Call Me Superficial But I Like Games With Good Graphics

Whenever I go surfing around on the internet looking for new gameplay videos, I usually seem to evaluate the games visuals and not the gameplay mechanics. I'm thinking that it is a first impression thing but when I think about it when I play a new game with crappy graphics, I feel that it takes away from the game.

Yes, you can call me shallow but hey I don't think many people enjoy playing "ugly" games. Like when ever I play Killzone 2 I am still amazed by the graphics after all this time. This is why I wish I could play Crysis on some kind of high performance gaming computer to actually see the games full visual potential. I know, I know; graphics are not everything but I feel that visuals are a significant part of gaming. Besides years from now I would rather play some photo-realistic games over the old stuff any day. The way I look at it games can be like women, sometimes the look great but deep down they are horrible or they may not look so good on the outside but it's what is on the inside that really counts. Well with that said, I am just hoping that Killzone 3 and Crysis 2 will be the Adriana Lima of video games.

For Some Reason I Love to Run Through Games

For as long I can remember I always end up beat the single player component of games relatively quickly. I guess it's like when you are reading a good book or watching a really good TV show and you just can't stop reading or watching.

The First time that I can recall running through a game was when I was between the ages of 8 and 10. One of my good friends, my sister and I all sat down together and decided to play Rayman 2 on the PS1, it turns out that we ended up tearing through that game in under 7 hours. Ever since then I have been running through games when ever I have the time.

Another example of the is when I play the Halo games I have beaten all of them in one sitting and even on the legendary difficulty sometimes. I think I feel like I am doing a time trial or something whenever I play a single player game, maybe I am trying to relive the time when I first hammered through Rayman 2. Who, knows? One thing is for sure though, developers better start making games longer so I can't beat all of them in 1 day!

Call Me Nerdy But I Seem to Get IntoThe Universe That a Game Creates

I am currently reading the last two books in the Halo series and it got me thinking, I really get stuck in the universe that a game creates. I always feel the need to delve into the extra tidbit of the back story of a game, always looking for new details.

Halo is one example of this since I enjoy reading the books, they provide some good background and they are entertaining reads. Also, I have read the Resistance book "Resistance:The Gathering Storm", for the same reasons why I read the Halo books (also one of the Halo authors wrote the Resistance book). I spend have spent a lot of time on the MyResistance.net forum and all the topics that have read helped clear up a lot things that I wasn't sure about or small things that I missed.

It happens that there is going to be an annual gaming/comic book convention in Toronto and I am going to attend it again this year. When I went last summer I got to play God of War 3 and Ratchet and Clank before they were released and I liked that little perk. This is very nerdy I know but I was contemplating buying a Keyblade that I saw. Yes I am a pretty big Kingdom Hearts fan and they had the Lion Heart Keyblade for sale but by the time I had seen it I had run out of money due to me buying up a bunch of Amazing Spider-man comic books. So hopefully I will have enough money to purchase a Keyblade next weekend if they have them but I also have to put some money aside for the Deadmau5 concert in October. I really hope that I don't have to choose between the concert and the Keyblade, I guess I'm just going to have to wait and see.

Right Now I Feel Like There is a Drought...

I usually feel this way almost every summer, there is a drought when it comes to good games. I feels like it has been such a long time since a good game has been released.

The most recent console game that I actually enjoyed was God of War 3 and that came out ages ago. So I have been neglecting my PS3 for extended periods of time this summer. Sadly it has been collecting dust and I just use it to watch Blu Ray movies these days. Why did all the good games have to come out so early on in the year, I wish their released were a bit more spread out so I wouldn't be experiencing this boredom; this drought.

The only game that I keeping me from being bored out of my mind is Starcraft 2 but honestly 1 good game for the whole summer, this is just ridiculous. It seems like every game I try to play is just trash. I tried to give Final Fantasy 13 a chance but it was so bad that I could only get a few hours in, it was that painful. Basically it looks like I'm going to borrow my mothers' eReader for a long while now so I can finish the Halo series so I get onto the Halo Reach hype train.

Some Games Are Just Too Damn Hard!

Have you ever played a game so difficult that you want to rip all your hair, because I have and it's not fun at all. Some times games are so hard they are just plain stressful and tedious.

So let's start with Ninja Gaiden, back in 2007 I decided to pick up Ninja Gaiden for my PS3 because it looked pretty cool since I think ninjas are pretty awesome. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into because I played the demo of the first level that I downloaded from PSN and I knew that the game would be difficult. I was able to beat that level on the hardest difficulty and decided that I would be able to handle the full game and I went down to my local game store and picked it up. Unfortunately I was very wrong, I tried to play through the game on the second easiest difficulty and it was probably one of the most frustrating experiences in my life (well besides trying to teach myself calculus). Each time I played the game I was either tempted to rip my hair out or chuck my Six-axis controller into my TV. Eventually I gave up after I fought a particular boss battle. This is what went down, I fought the boss drained all its health but I had almost no health as well, as the boss died and fell to the ground it touched me and I died. After a great deal of time, effort and "x" amount of tries to beat this boss I was so enraged that I was probably cursing at the game for a few minutes. Shortly after I sold that game, never again would I endure such torture.

A few years before that little episode with Ninja Gaiden, back when the PS2 was the it console I bought the Wolverine's Revenge game that came out when X-men 2 was released. The difference between this game and Ninja Gaiden is that in Ninja Gaiden you can actually move forward in the game although it is very hard but in Wolverine's Revenge a lot of parts actually seemed physically impossible. I remember I was playing this game on the normal difficulty and I got to a the first boss I think and it was so impossibly hard that I had to go onto the internet to look up cheats to beat this boss. So I got all the cheats ready including, the most useful one was me being "invincible". It seemed like that fight should have been a piece of cake, once again I was mistaken the boss was still able to kill me by somehow throwing me into a pit full of spikes so easily. So much for invincibility my twelve year old self thought, that game got sold so quickly.

Now when I hear a game is ludicrously difficult, I don't even attempt to try them anymore. I don't think it's worth all the the time and stress, I don't even think it's worth the ego boost to say I could beat Ninja Gaiden on hard, especially since I would have Hulk smashed a few TV's in the process.

Why Is Counter-Strike Like Crack?

As a child I used to play a lot of video games a lot more than I do now. I remember when I was first introduced to the FPS genre when I was about 9. The first FPS and PC game that I ever played was Counter-Strike (CS).

At the time my PC was not very good and I had Dial-up for my internet (which my parents restricted me from using as a child, I rarely used my home computer), so I would go to internet cafes with my friends and we would play CS for hours on end, It was probably one of the best games I had ever played.

Fast forward a few years, I was in the 8th grade. Me and 3 of my friends decided to band together and rent a server so we could be admins on CS and create a clan. It ended up costing us each $8 a month so it seemed reasonable. This is where my CS addiction began. My friends and I created our clan and learned the ropes of being admins. Those were good times but I quickly became obsessed with the game, I would play for 8, 10, 12 hours a day. Playing the same maps over and over again trying to hone my skills, it became routine and gradually worsened. I invested so much time into that game that it was getting ridiculous. For what? I really don't know; maybe to say I was better than my friends. Eventually, my mother had enough, she put her foot down and banned me from playing CS for a couple weeks and when I was able to play it again I was only allowed to play for a couple hours at a time.

Now That I think about it, I probably had a little taste of what gaming addiction. It was like a drug, I couldn't stop myself from playing...Well, I am glad that I haven't experienced anything like my CS addiction ever since I stopped playing that game back in the 9th grade.

I Never Realized How Much Vista Sucks, Until Now

As many of you may know, I decided to take the plunge last week and pick up Starcraft 2(SC2). But what you probably don't know is that my almost 2 year old Sony Vaio laptop is running Vista.

I knew from the get go that Vista was not nearly as good as Windows Xp, since it was pretty slow when I made the transition from Xp to Vista (very painful transition). When I thought it couldn't get any worse, worse than being pretty slow and frequent crashing; my purchase of SC2 showed me the dismal nature of this OS. Let's not forget my laptop has 3 gigs of RAM which would seem sufficient (in my eyes at least) to run SC2 smoothly on at least the lowest settings. Boy was I in for a surprise, it seems like Vista loves to eat up RAM like the obese glutton of an OS that it is. This is ridiculous! It can barely run SC2 on the lowest settings ( the graphics are comparable to a Nintendo DS game, and that is not acceptable considering my laptop was almost 2K last year). Don't even get me started on me attempting to run SC2 on medium settings. It was so slow that I could watch a sloth do a 100 meter race before the damn game would have loaded. A message indicating that I am slowing down the game pops up so frequently that it's starting to get annoying. I feared that trying medium settings would melt my computer due to the incompetence of Vista. I really do loath this OS, especially when it comes to playing games. Buying SC2 is my way of getting back into the PC gaming scene but Vista is like a rash constantly pissing me off. Why couldn't Microsoft just update Xp instead of making Vista and Windows 7. Seriously how can an OS that is over half a decade old be better than present day OS, it just boggles my mind. Just the thought of me running SC2 on Windows Xp and 3 gigs of RAM makes me feel all warn and fuzzy inside but then I am slowly brought back to the reality of the crappiest OS I have ever used, this pathetic OS we call Vista.

Ok, I Take Back What I Said About Crysis 2

While I was surfing the internet the other day, I stumbled upon some recent gameplay footage from Crysis 2. I must say, I was simply blown away.

This is what leads me to take back what I initially said when I was comparing the first Crysis 2 trailer to the Killzone 2 gameplay footage. In the new footage, Crysis 2 looks more polished and the scale of the maps are incredible. The attention to detail in Crysis2 as well as the physics are probably the best if have seen on a console. This leads me to believe that some of the aspects of Crysis 2 that I criticized in my earlier blog have been improved significantly. Even the character models and the weapon models look so much better. This game looks almost like CGI and is very easy on the eyes. So there you have it, I have excepted my false claims and I am not more excited to see how the end product of Crysis 2 turns out. It seems like the console versions Crysis 2 may even stand a chance against the PC version and have visuals that are nearly as good; well only if you have a beast of a computer.

Pokemon, The Only Reason to Buy a Gameboy...

Don't judge me but I have been playing Pokemon for over a decade now on my Gameboy colour (GBC). I know, I know people have told me to upgrade my handheld in the past but I have been content for a long while.

The main reason why I still play my GBC is because of Pokemon, I think it was one of the greatest games ever. Initially I had Pokemon Red Version but sadly I lost it several years ago. Soon after I got Pokemon Gold Version and I haven't looked back since. It's funny because that is the only game I have for my GBC but don't care, it's just that good. I have realized that Pokemon games are a good enough reason to buy a Gameboy. The game has all the elements I like, having some side missions so the game is not too linear, turn based combat and grind, lots and lots of grind. So when the 3DS comes out I will probably retire my GBC and make the shift into the "next gen" handheld scene, by now you could probably guess what game will be the first I will purchase.

Should I Bother Wasting My Time With Final Fantasy 13?

Basically my friend and I decided to trade games temporarily to save on money (times are hard, it's still a recession), so I gave him my God of War 3 and he gave me his Final Fantasy 13(FF13).

I must say FF13, is one of the most painful games to play. I am only a few hours into it but it is very difficult to force myself to go on. It almost seems like a chore to play. The plot is boring and generic, the characters are not likable at all (Hope pisses me off every time he opens his mouth). Those are some of the minor things that annoy me about this game mainly because gameplay is the most important part.

One saying that is very true, especially when it comes to games is "if it aint broke don't fix it". This saying explains how I feel about the gameplay and gameplay mechanics in FF13. First of all it is one of the most linear games I have played in a while and I know that I have said that I don't mind linearity in platforming games but in RPG's it's a totally different ball game. I want to be able to explore and do side missions and have a larger area to do my grinding, I can't walk in a straight line for the whole game, especially in an RPG. It puzzles me why the developers have made this game so linear. More importantly, I really hate how you can only control the party leader, why can't I control the rest of my party? I just find it stupid. It really grinds my gears that Square Enix tries to make the gameplay more simple by making it more complicated. With all the auto battling and paradigm shifts and nonsense, it seems like there is a tutorial every couple of minutes in this game. If they truly want to move away from turn base combat why don't they make the battle system more similar to the system in Kingdom Hearts. If not, just go back to traditional turn based combat because these new systems that they develop are getting progressively worse. I have realized this is a general trend with Final Fantasy games after FF10. The series itself has been getting progressively worse , so I am not surprised FF13 is one of the worst RPG's I have played in a long time.

So I Played Starcraft for the First Time...

So last week I decided to give Starcraft 2 a try, mind you this was my first time ever playing Starcraft or an RTS game in general. For lack of better words I think it is awesome.

I liked it so much that I decided to buy a copy of it a couple days ago (this is why I haven't made a blog post recently). Essentially, the game has consumed most of my time due to the highly addictive nature of the game. Although I discovered that I truly am a poor RTS player I still enjoy Starcraft regardless. I cannot wait to get better so I can play against my friends online. I guess it will be a while before I will play online, mainly because I'm such a noob and my friends have had played the original Starcraft for year. So, it looks like I'm going to get back playing some Starcraft 2, to satisfy my craving for this new genre of game I have recently discovered.

All I Want For Christmas Is a 3DS!

Well I know the 3DS won't be coming out for Christmas but hey it would be a nice move on Nintendo's part. But seeing a how any incarnation of the DS sells like hotcakes, essentially Nintendo can sell this handheld when ever they want.

Basically I have not been a part of the handheld market so several years now; the last handheld I bought was a gameboy colour back in the late 90's. I never had that much intrest in hand helds until now, I just find it awesome that we will be able to see 3D without the use of those goofy glasses. On top of that the 3DS can apparently take 3D pictures and who wouldn't want to see their pictures in 3D. With respect to the games on the 3DS, this is sad I know but I want to play those Kingdom Hearts(KH) games that are exclusive to the DS (I really need my KH fix, it has been way too many years now). Another reason that has lead me to consider purchasing this handheld, is one of my guilty pleasures; which is Pokemon (it is so addictive). So it looks like I am going to have to save up my penies or hope that Santa Clause will be generous this year (and yes I think Santa Clause can make a late delivery in 2011).