Madness Returns, however, seemed pretty interesting in previews I’ve seen, so I decided I’d check it out as soon as it came out, though negative reviews all around made me decide to just rent it.

Since I haven’t come close to finishing the game (done with chapter 2), this is an impressions post rather than a review, though honestly I doubt the game throws any curveballs gameplay-wise, so I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything that is to be seen here (considering the total lack of BOSSES in the game…). So read on and see what I thought (I’ll make it short).

Developer: Spicy Horse
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Date of Release: June 14th 2011
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC

Genre: 3D Platformer
Rated M for Mature (why?)

Basic gameplay

The basic gameplay is quite simple: jump on platforms, kill dudes, go to the next place where you’ll jump on platforms and kill dudes. The platforming is okay, though I find it incredibly easy since you actually have 3 extra jumps once you’re in the air AND a glide move ALA Princess Peach in Mario 2 (but less awesome). There’s generally not a lot of variety in the platforming, mostly due to how easy every jump is (so you do them all in the same way). And there’s no penalty for falling in holes, you just go back before the jump. The only variety comes from shrinking, which sometimes reveals invisible platforms (though the game places flowers around areas where you might want to shrink so you’re never at a loss as to where to go).

Combat is very Zelda Ocarina of Time-ish. You can target single enemies, you have a knife which has a single combo attack (more hits are added when you level the knife up), and you have extra weapons assigned to other buttons like the pepper grinder and the hobby horse. You have a dodge move as well, which is super versatile since it essentially lets you teleport behind enemies in addition to letting you dodge attacks in any direction. So combat ends up being super simple, with the only challenges being the first time you encounter the bigger enemy with 3 masks. You can level up your equipment, making it stronger or adding more hits, using teeth that enemies drop or that you find in various destructible objects. And if you’re having trouble against a bunch of enemies? Well, if you’re down to one health, you can go into a super-powered mode that makes you invincible and makes you stronger…. this is especially useful against multiple enemies since they seem to always drop health when you’re in this mode.

The problem here is that the gameplay wears thin really fast. It felt to me that I saw everything the game had to offer in the first hour of gameplay. And frankly I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with it. It all worked well, but it felt to me like it should have been so much more fun to play. It may be due to the complete lack of challenge, it never feels like you’re actually in any trouble, so you’re just going with the flow… The game is just holding your hand all the way through, you barely feel like you’re playing it at all. Even the completely random side-scrolling shooter level didn’t really manage to break the monotony for me. It did bring variety, but not enough to actually make the experience as a whole terribly fun.

Graphics

Quality-wise… Alice’s hair looks lame, and there’s low-res textures all over the place. But overall it does look good enough to portray the style very well. Stylistically, this looks great. It’s a bit like if Tim Burton (the one who made Nightmare Before Christmas, not his less talented clone who made that Alice film) took the Alice story and made it in his own style. There’s a lot of very interesting locations, though each chapter has the very same look all the way through so the areas start looking the same. There’s a few nice touches here, like Alice having different clothes depending on the area she’s in.

A problem here is that, since you can jump so far, a lot of areas end up feeling empty, though that problem does start to die down in the second chapter (I don’t know if it goes back to feeling empty later on though).

Performance issues

I don’t know if this is a problem on the PC or Xbox 360 version, but the PS3 version has terrible performance issues. It totally lags out each time you pick up a memory, the framerate keeps chugging, sometimes the physics mess up… This really feels like an incomplete game at times.

Overall

The basic gameplay is solid enough, but it’s not really fun. I have ragged on negative reviews of this game before and… frankly I still do. The complaints I’ve seen have generally been stupid (stuff like “the platforming has traps that can kill you”… No, I’m not kidding), and none of the reviews really commented on whether the gameplay is fun or not. So I’ll say it: It’s not fun. It had a lot of potential, and the controls are really good for the most part so… I have no idea where they went wrong. It just feels really bland and it has nothing that really defines it. It’s just… there. I’ll say rent it if you’re a fan of Alice, otherwise don’t bother.

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Just because I haven’t played enough of it yet, and probably won’t for quite a while, here’s a quick impressions post for Motorstorm Apocalypse.

Just for a quick background. I played the demo for the first Motorstorm; the controls got me out of it fast, those vehicles could barely turn properly. Later I played the PSP Motorstorm. Hated it. Didn’t play the second Motorstorm on the PS3 since I didn’t like the other 2.

So when I saw this one… the idea of constantly changing environments instantly reminded me of Split/Second, which turned out being a pretty bad game with horrible rubberband AI and not much else. I decided to try it out though, hoping that it would actually end up being Split/Second done right.

Was it? Read on and see!

What I liked

Track design
Holy SHIT! The track design here is nearly mind-blowing. Racing in ruined cities, rooftops (where some of the buildings are falling), and various other post-apocalyptic settings, they’ve done some really interesting courses here. The great thing about them is that they’re constantly changing as you race. There’s constant earthquakes and explosions, causing parts of the road to change, or paths getting cut-off, or new paths appearing. It’s really quite interesting.

The coolest track, though one of the harder ones to race in as far as I’ve seen, is an awesome track where you’re racing inside of a hurricane. Not only is there insanely strong wind making it harder to handle your car, but there’s constant lightning strikes destroying stuff around you, there’s a tornado causing damage, and there’s still earthquakes and explosions going on. The track is, like, the epitome of extreme. It’s like all the best car action scenes in movies mixed into one big pack of awesome.

This definitely handles the ever-changing track philosophy given by Split/Second… it just removes the randomness from it that was caused by making the changes user-inputted and instead goes for a static timeline in the race. It still does for great races, even if the amazement of seeing the course change the first few times through each of them is kinda lost pretty fast. Nonetheless, these are amongst the best tracks I’ve ever seen in a racing game.

Graphics
The great graphcis and visual effects really help in making the courses more exciting… not much more to say here, other than “I wish I had a 3D TV”.

Boost management
Here, you have a boost system. You have a boost meter. As you hold the boost button, it fills up. Fill it up too much, your car explodes. To reduce the heat level,  you have to either let it rest, pass through water puddles, or let go of the gas and boost while you’re in the air. This system is actually really good. It makes winning more about how well you can manipulate through the tracks and how well you can manage your car’s heat, than just dumb luck and trying to prevent a rubberband AI from catching up.

AI
Speaking of rubberband AI, if there is one here, it’s really subtle. Everytime I won or lost a race, it always felt that it was because I raced my best, or messed up too much. The races are super-intense and you’ll probably end up crashing a lot… but so will your opponents. So the races are always really close fights.

What I didn’t like

Controls
This is the fourth game in the series and it still controls terribly? What’s up with these devs? It seems like all the vehicles control badly, other than the ATV and the Superbike (though not all races are good for the superbike).  Everything else seems to have major trouble cornering, no matter how much you brake before taking the turn, or how well you think you’re using the handbrake.  Pretty much all the cars corner like tanks, which is quite annoying

The story sucks
But you can skip the cinematics so… no big problem here. The story really is bad though, I hated every cinematic I decided to sit through.

Collision detection
Just a minor complaint, but the collision detection here is kinda bad. I frequently crashed into nothing. Really. Sometimes you’ll hit obstacles full speed and not crash at all. Most of the time it works fine, but sometimes it’s just glitchly (it seems).

Then there’s the reset system. Sometimes you’ll crash into something and not get the crash animation, making you waste even more time waiting for the reset button to work. Sometimes you’ll go way out of your way by error and be way off-track for quite some time and the reset button will never appear. I’m not saying you should be able to reset anytime, just that, when you’re having problems, it actually does let you reset instead of wasting your time.

Overall

Motorstorm Apocalypse doesn’t come out as a highly suggested title. The controls still make the experience a lot less enjoyable than it should be, especially considering the amazing track design. As it stands, Motorstorm Apocalypse outdoes its predecessors by FAR due to having some of the best tracks around, with its only major misstep being terrible controls. More time put on making the cars less awkward to controls would have made this the premier racing game on the system.

Unless it gets patched or something, my suggestion is to rent it first, see if the controls bother you. They bothered me, but maybe you’ll be fine with them.

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The main selling point here, at least when it comes to the advertising and first impressions, is the glasses-free 3D, something no other system has ever done (well… technically the virtal boy didn’t require 3D glasses… but I’ll consider the virtual boy as a whole to be a big pair of 3D glasses ).

So are Nintendo setting the world on fire with their new device? Read on and see!

Visual design/functionality

It’s a DS lite! Yeah, that’s about the extent of that. There’s nothing really new to the design visually. Why fix what’s not broken? The “3-tier” thing when  the device is closed looks fine. I don’t know for the blue version, but the black version is a fingerprint magnet, but that’s to be expected.

It’s actually a lot thinner than I was expecting. People were talking about how big the 3DS is, but it’s actually super thin and really not big at all. It sits fairly comfortably in your hands, I have very little problem with it. It doesn’t feel as good in my hands as the first DS model, but that’s hard to beat.

The buttons are really good, they’re sufficiently clicky and well placed. Seeing pictures of the system before release, I thought the analog nub and the d-pad were strangely placed, but, after playing with the system, they actually feel really good. The analog nub in particular is pretty surprising, considering how terrible the analog nub on the PSP was.

There’s one fairly big problem to me when it comes to the buttons though. The Start/Select/Home buttons are terribly placed, and, rather than each being separate buttons, they’re one single strip of plastic, making them hard to press. (*EDIT: After further use, I have found that they are indeed separate buttons, but the area where you press them is tiny, which is why I have trouble pressing them… better positioning/better buttons really would be good*) The power button is also slightly badly placed, with it being below the ABXY buttons, I find it rather easy to randomly press it during gameplay (happened to me once for now).

So overall, visually and in regards to functionality, the design of the 3DS is great. No really big problems, though the start/select/home button placement and the power button really should be elsewhere.

The 3D effect

This is the one thing that truly separates the 3DS from every other system out there. 3D, without cumbersome/annoying glasses to see it. Well, let me be the millionth person to say “it works!”, but let’s go a little bit deeper.

First, the sweetspot. Basically, the 3D is only visible if you hold the 3DS at a certain angle. Otherwise you’ll either only see a 2D image, or 2 overlapping images. While the sweetspot is fairly strict, it’s also really easy to get. Just hold it like you’d hold any other DS system and you’re basically set. For now I have yet to have any major problems with the sweetspot, though I sometimes see very faint doubles, or sometimes I’ll move around a bit and lose focus (just to get it back a few seconds later). If you have problems with the effect, you can turn it down a bit, it makes the sweetspot a bit bigger and the effect retains most of the depth it has at 100%. At worst, just turn it off.

As for the effect, well, it looks really good. You get a real sense of depth while looking at the screen, a bit like looking out of a window. While there’s not a lot of “pop-up” (which, by the way, is the same thing as “depth” 3D, I have no idea why people think they’re different), when there is it looks fairly natural. Visually, I really like the 3D. It’s a new way to look at games and it looks great.

Gameplay-wise, I find that the 3D effect has very little… effect (sorry). I mean, it’s slightly easier to judge distances, and having certain things popping up in your face is kinda fun, but it really doesn’t add anything to the actual gameplay. I find it to be purely visual. I like it that way, and I wasn’t actually expecting any enhancements to gameplay due to the 3D.

The best applications of 3D gameplay-wise is actually the AR games included in the console. The best effect with that was in the archery game, where one of the targets was actually in a deep hole that suddenly appeared on my table (in-game of course), and I had to look down into it to shoot it.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the 3D. Sometimes I find myself having to adjust the 3D slider during gameplay, to be able to see the game better (depends on the game, Pilotwings is the only one I played yet that I can’t play well with full 3D), but that’s really not a problem for me.

Included Software

AR games
This is actually pretty cool, if you can find yourself a proper setup that you can walk around or you can just spin the AR card around with your hand. Heck, you can actually play the AR games by placing the card in the palm of your hand (though that becomes annoying to play). There’s a variety of mini-games here, which are all pretty fun to play (from what I’ve seen). The effect with the dragon bursting out of your table is actually really cool, as is the previously mentioned archery game.

The AR games serve sort of as tech demos, but I’d say very solid tech demos. Though it is kinda weird seeing the environment being low-quality due to the 3DS cameras, but the game graphics looking really nice.

Face Raider
First you take a picture of your face, lining up the dots and line to your eyes and mouth, and then it pops out of the screen, laughs at you, and you have to defeat your floating face, which appears in the environment around you through the camera (so you have to physically move the 3DS around to aim), by throwing balls at it. Shooting the mouth gets you extra points, and there’s different versions of the face that will attack. The 3D effect is quite effective here, the animations on the faces are actually really good considering it’s doing them going by a static picture, but the game itself gets boring fairly fast. After that first level with your own face, you can start taking pictures of other people (I personally got a picture of Andross). It’s an okay tech demo if nothing else.

Other useless shit
You can take pictures! Taking pictures saves both a “2D” picture and a 3D version. The picture quality of the 3DS cameras is kinda lame though. And 3D pictures taken on anything that makes the proper file type can be shared. As such, I have 3D pictures of a japanese model in my 3DS… obviously… Actually… Check them out, they’re a great display of the 3D effect: Click Here (don’t worry, there’s no porn in there).

Then there’s the Mii creator, which you can make normally just like on the Wii, or it can take a picture of your face and attempt to remake it in Mii form (which doesn’t work too well in my experience). Seems like you can also use QR codes to share Miis and connect to the Wii to get Miis from there. There’s a Mii RPG-ish game in the Mii Plaza which I have no idea how it works (you get new Miis for this with streetpass, and you can hire Miis by using play coins, which you get by walking around with the 3DS in sleep mode), as well as a puzzle game thing I haven’t tried and probably won’t.

There’s a sound studio , which is kinda useless… Well, you can listen to your own MP3s, record sounds which is useless, and screw around with the sounds a little bit (speed and pitch, or adding sounds with the shoulder buttons).

For now I have yet to meet any Miis or other stuff due to streetpass, so the Find Mii game and the previously mentionned puzzle game thing, as well as other game stuff (there’s a streetpass option in Samurai Warriors) hasn’t happened to me yet, but you never know. It should be much more effective at places like anime/gaming conventions and such.

More features will come eventually, as the system gets updates.

Games

Launch
The launch is admittedly weak. There aren’t any games that will end up being considered must-haves on the system in the long run. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth playing.

I’ve heard great things about the Super Street Fighter 4 port, and has the highest chance of being considered a must-have eventually.
Samurai Warriors Chronicles is more of a console-style game, but it’s quite fun to play despite the unskippable cutscenes (full review coming up soon for this one).
Pilotwings Resort is actually really fun to play, but only in small doses (playing it non-stop would make you play through it way too fast, so I limit myself to 10-15 minute sessions with it), and it seems to have good replay value (full review for this one coming sometime soon).
Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is the surprise title for the 3DS launch, it’s a well made turn-based strategy game , though the graphics are pretty bad(I’ll also have a full review for this soon).
Steel Diver might be worth renting from what I’ve read (not really enough gameplay or replay value to warrant a full purchase…. I’m renting it soon and will have a full review for it).
If you somehow enjoyed Nintendogs on the DS, well, this one seems no different, beyond the better graphics and 3D (apparently the cats don’t do much in the game).
And I’ve heard some good stuff about RIIIIIIIIIIIIDGE RACEEEEER as well (though I’m not personally interested in it).

So, while this isn’t a perfect launch, dismissing it completely is slightly wrong (it is better than the DS launch after all… or many other console launches in general) since there’s some good stuff here.  And, at worst, there’s still some normal DS games you can play. Yeah, that’s right, the 3DS has access to one of the best game libraries out there too (albeit with increased loading times). And there’s the included software too.

Upcoming
But what’s really important is all the great games that are coming up. On the remake side, you have Ocarina of Time, still widely considered one of the best games ever and Star Fox 64, which is by far my favorite N64 game and it has unlimited replay value (I probably played through it over a hundred times on the N64, and I can’t wait to play it more on the 3DS).

Otherwise, for new games, there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus Uprising (fuck yeah!),  2 Resident Evil games (which look great graphically), a new Super Mario (which will seemingly have Racoon Mario, holy shit!), Megaman Legends 3 if it ends up not getting cancelled (I’ve heard rumors, which I hope are wrong), Kingdom Hearts 3D, Cave Story 3D, Devil Survivor Overclocked, Professor Layton vs Pheonix Wright (this better get localized!!), Etrian Odyssey, and countless others I’m probably forgetting (and there were some tiny announcements regarding various series (DQ, FF, Contra, amongst others) that will begin 3DS development as well). And that’s just games that are currently announced, there’s sure to be a ton more great stuff on the way in the next 5 years that obviously haven’t been announced yet.

Oh, and let’s not forget the online store thing that’s going to be included with an update in May, which, from what I’ve heard, will include DSiWare, 3DSware and a Virtual Console for various consoles/handhelds.

Worth buying the 3DS this close to the launch?

Hum… I don’t know? Yeah, that’s the answer I’m looking for. It’s really up to you. The price won’t be going down anytime soon (at least not for the first year or so), and, other than better start/select/home/power button placement, there isn’t too much they can do for modified versions of the hardware, other than a bigger version (making it smaller would make little sense since it’s already DS Lite size), so I’m not expecting a revision for a while. Special bundles with games and different colors? Sure. Revisions? Not for 2-3 years at the very least, unless they really wanna go forward for an XL version fast.

The current game selection is a bit low-quality, and there’s really nothing in the launch window (I consider June kinda far away to say it’s still in the launch window), but that’s bound to change soon. Basically, buying a 3DS now is buying it based on potential. Potential that is 100% sure to be realized. I mean, when has a handheld Nintendo console ever had a bad game library? (hint: the answer is never) There are already a bunch of great titles announced by Nintendo alone, and, with the success of the DS before it, the 3DS is pretty sure to garner a lot of 3rd party support. There’s no way the 3DS won’t be worth it in the long run.

Why did I get it early? Well, for me it was a “just in case” thing. What if the console REALLY starts selling like crazy once the good games start coming out and Nintendo really starts going at it with marketing the device? (let’s be honest here, they’re not really doing much to market it at the moment…. the only people who even know about it are people who follow gaming news, and acquaintances of those people) Buying it at launch was just, for me, to be “safe”, so that I would have it already when games I want come out.

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I love Mario sport games. They’re basically always really fun. They take a sport and add various twists to them, making them much more interesting to play than the sports simulators that come out otherwise. As soon as Mario Sports Mix was announced, I was excited for it. Not only is it a Mario sport game, it was 4 Mario sport games.

I haven’t played the game a huge amount of time, and I won’t play it again for a while, which is why I’m writing this as an impressions post rather than a review.

Read on!

Developer: SQUARE ENIX Co., LTD.
Publisher: Nintendo
Date of Release: February 7th 2011
Platforms: Nintendo Wii

Genre: Sports
Rated E for everyone

Let’s go with a slightly different format here, since there’s 4 sports to talk about. So I’ll talk about what’s the same in every sport, and then my opinions for each.

Similarities between the sports

Each sport can be played in co-op or versus, in either 3 vs 3 mode, or 2 vs 2 mode, and all up to 4 players.

Each game includes items, which can be used to screw up the opponents, or make yourself more powerful. That’s actually interesting: if you don’t have the ball or whatever, items have a different use as when you do have the ball/puck (depends on the sport and such). So you can formulate different strategies in regards to which item you have and how you want to use it. Holding the puck in Hockey? Use that banana, it makes for a stronger shot, trickier shot.

Another element all the games have is coins. You can collect coins usually by stepping on “?” panels that appear on the floor, and, when you score points, those coins actually add themselves to your score. You can lose coins usually by getting hit by items. The only exception is Dodgeball, where the number of coins you have determine the power of your ball throws. That adds some strategy to the game as you have to try taking away coins from your opponents if you don’t want them to get sudden boosts in points.

The controls and character movements for each sport are fairly similar other than hockey (which is obviously slidier). The controls show some similarity, with the 1 button for passes and the 2 button for shooting. In all the sports, holding the 1 button will make your character rush forward to get ready for a combo. If you’re playing with a CPU, he’ll follow you in the combo too, otherwise you have to communicate with your fellow player to get it done. And every sport has a super bar on the bottom of the screen, which you use by pressing 1 and 2 at the same time, launching a powerful attack with various effects depending on the character.

As for the CPU, well, on any difficulty under Hard it’s completely useless, he basically can do nothing to stop you. On Hard and Expert games because a lot more intense and fun. One thing that sucks is that the Tournaments for every sport start at the Easy setting, where you don’t even have to try and you’ll have no problem beating them up and finishing the cups.

And, finally, the playing fields. A lot of the levels repeat through all the sports, but there’s a few levels that appear only in certain sports. There’s a lot of variety in the levels. One of the funnest, regardless of the sport, would be the Bowser Jr level, the pure randomness of the scoring system there makes it really fun.

Hockey

I’d actually compare this mode with old NHL games with penalties turned off and fewer players on the ice (or whatever else they end up skating on). Some playfields don’t have goalies but have other things instead (like breakable obstacles or other things) to block your shots. This adds variety since the gameplay will change according to the level, you’ll have to change your strategy depending on what’s going on around the field and what’s blocking the goal. It’s actually pretty fun, though some of the levels are way too easy to score on.

Basketball

It’s kind of similar to the Mario basketball game that Square Enix developed on the DS, but I find that it has a bit more in common with NBA Jam. It’s a super-simplified version of NBA Jam, with turtle shells and super shots, but it’s still a fairly good. The passing and shooting works great, if you move towards the basket and press the shoot button you can dunk, you can steal the ball, there’s a few defensive moves… It works well and it’s fun.

Volleyball

That’s probably the worst game of the bunch. It’s not bad, but just not up to par with the rest. There’s teamwork involved, trying to get smashes out of the opponents’ reach is fun, but the matches are ultimately way too long since it’s so easy to return almost anything. But this is also probably the sport in the mix that has the funnest use of special shots, as they sometimes affect all of the opponents’ field. It’s fun, but it drags out way too long.

Dodgeball

This one is fun, when you get used to it. I was hoping for something similar to Super Dodgeball on the NES, but this is fairly different. If you get hit by a ball, you can catch it before it hits the ground to not receive any damage. Rather than going out when you get hit, you go out when you lose all your HP which is a nice take on the concept. When you’re out, you get sent to the Box on the opponents’ side of the field, where you can catch the ball if it gets to you and, if you get a hit on an opponent from there, you get back into play. The levels here are quite cool. One of them changes the size of the playfield for either side for example, which really ramps up the game’s intensity, and there’s a bunch more cool areas to play in. It’s harder to learn how to play, but it’s satisfying.

Overall

If you’re going to get this game, be sure to play it with other people. When playing alone, the experience is a bit lacking as the computers don’t pose a huge challenge and make for scrappy teammates, but team up with someone against the computer, or get more friends along to have epic fights, and you’re in for a really fun experience. Every sport requires teamwork, and every sport is tremendously fun to play with someone else. Oh, and there are unlockables too, so that’s cool.

This is not a must-buy on the Wii, but it’s definitely worth it for the great multiplayer action (but nothing else).

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Well that’s a game I was not hyped for. Which is sad since I love the Castlevania franchise. I mean, I even beat Simon’s Quest. Other than a few crappy games in the series, such as… most of the 3D games (I haven’t played the ones on PS2… though I haven’t heard much good about them) and Encore of the Night, Castlevania has been one of the most solid series in the history of gaming, with incredible super-challenging side-scrolling platformers on the NES, SNES, Genesis and Turbo CD, to more exploration-based platformers on the Playstation and portable systems.

When I saw that this one was rebooting the franchise, and going for a more God of War style of combat, I couldn’t help but be very skeptical about it. The gameplay videos I’ve seen, as well as various previews/impressions have done nothing to convince me that this was not much more than a God of War game with Castlevania elements tacked-on to it.

Well, the European PSN just got a demo of the game, and I had to check it out, see if it would prove me right about what I thought the game might be like, or if it would actually prove to be awesome.

Usually, for demo impressions, I usually name what I liked about the demo and what I didn’t, but here’s I’ll go for a more standard style.

So, read on!

Combat
Well, like any other action game, if the fighting sucks, the game sucks. Ehis is the part that worried me the most, because it looked like God of War. After playing, I can say that my assumption was… sort of wrong. It’s definitely inspired by God of War, with the chain-like weapon circling your character nonstop. But it works differently. Rather than “light attack/heavy attack”, you get “Direct Attack” which aims for one enemy, and “Area Attack” which hits everything in an area in front of you, and a bit behind as well. There’s no lock-on mechanic which can make things a bit complicated, but for the most part it’s not really needed. There’s various combos to do, and more to be learned, which is potentially cool.

That Area Attack thing was what I thought would be the equivalent of the shitty “hold L1 and mash square to kill everything without effort” thing in the God of War 3 demo.  Thankfully, that’s wrong. Mashing the Area Attack button just makes you get hit. It does minimal damage and it doesn’t always make enemies flinch, so you really have to balance out when to use which attacks, and also when to dodge.

Speaking of dodging, it sort of sucks here. It’s not as bad as in God of War, where you have to use the right analog stick to dodge which is just really clumsy and unintuitive, but it’s rather weird. Here, you have to hold the L2 button, and press in a direction with the left analog stick. It’s kind of annoying not pressing a button to dodge (it worked so damn well with DMC and Bayonetta, why not copy them for dodging controls?), but I guess I could get used to it.

But the most annoying part here? Since the right analog stick isn’t used to dodge you expect it to be used to control the camera, right? Nope, there’s actually no camera control at all. That would be fine, if the camera wasn’t terrible. But here enemies come at you from directions you just can’t possibly see them coming and you get cheap hits from that, and all that because you have no camera control, or at least a good angle to view all of the action from.

Just a quick note on sub-weapons: they’re here, but I could only try one of them in the demo, and it kicked way too much ass…. the dagger dealt big damage to the big enemies, and one-hit-killed everything else. There’s limited ammo (5 daggers in the demo, though I’m guessing that can be increased), and the ammo is random drops from enemies, so you can’t overuse the things.

There’s 3 difficulty levels in the demo. I tried the “normal” difficutly and the one that’s supposed to be harder… and both difficulties were a cakewalk. There’s barely any difference between difficulties in the demo, the only differences I could find were getting slightly more damage from enemy attacks and lower sub-weapon drops. The monsters take as many hits. It was really easy, but it’s the first part of the game so maybe it’s always easy no matter the difficulty setting? We’ll see.

Just a quick note, the second part of the demo features a horse-riding sequence, and that sucked. You really just need to button-mash against the enemies’ mounts and they can’t do anything against you. It sucks and I hope there’s no more of that in the final game.

QTEs
QTEs are bad, and those are no exception. This game has 3 types of QTEs. You have “optional” QTEs, which require grabbing monsters. This is sightly better than the average QTEs, since you can press any button, as long as you time it properly (according to a special icon that works similarly to Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents). But it’s still annoying and pointless. There’s “random/mandatory” QTEs, which work like the optional ones, but only happen when the game decides it wants you to do them. Then, there’s the “mandatory” QTEs, and they’re the ones that really suck. Those are the ones that should frankly just be cutscenes. And those generally suck more since they require pressing/mashing specific buttons and they add nothing to the gameplay, just wasting your time.

Leveling
As you gain experience by killing monsters, you can buy new attack combos… that’s really all I know. I don’t know if there’s some sort of skill trees or something, but it gives a good amount of character advancement. I don’t know how deep it gets, but I really hope it does. It seemed to feature a lot of different new attacks to gain, even with sub-weapons.

Presentation
Really nice. Not much to say about this other than it looks really damn good. The graphics are nice. The monster design is classic. There’s sadly a lot of brown and grey, but thankfully colors managed to sneak in making it nice to look at. And the characters look good.

Oh, and the voice acting… well, not much is heard in the demo, but even the random villagers sounded believable and seemed like they’ve had some work put into giving them good voices… that’s just awesome.

My one complaint is the music… why does music in modern game never sound like game music anymore? Instead it sounds like movie soundtracks…. and I really don’t get it. Game music should sound like game music. I guess that even classic franchises like Castlevania (which are known for having great music) aren’t safe from having movie music instead of video game music.

Cutscenes
Not much to say about them, but there is one thing I really need to mention. There is something that a lot of modern games just don’t do when it comes to cutscenes. A lot of games just seem to never let you pause during cutscenes, which is really stupid. Most games with cutscenes will also not let you skip them, which sucks because, a lot of the time, cutscenes are just boring to watch. Well, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow gets THAT right. Not only can you pause cutscenes, but you can even skip them. Awesome.

Why is it a reboot?
Just a minor complaint, nothing to do with the demo but… why is this a reboot? Seriously, I don’t get it. It features a Belmont, and other classic Castlevania characters like Carmilla, so why can’t it be part of the Castlevania timeline? Why does every developer think that rebooting franchises that don’t need rebooting is a good idea *coughcapcomcough*? There has to be some place in the timeline where this could have fit in the series’ canon. What, did they run out of things to talk about in the current timeline? A timeline which, by the way, goes in completely weird directions all the time? Reboots should just be used if a series has been sucking recently, not when a series is still being awesome like Castlevania.

Overall
Well, I’m… sort of surprised. My expectations were stupidly low, the little that the demo lets you play is actually sort of interesting. The fighting is slightly better than I expected. It’s not as much of a button-masher as God of War, which is a good thing. But the dodging sucks, and so does the camera. The sub-weapons could be interesting if handled properly. The game seems really easy though, hopefully the full game pits you against really strong enemies.

One big problem here is that nothing in the demo seemed to have a Castlevania feel to it at all, and even the whip is actually just a long chain. They could have called the game anything else and it still would have worked. It’s not really Castlevania, but it might be an okay game anyways.

Maybe not great, and definitely not good enough to make me want to buy it, but I’m looking forward to renting it when it comes out (which is more than I could say before playing the demo). Now I’m at least willing to give it an honest chance. The demo doesn’t really make the game seem deep at all, partly because it shows basically nothing from the actual game (doesn’t show if there’s exploration, or how platforming works, or how deep the leveling can go, and various other things like the light/shadow system), so I really want to see just how deep it really is beyond the demo.

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Earthworm Jim, amongst the biggest badasses in the video game world. I mean, they just don’t make heroes like him anymore. Random earthworm who had a super-advanced space suit falling on him from outer space, making him a super powerful, lasergun-totting, super hero? And he can use his head as a whip? Awesome.
He hasn’t seen lots of action in quite some time (let’s just forget Earthworm Jim 3D, shall we?), but finally Jim is back and awesome as he should be.

I wanted to do a full review of this, but, well, I can’t find the motivation/originality to write a full complete review of such a classic game without sounding like a broken record. Instead, I’ll just quickly give my impressions on it, which will be a lot simpler.

Read on!

Graphics/Sounds
Like any game with “HD” in the title, this gets a graphic boost from the original. And they succeeded in making this really good looking. It keeps the same overall visual style, but the amount of detail is a lot higher than in the original. I was sort of scared that it would lose some of its original charm, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong. The sprites are a lot more detailed, you see more things on the screen, the animation is smoother and just great-looking. The backgrounds look a whole lot nicer too, which is great. The boost to the graphics is great, but the fact that they didn’t remove the original’s awesomeness in the transition is badass. While the graphics are basically the same as in the iPhone version, the much higher resolution offered by the PS3 on an HDTV just makes it look so much better.

The music also gets an upgrade. The game uses much higher quality instruments and sounds than the Genesis or SNES could produce, but they don’t change the composition of any of the game’s very memorable tracks, so while everything sounds better, it doesn’t sound different from the original, so that’s a big plus here. Like the graphics, the sound is basically the same as in the iPhone version, but much higher quality since it comes out of much higher-quality speakers than the iPhones’.

Gameplay
Maybe it’s because the Genesis has a very awkward button layout (that works well for 2-button games, but not as well for 3-button games), but I was never very good at the Genesis version (only played the SNES version once). And I could barely play the iPhone version because, let’s face it, and games requiring a d-pad and buttons just don’t work well on the platform, at all (making the iPhone version of the game terrible). On the other hand, this new version controls really well. The fact that the PS3 controller has a good d-pad and good button placement make it very easy to get into. Earthworm Jim has never been this intuitive.

The gameplay itself is solid. Running around shooting all the weird enemies (but not while you’re jumping… which I actually don’t have a problem with since the game is built around that), being able to shoot in 8 directions, picking up health and ammo for the more powerful version of the gun, platforming, using Jim’s head as a whip to hit enemies or swing from certain objects… it’s all very fun and very smooth, as it always was.

There have been some minor changes from the original version though (changes that were originally in the iPhone version). One of the funnest changes is the fact that you can actually stock up on plasma, by switching back to your normal gun with the R1 button (but you lose all your plasma ammo if you die). Some levels have new parts to them, where Jim is out of his power suit, and you have to platform through a new level up to getting your suit back, at which point you continue the level normally. And some new levels were added to the game, which you can access after completing the game.

And multiplayer was added to the game. It enables up to 4 players to traverse new levels together. Some have small puzzles which aren’t too tough to figure out, and, while they reuse graphics from other levels, the level design, while easier than the actual levels, is still very well done. I haven’t actually played it myself (well, I did go through level 1, alternating between controlling player 1 and player 2, just to see what it was like… but that doesn’t count), but I’m sure it’s pretty fun.

Overall
While most of the game takes heavily from the iPhone version (lots of the additions are in that version), it looks, sounds and controls a whole lot better. The iPhone version had the right idea for the game but, well, the iPhone sucks for any game that requires buttons… Earthworm Jim has never been this easy to control and fun to play. EJ is one of the big classics of gaming, and this remake doesn’t just do it justice, it surpasses it. It’s sadly not a sequel, but that doesn’t matter much when it’s such a great remake of the original.

I highly recommend this game. It’s fun and challenging, and it’s a game every gamer should experience at least once.

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I’m not going to do a full review of this game. There’s a simple reason for that. I really don’t like WarioWare. At all. It’s easily the worst thing ever to happen to Wario, a character that was dear to me before WarioWare appeared. I understand the series’ popularity, kinda, but I can’t find anything in it that makes the games interesting to me.

Maybe I’m just weird. Maybe it’s because my attention span is longer than 5 seconds, so I can’t really have any enjoyment from those “Micro-games”. But whatever it is, I don’t like WarioWare. The only one that managed to give me any kind of enjoyment is Smooth Moves on Wii, but that was just because of the hilarious narrator explaining how to hold the remote, that guy was awesome.

Yet, despite not being a fan of the franchise, I couldn’t help but have a bit of interest in WarioWare D.I.Y. The game-making aspect of it definitely made me curious.

So read on and see what I thought!

Playing the games
The games themselves, may it be user-created games or the few games that come pre-made, only have 1 control method: tapping the screen or objects. Nothing more. That kinda limits what you can do, and makes the game overall lack variety. There’s no drag-and-drop, no button presses, just tapping. Of course the games themselves aren’t terribly fun to play, though I did find a few relatively well made games that weren’t TOO bad to play. But at around 5 seconds each, it’s just not really interesting.

One thing I find interesting though is that all the mini-games that are pre-made here are all made using the same tools the users have access to. So everything you see here can be done by you. The developer didn’t just give you dumbed-down tools while they all had the good stuff. So all of your games can potentially be just as “good” as what the developer itself made, if not better. Definitely really cool. They only thing the developers did that you can’t do is boss levels.

Making games
So about making the games. You can do everything: backgrounds, graphic, music, and “gameplay”. Each are pretty nicely done.
Just a note, there’s tutorials for everything, and they’re very detailed. If there’s anything you’re unsure about, the tutorials will definitely help you. And there’s one tutorial that you NEED to do if you want to make games at all, so they don’t throw you in there blindly.

Graphics
The graphic side of thing is limited only by your imagination… and drawing talent. There’s some things that are pre-drawn like trees or rocks and such, but in the end you want to make you own things, right? So there’s 2 types of art you can make. Backgrounds and objects. The background is static, while the objects are what you can actually interact with. There’s various functions for both of those. Objects can have up to 4 “arts”, each of which can have up to 4 frames of animation. Using “programming” later you can interchange between different arts on the same object.

You can color fill, use pens to draw lines and stuff, use a stamp to put pre-drawn objects, spray-paint, and probably the most important for some people, zoom in up to 16x to make sure every detail is just right. Really nice, and quite easy to use.

One thing that struck me was that a lot of the art part of the game is ripped out of Mario Paint. No, really, they reuse some of the same icons, “textures”(for the color-fill), sounds, tools, and visual effects(like the various “erase” methods, and the color-fill animation). It’s almost a straight-out Mario Paint rip-off with very few added features… Which isn’t exactly a bad thing, right?

Music
The music part is pretty cool. There’s a whole other section to make longer songs if you really like it as well. In the game making section, music can be around 6 seconds long (aybe longer if you make a “long” game, I haven’t tried).

You can have up to 4 tracks, and a fifth track for the rhythm. In the 4 “normal” tracks, you can have one note for each part of the song’s timeline. The rhythm track let’s you have up to 4 sounds at the same time for each part of the timeline. You can also set each track to a different instrument to fit your song’s “needs”. It’s really simple to use, but you can do some really cool music there. And the Record-making part let’s you do longer songs which is pretty cool.

If you’re really into it, you can also hum a tune in the DS’s microphone and the game will try to get the right notes, or you can get the game to write the music by itself (just tell it what kind of music you want and you’ll get a randomly-made tune).

Overall the music-making program is really nice. And what’s nice is that the game automatically speeds up the music when it needs to in the game, which is surprisingly well done.

Gameplay
Probably the most important part here. Here you can give functions to various objects, and actually make your games playable.

You can decide what an object will do once you either tap it, or tap anywhere on the screen. That’s probably the most important thing you can make objects react to. Other than that you can make an object react to: touching another object, winning or losing the game, certain time passing in the game, and the object’s animation finishing. Each of those is a “trigger” that you insert in an AI for that object. After that, you decide what the trigger does. You can make the object move, make the object’s animation play, play a sound effect, make one of the few pre-determined special effects play, make you lose the game and, most importantly, switch the object’s “Switch” on or off.

When you’ve done what you need for each of your objects, you have to set the conditions for winning the game. Here, you have to select objects, and say if their “Switch” needs to be on or off to win. For example, you want the player to win by tapping an object, so turn the switch on when the object is tapped, and add the victory condition that says that you win if Object A is switched on. Each “Condition” can have multiple “Switch checks”. So you can say that someone wins if both Objects A and B have their switch on. You can have multiple different winning conditions too, so if you want the player to ALSO be able to win if Objects C and D are switched on, you can have that too.

From there you’re limited only by creativity in regards to what you can do in games. As long as it doesn’t require button inputs, or drag-and-dropping.

Overall
I still don’t like it. There’s something with WarioWare that just doesn’t strike a chord with me. But while it might not do it for me, but fans MUST check it out, no questions asked.

Being able to make your own games and sharing them with people is really cool. The only problem with sharing is that you have to share friend codes, which is STILL the most retarded online system yet. Why not something similar to LBP’s level-sharing system? That’d be PERFECT. But at least sharing friend codes isn’t TOO complicated since the internet exists, and there’s a big community for this game.
In addition to sharing games with other people, you can get games from the “NinSoft” store using Wi-Fi, so you can add various games made by other people (selected by Nintendo) to your collection. And the coolest part of the “online store” is that you can check out games made by big names in the gaming industry. For example, as of the writing of this post, there’s games made by Masahiro Sakurai(of Kirby and Super Smash Bros fame) and Yoshio Sakamoto (of Metroid fame). Nice.

Overall, it’s not for me… but it’s worth checking out nonetheless.

(I didn’t comment on the Wii compatibility since I don’t want to try it out)

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Well, Thursday a download on the European PSN appeared. The first 100000 people to get it got access to the ModNation Racers beta. I managed to be fast enough to get the download. So I gave the beta some gameplay to see if the final game might end up living up to its potential or not.

Does it, or should they delay the release to iron out some things?

Read on!
(NOTE: This is not a review, they’re merely my impressions after playing a very incomplete version of the game. I know this is a beta and that its nowhere near what we’ll get in the final version.)

Controls/Gameplay
The gameplay definitely borrows a lot from the Mario Kart series. The racing is similar, you can drift for extra boost, there’s weapon pick ups and the overall physics are pretty similar.

The controls are not too bad. You steer with the left analog stick, you accelerate with R2, brake with L2, jump/drift with X, L1 to boost, use weapons with Square, sideswipe with the right analog stick and use a shield with Circle. The steering… is okay. It’s a bit too stiff at times, and too loose at other times. There’s no middle ground. Once you get a feel of it, it becomes pretty good, but there’s a pretty big learning curve for basic steering. Drifitng works pretty much like in Mario Kart. You jump, and when you land you start drifting. There you have some control. You can basically decide how tight your drift is.

You get a boost meter for doing various actions. The one you’ll get more often is drifting. Starting and finishing a drift without hitting the walls will give you some boost power. The longer the drift, the more boost power you get. Otherwise you get boost power by attacking other racers, drafting (staying directly behind another racer) and getting in the air. Boost power has 2 uses from what I’ve seen: boosting (duh), and setting up a shield to protect from attacks (requires a third of the full bar).

Weapons come in weapon pods, regenerating pick-ups that are littered across he tracks. Getting a first weapon pod gives you a random weapon. Getting a second one without using the weapon gives you the level 2 upgrade of that weapon, and a third one gives you the level 3 form, which is also the final form. You have homing missiles, lightning strikes, boosts, and shockwaves. Maybe I’m missing some, but not that I can recall. Overall I think weapons are pretty well balanced… except for the level 3 boost. The first time I used it, I was in last place (8th in that case). After using it, I was instantly in third place. It’s essentially a teleport… REALLY cheap. It’s a BIT balanced by the fact that, when you create the “protal”, other racers can use it for a short time. Otherwise though, the weapons are pretty fun to use.

Customizing
There’s 3 things you can customize: Cars, Mods (basically avatars) and race tracks.

Cars have pretty limited customizing options from what I’ve seen. You can put on stickers, change the color, put on some accessories, choose the basic body’s look, the engine’s look and the suspensions. From my experience in the beta, whatever you choose for your car’s look doesn’t change the car’s performance. Which is a bit of a deception. It would be nice to at least have car types, like heavy, light, more acceleration in comparison to top speed, stuff like that. Again, this is a beta, so maybe this kind of thing will make it to the final version. Though, if it stays like this, victory won’t be determined by the car, but by actual skill, which could be nice.

Mods have a bit more cutomization options, and I have seen a lot of different characters made with what I first thought were limited options. I’ve seen a relatively nicely done Sonic, a Mario, a Rorschach, and other pretty cool-looking characters. I might not have the patience to make a cool character myself, but the option is definitely there.

Tracks is the main focus of the whole customizing part of the game. It’s actually quite simple. First, you drive a concrete machine in an empty area. You can turn, change elevation… basically do whatever you want. After you have the desired track, you have to populate it. Decoration in the outlines of the track, obstacles on the tracks, trees, buildings, you can change the terrain, add water, change the amount of clouds in the sky, change where the sun points, change the pavement, add item pods, add boosts… whatever you want. And if you can’t be bothered to actually populate everything yourself, there’s an option to let the game populate your track itself. ASfter everything is done, you have tons of options for fine-tuning… Making changes to curves, adding shortcuts, adding alternate paths… There’s a LOT you can do here.

Sharing is pretty simple. In the Share Station, you can check each type of creatable content by highest rating, name, newest stuff, search by keyword, things like that. For publishing, you just go in the publish section, choose what you want to publish, put in a description and keywords and that’s it. Really simple, and finding good stuff is quite easy too.

What needs to stay the same
- The customizing is really nice, the track creation is great, and the sharing is nice and easy.
- The racing works really well and it gets really fun and frantic when there’s 12 people on the track. The online system seems to work very well as I never encountered any

What needs change or improvement
- The ModSpot feels really useless. Maybe adding some things to it would be nice.
- The racing physics need just a bit of work.
- Make the controls a bit smoother, sometimes I just run into things because the controls aren’t responding how I’d expect them to. Even after getting used to the game.
- This might just be a beta problem(it probably is), but the load times are TERRIBLE.
- A bit of weapon balancing. There’s no actual Blue Shell equivalent (from what I’ve seen)… it might actually not be a completely bad idea… for some reason the first place racer rarely gets hit (compared to everyone behind him) by attacks… which is a bit weird
- I find it a bit strange that the race tracks are basically all “realistic” visual-wise when the cars and characters are basically cartoons… hopefully they give a lot of really cool visual designs in the final version beyond just boring realism.
-Different stats for karts maybe?  Heavy, light, high top speed, high acceleration, different handling, stuff like that.

Final word
There’s a bit of things that need balancing/minor changes, but I think ModNation Racers will be a very good game. The PS3 lacks a really good kart racer (does it even have one at all?) and ModNation Racers seems to offer a pretty good experience in that regard. I’d say not as good as Mario Kart, but it’s no slouch.

I know the beta is really limited in what you have access to and what can be done, so I can’t wait to see all the options that are going to be available in the final version.

After playing the beta, I went from uninterested to quite interested.

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The first game just won our award for one of the best PSP games of the year. And now a demo just came out for its sequel.

So I gave it a try… and it seems like it’s gonna be a lot better than the first!

Read and see what I liked about it! (just a short post)

What stays the same?
The basic gameplay doesn’t change. You build a dungeon by destroying blocks. Destroying blocks with nutrients in them create creatures. You get different creatures depending on the amount of nutrients in the block you break. Using slimes, the basic super-weak creature, you can move nutrients around in the dungeon. Other creatures eat lower level creatures. So in the end you have to maintain a working ecosystem while making sure to have powerful monsters to defend the Overlord from heroes coming to kidnap him. The basic gameplay works as well as before.

What’s new? (in the demo)
There’s some additions to the gameplay. The most noticeable is extra things on display. There’s some extra bits of info on the screen, both when zoomed in and zoomed out. For example, you have a better view of where the Overlord and the Heroes are in the dungeon since they’re circled when you’re zoomed out, and you always see a meter at the bottom giving a rough estimation of the division between the number of creatures you have.

The biggest gameplay addition is evolution. Depending on how your monsters die in your dungeon, the remaining monsters of that species might evolve to fit the current situation. If they get eaten a lot, they become a smaller stronger form. If a lot of them die because they don’t have enough food, they’ll evolve into giant form which doesn’t require as much food to survive. If they mostly die because Heroes kill them, they stay in basic form. As in the first game, you can upgrade your creatures, and upgraded creatures get their own evolutions as well. The Almanac will definitely take a lot more time to fill up this time.

I’ve seen that Fungus can grow in the dungeon too. It acts as food for most creatures, nutrients for slimes to transport around, and if you kill if nutrients spread all around it. There’s probably more than one version of that.

Another addition is the fact that the game isn’t confined to one dungeon anymore (well, 2 if you count the second difficulty level). Instead, you have to conquer multiple continents, each which seem to include 1 dungeon for you to defend the Overlord in. There’s also a new mode, which is not available in the demo. Overall it kinda loses that “arcade-style” gameplay from the first, but it gains a more coherent story as a result.

Overall
The sequel seems like it will have a lot more depth than the first game. In addition to the few changes I mentionned here, there are things like water which wasn’t seen in the demo, and maybe some more stuff. Needless to say that this sequel adds a lot to the original’s concept. This is definitely one to look out for.

On another note, buying the UMD nets you the first game as a bonus. The UMD is $30, and the PSN release is $20.

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I won’t be doing a full review of this because I just haven’t played enough of it to do so. According to walkthroughs I was a bit over half the game, and I didn’t really experience much of it, not doing any of the side-missions or anything like that. So instead I’ll give my impressions on the short time I did play the game.

Since this isn’t a review, there won’t be a Save Factor. And a different format than the usual review.

So read on and see!

What I liked about Assassin’s Creed 2
If there’s something to like about the game, it’s the locales. All the different cities look really damn good. There’s landmarks everywhere so you can always know where you are, the architecture feels genuine. Walking/jumping through the cities feels very good because everything looks really well made. Interior levels also have a good deal of work done to make them feel nice. Not exactly as good as outside, but there’s still some good stuff here.

The character animations are, overall, really good. The whole parkour thing looks really good, and when Ezio is climbing up something it looks real because he always use footholds and such that you can actually see, making the building climbing feel very realistic. The jumps and such rarely feel too unrealistic either, other than the fact that I doubt that jumping into a stack of hay can protect you from really high falls…

Chase scenes are also quite fun. Either when you’re running away from guards or chasing after an assassination target, it all feels really good. It can be a bit frustrating at parts, but it never feels cheap.

The assassinations are also pretty good. Easy to do and there’s a good variety of them this time around. With multiple weapons and such, you have various assassinations you can do. I especially like using poison because it makes a person go berserk before dying which is pretty cool. The assassination missions themselves are a step up from the first, making you feel a bit more like an assassin than in the first where it was pretty much just cutscenes for each target.

What I didn’t like about Assassin’s Creed 2
Well that about does it for what I liked in the game. Now for what I didn’t like.

The character models are pretty bad. Well… the faces are the bad part, the rest looks fine most of the time. Some look great, no doubt about that. From far away most of them look pretty good. But zoom in to them just a bit and… wow. They look horrible. Completely deformed faces, some of which just don’t look human. If a character is unlucky enough to have facial hair… it’s been a long time since I’ve seen facial hair that looks this bad in a game. Looks like they tried to make it look realistic, but on the way they forgot how beards looked and just put random hairs in random spots.

The combat is still pretty bad. It was one of my biggest complaints in the original, and it remains almost as bad. It’s actually a bit better than in the first, since now countering everything doesn’t always work, as some opponents can resist countering and even counter you as well. Sometimes you have to dodge too. But in the end you can button-mash your way through most battles, if you’re not countering your way through them. The fighting is still really boring.

The parkour, while it looks great, isn’t very fun to actually do. All the jumping is done by holding R1 and X. No need to time your jumps or anything, just holding 2 buttons and a direction is all you need, it’s basically automatic. Climbing buildings is the same, except you don’t need to hold X, just R1. No matter how good it looks, I can’t really enjoy it if it’s boring to do. And sometimes the control are unresponsive or don’t do what I want them to, occasionally making Ezio kill himself when I meant to make him jump in a hay stack.

The story is a total bore. The idea of having the character use a machine to live his ancestor’s past and learning assassination techniques and all, I love that concept. But the story inside of the machine and the character’s past? Very boring. I just didn’t feel any of the scenes, the scenes themselves are long-winded and not fun to watch, the dialogue is corny and boring, the characters pretty much all suck… There was nothing I really enjoyed story-wise. And the game has so many cutscenes and conversations it just wasn’t really interesting to move on with the game (which is why I stopped halfway through).

Overall
The game is definitely better than the first. It’s a bit less repetitive, especially now that you don’t have to climb down the fucking mountain at the start of every mission. And you spend most of your time in the Animus so there’s no “breaks” in the story. The assassination missions are a bit more fun. The combat, while still lame, is a step up from the first. And Ezio is a more lovable character than the boring Altair.

It might be better, but it still gets really boring really fast, and definitely couldn’t keep my attention until the end. Fans of the original will love it. Otherwise, I say skip it.

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