Deus Ex: The Conspiracy - Playstation 2

Eleven years ago Deus Ex was huge. Every PC gaming magazine was talking about it. It swept game of the year awards. At one point in time it was named "Best PC Game of All Time." So here's the question... why did it bore the hell out of me?

When Deus Ex was released on PC I played it, and I remember greatly enjoying it. I only ever made it about halfway through the game and I always regretted that. It was an awesome game and I felt I should have taken the time to beat it. At one point in time I even bought it and its sequel on Steam with the hopes of playing it again, I just never got around to doing it. When I first bought my PS2 I went out searching for games I wanted to play, I doubled my library in probably less then two weeks. One day I was at FYE and saw Deus Ex: The Conspiracy for $4, at that price I decided to double dip and get it for PS2.

The first thing I noticed when I started playing Deus Ex was how badly it had aged. The graphics (and too lesser extent, controls) were horrible. Now I won't say I'm surprised about this, it is a nine year old PS2 game, but even still the graphics seemed incredibly bad. We weren't quite in Goldeneye territory yet, but we were close. I was having a difficult time determining if things were enemies from any sort of distance, everything felt kind of dark and washed out (I know that's what they were trying to achieve, but it just felt too muddled), instead of 2002 this game felt very late '90s in terms of graphics and overall feel. (Note: The PC version even without mods looks like it has much better graphics, this seems to be more of a problem with the PS2 version.)

I could have gotten over that if I just hadn't been so damned bored with the game. The story is very interesting, don't get me wrong, it does have a very good story.... but when you mix in the gameplay it starts to go downhill. I know that this isn't the most popular opinion but the game is too long for the story. If they could have streamlined this game just a little bit, a little less of what felt like walking and busy work, a little less going back to the places I had been, I think this game would have felt a lot better. It felt like the pacing was off. When my killswitch was turned on I didn't feel a sense of urgency, I mostly felt like they wanted me to wander from one place to another, I never felt like I really needed to rush to anything. In a game like this I should feel like there's some sense of urgency to get things done, but instead I felt like everything was moving just a tad too slow for the tone. Don't get me wrong, I love stealth games, but a lot of times I felt like I shouldn't be slowly stalking around plotting my next move... but it very much felt like that's what the game thought I should be doing.

The game just felt like it was dragging on. When I look at a walkthrough I should never get dismayed because I realize I'm only halfway through the game and it feels like it has already taken forever... but that was exactly my thought when I was playing Deus Ex.

Maybe it's me, maybe my tastes in games have changed, but Deus Ex just wasn't the game I remembered it being. Instead of enjoying what I remember being an excellent game I felt like I had to trudge through the entire thing. It felt like a chore for the most part. Like I said, it seems like the game should have been a little bit shorter. Instead of the 20 or so hours it takes, if it had been 15 and some of the (what I deem) excess had been removed I think this would have felt like a much better game.

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.

Shadow of the Colossus - Review

As I mentioned before one of the reasons I bought a Playstation 2 was to play this game. I couldn't step on to a gaming forum without people talking about how excellent this game is. Hell, even Yahtzee liked this game... and that says a lot. I knew almost nothing about it, and yet wanted to play it. When something has been built up this much you have to wonder though, can it meet those expectations?

In a simple answer: no.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Shadow of the Colossus, I really did. It was a very unique, interesting video game experience. SotC is a game like I've never played before. However, unique does not always equal good.

There's always the possibility that because I didn't play SotC when it was first released I just didn't get the "oomph" that the game properly deserves. I'm a generation late. I came to the party late on this one. I can admit that my gripes about the game can easily be put off because I'm playing this game a half decade after its release.

First off, I hate the horse. With a passion. If 80% of your game is going to be spent riding on one creature and be your only means of transportation besides walking I would hope that perhaps that creature would handle well. Nope. The horse may be one of the most frustrating experiences in recent memory. I don't know how many times my horse just stopped. Not be pressing something, not me doing it... just the horse deciding to stop for no apparent reason. Or run into something... I don't know how many times my controller was telling my horse to do one thing and it would do the complete opposite. If there was a tree with open space for a 100 yards on each side I guarantee my horse was running headfirst into that tree no matter what I did. There were times when the horse riding felt very normal, and there were times when the horse felt like verged on being broken. It's not a good sign when there were times I would get off the horse and just walk because I was tired of wrestling with it.

The way you find the colossi. Bear with me on this one. I know that using your sword to find the next colossi is a somewhat cool idea, but to me it seemed flawed. To me it seemed like if google maps only gave you directions as the crow flies not taking into account obstacles... also it only worked when it was light outside. Listen, I understand that it's what they were trying to do. It's not broken if it's what they were meaning to do, I said it was flawed. Essentially you're supposed explore to find the next colossi using that as a guide. Only problem is... there's no reason to explore. It doesn't matter if I take 30 minutes finding that colossi or 5, at the end of the day the outcome is the same. If I take 30 I'm not going to find some new cool armor, or some new weapon... I'm going to find the colossi. There's no carrot at the end of the stick for exploring... so why would I bother? And frankly there were times when the light was just flat out wrong. It would point me in a direction but what it didn't tell me is that there's a impassable mountain between me and that colossi, sure I can follow the light but if I do there's absolutely no way to reach the colossi. There were times when even though I had explored I still couldn't find the damn colossi because the light had put in the completely wrong area. I don't particularly enjoy being frustrated in games, but there were several times in SotC where I was.

The camera. Honestly, the camera was kind of awful in this game. There were times when I would be using L1 to follow a colossi and the game decided that the best camera angle was below my horse staring at it's junk... which isn't all that helpful when I'm trying to leap onto a fast moving flying behemoth. On the final colossi fight there was a part I had a very difficult time beating it because every time I would get to a certain point the camera angle would go wonky and give me an insiders view of the colissi's arm... when I'm trying to make a jump from three hundred feet off the ground I kind of want to be able to see what I'm doing.

Okay, those are my complaints... but I said I enjoyed the game. So that must mean that there is praise as well.

The fights with the colossi were pretty damn epic. Most games where you fight a bad guy that size you're most likely going to do it with some sort of quick time event. Here you got to feel the satisfaction of taking down a humongous bad guy with nothing but jumping, climbing, and your sword. Some of them felt pretty damn awesome to take down. I want to say that it seems like they could have used something more than weak spots and changed it up a bit, but I'm not really exactly sure how so I'll just go with the flow.

It was a unique experience... and frankly that's not something you always get in video games. When you start talking about a game and using words like "Doom Clone" or "Diablo Clone" or "Halo Clone" you know that there's not always a lot of uniqueness in the gaming industry. I don't think I've ever heard the phrase "Shadow of the Colossus Clone". I applaud them for trying something different even if it may not all work out in the end.

I enjoyed Shadow of the Colossus, even if I have my gripes about it. It was a fun, unique gaming experience and maybe I just showed up a little late to truly appreciate it. If you haven't played it yet, I would honestly say to give it a shot there's really no other game you can compare it to, and that's a compliment.

Squid.

Shadow of the Colossus - Playstation 2

Up next is Shadow of the Colossus, one of the main reasons I actually bought a PS2.

I know absolutely nothing about this game. It flew completely under my radar until Roger Ebert said that video games couldn't be art. All of the sudden everyone was suggesting he play one game: Shadow of the Colossus.

Since then I've constantly heard people proclaim it to be their favorite game, or the best game ever made. It's on every list about must have games for the PS2... and yet still, I know absolutely nothing about it.

It will be interesting to play it, and see if it lives up to this hype.

Squid.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II - Review

I know, I know I forgot to put up what I was playing next. I kind of forgot. Sorry about that.

So since I have myself a new Playstation 2 I decided that my next game should be one of the many that came with the system. I started out playing SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals but just couldn't get into it... guess I wasn't in the right mood. So I decided to give Dark Alliance II a shot.

First off, I never played the first Dark Alliance for the PS2. So I kind of went into this game not knowing the lore, or what happened to lead up to the events of Dark Alliance II. Though with as much fun as I had with the second game, you can bet the first is going to be bought sometime soon.

Dark Alliance II is a great game. Switching from a PC gamer to a console gamer there are a couple of genres of games that are somewhat sparse. Dungeon crawling hack 'n slash games are one of those genres.

I loved Diablo II. I don't know how many hours I spent playing it. As well as Sacred, Dungeon Siege 1 and 2, and Torchlight. I'm a big fan of those types of games. You don't have to really think. I swing my sword, whats in front of me dies. I pick up loot and I'm my way to the next mob of enemies. I play these kinds of games when I want to just turn off my brain and slaughter groups of enemies. And Dark Alliance II was perfect for that.

I haven't played many console hack 'n slash games but I will say that Dark Alliance is easily the best. It controls beautifully, which is usually my main problem with these types of games. It's hard to emulate the simplicity of clicking a mouse on something to kill it, but Dark Alliance II manages to do it well.

There's a whole host of treasure for you to sort through, and on top of that you can customize your armor in the workshop to tack on special powers. It really added something to the game, sadly I didn't really try it until later in the game... but once I did I saw how truly awesome it was when you're wielding two kick ass, customized swords.

The story is just long enough that you don't get bored, but short enough that you'll want to play through it again. And you can bet that at some point in the future I'll be popping this game in to beat it with another character class (there's five to choose from), or perhaps just using my kick ass barbarian on a higher difficulty level. [Note: most people say that Dark Alliance II is 8-10 hours long. I think this is based off of the in game timer which appears to run rather slow. It says I beat the game in just over 10 hours, but I would guess I played it for 15-20.]

The story... the story is the one part of the game I will admit that's somewhat weak. If you haven't played the first Dark Alliance you're going to be somewhat confused. Not enough that it ruins the game for you, but you'll be wondering what they're talking about. It seems they could have given you a better understanding of the backstory so if you hadn't played the first you wouldn't be as lost. Overall though it's not a huge deal, the story is still pretty good it just can get confusing in part. Also it ends on a somewhat cliffhanger... not a huge problem, but considering Interplay's financial problems there's a good chance we will never see Dark Alliance III.

Over all Dark Alliance II is a very good game, a very good hack 'n slash game, and probably the best hack 'n slash console game I've played. If you own a PS2 or Xbox and are a fan of the genre, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Squid.

New Kid on the Block

An alternate post title would be "I'm never going to finish."

We have a new addition to the video game family.

If you added up all of the hours I've spent playing the Playstation 2 I would assume it's under 20 hours. Last generation I bought an Xbox... which I barely played. Certainly not enough to warrant the purchase of a PS2. Later I did buy a Gamecube but only because it was a screaming good deal and I got the Legend of Zelda Collection with it. Overall I didn't have much playtime with the PS2, my brother had one and I would occasionally play it for a couple of minutes when I went over to his house.

Recently though I've very much wanted to try out a few Playstation 2 games, Shadow of the Colossus being a one. Problem being is that I didn't really want to shell out a ton of money for one. I really figured you could pick one up for $25 or $30... boy was I wrong. Looked like the price for a used PS2 was about $50 and that didn't include any games.

I kind of looked around, occasionally checked Gamestop, Amazon, and eBay but couldn't find any really good deals.

The other day my brother sent me a local ad for someone selling a PS2 and ton of games for $50. The ad had been up for almost two weeks, but still I emailed them hoping it was still available. Luckily it was.

So now I'm the proud owner of a PS2, 2 memory cards, 2 controllers, and 11 games and all for $50. So along with the huge list of games I need to play we have some new additions:

Devil May Cry, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2006 Fifa World Cup, Athens 2004, SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Dark Alliance II, Champions of Norath, Prince of Persia The Two Thrones, Grand Theft Auto III, and Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

Edit: And with a trip to FYE I added Mafia, XIII, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, Deus Ex, Rogue Galaxy and Final Fantasy X to the list.

Some of the games look good and the two Grand Theft Auto games are my favorites of the series. All and all very pleased, plus I can borrow some of my brothers games, and there will be many Gamefly games to play in the future.

I'm never going to finish beating every game I own.

Squid.