + parachute combo, and the game suddenly clicked, and became pretty great.

You can cross vast distances just by chaining slingshots – it’s pretty exhilarating to be honest. The grappling hook and parachute are the core of this game in many ways – you can use them to engage and disengage from battles on your own terms, to drag enemies out of cover, pull enemies down from high perches, and generally to demonstrate your general superiority. The game is basically about causing chaos, and the game responds to your actions by throwing tougher and tougher enemies at you the more chaos you cause. I’m playing on Normal and the toughest enemy so far has been a helicopter, but even those are a piece of cake if you grapple to them and throw the pilot out of the cockpit. Oddly enough, getting bumrushed by multiple soldiers is actually more dangerous to my health than helicopters, mainly because a lot of your fighting tends to be done out in the open.

Really, though, my only complaint with the game is that the side missions are a bit uneven. Some of them are interesting at first – blow up a bunch of rockets and then hijack a jet to blow up another one as it lifts off, hijack a car and drive it to a safe house…and then they start to repeat, and I get a whiff of Assassin’s Creed deja vu.

Bayonetta

This was the first game I bought for my 360, and it’s everything I would have expected. You can play it NG-style with a dodge button and no lock-on, or you can play it DMC-style with the lock-on button and using the jump button to dodge. Dodging, of course, plays a major role in the game, allowing you to slow down time when timed just right. Combined with the fact that most of your attacks don’t put the enemies in hitstun, this means the best strategy is generally to fight aggressively, and then dodge at the last possible second to activate Witch Time. It’s something that takes a bit of getting used to, but I’m having a lot of fun doing it.

Some of the fighting arenas are also pretty great setpieces – fighting on a giant building that’s falling through the air, fighting across the walls and ceiling of a church…pretty spectacular.

The only qualm I have so far is the QTEs that seem to randomly pop up in cutscenes, but they’re easy to do for the most part, so I’m not going to complain too much. The ones that you do as special finishers are easy enough to do and they’re great to look at, so I have no complaints there.

Backlog Blues

Unfortunately my backlog has only gotten longer since I last wrote about this stuff…Metroid Other M, Monster Hunter Tri, Thief Deadly Shadows and both Max Payne games have been added to it (damn you Steam sales, damn you to hell). At some point I’m going to have to buy a bunker and stay in there until my backlog is empty…

I used to be (and still am) pretty disdainful of Twitter as a whole – I remember thinking ‘wtf?’ when Ashton Kutcher suggested that the guys who wrote Twitter would be remembered in the same vein as Alexander Graham Bell. It’s very hard to find anything of substance on there – it’s hard to be profound in 140 characters, unless you truly have a way with words. That is not something I can say about the majority of Twitter’s denizens, most of whom seem content to dial a number provided to them by some teen idol on reflex.

That said, I’ve come to a compromise of sorts, since I have occasionally found that my immediate reaction to something can sometimes be fairly snarky, which is an attribute I value very highly. So I did end up getting an account to preserve quick thoughts like that, thoughts around which I might eventually craft a more coherent opinion.

So, long story short, if you’re wondering what I’m up to in the lengthy interval between my blog updates, the sidebar I just added should tide you over until I find something new to write about.

Then again the iPhone version of Espgaluda II on Novice difficulty isn’t exactly the best basis to make such a claim. I’m kind of interested in trying the 360 version now – anyone know if it’s any good?

Also apparently Cave’s next iPhone port is going to be Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. Not really sure how that one is going to play on this device…

That said I don’t know that Sonic 2 is necessarily the best game to show that stuff off…it’s pretty streamlined compared to some of the other games.

Oh well, still funny!

Swallowing notes all over the place, and both my right- and left-hand techniques are rusty as hell after not practising for months on end.

(Oh and that background noise? Episode of Scrubs I had playing at the same time I was recording this)

Still, it’s a start, I guess.

Name: The Church of Wyler
IP/port: 216.244.67.137:27015
Players: 16

It’s a 16-player server, and the rotation is mostly 5CP maps + Gravelpit + KOTH + the few Payload maps I can stand. It also runs Sourcemod for handy things like map voting etc, so if you own TF2, drop in sometime!

Oh, and if you’re tired of all the engineer class spam…I’ve installed a class limits plugin too. *wink*

To illustrate why this game is so important, it might help to make a few comparisons with more recent titles.

There are tons of games out there (mostly Bioware and Bethesda games) that advertise the fact that you can make choices in-game that have consequences. However, most of those consequences are fairly minor. For instance take Fallout 3 – one of the quests early on lets you decide whether or not to spare the town of Megaton or not by defusing or detonating its resident unexploded nuclear bomb. How you resolve this quest certain has consequences – for instance, it decides where your ‘base’ will be early on, and it will change certain characters’ attitudes towards you. That said, pretty much all the story quests are unaffected by this – they unfold in exactly the same manner, and you experience the main storyline the same way over multiple playthroughs. Sidequests might change, sure, but the main plot never does.

Deus Ex, however, has no such limitations. You can kill off major characters way before they’re supposed to have a major impact on the plot, and doing so will prevent those events from ever occurring (I actually did this). On top of that the decision making is thankfully free of the binary good versus evil distinction – heck, in most situations the options available to you aren’t really apparent unless you explore the areas and invest points in the correct skills. This even extends to the game’s conclusion – unlike Fallout 3 and so many other games that tout choice as a major selling point, there is no distinction between a ‘good’ ending and a ‘bad’ ending – once again, just choices with consequences, and you’re left to decide which choices are the most palatable to you. Believe it or not, it took me something like 30 minutes to decide which ending I wanted to go for.

Given that this game came out ten years ago, way back in 2000, it’s amazing and thoroughly disappointing that no game has managed to improve on it – not even its own sequel, apparently. Deus Ex 3 is on the horizon, but given that it’s being handled by a completely different development team, and that Warren Spector is busy making Mickey Mouse games for Disney, I’m not going to get my hopes up too much.

I’ve just started on Mass Effect 2, whose developers insist that the way the game unfolds will depend on how you beat the original Mass Effect. We’ll see, I suppose.