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Author Topic: A handful of mini-reviews for Xbox  (Read 751 times)

Spike

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A handful of mini-reviews for Xbox
« on: March 22, 2013, 01:43:07 AM »
I haven't much played in the last two or three months, for whatever reason, but none the less here is a general quick and dirty overview of the stuff I have, in fact, played recently.

 Skyrim: Does this need a mini-review? Fuck no, but here it is: awesome on toast. As is my tradition with games set in the Elder Scrolls world (Daggerfall, Battlespire, Morrowwind, Oblivion and now Skyrim... probably something else I forgot along the way...), I clocked literally hundreds of hours without actually ever beating the game. That's right, I can honestly say I've NEVER finished a main story arc on an Elder Scroll's game.  My dual ax wielding fighter hit fifty, killed enough dragons that I was just banking souls for the next Word, and I still didn't finish act 2 of the game.

Sadly, that save was on another hard drive so I'll have to start over. Woe. (kidding!)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution:  Balls on Toast. Seriously, I never played the first Deus Ex, and Invisible War left me kinda flat at the end. The weird process of going backwards in time for each new iteration of the game is unusual to say the least, but since I can't be bothered to remember lore over the five or six years (seven? Eight????) between titles, there isn't much 'conflict'.   That said: I do get tired of 'here are three choices, you will die no matter what you pick' endings, really I do. Still, compared to ME3? Sweet.

On the other hand, the boss fights were just badly done. Game breakingly badly done.  Seriously, unless you happened to pick the exact right upgrades for your character, chances are you won't actually be able to win any of the fights without looking online for an exploitive tactic.  While I don't have exact numbers, I think its safe to say each of the three bosses has something like fifty times your health, they dish out two or three times as much damage with their weapons and they don't have an ammo restriction.  Not only do the fights NOT play out like the rest of the game (to the point: one of the strongest game play 'builds' is a stealthy build, with stealth being literally pointless, even crippling, in boss fights), but they are so much tougher than anything else in the world that it ruins any sense of immersion. Plus, you know, even with guides on how to beat them you will still probably spend an hour or two on each fight trying to get it right.  Ironically: They seem to go in reverse order, with the toughest boss being the first, and the weakest being the 'big bad', or the 'Dragon' in TV tropes terms.

X-Com: Loved it. Plays enough like the classic that it hit the nostalgia factor hard. Graphics are good, replayability seems decent enough (I beat it and ran about half way through a second full playthrough without feeling bored).  The Graphics are nice, in a cartoony fashion that is entirely appropriate, and the challenge scales fairly well.  Even an old hand at Xcom, like me, found it to be shockingly lethal at times.  

Fallout 3: Hey, I know its old now, but hell, I love it. You don't need a review, and I'm not going to waste time cramming one down your throat.  I did get the downloadable content at last, but I haven't actually touched any of it yet.

Ghost Recon something-something:  Sure, against the marketing juggernauts of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare, this sucker dropped like a rock, but I had a lot of fun with it. One under-advertised feature is the ability to customize your weapons. Like REALLY customize your weapons. Swap in a match trigger, change stocks, bolts and barrel lengths... all kinds of stuff, plus, of course, the paint scheme.  Some of the missions are worse than others (the last one really irritated me due to how it, once again, violated almost all the previous game play I'd spent hours learning. Sigh...). I haven't really gone into any online stuff or the non-storyline stuff, so I can't speak to that at all, but the story-arc is long enough and has enough really hard challenges that you can replay misssions over and over again and probably not get too bored.  

Fable 3: another oldy, but I 'beat' the game for the first time and man did it suck worse than I remembered.  The Fable series seems to be one that just got worse over time, while adding more options it also reduced playability. I think Peter Molyneux is a fucking hack with an unearned jumped up rep, there. I said it.

DMC: Devil May Cry. I didn't actually play this one, it was bought for me and I left it on the table and some punk kid who spends a weekend a month (or less) at my house, came over, unwrapped it and played the fuck out it for me.  I can't speak much about playability, but I thought the graphics sucked. Uncanny valley sucked, mind you. Some of it looked really good, but every time the characters talked it was horrifying.  That and like Deus Ex the series went backwards here, so you pretty much already know the major plot twist at the end in advance if you've paid any attention.

Mass Effect 3: You've seen my bigger reviews in this forum before.  Game is still nice, ending still sucks balls. Got the DLC for it, played it, enjoyed it.  I will add that teh expanded ending manages to actually be WORSE than the original ending. Cheap ass artwork that is jarringly out of place, cutscenes that managed to dig plot holes deeper than they already were, and the already obnoxious dialog with the star child gets LONGER... and as I recall you actually get fewer choices along the way. Yay for Fail?  In short: If I could just play this endlessly and never have to complete it? I'd probably like it a lot more.

Assassin's Creed 3: Ugh. I played for something like four hours and hated it. Worse, I'm pretty sure I was still in the 'intro' to the game.  Its the Storytelling Game of swinging from rooftops for Narration, or some weird shit.  Seriously, I felt constantly that my primary purpose was to push buttons when told to to move the plot and action along, more watching the game play out than actually doing the playing. Most of the freedom you have won't accomplish much of anything except bog down the game play. The Stealth Mechanics weren't, the action mechanics weren't and the combat was seemingly arbitrary. Also: I'm pretty sure that at no point in American History, even pre-revolutionary war era, did british troops hang out on rooftops in large clusters and start randomly shooting anyone they saw who also happened to be on a rooftop.  So, in other words, the one thing that this series likes to sell itself on (that is free-running rooftops) now includes an entire army of punitive bastards waiting for you to try to do it, so they can interrupt your game play with a pointless, painfully dull fight.  So. Yay?  Fuck AC3 in the ear with a spoon.  

There you have it, Spike's Mini-reviews of a bunch of random Xbox games he's played by a loose definition of 'recently'.

Because I can.
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Ladybird

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A handful of mini-reviews for Xbox
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2013, 03:19:31 AM »
I really like DmC (It's a reboot of the series, rather than a prequel), good action, controlled well, fun to play, quite pretty (I played it on the PC), decent characters with a good story arc for Dante. It's solid stuff.

The rest of the video game playing world threw a hissy fit because this Dante has a different hair colour. Worst game ever in the entire history of games, etc.

So we won't be getting any more Devil May Cry games.
one two FUCK YOU

Silverlion

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A handful of mini-reviews for Xbox
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2013, 05:16:48 AM »
Nice, thanks for sharing.

A friend of mine told me "Hurry up and get Skyrim, its High Valor the computer game!"

He felt they were similar, so I finally did get it. Had a lot of fun with it.
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