Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time - Nintendo 64

I've owned Ocarina of Time since it came out. I still have the gold N64 cartridge and everything. I've played OoT probably at least five times, and every single time I get about halfway or so through it and move on to something else. I know that I've gotten to the ice temple, but I'm not sure I've made it past that point. It's not that I though OoT was a bad game, or that it was uninteresting, I just seemed to get distracted and moved on to another game.

I was kind of excited to start playing OoT because I've always wanted to beat it. I constantly hear how great of a game it is. At one point in time I know it was voted the best video game of all time.

So I started playing it, and I'll be the first to admit: the first little bit felt like I was trudging through it. It was hard for me to get into the game, to even get excited enough about it to want to play it. I figured it was because I had played it so many times, it just felt kind of stale. I figured that once I got past the point of where I had played it would pick up and I would get into it.

But it didn't happen. I just could not get into OoT. I kept playing and kept saying "It will get better..." but it didn't. Never once did I not feel like it wasn't a chore playing the game. Normally I play video games every day or at least every couple of days, even if it's just for a couple of minutes. With OoT I felt like I pretty much had to force myself to continue playing. Days would go past, and I would finally have to force myself to play it.

I don't know what it is about the game that made me not like it. I have enjoyed every Legend of Zelda game I've ever played. This starts from the NES days and goes right up to Twilight Princess. Maybe it's the fact that I've played it so many times, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for a Zelda game, but for whatever reason I just could not get into OoT.

Squid.

Saints Row - Xbox 360

I quite like GTA sandbox games. I pretty much have since I first played Grand Theft Auto 3. There's just something about driving around, and creating mayhem. I enjoy the freedom that these games allow. I really enjoyed Grand Theft 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City... and then the GTA series seemed to get serious about itself. It was still fun, but not as cartoon-y and unrealistic. With GTA4 it became a little too serious and I just couldn't really seem to enjoy it, but that's a review for another time.

Saints Row basically made me feel like I was playing Grand Theft Auto 3 again. It brought back the over the top fun that I remember. I was still answering my cell phone, but instead of then having to drive and pick up my girlfriend it was having to drive and stop a gang warfare on my turf. I was involved in insurance fraud schemes that had me running in front of cars. Huge police chases that could go on for miles. Overall it was just insane, over the top fun. That's what I was looking for. This is what I wanted a GTA clone to be. Honestly this is what I wanted GTA4 to be.

When it comes to GTA-like sandbox games I really don't care about the story. I want there to be one, but I don't really care how deep it is or how great it is. Basically I play these games to cause mayhem, and Saints Row excels in this. Hell, there's even a mini-game called Mayhem. Overall Saints Row is just a fun time where you don't have to think a lot.

That's not to say that there isn't some problems with Saints Row. There were actually quite a few missions that were oddly difficult, mostly ones that involved doing a mission that automatically gave you five stars. It's hard to finish a mission when you're getting rammed by FBI vehicles left and right. Frankly I hate missions like this in any GTA game. Also you can't do missions until you fill your respect bar, this get's really annoying after a while. Having to do a couple little mini-missions before you can advance the story is kind of aggravating.

Overall Saints Row was a really fun game with some flaws that can be overlooked. If you're looking for a game that feels like a throwback to GTA3 then this is definitely game you want to play.

Squid.

Halo Reach - Xbox 360

We all know my feelings on the originalHalo. I've played Halo, Halo 2, and Halo ODST, and yet I've never been all that thrilled by the Halo series. None of them ever seemed all that exciting or good to me. They were all fun, but I never felt like they were truly great games. That all changed with Halo Reach.

Halo Reach is everything I wanted the first Halo to be. One thing I never felt in the first Halo was the pull to keep playing. I always would get to a point and think "Well, I guess I'll stop now." In Halo Reach it was more of a "Holy crap! It's two in the morning and I should really stop now... after I finish this level." There was a drive to keep playing, a wanting to know what was going to happen next. Halo Reach completely sucked me in.

The action was great, the story was great (though was somewhat confusing having never played a few of the games), and overall was just an incredibly fun game.

Here's the thing. Halo Reach was a good enough game that I'm seriously considering playing the series over again. Over the years I've played the games and haven't really been all that interested in them... but Halo Reach was great. Maybe the problem was me, maybe I wasn't giving them the chance that I should have. It's either that or Halo Reach was a great end cap to a series that was overrated. I'm not really sure.

At the end of the day though Halo Reach was a great game. Even if you're like me and didn't particularly enjoy the series you should certainly give Reach a chance.

Squid.

BioShock - Xbox 360

BioShock is kind of a conundrum to me. Everyone seems to love this game; it currently has a 96 on Metacritic. It is almost universally loved by fans and critics alike. It seemed like a game I should enjoy. A story driven FPS with a very interesting setting? Sign me up!

When I first played the game a year or so ago I was underwhelmed. I didn’t dislike the game, but on the other hand I didn’t really like it either. I never quite got into the game, it was decent enough but I didn’t find it as compelling as everyone else seemed to. The story was good, the setting was good, but I just couldn’t get engrossed in the game. The problem is that I can’t really tell you why. Everything tells me it should be a good game, but I never found it more than just somewhat entertaining.

After beating it the first time I thought it was just me; maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood. I had just beaten Fallout 3 a couple days before, maybe I was kind of burned out on first person shooters the first time I had played it. Maybe I was unfairly comparing the two games… who knows? I just felt like I should give it another chance, another try.

I started it up and for the first couple hours I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the ambiance of the game, I enjoyed the writing, I enjoyed the music… and then the enjoyment just kind of stopped. I still liked all of those things, I still thought they were very good, I just wasn’t enjoying myself. I felt like I was trudging through the game, I wasn’t having fun, I was just playing it to beat it.

And I did. I stuck around long enough to beat the game. I felt the exact same way the second time around. I didn’t think it was a bad game, but I didn’t think it was a good game… but again, I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t know what it is about BioShock but I just can’t seem to get into it.

I appear to be one of the few who didn’t think that BioShock was an absolutely amazing game, and I don’t understand why. BioShock appears, even to me, to be a very good game… it’s just a very good game that I don’t seem to enjoy.

Squid.

Morrowind - Xbox

I absolutely loved Morrowind. It was one of the first games I purchased for the Xbox and I played it for God knows how long, I probably spent ten hours alone just exploring and talking to people in Vivec. Since I bought it on Xbox I've played it at least twice as well as buying and playing it on the PC. I love games that allow me to explore and Morrowind exceeds at this. Though despite loving the game, I've never actually finished it, and because it's such an open ended game I'm not really sure how close I had come. I needed to remedy that. I needed to beat Morrowind.

One thing that actually somewhat shocked me is how well Morrowind has aged. For an almost eight year old game it doesn't look half bad. The character models are pretty bad as well as the animations, but overall the game is still rather pretty. I'm not one of those people that constantly complains about how games have just all turned brown, but it's kind of interesting to see the vibrant colors in Morrowind. The skies are sometimes a mix of blue, pinks, and purples. There's forests, mountains, water, things that feel like a true environment. It's a stark contrast between it and games where you sometimes feel like you're in a dull wasteland.

I will say that Morrowind is an absolutely great game. It's an amazing exploring experience and a great game with a great story on top of everything else. If you liked Oblivion, if you like Fallout if you like just kind of wandering on your own and making your own experience, you will love Morrowind. However there are a few complaints I had with this game.

The map and travel system are kind of lacking. The map is adequate but sometimes I would have liked a bit more detail. There were times when I wandered around for a half hour trying to find something that was actually marked on my map, it could get rather frustrating. I wish there could have been a way to mark your map, not necessarily a waypoint system but just a way to put a mark on your map so you could reference it. The travel system could get rather confusing as well. On many occasions I had to go and look on the internet what town I had to travel from to get to other towns and it became a maze of towns to get to one place. It could get confusing. Part of it made you feel like you were exploring even more, though with the game being as big as it is and with as much travel as there was it eventually became somewhat frustrating.

Okay, here's the weirdest complaint I've ever had about a game. It's too damn big. I absolutely love games that allow me explore. Fallout 3, New Vegas, Oblivion, I've spent around 400 hours just playing those three games. With Morrowind I feel like I could have easily spent that many hours just exploring it. I'm not sure how many hours I spent playing Morrowind, it doesn't keep track, I do know I started it February 10th and finished it around April 4th or so. That's almost two months of playing, I would estimate that I played somewhere between 50 and 100 hours, the main quest alone probably took close to thirty hours. Here's the thing, I would guess I saw less than 25% of the entire world. I didn't explore a ton of the caves, I didn't see a lot of the eastern part of the world, and yet I easily spent at least thirty to forty hours if not more exploring... and still only saw maybe 25%. If you explored every cave, every nook and cranny, every sidequest, every town, I would guess you could easily spend 250 to 300 hours on this game. Maybe more. It's huge. Amazingly huge. In Fallout 3 I did every quest I could, discovered almost every location, did everything I could in the game and finished all of the expansion packs. That took me 145 hours. I didn't even bother trying to complete the expansion packs for Morrowind, didn't explore probably 80% of the places I could have, I didn't do a ton of sidequests and yet it still took me almost two months to finish. Morrowind may actually be too big of a game. You may actually get tired of it before you could 100% it. The sheer size of the game is amazing.

Morrowind is a thoroughly enjoyable game. It's just fun. There's some annoyances here and there but overall it's a very solid game and still remains that way even seven years later. If you like exploring, if you like any of the other games I talked about, and if you have a lot of spare time, it is a definite must play.

Squid.

Killer Instinct - Super Nintendo

I'll start this review off by saying you can take it with a grain of salt. I've never been a huge fan of fighting games. I've played quite a few of them and they've just never really grabbed my attention for that long. I enjoyed Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, and I remember pumping in a lot of money to Time Killers at the Nicklecade but for the most part they're not high up on the list of games I like to play.

That being said Killer Instinct was okay. Much like WrestleMania I'm not 100% sure how to rate it. Fighting games are something that I consider a lot more fun with a second player, since I don't have one I just have to go up against the computer. Generally speaking the computer either offers no resistance whatsoever or suffers from rubberband AI. Killer Instinct's AI fell somewhere in the middle. For the most part it was fairly easy, with the occasional rubberband AI problem. I managed to get through most of the game with very little problem.

I chose Thunder as my character because oddly I still remember most of the characters you fight/choose from. Not exactly sure why, this game doesn't stick out in my head as one that I played a whole lot growing up. Either way I started off using the strategy I always do in fighting games: button mashing. I managed to beat the first few guys with this strategy, only to decide to mix it up about a fourth way through the game. I decided I should actually learn some combo moves. It was actually kind of a mistake. With button mashing I was actually having a fairly difficult time beating the bad guys, with combos I almost always sailed right through the level. Once I learned combos the game became almost too easy. Sure I didn't have it on the hardest difficulty setting or anything, but at the end of the day I beat every single character and only lost once.

Killer Instinct wasn't going to change the way I view the fighting genre. It's still not a genre I get excited about. I understand why people like it, but it's just not really for me. As fighting games go, with two players I'm sure Killer Instinct would have been lots of fun. It's not like I didn't have a good time playing it, it's just that I'm probably not going to go back and replay it any time soon.

Squid.

Metroid - NES

So I have a confession to make. I don't think I've ever beat Metroid in all of the years I've owned it. Sure it's a classic game, sure I've had it since probably the late '80s/early '90s, but for some reason or another I don't think I've ever managed to finish it. Even with the Justin Bailey code I don't recall ever beating the game.

If you read my Shadow Complex review it will come as no surprise to hear that I enjoy Metroid. I've always enjoyed this game. Though when I was young I always thought this game was very difficult. I remember falling down those long vertical corridors because I missed a jump, I remember some of the trickier places where you had to freeze enemies so you could jump on them to make it across lava filled screens. Though in beating the game last night I really wonder how far I actually made it into the game as a child. I don't recall at all ever fighting the two sub-bosses, Kraid and Ridley, and frankly a lot of the places I went to didn't look all that familiar. Perhaps as a kid I had the attention span to play for one or two hours, but maybe not the four or five it would have taken me to get very far in the game.

There's also another problem: while I will say the game itself isn't particularly difficult, the final area to get to the mother brain as well as the escape out are what I would call very difficult. That would be my guess as to why, even with the Justin Bailey code, I never managed to finish the game. The end part is brutal.

You have two problems with the end stage: 1) It's just difficult in and of itself, the metroids can drain your health rather quickly and are kind of difficult to get off. 2) The slow down when there's too many objects on the screen ain't helping. When I got to the last room before the mother brain the slow down made the game almost unplayable. There was just way too much going on for the little NES to handle.

Though as of February 3rd, 2011 I can now say with great pride (okay, not really all that much pride) that I have beat Metroid for the NES. It was a fun game, it was actually just as fun as I remember it being. There's something enjoyable about games that let you explore, that aren't exactly linear. I've always really liked those types of games. Metroid probably wasn't the first game like this and it probably isn't the best, but it's the one that sticks out in my memory and it's the one I remember loving as a kid. If you haven't played Metroid perhaps it's time to dust off the ol' NES and give it a go.

Squid.

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game - Sega Genesis

I'm not really sure what to say about a wrestling game that takes you about 45 minutes to beat so I'll give you a little look into my formative years when I thought wrestling was better then The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe combined.

Wrestling even today still holds some pretty fond memories for me. I still remember going to my cousins house and renting the Wrestle Mania from that year (probably about 1990) and watching it and loving every minute of it. I remember the action figures, I remember watching it on TV, I still have The Ultimate Warriors autograph somewhere, I remember being absolutely obsessed with the WWF. From the about the time I was eight to maybe the time I was eleven or so I loved wrestling. Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, Randy Macho Man Savage, Jake The Snake Roberts, Earthquake, Andre the Giant, etc. For me that was the heyday of wrestling. Since then Hulk Hogan has essentially become a parody of himself, The Ultimate Warrior is a crazy right wing religious guy who seems about one step away from joining a militia, Randy Savage has... I don't know, faded into obscurity? Jake The Snake may now be homeless and smoking crack considering the shape he was in during Beyond the Mat, Earthquake has been dead now for a couple years as has Andre the Giant has been dead even longer. My point being is that this is the last time I actually kept up in any sort of fashion with wrestling. To me it was one of those things that I loved as a kid but have absolutely no interest in watching now or even by the time I was thirteen. So how do I rate a game based on that?

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game was released in 1995, this is about two to three years after I had stopped watching wrestling. I actually recognize some of the wrestlers featured in the game though. The Undertaker, Bret Hit Man Hart, Shawn Michaels, Lex Lugar and Bam Bam Bigalow are all names I recognize. Though except for The Undertaker and Bret Hart I don't think I know any of them past there names, I never really watched them wrestle. So I decided to play the game as The Undertaker. I actually quite liked him when I was young.

You never appear to wrestle one on one in this game. It's alway one on two, one on three, and so on. You're always the one. You would think this would make for a rather difficult game, but really it doesn't. For the most part if you're attacking one of your opponents the other guy isn't really attacking you. Sure they sometimes will hit you in the back of the head, but for the most part they seem to wait their turn. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it is what it is.

Most of the game can be beaten by using the kick button, the first couple of matches I had I just got a guy in a corner and kicked him into submission, found the second guy and did the same. You could probably beat the entire game this way, but what fun would that be? So I decided to break out the combo moves... and that's when I ran into the problems.

Apparently at some point Sega released a six button controller, this game talks about using it. The problem is that I have the three button controller. So to run? You have to hit A and C... considering there's a B in between those buttons that gets a little awkward. You're having to do two button combos and after a while it just gets annoying I would go back to kicking my opponents. I'm sure with a six button controller it would be a lot easier, but I don't have one.

The graphics are decent for a wrestling game, the sound is sometimes good and sometimes makes me want to shove a pencil into my ears. Overall the game is just kind of average. I'm sure it was fun in the arcade, but I'm not really sure it transfered over to the home game.

With a six button controller and perhaps a second player this game would be decent, but not anything to write home about. Without those two things it's 45 minutes of mashing the C button and kicking Bam Bam Biglow in the balls over an over.

Squid.

Jurassic Park - Sega Genesis

I've played a lot of games in my lifetime. Across every genre, every console, and every generation. I've played games that I consider excellent and I've played games that I consider absolutely awful. I'm not going to say that Jurassic Park for Sega Genesis is the worst game that I've ever played, but I will say it's damn near the top of the list. I will say it's probably the worst game I've played in the last year.

Before I play a game I kind of research it on the internet. Find out what kind of game it is, look at what kind of scores it received, find out what kind of cheat codes there are for it, basically just kind of look into the game.

I was actually kind of excited to play Jurassic Park, on GameFaqs the reviews were actually very good. There's only one review that's negative. Most of them are between eight and tens. I've come to the conclusion that this is either trolling at its finest, or these people are absolutely crazy and or stupid.

Where to start... there's so many bad things about this game. Maybe we should start off with the fact that this game controls like everything is submerged in Jell-O. Though I can't tell if it's because the controls are bad or because every time you try to move more then three feet the game suffers from horrible slow down. Maybe it's a mixture of both, you never really know. All I know is trying to make Dr. Grant land on a very tiny ledge while trying to combat bad controls and slow down? Makes the game perhaps one of the most frustrating things I've ever played.

I also ran into the problem on numerous occasions where for no real apparent reason dinosaurs became invincible. No matter how many darts I shot at the dinosaurs nothing would happen. This was almost always a problem with velociraptors. On the subject of velociraptors it wasn't uncommon for them to knock you down and then proceed to trap you in a corner knocking you down over and over until they killed you. So on top of everything else, the game also had some bugs!

The level design was awful, absolutely horrible, and broken. On several levels there were places where you could fall through the solid ground you were walking on and die. There were occasions where a small fall would lead to you having to jump at the exact right moment, or perhaps land on a small ledge and if you missed it you died. Littered throughout the game were little problems with the level that could easily kill you for no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes over and over again. On the first level there was a spot where you have to crawl out on to a branch, three out of four times I'd live, the other one time? Fall to my death. Nothing changed, I didn't go out farther on the limb I wasn't running, nothing was different. Hell, I even was landing in the same spot... sometimes you just died.

Here's the interesting thing. There's quite a few things about this game that aren't too bad. The music is decent, the graphics are fairly good, the ability to play as Dr. Grant or a velociraptor is cool... I can see it being a somewhat decent game. Here's the problem though: all those problems I listed above? Those are all so irritating, so awful that they make the game almost unplayable. It took me 45 minutes to beat the first Dr. Grant level. I watched a YouTube video on how to beat it and still couldn't. I played it over and over again and just couldn't beat it. It's not that I'm bad at games, it's not that Jurassic Park is hard, it's just that it's broken.

That's the best way to describe Jurassic Park: broken. Not bad, broken. When you're trying to play a game that is broken it starts to become frustrating. It starts wearing on you. You want to beat a level but you just can't because it's broken.

The absolutely best thing I can think to say about Jurassic Park is that it's short. You can beat both campaigns in about two to three hours. In all honesty if the game wasn't broken I would guess that you could beat it in about a half hour or so. That shows you just how broken it is. For the love of God skip this game. It's absolutely awful.

Squid.

Big Sky Trooper - Super Nintendo

I have very good memories of playing Big Sky Trooper on SNES. I never owned the game but I do remember renting it more then once. I also distinctly remember playing it when I was big into ROMs when I was a teenager. I loved Big Sky Troopers. One of my favorite genres is Action RPGs and with the mix of that, it's uniqueness, and brilliance of LucasArts I remember thinking this was an absolutely amazing game.

When I first started doing this blog one of the first things I did was buy Big Sky Trooper, I figured I should really beat a game that held so much nostalgia for me. I didn't play it right off the bat because I wanted to kind of mix favorites with games I had never really played. Finally I figured I should get around to playing a game I remember so fondly.

Then it all went horribly wrong. Big Sky Trooper was exactly how I remember it. The humor was there, the art direction was there, there was just one thing missing: the fun.

It wasn't that I was remembering the game differently from what it was, it was exactly how I remember it. It's just that in the decade since I had last played it apparently my wants and needs in a videogame had changed.

The controls were the first thing I noticed, they were absolutely awful. When you entire combat is based on shooting lasers at a slimes you better make it as good as possible. Unfortunately they didn't. Shooting slimes can actually be somewhat difficult. Any direction you shoot it's rather difficult to hit them and for the most part you have to get so close to the slime you end up bumping into them causing you to lose health. Shooting and killing things is actually somewhat difficult and can be frustrating. And flying the spaceship? It was like trying to navigate a aircraft carrier through a slalom.

The levels were pretty bad as well. You're beamed down to a planet and are given a small area of land to eradicate slugs from. The land is much like old Warner Brothers cartoons, everything is on a repeating background. You go to the bottom and come out the top, you go to the left and come out the right. This got real old real quick. Instead of making a couple large planets to explore you get a bunch of really tiny planets to do the same thing over and over on.

Big Sky Trooper is actually kind of confusing as well. This could just be because I didn't have a manual, but there were quite a few things that I had no idea how to do and basically just kind of had to trial and error figure it out myself. It wasn't a big deal but quite a few things that I feel should have been explained to you just weren't.

It was odd, I never have run into this before. This was a game that I had a lot of nostalgia for, a lot of good memories about, and yet I wasn't having fun. It was almost a complete reversal of what I was expecting. I just wasn't having fun.

After about fifteen hours of play I just didn't really want to go on. I almost called it quits. Finally I decided to just pull out the Game Genie and power my way through it. With infinite health and a few other codes I was able to speed through the rest of the game, and you know what? It didn't get any better. I really thought it might pick up and get better, but it didn't.

Big Sky Trooper wasn't good or fun. Replaying the game just took all of the great memories I had of the game and shattered them. It went from a great, fun RPG to being a horribly frustrating, boring mess. It's a shame, but it's one of the reasons I'm doing this.

Squid.

Clockwork Knight - Sega Saturn

Clockwork Knight is one of those games that I've owned for well over a decade and have probably never played, or if I have played it it's for maybe a couple of minutes. Want to know how I know this? Because you can beat this game in about an hour. Maybe a little bit longer if you play it on a harder level.

I'm going to get this out of the way: I'm not a huge fan of platformers. Sure, there are quite a few that I really like but for the most part I don't really enjoy them. For every Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog there's about 100 platformers that don't control well, are difficult because they're way too short or just because of gameplay problems, or have a level that involves ice and moving platforms... you get the idea. I guess the thing is, when platformers are done well I don't mind them, but for the most part? They're just not done very well. They seem like the kind of games that are made to be made. Want a movie tie in? Platformer. Want to make some kind of shovelware game? Platformer. Want to make a kids game? Platformer. I don't think it's the genres fault that it has a lot of bad games to its name. It really just seems like developers tend to use the genre to occasionally make a quick buck.

So what category does Clockwork Knight fall into? Kind of in the middle. It's controls were okay, but not great. They felt kind of stiff. You would look at a jump you needed to make and wonder if you could because Pepper the Knight just doesn't control really how you want him to. Clockwork Knight was okay, but completely forgettable. About the only thing it had going for it was it's somewhat unique atmosphere as well as some pretty good cutscenes with some decent original songs.

One thing Clockwork Knight had against it was that it was incredibly short. I started playing it late the other night figuring I would get a couple levels in before bed. The first problem with this plan was that there are no save games, passwords, anything to save your progress. Annoying, but it didn't really matter because there was a cheat that would allow you to warp to any level. The next day I boot up Clockwork Knight, input the code, and that's when I realize that the level I stopped playing at the night before was in fact the last level of the game. If I had continued on for about fifteen minutes I would have beat the game. I would say that you could easily beat the game in under an hour if you were even somewhat decent at it.

Here's the problem, I don't know if I should dock points for that. I really enjoy Contra but I can easily beat that in under a half hour. The original Super Mario Brothers is a pretty short game... on the other hand Super Mario World is actually a pretty long game, so are a bunch of other platformers. There doesn't seem to be a set length when it comes to the platformer genre. If I bought an RPG and could beat it in an hour I'd think it's too short, hell even five hours might irk me... but platformers seem to be able to get away with it. Either way, here's letting you know that if you do play Clockwork Knight, don't expect a lot of time or replayability out of it.

Clockwork Knight just comes off as a mediocre kind of game. Nothing really stands out about it, and the few things that aren't too bad are kind of deflated by it's length and control issues. Maybe I did play this game when I first got it, maybe Clockwork Knight is just that forgettable. It's not a horrible game by any means, but it's also not what I would consider good. Clockwork Knight sits in the middle, somewhere between good and bad... and sadly, that's the best thing I can think to say about the game.

Squid.

Faxanadu - NES

I have an odd nostalgia when it comes to Faxanadu and I'm not really sure why. In my head I remember it from my childhood, I remember the first few screens and almost nothing else. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea why. There's a possibility that I rented it as a kid, but I don't specifically remember it. I also honestly only remember the first few screens, really the first town, after that I couldn't tell you one thing about the game. So either I rented it and played the first few screens and that's what I'm remembering or I've somehow invented the nostalgia in my head. Either way, it's about time I actually played and beat this game I remember parts of oh so well.

To show how little I (possibly) remember of this game, I didn't realize it was a side scrolling RPG in the vein of Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link. Honestly I've always kind of enjoyed that genre, I loved The Adventure of Link as well as Castlevania II. After learning this I was rather excited to get into Faxanadu.

Faxanadu isn't as good as either of the games listed above, but it still is a rather solid game. The story is a little light, but that applies to about 90% of all NES games so I can't really hold it against it. It doesn't add anything huge to the genre, and borrows nicely from the big names. It's basically in every way just kind of average. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I've enjoyed a lot of games like that, but Faxanadu isn't never going to reach that status of a game that just sticks out in your mind as a shining jewel of a particular genre.

One of the things I did enjoy about Faxanadu was the way it handled experience points and gold. In quite a few games I've played they've had it where if you die you lose XP or Gold or perhaps both, and in Faxanadu you do as well... but with a twist. There are experience levels in the game and when you hit that you maintain that level with XP and Gold if you die. It's hard to explain, but let's say you need 2000 XP to hit level two and 3000 XP to hit level three if you have 2300 XP and die you don't lose all your XP, you just go back to your previous level, so 2000 XP. It works the same way with Gold as well, you just go back to the set amount of Gold for your current level. So like above, you die and come back with 2000 XP as well as perhaps 500 Gold instead of dropping back to zero or just constantly losing some. It was an interesting way of handling it. It also is unfortunately rather exploitable. With a little bit of grinding I was able to hit the highest level which meant that when I died I came back with 15000 Gold. This meant that I could just buy all the armor and items I wanted and when I ran out of money I would just save and restart or die and come back with 15000 more gold to buy the rest of what I needed. Sure it was exploitable, but I always enjoy something new if it works.

Did Faxanadu meet my nostalgia memory requirements? Kind of. I still remember it in my memory, but what I played and what I remember didn't quite meet up. The first part was still how I remember it, but as I said nothing else rang any bells. Part of me wonders if I never really played it as a kid. There's a good possibility I played a little bit of it as ROM as a teenager or something and that's what I'm remembering it from.

Overall Faxanadu was fun, but nothing really to write home about. There weren't a whole lot of side scrolling RPGs (that I remember) so any game in that genre that is even somewhat decent is a welcome edition to my gaming library. Faxanadu was a decent game if you are a fan of the genre or even the RPG genre in general. If you like those types of games you should give it a try, but it's not amazing enough that I would suggest it to everyone.

Squid.

Blue Dragon - Xbox 360

I wanted to like Blue Dragon. I really did. I didn't go into it with a mindset of "I'm going to detest this game!" but over the forty-five hours I played it, Blue Dragon pushed me to that.

I really need to learn that when I say "It's ten bucks, how bad could it be?" that it really can be not worth that ten dollars. For every The Saboteur I get I also get a Jericho and a Blue Dragon. Games that despite the fact that I paid under ten dollars for I wished I had the time spent playing back.

Blue Dragon was awful. I'm just going to lead off with that.

I played the demo a while back and thought "This is really fun, I should pick this up some time." Apparently Blue Dragon isn't too awful in small doses, but the more you play the more the flaws shine through.

The story in an RPG is essential, that's pretty much the bread and butter of RPGs. Blue Dragon's is pretty much crap. Well that's not fair, the story isn't all that awful but it feels like they took about five hours of story and stretched it out through about fifty hours of gameplay... and that five hours is still kind of light. It's like you get about five minutes of story for every two hours you play. The story just seems incredibly thin and cliche, especially for an RPG. For the most part you do things without necessarily understanding why you're doing something, or at the most have a very flimsy idea why you need to do something. Which leads to my next gripe.

There's no real direction to the game. I can't tell you how many times I wasn't sure what I was supposed to really do next. There were several times when even after checking a FAQ I wasn't exactly sure why I was supposed to be doing what I was doing. This is another time when if the story had been better I wouldn't have been as lost.

This is a minor story gripe, but I'll still air it. Did five year olds write this game? Seriously. I haven't seen this many poop joke/references in a game since... well honestly I don't remember. The story is very simplistic and cliche, but on top of all of that you have poop joke/references littered throughout. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good poop joke, I'll be the first too admit it... but all of these seemed, well, juvenile. Not only are their "Poo Snakes" in the game, one of the final end battles is with a "Jumbo Poo". You also occasionally get the fun of searching through poop for items (with the included "squish, squish" subtitle). It all just seemed rather out of place is a somewhat serious RPG.

The save points... pardon my French, but fuck the save points in this game, fuck them in their stupid asses. I don't remember the last time I saw such horrible save points in a game. I'm not a fan of save points for the most part, I've said this before, but the save points in Blue Dragon are easily one of the worst uses of it I've ever seen. It's not uncommon to go for over an hour without being able to save, and the longest I ever went was just over three hours. Think about that for a second, if you die you have to replay three hours of the game. You also almost never get a save point before a big boss fight, you instead get a checkpoint. This seems like I an okay idea, but I'll explain why it isn't.

So remember that three hours between save points? So that happened in an optional sidequest dungeon. After three hours of dungeon crawling I finally make it to the end boss, I get the checkpoint... and then get slaughtered. I was under-leveled for that fight. So here I have three options: I can just quit the sidequest and waste three hours of my time, I can go back three hours to my last save and re-level to my current level as well as grind out a few more, or I can just keep trying to perhaps get lucky and kill the boss. If there was a savepoint before the end boss I could simply just go to it, grind some levels in the dungeon and try again... but because of their ludicrous savepoint/checkpoint system I can't do that. I ended up trying the end boss a few more times to no avail before just quiting the dungeon and cutting my losses. This isn't the only time something like this happened. Throughout the game there were times when I really needed a savepoint and just couldn't get one. It's frustrating when you need to do something else, or need to be somewhere and there's not a savepoint anywhere to save your game. There were times when I wanted to say go to bed but had to wander around for an hour looking for a place where I could save my game. It just gets incredibly frustrating after a while.

The battle system was rather odd too, not the way you actually did battle, but the way that who was picked to attack next was chosen. On many, many occasions the the order in which the enemies got to attack was completely nonsensical. In one fight that I remember a bad guy got to attack my party eight times in a row... for no real reason. Considering that this enemy could do about 120 damage per attack and my strongest character only had 400 health, he almost completely wiped my party... and I still have no idea why he got to go eight times in a row. If it had been just that one battle I would have called it a fluke, but it happened constantly. I don't know how many times I died in a boss fight because the order would say that the boss would get to attack next and then I was up, only to have the boss attack my party one or two more times without me getting a turn. I still have no idea why this happens, and as far as I recall it was never really explained in any battle tutorial. Overall it just got very annoying and felt rather cheap.

Last gripe, I promise. So I made it to the last set of boss fights in the game, only to have my team just get continually killed in one. I couldn't beat it. I could come close but due to the attack order mentioned above I just couldn't seem to beat it. That's when I decided to check a FAQ and see if it had any helpful hints. It did, it told me I should be at level 50-55 for this boss fight. Only one problem, my highest level character was 37 and my lowest level character was 32. Here's my problem with this. I would occasionally walk around bad guys to skip a fight, and I skipped a couple of the optional sidequests, but not many... and yet I was 15 levels lower then I should have been at the end of the game. I'm not saying that you should never have to grind in an RPG, but you know what? You should never have to grind that much. In any RPG you should probably never be more than two or three levels then you need to be if you're playing correctly and following the story path. In Blue Dragon to be the correct level I needed to be I would have probably needed to never skip a fight, do every single "optional" sidequest and still probably grind for a little bit. Boy howdy does that sound like fun. So here I am at the final battles and I have two options: go back to my last save point (about an hour and a half ago) and pretty much grind levels for probably 3-4 hours and then play to get back to where I was, or call it quits... so I quit.

That's right, Blue Dragon is now the second game I haven't finished. If I had liked Blue Dragon I would have suffered through the 3-4 hours of grinding, but at the end of the day I found it to be at best a mediocre game. It had potential, it really did. I enjoyed the shadow aspect of the game, I enjoyed the game world... but it just had so much working against it. I didn't even bother including things like timed missions and escort missions in my gripes because it already had so many things going against it I didn't think I needed to even bother bringing up more.

I quit and then watched the end battles that I missed on YouTube. That way I could at least tell if the story got interesting or at least better, and you know what? It didn't. It stayed the same stale game that I put forty-five long hours into.

A lot of people really liked this game. On many of the forums I visit no one had anything to say but great things about Blue Dragon. I found it to be mediocre at its best and frustrating and tedious at it worst. There's tons of great RPGs out there for the Xbox 360. This isn't one of them.

Squid.

P.S.

This is the song they play during every single boss battle in the game. Yes, that is the lead singer of Deep Purple. That song is three minutes and fifty seconds long. Sometimes boss battles will last twice that long. They just repeat it over and over until you win. It's practically torture.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 - Xbox 360

I hadn't planned on playing The Force Unleashed 2, but it just kind of fell into my lap. I was house sitting last week and had planned on playing Blue Dragon, when I noticed they owned Force Unleashed 2. I figured I might as well give it a shot while I had it instead of renting it.

I should have enjoyed The Force Unleashed 2. I really should have. They seemed to have changed some of the things that I disliked about the first. And despite its flaws I still really enjoyed the first Force Unleashed. Though for some reason I just couldn't get into The Force Unleashed 2... something just didn't click.

Even though they fixed a lot of the things I complained about in the first one, they still didn't fix them all the way. The annoying quicktime events? Still there, sure there are less of them, but they're still there and they're still annoying. The targeting? Still not what I want it to be. Occasionally you just can't target the stormtrooper you want to, and that can be a problem. Why you ask? Because The Force Unleashed 2 is significantly harder... kind of.

It's not that the game is harder, it's an artificial difficulty. The bad guys aren't more difficult to kill it's just that there's more of them, and their attacks are more annoying. Then they do things like mix bad guys, ones who can't be hurt by the force with ones that can't be hurt by lightsabers. So you're trying to attack some with lightsabers and others with force magic, and that's where the problem of targeting comes in. You're trying to do to much at once on a game that just doesn't handle like you want it to. It's not a horrible problem but overall it detracts from the game. You will end up dying a lot more then you did in the first one... but all of your deaths will feel kind of cheap.

The game is also still way too short. I started playing it at about three o' clock in the afternoon the day I got there, and with some major time not playing I still manged to finish it by morning of the next day. I would say there's maybe five to six hours of gameplay... padded gameplay. I would say at least an hour or so of that was spent on two boss fights: The Gorog and Darth Vader. Those two boss fights may be the most padded boss fights I've ever seen. It got to the point that they were so long I got bored. And on top of everything else for the most part they're long because they're confusing. You're vaguely told what you have to do and left to kind of fill in the blanks. On both fights I had to consult a walkthrough to see what the hell I was supposed to be doing. I'm okay with a game being short if there's a high amount of replayability or some sort of multiplayer. With The Force Unleashed 2 you get a really short game and that's it.

I really enjoyed the first Force Unleashed game. It's probably one of my favorite Star Wars games. Yet somehow they managed to take the second one, add things to make it better, and somehow end up making it not as much fun. Sure there were some things I enjoyed: I started off with all my powers, the rage meter thing was kind of fun, and the story was pretty good... but overall I just didn't have as much fun as I did with the first. I've played the first game four times, after I beat the first one on light side I instantly played it again to get the dark side ending. With the second one I had no desire to replay it, maybe sometime down the road but certainly not after I had just beat it. The Force Unleashed 2 isn't a bad game (though I would say it's not worth $60), but I didn't get as much enjoyment out of it as the first. I would say it's worth a rent, but I wouldn't expect a lot out of it.

Squid.

X-Men Arcade - Xbox Live Arcade

Sit down and let me tell you the story of how I came to own X-Men Arcade for XBL. I remember playing X-Men Arcade as a kid so when I heard that it was going to be released on XBL I was rather excited. Not wanting to jump right in and buy it I decided to pick up the demo and play it. So I started playing the demo, it wasn't really as fun as I remember, but I was somewhat enjoying myself. That's when I got an achievement. Actually a pop up said that if I owned the game I would have gotten an achievement. It also gave me the option of buying the game by pressing A. Well I was jumping around doing kicks at the time that the message popped up... pressing A. So it took me directly to the buy page. You have two options, confirm download or cancel. I'm not sure if you can cycle through back to the top or if I just thought I hit down and didn't, but either way I ended up hitting confirm download instead of cancel.

I now owned X-Men Arcade. Oh boy.

Now I won't say that it wasn't my fault, but it seemed just a little to easy to buy the game. Whatever, I owned it now. Not much I could do about it. So I decided to put my best foot forward, not care, and just play the game.

And that's exactly what I did. I sat down and played the game. It took me twenty-seven minutes to beat it. Twenty-seven minutes from start to finish. Oh well, there was always the multiplayer.

X-Men Arcade Multiplayer allows you to play the single player game with up to six different players. Which is interesting... except that in the next hour I beat the game another three times. In less than an hour and a half I had beat the game four times.

Over the next couple days I played the multi a few more times, beating the game another five or six times. It was kind of fun just to spend twenty minutes or so beating the game, but it's not like I'm going to be playing it a ton more over the next weeks or months. It's mostly just served as a twenty minute distraction.

Here's my problem. This game costs 800 MS points, that's $10 in real life money. That's quite a lot of money for a game that can be beaten in less than a half hour on the hardest setting. Even with the multiplayer this game is worth more along the lines of 400 MS points. Also the multiplayer is kind of borked. You get six players in a game and I guarantee you're going to get some slow down. In some places it becomes downright unplayable.

This game isn't at all difficult either. You're playing the X-Men Arcade game, but with unlimited quarters. Sure you can die, but the game never ends. Even on the hardest difficulty setting this game is incredibly easy. There's almost no challenge.

So should you buy it? I would say no unless there's certain conditions: On sale or 400 MS points? Sure, it's worth $5. Huge X-Men fan? Might be worth it for you. Have massive nostalgia for X-Men Arcade? Probably worth the $10. Overall though it's just not a good enough game to be worth $10.

Squid.

Assassin's Creed - Xbox 360

Assassin's Creed was the second Xbox 360 game I ever played. I owned Assassin's Creed before I even owned a 360. I bought it to play on my brother's recently purchased 360. I remember being blown away by the graphics of the opening cinematic. It was about that point that I realized I needed my own Xbox 360. Within the week I had purchased a 360 and a spiffy new HDTV to play it on.

People have always complained about Assassin's Creed. It was repetitive, the climbing was sometimes kind of wonky, you switched between Altaïr and Desmond way too much. I didn't see this. I loved every minute of the game. Was it repetitive? Sure, but it was fun as hell so I didn't care. Was the climbing sometimes wonky? I didn't know, up until this point I had never played a game where you could climb like that. Everything was so interesting and new that I didn't care if occasionally you made a misstep and fell. And I never felt that traveling between the two time periods did anything but add to the story.

That was my first playthrough. My second playthrough I had a change of opinion.

The first thing I noticed... how repetitive it actually was. Gone were the days that I was just happy assassinating people. After about the first two assassinations all I could think was "I have to do this again?" I went from helping every person I came across, climbing every vantage point I could find, to just doing what needed to be done to get the next assassination just so I could forward the game progress. It was the same thing over and over. It became a grind.

All of the sudden every other game I had played that had a climbing mechanic felt vastly superior. It wasn't just that occasionally Altaïr would fall from a ledge. It's that occasionally Altaïr would do the exact opposite of what I had just told him to do. It was like occasionally Altaïr would get a deathwish and decide he didn't feel the need to live any longer. "Want me to jump to that ladder? Screw you, I'm jumping down three stories into a crowd of angry guards!" The climbing wasn't horrible but felt somewhat antiquated and occasionally difficult to control. It wasn't just the climbing. On more then one occasion Altaïr would draw the wrong weapon (even though I knew I picked the right one) or would just refuse to draw his sword. I have no idea what the problem was but it quickly became annoying. Also once you learned to counter fights became way too easy. I could take on a hundred guards simply by blocking and countering and eventually kill them all. What's the fun in that?

I still don't have a major problem of the switching between Altaïr and Desmond. Occasionally it did feel a little out of place, or slowed down the action, but overall I still don't see why so many people hated this aspect of the game.

The game just didn't hold the same wonder that it did the first time around. It was the same game, I was just looking at it through different eyes. Long gone was ability to overlook some of the more glaring problems this game had. Towards the end I was playing the game to beat it, not because I was necessarily enjoying myself. The repetitiveness of the game finally got to me.

So what are my second thoughts on Assassin's Creed? Well, it was good... but not great. It certainly didn't feel as fresh and entertaining the second time around. However, that doesn't make it a bad game. It still find some enjoyment in it, and assassinating people can be very entertaining. If you haven't played it before I would say that you should give it a try, but I'm not sure that it's worth a second playthrough.

Squid.

The Saboteur - Xbox 360

One of the many little joys of gaming is finding a great game that you've never really heard of, or heard much about. It happened when I played Metro 2033 and it happened again when I played The Saboteur.

Up until the point that I played it I really knew very little about The Saboteur. I read its review in OXM, but I'll be damned if I can remember one thing they said about it. They only thing I remember from the review was that it was a sandbox game where you fought against the Nazis and that the areas you had liberated changed from black and white to color. I remember thinking I should play it, but I didn't really follow through by adding it to my Gamefly queue or anything. Months passed and then one day while shopping at Target I saw it on clearance for $4.75. That's a hard deal to pass up.

It took a couple of weeks after I bought it to finally get around to playing The Saboteur, but man am I glad I did. Simply put, The Saboteur is a really fun game. It may not be the most original game, but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy every bit of the thirty two hours I spent playing it.

I'm a boy. I like explosions. There are a lot of them in this game. Seriously, you spend a lot of your time sneaking into Nazi installations and blowing them the hell up. That is when you're not driving around in fancy cars, shooting Nazis, or climbing up buildings like Spider-Man.

Yes, you are Irish brogue Sean, a race car driver who also happens to know how to use pretty much every gun and explosive known to man as well as how to scale the sides of buildings as easily as walking up a flight of stairs. You are the Irish James Bond. So when Nazis kill you're friend you decide to wreck their shit up in Paris with the help of the resistance fighters you will meet along the way. You'll do quests for these people to help further their cause, everything from sneaking into buildings and blowing them up to assassinating Nazi higher ups.

The game gives you a fairly decent option of how to complete your missions. Feeling stealthy? You could always steal a Nazi uniform and plant explosives in key areas without them knowing... you also have the option of packing a car with explosives and driving it through the front gate. Just remember to bail out before you hit the building.

Is the story deep? No. It's your standard fare pretty much. Is it going to win any game of the year awards? Probably not. You know what though? At the end of the day if a game is fun I'll play it and enjoy it. Sometimes I don't want some intricate plot with twists and turns. Sometimes I don't want to be lead on a journey through a magical story that will change my life and blah, blah, blah. Occasionally? I just want to get in a game where I can cause a lot of destruction, drive fast cars, blow up buildings, kill Nazis and have a hell of a fun time doing it. And you know what? The Saboteur allowed me to do that and enjoy every minute of it.

Squid.

Fallout: New Vegas - Xbox 360

I rank Fallout 3 as one of my favorite games of all time. Single player wise it's probably the game that I've spent the most time on. I absolutely love it. When I heard there was a new Fallout game coming out I was excited like a fat kid in a candy store. I didn't want to wait, I wanted it now. I didn't care that it wasn't Bethesda making it, I just wanted more Fallout goodness.

Then there was what felt like an eternity of waiting. Seeing screenshots, teaser videos, magazine previews, all for a game that I wanted oh so badly. I soaked it up like a sponge, every time they gave up a morsel of information I ate it up. I don't remember the last time I remember being this excited about a game.

For some reason I had it in my head that it was coming out November 27th, I had that day mentally marked on the calendar. I was scrounging together money trying not to make my bank account weep... that's when I learned I was a week off, it was actually coming out November 19th. This is like learning as a kid that Christmas is going to be on the 18th this year. I was pumped, I was getting the game earlier then expected.

Ahhh the intro. The intro to the Fallout games are absolutely phenomenal, Ron Perlman sets the mood for the undertaking you're about to endure. If Fallout 3 was about what happens to the land after the nuclear strike, Fallout: New Vegas is about what happens to the people. You'll be constantly trying to figure out what side you're on, who you'll betray, who you'll fight for and who you will kill. Fallout New Vegas is about choices. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, and a lot of times they're ambiguous.

One of the things that surprised me the most about Fallout: New Vegas is the decisions. In almost every game I've ever played that gives you a choice you know how it will affect the outcome. The choice is between killing an orphan and her puppy or giving her a new mommy and daddy... you know which one is good, and which one is evil. You know how it will affect you. You don't expect to kill an orphan and puppy and be revered by the people. Every game I've ever played with moral decisions pretty much gives it to you in black and white. Right and wrong, good and bad. Fallout: New Vegas is all gray for the most part. Most of the decisions I made I wasn't really sure how they were going to affect me. I didn't know if I was making a right or wrong decision, but I knew I had to make some decision. Everything was in shades of gray. Sure Caesar was evil, but was the NCR good? Who could I trust? Could I trust anyone? To this day I'm not sure if I made the right decisions. My decisions ended up being good, but could they have been better? Should I have made different decisions along the way? Should I have made different allegiances?

Fallout: New Vegas feels almost exactly like Fallout 3. Same game, different setting. Sure there are definitely some differences, mostly the way certain things are handled and the tone of the game in certain parts, but for the most part it is very similar. If you liked Fallout 3, you will like Fallout: New Vegas. It pretty much feels like a 100+ hour expansion pack.

One thing I would like to talk about is the bugs. From the get go this game has been plagued with bugs... apparently. Honestly I only came across one bug the entire 102 hours I played the game. Occasionally my gun would go all wonky, thinking I was standing up when I was actually crouching, this would cause my gun to show up at the top of my screen instead of the middle. Other then that? I didn't run into one other bug. I know a lot of people did, I however did not. Just sayin'.

Did I enjoy Fallout: New Vegas as much as much as Fallout 3? No. I enjoyed it greatly but Fallout 3 I think is still the better game, from what I can tell this is not the popular opinion. A lot of people I've talked to have actually said they prefer Fallout: New Vegas to Fallout 3. Overall I'm confident that if you like one, you'll like the other.

Fallout: New Vegas is a very good game. Compared to Fallout 3 and in its own right. It kept me gripped for 102 hours and I assume that at some point in time I'll be playing it again with different choices. It is a very good game, and it's one of the first games I've played where the choices are not black and white. Go out and get Fallout: New Vegas, it's definitely worth your time and money.

Squid.

Clive Barker's Jericho - Xbox 360

Woopsie doodle, kind of forgot to review this game when I beat it. Well, here it is:

In my last review for Red Dead Redemption I talked about what makes a good game, not wanting a game to end. Being so engrossed in the story that you just want to keep going. So what's the opposite of that? Pretty much Clive Barker's Jericho. This is a game I wanted to end. A game that I wish would end. How long is the game? I've heard anywhere from five to ten hours. How long did it feel? Like a goddamn eternity.

In case you can't read between the lines, I absolutely hated Clive Barker's Jericho. I paid $7 for it new, and frankly I wish I could have my $7 back.

I remember putting the game in and the first thing I thought was "Oh, this must have been a launch title." The graphics weren't horrible, but occasionally I noticed that the characters limbs looked like they were made out of 2x4s. They were occasionally incredibly blocky... but it's understandable, being released in 2005... wait, this game was released in late 2007? If this game had been released in 2005 I would say it had decent-ish graphic. In 2007? Some of the graphics are absolutely shittacular. Like I said, not all, but some. It's a here and there problem, not an overall problem.

The AI on the other hand? That's an overall problem. My biggest complaint about the game is probably the AI. Little back story before I get into it.

You're a member of a paranormal team in charge of keeping the firstborn in line. What's the firstborn? It's a long story. Basically the antagonist. You're team consists of six members, all who have different paranormal skills. You can switch between each of these members and use their skills to fight various bad guys.

Each one of these skills comes in handy during different battles, also despite the fact that you have enough guns to take on a small army your skills are almost always superior... and that's where the AI problems start.

A lot of times they're using their guns, even if their powers are charged. I don't know how often every single one of my teammates was going full out with their guns... that is when they weren't getting absolutely slaughtered. My teammates were essentially cannon fodder. You can revive your teammates as long as you are alive, and for the most part anytime their was a firefight I spent a good portion trying to revive most if not all of my team. They would just run towards anything shooting them. There are bad guys who blow up after they're dead, several times all of my teammates would die because they would rush these enemies. The AI was absolutely awful. I can't say that enough.

There were so many things wrong with this game. The AI, the graphics, the voice acting, and frustratingly difficult parts, the awful ending, the fact that it's billed as a horror game but really lacked on the whole "horror" part, and I could go on and on... It's just a bad game. I honestly can't think of one redeeming quality. How do you review a game like that?

At the end of the day I beat the game and thought "I hope I never have to play this game again." That's a bad sign for any video game. Clive Barker's Jericho wasn't enjoyable to me, from the start to the end felt like a chore. I don't think I ever really enjoyed it. I played it to beat it, and I didn't really have much if any fun. If they're handing this game out for free I would say skip it, it's not even worth free. Skip it.

Squid.

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.