Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy - Xbox 360

I've always said I loved the Lego games. The first one I played was the Lego Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and was hooked. Here's the kind of interesting thing: I realized that up until I played the original trilogy game I had only played two of the Lego games. Star Wars 1-3 and Lego Indiana Jones. Star Wars 1-3 I thoroughly enjoyed and Indiana Jones I hated with a passion. So basically my love of the Lego games was based off of enjoying one game and hating another... and yet I would have said I loved the Lego games.

When I started playing Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy I went into it thinking I enjoyed the Lego games. You know what I found out? I really don't. When I originally played Star Wars 1-3 I believe I truly enjoyed it. However every Lego game after that has felt exactly the same, and every thing I've disliked about the Lego games just gets transfered over to the next.

When I have to trudge through a Star Wars game you know something is wrong. I love Star Wars, I love everything about Star Wars. Hell, I actually enjoyed the prequels to an extent, but you know what? It was a chore to play Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy. By the end I just wanted it to be over. Where do I even start?

The AI? The AI was absolute shit. This doesn't really surprise me and frankly I don't expect the game to have stellar AI. Here's the problem though. You have AI teammates. Teammates that I expect to at the very least SHOOT bad guys... and they don't. I once had three AI teammates stand there and watch stormtroopers kill me. They didn't do anything, they just watched. This wasn't an isolated incident. It happened all the goddamn time. Your teammates do absolutely nothing while they're being shot or you're being shot. Occasionally they fight back but for the most part they just die. This wouldn't be so bad except occasionally you have to build things from destroyed Lego blocks. Every time you get shot you have to start over. Bad guys almost always target you. Bad guys respawn infinitely. See the problem? For the most part I just tried to make a barrier with my teammates so at least they would get shot so I could build things. And forget if you need the AI to actually do something, press something, or help you out in some way. That was just a practice in frustration. The AI in this game is beyond terrible.

Jedis are absolute bad asses... in every other Star Wars game. In this game? I would take a blaster over a light saber any day of the week. If there was an option between a Jedi and some sort of generic trooper with a blaster you can bet I'm going with the trooper. The light saber is the most ineffective weapon in the entire game. Makes total sense, right?

Only Bounty Hunters can open this door. Get used to seeing that phrase. Littered throughout the game are doors that only bounty hunters can open. What does that mean? It means that once you beat the level you have to re-beat at least part of the level with a bounty hunter character (which you may or may not have unlocked somewhere in the game) just so you can open that door and see what's behind it. If the game was a little better I might have wanted to try it, but considering for the most part it was a trudge to beat the level the first time I rarely wanted to replay the level with a different character.

It's dull and repetitive. Basically I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over just in different locations. There seemed to be absolutely no variety in the game. Nothing surprised me. Mostly I just killed some guys, found some puzzle pieces, built something, moved on to the next screen. Over and over and over again. That's what I felt like I was doing all six hours I played the game. Occasionally you would get a flying level or something that was a bit different, but overall it was incredibly repetitive.

The flying levels. Sure they broke up some of the repetitiveness, but here's the problem: they're horrible. Remember in Empire Strikes Back where Luke had to attach a rope from his A-Wing to a boulder and then crash the boulder into a wall blocking his path, but unfortunately the boulder was insanely difficult to control and also he had to kill 3 AT-ATs, 6 AT-STs, and 8 Imperial Probe Droids before he could that? Me either, but you'll sure do a lot of that kind of thing while on the flying levels! The ships control like absolute shit, you're tasked to do repetitive shit that just feels like padding the games length, and overall you just want to flying levels to end. So yeah, they break up the repetitiveness but you have to deal with all that.

The camera. Yeah, the camera is bad in a platformer. Shocking, I know.

The save points or lack thereof. This has been one of my major complaints about the Lego games. Their save point system is absolutely shit. You save when you beat a level... with no middle checkpoints of anything of that nature. You can save when you beat a level, that's it. These levels may take 45 minutes, it may take an hour. Need to turn your system off before that? Have fun completing the level all over again. Listen, we're no longer playing on the SNES or something with limited memory for saves. You can give us more then one save every 45 minutes. The one reason I've heard against save anywhere is that it makes games easier (which is complete BS, it generally makes games less frustrating, not easier) but with the Lego games you're literally playing a game where you can't fucking die. It doesn't get much easier then that. Give us a save anywhere feature. I was playing a level in Return of the Jedi when I realized I needed to get ready and go out for the night. I needed to leave in 15 minutes and just didn't have time to finish up the level. Rather then leave my Xbox on for the next five hours or so doing nothing I opted to turn it off. Guess what I had to do the next day? Beat that entire level over again because I couldn't just save. Awesome. The save system in the Lego games is absolute shit. Each level is broken up in two or three mini levels, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to save at the end of each of those mini levels if you're not going to give us a save anywhere feature.

All of the Lego games feel exactly the same. They feel like you just changed the backgrounds a bit and went from Lego Star Wars to Lego Indiana Jones or to Lego Batman. They all feel like the exact same game with the exact same flaws. That's why I enjoyed the first Lego Star Wars game, at that point it was new to me. The humor was new, the feel was new, it was new... but after playing two more games that felt exactly the same with the exact same flaws? I've had enough. Until there's a major overhaul with the Lego Games I might has well just not play them because I already have.

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.

Shadow Complex - Xbox Live Arcade

Yep, yet another XBLA game. About a year ago I bought Shadow Complex knowing almost nothing about it. I remember reading a review for it and hearing about its similarities (gameplay wise) to Metroid on NES. I didn't think much about it until a couple months later when I saw it on sale for half off. What the hell, it looked fun so I picked it up... and then proceeded to not play it for a year or so.

I was looking for a game last week and nothing was really peaking my interest. So I decided to look through my Arcade games. Shadow Complex, eh, why not.

The first half hour or so started out badly for me. I just couldn't get into the game. The aiming felt off, the controls felt a little awkward, and I wanted to see more of the screen... I wanted a more widescreen feel. A little more left and right.

Thankfully I continued playing because suddenly it all came together. It all made sense to me. Suddenly I was transported back to the fun I was having playing that NES classic so many years ago. I understood why they were often compared to each other. It feels like Metroid. Sure you can draw the obvious conclusion that it's because it has same type of gameplay, but it's more then this. It's the exploring. It's the realization that you can now open a door or enter a new area because of this brand new power up you just got.

Shadow Complex drew me in. I didn't want to just play this game. I wanted to play it and see everything. I wanted to see every secret room, I wanted to open every locked door, I wanted to play all of this game.

I can tell a game is good when I become a completionist. When I want to play all of a game I know it's a good game. There's a lot of games that are very good but that I don't feel like finding and doing everything. When you don't really want a game to end you know that it's a step up from the rest. That's Shadow Complex.

I had this game for a year at least and never bothered to play it. This is a damn shame. I spent twelve hours playing and beating Shadow Complex and I have to say it was an incredibly good time.

Go out and buy Shadow Complex. Especially if you enjoyed Metroid as a kid. Overall it's just a really fun game. It's a game you want to play. A game that you want to find everything. A game that knows you want to explore so it lets you. Seriously, do yourself a favor and don't miss out on this one.

Squid.

Call of Duty: Black Ops - Xbox 360

You would have a harder time getting a bad review of a Call of Duty game out of me then you would the president of Activision. Simply stated, I love the Call of Duty games. Well, the newer ones. Not that I don't enjoy the WW2 CoD games but I absolutely love the modern Call of Duty games. I still rank Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as probably one of, if not the best first person shooters of all time.

So what does Black Ops bring to the table? A lot. New environment, a much different storyline then we are used to, and a whole lot of ass kickery that makes the Call of Duty games so Goddamn great.

Sure, modern times is a great time period with a lot of awesome technology but we're seeing more and more of it now. It's in danger of becoming stale. So Black Ops is set during the beginning of the cold war area. You'll be in places from Russia to Vietnam. You'll drive boats, fly helicopters, and repel off of mountains. From blowing up bad guys, to slitting throats, to zip lining through a window to save a hostage. Call of Duty kicks up the awesomeness notch with Black Ops.

Black Ops is like the other Call of Duty games, short one player campaign but chalk full of so much damn awesome and testosterone (sadly the word "Test-awesome-rone" hasn't been picked up in the common vernacular)that you just don't care. Sure it's seven to ten hours long, but that seven to ten hours is some of the most on the edge of your seat, ass kicking time you can possibly have. It's exactly what you would expect from a Call of Duty game.

Then you have the multiplayer. Say goodbye to your wife and family because you're going to be gone for a while. Remember the multiplayer you loved in CoD 4 and Modern Warfare 2? Well it's back, and in my opinion better than ever. The game may only be seven to ten hours long, but then I played another forty hours(and still counting)of multiplayer. CoD's multiplayer is possibly the most addicting thing I've played in a long time. I don't know how many times I said I would play just one more game only to find myself still playing an hour later. It's fun, it's awesome, it's worth the price of the game alone.

Go out and buy Call of Duty: Black Ops, trust me, you won't regret it.

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.

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.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - Review

I love Star Wars. LOVE Star Wars. Ever since I was a kid I've had a fascination with Star Wars and everything related to Star Wars. I have a rather large Star Wars collectibles collection, I've seen the movies countless of times, I've read some of the extended universe books, hell I loved Star Wars Galaxies. I saw the "special edition" original trilogy when it was in the theater even though it was awful. I saw The Phantom Menace opening night and seven more times while it was in the theater. What I'm getting at is that I love Star Wars. So having me review a Star Wars game reminds me kind of this Penny Arcade comic.

I greatly enjoyed The Force Unleashed. Does it have it's flaws? Yes, certainly... but other then a few minor things it is in my opinion what a Star Wars game should be. When I harness the force in a video game I want to feel powerful. I want to be able to force throw people across the screen, I want to be able force lightning stormtroopers and then throw my lightsaber at their electrocuting lifeless bodies. In The Force Unleashed, I can do that... and so much more.

This playthrough of The Force Unleashed will be my fourth, why is that? Well one because it's an awesome game and two because it's an extremely short game. Short but sweet. You're looking at about six to seven hours of gameplay. After you're done though you're most likely going to want to pick it up and beat it again. I kid you not. The first time I played it I beat it to get a certain ending, I then immediately started over and beat it for the other ending. After that? Well I turned on all of the cheats and beat it as a God. Let me tell you how awesome it is to be able to pull a TIE Fighter out of the air and throw it at someone. The best thing about that? That wasn't some cheat code I had to enter... you can do that normally in the game. That's right, you can toss a goddamn TIE fighter at someone.

The Force Unleashed is set in the time between the prequels and the original trilogy. Order 66 has been executed and you're Darth Vader's new secret Padawan, in charge of hunting down Jedi as well as a plot to kill the emperor and rule side by side with Darth Vader.

When I play almost any game that has a morality choice I almost always go with the good side. I'm not sure why, I always have. Fable? Good guy. Fallout 3? Choir boy. Star Wars Galaxies? Fighting the dirty imperials with my rebel friends. I always choose the good side. Well with The Force Unleashed I got to play from the other point of view... and let me tell you, it felt good. There's something interesting playing as a complete psychopath of a Jedi. There's something very enjoyable about force lifting a jawa to the top of the screen and just letting go, thus solving the eternal question of "Can jawas fly?" (Hint: they can't.) I couldn't get enough of throwing a stormtrooper through a spaceships window and watching as him and all of his buddies get sucked out into the vacuum of space.

As I mentioned before The Force Unleashed does have its flaws.

Like I said, it's short. If I had paid $60 for it this might have mattered, but I picked it up for $20 and have played it four times now. So even though it's a very short game it appears to have a rather high replayability factor.

Quicktime Events. If there was something I could banish from the gaming world forever it would probably be quick time events. That being said, I didn't mind them all that much in The Force Unleashed. They only appeared when you were about to kill really large enemies or bosses. Taking down a huge rancor with some awesome moves, but having to do it through a QTE? I can deal with that.

Combat can be kind of difficult at times. Occasionally my targeting was kind of wonky. Instead of using force lighting on the guy in front of you it might go just to the side of him, or a guy behind him. If you pay attention and try not to do things to quickly this usually isn't a problem, you just have to pay attention to what you're targeting. Overall it's a very small gripe about the game.

The Force Unleashed is probably one of my favorite Star Wars games. As I said, to me it's what a Star Wars game should feel like. If you're a fan of Star Wars (and how could you not be?) I would highly suggest it. Here's a tip though, if you play it through once and aren't a huge fan? Play it a second time, preferably with cheat codes. Having all of the force powers and being all powerful in this game is one of the most fun gaming experiences I've had.

Squid.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - Xbox360

I'm a huge Star Wars geek, shocking I know, I love everything about Star Wars. I recently sat down and in two days watched Star Wars Episodes I through VI and loved every minute of it. I then remembered that The Force Unleashed tied the two trilogies together... but I couldn't remember how.

So now it's time to sit down and get my geek on and force push everything in my way... hopefully through windows and into outer space.

Squid.

Golden Axe Warrior - Review

Legend of Golden Axe... err... Golden Axe Zelda... umm... Golden Axe Warrior. That's what I played. Sorry, I got confused. Let me get this out straight off the bat: I'm not really sure how Sega didn't get sued for this one. This is about the closest you can get to playing Legend of Zelda on the NES without actually playing Legend of Zelda.

Golden Axe Warrior is hard. Very hard. Like if you started off Legend of Zelda with one heart instead of three kind of hard. There's two ways to regain health in Golden Axe Warrior, staying at inns or the occasional dropped food from monsters. Let me tell you, the first three or so hours seemed like all I was doing was clearing a screen and then running to the nearest inn only to do this over and over again. When you have three hearts and have to kill five to six enemies who can take off a third of your health just by touching you... not easy.

After beating the first few dungeons you'll get more hearts, making the game a little bit easier. Don't get me wrong, the game is never a cakewalk but with equipment and health the game does become a tad easier.

Once I got past the first few hours the game really picked up. Golden Axe Warrior is fun. Is it as fun as Legend of Zelda? No, probably not, but I would say that it's certainly in the running. At the end of the day though I had a good time beating it, even if there were some moments of frustration. It's just unfortunate that it's so difficult to distance it from Legend of Zelda, the games share a lot of similarities. Even so, Golden Axe Warrior is a fun game.

Here's the deal, if you played Legend of Zelda and enjoyed it you will most likely enjoy Golden Axe Warrior. Sure it's a little bit more difficult but it's bigger and also has a few interesting things that Legend of Zelda didn't. Golden Axe Warrior is essentially what Legend of Zelda would have been if it had been released four years later. Why not give it a shot?

Squid.