Excessive

It's been awhile since I've written and most of the time breaks are caused by depression or extreme exaustion, but this time it's just been caused from forgetfulness and playing too many games. Yes, for this week I've been off school, I've relaxed and played games guilt-free, without worrying about what I should be doing. I've been playing a bunch of games that I've had on the go forever, as well as restarting a couple that I had played before but only for an hour or so, and never went back to.

I figure I'd talk about the games a bit since that's what I've been doing with the majority of my time in the last few days, so it's fresh on my mind and a lot of what I've been thinking about.

The games I've been playing, cycling through with regularity: Half-life, Blue Dragon, Heroes of Might and Magic V and WarCraft 2.. and I beat Costume Quest. I've got two others 'on the go' with Borderlands and Dragon Quest 4, however I haven't played them, and I'm not sure if I will, just because that'd be a lot of games to keep track of at the same time.

Blue Dragon
Blue Dragon was an early release on the Xbox 360, and one of the first RPG's released for the console - a console that had never really had RPGs at all, so it was kind of a big deal, and making it an obvious buy for RPG fans who always wished there was something from the genre to play on the console. Blue Dragon was written and produced by the creator of Final Fantasy, leading you to believe that it would be good, and all of the art was done by Akira Toriyama (Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger) and it spans multiple DVDs.

Where to begin with this game would be just saying outright that it's bad. It's really bad... the art is terrible, the story is laughable, bordering on literally embarrasing to experience. The controls are unresponsive and uncomfortable, the camera is disorienting and frustrating and the music is hilariously bad. The only thing it has going for it is the gameplay, the actual fight system, which had potential to be good, but falls short by only offering six classes or something instead of something higher, like 20 or 30 like a Final Fantasy 5 or Tactics.

The game seems to hit every single early to mid 90's RPG cliche and stereotype possible. The story makes no sense and the characters are unrelatable. It's just... terrible. The battle system and character development system is just interesting enough to keep me playing, and the game is so easy that I can just sit on the couch and kind of zone out or relax while I play, which is why I enjoy it. I do find myself laughing at how bad it is while I play, and asking, "How am I playing this?" but I'm about half way through and I'm not about to stop.

Half-Life
Half-life is a classic, ground breaking game from the early years of PC gaming and it has always been a game that I never got around to playing, mostly because I didn't own it (as I was way into consoles and then Unreal Tournament), but it was regarded as one of the best games ever made, so I had always wanted to play through it. Since getting it on Steam, I've tried a few times to start it but always played it for a day or two and then got distracted by other things, but this time I've made it quite a bit farther than ever before, and feel like I will continue to play through it to the end. How does it hold up 14 years after release (yes, this game came out the same year as StarCraft 1)?

The graphics aren't great, but it's forgivable because they're good for a game from that time. I don't mind them, and it gets the idea across, and while it's a bit less than immersive, the general idea of the enviroments are passed on, so the atmosphere is established (albiet not perfectly).

The story is told in game, not through cinematics, and you are thrown into a situation and as the game unfolds you learn new things, although so far the story isn't really deep or interesting. There was an explosion and now I'm trying to get out of a military science lab, but there are things trying to kill me.. that's about the entire game.

The only big issue I have with the game are the controls. The running around, the strafing and the jumping are so terrible that it creates a shitload of frustrating situations. If you need to make an accurate jump, or stop running quickly, or quickly turn, good luck with that. You slip and slide around, you get stuck on seemingly invisible ledges, the entire game is like you are running on ice, and you just kinda float around, causing a lot of annoying situations.

I will play through to the end because I really want to play through Half-Life 2, and I want to have 100% knowledge of what has happened up to that point going into the game. While I may have to play the game in shorter bursts because of the controls, it's still an important game to get under my belt because of how highly regarded it is to everyone else.

Heroes of Might and Magic V
This game I didn't really know anything about going into, other than it was a fantasy game, and... well, that was about it. It involves knights, castles, demons, elves and the like. I tried it months ago, maybe even a year ago, and remember being a bit confused about the point, the genre, the goal, and pretty much everything about it, and didn't really go back to it, but for whatever reason I was compelled to pick it up this week out of the blue, and right off the bat, for whatever reason, it instantly clicked with me. I understood it, I knew what the goal was, what made it fun, how to be good at the game, and it seemed like a lot of fun, so I've been playing it quite a bit.

It's a turn based strategy game, so... like Chess, in that you make your turn and then it's your opponants turn, and then you react and make choices depending on what they did. You walk around the world as hero, capturing key points on the map to collect resources, and eventually capture a town, and use the town to grow an army, and the army is what you use to defeat the enemies guarding the resource points.

The first few levels were very easy, very, very easy, but I can see it already gaining in difficulty, however very early on I've discovered a number of ways to exploit the game system making it impossible to lose, which kinda sucks. Let me explain...

Okay, so you have a town, and at this town you build or train a certain number of units per week (a week is seven turns). At the start of the new week, the number you can train goes back up, and you are free to purchase the new set of units. However there doesn't seem to be any negative or downside for having weeks go by, or for taking a long time to play the level. So... with that knowledge, I can literally stand outside my town, end my turn seven times in a row without doing anything, making gold each turn (happens automatically), a new week starts, I buy my new units to make my army stronger, and repeat, new week, more units, repeat, new week, more units, until I get bored of it, ending whenever I feel as though I have an unbeatable army.

Obviously the only thing the game has to do to stop this exploit is introduce some kind of time limit to beat the level in, but for now it makes everything in the game trivial, because if the mission objective is to beat some enemy, I can just keep letting the weeks go buy to boost my army, and then go fight it when I have no chance of losing, so where is the fun in that? Anyway, so far it's still fun, because I haven't really exploited the system except once when I kept losing, and who knows, they may very well introduce time based goals/limits in the future missions, as I'm only six missions into a thirty mission game.

WarCraft 2
Not much to say about WarCraft 2 other than I played it a shitload when I was a kid, back in 96 and 97. It hasn't aged well as far as RTS games go, as the AI can be brutal at times, and there really are no options other than mass a giant army of a specific unit and then attack and hope you win, but you might be able to say that about most RTS. The reason I'm playing it is that it's been years and years since I've played through the main campaign, and have never played the expansion, and on top of that, I wanted to play through WarCraft 3 and expansion, and figured it'd be fun to see the story from all the way from the start of WarCraft 2. I'm about halfway through the game, and I can only play it a level or so at a time because it can get slightly boring (as there is really only one or two viable strategies).

Costume Quest
Costume Quest is a simple RPG created by Double Fine (adventure game masters) which featured a cute, simple story based on little kids trick or treating, and it was light hearted and fun, and the battle system had enough depth to be not-boring, and the story was short enough to not get on your nerves. It took about six hours to complete the game, and it had enough charm and fun to be worth it.

So that's what I've been up to recently, and not really much else. Tomorrow is a special date day. I got movie passes from work as a showing of appreciation for my hard work on Sundays, and Bekki got gift certificates to Milestones from work for being a good worker and training and going above and beyond, so we're using those things to go for dinner and a movie tomorrow, stopping in at the mall for whatever, to just browse and stuff. It should be a fun, relaxing day.

As for tonight, probably gonna relax some more, play some more games and eventually go to bed! Ah, this week rocks.

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