The Ragey's 2012: The year end wrap up

God am I still writing for this awful blog? Are people actually reading it? Don't you people have hobbies? Yeesh, Madness. Well, now that I have an actual full year of blogging (Jan to Dec) under my belt I guess that means its time for this years annual wrap up. Same rules apply, gonna try to stick to stuff I played this year, and generally the stuff I actually got my hands on.  So lets get to it then!

The 2012 Ragey's: Still not presented by Southern Comfort
But much was consumed over the course of the year.

10: The Standing in the rain, staring into the window of a friends big party that you weren't invited to award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Hot Shots Gold: World Invitational (PS Vita, PS3)

Why do you hate me, Sony? I didn't even bitch when my credit card got stolen after Anonymous hacked your ass. Playstation got two Hot Shots Golf games. Playstation 2 got two of them. So did the PSP. So why did the PS3 owners get left hanging? I fucking love these games and anxiously awaiting a new PS3 installment I see it get released on the Vita. I'm not paying for a Vita, assholes. Mobile phones are killing on portable gaming. Oh, but you released it on PSN for Japan? Well that's cool, when does the US get it? What do you mean you don't know? Answer me!

Seriously, I don't know why I love this franchise so much but I'm tired of waiting for it. I need a new Hot Shots Golf, and I need like like 2 months ago. Hop to it, you fuckers!

9: The I can't believe I paid to see Silent Hill: Revelations 3D in 3D garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Final Fantasy 13-2 (XB360/PS3)

This hurts. A lot. As a life long Final Fantasy fan I keep waiting for this series to repeat the glory days of Four, Six, and Ten. But aside from looking like they want to make movies, Squeenix seems to be content with trying to cram this universe down my throat.

I'm going to call this "Raiden Syndrome". Because like Metal Gear creator Kojima, Square Enix seems to be really trying to push me to like Lightning as a character. She's easily the most angsty protagonist in the FF Universe (a place that has Squall and Cloud, so that's impressive), it makes a game about trying to find this person and bring her back not great motivation to finish the game.

And really, the game is probably the most frustrating thing about 13-2. It seems like every complaint I (as well as many others) had with the game, they seemed to fix by replacing them with new equally annoying problems: World Maps came back, but you jump from map to map through excessively busy and boring menus. You get new interesting protagonists, but they are joined by the ragtag band of unlikeable douches from the last game.  The story still doesn't make a lick of sense. Worst of all, I literally fall asleep every time I try to play.

Glad they tried to fix some things, but if I'm nodding off while playing your game that's obviously a step in the wrong direction. Maybe they'll fix it in 13-3 but I am not getting my hopes up.


8. The Bruce Willis was a Ghost the Whole Time award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Slender (PC)

Up until its release, I would have just stared at you blankly if you asked me who the "Slender Man" was. At the suggestion of randoms I downloaded this free PC title and gave it a wild shot in the dark. Initial impressions were that it was slow and boring.

But what followed to me was a shining example that there are some people in the game development world who understand what makes a horror game terrifying. Bone chilling audio, Creepy visuals, and a genuinely terrifying lore spawned by some very creative people produced a survival horror experience that I have not had in quite some time. It just makes me wonder what they could do with an actual budget.

Slender is still free to download. So if you haven't had the opportunity to sit down with it yet, I suggest you do so. And make sure you have a fresh set of pants or two on standby.


7. The Lets Make Every Fucking Meme on the Internet Grumpy Cat award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

Halo 4 (XB360)

I really don't know what else I can add to my previous "hate speech" as its been called. This game came out to praise like it cured 5 forms of cancer when it came out of the packaging. I played a fairly pedestrian and samey FPS with staggeringly little innovation to the original formula. I was able to see it through to the end, but I was incredibly underwhelmed.

My review was called into a question on xmas by a colleague of mine from PijigaMonkey Productions (I'm not sure he has actual company name yet, but you can find him on youtube) where he basically said he disagreed with my review. I asked him what he took issue with in the review to which he responded with "Well, I like the game".

Which pretty much summarized my main point, Halo is successful because it has a feverish and relentless core of fans based solely on nostalgia. Nostalgia for a solid game in a weak launch lineup. It wasn't innovative at the time, and its not innovative now. Its not a bad game as far as FPS games are concerned but because there are so many better options it shocks me that people praise this game as much as they do. There are better FPS games.

6. The Antichrist Superstar to Mechanical Animals award for "Amazing then Forgotten" game of the year.

Mass Effect 3 (PS3/XB360)

This game had some real possible "Game of the year" implications, but I was incredibly torn on if it would hold up over time. Since the games release, DLC controversy, and subsequent firestorm of crybabies being unsatisfied with the ending (The likes of which I've never seen striking a deep wound to creative integrity as far as I'm concerned). Mass Effect 3 turned out to be an excellent 3rd person shooter that leaned more towards the Gears of War style of game play rather than the Action + RPG elements space saga I was hoping for.

My problem comes in once I was finished, that's it. I was finished. The multiplayer had no draw for me and neither did the DLC. Instead of adding cool innovative features (say some form of spaceship combat? I mean, its only three 40 hour games. I'm sure the Normandy had to fight something.) the game just regressed to a cover based shooter that became surprisingly linear. What happened to the freedom to explore random planets?

I can't call the game "underrated" since it is winning a few game of the year honors, and was considered a commercial success. But I do find myself questioning who is still playing it or how successful the DLC has been. I'm sure I'll eventually come back to it, but like Dead Space 2 last year, it feels like a flavor of the month title that was immediately pushed aside when the next big AAA game came out.

5. The 89 Cent Taco Bell Cheese Roll up award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Lollipop Chainsaw (XB360/PS3)

I found myself surprisingly enamored with this release as time passed. This feeling was intensified as I was at PAX East and unable to try it there. Thankfully, it managed to deliver as a fun to play zombie hack and slasher with a penchant for the ridiculous story and lots of costumes to unlock.

Unfortunately, the game only has 6 levels. And for a 60 dollar game, that is a real problem with me. I will admit that the levels in this game are way longer than you would expect, but it seems to me like it would have been better served to break them up some. If you cut each level in half the game would have 12 stages that take 15-30 minutes to complete each. That would make the passage of time as you play seem much more realistic, and make the game seem to move at a faster pace.

If the combat was sped up a bit, and the cut scenes had a skip option, this game stood a real chance to have been my game of the year. But for a new IP Lollipop Chainsaw made a pretty strong showing, just not a long one. For the amount of game this had it should have been 30 or 40 bucks tops. Miss Starling accepts the award for worst value.


4. The "I've only done a few bumps, I haven't done lines." award for "Best Value" goes to....

Dark Souls: Artorias of the Abyss (PS3 DLC)

I was really struggling with what I was going to to give my Best Value Award to. Because there were a handful of games I played quite a bit after I bought them. But really this makes the most logical sense. Dark Souls released a DLC add on that added about 2 or 3 new maps, about 4 or 5 new bosses, and some new weapons and abilities.

I worried that 20 bucks would be a bit steep for the DLC, but frankly?  Its gotten me to play a game I've already logged well over 250 hours with another 150 more. More so than that, its made the game feel completely brand new again as I tried new builds, new weapons, and new attacks.

I know the game like the back of my hand and well after a year of release, I'm still not bored with it. I was temped to make Dark Souls my game of the year again but that seemed like a cop out, but it certainly deserves best value for all the time I've put into it.

3. The Phil Dawson 28 of 29 honorable mention goes to....

Resident Evil 6 (XB360/PS3)

Resident Evil 6 got a good deal of well deserved flack for basically not being a traditional Resident Evil game. I complained about it quite a bit on this very blog about it being more of a generic 3rd person shooter with too many genre elements added in, if anything.

But the one thing I should probably make mention is despite all the faults I had with the game, I still find myself enjoying it. If it was just replaying the stories over and over, that might get tiresome. But I never bore of the Mercenaries mode. I can easily toss that in and kill an hour of my time and still be looking to play it. I caught myself trying to rank in the Residentevil.net world events. It may have gotten a bit of a beating in the reviews but its sold very well, and really is a pretty solid title.

I play this game a lot still, so I think it deserves the honorable mention.

2. The Having to meet the "Tickle Monster" in the Penn St. Locker Room award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Dishonored (XB360/PS3)

I was pretty hard pressed for a worst game a year because as far as actual playable games go, nothing really stood out as exceptionally poor to me. Really it came down to what games did I play more than others, or I suppose in this case, what game did I want to play more of.

Dishonored is one of those games that was completely marketed out the ass around its release and nearly all the trailers I saw featured no game play footage. After Dead Island, I don't trust that. But since I knew nothing about it and I had no expectations going in, so I can't mark it as a disappointment.

But I can say that I spent a large number of hours playing an incredibly underwhelming title, all the while wishing I was doing something else. First person stealth doesn't scratch the itch like 3rd person does. The combat was visceral enough, but again I would have liked it more in 3rd person. Graphics don't fit the style and violence of the game, no real notable music than the nursery rhyme that I can remember, uninteresting predictable story, awful Bethesda controls.

I'm sure these are all things that western RPG fans like, but I didn't. I will probably never pick up Dishonored again, so it takes away the award for my worst of the year.

1. The Can't Name Dark Souls again because it won this award last year Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3/XB360)

I spent weeks trying to figure out what my game of the year was. Saints Row: The Third was really really fun, but it wasn't from this year. Dark Souls won it last year, and even though I played that more than anything this year, it wouldn't be fair to give it again. Resident Evil 6, Dragons Dogma, the Atelier Series, and Mass Effect 3 were all great games I played often, but none of them stuck with me enough to be my Game of the Year.

But then I watched my Omniderp video and remembered that I played the Silent Hill HD Collection. Are these games new? No. But I'll tell you what? With a bunch of new voices and slick new HD graphics made it feel brand new to me. I managed to play Silent Hill 2 like 4 times again. Managed to play Silent Hill 3 like twice. After writing that huge diatribe for Hashtagnerd, it just made me fall in love with these games all over again. 

I and many other people still hold Silent Hill 2 as one of the best games ever created. It has an incredible soundtrack, and excellent story, is genuinely scary, properly paced, and has good replay value with multiple and varied endings. Giving it the nice HD gloss over gives it an opportunity to bring it to new audiences as well. Since I couldn't think of one game that stood out enough this year to be the Game of the Year, I decided to give the honor to a game that really deserves it. Disappointed? Well fuck you. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are amazing. 

I can't believe that after all this time I am still writing on this thing. I'm even more surprised when I find out someone is actually reading it. With only 6 followers and no comments I seriously thought I was just putting this up here for me. But if people are actually enjoying my stuff, then for that I thank you greatly. More to come soon!

Happy 2012 bitches, see ya next year. 

Halo 4 (XB360): Same old song and dance.

So stepping out of my comfort zone and playing Black Ops 2 actually gave me the twinge of a thought that I may have been a bit too critical of the FPS genre. My friends have basically been masturbating themselves raw when they rant about the newest installment of this franchise and given my new found willingness to give games like this a shot, I find myself going back to series I basically haven't touched since the 2nd on the original Xbox. I speak of course of....

HALO 4:(XB360)

Four years after the previous Halo incident, the AI unit Cortana activates in the ship Forward Unto Dawn. It has long been abandoned and has been drifting in space. She reactivates Master Chief and informs him that they are approaching the Requiem and they are about to be boarded by Covenant forces. The ship is caught in Requiem's gravity well and draws the ship crashing down to the planets surface. 

Cortana is experiencing some temperament issues because of increased rampancy. She explains that the AI's average lifespan is 7 years and she currently in her 8th. Its causing her to be less functional as if thousands of her are arguing in her head. Chief tries to console her and let her know it can be fixed.  They also pick up the signals of UNSC Infinity which picks up the Dawn's distress call.

Chief then goes to try to stop the gravity well from pulling in the Infinity from crashing into the planet as they have, but inadvertently releases the Didact from imprisonment, who assumes control over the Covenant and the Prometheans and begins an assault on the Infinity, and then to earth.

Through the game, Cortana will snap into these rage fits and scream at you.
Something I can totally relate to.

Now, truth be told, I didn't play much of Halo 3 or ODST. The last game in this series I played for any reasonable length was Halo 2 and it was because I succumbed to peer pressure. So for the most part, I have no idea whats really going on.

But one thing that kind of bugged me right off the bat is pretty much as soon as the game started I was fighting against the same grunts and elites I have been playing against in the previous versions. I understand that they are this series primary antagonists, but seriously. These are the same fucking enemies I have faced in every previous versions of Halo.

To make matters worse though, is the weapons didn't seem to change either. As I marched through the early levels of the game I realized I was using the same rifles and covenant weapons I was familiar with too. Same rifles, same pistols. If I didn't know any better, I could have just been playing a remake of Halo 1 or 3. They did eventually throw a new weapon at me in the Saw, which feels like a massive Tommy Gun style of machine gun, although it seemed a bit weaker than the Assault Rifle in exchange for more shots.

Perhaps because I was coming off the high of playing my first realistic fps title, but as I played through the first few levels I kept wondering where all the enemies were. I would fight like 5 grunts then spend 30 minutes walking along the map looking for the next set of guys to shoot. It would give you a destination marker on occasion but only when you are like 5 feet from the location, but it never seemed to come up when I was actually lost.

I did like how the map was open and non-linear because too many games basically have you follow a straight line from cover to cover (see Gears or War). But I'll be honest here, it was at this point I was ready to pop the game out and go back to playing Dark Souls. This is exactly the same reason I didn't like Borderlands, walking around for 20 minutes looking to shoot a single enemy can get boring.

Things did get a bit more interesting when the Prometheans came out. New fast moving enemies with different attack patterns? Now things started to feel newish. Sadly these feelings didn't last because after I got through about 4 different enemy types of Promethean the game threw its hands up and said: "Whelp, that's it for new enemies. Were out of ideas, this'll do." Seriously? Fuck you Halo. If the game is going to be as long as this is, you can certainly do better than about 8 enemies to shoot at.

My feeling quickly turned that way with the games weapons as well. As soon as the Prometheans started dropping their weaponry, I got foolishly excited and tried to use them. Within seconds that crushing disappointment hit me again, because all of the new weapons are just different colored versions of the same fucking weapons I've already been using. The Scatter shot is just a shotgun. The Suppressor is just the Saw. The Binary rifle is the just the Carbine or Battle rifle. They are the same fucking weapons.

Let me stick on this issue for a bit. You know why I liked Resistance 3? Because it had interesting boss fights and fun to use weapons. I could tag a guy with a bullet and then run around a corner and open fire to watch my bullets fly around the wall and kill the guy. I could shoot them with a blob and watch enemies vomit themselves to death and in turn their vomit would make other enemies vomit to death. I could fire my Auger and hit an enemy through 3 walls of cover. That shit is new, interesting, and fun to play with because they are new and different. All of Halo's weapons are the same variant of the stupid normal human weaponry  with the options of wintergreen or orange burst.

Really these were designed well enough to be a good horror game,
shame it wasn't though.

I will say that this game has a pretty exceptionally long play time to it. I think it took me almost a whole day to get through the campaign on normal mode. That's another thing. My friends are constantly telling me I need to play the game on legendary mode. Why? I died in this game a fucking lot just on normal mode. 90% of the time it felt like an aggravating cheap death that there was nothing I can do about, but I'm willing to let this slide because I know I am not great at shooters.

Fucking nothing about this game felt new to me. Not a god damn thing. I don't know how this series continues on so successfully. This is almost Mario game level of stagnation. Same characters, same general enemy types, same weapons. Aside from the graphic updates and some of the colors of the weapons, Halo 1, 3, ODST, and 4 all felt like the same fucking game. At least 2 had dual wielding and introduced the sword.

The only thing that really drove me forward was the actual story. And really, I can't even say that the story is very good. For the majority of the time I barely even understood what was going on with the Didact and the Prometheans. I was able to deduce that Captain Del Rio was a dick, but really I had no idea what his ship was doing out there or what his problem was.

There was only one real sympathetic character in this whole game, and that was Cortana. Pretty much at the start of the game, she tells you that she's already outlived her life cycle and she's basically dying. Through the whole game you see her losing control of her personality and splintering off into fragments of rage. You get to hear her struggle with her rampancy as she tries to come to grips with whats happening to her while still trying to be useful to Master Chief.

And even her tragic ending (spoiler alert) you genuinely feel for her as you learn she had this long standing desire for some kind of actual physical contact with Chief, and the only time she got to fulfill this desire is the moment before she's gone for good. It was pretty heart wrenching to watch and if I had actually followed the entire Halo story from game to game, I would imagine this probably would have had an even stronger emotional impact than it did with me. Cortana was the most human character in the game, and she's not even human.

Shame you never got to see his face either.

But this is complete marred by the fact that Master Chief is probably the worst fucking character in the history of video games. Fan boys can fight me on this series and this character all day, but so help me they are fucking wrong. You have a main character to with no face, no emotion, no tonal range his speech, and doesn't have a line of dialog that exceeds ten words. Cortana pours her little digital heart out that she's basically coming apart at the seams and the only thing Chief can say is "it will be alright". Fucking weak.  Don't believe me? Take a look at all the fucking Emmy award winning lines of dialog provided by IMDB in some of the previous Halo games. Some real fucking winners in there.

I'd be more ok with this if Chief was an actual silent protagonist, but he's not. The best he achieves in the script is Nail Gun Massacre style one liners (IE: one liners meant to be cool or funny, but are neither). Game Informer magazine had the nerve to give the end of Halo 4 one of their top moments of 2012 and said "It personalizes Master Chief in a way no Halo game has done before, Making us care about the man behind the armor as he struggles to set aside his own desires for the greater good".

Permit me to disagree GI, but you are out of your fucking minds. He doesn't show any growth as a character, he doesn't show any emotion. He can't even stammer out a genuine desire to save Cortana in her last moments. At best he shows mild annoyance he is helpless but we don't know for sure because all we have is a stupid emotionless visor to go off of and three broken sentences that don't reach 10 words. I had this problem in Halo 2 as well because the Arbiter had this great fall from grace and rebirth story line that we only got to see sparingly because we had to break to watch Master Chief spit a 3 word one liner and then shoot Covenant.

Just watching action take place elsewhere.

So here we are. Much like the Skyrim review I did and I find myself faced with the task of ranking this game and despite is popularity in the media and with its fan base, I'm going to give the unpopular opinion: Halo 4 sucked and was boring. It's a stagnant series of games and an overall boring franchise. Maybe the novels paint the universe as more interesting, but as a game it does less than nothing for me.

Shooters like Bioshock, Resistance, Doom 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Painkiller, Half-life, Hexen (I liked Hexen, eat me), and so on are shooters I was willing to give a try and in some cases enjoy because they offered something new (at the time) or different to me to shake up the FPS genre a little.  But the Halo Series and this installment specifically just goes out of the way to show how generic, samey, and boring a shooter can be.

You get to fight in a mech suit for like 6 minutes. The game rips out of it when it
 realizes this is actually innovation to the series and sticks you back behind a rifle.

Halo is only popular because when the original Xbox came out in 2001 it was one of the two titles that were worth playing in the incredibly weak launch lineup. So their the entire fan base would relentlessly defend it to rationalize their purchase. Since pretty much every Xbox owner was part of this cult, its fervor naturally spun and manufactured this radical popularity. Much like Mario and Link, Master Chief being in a game makes shooter fans wet their jeans from gusset to ankle with glee every time he appears in a new game regardless of how little its changed from installment to installment.

I TRY to go into games like this with an open mind, and give it an opportunity to change my opinion. Sometimes it happens, I mean Black Ops 2 was able to do so somewhat. But Halo 4 only reinforced my theories and feelings towards the FPS genre. It was not fun for me. Look, If people genuinely enjoy Halo and all its samey installments, then more power to you. But there is no argument you can give me to make it sound like its pushing the boundaries of gaming. Its not. Halo 4 is not a bad game by technical standards, but everything that it boasts has been done and done better by the other more competent and interesting shooters I have mentioned above.

The only good things to come out of this series as far as I am concerned is its soundtrack, Red vs. Blue, and Grifball.

Muramasa: the Demon Blade (Wii): Come back home, Vanillaware.

Not all that long ago, I was asked to write an article about Nintendo for the fine people over at Hashtagnerd.com. In the article, I basically complained that Nintendo basically stopped making games for Me as a gamer, because I aged out of their focused demographic of 5-12 year olds, young women, and old people. But in the article, I strategically placed a video of a game I constantly pushed at customers without success of its purchase. After the my recent review of Odin Sphere and watching this video in my article, I  decided I couldn't wait any longer and called up my friend Em Ulator and finally had to the opportunity to sit down with....

MURUMASA: THE DEMON BLADE:(Wii)

Muramasa weaves the tales of two protagonists together in Momohime and Kisuke. Momohime is a quietly reserved and introverted princess of Nakrukami Han in the Mino region. Her body is inadvertently possessed by the spirit of a foul and vile swordsman named Jinkuro. Jinkuro was looking to possess her fiance to steal his young body and his knowledge of the Yagyu sword style, but Momohime interfered allowing her body to be taken instead.

Kisuke is currently being hunted by a clan a of ninja for crime of betrayal, but Kisuke has no recollection of it. Kisuke is filled with a sense of vengeance and has a desire to find a specific katana to drive him forward as he tries to discover who he is. 

Momohime and Kiskue

I will admit right off that compared to Odin Sphere, I found this story a bit lacking. While both of the tales were interesting and fun to learn as I played through, it didn't exactly weave a complex narrative like its predecessor was able to do.  That being said, the stories are both pretty interesting and tie together well which I will assume lead to one final bonus chapter. 

Vanillaware's art style is completely unmistakable here. And while the characters are beautiful and highly detailed in all their subtle animations, something I noticed is how much attention to detail the backgrounds and settings have to them. The game involves a lot of travel so you find yourself running and fighting through various settings of Japanese countryside and there are lots of little details to each setting that bring the backgrounds to life. One of my hands down favorites is when a rainstorm kicks up in a bamboo forest. It just looks phenomenal.

While a number of the basic enemies to kill aren't all that original like the myriad of generic Ninja's you fight, there are a number of spectacular bosses based in Japanese mythology, and even better is its not the retarded, wait for the exposed weakness then attack or side step the charge style bosses. Many of them have varying attacks and patterns to follow before you can charge in blade swinging. Be it gigantic sea monster, the thunder goddess Raijin, or even just the massive foot of a demon, all the bosses have original looks to them and different ways to approach them. 

The music in this game is exceptional. Various areas have traditional Japanese sounding musics with a beautiful array of flutes, kotos, and other various traditional Japanese string instruments. It makes some of the more dull travel sequences more enjoyable to listen to. When you are attacked the song itself doesn't change, but its style picks up in tempo and turns into a hybrid of the traditional Japanese sound with an upbeat rock influence as well. Its a great compliment to the fight sequences. 

Now then, the real meat of this game comes in with its combat and its got its pluses and minuses. Unlike Odin Sphere, Muramasa had better hardware behind it in the Wii (and way better hardware with my PC) so it didn't suffer from any of the slowdown issues that the PS2 faced it with. Because of this, the combat it fast and frantic. Your characters get to hold 3 weapons at once between Katana's and Long Blades. The katana's are fast and agile weapons while the long blades are stronger but with slower with big sweeping attacks.

The backgrounds are as beautifully illustrated as the characters.

You can make over 108 different weapons that increase in strength but many of them effect your attributes and each of them have a unique special attack that you can can string in between your combos. If you let the swords charge enough, you can switch between them for a massive all screen damaging slash. They can break from overuse of the special or excessive guarding so you need to actually watch your strategy and not just swing blindly. Swords recover while not in use but if you go too fast you can be stuck with 3 broken swords.

The downside to the combat I'd say is there is no difference to the two characters. Both Momohime and Kisuke can use both types of blades and both of them use the same style between them. So if you spent the time going through a whole playthrough as one of the characters then when you pick up the other one you will be disappointed to see that they fight the same way. This is kind of a shame because Odin Sphere had 5 characters to play as and all of their fighting styles were drastically different from one another. 

Sometimes fights can get clusterfucky, but I think that adds the excitement.

While the lack of variance was a little disappointing I am willing to overlook it because the combat is just so fast and fun to play that I found the game almost impossible to put down. After a bit of a rocky start I learned a lot of the tricks and quickly was getting the point where I was herding up the enemies and slashing them for a fast combo, using a triple dash attack to send them airborne, hacking them to ribbons with an air combo, before spin slashing down to the ground. Its overall control is simplistic in design which allowed me to become immersed in it easily and not pay attention to the controller.

Speaking of, this game does suffer from the awful Super Smash Bros. control scheme of pressing up to jump. I suppose it makes sense but its never something that has flowed exceptionally well for me. You will noticed that I haven't mentioned any of the Wiimote controls or stick waggles. Why? Because it doesn't fucking use that nonsense. Actually, my experience was probably better because I had more buttons to map to so I wasn't restricted to Wiimote.

It saddens me to know that this game was generally not successful despite pretty solid reviews. It only sold about 35,000 copies in the US and barely over 64,000 world wide. Odin Sphere sold over 90,000 in Japan alone. It disappoints me because much like in my hashtag nerd article, I 100% believe it didn't sell because the people who buy Wii games are casual gamer who wouldn't know an excellent title if it was lodged into their skull from a high power rifle. Its fucking disappointing because I thought this game was amazing. Instead, it faded away into obscurity buried under mountains of fucking shovel ware.

Allegedly it was supposed to be getting and HD re-release for the PS3 and the PS Vita, but it hasn't seen the light of day. So if you are looking for something to dust off your Wii with, I would say to try and find a copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade. It has a solid retro style of play control, beautiful visuals, good story, and fast and fun combat. I can't say I ever intend to get a Wii or a WiiU, but if I did? This game would easily be a linchpin in my collection.

Thankfully, Dragons Crown will be on the PS3.
Welcome back, Vanillaware. 

Dishonored (XB360): Stealthing its way out of my memory.

As you found out from my Black Ops 2 review I recently learned that Redbox rents games, which is super helpful now that I am not gainfully employed at my local Derpstop, (thats a joke, nobody is gainfully employed there). But in this continued quest to branch and try games I don't normally play, and partially because the only other option was Borderlands 2 I decided to step into the steampunk universe of a game marketed out the ass in....

DISHONORED:(XB360)

In Dishonored you play as silent protagonist Corvo Attano, assassin and bodyguard to the empress Jessamine Kaldwin. The game picks up with Corvo returning from a dignitary mission to the surrounding foreign lands seeking aid from a plague infection affecting the Dunwall empire. After your boat docks you meet up with the empress and her daughter to report on your mission.

After a brief few seconds of conversation, teleporting assassins descend on you and you get a very quick crash course in the combat where you fend off 2 or 3, and then the empress is killed in front of you. The assassin's make off with the empress's daughter Emily, and with her dying breath the empress implores you to find and save her. Of course this is shot immediately in the foot as Lord Regent enters and blames you for her murder and are promptly arrested.

Corvo is held and tortured for six months before the Lord Regent reveals that he was in on the murder and you will be executed to be made an example of. After being thrown your cell, you receive a letter and key from Empire Loyalists who help him escape and request his help to save Emily and return the empire to the proper bloodline.

Ok Bethesda Games, really? You know what? No. You guys are suspended from me ever trying your games again. This is now the 3rd game of yours I've played where you start off as a silent protagonist who is captured and near executed before the game actually starts. I know it must be hard to write a story but you can't keep using the same goddamn opening for all of your fucking games and expect me to keep giving a shit. 

So as the savvy gamer can already tell, this is going to be a first person western RPG like all Bethesda games are. But I will say this one breaks the established convention I've come to expect out of this developer. At a glance, I could say that this game is the ungodly offspring of an orgy between Assassin's Creed, Fable 3, Mirrors Edge, and Bioshock over a skeletal structure of a Bethesda RPG.

Its visual design definitely borrows the most from Fable 3. Lots of bright colors in a tightly confined steampunk city with character models that are seem a bit too cartoony for the violence this game has. They are a bit more grim and dark than say Fable 3's character models that look like they have been ripped from a Sims title. The game starts with one of those "set your brightness for the proper play visuals" but I don't know why its there. Pretty much every stage is brightly lit with little issues of visuals. One last little visual side note about the game, watching bodies getting picked to the bone by swarms of rats never loses its charm with me. That was fucking awesome.

Dishonored's overall play style feels like a hybrid of the Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge parkour. The problem I have with this is the game is strictly first person, and I feel that inhibits that style of running game play. They spruce things up by giving you different magical abilities like blink teleports which allow you to zip to the tops of ledges or from building to building or to swoop in for a kill.

One of the abilities allows you to see through walls so you can track your target better

It may be why the NPC guards that wander around seem to be kind of dopey and seem to have a pretty generous margin for error. But what bothers me is if they spot you once, it takes FOREVER for them to stop looking for you so you can complete your mission. It can be somewhat aggravating  and even more so if you are trying to play the game via non-lethal methods. 

First person combat and I never get along. Even in games that I love that have it such as Left4Dead 2 the melee combat never feels as smooth as I would like it to. Admittedly, Dishonored probably has some of the cleanest first person combat I have played in a game but its still not great. Again, the margin for error seems kinda big here as guards really telegraph their attacks long enough for you to fumble your way to the block button and then allows you to mash the trigger all to hell. I did not have the game very long but I never felt I got to the point where I could fight without taking damage. Perhaps that is by design so you are forced to try to stealth around.

This is where Bioshock's meager influence pops up aside from the steampunk setting. Littered throughout the stage are cakes and candies and snacks that you can pick up to restore your health through out most of the stages. Generally all the looting you do pretty much pays out in cash for all the items you pick up along the way which you use to upgrade your health and items and such.  

The combat is pretty visceral though and to that end its actually pretty enjoyable. Scoring a well placed block or a sneaking up on some unsuspecting doofus results in you watching your blade wedge deeply into their neck or spine. But if there is more than two or three people on, you might as well just chalk the fight up as a loss.

I found myself not even worrying about the stealth after a while because once you unlock the slow time ability, there really didn't seem to be a need to use anything else. I would get caught, let them chase me a second, slow time, then cut the lot of them to fucking ribbons before I broke a sweat. If you are going to try to make this a stealth game, then you really shouldn't give me abilities that render sneaking pointless.

Some of the quick kills are very satisfying to watch.

Dishonored has been getting really solid reviews from all the major outlets, but it certainly isn't going to get one from me, I found this game to be really insubstantial. Maybe I am an overly rigid judge of games, or maybe I just can't be convinced that this boring style of western RPG that people seem to enjoy is actually fun. But I sat down with this game for a solid 8 or 10 hours, and much like other Bethesda games I've played like Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 I just found myself trudging along from mission to mission in a half lulled state of sleep. I was constantly getting distracted by Internet videos or instant messages or even just staring out my window and usually that is not a great sign of the game. 

I think if this game had given me a 3rd person option much like Skyrim did I might have been a bit more favorable to it. Bethesda has shown me that they can do it and make it work, because it got me to play Skyrim to the story's end. But instead I got a slow paced parkour RPG with some decent combat mechanics but not engaging enough to keep going.

Dishonored shot itself in the foot with me because after Dead Island I don't trust game trailers that don't show me game footage and all the trailers I saw of this were all fully CG with no game footage. I was right to stick to this belief, because if they aren't showing me game play footage then even the devs know their game is lacking. Had I seen actual gameplay prior to playing it, I wouldn't have wasted the 2 bucks to rent it. I'm sure Dishonored will find its crowd, its reviews will see to that. But this game does nothing for me and I don't intend to pick it up again. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (XB360): A Torn Review

As many of you know and have heard from previous reviews, I am not a fan of first person shooters. I never have been. I liked Wolfenstein 3D because it was it was the first FPS game I'd ever played. Then I got to play Doom and Doom 2 and those were excellent. But from there on I just kind of faded away from the genre.

Pretty much for then on that genre did zero for me. There were a handful of good shooters that managed to hold my attention like Bioshock, Resistance 3, or Left4Dead but ultimately the genre as a whole bores me to tears. They all feel the same to me so I typically don't waste my time and money on them. However, in an effort try to broaden my horizons I stepped way the fuck out of my comfort zone and Redboxed the unstoppable juggernaut of the FPS genre....

CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2: (XB360)

Now if there is anything that bores me about FPS games, its the same old stodgy military ones. You'll note the titles I mentioned above do not fall under that archetype. Because of this, I'm probably going to do a very bad job of explaining the story here but I'm gonna give it a crack.

From what I gather, the story jumps between alternate time lines between David Mason and his father Alex. David leads a special forces unit in pursuit of Raul Menendez, the leader of the populist movement Cordis Die. We learn in the Alex chapters that Menendez chapters that his current war stems from the death of his sister who was inadvertently killed by Alex's partner Frank Woods (who narrates the past chapters) because Menendez's group captured woods and tortured him.

The chapters as Alex depict war from 1986 and cover the rescue of woods, the murder of Menendez's sister and the subsequent chase. The David chapters are modern in 2025 and frankly all I know is that they are still chasing Menendez. Menendez uses cyber terrorism to cripple the Chinese stock exchange and it causes a ban on the the release of rare earth elements and Alex basically works covertly in this new era cold war between China and the US. All of this eventually leads to gaining control of the US unmanned military drones and robots to be turned against the US.

Woods narrates the 1980's chapters and is your support during those missions

Shitty explanation? Well that's about all I understood from it. The game after one cut-scene immediately dropped me off in the middle of a desert battle with gunfire flying and shit blowing up constantly. Clearly, this game was not intending to hold my hand while I tried to figure shit out. I also find it difficult to sympathize with any military protagonist because I can't stand that Jarhead mentality. I'm willing to support em when their fighting to keep me safe, but they tend to be the biggest douche in a bar.

Really, out of all of the characters shoved into my face in this nonstop rush of military rhetoric the only one that I found genuinely sympathetic was the villain, Menendez. Does some bad things to try to care for his sister, she gets killed in a conflict she has nothing to do with, and he seeks revenge for it. Simple, easy to understand.

Seems to be the only guy in this game with any legit justification of his actions.

The controls for the most part seem intuitive enough, but then again there are is really little strategy to a game like this. There are really only 2 buttons you need to know in order to really play this game: the Aim and the Trigger. Pretty much everything after that from what I found is useless. Maybe you can duck behind some cover, or if you are as impatient as am I am learn that the L3 button dashes. But what this game instilled in me is if you aren't running and shooting you aren't doing it right.

Speaking of being patronized the game has a pretty shitty level of respect for your intelligence as well. Lots of games will give you checkpoint markers or small instructions. But COD:BO2 really seems to go out of the way to remind me that I don't know what I'm doing. "Follow this asshole, blow this up, go this way, no not that way stupid, boom." The second I deviate from where it is it thinks I should be going that's pretty much the moment a cheap kill hits me.

There was one desert scene where I was supposed to follow two guys on horseback. My first 4 attempts I followed them outright and it resulted in me getting shot to shit and restarting the mission. My next two I tried to slow down and fight who were shooting at me, but if I did this for longer than 5 seconds the game screamed at me for not keeping up with them and failed the mission and made me restart. I tried to maneuver in other directions and it failed me for not following my team. The game was pissing me off.

I hated this mission so much

Not to mention if you aren't active military or you spend your evenings masturbating to NRA magazine, the weapon load outs are going to make you feel retarded too. I can identify the following guns maybe: An M16, an AK47, a Desert Eagle, and maybe an UZI. But the guns in this games could be barcodes for all I know. So when I am presented with like 30 weapons with names such as "SDFK1269869" or the ever sexy "Mpoumhasedhi14789632KSUN41" just put the fucking word AUTOMATIC on the top of the screen for the uneducated idiots like myself so I can just get to the fucking game already.

Despite all this, there were a handful of things that I did like about the game (which kind of surprised me). The first thing that grabbed my attention is how smooth and clean the graphics looked. Maybe its because the xbox has a better frame rate, or the makers of Call of Duty are really good at producing their product, but I literally marveled at how smooth and clean the graphics looked. It really did go a long way in slipping into the immersion of the game. I'm usually one that says graphics don't make a game but they certainly helped here.

And for a guy who doesn't like first person shooters or basically anything military related, I found myself getting more into this game than I figured I would. Pretty much from the moment I sat down with it I was able to crank out 4 or 6 hours of it without ever really noticing the time passing. Once I got the controls somewhat  down, I found myself flying through the missions and slipping in and out of iron sight aim like I've been playing FPS games my whole life.

The zombie mode was pretty fun as well. It has a survival mode which was simple enough but I tried the Tranzit mode and the only thing I can really complain about it is doesn't really explain what the fuck you are supposed to be doing. I came to find out that I was supposed to pick things up so I could build something to open a door, but it doesn't really explain how to use it or what my ultimate goal was. I definitely think that COD:BO2 probably has some of the worse conveyance I've played in a game, which is pretty impressive considering it tries to hold your hand but still doesn't manage to tell you anything.

I've played enough zombie games. When you headshot, they fucking drop.
They don't in this. I call bullshit.

However, this cheeky change of pace did bring up one major issue. Something I didn't want to do. The reason this game is as huge as it is, is because of its multiplayer. So I decided if I was going to be as objective as I can about this, I have to play all its aspects. So I used one of my one month cards to renew my gold account and I logged into the multiplayer. Decided to start off with something simple and jumped into a team death match. This is exactly what happened the first time I tried to play an online match:

-Finding game.... Game found. Entering Lobby.

-CannonMan: Hey everybody. How are we doing tonight?
-Shitdick12 year old: (Screaming) THIS GUY IS FUCKING LEVEL ONE. SOMEBODY KICK THIS NIGGER JIZZ BUCKET.
-CannonMan has left the game.

If I was a judge, Child abuse cases would have much lighter sentences
if the term "Xbox Live" showed up in the case. I hate children.

Xbox Live and its community can go fuck itself. It is hands down the worst community of people on the face of the planet (which is impressive considering how shitty the Gunbound community was). I don't give a shit how good some players are, and I don't even mind a little bit of smack talk when you play a game. But I will tell you something that I constantly told the parents who would shop for games when they come into buy their kid a game like this: There is absolutely nothing a developer can put into their video game that is more offensive then the entitled trolling little shit dick kids who play these games. 

Go and log into YouTube. You will find hundreds of videos of kids and teens saying saying some of the most disgusting vile shit I've ever heard in my life, and this is coming from a guy who says the word fuck a lot. They just ruin the game for me. The constant screaming, the constant swearing, the constant racism and sexism. Where the fuck are the parents of these people? It is completely intolerable.

So seriously, I've said this before and I'll say it again that two things need to happen. One, Xbox and PlayStation need to put on age filters one profiles so I have the option to not play with kids. Two, whenever you hear a kid screaming obscenities for no real reason. Do not engage them, Report their name, try to get everyone in the room to do so as well. Start banning these fucking accounts.

Alright, got that out of my system. So after removing my headset and changing the audio settings, I tried again, this time only playing a regular death match. I found immediate aggravation because in these games you don't have regenerating health. Oh the game says you do but its bullshit because if you get shot once, its too late. You are already dead. My first game went embarrassingly poorly. It was a lot of me running around looking for something to shoot and being put down almost immediately.

But I started to get the hang of it. While I feel having some medium of a life bar is better for games like this, being able to put someone down quickly did work a little to balance the game for me. I never could break out of the bottom three of each death match I played, but my kill count generally rose with every game I played. I do feel its kind of stupid to give all the best players the best gear. Yes its a reward for leveling up, but it just makes the new players that much more at a disadvantage.

I will say however, it was very nice to see that I was able to log into the game and play the multiplayer without the need of a "Season Pass" or an "Online Pass". I understand companies like EA don't like not getting a cut of the used sales, but I really think nickle and dimeing the player is going to just hurt the gaming industry more than help it. Make us pay for maps and DLC, the online should come with the game new or not.

I picked this game up with the full intention of going off about how right I was, and that this game is stupid and is right to be called Spunkgargleweewee. But god damn it, it really wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. It did confirm most of my suspicions for me. Military does nothing for me in story or game play, the online community pretty much deserves a massive genocidal purging, and that this game is strictly designed for its fan base.

But I do find myself unable to call it a bad game. I want to hate it, I really do. But the fact is I was able to sit down with it and was able blow a whole day off playing it. Of the multiplayer games I've played, I really did kinda get into this one. Would I buy this game? Fuck no. But if a group of friends were getting together to do like a Black Ops 2 lan party, I would probably show up to participate. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was its chance to try to sell me on the genre and this franchise of games. It failed to do so, but it did give me somewhat of an understanding of why its so popular.

Odin Sphere (PS2): The Last Great Game of a Generation

As I haven't had much to play of late, I find myself to be introspective. In this age of high tech hardware and top of the line graphics and cinematics in our video games, I have always been a massive advocate that high end life like graphics don't always make the game. Just take a look at some of the simplistically designed titles such as Limbo, Braid, or Disgaea. None of them have 3d out the ass and I've played those a lot more than I have some ridiculous cover based shooter. All a game really needs is solid core mechanics and is fun to play. Everything after that is bells and whistles. 

One game that truly emphasized this was one of final games to be released during the era of the Playstation 2. It came out with practically no hype that I heard behind it, and I picked it up completely on impulse knowing nothing about it. What I ended up purchasing was a game that I spent well over 120 hours to play through and was such a hidden gem I know am willing to throw my money at any product they intend to release in the future. I am speaking of course, of Vanillaware's loosely norse based mythological adventure......

ODIN SPHERE:(PS2/PS3)

The story of Odin Sphere is expertly crafted among 5 separate tales. When you start the game you take control of a young girl in her library attic. You pick up a tomb and sit down to read. In the world of Erion, Demon King Odin wages war against against the Fairy kingdom of Ringford to the south for control of a Crystallization Cauldron that has the ability to produce pyspher crystals. The war is waged in the wastelands of the former kingdom of Valentine, who's remaining survivors are cursed and trapped in the form of anthropomorphic rabbits called Pookas.

As the war wages, you take control of 5 characters and play along each of their adventures during this sorted timeline:
-Gwendolyn the Valkyrie, who is caught up in Odin's plan to distract one of the faeries agent's and is torn between the duty to her father and the love that develops to the agent.
-Cornelius, the prince of the neutral kingdom of Titania who is in love with the princess of the former kingdom of Valentie, and is cursed to become a pooka and sets off to reunite with his love and find out the truth behind his grandfathers death.
-Mercedes, the fairy princess of Ringford who is ill-prepared to lead and is caught up in an uprising of her cousin Melvin for the throne. She must quell the usurping before she can lead her people into war.
-Oswald, the Shadow Knight who was orphaned and adopted by Melvin, but is betrayed the Fairy kingdom when he falls for the valkyrie, Gwendolyn.
-Lastly there is Velvet, one of the two remaining uncursed survivors of Valentine and its former princess. She fights to stop Odin from using the cauldron because it is the reason Valentine was destroyed, and piece together ancient prophecies to try to stop a foretold Armageddon.

The game can best be described as a side-scrolling hack and slasher with RPG elements. Levels are broken up by story chapters where you get exposition about the character and the situation. Then you go into various levels of the game. The maps are all basically a series of combat challenges of varied difficulty. All of the maps are completely circular so you can't really get lost. If you continue going one direction it will eventually bring you back to where you started. The objective is to clear the map of enemies as quickly as possible.

When you defeat enemies, they drop phozons which you can absorb into your weapon. These allow you to use your various magic attacks but the more you collect they more they level your weapon as well. They are also used to grow seeds you can plant for recovery items. So there are many instances where you may want to release the phozons you collect, and while you don't get as many back when you release them, their experience does stack when you absorb them again.

As stated just one paragraph ago, you can plant seeds to grow various fruits and sheep (yes, you and grow sheep. No, I'm not kidding.) which you can harvest and use to recover your health. But one of the first mistakes I made was trying to hoard my healing items. What you want to do is start stuffing your face because as you eat, your health has an experience gauge too and every time it levels you gain a larger health meter. Some fruit will leave seeds so you can eat the fruit, plant the seed, release your phozons, and repeat. 

Lastly there is an alchemy system as well. By combining certain items with material bottles you get new items that can help in battle, recover health, remove status ailments, and so forth. You can also upgrade the bottle levels through simple multiplication to produce extra phozons to collect. So after some stages you may wanna spend a minute doing some item creation.

People who are very familar with 2D fighting will feel right at home with the combat. But what makes it fun is each character has a different style of weapon or a different type of a ability unique to their character. Gwen is a valkyrie and is able to use a long float that can turn into a downward dash. Cornelius is fast and nimble in his pooka form and has lots of quick moving and flipping combos to hack enemies with. Mercedes is a fairy and can fly while using her bow and so forth.

The graphics of Odin Sphere are probably one of the games best selling points. In an era of games of shades of brown and gun metal grey with lifelike sweat and grime glistening effects, it was a wonderful change of pace to have beautifully illustrated characters with bright vibrant colors that pop out and contrast well. The animations of the character sprites are well done and many of the monsters are original to set this great fantasy piece together.

The music is classical, and scores well with the game. There are a handful of notable tunes in the game but nothing so memorable you'd catch yourself humming it later though.

But what is incredibly noticeable about the sound is how well voice acted it was. All of the characters manage to speak in their own style accent that feels "medieval" enough to fit in with the the games setting. None of it really feels awkward or hokey, and they stay away from some of the anime stereotypes of giving a character an exceptionally high voice. Sure, there is an occasional exception to this but their characters are sympathetic and tragic and really bring emphasis to the story.

Its not without its flaws though. Because all the maps are circular, there really isn't any real exploration to be had in the game. You can pretty much play the entire game only moving in a single direction and can probably complete it. While each stage is a map of different areas to explore the only thing that changes from map to map is what type or the number of enemies appear.

Because of of the lack of exploration, the game concept can get a little samey. You are basically plodding along from one fight to the next. Since the controls are fairly tight, I think a little platforming in the game could have helped somewhat and led way to some complex boss battles. Its fun to play but by the end of the game you are more pushing to see the end of the story rather continued excitement  Its fun but can be a bit much to finish all at once.

And on the technical side, I played this on the PS2. There are a handful of boss fights, and I would say Odette in particular where there is just too much shit on the screen, and the frame rate starts to chug way down. I suppose it helps with precision to beat the boss but it is annoying. However, I am told on the PSN re-release they have since fixed that issue. So that's great.

What really made me fall in love with this game is that it took aspects of games that I love, none of which are original, and combined them together to make something I felt was really special. It was easy to get behind and fall in love with this universe, and its all capped off by a clever bit of ingenuity on how to properly unlock the final good ending in the game.

I really don't know what else I can say about it. I had never heard of Vanillaware before this one, but they have made me a huge fan of their work from one game alone. I am eagerly awaiting their upcoming PS3 release Dragon's Crown and and somewhat crestfallen that I never got to play their Wii title Muramasa: the Demon Blade. They also released a title on PSP called Grand Knights Story. Supposedly the last two were supposed to get PSN HD releases but that was last reported in 2010 and they have yet to see the light of day.

Odin Sphere is 20 bucks on the Playstation Network under its PS2 classics. It was a total impulse purchase but I'm completely thrilled with what I got. I easily cranked out 120+ hours to finish it and even now I have the urge to go back and play it further. As far as I am concerned it was the last great game on the PS2.