|
Posted on 10.16.07 by skintari @ 11:29 am
I finally got a copy of the BIGS, and let me tell ya, I like it! I played the demo several times and found the controls to be confusing and un-smooth (no, that’s not a word, but it fits here). Anyhoo, I got it this weekend and decided to pop it into the ol’ 360 yesterday. What I found was a very good, arcade-y game. As a baseball fan and having the playoffs upon us, I thought this could really get me hyped about watching a Rockies and potentially Cleveland World Series. I started with the Home Run Derby. Actually, there’s 2 of them. One is your traditional fare. First one to 10 homers wins basically. But the second one is a home run pinball game. It sets you in the middle of Times Square and lets you have at it with all the marquees and obstacles that comprise of downtown N.Y. That was fun. A lot of fun. It took a bit to get accustomed to the aiming, but once I got it down, I was hitting signs all over the place! My next objective was to check out this rookie challenge. You create your own rookie and assign him to the team your going to play as. The downfall is that there aren’t a lot of customization choices, but as you continue through the game, you can add sunglasses, a theme song, and several other options which gives your player a little added depth. I was happily surprised by this and it kept the interest in my player growing. The other thing is that as you go through games, situations, and scenarios, it adds points that you can apply to your rookie stats. You can bulk up and make him a power hitter, give him speed, or make him a better fielder. The options of how you do it is completely up to how you spread the points around. This made me decide early on how I wanted to develop my player. I made him a speed/power combo and am working on his contact. Another great thing about this game is that it IS an arcade game. It doesn’t have the set 180 + game schedule, but rather, it assigns games as you progress. My first couple of games were against the Royals and Tampa Bay. As I completed those, it unlocked Seattle and Detroit. Besides that, you don’t necessarily play traditional 9 inning games. In fact, it gives you a few different options when going to an opposing ballpark. Like in Seattle, I had to play a best of three, three inning games. The next objective was to be in the bottom of the ninth and hold the lead. In Tampa Bay, I had to get a hit with my rookie player in a five inning game and then had to beat the Rays in a five inning game. The last challenge at each stadium is the “steal” challenge. You beat the team in a five inning game and you get to steal a player and add him to your own roster. My Chicago White Sox now has the following order….Vernon Wells, my rookie character, David Ortiz, Paul Konerko, A-Rod, Joe Mauer, Alex Gordon, Tad Iguchi, and Dye. My pitching staff is just as sick! The cool thing about stealing players is that you only get 10 steals throughout your “season”. This gives a little strategy to who you want and how to rebuild your team. You also only have 3 starting pitchers and 3 relievers, so it provides a good balance while still loading up on playmakers and superstars. The gameplay is really fluid in my opinion. I am not a fan of the current MLB game that is out as I find it to be clunky. I prefer to have a timing pitching/batting sequence and the BIGS delivers on that. The one fault I find with the gameplay is the quirkiness of the runners. To select a runner, you tap the button that displays above them as they are running the bases. The problem is when a runner is about to reach 2nd, the button will change from the “B” to the “Y”. Once you do select them, you have to hold the LS in the direction of the base they are going to. The other issue that I have with that is it’ll look like they are standing on 3rd in the hud, yet are not on the base. I have been thrown out more than a few times when this has happened. The other problem I have with the actual play is that the computer is more apt to make a “great play catch” than you are. Many times have I hit the ball well only to have the A.I. rob me. This happened exactly five times in a row, so I know it’s not just randomness. Overall, this game was something that I thought I’d like in small spurts. Instead, I find that I’ve played it so much that I’m actually forming a blister on my thumb. With the different challenges and the achievements to strive for against each team, I want to keep playing so I can build up my rookie and my team for the post season. I haven’t enjoyed a baseball game as much as this since the old Triple Play series! Oh, and it helps that the game does look good too! And as I initially stated in my opening, once I went through the tutorial (which isn’t on the demo), the controls made a lot more sense. Hence, don’t always put stock into the good and bad of demos! So my rating for this is a 4.5 out of 5. If they can fix the baserunning errors by next season, then I wouldn’t hesitate to give this a 5! Filed under: Review and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: None |
|
Posted on 10.11.07 by skintari @ 8:50 am
While I, like most of the 360 universe, have been playing my fair share Halo 3, I did get a chance to take a test drive of Two Worlds. Let me just say that was a very bad idea! The game itself has a confusing premise, albeit comparable to Oblivion (and a host of other middle aged themed games). You set yourself up as a customized character that journeys through the countryside trying to find your sister who mysteriously vanished while you were checking an empty house for a nights rest. Then you fast forward several months and start your journey. “What about the sister?”, you ask. I know, cause that’s what I said too. Unfortunately, I never made it far enough in the game to actually find out what was going on. Let’s start with the customization. No matter what changes you made to the facial features, it never really looked like it did anything. Really, you could only see very vague changes and it wasn’t worth the hassle. Now the gameplay. It was bad. Very bad. The worst part about it was the dizzying camera effect along with the very poor frame rate. The landscape and scenes looked decent, but when it’s going at 20 fps, it can be vomit inducing. The inherent “chipping” of the background because of the framerate actually rendered this game unplayable to me. I have a very strong will (don’t get seasick, carsick, yadda yadda) but this game actually gave me a headache to try and play. Since the game is viewed via 3rd person, it really gave a poor visualization of the surroundings. It’s hard to imagine that a game can be approved and released when there is such huge flaws in it. Another gripe was the language selection. It was like a combination of middle aged jargon mixed with made up sentence structure. Something along the lines like, ‘I t’with you fell on. We must go now’. WTF?! Yeah, it was that bad! A few months of polish could have really helped, and maybe some testing on it would have pointed out the very evident character and background problems. But, all in all, I found this to be a huge disappointment and not worth taking away from my Halo time. Unless you’re some kind of masochist, stay very far away from this game. My vote is .5 out of 5. The .5 is because the verbatim was so absurd that I found it kinda humorous! Filed under: Review and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: 1 Comment |
|
Posted on 09.24.07 by skintari @ 9:13 am
Well, I tried to like you skate. I really did. But in the end, you just left me yearning for my days as a youth and thrashing the church steps in my old hometown. Let’s start with the good, shall we? Skate is a beautiful looking game. The tricks were realistic enough to bring back memories of pulling my own method airs oh so many years ago. The buildings and the scenery were beautiful to look at, and even better to skate! The trick system was actually quite good too, once you get the hang of it. Pulling nollies and flips became second nature when I was just zooming around town looking for a nice long rail to 50-50. Although, I wish they would have let me pull off a darkslide as that’s one of my favorite grinds. But it was still so much fun to have a skateboard game where I could actually envision myself as the skater. I was truly immersed in this game, and that rarely happens! Now the downfall….It was a little too realistic. The game shows you in a third person form, looking up from the ground. This is bad because a skater needs to be aware of his surroundings. Whether you’re trying to get a good angle for a grind or if you need to see if traffic is coming before you grind out into the street, you need to know what’s going on around you. This hindered a lot of tricks and force you to bail. A lot. I really would have liked to change the camera angle so it’s over the shoulder, or even be able to look freely left and right. If they wanted a game so realistic, they should have taken all the aspects that one has when they skate. Many times I would skate to the top section of some stairs and have no idea how they curved or if there was even a break in the steps so I can time my landings. I felt cheated by the “unknown” and it really detracted from my gameplay. Another thing that frustrated me where the difficulties of the missions. Quite a few of the accomplishments that you had to do seemed so outrageously difficult that I just gave up. Once again, a lot of this was attributed to the poor camera angle selection. If I was able to actually see where and what I had to do, I’m sure it would have been a lot easier to judge without taking away from the difficulty of the tricks. Instead, it just frustrated me to the point of shutting the game off and playing Zuma. Another issue I had was trying to pull manuals. This was a necessary trick you had to use for some of the missions, yet it was so difficult to pull off that it wasn’t worth the 15 minutes I spent trying to accomplish this. Another downfall of this realism is the fact that you cannot get off your skateboard! I found it infuriating that they could make a game so real to play, yet, you couldn’t walk up a hill or climb some stairs. Seriously, it would take 5 minutes to skate up a hill that you could have easily walked. There were so many neat features to this game (being able to upload tricks and pictures to the online server for the world to view was really cool). But it became undone by it’s own desires to be real, that it ultimately doomed this game. Too much went into the concept that it degraded the gameplay to such an extreme that it wasn’t fun. Maybe they’ll make a second one that’ll really give the gamer a chance to explore and thrash without worrying about getting hit by a car that came out of “nowhere”. So my vote for this game is 2/5. I’m glad I only wasted a rental on this and not the full $60. Filed under: General and Review and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: 1 Comment |
|
Posted on 09.11.07 by skintari @ 8:13 am
Pool Party. How do I describe thee??? Let me start off by saying that I didn’t have high hopes for this game. As with a majority of Wii games I have played lately, I’ve noticed that they really are the product of a “new” console. The controls and game play just seem a bit off to me. Pool Party is no different. It suffers from awkward camera angles, odd game physics, and too much controller function. What should have been a relatively straightforward “point and shoot” gets dulled down by the many functions of the button schemes. What I mean is, just because the Wii has ten controller buttons, you don’t have to assign a function to each one. At one point, I actually had to contort my hand to place the ball when it was in hand. It was overkill for me and made me want to quit playing right there. I did persevere and I can’t say I was really rewarded or let down. The game itself was fun enough playing it 2 player, but on the single player, it got to be too much. The A.I. was stupid for the first 4 or 5 balls that were sunk, then it became a professional trick shot artist on me. There’s no way someone can bank the ball back and forth off of 4 rails across and have the ball go in. No way. But of course, the physics of the game will let the computer do it. The other thing is that there was no “slop” rules. Which meant, in a game of 8 ball, you could just hit the stack of balls and whatever dropped, you got credit for. I’m not a purist of the sport, but c’mon, you gotta have some kind of rules to govern that! Otherwise there is no skill and therefore, no challenge. Another thing that was lacking in this game was the effects of English. The game would allow you to hit the q-ball in different spots, but that would just angle your shot. There was really no true backspin or topspin that you could put on there. In fact, it was hard enough to work the point of impact on the q-ball as it was. Anyway, a pool game without English is pretty much useless as there was no real way to give yourself a good leave or even to avoid scratching on close shots. The only thing that would really help you was if you used max power to hit the ball. The q-ball would stop on impact then, but you had to be extremely accurate (and with the camera angles, that was near impossible). Overall, this game really could have been a solid, fun game. There is a pretty hefty amount of games on there…Snooker, 8-ball, 9-ball, and several different variants of each. But they became after thoughts as the difficulty of making good shots and the unevenness of the A.I. really brought the game down. I would have given this game a lot more because the 2 player was fun, but just not enough to get me to enjoy it. So, 1.5 stars out of 5. Hopefully, someone will read this and make a pool game that we can really enjoy! Filed under: Review and Wii and skintari Comments: 1 Comment |
|
Posted on 08.07.07 by skintari @ 4:39 pm
Sorry for the lack of posting, but I have been consumed lately (pardon the pun). To make up, I’ll make this a double post! Yay! First game is Bust a Move for the Wii. We received this game on Saturday and had it beat by Sunday. It is that easy. And repetitive. And boring. If you’ve played the online or any of the previous console versions, you know exactly what you’re getting. Aim your little pointer at the like colored balls and press a button. That’s it. No more, no less. The controls are extremely twitchy. My girl sat down next to me and it actually caused the aim to dart all across the screen. That means you have to sit perfectly still and hold the wii-mote with both hands to even play this. That is not good. Secondly, was the constant music that played throughout the game. There are 5 different “8-bit” tracks (one song for each 50 puzzle level). These songs play continuously through the level. And then continues on in your mind a good half hour after you quit playing. It’s that bad. And I won’t even get into the lack of a decent multi-player section. My rating: 1.5/5. This game was fun for about 2 minutes. After that, it sucks the life out of you…. Speaking of (see what I did there!)….The Darkness. This game is good. Very good, in my opinion. Although the length of the game is rather short (it can be beaten in less than a week if you really try), it provides quite a punch from what’s on the market currently. I am going to refrain from any real “details” of this game because it was a joy to uncover powers on my own and I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let me start this review by stating that I had not previously read the comic before I played this, so it was a fresh storyline for me. However, I have started reading it and the storyline really stays true as far as I can tell. At least moreso than most of the other comics to games that are out. So the gameplay gives you control of the main character, Jackie, and his “demons”. This is surprisingly intuitive considering that you play as both, and at the same time no less! The controller scheme is mapped in a convenient way so you can use your dark powers while maintaining a fire fight with your enemies. This also leads to some very graphic and up close “kills”. I won’t spoil the different ways you can tear your victims apart, but let me just say that none of them ever get old! Now the look of the game is also very detailed. Seeing the faces of these people that you have to interact with gives you the feel that you’re back in an old timey mob setting. In fact, there were a few times that I would just admire my character in a mirror. It was surreal to me to see your reflection as clear as day in-game. The only real problem I had with this game (outside of being short) was the camera angles. Quite a few times the camera would get hung up corners or as you controlled the creeping death. This was frustrating at times, but not nearly enough to make me not want to play it! All in all, I give this a 4.5/5. I hear that the multiplayer is “broken”, but as a campaign, I thoroughly enjoyed this from the beginning till the end. I also recommend that you rent or gamefly this as it can be beaten in a relatively short time. Filed under: Review and Wii and Xbox 360 and skintari Comments: None |
| « newer posts | previous posts » |
