Medal of Honor - Xbox 360

I absolutely love the Call of Duty franchise (as you'll find out in my next couple reviews). When I saw the new Medal of Honor in OXM a while back it struck me as a CoD clone. I had no problems with this, mostly because I sometimes enjoy the clones more then the original (see my Saints Row review). The release of Medal of Honor came and went, and I didn't really notice it's reviews so I wasn't sure how good or bad it was. It mostly flew under my radar.

About a month ago Medal of Honor went on sale for $10 on Amazon. My stance is that I'll try any game for $10... how bad could it be? While that has bit me in the ass a few times I generally stick by it. So I picked up Medal of Honor and I have to admit I was kind of excited about it.

Medal of Honor is a flat out Call of Duty clone. It might as well be called Medal of Honor: Call of Duty. I was expecting as much, but still it was pretty much a carbon copy of Call of Duty... but something was off. It didn't have the slick feel that Call of Duty has. It was like if Call of Duty was suddenly made by another developer, a developer who just wasn't up to par with Treyarch/Infinity Ward.

It's things like the AI being a bit wonky. Not overall horrible but just a little bit kooky here and there. Occasionally my AI teammates would just stand there staring at the enemies while they sat and shot me. It didn't happen always, but it happened just enough for me to notice it was happening. Or when you have two guys to snipe and your AI teammate says he'll take the one on the left... most the time I ended up killing both of them because the AI teammate was just too slow. Little things like that.

The game was fun, I enjoyed it. For $10 I got about five and half hours of enjoyment out of it. It wasn't on the same level as the Call of Duty series, but it did come close. At the end of the day I'll probably end up playing it again because I did have fun. If they release another Medal of Honor game in the same vein I'll probably also pick that up as well.

Medal of Honor is a slightly less polished Call of Duty game. It has the same feel, the same ambiance, and the same fast paced nature. It's not as good as the CoD franchise but it's certainly worth taking a look at.

Squid.

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.

Crystalis - Nintendo

If you asked me my ten favorite games of all time Crystalis would definitely be on the list. It would most likely make it in the top five. Probably my favorite NES game of all time, and certainly the one that I remember the most. I remember this game vividly from my childhood, the graphics, the music, the gameplay, everything about this game brings a rush of nostalgia to me.

Here's the thing though, I've never actually beat Crystalis. I don't know how many times I've played Crystalis before, I would guess at least five, but I've never been able to make it all the way through. One of the reasons I started this blog was because about 85% of the games I played up until about three years ago I've never actually beat. I would start a game, then something new and shiny would come along and I would put down the old to usher in the new. That's why I wanted to go through my old games, to actually beat some of these games that I never made it through.

I hadn't planned on playing Crystalis yet, I was holding off on some of my favorite games. Figured I would go through the ones I hadn't really given a chance to. Then I joined a discussion about Nintendo games that you wish were longer, there were quite a few people saying Crystalis. They were mentioning that it was only about five hours long. This made no sense to me, I guessed it was at least a twenty hour game. I remember spending a ton of time as a kid playing this game. I wondered if it really was a five hour game, had all this time I not finished a game that could probably be done in one sitting?

I sat down with Crystalis and it just made me smile. I knew every note of music, I knew pretty much everything people in the first town would say to me, I knew the map like the back of my hand. I played for a good four hours the first night... and that's when I noticed something weird. In those first four hours I had played through a lot of the game that I remember... and the second night when I played again for about another three hours? I made it through to where I had stopped the last time I played the game. The next time I played the game? Well, I beat the game. This game that I had played at least five time since 1990 that I had never managed to beat was actually about eight hours long. Here's the funny part: Crystalis has two save data slots. I used one and left the old save alone, after I beat the game I loaded up that old save to see where I had quit in the game last time. Turns out on that save I was only about 15 minutes to a half hour away from finishing the game. If I had stuck with it for another half hour it wouldn't have taken me twenty one years to finally beat this game.

Crystalis is a really good game, and I don't think that's nostalgia talking. It's a great action RPG with a decent story. It's one of those underrated gems that if you like these types a games and haven't played it before you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It's one of those games I wish had become a series, or at least had a sequel. Do yourself a favor and find and play Crystalis.

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.

Simpsons Hit & Run - Gamecube

I'm not sure why but for the most part video games based off of The Simpsons are pretty bad. Sure there's a couple that are okay, but overall they're not great. Maybe it's because most video games based off of TV shows/movies tend to be bad, but I was always kind of disappointed that there wasn't a really good Simpsons game.

About five or six years ago I picked up Simpsons Hit & Run for the PC and thought "This is the game I've been wanting!" It was funny, there was a ton of references sprinkled throughout, it had the voice actors doing all the lines, and it was a pretty fun little sand box game.

I would play it for a bit and then would forget about it. Then a year or so later I would remember how much fun I had playing it and would start it up again. I would get to about the third level and then find some other game that interested me more and start playing it. I never managed to make it past the third level.

Well one day I was sitting around and thought "I should see if I can get Simpsons Hit & Run on some console I have." What would you know, Amazon had it for Gamecube for $4. Done.

I have to admit, I was pretty excited about playing Simpsons Hit & Run, and really it was everything I remember. There were actually some pretty funny lines, I did laugh out loud at one point. There are tons of hidden little references throughout the game, like head into the Kwik-E-Mart and you'll see Frostillicus in the freezer. There's a lot of little in jokes if you pay attention. I was having a pretty good time, I finally made it to the third level and realized that I had only played a bit of it, from here on it was going to be new to me.

After the third level Simpsons Hit & Run morphed into some sort of horrid beast from the dark depths of hell. I went from describing the game as fun to "possibly the most frustrating game I have ever played." That's no lie, I honestly cannot remember a game that so thoroughly frustrated me. There were times I'm pretty sure I was just yelling a string of expletives at my TV.

Up to level three it wasn't that difficult. There were timed missions but nothing to hard. After level three it seemed like EVERY mission was timed, also you never got enough time. The game worked on the idea that you needed EXACTLY 47 seconds to do a mission, so they would give you 45 seconds. Hey you have a spare 2 seconds, what are you complaining about! As long as you don't crash, slow down, or do anything that may eat up your precious 2 seconds you're fine. Also when I say you needed 45 seconds that's only if you know all of the shortcuts. If you don't you're going to need about 60 seconds... better know those shortcuts! I'm not kidding. There were missions that I did in a fast car, didn't crash, took all of the shortcuts, and overall drove incredibly well... and still ran out of time. This wasn't an occasional problem, this was on about 90% of the missions after level three. I would say on average I probably would fail a mission at least once, but more likely two or three times. If it was because I was doing poorly, I can understand it... mostly though it was just because you had a VERY limited amount of time and any little thing that screwed that up made you fail the mission.

The missions are what killed Simpsons Hit & Run. As I've said I hate timed anything in video games and think they shouldn't be in them. Almost all the missions in Simpsons Hit & Run are timed and done horribly. So much to the point where you become incredibly frustrated and want to break the game in as many pieces as possible. It's lucky it survived.

Squid.

Dead Nation - PS3

So after the whole "Awww crap! Our servers have been haxored!" debacle that happened with the PS3 they gave away two free games. Seemed like a good deal to me since it didn't effect me at all. I think it made it so I had to watch Netflix on my Xbox360 and that's about it. I couldn't really decide which games I wanted, it came down to Little Big Planet, Dead Nation and InFamous. Since my brother was getting InFamous and I figured I could play over at his house I decided to go with Dead Nation, and quite frankly I'm glad that I did.

I've always enjoyed top down shooters since probably I first played Smash TV on SNES. I think they're a very under-appreciated genre. When done well I think they're a really good, brainless time. And that's exactly what Dead Nation is. It's not going to win awards for writing but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy pretty much every minute I played of it.

One of my major complaints about zombie games is that there are not enough zombies. With Dead Nation there was no problem on that front. When you first start playing there's a lot of zombies, somewhere around level three you get more zombies then you can handle. Making it this frantic, fun filled race to the checkpoint. Much like Left 4 Dead (which this game borrows quiet a bit from) you get a variety of different zombies including the fat zombies, the fast zombies, the jumping zombies, the hulking zombies and your run of the mill zombies. There's a LOT of zombies. Everywhere. You will spend every single level running from zombies, trying to get the horde off of you and trying to make it to the end of the level alive. It's just a damn good time.

Dead Nation is $15, has a ton of replayability, is fairly long (I would say probably a good 10+ hours), and overall is just really, really fun. If you have PS3 and didn't pick this up as your "we're sorry!" game I highly suggest you buy it.

Squid.

Minecraft and Terraria - PC

Yeah, we're going to go with a double feature here.

I had been hearing about Terraria for quite some time, mostly about how it was this awesome 2D Minecraft clone. After watching some videos, seeing some screenshots I decided to buy it. Everyone had said how awesome it was, always comparing it to Minecraft... here's the thing though, I had never actually played Minecraft. My brother had bought it a while back and would talk about how great it was, but I just never got around to playing it.

So I started playing Terraria and I was immediately hooked. In the first week I owned it I think I put twenty or so hours into it. There was just so much to explore, digging and digging and digging, finding caves, finding ore, making bigger and better gear. This was a game about exploring. I had an incredibly extensive set of tunnels under my spawn point, so much so that occasionally I would die and have absolutely no idea on how to get back to where I was. I eventually had to start putting up signs so I knew where I was.

It was so odd to me, I realized that pretty much all I was doing while I was playing Terraria was digging. Digging into tunnels, digging for ore, digging to go lower and lower into the world. Digging. But you know what? I was having a blast doing it. If you had told me that I would be playing a game that was essentially me digging AND having a great time doing it, I'm not sure I would have believed you. The last game whose central theme was digging that enjoyed this much was Dig Dug... and that was on the Commodore 64. But here were are. Digging and having a good time doing it.

I was still hearing about how Terraria was a Minecraft clone. How Minecraft was better, how Terraria was just a rip off. I thought "Well, I enjoy Terria... maybe I should give Minecraft a try".

So I bought Minecraft.

Before I get into that let me say something. I don't see Terraria as a Minecraft clone. At least in a certain sense. Yes, you have a pick axe and a ton of other things that are in Minecraft, it's greatly influenced by it... you can tell. I would even give you that it's gameplay mechanics are a rip off of Minecraft, but in my opinion they're very, very different games.

Terraria is a game about exploring. Digging down, finding new tunnels, finding new worlds. Minecraft is about building, building houses, building villages, building... well pretty much anything you want. But there's very little exploring in Minecraft, in fact exploring can be very difficult. There's very little building in Terraria, once you've built a house to get in the merchants there really no reason to continue building as far as I can tell. So in my opinion they're very similar games but with very different end games.

So after buying Minecraft I logged on to a multiplayer server that my brother's friend hosts. I was immediately in awe of some of the things that were built. Huge buildings, giant railway systems, a giant central village. It was actually kind of amazing. Not really wanting to get in their way I decided to make my house far away from town, if my Terraria world was big, Minecraft was enormous. The world was overwhelmingly big. I finally found a place for my house... but I had no idea where I was. I actually died and wasn't sure if I could find my way back to my new house.

So I built a grand house to live in. Then I started to mine, after I could make better tools I started to make an incredibly long tunnel to my brother's house so that if I died and couldn't find my way back I could just go to my brothers house and follow the tunnel back to my own house. So then what? Well my brother was trying to catch a squid so I made him a railway so he could get it back to his aquarium. Why not build a GIANT roller coaster near my house? So I did that. Well parts of it are kind of boring, maybe I could make it go through a diorama that shows the different worlds of Minecraft. Well that's done... now what? A pirate ship, a floating island castle, a farm, an enormous castle. I built them all. If you can think it up, you can build it in Minecraft. Seriously, just look at some of the amazing things people have built.

Minecraft is like a giant game of Legos. It's like being ten again and having pretty much unlimited Legos. Minecraft is a game about creativity. It's a game about thinking of something and making it. It's a game where you'll find yourself going "Oh! I should make that!" and once you're done with that you'll think "Making that would be awesome!" and before you know it ten hours has passed. It's incredibly addictive and fun.

So which game would I suggest? Both. They're both amazing games, and they're both fun in entirely different ways. They both get updates that add new and interesting things to the games, and they both continue to get better and better. Spend the $30, get them both and enjoy them both. They're definitely worth the money and you won't regret it.

Squid.

Condemned: Criminal Origins - Xbox 360

Condemned: Criminal Origins was kind of a blast from the past for me. Condemned was the first Xbox 360 game I ever owned, and the first Xbox 360 game I ever beat.

My brother had just bought an Xbox 360 bundle with Kung Fu Panda and Lego Indiana Jones. Right after he bought it I house sat for him for a week. Neither of those games really appealed to me so I headed over to Game Stop to see if I could find something I wanted to play. At this point in time I didn't own an Xbox 360 so I didn't really want something very expensive, I was looking for something in the 10$ or so range. That's when I found Condemned, it looked fun, the premise sounded pretty awesome, and I love scary games, so I picked it up.

I am glad I did. Condemned is an awesome game. From pretty much start to finish I loved it. It was one of those games where I sat down and just played, and played, and played, losing track of time. I think I beat it about a day or two after buying it.

Condemned is in my top probably five scariest games I've played. The first time a crazy guy jumps out of the shadows behind you to beat your skull in with a pipe will scare the hell out of you. In most games they give you a flashlight that you can only leave on for a small amount of time before your batteries die and have to recharge... in Condemened your flashlight is always on. Constantly. And trust me, you'll be thankful for that. The atmosphere of the game is just creepy. It works incredibly well.

I wasn't too sure about an entire game based on melee combat (there's a few guns scattered around the game, but not many). Most FPS games have kind of horrible melee combat, but Condemned makes it work. I think this makes the game even more intense. When you see someone you can't just shoot him from a distance, you have to get pretty much right up next to him to get within range for your found weapons (pipes, 2x4, axes, etc.)

Overall, Condemned is a great game. There's a lot of things about this game that if they hadn't worked would have doomed the game, but everything seems to come together perfectly. For a launch title it was a surprisingly solid game. Really a must play if you like scary games and want something different from the FPS genre.

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.

Snoopy Flying Ace - Xbox Live Arcade

If you ever told me I would really enjoy a video game based off of the Peanuts cartoon strip I would have probably called you crazy... there are just some things that I wouldn't think would lend themselves well to the medium. Turns out I was wrong. Though I think if you had told me the Peanuts game I was going to enjoy was going to be a World War I flying game I probably would have tilted my head the same way a dog does when you tell it something.

A while back my brother bought Snoopy Flying Ace, but I never really played it. I heard it was fun but it didn't really interest me all that much. Then XBLA had a huge sale and Snoopy Flying Ace was dropped to 400MS points. It's hard for me to turn down a $5 game, so I bought it.

Snoopy Flying Ace is just cartoony fun. It's what you expect from a dogfight sim based off of Peanuts. The single player isn't a huge long experience, but it is fun. It's just difficult enough to not be frustrating and just easy enough to just be fun. I spent a couple hours going through the campaign one weekend and had a good time doing it. I never made it to the multiplayer (I was sans internet at the time) but if it's as fun as the single player I can see sinking quite a few hours into it.

Snoopy Flying Ace is totally worth the $5 I paid and is certainly worth the $10 it normally is. If you want a kind of cartoony flying/dogfight game it's definitely worth checking out.

Squid.

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.

Doom II - Xbox Live Arcade

We all played Doom 2. If you're over the age of about 25 there's a good chance you spent many hours killing demons from hell. The Doom series wasn't the original first person shooter, but it was definitely the game that skyrocketed the series to what it is today. Everyone played Doom. Hell, my dad has beat Doom.

I picked up Doom 2 on XBLA a while back, not really sure what to expect. I hadn't played Doom 2 in quite some time and a lot of computer games from that time have not aged well. Blocky graphics, clunky controls, and you know how in modern games you can aim up and down? Not in Doom 2, bitches. I was very curious to see how a game like that would transfer over to the 360.

The answer? Incredibly well. Shockingly well. The last time I played Doom 2 the one major complaint I had with it was the control scheme. These were the days before WASD, you had to use the arrow keys. As odd as it seems this is incredibly awkward, especially after years of using WASD, but with the controller this is a thing of the past. The controls are great, I couldn't have asked for a better control scheme.

You know what else I found out? Doom 2 is still very fun. The later levels somewhat dragged on a bit, but overall Doom 2 is still a blast. It's nice to go back to a time in FPS games where there was a paper thin plot but a shitload of bad guys for you to kill. That's what Doom 2 is. A game where you can turn your brain off and just kill as many of hell's minions as possible.

If you haven't played Doom 2 before I want to welcome you out from that rock you've been been living under (I'll also accept the excuse of being too young), but you know what? With the great port we have of Doom 2 for XBLA there is absolutely no excuse for not having playing this game. Go out and buy it, it's well worth the 800MS points.

Squid.

Trials HD - Xbox Live Arcade

I first played Trials HD over at my brother's house, I'm not sure how he discovered it but all I know is that after playing it I was hooked. I went home that night and bought it for myself. I've been playing it ever since. It's been at least a year now, I would say that a month doesn't go by where I don't play Trials HD at some point.

Trails HD is just fun. There's no other way to put it. It's fun. Incredibly fun. It's a game that you'll find yourself playing when you have a few spare minutes. Have a spare five minutes? Hop on and play a few levels. Have a spare hour? Hop on and play a bunch of levels. Have a spare couple hours and some friends? I guarantee you can kill those hours with some Trials HD. You know how I know all of this? Because I've done all of those before... many, many times. You know what? I'll probably keep doing those things in the future.

Trials HD doesn't really seem to get old. I don't know how many hours I've played it, or how many times I've played certain levels, and yet I haven't grown tired of the game. I still try and beat my fastest time. I still try new things. I still try different bikes on different levels. I still haven't grown tired of it.

As I said, Trials HD is fun. For a fairly simplistic physics motorcycle game I seem to find myself playing it over and over and over again. If you don't own it already go out and buy it right this second. Trust me, you won't regret it.

Squid.

Hexic - Xbox Live Arcade

I'm not exactly sure how to review a puzzle game. How long do you have to play a puzzle game before you can review it? How do you review a game that you can't really beat? I'm not sure of the answer to either of those questions. I do however know that Hexic is a damn fun, addicting puzzle game that once I started playing I didn't want to put it down.

I think Hexic came with my Xbox 360 when I bought it. It's been sitting on my hard drive for about two and a half years now and not once have I ever bothered playing it. Hell, Hexic 2 was released in 2007 and I didn't even bother to play the first one despite the fact that I owned it. I wish I had discovered this game sooner because it's a hell of a fun time.

I'm not sure how to explain Hexic. You have a bunch of hexagons that are different colors and you can move them in a circle and you have to clump three of more of the same color together to clear them from the board. It's a very simple concept and frankly it's very fun. They throw obstacles in your way like bombs that you have to clear before the timer gets down to zero, which while it sounds easy can actually be very difficult. You can also make "flowers" which is a similar colored hexagons surrounding a middle, if you do this you get a special piece. Make those special pieces into a flower and you get a black pearl, get three black pearls clumped and you win your game. There's several different game types for you to choose from as well, that's just your normal game. There's also a timed version as well as a version that every round locks the pieces you didn't use the round before.

All and all the game is rather simplistic, but because of this it's easily accessible and fun. There's times where I started playing just thinking I was going to play one game, an hour later I've been sucked in and am still playing.

Hexic surprised me in how fun I would find it. It's a throughly enjoyable game that I find myself going back to when I have a spare few minutes. Check your Xbox and see if it's on the hard drive, it might have come free with it. You also occasionally see free promotions of the game as well. It's a really fun game and it's definitely worth giving a try.

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.

Doritos Crash Course - Xbox Live Arcade

Like me you probably got Doritos Crash Course when it was free. Hell, it still might be free I'm not really sure. I just saw a message saying it was free so I grabbed it up... because frankly I can't resist free things.

So what can you expect from a free game brought to you by Doritos? Surprisingly a fairly fun time. It won't be winning any game of the year awards but it certainly was worth free.

You must guide your avatar through several different obstacle courses with different types of terrain as well as obstacles (it is after all an obstacle course). You're timed but you don't seem to lose anything by not finishing, you just have to finish.

Overall it's a pretty fun game. It kept me entertained for an hour or so and frankly I'll probably go back and play it again at some point down the line. It's the kind of game you play when you have a couple spare minutes that you want to waste.

This is a short review, but I'm not exactly sure what I can say about a game that involves me running an obstacle course. I just checked and as far as I can tell it's still free. Overall I was rather impressed by it. Go download it, what do you have to lose?

Squid.

Deus Ex: The Conspiracy - Playstation 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

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.