PS2 Spree

Feeling nostalgic i went through a few lists of kick ass PS2 RPG's and such. I ended up finding a few of the top ten titles and never having been too into the genre during its PS2 hay day I have never played any of them.

First up on the list is the Dot hack GU series. I've been playing through volume one and i have literally gone 18 straight hours playing it. A hack and slash thats not quite just a hack and slash style combat that's repetitive yet addicting. An interesting setting and story that keeps me playing and tons of side quests. The only problem the game has, a huge, glaring, obnoxious problem, are the characters. I'm not entirely sure how far into the game im at, but the characters have been just terrible since the first couple of seconds. Hasaeo, the main character is an arrogant idiot (yet seems to be the only one who realizes they're still just playing a freaking game) and the rest seem to be horribly innocent, cliche retards who seem to have forgotten that they are in fact in a video game. As annoying as they all are they all do seem to have the occasional bad ass moment though, so its not entirely bad and its no reason to stop playing.

Next on the nostalgia list is Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3. This game is so JRPG its almost hilarious. It's very fun, and the story is amazing and dark. It never gets old watching the Persona invocations (you know, a magical bullet to the head) The game as a whole does get old really quickly as the game play is very repetitive so i can only really take it in small doses, but those doses are fucking great. You play a Japanese high school student that has the ability to stay awake during the dark hour where all other humans drop into a coffin and sleep for an hour to protect them from crazy demon monsters and wake up without a clue it happens. This kid joins a group of other high school kids in his dorm that fight these demons using "personas" fractions of their mind that can form into bad ass looking creatures with cool abilities. The main character can actually summon and use every persona instead of just one which leads to some cool customization of party roles. You play half the game in school doing random social events and making friends to strengthen social contacts which in turn strengthens your personas. The other half of the game is played at night after school when you can take your team to the "tartarus" tower where all the demons come from. Working floor to floor killing demons and finding sick gear until you feel beat and return to sleep and then repeat it all over again. Slightly repetitive, but really fun and dark as hell.

I just picked up a copy of another interesting and well rated RPG in last days of the PS2. Rouge Galaxy, a fun game half single player and half online. haven't gotten a chance to play too much of it, but the combat is a lot like Persona 3 and therefore very fun.

Last but not least I have been playing through Fatal Frame 2 again. I just love it. The extremely fucked up story. The creepy as hell setting and atmosphere. The combat requiring you to get yourself as close as possible to some horrific looking ghosties. FF2 is just an amazing PS2 game and ranks as one of my favorite games of all time.

If I can get out of this PS2 kick I just might play through The Darkness 2 and Hitman Contracts.

The reminiscing of the mediocre nostalgia

With the start of the school quarter, moving and other various things in the way i haven't been able to post, but now with everything settled i have the time and even better, a treasure trove of nostalgic PS2 titles now at my disposal! Oddly enough out of the titles i had but with no working PS2 or the games i have access now to the one that kept jumping out at me to play and actually finish was Final Fantasy 12. The list of people who actually liked 12 that i know is hilariously small, which is unfortunate as i actually enjoyed it. When compared to 10 or 7 it's pretty terrible, but as with 13. if you look at it by itself and don't compare it to previous titles I find it to be a fairly fun game. Yes the majority of the game as far as a final fantasy title goes is very mediocre, just remember they made 11 and 14, then it'll look like a masterpiece. 12 at least had a semi interesting plot line, some pretty bad ass characters and a unique, slightly annoying and different but overall...neat...combat system. It makes it worth chugging through and actually beating. In the end there are probably better games to invest in at the time, but hell i want to beat it so off to play it some more i go.

This Vacation Sucks

I've dived into the massive game that is Dead Island. The game is pretty much a cross between Borderlands and Left4Dead, and it is AMAZING. I haven't gotten too far into the game yet, just a bunch of quests around the lifeguard tower in the beginning (WoW and other things have been distracting me) What iv played though is just pure zombie skull crushing bliss. The only real issues iv been having with it so far though is the characters. I think they ALL could be entered into the blandest stereotypical annoying characters list. Not to mention it would have been much cooler to be able to create your own character, but that might be asking for too much. Just would have been nice to not have to play an annoying horribly bland character. Other than that SO FAR I have no complaints, its just so much fun, and very well made, the UI is pretty easy to get around the zombies fun the combat kind of easy but slip up for a second you get screwed up, and it looks beautiful.

In other game news, 1.8.1 is "neat". So far there is nothing the XP you get from killing things apply to anything, the endermen are bugged, and i have YET to run into any of the random dungeons or mineshaft things. In the end, other than the ui and menu tweaks its not at all different from 1.7. Ill give it time though and just continue with building castles and giant pirate ships.

Now back to WoW.

Rant of the week

Because i have inevitably drifted back to playing WoW again, mainly due to my gf plays it. I have been pulled into the "starcraft two starter edition". Now iv never played the first one myself, but from what iv seen of it and from what iv heard i gathered starcraft 2 was essentially the same game just with enhanced graphics, which when i installed it for some reason detected my computer was not actually quite a good machine and set it at the lowest possible settings which pretty much looked like starcraft  one graphics. Anyways in the end i thought id give the game a try, as iv heard so much about how great it is, and how strategic it is, how many players out there are now professional starcraft players, etc. Being a huge RTS fan (they were in fact the first games i delved into with the PC when i was yet still a wee lad, age of empires and empire earth and all.) After the first few missions though i couldn't take it anymore. EVERYTHING i saw was just yet another ripoff from the war hammer 40k universe, which from my last post you might be able to tell i absolutely love. I have 40k books, 40k games, 40k wallpapers, 40k role playing games, and 40k figures (although unfortunately the actual tabletop isn't made for anyone who doesn't have several hundred dollars to spend.) I am a huge warhammer 40k fan and in turn could not bring myself to play anymore starcraft.....40k. Although the game play is quite different from Dawn Of War, and in a lot of ways better, and the game play itself is pretty fun nearly everything i was seeing was some sort of derivative of the 40k universe, which in turn completely shut me off from the game without a chance for logic or fun to step in and stop me. There you had it my rant of the week.


     In other news though and in a semi rant. WHERE IS MY ADVENTURE UPDATE NOTCH?!?!?

     Also been playing a little bit of "From Dust" and iv gotten about halfway through the story and so far seems a neat little game. Not much to it in the end, but it is fairly fun and when you beat the game you unlock a sandbox mode for you to drop lava on poor villages, send tsunami's to poor villages, set poor villages on fire, drop giant rocks on poor villages, well i think you get the point, its something to look forward to if you find the story mode boring.

     Now it's back to game development and continuing to learn the fine points of BYOND's game engine and language. Anyone willing to help out feel free to comment!

Count Aggro returns. With a vengance!

I waited months for a particular game to come out. Pre-ordered it. Then proceeded to play it for eleven hours straight. The game? Space Marine. A hack and slash game heart and soul fused with a 3rd person shooter with a penchant for needing fields of waist high walls to crouch behind, create a game much like Gears of War, but with the whole not needing to duck behind cover and fire around walls at alien things and being X-Box only part. No this game is far more entertaining. Relic took the brutality and the style from GoW, but turned it into a Warhammer 40k game any fan could love. By that i mean making you an eight foot tall bad ass in power armor with 80 caliber rocket propelled explosive ammo guns and chain swords and giving them an endless horde of orks to slaughter through with glee, leaving nothing but orky red residue and bolter casings in their wake. It starts off with you and only three other marines jumping out of a drop ship with a jet pack, dodging and weaving through an in atmo space fight and anti air fire to land in the middle of an ark camp, and the game doesn't ever let up, just MORE orks and  just when you start to get just a little bored of green skins, just when your looking for a little more challenge or just a slight kink in the story's over all straight forward plot line. The game throws in a chaos army with teleporting daemons and space marines with plasma cannons to up the ante. All i can say is it is EXACTLY what i expected it to be. A hack and slash game but with guns too in a over the shoulder camera angle. So if your looking for a bad ass game full of bad asses, bad assing it with non stop dark gory slashing ork curb stomping chaos eviscerating goodness then its well worth the 60 bucks, because that is exactly what you'll get, its certainly entertaining.

     In other news/games. Iv been getting back into the wonderful horrors of Minecraft. With the adventure update looming just over the horizon, and my friends pretty swell server has tempted me back to the 32 bit (i have an HD texture pack, I'm too good for 16 bit) addictive goodness. A website for the server is in the makings and full online connectivity is still in the works but you can join via hamachi. If you'd like to play just leave a comment and Il send you the server info. The server itself is still a little under development, but fairly fun as its like an RPG with a race and class system and encouraged role playing and community resources.

     I'm also delving into the wonderfully frustrating world of indie game development for something to do that's a little productive. Working on creating a simple game through the BYOND engine as its a fairly simple yet intricate and fun platform for small 16 bit games. If you haven't heard of it id check it out it has its fair share of horrifying games, but there are some fun ones such as Space Station 13.

     That's it for now, but I will be posting every other day if not daily from now on as i have a lot of material to cover, and plenty of frustrating gaming rants to go on forever about, so subscribe and enjoy my awesome talent of bullshitting and ranting, or maybe its ranting bullshit?

For Nordaugh!

Started up playing gladius again, which for years has been one of my favorite strategy RPG's as well as one of my favorite games in general. The story is pretty cool, the combat is a little slow but awesome, and the characters look bad ass. The lack of an auto save feature though really gets to me though. As long as the battles can be sometimes and having to back all the way out to the main town's menu before your able to save kind of keeps me from remembering to do so after each and every battle and since my particular copy of the game or my PS2 or maybe even both decide to freeze quite often on me in mid game. Setting me back sometimes three battles back, which seems minuscule but is ultimately extremely fucking irritating. Needless to say iv chucked the controller more than once because of it. Other than that and the sometimes horrid voice acting and the ridiculous in game loading for magic animations its an amazing game. Iv also recently gave in and bought fallout:new Vegas and well. It has me genuinely interested in it. I'm playing in hardcore mode and well shit, its pretty hardcore. In hardcore mode if one of your limbs is disabled by lets just say two sticks of TNT landing at your feet blowing your legs off, well the only  way to fix it is either a doctor, or a doctors bag and a decent medical skill. Which at the time of this writing well, isn't happening anytime soon, so me my quarter of a health bar not one but TWO blown off legs and a blown off arm are sadly limping around clearing out the rest of this fucking town's powder ganger problem. Hoping to get paid enough to afford a Dr to sew my legs back on, and do it right for that matter. Also iv ran out of water, which is starting to make my character a tad dizzy. They aren't fucking around when they say its hardcore mode that's for sure. Still pretty fun though, although a tad frustrating and rage inducing. Slitting a man's throat open with a straight razor, switching to a six shooter and literally blowing his buddy's head off certainly makes up for it.

Just cause or just cause?

As the title states its a fairly ambiguous game title, but it doesn't affect the game and its awesomeness in any way or form. I received a free copy of Just cause 2 and Mafia 2 via steam, from buying my new video card. Which my new pc is fully capable of running anything now so more gaming opportunities. Anyways, the game is like if grand theft auto had a love child with really cheesy over the top James bond movie. If your thinking that sounds completely over the top, insane, and wtf. Your correct! You can fall out of a plane 5 kilometers in the air and shoot your grappling hook into the ground and survive, you can hijack the "boss's" helicopter in any side mission throw him out and use it to blow everything in sight up. You can get across the entire island by parachute and grapple hooking trees to gain momentum. You can SURF a plane into a helicopter dive into the fray of combat below you grapple hook onto a tower and proceed to use the enemies own mini gun against them, once again blowing everything up in sight. It is completely ridiculous and its incredibly awesome. Its like every ADHD kids' wet dream. Its like it was directly influenced by Micheal bay's EXPLOSIONS (he owns the rights to fire, much like Danzig owns the rights to blood.) The best part is the main character just doesn't give two shits that hes blowing up an entire island, its just what he does. The game when it comes down to it is purely about blowing shit up. The main story line consists of blowing shit up, which to unlock story missions you have to complete side missions or "Faction missions" which consist of blowing shit up, and to unlock THOSE you have to just blow shit up. So really the only "story" the game has is "here's a gun and some bombs and a grappling hook which ignores all physics. Go blow shit up." I cant stop playing it though, its just that open, and FUN. Which when it comes down to it is really the only reason why you play games. Good story or alot of fun, which since this game has no story what so ever its purely fun.
     In another aspect of my gaming world our gaming group had just completed a play test of some of the Pathfinder's new "alternative classes" it went fairly well we were able to detect balance issues but it ended pretty in pretty hilarious circumstances. Over all it was entertaining as all hell.
    Also Sometime during this week likely Monday night I'm going to be doing a live stream of Fatal Frame, so if you like creepy ghost games and don't mind a game that has minor tweaks in it and have nothing else to do, come watch! =D