FUS RO DAH!

Finally I'm able to talk about something I've been wanting to for a while now.  Most of the bugs in my game have been fixed with patches and it is now more than playable.  I have been sucked back into "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" with their recent expansion "Dawnguard".  Huzzah!  To be honest, I really think this is the best game in the Elder Scroll series to date.

Insert dramatic music here

Game: The Elderscrolls V: Skyrim (with expansion "Dawnguard") 
Dev: Bethesda 
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PS3 
Rating: 9 So many bodies, so little ketchup. 

"HEY-- YOU-- GUY---S!"

Dramatic landscapes come standard, of course.

And here we have the review that's been a long time in the making, really.  Constant saves and loads, checking back to see if I can progress or not.  Let's be honest.  Skyrim (much like Diablo 3) didn't have... the best nor smoothest in terms of game launches.  It is reminiscent to the issues that Lion Head studios had with their game "Fable 2". When that game got released it was just rough. Both games were riddled with bugs like Swiss cheese with holes.  Bugs were more rampant than fire breathing dragons, and that's saying something.  But now that the game has been out a while, patches galore have pretty much smoothed everything over to a gentile, if not smooth finish.

Ye olde bug spray.

So onto the game: What is Skyrim?  If you don't know by now, it's another in a long long list of open sandbox first person RPGs.  You run around doing quests and what ever at your leisure.  There's a couple main story arcs and nearly endless random quests for whatever.  Pretty simple.  You get weapons and abilities and points and levels and perks and stuff.  Magic and dragon shouts and all sorts of gizmos and gadgets to defeat dragons, poke town guards, and take arrows to knees.

Life force before hos.

The expansion, Dawnguard, adds content in 2 parts.  The 1st part is the more obvious one.  That is like adding a new story arc, new items, new areas, and the usual mumbo-jumbo.  The other part is going back into the old game and adding features.  The biggest of which, and my favorite, are the perk trees for werewolves and vampires.  I only wish the trees were bigger, more complex, and had more perks  thatcould be gained over a longer period of time.  What they have is good, but more would be better.  One other quick note, was that I was a little disappointed in both the werewolves and vampires, in the sense of their end transformation.  What they have is alright, but it would be amazing if they could incorporate hints of your gender and/or race in the final product.  Like khajiit markings in the werewolf fur, skin tones on the vampire lord/lady, making your character design settings reflect into the beast you become, instead of just overriding into X generic stock image that everyone becomes with no differentiation what so ever.

There he goes again, waving around that glowing shit like he owns the place.

"Call me 'Pussy', one... more... time..."

They also revisit some questions that arise from the original Skyrim and refined your knowledge about the lore there, which is always a good thing.  They added a few more "collect x" quests as well.  Still, a way to re-allocate your points to go with the newly added content would have been nice as well.




Overall, there's just a plain satisfaction of screaming at dragons and running your knife/arrow/lance of ice through any given opponent.... That and chowing down on their corpse to feed your wolfy hunger...hehe.


Game: The Elderscrolls V: Skyrim (with expansion "Dawnguard") 
Dev: Bethesda 
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PS3 
Rating: 9 So many bodies, so little ketchup. 

(All images gained from Bethesda's public website)

Pandas Don't Know Rights From Lefts

A short review this time.  This is a game I've been comically struggling with.

So I'm a huge fan of Kung-fu.  Everything kung fu is win in my book.  From bad 60's films to the real life guy that can do hand stands on nothing but his thumbs...thumb-stands?  So it's only natural that I quite enjoy Dreamwork's Warcraft knock off with the "Kung-fu Panda" series.  So I picked up the game a while ago...

Game: Kung-fu Panda 2
Dev: Griptonite Games
Platform: PS3, Wii, DS, Xbox 360
Rating: 5 Too much sticky rice.

I get by with a little help from my friends

First off, this wrongly titled game isn't the movie "Kung-fu Panda 2".  It takes place right after the fall of Lord Shen in the aftermath.  Of course there's a vacuum of power and of course there's a new evil so behold, video game.  This is more "Kung-fu Panda 2.5" if you want to go all numbers.  It's the epilogue, 'nuff said.

To be honest, I haven't gotten through it entirely.  Story wise, what I have seen I have rather enjoyed.  The mini games are interesting and entertaining with the kinect (depending on how finicky my sensor is being).  And the transition of game play from one scene to another is rather smooth.  But the biggest folly of this title is the game mechanics themselves.  Which is a shame, really.

Combat.  With Kung fu, there's fighting (as the well known disco song suggests).  And this... well... you can clearly see what they were aiming for, but they really missed their mark.  Combat is split into 2 trees (that take turns in alternating phases).  An attack tree and a defense tree.  Attack tree you have various "moves" single punches, single kicks, jump, and double fist and from there they fit and interact with various situations (like an opponent dodges, you flail about in that direction and activate a jump move).  Kinect has difficulty reading double punches since your fists push in the same line as your torso so your hands become invisible to the sensor some times.

Rickshaw...

Defense tree is the biggest issue, and it's a really important issue at that.  Defense is broken down with single blocks, double block, quick time event counters, and dodges.  Dodges are the worst idea in this game since square wheels.  This notion of dodging attacks is carried out poorly.  The idea makes sense, the execution was sloppy. And when I say sloppy, I mean to the point where it makes the game practically non-playable.

Here's the idea: An enemy glows when they are doing an "unblockable attack".  They "charge" up in a slow motion movement and the player dodges in the correct direction of their movement.  Novel right? Sounds great.  They even had the enemies glow different colors depending on which way your supposed to dodge.  Sadly, they didn't tell the game they did that.  So enemies glow randomly between the two colors (red and red-orange, which is GREAT for the color blind) and your supposed to "guess" which way they are attacking.  Even worse, most enemies carry huge round shields which block a good 70% of your line of sight so you can't tell "how" they are "charging" their attack or which way they are going to move.  Even worse, they all lean to the right, so instinct says "dodge left".  You're always in the line of fire.

The models flow like in the film

When it's just small fish, yeah, you can get through a small pack of mooks alright.  But a boss? Forget about it.  You have to dodge 3-4 times in the same defense phase on every defense phase, and each failed attempt takes huge chunks of health from you.  The game is unforgiving as well.  If you fail on the super healthed out boss, you have to start at the very beginning of the level.  square one, and survive the minions again.  Depending how the first few fights go, depends greatly how many dodge hits you can take.  And you WILL take the dodge hits.  It's safer to just stand still than to try and guess where it's going.  Probably get the same results.  There's no changing of difficulties to make up for the poor game mechanic either.  Your just suck with it, and it's made me very frustratingly stuck as well.

I really want a cheat code that just lets me watch the cinema scenes instead of try to chew through the bad mechanics.

No Kung fu is complete without a pagoda

Now, keep in mind, this was a very early kinect release.  So the fine tuning of the kinect sensor really hasn't come through yet (it still hasn't, but it's getting there).  So things are really understandably choppy.  But it almost feels like nobody played the game before it got put out on shelves.  It doesn't matter if the game is "finished", some one had to have seen that it couldn't really be played very well.

There's a very easy, easy, easy fix that I'm sure they could probably patch it in through PSN, what ever the wii has, or Xbox Live.  Simply add an arrow to the GUI.  Dodge in the direction of the arrow.  Easy peasy.  This isn't an argument of difficulty or skill as some of you might argue.  Think of it more like playing Tosh.0's Rock, Paper, Balls.  There is no winner, only pain.

A quick note: I do like their modeling, and the visuals are pretty great.  It really catches the feel of the movies...just wish I could see everything in the game...


Game: Kung-fu Panda 2
Dev: Griptonite Games
Platform: PS3, Wii, DS, Xbox 360
Rating: 5 Too much sticky rice.

So Epic it's Purple

When the xbox 360 was new, and trying to find it's footing among the established legacy consoles, there were a lot of interesting and somewhat strange games stocking the shelves at stores.  Games like these were Prey (a very interesting sci fi Native American horror game), Perfect Dark 2 (which had none of the feeling and even less of the epic space secret agent story of the first game, leaving you with a really poor story), and games like the brash awesome Saints Row.

At this point in time, developer Rock Star Games pretty much not only had the market cornered, but had a precedent on vehicular crime sandbox games.  Back then, their game "Grand Theft Auto" was kind of the "end all' with outrageous.  Run around, pay a hooker, then kill them for your money back while you make off in your stolen car.  It Really wasn't till a splinter company named Volition showed us a few boundaries that not even GTA had crossed.  However, because of the history of GTA (that is, it came first), you can only really compare the beginnings of the Saint's with it's rival for perspective.

Saints Row

It was brash, in your face, and I loved every moment of it.  Where GTA was confined to making games a little more realistic, Saint's was a bit in the opposite.  The quests, the people, the weapons, the story, all of it was over the top.  There were many facets of hidden amusement, it's really hard to talk about with giving away major spoilers.

Like GTA the game had quite a few of the same notions.  An in game cell phone was how you communicated with quests.  Gang wars in the streets and you capture zones.  Cheat codes could manipulate the environment in which the game operated.  You join a gang, you go and do gang stuffs.  And then there's zombies, military, crazy bosses, and all sorts of wackiness.

But Saint's Row really raised the bar on how much a video game could get away with (much to the same effect as Conker's Bad Fur Day for the N64).  There was, however, the downfall of the ending.  It was pretty awful.  Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't Mass Effect 3 bad.  It was expected, but fairly bad none the less.  It also had issues with game mechanics as well.  UI and character controls were clunky and some of the chase scenes were really difficult because of it.

Saints Row 2

To be honest, I couldn't make it all the way through Saints Row 2.  It was a tough chew.  The difference was that it took itself way, WAY, too seriously.  It turned into a GTA clone more than anything else with nothing very surprising about it.  Everything was droll and realistic and wasn't what I was expecting.  It's only saving grace was that there were no limits on character creations.  So having a girl with a giant Mohawk and a British rugby thug voice was pretty hilarious.  Who ever did that particular voice was wonderful.

Saints Row 3


Developer: Volition Inc.
Console:  Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, F-Yeah!

This.  OMG this.  Shake off the shackles of boring realistic gaming.  This is just epicness.  Saints Row 3 was just a sick secret pleasure to play.  The shear numbers of customization with outfits (including the pretty funny fursuiting mascot options...still need tails but a minor want....) are awesome.  Volition really didn't worry about keeping it too "real", which is exactly why this game is hot.

I like using "a different" melee weapon...

The quests are crazy.  There's so much insanity in this game it's hard to spoil any one thing.  One point I love talking about is sky diving.  There's this scene where you fall from an aircraft...and then you fall from a 2nd aircraft...and this time....in a tank.  You skydive with a tank.  A tank.  With sky diving.  A sky diving tank.  There's throwbacks to pop culture like Tron.  Weapons like the "Fart in a Jar".  Hover bikes.  Murder Bowl.  So much stuff.

Typical firefight

And something that is kind of amazing about it all is that the story stayed consistent throughout all the "over the topness".  The conveyance of Saints Row 3 is smooth and nice while all the shit goes down around you. There was plenty to do and plenty to see.  And topping this title is going to be very difficult in the future.

One of the major problems I had with the game was that I wanted more.  Much like in Crackdown, they automatically limit themselves with declaring factions.  There's 3 factions and thus 3 bosses.  Game, Set, Match.  I really felt that there should have been a bit more in length.  It really wouldn't have suffered story wise to have a few more mini-sub bosses and quests along the way.  The side quests were nice, but more story would have been absolutely wonderful.

Skydiving with class

Something that I kind of would have liked to see, would be some sort of limitation on skills and abilities.  By having it "open" it puts an artificial "end" to the game.  What I mean by this is that the "end" of the game comes when the player has all skills.  There's no real point in deciding which to get when or something.  You get infinite ammo to all weapons, you can't be hurt by anything save for physics, all the gangs and cops love you.  Game Over.  Not literally but there's no expanding beyond that, it just "is" and you get kind of stuck with it. The character can't move forward as there's nothing to move too. There's a few options out there to alleviate this problem.  One that is most commonly used is to introduce a skill tree.  By selecting an option it blocks the selection of another.  By adding a limit like this, it expands future playability.  The player is able to replay the game over and over changing their options around to see how their character develops through specialization and such.  Another option is to make the list incredibly expansive.  There's a lot there, but a lot more extraneous things (like for instance a moon jump and many other aesthetic options as well).  It's not a major issue, however.

Hey...hey...hey you!....Ba---BOOOM!

Co-op was beautiful.  To often is co-op handled poorly.  Limiting players in game mechanics like camera or distance limitations from each other.  This game, you join and do what ever you want.  There were quite a few missions that were fun to be flying air support in a missile loaded helicopter while my buddy finishes objectives.  That's pretty much it.  This game is was just pretty amazing and fun to play.

Saints Row 3

Developer: Volition Inc.
Console:  Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, F-Yeah!
Rating:  9 Bitches 

F da po-lice with Kung fu.