Red Dead Redemption - Xbox 360

You want to know the hallmark of a truly great game? You don't want it to end. That's how I felt about Red Dead Redemption. I knew the ending was coming, but I didn't want it to. I wanted more, I wanted it to continue. I wanted to keep playing.

In case you haven't already guessed, Red Dead Redemption was an amazing game. From start to finish I enjoyed every minute of it.

Much like movie westerns there haven't been a lot of good video game westerns in the past couple years. Sure, there's been several western themed games released but overall they've been somewhat mediocre. When I first heard about Red Dead Redemption I looked at the track record of western games and figured it would be one more in a line of average games. Boy did I turn out to be wrong.

Red Dead Redemption pulled me in from the very start. Rarely does a game come along that hooks me so quickly and with such ferocity. It wasn't "Oh, I should really play some Red Dead Redemption!" It was "Oh, I should really do something besides play Red Dead Redemption... I've been playing for five hours straight."

Everything about this game just struck me as great.

The story was incredibly well crafted, you felt attached to the characters, you wanted to know their stories. You wanted to learn more. All while the main storyline kept you gripped and sucked in. Everything felt like it should be there, none of the side characters had me bored or not wanting to finish their part of the story. It was one of those games that I actually wanted to achieve 100% in.

The music was phenomenal. Amazingly well done, some of the best music I've heard in a video game in a long, long time. I was amazed at how well it flowed in the game. Red Dead Redemption did something I'm not sure I've seen in a game before, some of its music actually had lyrics. It was very interesting, it was sparsely used but when it was it very much had a very movie like feel to it. It made things feel very epic. I was very impressed with the music in this game, and I don't get to say that often.

I thought the writing was done very well too. Like I said, the story kept me interested until the very end and not once did I find myself bored or thought something was tedious. Often while playing video games I watch a movie or TV, with Red Dead Redemption I tried this and couldn't. I got so sucked into the game and what everyone was saying I would just stop paying attention to everything else entirely.

At the end of the day this is pretty much Grand Theft Auto set 100 years in the past... but Red Dead Redemption pulled me in far more then probably any GTA game ever has. Everything in this game just clicked for me. I finished it and just thought "Wow!"

Sure, Red Dead Redemption had a few minor flaws here and there, but nothing major. There were so many great things about this game that a few minor things couldn't stop it from being absolutely amazing.

If you're a fan of Grand Theft Auto games, if you've just been been waiting for a great western game, or if you just want a phenomenal game, Red Dead Redemption is a game that you need to play.

Squid.

Mafia - PS2

Mafia. Ahhhh, memories.

I played Mafia on the PC when it was released back in 2002. At that time I absolutely loved it, I had a great time playing it... up until the race mission. As much as I tried I simply couldn't beat that damn mission. I must have tried thirty times to no avail. About the only advice people had was to beat it using a controller... which I didn't have. So I got stuck and finally gave up on the entire game.

When I first got my PS2 and was looking for games I noticed Mafia for $5. I immediately picked it up. I remembered how much fun I had with it on my PC and now with a controller I could finally beat that damn racetrack mission.

I was excited when I finally got around to playing it, but that excitement quickly turned to frustration several hours in.

The first thing I noticed is that this game is dark. Not since Doom3 have a played a game so hampered by it's lighting. Driving at night quickly get annoying when you slam into cars that you can barely see ten feet in front of you. Occasionally there would be a shootout and the only way I could see where the person was is by the muzzle flash. Nothing I did worked, with no in game brightness setting I had to rely on my TVs, and even then it was still too dark.

I remember the driving in Mafia being very different, you couldn't really go speeding through town, you were driving '30s era cars. So high speed anything was really out of the question. What I don't remember is the cars handling poorly. It had nothing to do with them being older cars, or them not being able to go fast. They just handled incredibly poorly. It wouldn't have been such a problem if so many of the missions hadn't involved driving.

Timed missions. I know I've talked about how much I hate timed missions before, but Mafia brought it too a whole new level. A lot of the missions are timed, drive here before this amount of time passes. Get this person to this place in this amount of time. These missions would suck on their own, but pair it with the fact that the cars handle so poorly and you have a recipe for disaster.

The AI. I'm not sure if I have the right to complain about the AI in a game that's seven years old. A lot has changed since then. The AI was utter crap though. There were a few times when I hit a person who was just standing in the middle of the road. Not walking across it, just standing in it. Usually at night when I couldn't see them until it was way too late. Cars will turn left from the far right lane, people will get out of cars and step right into oncoming traffic. I'm all for hitting people, but in this game there are ramifications for it... the only problem being is that these people seem to WANT to be hit.

Gunfights in the game were incredibly difficult as well. I turned the sensitivity all of the way down and still had problems targeting people. Up and down was okay, but side to side I would completely overshoot the target. Killing people in a game about the mafia should not be problematic.

The load times. Dear God the load times. The load times were excruciating. I actually timed some of them, and they ranged between 30 and 40 seconds. 30 seconds doesn't seem like a long time, but it is when you're chasing someone and cross a bridge and all the sudden you have to wait 30 seconds to get back to the action. I did one mission where to load the mission would take 30 seconds, you would drive down the road and hit another loading screen... another 30 seconds. Problem being I had to retry this mission six or seven times. So it was 30 seconds of loading, drive for 10 seconds, load for 30 seconds and then the mission timer would run out 3 minutes later and I would have to do it all over again. So even though the mission took three minutes I had a minute plus of loading time. Not fun.

Either I remember this game a lot differently, or the PS2 version is just horrible. I remember a very fun game, a game that I wanted to play. Instead I got a game that about halfway through was just frustrating. Too many missions I had to retry, too many time I was frustrated... too many times I just wasn't having fun. About halfway through the game I just wanted to put on God mode so I could make it through the other half.

I wanted Mafia to be the game that I remembered, unfortunately it just wasn't.

Squid.

DarkStar One: Broken Alliance - Xbox 360

So it's come to this. I always wondered what would happen if I came to a game that was just so bad, so frustrating that I couldn't finish it. So far in the twenty-three games that I've played it hasn't happened. Sure, I've come across a couple that were bad, but nothing that I just gave up on. Until now.

I was excited about DarkStar One: Broken Alliance, I really was. I remember I was mining in Mass Effect 2 and thought about an old Sega Genesis game called StarFlight. It was a space mining somewhat RPGish game that I used to love. It involved mining, space fights, traveling between galaxies, it was just a fun time. I really wanted a game like that for the Xbox360 or PS3. Oddly like three days later I read about a game called DarkStar One: Broken Alliance in OXM... and it sounded like exactly what I wanted. Space battles, upgrading your ship, it sounded like a great time... unfortunately, the game wasn't out yet. It stayed in the back of my mind though, so when it was released I knew I was going to Gamefly it.

A couple months passed and I got busy with other games, DarkStar One was on my Gamefly queue but generally other things got shipped before it. I kept it on there because I really wanted to play it.

Last week it finally shipped, so the day I got it is the day I started playing it. Let the disappointment begin.

Parts of DarkStar One were good... but those parts were quickly ruined by the other bad parts.

The space battles were fun. At least they were at the start... then I realized they're pretty much all the same. The battles all feel exactly the same, there seems to be no variations in them. You kill six space pirates who all look exactly the same and then go to the next system and kill another six space pirates who look exactly like the last ones. Occasionally there would be a cruiser, or a slightly more difficult space pirate but overall the battles felt incredibly cookie cutter. They also all take place and space, and despite the fact that there are planets, stars, and asteroids that all move around you, you feel almost stationary in your battles. You don't feel like your speeding through space fighting battles, you just feel like your on a stationary axis shooting at moving ships. So while the space battles were fun at first, after a while they just became tedious.

Let's talk about space travel. You start off with an engine that will allow you to travel three light years. So you can travel to different planets within a galaxy, but to travel to the next galaxy over you need an engine that will allow you to travel four light years. So you do missions until you can afford to buy that engine so you can travel to the next galaxy over... and to get you to the next galaxy after that you need an engine that will travel five light years, and you keep doing that over and over. That was annoying, it really was, but it gets worse. So Let's say you have to travel to a planet a couple galaxies over... you essentially have to travel to the farthest star your engine can reach and keep doing that until you reach the galaxy you want. So you jump to a planet that 1.9 light years away, then you wait for your engine to cool down so you can hyperjump to another planet 3 light years away, then you do the process all over again until you reach your destination. I read something wrong and thought I had to travel to a planet several galaxies over... it took me about a half hour to get there and back. Let me tell you how bad that sucks.

Remember how I told you about exploring galaxies? You do... but they're all practically the same. They each have a space station, they each have different spaceships flying around, some of have asteroids, some have pirates... but they're all pretty much the same. There's really no exploring though. All of the space stations look the same, you fly into them and it cuts you a static screen that just has a menu of what you can do. You want to buy ship parts? You go to dock yard in the menu which opens up another sub-menu. You never actually see or get to walk inside a space station. As far as I can tell the only time you can actually explore is when you're in your ship... and really there's no reason to. You're radar tells you everything that's in that planets orbit. So you don't explore, you just a open a menu and see if there's anything interesting, and as far as I could tell for the most part there wasn't. You could travel around a bit, but for the most part I felt no reason to. Everything just seemed the same.

DarkStar One wouldn't have been too horrible if this game had been eight to ten hours long. Sure it would have been kind of boring, but I'm sure between the story and a little exploring and some space fights it would have been an okay game. Problem being is that I spent at least fifteen hours if not more playing the game and wasn't even halfway through it. By that time not only was I incredibly bored I was getting very frustrated. I felt like I was making no headway in the game, honestly I felt like I was just going from planet to planet, occasionally shooting pirates, and very much grinding missions so I could get enough money to buy a new engine so I could get to the next galaxy in hopes that I could finally beat the game.

I realize that a game isn't fun when the only reason I'm playing it is because I want to beat it. Sure, you always want to beat the game you're playing but you also want to have fun doing it, you want it to be a good experience. With DarkStar One, all I wanted to do is beat it. I wasn't having a good time, in fact I was having a bad time. I just wanted to beat it. Video games shouldn't be like that. Video games should be enjoyable. You wouldn't watch a TV show that you absolutely hated, why should I play a video game that I don't think is fun?

I have pushed through some bad games, games that were bad but at least had some good qualities. DarkStar One had very, very few good qualities, and certainly not enough for me to keep playing. If there had been at least a few redeeming qualities I probably would have pushed through and beat the game, but at the end of the day there weren't enough to keep me playing.

I know, I'm reviewing a game I haven't beat. For all I know at the halfway point the game became much different and much better... but the first half wasn't good enough for me to make it to that point. Something tells me though if the first half was this bad, the second half wasn't magically going to get much better. You can take this review with a grain of salt. I didn't actually finish this game. Remember though, the reason I didn't finish it is because the first half was so bad that I didn't want to waste my time with the second half.

In the entire time I've had my Xbox360 there's only been two other games that I couldn't finish, out of probably forty plus games that I've beat. It's a bad sign for DarkStar One that it's now the third game on that list.

Squid.

Coming up next...

I'm going to try something a little different.

There's no real set way I choose what video game to play next. Generally I try to kind of mix up what consoles I play and try not to play two games from the same console in a row.

In the past couple weeks I've bought a ton of new games for PS2 as well as Xbox360. On top of that I have two games out from Gamefly. So for the next little bit I'm going to try and power through some games and hopefully make a dent in some of the backlog.

I had originally planned on playing Chrono Cross next but I think that's going to have to go on the back burner for a while, at least until I get through some of these other games.

Once I get some of these finished I'll go back to business as usual.

Squid.

Chrono Trigger - Review

Chrono Trigger is a hard game to review. Everything that could be said about the game has already been said, and probably a lot more eloquently then I could ever put it.

Chrono Trigger is one of those games I remember from back in the day, it's one of the true great RPGs I remember from my childhood. Chrono Trigger, Crystalis, Final Fantasy 3, and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past are really the games I credit for getting me into the genre as a whole.

It's a funny thing though... out of those four games I've only beat half of them. I never managed to finish Crystalis or Chrono Trigger for some reason.

It seemed odd to me that here's a game that I rank as one of the better RPGs ever made and yet I hadn't even managed to finish it. I thought it was about time to remedy this.

Chrono Trigger is still a great game. As I've said in the past, RPGs from the NES/SNES/Genesis days still hold up fairly well in my eyes. I realize part of this is nostalgia, but part of it is there are just some very good games on those systems.

Chrono Trigger is one of the best. If you ask people the top five games of all time on the SNES I guarantee that Chrono Trigger is going to be near or at the top of almost everyone's list.

The soundtrack is great, there are really two soundtracks to video games that I would actually buy: Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger's soundtrack fits the game perfectly, it's not just background noise it actually feels right for the game.

The story. The story for the most part is great. I will admit there's a couple places throughout the game where the story feels a tad disjointed, but overall it's a great, original story. It's something that you didn't really run into at that period of time in gaming. There were a lot of RPGs with a lot of hackney stories filled with cliches... Chrono Trigger didn't feel like that.

There were tons of different, unique characters across many different lands that all felt like they had a lot of time and thought put into them. All the character felt needed, you may not have used them in your main party, but they all felt like they were needed characters.

Chrono Trigger was also one of the first games I remember that had several endings. There might have been games out there with one or two different endings, but Chrono Trigger had I believe thirteen. Thirteen different possible endings depending on certain things you did throughout the game.

Overall the game is amazing. Like I said, there's nothing I can say about this game that hasn't been said before. It's simply just a great game. Pick it up for SNES, DS, or PSN but I highly suggest you play it.

Squid.