DarkStar One: Broken Alliance - Xbox 360

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Coming up next...

I'm going to try something a little different.

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Chrono Trigger - Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Chrono Trigger - Super Nintendo

What can you say about Chrono Trigger? Phenomenal game, possibly one of the best RPGs for the Super Nintendo. Great gameplay and amazing soundtrack.

Though I don't know if I ever beat it. About five years ago I broke out my Game Genie and decided to essentially give myself God mode to beat some of the games I had never gotten around to finishing. I just don't remember if I did this with Chrono Trigger. As far as I know I didn't.

Either way, it's going to be fun to finally beat this game.

Squid.

Shadow of the Colossus - Review

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

In a simple answer: no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Shadow of the Colossus - Playstation 2

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II - Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.