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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Half Life 2 - Xbox 360

How exactly do you go about reviewing one of the best reviewed games of all time? Were talking about a game that has a 96% on Metacritic. A game that currently is ranked the seventh best game of all time on Metacitic. A sequel to what is considered to be one of the best, most innovative first person shooters of all time. There's not exactly a lot I can say about this game that hasn't been said before.

The best compliment that I can think to give Half Life 2 is that it's just as fun and as good now as it was when I played it in 2004. This games held up incredibly well. Sure, some of the graphics aren't quite up to par with games released now, but at the end of the day they're still pretty damn solid.

In fact this entire game is solid. There wasn't a moment that the game dragged, there wasn't a moment that I wasn't having a great time, there wasn't a moment that I didn't think that this game deserved as much praise as it got. The game was great, and the game remains great.

I remember the first time I played the original Half Life game, I was blown away by it. The game, the story, everything about it was amazing. For the next couple years I was satisfied playing mods, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike mostly. Then I heard rumblings about a sequel in the works. I remember being very excited, but it could go either way. It's an incredibly difficult thing to follow up a game as great as Half Life. Valve was fortunately up to the task though.

Half Life was an amazing game, but Half Life 2 upped the ante. I'm not going to say that it's better than the original, but I will say that from where I'm standing they're pretty much on equal ground.

As I said before, nothing I say about Half Life 2 is going to be something new and exciting. We're talking about a game that's several years old and in almost every top ten list. So all I can say is that it's an amazing game. It's a game that every gamer should play at least once. If you played it and enjoyed it, do yourself a favor and go play it again. I had forgotten how great a game it was. I usually name it when I'm talking about my favorite games, but up until I replayed it again I think I had forgotten why. Playing it again gives me renewed appreciation for what may be one of the best first person shooters of the decade as well as a game that really sets the bar for what first person shooters should be.

Squid.

Mafia - PS2

Mafia. Ahhhh, memories.

I played Mafia on the PC when it was released back in 2002. At that time I absolutely loved it, I had a great time playing it... up until the race mission. As much as I tried I simply couldn't beat that damn mission. I must have tried thirty times to no avail. About the only advice people had was to beat it using a controller... which I didn't have. So I got stuck and finally gave up on the entire game.

When I first got my PS2 and was looking for games I noticed Mafia for $5. I immediately picked it up. I remembered how much fun I had with it on my PC and now with a controller I could finally beat that damn racetrack mission.

I was excited when I finally got around to playing it, but that excitement quickly turned to frustration several hours in.

The first thing I noticed is that this game is dark. Not since Doom3 have a played a game so hampered by it's lighting. Driving at night quickly get annoying when you slam into cars that you can barely see ten feet in front of you. Occasionally there would be a shootout and the only way I could see where the person was is by the muzzle flash. Nothing I did worked, with no in game brightness setting I had to rely on my TVs, and even then it was still too dark.

I remember the driving in Mafia being very different, you couldn't really go speeding through town, you were driving '30s era cars. So high speed anything was really out of the question. What I don't remember is the cars handling poorly. It had nothing to do with them being older cars, or them not being able to go fast. They just handled incredibly poorly. It wouldn't have been such a problem if so many of the missions hadn't involved driving.

Timed missions. I know I've talked about how much I hate timed missions before, but Mafia brought it too a whole new level. A lot of the missions are timed, drive here before this amount of time passes. Get this person to this place in this amount of time. These missions would suck on their own, but pair it with the fact that the cars handle so poorly and you have a recipe for disaster.

The AI. I'm not sure if I have the right to complain about the AI in a game that's seven years old. A lot has changed since then. The AI was utter crap though. There were a few times when I hit a person who was just standing in the middle of the road. Not walking across it, just standing in it. Usually at night when I couldn't see them until it was way too late. Cars will turn left from the far right lane, people will get out of cars and step right into oncoming traffic. I'm all for hitting people, but in this game there are ramifications for it... the only problem being is that these people seem to WANT to be hit.

Gunfights in the game were incredibly difficult as well. I turned the sensitivity all of the way down and still had problems targeting people. Up and down was okay, but side to side I would completely overshoot the target. Killing people in a game about the mafia should not be problematic.

The load times. Dear God the load times. The load times were excruciating. I actually timed some of them, and they ranged between 30 and 40 seconds. 30 seconds doesn't seem like a long time, but it is when you're chasing someone and cross a bridge and all the sudden you have to wait 30 seconds to get back to the action. I did one mission where to load the mission would take 30 seconds, you would drive down the road and hit another loading screen... another 30 seconds. Problem being I had to retry this mission six or seven times. So it was 30 seconds of loading, drive for 10 seconds, load for 30 seconds and then the mission timer would run out 3 minutes later and I would have to do it all over again. So even though the mission took three minutes I had a minute plus of loading time. Not fun.

Either I remember this game a lot differently, or the PS2 version is just horrible. I remember a very fun game, a game that I wanted to play. Instead I got a game that about halfway through was just frustrating. Too many missions I had to retry, too many time I was frustrated... too many times I just wasn't having fun. About halfway through the game I just wanted to put on God mode so I could make it through the other half.

I wanted Mafia to be the game that I remembered, unfortunately it just wasn't.

Squid.

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.

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.

New Kid on the Block

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

We have a new addition to the video game family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Golden Axe Warrior - Review

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

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

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

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

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

Squid.

Mission Impossible - Review

I promised you a story of how I came to own Mission Impossible, so here it is.

I rented Mission Impossible on Nintendo 64 from Blockbuster probably back in 1998 or so and had a good time playing it. I very distinctly remember the Embassy mission, actually that mission and the mission in the terminal room with the lasers were the only missions I really remember. But I remember having a good time with the game. Well, except for the terminal laser room. I remember that being frustrating and never being able to get past it.

Either way, one day I was browsing eBay for old video games trying to find some good cheap games when I ran across Mission Impossible for Nintendo 64 for $4 buy now, shipped free. Well I remembered it being good, and hell, it was only $4 so I bought it. I waited patiently and about a week later I received it, I opened it up only to find... Mission Impossible for the NES. I was kind of disappointed that I didn't get the N64 version, but on the other hand I the NES version pretty much new in box, seriously the thing is nearly mint. So I went and checked the ad, maybe I had read it wrong and it was for the NES version, but after re-reading the ad it was definitely for the N64.

I chalked it up to a mistake on their part, it was $4 and I still got a game. I didn't really care.

So I went back to eBay and found another copy of Mission Impossible 64. This time it was $5 buy now, shipped free. Different seller, checked to make sure it was the N64 version, purchased.

About a week later I got it in the mail. Opened it and found... the NES version.

So now I had TWO sellers who sent me the NES version when they were clearly advertising the N64 version. Either these two sellers are really stupid or it's a very, very odd coincidence. Either way, I was out $5. I figured return shipping and the hassle was worth less than that.

So I proceeded to check Amazon. Found it used for $4.50 shipped prime. So two days later I had Mission Impossible, for Nintendo 64 this time, in my hands. Success!

So that's my tale of how I came to own Mission Impossible for N64 as well as two copies of Mission Impossible for NES.

On to the review!

Oh I'm about to get guffawed at! I enjoyed Mission Impossible more than I enjoyed Goldeneye. That's right, I said it. Whatcha gonna do about it? I'll even go as far to say that Mission Impossible held up better than Goldeneye, and that if you put the two single player modes against each other, Mission Impossible is the better game. Oh, I'm sure the nerdrage is on now.

Mission Impossible is a game based on a movie based on a TV show. It follows the movie starring Tom Cruise... kind of. There's two missions that bookened the other missions that have absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Even still, while the plots are similar to the movie they're far from identical. More just kind of based off of them.

Mission Impossible is semi-stealth/action/third person shooter. Frankly the third person shooter aspect is probably why I enjoyed it more than Goldeneye. Let's be frank, 3D games from this era look horrible. They don't even kind of hold up well. Most N64/Saturn/PS1 games look like crap. Sure, there are a few that still look decent, but for the most part they're awful. You almost had to go with a cartoony look for it to work well. The Legend of Zelda games and Mario 64 games still look decent-ish. Any games that tries to give you real looking graphics... well you end up with this:

The part of Sean Bean will be played by Kryten.

Playable? Yeah, though it is a detriment. Ugly as sin? Oh God yes. Because first person shooters put you right into that action with the whole screen filling up your view, you tend to notice it more. Over the shoulder third person? Not as much.

Enough with the Goldeneye bashing though, back to Mission Impossible.

Mission Impossible is fun. It's just stealthy enough to give you a taste of that, but there's also enough action that you're not just sneaking around everywhere, hiding in the shadows. There's also some levels with very interesting gameplay. In one level you stop playing as Ethan Hunt and play as two snipers covering him, switching back and forth between the two snipers and shooting people who come out of the shadows to attack Ethan. I have to admit, it was fun... and I don't really remember seeing something like that before.

There's a certain amount of thinking that goes into this game. Because for the most part you have to be somewhat stealthy you have to decide the best place to ambush people, plant traps, change identities, etc. It's not your standard "shoot everything that moves" kind of game. Sure, it's no Splinter Cell, but it it's certainly what I would consider a predecessor.

Overall Mission Impossible is fun, sure it has it's flaws. Sometimes the controls are sometimes sluggish, there's escort missions, timed missions, and civilians and your crew are bullet magnets, but overall I enjoyed it. The few hours it took to beat were a pretty good time.

Does that mean you should rush out and buy it? Probably not. Look, unless you played it in the past or have some sort of weird affection for Nintendo 64 games you'll probably think it's an okay game, but nothing spectacular. On the other hand it cost me $4.50 so maybe at the end of the day maybe it's worth it. Your choice.

Squid.

Phantasy Star - Review

Occasionally I have to write a review for a much beloved game from people's childhood that I know certain people aren't going to like. This is one such review. Maybe it's because I had never played it before so it held absolutely no nostalgia for me, but I did not enjoy Phantasy Star.

After my last game I decided I wanted an old school RPG, I looked around and couldn't see one that caught my eye. Then I remembered the Ultimate Sega Collection on Xbox 360, I remembered that it had the Phantasy Star series on it. That's great! I loved Phantasy Star III or IV (I couldn't remember which) so I had found my game. Then I got thinking, maybe I should start the series on the first game. So after the hassle of unlocking Phantasy Star I started playing.

It started off good enough, your kind of standard RPG fare. I decided to get some levels under me at the very start in hopes that it would cut down on my grinding later. It made sense at the time, now I look at it as I was grinding early so I wouldn't have to grind later. That's neither her nor there though, I was having fun for the first few hours... and then things started to go downhill, and the farther I got into the game more we kept going down.

I'm just going to start off with my complaints.

If there's more than one enemy you can't choose who to target. You may think that this sounds petty, but let me tell you, it gets really annoying. Here's an example. I got into a battle with four bad guys who were at or a little above my level, but shouldn't have been much of a problem. They had about 58 health each and my guys seemed to be attacking one of them and eventually whittled down his health to 3. Then they started attacking the other guys. The guy with the 3 health was the last one to die. Instead of killing him he got an extra hit in every round. If I could choose who I wanted to target the one with the 3 health would have been the first to die. This didn't happen a lot, but enough that it got annoying.

Attack power can seem wildly inconsistent at times. Towards the end of the game I had to back track to one of the starting zones where I happened upon a red slime. No problem. Odin attacks and causes... 4 damage. At this point in time all of my characters were about 6-7 levels from the cap of 30 and had the best gear in the game, and Odin couldn't manage to kill something with 12 health in one shot. It was like this through the entire game, no matter what level I was or what gear I had I would occasionally throw out an incredibly weak hit. Again, not a super huge deal breaker but it would get rather annoying at times.

Random battles tend to cluster. Phantasy Star uses the random battle system, that means you can't see the enemies and could get attacked at any time. Occasionally you would run into fight after fight after fight. One times I was trying to get to a town and in eight steps I had five battles. The random battles seem to cluster and when they do, they do it bad. It's not that you run into two battles it's that occasionally you take a step, fight a battle, take another step, fight another battle, and it will keep going. This is especially a problem when you're in a dungeon and fight four battles in the six steps before the boss.

Low level battles, huge damage. After every battle you get a chest, you then can open it and receive the gold and perhaps other items inside. There's a flipside however, you see these chests can be booby trapped as well. And holy hell can they be annoying. I don't know how many times I would fight a battle that I could kill all of the enemies in one round only to have the chest be booby trapped taking sometimes 60 health off of all my characters. It wouldn't be so bad if...

Healing in this game sucks. You have three ways of healing yourself: magic, food, or hospitals. While this doesn't sound bad, trust me, it is... especially farther into the game. Hospitals aren't bad, they're just kind of out of the way. They're only in towns, which would be fine if the other modes of healing worked a little better. With food you have your choice of Cola or a Burger. The Cola heals 10 health and the Burger heals 40. So essentially Cola is useless even fairly early in the game, and 40 health is nice but occasionally not enough. So then you have to carry a ton of them, only problem is that you can only carry so many items and towards the end of the game you've stockpiled a TON of items that you have to carry and can't get rid of, so that really cuts down on Burger space. Magic works the best, you have three characters who can heal. Your main character has a spell that will heal 20 points and two other characters have a spell that heals 80 points. Which is great except for...

You don't have enough magic points. Your main characters heal spell uses 2 magic points and the spell that heals 80 uses 6 magic points. Doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that you only have about 40 magic points... and you still have to use other magic. Having to seriously ration MP because you know that this is a huge dungeon and you're going to have to fight a boss at the end and you NEED your MP kind of sucks. Also? There's no way to replenish MP except by going to a hospital. Which basically makes healing and magic in this game kind of crappy.

There's no map. Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is true. There's a chance that the original copy of the game on the Sega Master System came with a map. Let's hope so because without a map you will wander around hopelessly lost. No one in this game gives you directions, apparently you're just supposed to know where to go... well let me tell you, I for one didn't. Which is especially annoying in the...

Dungeons. Jesus Christ are the dungeons annoying. Basically they all look like this



The walls are all the same color and it's like a goddamn maze. The first dungeon I tried doing without a map, and I managed to wander around lost for about a half hour before I broke down and got a map. I used a map for every other dungeon and cave and still occasionally got lost. I honestly don't even want to know how long it would take you do this without a map.

There's a lot of back tracking. A lot. Now, this one I kind of actually understand. You only had so much memory on a Sega Master System so you couldn't have these huge sprawling maps... but holy hell did I constantly feel like I had to go back to the places I had visited before. After a while it just got repetitive.

My number one complaint is that there seems to be no direction. Look, I don't need a game to hold my hand all the way through but honestly I don't think this game ever mentioned what to do next. I would spend time just wandering around not sure where to go or what to do next. It would often get very frustrating.

Is Phantasy Star a bad game? Not really, it was occasionally rather fun and inventive. At the end of the day however I spent way too much time being frustrated or feeling like I wasn't sure what the hell I needed to do next. Towards the end I just wanted to get it over with, I wanted the game to be over and done with, and that's never a good sign. Hopefully when I get around to playing Phantasy Star 2 some of my complaints will be fixed.

Squid.

Metro 2033 - Review

A while back I read about Metro 2033 in Official Xbox Magazine, they had a couple page preview. I remember being rather excited about it, it looked great and I love those types of games. Then I didn't hear anything about it for a while. I had almost completely forgot about until I noticed a release date for it. I quickly added it to my Gamefly queue and hoped they would have it by the time my disc got there.

After playing a few hours I realized that Metro 2033 is a game I should have hated. It's incredibly dark, there's escort missions, and it's occasionally very difficult to stealth... but for some reason, I enjoyed it.

Let's start off with the things I thought I wouldn't like.

The Darkness. This game is dark. We're talking Doom 3 dark. We're talking playing an original Gameboy Advance in a closet dark. And yet... this game makes it work. Instead of a hindering you it actually adds to the ambiance of the game. The darkness seems to encompass you. Every little bump in the night seems all that much worse because you're not sure what it is or where it's coming from. All you have is your flashlight and later on in the game, night vision goggles to light your way. Not since Alien Vs. Predator 2 have I seen a game that makes the darkness work so well in its favor.

Escort missions. If there's one thing I hate in a game it's escort missions. Metro 2033 did it right though, it gave me escort missions without me knowing they were escort missions. Occasionally you have a computer controlled teammate that will help you out along the way, occasionally these are escort missions. So if that person dies, you have to start from the last checkpoint. For the most part you won't actually know that it's an escort mission unless you let that person die, and as long as you help them out, for the most part you don't have to worry about them dying.

The problem with stealth isn't really that much of a problem. When you have an AI teammate they're not stealthy so you can't be stealthy. It's occasionally a pain because stealth in this game is awesome, but there are plenty of times when you'll be by yourself so you can just be stealthy then.

So even the points about the game that I thought I wouldn't like turned out to be okay... and after that you had an awesome game.

A really awesome game. When I first heard about the game it sounded a lot like Fallout 3, and since I have a love obsession with Fallout 3 I was totally game. Other then being set in a dystopian, irradiated future it turned out to be nothing like Fallout 3... but instead I got a little gem of a game.

Metro 2033 is like if you mixed Fallout 3, STALKER, and FEAR all into one game. So basically, awesome.

A nuclear war has taken out all of human civilization, those who survived now live in the metro under Moscow. And that's where you meet Artyom, the protagonist of our little story. Basically you're world has been taken over by a bunch of funky mutated creatures who are hell bent on eating your face off as well as the Dark Ones. The Dark ones are the real threat in the world, they have the power to drive humans insane and slaughter entire groups of people... and it's your job to stop them! Lucky Artyom!

So you start out on your quest through the metro, and you're going to meet a lot of people and creatures. Some will want to help and some, again, will want to eat your face. Which keeps things interesting.

This game certainly keeps you on your toes. Whether it's sneaking past a group of enemies, heading down a dark corridor, wondering where that noise came from, or searching for more gas mask filters, you will be on edge.

Seriously, one of the most tense moments in the game came from searching for a gas mask filter. You see the air on the surface is unbreathable, so you need a gas mask as well as filters while on the surface. Run out of filters, you run out of air, which means you die a slow death. There I was, in a huge firefight and I notice I have no filters left. There's still three guys to kill and I can't breath. I start choking for air. Two men down, one to go. I'm gasping. I kill the third. It's a mad dash into houses, cars, corridors looking for a filters. My mask if fogging up, the wind is whipping up snow, I can't see. Finally I spot a shack, I run in and find spare gas mask filters. I can breath again. It was a seriously intense moment... and it wasn't scripted. I ran out of gas mask filters because I had been wandering around. Not because I hit a trigger scene and it happened. It could really happen anywhere... and it was great. Sure if I had died I would have just gone back to my last checkpoint, but I wasn't thinking about that. All I was thinking about was that I needed to find more filters.

There's just so much fun to be had in Metro 2033. My advice, as soon as you can, get some silenced guns. Once you have the night vision goggles it can be so much fun. I was sneaking up on a camp of bad guys, so the first thing I did was shoot out all the lights and shroud them in darkness. Then I pull out the night vision goggles and pick them off one by one as they stumbled around in the dark. Now I know why Buffalo Bill did it in Silence of the Lambs... because it's damn fun, that's why.

Sure Metro 2033 has some flaws: I would have much preferred a save anywhere system to a checkpoints system, sometimes I was unclear on whether the gun I was carrying was better than the gun I could buy/pickup, there were a couple quick time events, and scopes seemed fairly useless. But these were all minor complaints in an otherwise very good game.

This is 4A Games first game, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next. This game was a hell of a fun time, do yourself a favor and grab it. If you're a fan of first person shooters I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Squid.

The Ren & Stimpy Show Presents: Stimpy's Invention - Review

I love Ren & Stimpy. I used to watch the show all the time growing up. I still have a Stimpy doll that farts and tongue comes out when you squeeze its stomach... and yet I remember almost nothing about the show. I remember a few of the characters and the general feel of the show, but I couldn't tell you the plot of even one episode. So when it came time to give this game a whirl I was kind of excited to play it, perhaps it would bring back some of those long lost memories.

First off, let me say this: This game is incredibly short. Not Contra short, but getting there. It took me about an hour to beat the entire game. Not that it wasn't a fun hour, but I kind of expected my game to last longer then three episodes of the TV show it's based off of.

Overall Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention was enjoyable. It captured the wackiness and fun of the TV show. I enjoyed how you controlled one of the characters with the other being AI controlled. Sure the character you weren't controlling usually fell off of things and overall was kind of dumb but Powdered Toast Man always brought them back fairly quickly, plus you constantly used the other character for "special moves". Need to get up somewhere high? Ren would squeeze Stimpy and you'd shoot up like a rocket. Need to hit a far away target? Stimpy can pick up and throw Ren like a boomerang. There's tons of special moves that you'll use throughout the game. Most of them being very quirky and fun.

Now on to the bad. One of the special moves I had a very hard time with. It was when you pressed UP + C which is supposed to make you do a special move to get to higher points. I had a difficult time getting it to work, I would say it only worked about a third of the time. The only problem being, it could possibly have been my controller. I only have one Genesis controller and who knows how well it works. But let's just say that it's not my controller, even if this is the case while it was annoying, it certainly wasn't game breakingly annoying.

Also I would have liked to have seen different special moves for the characters. While they technically have different moves, those moves do the exact same thing. So pressing UP + C as Ren would make you squeeze air out of Stimpy and shoot you up like a rocket, with Stimpy it would make you turn Ren into a helicopter.. both of these just you to higher places. I would have liked to have used separate characters for separate things, you can beat the entire game as just one character. I would have liked to have NEEDED to use both characters to beat the game.

Also, I would have liked the game to be a longer.

Sure there are cons to this game, but other than the the length of this game I would say they're rather insignificant. This was a fun game and really did well in preserving the entire feel of the TV show. If you're a fan of Ren & Stimpy and want a fun but short game, this is for you. I'm also guessing this game would be pretty fun playing two player mode. If you can pick this game up for $5 or $6 I would say to give it a go.

Squid.

Paladin's Quest - Review

I have a soft spot in my heart for SNES games, especially SNES RPGs. The Super Nintendo was really when I got into role playing games, it started with Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I think I was old enough that the games and their stories really clicked. Sure, I played RPGs on the NES but I don't think I truly understood and enjoyed them until I was a bit older. So anytime I pick up an SNES RPG I get a tad bit nostalgic.

Paladin's Quest doesn't offer you anything new and exciting that you won't find in other RPG of that era, but it does do old RPG standards well and does offer up a few little things here and there that certainly keep things interesting.

The first thing you'll notice is that despite the fact that you'll be using magic you have no MP meter. Whenever you use a magic spell it drains directly from your health meter. At first I wasn't a big fan of this, but the further I got into the game the more I understood and came to like it. Some of the spells can use up to 200 HP, when you only have 1300 and the bad guys are also damaging you? You have to know when and when not to use your magic. It does certainly make some battles interesting, especially the end battle.

The way your spells gain power is also kind of interesting: the more you use the spell the more powerful it gets. This is a blessing and curse. Some of your spells will kick ass while other lesser used ones will be horribly underpowered. So it's best to kind of use magic throughout the game, unfortunately I wasn't really aware of this had some really crappy spells at the end. The way you learn spells is also kind of interesting, instead of learning individual spells you learn spirits. Learning a spirit will give you all of the spells related to that spirit. So say you learn the Lightning spirit you'll learn several lightning related spells.

Another interesting thing that Paladin's Quest does is the party system. You can have four members in your party like most RPGs, but you only have two party members who are consistent. The other members are various mercenaries that you will hire throughout the game. Each mercenary has their own set of unique weapons and spells at your disposal, and there's a lot of them speckled throughout the game for you to choose from.

Now on to the bad, though really it's only two minor complaints. There's a lot of level grinding, though there was level grinding in all RPGs of that era. It's been a while since I've played an SNES RPG so I can't really say if there's more or less in this game then there was in other games. The other thing was inventory. EVERYTHING is written in shorthand form. A paralyzing knife is a Para kn, a boomerang is a Bmg, and a photon cannon is a Pht cn. It will get very confusing and you probably wont know what a lot of things are, I highly suggest this website it will tell you what all of the weapons/armor/items are as well as a ton of other helpful information. It certainly helped me out while playing.

Overall Paladin's Quest is a fun game but nothing really mindblowing. It's certainly worth playing and will easily give you fourty to sixty hours of gameplay. You can pick it up fairly cheaply on eBay, and it would definitely be worth the fifteen or so bucks it will cost you, especially if you like SNES era RPGs.

Squid.