Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat - Xbox

Figured it was about time I broke out my Xbox. I'm really hoping that it works, a while back I tried to play Knights of the Old Republic on it and had some problems with crashing. So start sending me your good mojo in hopes that it continues working. Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat is one of the first games I got for Xbox. I'm pretty sure I found it in the discount bin and figured it looked pretty fun, and I remember it being rather enjoyable. I've always enjoyed Pirate games, I think it stems from playing Sid Meier's Pirates! as a kid. I think there was a point in time where we had rented that so much from Blockbuster that it would have just been cheaper to go out and buy it. For now I'm off to swashbuckle and pillage on the high seas. Yarr!

Squid.

Paladin's Quest - Review

I have a soft spot in my heart for SNES games, especially SNES RPGs. The Super Nintendo was really when I got into role playing games, it started with Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I think I was old enough that the games and their stories really clicked. Sure, I played RPGs on the NES but I don't think I truly understood and enjoyed them until I was a bit older. So anytime I pick up an SNES RPG I get a tad bit nostalgic.

Paladin's Quest doesn't offer you anything new and exciting that you won't find in other RPG of that era, but it does do old RPG standards well and does offer up a few little things here and there that certainly keep things interesting.

The first thing you'll notice is that despite the fact that you'll be using magic you have no MP meter. Whenever you use a magic spell it drains directly from your health meter. At first I wasn't a big fan of this, but the further I got into the game the more I understood and came to like it. Some of the spells can use up to 200 HP, when you only have 1300 and the bad guys are also damaging you? You have to know when and when not to use your magic. It does certainly make some battles interesting, especially the end battle.

The way your spells gain power is also kind of interesting: the more you use the spell the more powerful it gets. This is a blessing and curse. Some of your spells will kick ass while other lesser used ones will be horribly underpowered. So it's best to kind of use magic throughout the game, unfortunately I wasn't really aware of this had some really crappy spells at the end. The way you learn spells is also kind of interesting, instead of learning individual spells you learn spirits. Learning a spirit will give you all of the spells related to that spirit. So say you learn the Lightning spirit you'll learn several lightning related spells.

Another interesting thing that Paladin's Quest does is the party system. You can have four members in your party like most RPGs, but you only have two party members who are consistent. The other members are various mercenaries that you will hire throughout the game. Each mercenary has their own set of unique weapons and spells at your disposal, and there's a lot of them speckled throughout the game for you to choose from.

Now on to the bad, though really it's only two minor complaints. There's a lot of level grinding, though there was level grinding in all RPGs of that era. It's been a while since I've played an SNES RPG so I can't really say if there's more or less in this game then there was in other games. The other thing was inventory. EVERYTHING is written in shorthand form. A paralyzing knife is a Para kn, a boomerang is a Bmg, and a photon cannon is a Pht cn. It will get very confusing and you probably wont know what a lot of things are, I highly suggest this website it will tell you what all of the weapons/armor/items are as well as a ton of other helpful information. It certainly helped me out while playing.

Overall Paladin's Quest is a fun game but nothing really mindblowing. It's certainly worth playing and will easily give you fourty to sixty hours of gameplay. You can pick it up fairly cheaply on eBay, and it would definitely be worth the fifteen or so bucks it will cost you, especially if you like SNES era RPGs.

Squid.

Paladin's Quest - SNES

I was trying to decide what to play next, figured I hadn't played my SNES in a while so maybe we'll give that a go. The game I chose is Paladin's Quest, an RPG that I've owned for a long time but I don't believe I've ever played. The reviews on it are somewhat mixed, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

Squid.

Folklore - Review

Folklore. Ugh. If you followed my updates on Twitter about Folklore it must have been an interesting roller coaster ride. Straight up to only go straight down farther and farther.

Every single list of must play Playstation 3 exclusive games includes Folklore. I don't know how many people I had tell me that I should play Folklore because it's an amazing game. And on the surface it does sound amazing, I had it described to me as a mix between Silent Hill, Pokemon and an RPG. Sounds like it could pretty damn awesome. So finally I put it on my Gamefly queue and eagerly awaited it.

My first three to four hours of Folklore were awesome. There's two main characters, Ellen and Keats. Ellen is lured to the Irish village of Doolin through a letter sent by her supposedly dead mother telling her to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. Keats is a writer for an occult magazine, he receives a telephone call from a mysterious woman who sounds like she's in trouble, she tells him to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. So both of our characters show up at the Cliff of Sidhe at the same time, only to find that the woman isn't Ellen's mom and that she's been murdered. So it's up to you solve the murder as well as three other murders that happened 17 years ago and the mystery surrounding them. You do this by entering the Netherworld, which is the realm of the dead.

It started it so well.

Once you're in the Netherworld you fight creatures, and take their souls (I don't remember what it was called in the game so we'll just go with souls). What this allows you to do is have this creature fight for you. You assign it to one of the buttons on the controller and hitting that button will call out this creature who will do it's attack move. There's tons of different creatures and all of them have different skills. You might need a fire creature to beat an ice creature, or you might need water creature to break a crystal that will get you to the screen. Each realm has different creatures, and each creature has a special attack which may help you against another creature or boss in one of the other realms.

I was still interested.

The game is broken up into chapters. There's seven chapters each for both Ellen and Keats. So after my first chapter with Ellen it asked me if I wanted to do Chapter 2 with Ellen or if I wanted to play Chapter 1 with Keats. I figured I'd play one chapter as Ellen and than one chapter as Keats and just keep switching back and forth. So I chose to do Chapter 1 as Keats.

That's kind of where it started to go downhill.

So it turns out that Chapter 1 as Keats is almost as exactly like Chapter 1 as Ellen. Sure, there's little difference. The creatures are the same except their skills are bit different. So if one creature was a water type with Ellen it might be an ice type with Keats. The story was a tad bit different, you might learn a something a bit different as Keats that you might not learn as Ellen, but not anything especially earth shattering. So I just kind of assumed that you were supposed to choose one or the other, Keats or Ellen. I assumed that it was meant to be a "Hey! You beat the game as Ellen, now try it as Keats so you get a bit different story." Which would have been interesting because down the line it adds a little bit of replay to the game.

Boy was I wrong.

So I continued the story as Ellen, but over time I started noticing more and more flaws in the game. Some were big and some were small, by about Chapter 5 my enthusiasm for the game had taken a drastic turn. There were just so many things that I didn't really care for.

1) The cut scenes
2) The save points
3) The respawning creatures
4) The map
5) The story

The cut scenes: For the most part there's very little voice acting, which is good... because when there was it was generally pretty bad. No, instead your treated to comic book like cut scenes (you can see what I mean here), which at first I thought were kind of interesting, but towards the end of the game I disliked them and thought that they felt out of place.

The save points: I dislike save points in games. I understand why we had them back in the day, but I don't understand why we still have them. The only real arguments I've heard for save points is that they're for nostalgia sakes and that they make the game more difficult. You know what else makes me nostalgic? 8-bit graphics, but games still don't have those. And as for adding difficulty I've never understood that, it just means if you die you have to replay something you've already played. That's not difficulty, that's annoying. By the same logic rubberband AI makes games more difficult, let's bring that back. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here... for the most part the save points in Folklore weren't too horrible, but there were times that I would go 30-45 minutes where I wasn't able to save. If I die I don't want to have to replay 45 minutes of game. Some of the save point placements in this game were just unforgivable.

The respawning creatures: Ugh. Okay, I understand that there were certain creatures that if you accidentally killed them without taking their soul you would be screwed because you need that particular creature for a boss fight. But EVERY creature respawns every time you leave that screen, including the mini-bosses. So you fight 15 creatures on one screen and then leave and come back? Those 15 creatures are back. For the most part you can just run past them instead of fighting, but it's still very annoying.

The map: The map in this game is fairly useless. Every time you enter a screen that part of the map is now shown. So you have to visit every screen to have a complete map. Okay, it was kind of annoying but that's not a deal breaker. Later on in the game I wasn't sure which door I needed to go through so I pulled up my map so I could see which door I was standing in front of... that's when I noticed it. There's no marker on your map telling you where you are in that room. It's not a huge problem but occasionally it was annoying. It's like if you were at a mall looking at a map and instead of arrow saying "You are here" the map just said "You're in a mall". Not too helpful.

The story: The farther I got into the story the more I realized that it wasn't very good. Every plot twist they had in the game I easily guessed. A lot of the characters weren't fleshed out very well either. Overall it just felt kind of lacking. It wasn't an awful story, but it also wasn't very good. Especially for a game that had RPG elements.

And then the thing that I hated the most. Remember how I was just playing as Ellen? Well at Chapter 6 the game informed me that I needed Keats to help me. Now I assumed I would just be able to control Keats for this chapter. Nope. Keats ALSO needed to be at Chapter 6 before I could continue. Apparently the developers thought that I needed to play both of these characters to understand the story. I got to Chapter 6 just playing Ellen and not once did I not udnerstand the story because I also wasn't playing Keats, the story just isn't that good and certainly isn't that intricate. So those five chapters I had just beat as Ellen, well now I had to replay those as Keats. This was like playing Super Mario Brothers and getting to the fifth level and the game making you play those last four levels again but as Luigi. The story lines between Ellen and Keats just weren't different enough that I thought you should have to play as both of them. And if you're going to make me play as Keats at least give me different levels, mix it up a bit, have Keats go to different realms... but no, instead I have to play the same levels again but with very slight differences. Awesome.

I went from really enjoying this game to disliking it very quickly, and the worst part is that if they had made some minor changes I would be singing a completely different tune. I'm not sure why everyone but me seemed to enjoy this game, but I didn't. When you add up all the minor annoyances and the couple major annoyances... what's good in this game just isn't enough to overtake them.

That being said there are a ton of people out there that really enjoyed this game. I didn't. Give it a shot you may be one of the people that like it, but I would highly suggest renting it instead if buying it.

Squid.

Folklore - PS3

My next game is going to be Folklore. You might notice that this isn't actually on the list of games that I own. That's because Folklore is from Gamefly. I had planned on playing another old school game, but I realized that I had Folklore out for over a month and I figure I should really play it so I can send it back. Plus I hear it's a pretty awesome game. I guess we'll find out. Follow my twitter for updates.

Squid.

Contra - Review

Last night I beat Myst and was looking for something quick and fun to play. Then it hit me: Contra. I love Contra. It and Iron Tank were the first NES games that I owned. I also find Contra fascinating because while it's a pretty big series with games spanning almost all consoles since the NES, most people seemed to have only played the original. Hell, I'm a huge gamer and I think I've only played one other game in the series. But the general consensus on Contra is that it kicks ass.

And despite one major flaw, it does kick ass. What is that major flaw you ask? Well last night I sat down and beat Contra in 26 minutes... and I wasn't even really trying all that hard. Can you imagine if any company now released a game that was 26 minutes long? People would be up in arms. But you know what? Despite being only 26 minutes long, it was an awesome 26 minutes... hell it still is an awesome 26 minutes.

Contra is a game that will be cemented in history for one thing though. The Konami code. Contra wasn't the first game to use it (Gradius was in 1986) but I'll be damned if everyone remembers it from this game.

So you know what, if you haven't played Contra do so. It's a part of gaming history, and hell even if you don't like it, you only wasted 26 minutes of your life.

Squid.

Myst - Review

I mentioned that I think the reason that I had never finished Myst is because I played it when I was too young. Having now beat Myst I can say that I was 100% correct in thinking that.

I'm split on how I should feel about Myst. On one hand I thought it was a fun game that made me think and was also very interesting. On the other hand I had a hard time with the pacing and I felt that the game was extremely counter intuitive.

Myst is different than any game you've probably ever played before. There are no bad guys, there are not time limits, there really are no rules, no one tells you where to go, no one tells you what to do, and there's a total of three characters in the entire game. You're pretty much just plopped down into a world and you decide what you do next. Which I greatly enjoyed, I like non-linear games. Though with Myst I really wish it had given me at least a little direction. For the first 30 minutes I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I basically wandered around the island wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing, which can get frustrating at times.

It took a while to finally figure out what I needed to do, but than I ran into a problem when I tried to do it. Myst is full of puzzles. Throughout the game you're going to be solving all sorts of puzzles. Which is okay, puzzles in games that should have puzzles are great. Except with Myst I felt like I was missing about 20% of the information I needed to solve most the puzzles. Don't get me wrong not every puzzle had me stumped, but there were quite a few that I had to give up on and go check a walkthrough to see how to finish them... and even once I knew that answer a lot of the time I still wasn't sure how they arrived at it. It's things like that which got on my nerves. Myst puzzles occasionally feel like a connect the dots only half the dots are missing and you're just not sure how to complete it.

Let me give an example: In one puzzle you're supposed to put exactly 59 volts of power into a rocket, you do this by clicking on ten different buttons. Each button will add X amount of volts to power the rocket. There's two screens, one that shows the amount of volts currently and one that shows the amount of volts going to the rocket, well if you go over 59 volts all of the sudden the screen telling you the amount of volts going to rocket goes blank. I had no idea how to fix it, finally I checked a walkthrough and apparently I tripped a circuit breaker and I had to go fix it. Not only did I not know that, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know that.

Despite the fact that occasionally I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do and was often somewhat confused by the puzzles I still enjoyed playing Myst. It does a good job immersing you in it's story and the visuals and sound/music are all very interesting (even though the visuals are dated). I had a good time playing it, and can understand why it's as popular as it is. It was interesting to play a video game that I don't think I could actually compare to any other video game I have ever played. If you haven't played it before I would suggest giving it a shot some time even if it's just with a walkthrough in hand.

Squid.