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Game #41- Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Rating: ★★
Platform: PS3
Beaten: August 28th
Time: Roughly 4 hours
There's something weirdly profane about making a generic, downloadable beat 'em up based on Watchmen, but for what it is, this ended up being a pretty alright time. It's set in the movie canon, and follows Rorschach and Nite Owl's time as partners before the Keene Act's passing, plus it came as a bonus alongside my copy of the blu-ray for the film. There's not a whole lot of depth to the combat; you can basically just counter every enemy in the game all day long, and there's only a handful of combos, which leads to a relatively mashy couple of hours through chapters just long enough to overstay their welcome. It's interesting how differently Rorschach and Nite Owl end up playing; Rorschach being more based on leaping from enemy to enemy like a pinball of death and stealing weapons from enemies, and Nite Owl focusing on single target damage with more discipline as he builds meter to clear rooms with AOE stuns, and there some actually really well done animations that capture the feel of the characters and the style (of the movie versions anyway) really well. Unfortunately, it's also wrapped up in a not great performing game- it gets really framey at times, and at least one chapter had extended areas that just ran consistently poorly enough to feel wrong, and there ends up being a lot of janky character movement, behavior and interactions. The story tries to do some interesting things, highlighting The Comedian's involvement with the Watergate Scandal never breaking out in this timeline and what exactly caused Rorschach and Nite Owl to split up their partnership before the events of Watchmen itself, but overall, those ideas are wrapped up in a mediocre script and a forgettable game that, while an okay if forgettable experience in co-op, is clearly no Alan Moore work, and as unfair as that may sound, it's impossible to divorce the expectations set by the graphic novel from the products following in it's wake: it overshadowed the Snyder film, it left Before Watchmen cold, and it makes this otherwise just okay downloadable title just seem all the more off.
Game #42- Jak II
Rating: ★
Platform: PS3 (via HD Collection)
Beaten: September 8th
Time: 26:32
I'm going to get flak for this opinion, but I think Jak II might be the worst time I've had playing a video game ever. I really enjoyed Ratchet and Sly back on the PS2, but never got around to the Jak series, but a friend is a huge advocate of it, so I thought I'd give it a fair shake on the HD Collection, and I really, really enjoyed The Precursor Legacy. Unfortunately, it's followed up by this awful feeling, janky mishmash of parts from better games and pumped full of edgy 'tude to look cooler. Mechanically, there's almost nothing redeeming here- I can't stand the way a single vehicle handles, and I hate the way the city is designed (especially in regards to the feeling of driving in it), the shooting feels primitive and sub-par, the checkpoints are awful, the level design is uninspired and bland, the points where they try and change things up like levels in mech suits or race challenges just feel bad, and almost every mission felt like a boring chore to complete- the only times the game shined was when there was just some raw platforming sequences, like in the Tomb of Mar, but those are few and far between, and usually sandwiched around some awful boss battle or shooting gallery sequence.
From the story perspective, I kinda wanted to skip every single cutscene and piece of dialogue, and that's something I
never do. Jak is an overly edgy shit that acts like a huge prick to every single character in the game, often for no reason, and comes across as one of the least sympathetic characters I've had to play as in a game. Daxter is one of the most annoying characters I've listened to- he's never funny, he's always obnoxious, and he's constantly talking (though, the exact one time Jak congratulates him for winning a race is probably the one time Jak comes across as an okay guy,so I'll give him credit for that), most of the mission givers come across as scumbags and it's actually really not clear why Jak continued working with people like Krew for very long. Sig and Torn seemed okay, but weren't around very much, and the writing everywhere was pretty bad.
Apparently the game realized what a low opinion I had with it too, because it decided to render my save totally unplayable- around 60% of the way in, I fell through a wall and got stuck under the floor until I died and reloaded the checkpoint, only to still be trapped under the floor at the start and unable to proceed. Naturally, this autosaved over my save, leaving me shit out of luck. Undeterred, because Jak 3 does actually seem like a huge improvement I want to play and I can't bring myself to do so without finishing 2 first, a friend and I started it all over again this month and powered through the whole shitshow in a weekend. I know there's a lot of people who love this game, but honestly? It just felt like a really bad attempt to weld things that were popular in Grand Theft Auto and Ratchet and Clank on to something that was already good, and strip it of any character it had originally, to paint it into something "cool and edgy but still for kids that can't actually play GTA" and ended up with another Shadow the Hedgehog, and I can't say I'm not glad I won't have to put any more time into it again.
Game #43- Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Rating: ★★★★
Platform: PS4
Beaten: September 9th
Time: 8 Hours (?)
Valiant Hearts is the standard any educational game should be held to; as much a lesson in history as it is an engaging story and an entertaining game, Valiant Hearts follows a group of five characters on their journey across the various fronts of World War 1's war-torn Europe. It's a gorgeous looking game, and each of the characters end up being really compelling. The library of facts and information that you unlocked as you progressed did a great job of presenting things and teaching about an era of history that is largely overshadowed by the things that followed it, and it does so in a really unblinking way- Valiant Hearts does a fantastic job of honoring the men and women who went to war, without crossing the line of idolizing the idea of war itself; it's presented in all it's horrors, from the mustard gas, to the conditions of the trenches, to the human meat-grinder lines marched into walls of machine gun fire; Valiant Hearts is both a gorgeous looking and fantastically styled game, that really captures the feeling of the period. There's some jank to some of the puzzles, or at least, I felt like there was- like one where a shape needed to be recreated using levers and moving shapes,and I felt like I had nailed it, but it just wouldn't take, or trying to figure out which of the numerous numbers on a flag in the window were the numbers I actually needed to unlock a combination lock, but for the most part it stayed interesting and made sense. Plus, there's an action dedicated to petting the dog whenever you want, and that's a great thing to have in any game.
Game #44- Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus
Rating: ★★★★
Platform: Vita
Beaten: September 17th
Time: 10 Hours
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus is a game I wish was a better port than it is, because I had an absolute blast playing it, but it suffers from performance issues just bad enough that if I wasn't otherwise having a blast, I don't know that I'd be able to bring myself to keep playing it. It's effectively just a port of the PS3 version of Sigma 2, but with a few extra bits and pieces- most important is that they added back the gore that was in the original release, while the original Sigma rerelease turned it all into dumb purple mist because reasons or something. This still being Ninja Gaiden, the combat feels so damn good to perform- execution kills are consistently satisfying, counters never stop feeling good, figuring out new combos is a great time, and the three new characters, while lacking the depth of Ryu, all feel really fun to use. There's a bonus mission mode that lets you play as any of the characters in any costume and just kill a bunch of enemies for points, and it's a great, satisfying little time killing extra, perfect for a Vita game.
Unfortunately, there are also a number of chapters where the framerate feels like it's running in slow motion, and it really throws the whole experience off- it happens frequently enough to be an issue I would warn people about before going into the game, but not quite enough (and the drops aren't quite bad enough) to make it a complete mess- it's just not the ideal way I'd want to play it. There are a lot of times where the graphic quality just drops tremendously, which I would have assumed would be a smart trick to try and keep the performance better if the performance wasn't already not great. Also, some of the higher level missions in the extra mission mode are actually unwinnable- they're designed for co-op, which was removed from this port, but the difficulty was changed or adjusted to deal with it, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making two trophies and the Platinum unachievable. I don't just mean that as "these things are too hard, I can't do them so they must be impossible", I mean it as "these trophies have a 0.0% clear rating because no one has them unlocked because it is actually impossible".
And yet I'm still giving it a 4/5 rating, despite there being these huge performance issues, because I really, really enjoyed playing through the game. The 360 version is still the best Ninja Gaiden 2 experience, but I sure wish there was a more definitive port somewhere.
Game #45- X-COM: Enemy Unknown
Rating: ★★★★
Platform: Xbox 360
Beaten: September 20, 2015
Time: 15 hours
X-COM is a game that would have never crossed my radar if it weren't for it's Giant Bomb game of the year presence, but I'm sure glad I gave it a shot anyway. I never got very deep into any SRPG, tactics game or similar tactical, turn-based strategy thing before this, and as a result, trying to play X-COM "pure" was a rewardingly punishing challenge, and I consistently took save-destroying setbacks that pushed my finishing this one back a couple years after my initial purchase. I'm sure that, as someone who doesn't play these kind of games ever, there's a lot of depth and nuance I'm missing, and it sounds like more old school fans are a little disappointed with some of the mechanics and the replayability, but as an entry level game, I was enthralled from start to finish every disastrous new attempt to stop the aliens. My winning game finally came in the save where I resolved to customize every soldier into another video game character, and a key element to winning was finally coming to understand how to effectively use the Sniper and Support classes- Ultimately, Quiet and Jim Raynor's sniper skills won me countless battles against Cyberdisks and Sectopods that otherwise destroyed whole games in the past, while Abobo, Geralt and Yukari cleaned house otherwise. Plus, my Psionic Volunteer ended up being Andrew Ryan, which was neat. RIP Cole Train, Doomguy, Liquid, Vergil, Master Chief and Nathan Drake, who gave their lives that the Alien menace may be stopped.
If I had any real critiques of the game, it's that there was a little weirdness with movement on the controller- sometimes I would move the stick to where I want the unit to go, and the cursor would keep going a little bit, or wouldn't quite go to the cover I was trying to make it stick to, and it lead to a number of units running into unsafe territory or wasting turns (it's actually what got poor Drake got killed), and I wish there was more customization options and variety for my soldiers, but overall I really, really enjoyed it. Now I really need to track down a copy of Enemy Within.