Sunday, January 2, 2011

Now Playing - "An evil desert? Is that even possible?"


I meant to post this yesterday(Sunday) but completely forgot. I went out for a while to the pub with some people from school that I hadn't seen in ages. Pretty good to catch up with them again after so long.

Anyway, I've been making some progress in games, finishing the main stories of 2 games, albeit rather short RPGs...so here are some of my musings.

Finally...I finished Dragon Warrior Monsters (GB). I've had this game for quite a while now after a friend sent me it randomly for a birthday a while back. He knows me pretty well, and I hadn't even told him that I had played the 2nd one of these games but never saw the first anywhere, and he sent me it up. He had played through a fair bit of it, but I dont think he had finished it. Compared to Dragon Warrior Monsters 2, there are definitely some balancing issues, this one seems harder a) to grind in and b) to breed a good selection of monsters early on. Still, once I had got past the ridiculously long late game dungeons (the longest one is 29 floors, and then a couple back to back strong bosses) I had access to a good selection of monsters and good places to grind, so managed to bring my team just up to speed for the final battle. I like in some ways the simplicity of the games. They remind me of the early pokemon days, where it doesn't matter about EV training, stats are determined in other ways, mostly by breeding, which you can put various degrees of effort into understanding and using. These games are kind of cheap for the carts only, so I'd definitely recommend trying them out if you like the pokemon games, the dragon quest/warrior games, or the more recent Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker games (they are basically the same idea and have wi-fi online as well...something is still keeping me away from Joker though, I've not tried it.)

I started up a New game on Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PS3) earlier in the week. I chose the Easy difficulty, which is a bit unusual for me...I usually choose at least normal if I have a choice, but I figured, I get trophies for all difficulties but more than that, I suck pretty bad at Action games like this, so went for Easy. It seems to be a good fit so far, its not far too easy, some of the fights give a fair bit of a challenge (namely the Titan bosses, which are Shadow of the Colossus inspired battles.) I'm enjoying the game for the most part, its got a really nice Castlevania atmosphere and feel to it in places, but it does seem different in many ways. I'm not entirely sold on some of the stuff-it highlights objects you should be looking for, for example ledges, or objects you can interact with your whip analogue, the combat cross. So it doesn't really let you do it for yourself. On one hand, it means you won't really get stuck, but on the other hand it does feel like they think the player is too idiotic and has to be told everything to do... The enemies are not too interesting, they are fairly generic so far, but I'm really impressed with some of the graphics and areas you visit. The game looks amazing. I'm currently on chapter 8/12 and going to try and finish the game before the end of the week. Lost series 6 is taking priority in my PS3 right now though, so its slightly on hold til I finish Lost up. No spoilers by the way! I tried to isolate myself from everyone else who had finished it way back when it aired in the US, I prefer waiting for the DVDs and marathonning the shit out of series like this. =D

I finished up Golden Sun (GBA) this week, doing Crossbone Isle and then going on to the final stages of the game. Its very easy...I don't think I died more than once the entire playthrough. I realised that I've done Crossbone Isle before, last time I played through the game. I also imported my save data for Golden Sun: The Lost Age. I'm going to play through it next probably. At times I really enjoyed playing through this game again, but at other times, some of the dialogue seems needlessly padded out and rather annoying. I definitely enjoyed it more back when it came out, but it has been pretty cool to revisit this game after a few years. I'm a bit dissapointed at how short the game is, even to 100% finish everything, it wont take you more than 40 hours probably. I'm not actually too sure on certain things, like what the level cap is, because you can import your levels as you take data to the 2nd game.

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