Weekly Wrap-Up in Gaming - August 21 - August 27

Earlier this week, I managed to finally beat Darksiders.  It was a long, oftentimes difficult journey, and at parts, I wasn't sure that it was honestly worth it.  I didn't really care for the last.....hour or so of gameplay prior to the end-fight as it just seemed a little....not arbitrary, but it could have been considered a little better.  Even when I took to the final boss fight, I couldn't help but find a thing or two to complain about, but when I won?  When I finally got that ending, all I could do was sit back and tell myself that yes, it was indeed worth it.

That said, there were quite a few cracks in the armor that only seemed to get bigger and bigger as the game went on, which only frustrated the whole experience more than necessary.  Again, I know the core of most of the frustrations were that I was trying to play the game on Apocalyptic first clip (and, well, -did-, getting like five trophies when I beat it for my efforts.  That was almost worth it alone.) but some of them were very, very clearly design.  Design like the previously grumbled about Voidwalker sections, and, well, every part after that.  (Which isn't much.)  It's hard to say much without spoiling the ending, but I will say that a collect-a-thon is something you base the start of a game around, or throw in towards the start or middle, not something you throw in at the end as a 'key' for the final boss encounter.

Then the final boss itself honestly lacked the sense of scale and grandeur that even some of the other, less-important fights had.  Admittedly, the first part of it was fun for me, if a little paint-by-numbers, but it just went off the deep-end there at the end in a way that honestly would have been better served if they took a page from the pages Uncharted:  Drake's Fortune and made the final boss less about 'fighting' the boss and more about 'getting' to it.  But oh well, it honestly wasn't too challenging, offered more good than bad, and lead directly into the amazing ending that was wholly satisfying.  Even if the whole of Darksiders was 100% worse than it was, that ending alone would have been enough to place Darksiders 2 solidly on my radar, so suffice to say it is there.

In a move sure to surprise no one, after I felt I was sufficiently done with Darksiders for now (Got the Abyssal Armor, but didn't have the desire to go for more than that with the Lifestones and Wrath Cores and such), I took it out, looked at my games, saw Yakuza 4 and remembered "Hey, I shelved that for DW7, and then got distracted" and quickly sought to remedy this by throwing it into the PS3 and starting a new game.  I mean, sure, I was only at the end of Akiyama's section with my last game, but this was an excuse to start the whole game over again, and that's not an excuse I'm going to overlook because, despite not playing it for...er...five months(?), you all know the Yakuza games are my bread-and-butter.

And honestly, that's why I think I haven't played it for so long.  It's one thing to say you love a game and play it compulsively, but it's a whole other thing to say you love a game and not have to play it to prove as much.  Jumping into Yakuza 4 again just feels natural.  It's a game where I'm not going to get rusty at it, I'm not going to become disinterested because of the passing of time or anything, it's just a game that'll always be there, ready for me when I'm ready for it again.  Other games are challenges to clear, things to get through to see what the hype is about, or things to enjoy, but, much like inFamous 2, Yakuza (of any number) for me is just pure, condensed fun.

And it proved that much when I started it again and won my first (non-tutorial) fight by kicking bicycles at a guy until he fell over, unconscious, walked over to him, grabbed the sword he'd been carrying and proceeded to take out his partner by engaging in a HEAT action, slamming the hilt of the sword into the back of his head over and over again until he fell to the ground and spiked it against his head. (Not the blade part, Akiyama apparently doesn't know how to use a Sword in HEAT)  Grinning in glee, I went around, looking for my next fight and had a right bit of fun by throwing the guys I encountered around a few times and soccer kicking their faces in.  I'm not sure why I had my reservations about Akiyama the first time I started Yakuza 4, honestly; the dude is a fucking boss.

I think one of the best things to say for the game is that it's not a chore to look for sidequests/sidestories like it could be in other games.  Sure, you don't know where all of them are without extensive searching or checking a FAQ, but that's not really an issue as Kamurocho is just a wonder to explore, and I honestly know more about the map layout there than most of the surrounding areas.  Which is....kind of hilarious really.  At one point, the game is like "Go here" and I said to myself "Oh yeah, I just need to make a left here, go straight for a while and then right", like I was telling someone else how to get to the store from my house.  There's just that level of familiarity there which I find a little amusing, personally.  Of course, it won't be that way with the new areas for quite a while, the rooftops and the underground malls and such, but that just adds to the thrill.

I also put some more time into Phantasy Star Portable 2 this week, but, well, that's been the same as always.  I'm slowly edging towards higher levels (My MC is now level 94) but the keyword is 'slowly' and it's not without frustration.  You might have noticed a recent tweet on the sidebar yelling about how everything has a ton of HP and, well, it's true.  It's really rough throwing down against a single enemy for the amount of time you apparently have to, not to mention the damage they deal, but I've been managing to do so enough times to get by.

So, there's that!  Been a pretty good week this week, I should say.

Lazy Sunday - A Piecemeal Post of Many Little Topics

First off, no this isn't about the song but I am very much a fan of The Lonely Island, so, hey that could work.

Today was....in all honesty, a completely uneventful day.  Not enough of anything happened to warrant a lot of discussion on it, but there's a lot of little things I could bring up to touch on, but not really speak on them at length, which is honestly a pretty frustrating experience.  I'm sitting here with topics in my head, swirling them around and figuring how many paragraphs I could get for each on, and it's just.....not really a lot.  But, in lieu of trying to force one to be any longer than any others, I figure I can just touch on them.  It'll be a pretty good reflection of this week, really, as I didn't do enough for it to make a big to-do, but I did enough.

I had considered another Weekly Wrap-Up in Gaming post, briefly, but when I recalled that my only exposure to games this week were the same as last week, I figured a retread wouldn't be in my best interest.  I have made enough progress into Darksiders that I feel I can speak on it a little more, but it's not all positive, and I'm still not done with the game of course.  But what I can say on it isn't enough for its own post, at least in my head I don't think it is, so it'll just be topic number one here.

First off, I'm seeing more and more what this "Rip-Off vs. Homage" debate was all about and while my position remains the same (pleasant homage), I'm getting a little fed up with the parts of other games that Darksiders tried to, er, show off or give some sort of flattering imitation of.  Namely, the Voidwalker.  Now, the game has started to grate on me a little (which I'm fully attributing to playing on Apocalyptic), but prior to getting the Voidwalker, it was a mere annoyance here and there.  But with this homage to Portal, I'm not....really that happy of a camper.  I mean, I liked Portal and all, but I didn't think it was a religious experience and I didn't beat it because fuck that goddamn Turret room in the last test before the...er....reveal?  It's not really a reveal if it's foreshadowed the entire game is it?  Bah, you probably know what point I'm talking about.

The problem with the Voidwalker sections is that they're simply not fun.  And even if they -were- fun, I've had to play with the Voidwalker for two hours.  I'm beyond sick of it by now, and I'm nowhere near done.  I still have one more leg of the 'dungeon' left at minimum before the boss itself, and I'm just....ragged from my experience with it.  I'm practically begging for Enemy Gauntlet rooms even though the enemies at this point can literally take off a third of my HP with one hit if they tried.  But at least I have some sort of semblance of control with the fighting, since I can really choose just how I go about it.  The puzzle sections really take that out of my hands, or at least they feel like they do, and it's really just....doing nothing positive.

Still, it's one bad section in an otherwise fun game.  I'm sure when I'm finally done with it, the game will remind me why I liked it in the first place and why it has so many vocal fans about.

Second, and I already touched on this Friday, but with my internet woes (which, if you haven't noticed seem to have cleared for now), I couldn't really look into it as much as I had wanted to.  A few places have said it, but it caught my eye specifically at Joystiq, but with confirming that the Metal Gear Solid 3 in The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection was the Subsistence version, I could only question about the status of Metal Gear Solid 2.  Joystiq confuses me even more by pointing out that Kojima said MGS2 would be 'based' on Subsistence which raises multiple other questions.  Namely, he meant Substance, right?  And secondly, what the hell does "Based on" mean?  Will it only feature some of the content?  Will it really be 'based on' Subsistence and just be MGS2 with a fully manageable camera ala MGS3:S? (Or did it have that already...?)

I haven't really seen any answers to these floating around.  Suffice to say I'm not worried, just a little frustrated.  While I would love MGS2 to be the Substance version, if solely because I like the 'complete' feel, Metal Gear Solid 2 in HD is just about all I could want anyway.  But still, some answers would be nice.

And finally, I just want to, y'know, reiterate something I've been saying for a while now.  Nier is a fantastic game, and you would do well to go get yourself a copy of it.  After getting to the point in the game where I stopped playing (Just before the last ending of the game because of...personal issues) in the Let's Play I've been reading of the game, I just feel all these....well, feelings being stirred up again.  And it's not how much I hated this boss or this part of the game, or how fun it was when I killed this thing, but rather the impact the game had on me and still continues to do.

I lose man-cred saying this here, but Nier made me cry.  Several times.  And while I venture to say that that's not necessarily a hard task, it's hard enough that I can assure you that it's real.  The game, at points, is so tragic and beautiful and even touching that, looking back if I were to reshuffle my Games of the Year, Nier would have been number 2 for sure.  While God of War 3 was the better game, Nier was by and large the better story and had the better presentation, which I'm growing to learn is what I really care about in a game.

Like most games, I can say that it's a flawed game, especially so with some of the sidequests and where some of the cracks in design show, but unlike most games, I can say without hesitation that Nier is an important game.  Much like how some people hold Ico or Shadow of the Colossus dear because of the story (or the implications of one for the latter), Nier will always hold a spot in my heart because of the impact it had.

Well....that went on longer than I expected it to.  But, hey, more the better, right?  And I got to say a few things I've been meaning to say, anyways.

Weekly Wrap-Up in Gaming - July 31 - August 6

Some of you (Chance) might remember waaaay back in January when I made a post of games that weren't my GotY contenders for whatever reasons, Darksiders was featured prominently under the label of "No Time", as I bought the game in December, but just couldn't get to it before years-end.  And clearly, that was no empty statement as it wasn't until this week that I cleared out enough of my backlog that I decided it was Darksiders time.  And as I started playing, there was only one thought going through my head.

"This is good.  This is damn good."

Now, the game has quite a bit of praise abound, both from proper reviewers and just people whose opinions I can trust, but I like to at least try going into every game with no expectations, or at the very least, willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt.  It generally allows me to enjoy whatever I play in one way or another, even if I do eventually draw some parallels to other games to compare it to.  So despite the praise and the good things I've heard, I went in expecting nothing and managed to get blown away.

I don't believe I'm very far into it, as I've only taken down one big boss, but there's just so many good things to be said about this game - chiefly, the spectacular voice cast that the game possesses.  So far, the most prominent voices of the game are those of Liam O'Brien, Mark Hamill and Phil LaMarr, any one of those being enough to drive near any gamer wild with excitement, not to mention the effect all three have.  And while I can't confirm this, I swear one of the smaller bosses that I fought was voiced by TC Carson, better known to most by his most prominent role as Kratos from the God of War series.  I could be wrong, of course, but I really don't think I am.

Regardless, thankfully the voice cast is just the most prominent positive the game offers, rather than being the only one, as the gameplay itself is quite fun and familiar.  I, as many others have noticed that the gameplay seems like it cherry-picks the best elements from a few other games to push it all together into something fantastic, and while we may complain about this very thing in other games, there's no real complaint for it here with Darksiders.  I'm not sure what it is; maybe that it takes just a little from multiple games, rather than clones itself to just one or two, or maybe it's just the rest of the game being fantastic that lets us not worry about it so much, but the truth is the truth:  Darksiders, for me so far, is definitely Devil May Zelda of War and you know what?

Good.

It's by no means a mark against the game and only enhances what is already a more-than-competent work so much so that I am actually kicking myself a little for waiting this long to play the game.  But that's been remedied and hopefully my playthrough of the game will continue to be as fantastic as it started.

It's always strange to play the sequel to a game before playing the first in the series, and it's something I like to avoid at all costs since it usually results in wondering just how the first game spawned a sequel, since the gameplay of said sequel usually outclasses the first in every way.  Which, that's kind of what's supposed to happen, of course.  Though there's always exceptions to this, where a sequel seems more like a step to the side rather than a clear rise up (Resistance and Resistance 2 being my prime examples of thise) the case is that usually people are vocal enough about what they like and dislike about a game that the developers know what to improve on.

So it's no surprise that when I started playing Phantasy Star Portable 1 this week, I was..a little less than enthused.  It's definitely earlier PSP work; the game looks a bit muddier, fighting is a little stiffer and under-realised, and there's just a lot of things that I miss dearly from the sequel that I can't blame on the game itself, since they were clearly ideas that spawned from the release of this game.  But I kept with it taking Tenzin, my Beast Hunter (As in a Hunter who is a Beast, not someone who hunts Beasts) through the first story missions and a few open missions here and there and I'll say I've gotten pretty used to it.  Things are clearly different, but I've found a way to work around them and enjoy.

And I must say, despite some of the characters looking like feet (more design than graphical capability issues) that I'm enjoying the story, possibly even more than the one the sequel holds.  Phantasy Star Portable 2's story was, honestly, not really much to write home about when I think back on it.  Not bad, but not great, just enough to service the game from Point A to Point B while forgetting that there has to be an escalated sense of scale somewhere and deciding to throw it in right at the end. 

The story of Phantasy Star Portable 1, playing through it now, does seem to step up here and there, but a lot of it is unfortunately wasted on me.  You see, Phantasy Star Portable 1&2 both rely on the canon of Phantasy Star Universe which I never played as the main story placed you with a fixed character, leaving the multiplayer as the only place where you could make your own, and considering my PC couldn't handle the game, my PS2 wasn't internet-ready and I had no 360 to speak of (much less the proper internet, as I stated earlier), I felt it was a safe pass.  Previously, my only exposure to the series, especially this 'branch' of it, was Phantasy Star Online, so I was very attached to the idea of making my own character.

So when the game trots out obviously important characters from PSU, expecting a gasp or a surprise reaction from series players, I just sort of recognize that they used to be important and brush them off, not really caring about them or having an attachment whatsoever.  And what's humorous is that the game also trots out characters that I already know from the sequel, who I would actually like to like, but the ones I've run across so far are so damn terrible yet (because they haven't been, y'know, matured through the story) that I just don't care about them either.  Still, characters are by no means the only important part of a story, so for what it lacks there, it still makes up for with the general plot.  While it's nothing too grand yet, it's involving enough to keep me going out of interest, rather than simply completionism.

As far as I can think of, those are the only two notables in my gaming this week, but I'm sure we can all agree they were note-worthy enough to talk about.  So until the next one of these (I should probably stop calling it Weekly, huh?), that's it for now!