Let's Plays and No More Heroes 2 review

I've been meaning to update this for awhile but because of my own laziness I haven't (go me). There are a few things I want to talk about first being a project I'm going to begin this summer. By the time I post this blog entry, a thread will have been created for a Let's Play on CAA. This, though, will not be the only Let's Play I will be doing. I am planning on starting to make and post some Let's Plays on Youtube as well. My first game will likely be MagiNation...hopefully.

Besides preparing for Let's Plays, I've been playing a lot of games. I could ramble on for an entire post about the various games that have been taking up my time but I'll limit it to one for my own sanity. No More Heroes 2 is the sequel to one of my favorite games, No More Heroes. Of all the games that were to be released this year, this one was the one I was most looking forward too. Everything Suda 51 was revealing just made the game look like it was going to be awesome. So how was it? Good but not as nearly as good as I thought.

Overall the game was a better game then the first. The controls were just as fluid as the first, the addition of extra playable characters made the game feel fresh and unique, the graphics are amazing and the soundtrack is just as good. The problem, though, is that the game seems to have lost the character of the first. The first game was challenging and centered around the colorful bosses you had to kill to advance. While it was flawed, just the characters and challenge of beating each of them was enough to keep me coming back for more. Only a couple bosses in No More Heroes 2 are challenging and one is only challenging because of a single, annoying move. On top of this, none of them stand out the same way the No More Heroes bosses did. Now, No More Heroes 2 doesn't have the annoying, and repetitive requirement of entry fees for every rank fight, but I still would rather deal with that then fight Pizza Bat Jr. one more time. Overall, No More Heroes 2 is a better game, but in the end I liked No More Heroes better.

Tales of Monkey Island and #28:Actraiser

So, I just finished Tales of Monkey Island and noticed something kind of interesting and wanted to briefly talk about it. Basically, in the 4th and 5th episode, the game has some slight parallels with the gospel. The obvious one is the "Judas" role that Morgan LeFlay has. She betrays the hero and is paid with exactly 30,000 pieces of silver. However there are some other slight parallels as well. Guybrush Threepwood is a savior figure, who frees the world of the pox before dying to LeChuck. He then has to conquer death to set things right and is finally resurrected at the end of the whole ordeal. I would love to read more into this but I shouldn't since I think most of this is sort of incidental. The 30,000 pieces of silver is the only direct reference and I'm pretty sure the makers weren't thinking "Hey, lets take the story of Christ and retell it with voodoo and pirates. Yeah that will be awesome." So, I won't go about it, though I'm sure others will. As for the game (or games since it was episodic), it started out slow but by the third episode, it picked up and became a solid series. Not as good as the other Telltale Games I've played but definitely worth my money. And now, for more games I like:

28. Actraiser

Once upon a time, I heard about a game called Actraiser several times. When it appeared on the Virtual Console on the Wii I decided to buy it and try it out. What I came across was one of the more original and better games I've ever played.

The game puts you in the shoes of God (or the Master in this case) on his quest to reconquer his creation from the clutches of Satan (or...actually I forget what they called Satan in this game...). The game takes place in two modes. The first mode is a Castlevania-esque sidescroller that has you play as a statue the Master posses. The first time you enter this mode, its to free an area of land from the clutches of evil. After you've defeated the boss, a temple will be built and a priest and priestess will appear. From there you enter the next mode which plays sort of like civilization. You take the control of your Cherub, with whom you can guide how the village builds itself up, defeat monsters who are trying to terrorize the area, and cast some spells that cause natural disasters and stuff. Your villagers will occasionally seal up evil layers if you guide them to them. Eventually, you'll descend again and posses a statue again to free the land from evil once more. Once you finish with that area you move onto the next one until you finally reach your confrontation with Satan himself.

The game plays pretty well and both modes within the game feel as if they belong there. I'm actually surprised more games haven't tried to do something similar to this game since it really stands out because of it. The music is also amazing and gives you a feel for the sheer epic nature of this game. The game, though, does have its flaws. It was made early in the SNES lifespan, so its not particularly impressive graphics wise. Its controls also leave something to be desired though mostly its because of the lack of a double jump function. The game is rather forgiving in the sense that you have infinite continues...

All in all this is a good game that no one should pass up if they have a Wii.

#29: Timesplitters 2

It's been awhile, but I figure now, in the midst of homework and NaNoWrimo, I should go ahead and post something. Since I obviously haven't completed Eternal Darkness yet, I might as well continue onto the next game on my list of favorites.

29: Timesplitters 2

This was my introduction to the incredibly difficult series of FPS known as the Timesplitters series. I bought this game because it was advertised as an heir apparent to Goldeneye and, knowing that Goldeneye had a reputation as the first, good console FPS, I figured I would pick it up and give it a chance. Needless to say, it managed to impress me quite a bit.

There really isn't much of a story to Timesplitters 2. Basically a race of aliens known as the Timesplitters have captured a bunch of these crystals that allow them to go back in time. Our heroes, Corpral Hart and Sergant Cortez, have been sent to stop them. When they arrive on the ship, the Timesplitters quickly take the crystals and jump into a time portal that looks like something out of Stargate. You take the helm of Sergant Cortez, as he travels back in time to retrieve the Timecrystals and have his sex changed...many...many...times. If you're wondering about that let me explain. Each stage has you playing as a character from that time period who Cortez has sort of...taken the identity of. So, for instance, in the first stage of the game, you end up taking the identity of a female, Soviet character and, in the first cut scene, watch as Cortez literally becomes this person. The time periods themselves have their own unique story established with the opening cutscene, however there is barely any attempt to connect them, making the story of this game a major weakness. The game does have a co-op mode for the story, which was nice to see since only a few FPS seemed to be doing that back when it was released.

What Timesplitters 2 lacks in story, it makes up for in the wide variety of multiplayer and single player modes that you can tackle. Single player wise, you have the Challenges and then a single player version of Arcade Mode with various objectives ranging from find these bananas in x amount of time to win this type of game against this type of enemy. All of these single player challenges can be rather difficult and that brings me to something about TS2 that must be mentioned. This game is hard. Not just mahogany desk hard, no I'm talking about diamond plated steel hard. I have never beaten the story mode on any difficulty beyond Normal (there's Hard and Very Hard after that) and many of the single player challenges I haven't even come close to beating. If you manage to unlock everything in this game, you are truly a god of console FPSs.

TS2 contains a ton of multiplayer modes as well. You have your deathmatches and Team Deathmatches but you also have a mode called Assault. This was a game mode where one team would be given a set number of objectives to complete while the other team tries to stop them. In TS2, these objectives are always the same no matter what map you choose, but they are still a lot of fun to accomplish.Another interesting modes are Flame Tag, where you have one person on fire and they try and run into another person, causing them to catch on fire and be it instead of them. Not only did this game have a ton of multilayer modes, but it also fields map maker built into the game, allowing gamers to make their own multiplayer and story maps.

There are some other things which need to be noted in passing before I can move onto the flaws of this game. First, the game allows you to choose from a huge cast of colorful characters that, if you leave this on, have different strengths and weaknesses. The differences in play between the characters makes Multiplayer a little more interesting and actually makes you choose strategically which character you are going to use. Second, the game also boasts fully customizable controls that allow you to fine tune which buttons do which on your controller. Finally, if you don't have any friends around but want to play through the multiplayer modes, the game allows you to use bots to fill up all the other, open roster spots. The bots AI ranges from horrendous to spectacular, so it can provide some challenge in any of the modes.

Despite its strengths, TS2 does have a number of weaknesses. First of all, there is no jump button. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for Halo's successful incorporation of such an ability into their controls. Speaking of controls, aiming in this game is just downright difficult. Unlike in Halo or other FPS where you move the cursor and it will stay where you've left it, TS2 has it set up so that the cursor will snap back to the center of the screen whenever you let up on the control stick that handles aiming and turning. This is incredibly frustrating and makes Sniping a much more difficult task then it actually should be. The multiplayer lacks any online play, though the PS2 and XBox versions of the game support system link, allowing for 16 player matches.

TS2 is still a fun FPS and was a great introduction to the Timesplitters franchise for me. While its story was lacking, I found myself enjoying the multiplayer with my friends or by myself with a bunch of bots. TS2 did its job, and made me a fan of the Timesplitters franchise.

An Update and some brief reviews

If you haven't figured it out based off of my inactivity, I've given up on Stalin vs. Martians for now. I will return to it in the future however I need a very long break from it. So, I've been working through my last run of Eternal Darkness. Hopefully I will complete that this week and will be able to post a review of it before Halloween. For now, though, I've decided to do some brief reviews on what I consider to be my favorite games of all time. I wrote a list like this a while back, but it's changed slightly sine I compiled it and I want to expand it from 11 to 30 (I kept adding games to the list as I went through my Backloggery...). I should note that in some cases on this list, I have placed a series, not a game, in one of the slots. In all of those cases, this is because I've loved every game within those series and have decided to just lump them together so I can fit more games on the list. Anyway, here is number 30 on that list-

30. Heroes V (including Tribes of the East)

Let me cut right to the chase and say that the Heroes of Might and Magic series has a special place in my heart since I grew up playing it. So, when I saw that Ubisoft had picked up the license for that series after 3DO folded, I knew I would be buying Heroes V at some point in the future.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this strategy game series let me quickly break it down for you. The game is completely turn based and revolves around you controlling a Hero and a Castle. The Castle allows you to spawn monsters for the Hero to take along with him as his army. The Hero can also get spells, artifacts, and siege machines from either the Castle or the map. The battles play out sort of like chess, with you moving around stacks of Monsters ranging from 1 to well over 9000 (meme reference intended...). Heroes V carries on this lineage except unlike the previous games is in 3D. Tribes of the East and Hammer of Fate (the two expansion packs) add to this further by giving you alternate upgrades of your various monsters to summon, something that's never been done before. It should also be noted that you don't need to own a copy of Heroes V to run Tribes of the East (which is awesome). The only games I have from this set are Heroes V and Tribes of the East and this is likely how I'm going to keep it.

The game carries on the lineage of Heroes quite well. The atmosphere, strategic elements, and overall design have been kept in tact and because of that, I have to say that I love this game. It's fun to see all the different units I knew from my youth blown up into full 3D models and changed to give this game and even better art direction. The game still has the Hot Seat mode which allows you to play a multilayer game at one computer which is probably the best reason to buy this game. However, there are flaws that hamper the Heroes V games. The campaign mode is ridiculously hard and unlike previous games, there are no cheats to help you. So, not surprisingly, I got stuck on a mission and haven't touched the campaign since. The move to 3D has made it a little harder to click on things that you want to go to or pick up however this doesn't effect the game play much since you can correct it with no problem. Most of the monster abilities are never explained forcing you to experiment until you figure out what each one does. The graphics and art style look like a rip off of Warcraft III and finally, those extra advanced forms of every monster in the game don't seem to add as nearly as much strategy as it should.

All in all, though, I still like this game a lot. It's not my favorite game in the Heroes series by a long shot, however I'm glad that Ubisoft made it and look forward to whenever the create Heroes VI.

Stalin vs. Martians part 6: From the highest peak enjoyment to the lowest valley of despair

Sorry this took so long. I attempted to actually beat the game this weekend so I could churn out a bunch of these back to back to back. That plan was dashed in the mission right after mission 6, but I'll get to that later.

Mission 6 is, again, very straight forward. Your basic goal for this map is to wipe out every Martian you see, something which is rather easy seeing as how Soviet tanks trump all Martian units. This is made even easier, though, thanks to Stalin finally pulling some strings and giving you access to every unit in the game. The two new tanks you get (the T-34 and T-35) are more expensive but have most of the benefits of the cheaper models along with more fire power. The T-35's are probably the most useless of the tanks you get. It's huge and therefore moves slower, however it packs a rather large punch so I still ended up using it in my force. The T-34 is faster, smaller and cheaper so, I guess this is the best unit in the game.

The Martians also get a new unit, a purple frog which hops towards your troops and burps up something. Again, they aren't anything which focused fire can't handle so they are barely what I would call a threat.

The mission starts out with you making a dash towards the northwestern corner of the map to gather your scattered troops. There is some light resistance along the way, but it's nothing a little Soviet steel can't handle. After you gain reinforcements, you're given a command to cross a bridge near where you started. Before I did this, I decided to explore the rest of the starting area and was rewarded by running into one of the slime creating trees. By destroying this and its Martian guards, I made a later objective much easier.

When you cross the bridge, you run into the first of the giant purple frogs. After plowing through them, you are told to destroy several Martian slime trees including a cluster in the middle that is heavily guarded. Because of my exploration, I had managed to destroy one of these earlier. So, I decided to start with the single trees and then attack the central location with a massive force. After I crushed any Martians around each tree with the usual strategy of move-shoot, focus fire on the larger Martians and structures and then celebrate my victory, I bought more tanks to enlarge my force further for the final push. I came up to the central cluster through the back way and absolutely crushed the Martian resistance their. It was epic in a "I just completely owned you" sort of way.

The mission ended and I suddenly had a realization that I was actually enjoying myself. Despite all the flaws which make this a horrible game, I was actually almost at the point of saying "For it's novelty, its worth the price." Then I tried the next mission...and that went down the gutter.

The briefing basically tells you that the Martians have caught on to your tactic of spamming tanks until they die, and have called in some bugs that serve as their artillery. Stalin then tells you that you should stick to infantry for this next mission. I took this as a suggestion so, when I read it, I thought "screw that, I'm using tanks!" No, this was a command. Right after experiencing access to every unit in the game, this mission makes it so you can only build and use Spetznas for the first half. Spetznas are a little more competent then regular infantry, but they suffer from being unable to shoot and move at the same time. So, whenever you encounter smaller Martians which are littered all over this stage, you have to tell your Spetznas to hold position or just not move them. They'll take care of the enemies that rush them, and then get destroy by a single artillery strike. By the way, the first objective in this mission is to destroy the three Martian artillery embankments scattered across the map.

You see, the artillery in this mission, is incredibly effective against infantry who stay still. You see, like all units in Stalin vs. Martians, they have trouble targeting things that keep moving. So, even though these bugs could probably one shot tanks, they probably wouldn't be able to target them since I'd be moving them around so much that they'd never get to target them. That's not all, in this mission, for whatever reason, you don't get a ton of money. So, if you get hit and loose most of the units you start out with. That's it, restart cause you aren't winning this. Further frustration is added by the fact that the only way to get out of the starting area is over a bridge. So if you move all of your units over the bridge and they get rushed by the annoying confetti aliens, they will get killed in one hit. But that's not all. There is one artillery battery near the starting point of the mission, so occasionally your units will be destroyed by them while they are in the starting point. However, once you get rid of these artillery units, you can still get hit by artillery strikes from another embankment much further away. So, these artillery bugs, have ridiculous range and there is no sage spot for your troops. But this isn't the worse part of it. The placement of the units and the objectives on this map are horrible. If you go the wrong way, you can aggravate Martians that your Spetznas stand no chance against. Also, at the very center of the map, is one of those Toy Story looking aliens who, for some reason, the Spetznas can't kill. I've killed these guys with Infantry before, but I guess Spetznas don't have grenades or something.

So far, I'm on my 12th attempt of this mission and the furthest I've gotten is to destroy two of the artillery embankments. Honestly, this might be the mission that makes me stop playing Stalin vs. Martians. It's just that bad. I may give it one more go here in a few days since I do have some other more in depth strategies I want to try out. But if those don't work, then I will likely put this on hold for a while until I can work up the will to play it some more. If that occurs, then I'll be writing on other things (like Eternal Darkness...).

Stalin vs. Martians Part 5: Black Gold

Let me start by saying I somehow managed to beat the objectives in Mission 5 out of order, which is actually kind of cool and also a little disappointing. But more on that later.

Mission 5 has Stalin sending you to destroy several UFOs which happen to be sucking up all the oil in Russia. Also, yes, after the previous mission you've been promoted to something along the lines of "High Orthodox Wizard Commander" or something like that. Anyway, similar to every mission up to this point, Tanks are your best friends and Stalin has come through by providing you with the next level of Soviet Tank, the T-34. Its exactly the same as the tanks before it except its much larger and they don't call themselves Bolsheviks on Bicycles (instead they quote some song I don't recognize...). Speaking of music, the battle music in this stage is some insane screaming metal. It actually fits really well and I have to admit, I was head banging a little while mowing over the Martians.

Speaking of the Martians, they've added to their forces as well. One new unit are these little green men that are slightly larger then the smaller Martians you've run into so far. So yes, I managed to target some of them. But, the strategy of running around with your tanks and letting their machine guns cut them down works even better. The next new unit are these large hopping mushrooms which explode when they get near your units. However, they don't seem to do much damage to tanks (in fact they might do no damage) so I sort of ignored them when they showed up in large masses.

When I went to kill the third UFO and last UFO that was sucking up Oil was when I accidentally beat the last objective of this mission. You see, the last objective is to destroy the main UFO, which looks like all the other UFOs except its green, buried in the ground, and guarded by tons of Martians. This just so happened to be between me and the third UFO I had to destroy to complete the first objective. So I of course mistook it for that other UFO and destroyed it before completing the first objective. When the game failed to tell me that I had accomplished that objective, I began to look around to see what was wrong. Finally, after running all over the map, I found the last UFO sucking up oil, destroyed it and won the mission.

That was sort of cool I have to admit. Honestly, it was kind of awesome beating an objective before it was given. It was sort of like when you break a game so it becomes a lot easier except in this case it just ended the level faster. On the other hand, it was disappointing because any good level designers would have isolated that last battle somehow so you couldn't accidentally stumble upon it before the right time. And, therefore, the ending of the mission was less then epic.

Part 6 will be up later this week. And I think I am getting close to the end of the game. Though we'll just have to wait and see.

Stalin vs. Martians part 4: It's a Giant Worm!!!

Yep, the title says it all. Mission 4 calls you to activate these pagan altars with sacrifices to activate some sort of Red Magic (I see what you did there) to kill a Giant Worm. I'm not making this stuff up folks. So, as you would guess, we are introduced to a new enemy unit: The Giant Worm. It is indeed giant, and it looks like a worm (or catepillar with some sort of green...glowy thing coming out of its backside...) and if you tell your normal units to shoot at it, they say they have nothing to smash it with. But don't worry, it doesn't attack, it just sort of wanders around all worm like. In fact, I'm not really sure why we are killing this thing, it's definitely more docile then the other Martians and the Soviet Army. Heck, I'd be down with capturing that and offering it as a giant pet for Stalin.

Anyway, like the last mission, this one is pretty straight forward too. You start in a town which immediately comes under siege, after fighting all the Martians off, you move a little bit north to liberate the first altar. Here we run into the first of a number of problems. According to Stalin (and the objectives) you need to activate the altars. It's hinted in the mission briefing that you have to sacrifice the appropriate unit to do this. When you liberate an altar, a group of infantry appear with exclamation points above their heads (I guess they saw Solid Snake or something...) and these are supposed to be your sacrifice. Except, besides the exclamation point, nothing in the game indicates this. So the first time I played the mission, I actually assumed these were normal units given who you had freed and added them to my force to fight.

The second problem you run into is the town. Supposedly, you're supposed to keep it from being overrun and if you aren't careful, it can happen anytime throughout the mission. Or at least I think it can. You see, the second time I played through this mission, I got a random mission fail message, and the only reason I can think of is that the town had been taken.

On my third run through I actually activated all of the altars, and...summoned three large red bear looking things...yep. They're the only units which can damage the giant worm, they are also rather powerful and have obscenely long life bars. I doubt I'll ever get to summon these guys again but hey, it was nice to see them smack down that rather docile Giant Worm.

While I'm on the subject of new units, I might as well mention that the game has handed me Spetzna's. I didn't use them because, frankly, I doubt they are much better then normal infantry and my strategy of spamming tanks is still working pretty well.

At the end of the mission, the game tells you that you've reached intermission and has this music video performed by some of the Martians. I actually skipped this because it was so jumpy, I was worried the game was going to crash (which happened for the first time for me during this last mission). And it did screw me up, after I finished watching it, my mouse cursor disappeared. So I restarted the game and hoped that it auto saved after the last mission (it did, thankfully). Also, I think that cutscene was supposed to signal that you got a promotion or something, I'm not really sure.

I think this was probably my favorite mission yet mostly because of how ridiculous it is. I mean, whenever you have Stalin telling you that your country houses a pagan magic called Red Magic and that the Martians are trying to destroy all the altars with a Giant Worm so you can't use it against them, then you know you're in for a memorable mission.

I'm beginning to think that I've reached the half-way point to this epicly bad game. Which is good to be quite honest. Part 5 will go up after I beat mission 5.