The Ballad of Gay Tony

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the last thing released for the Grand Theft Auto IV DLC. You take control of Luis Lopez, business party and bodyguard to Gay Tony, a club owner with a drug problem.

It starts off during the bank robbery that Niko Bellic is involved with in the main game. However you take control of one of the hostages during their crime. But Luis gets away safely, unlike some of the other people involved. And then you call your boss Gay Tony, who's just explained that he's borrowed money from the mob to pay for his increasingly expensive drug-addled lifestyle, and being the good friend you are, you run all over town doing missions for varying-leveled people of the criminal underworld, just like every other game in this series.

It's a fun little game though, slightly longer than the Lost and the Damned, levels capping about 25 or so. There's more side quests to do, this time you can go parachuting off of buildings or from helicopters at various points throughout Liberty City, which is fun one time, then I never wanted to do it again. The other thing is you can go on Drug Wars, which is with two childhood friends who now sell drugs and kill people. Just like you!

Something they added, which I thought was a good idea, were continue points. It's great when you die doing a mission and when you continue from your phone you start right before the point you died at. Yup, that's pretty super-duper...

Overall: C-, Okay, really this one is well made and everything, but something about it feels kind of phoned in. Like one of the folks at Rockstar suddenly realized that they had a couple of loose ends to clear up at the end of GTA 4 and decided to make another expansion. It's nothing special and I think I had more fun using a motorcycle gang, waaaaaay more fun actually. I mean, this story was interesting, had its moments anyway, and some of the new guns were pretty cool. But, at the end of the day, it's really just the same old shit.

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and the Damned

I've been playing GTA 5 Online pretty much since it came out. If anyone wants to join my crew, here's the link: http://socialclub.rockstargames.com/crew/serial_killerkillers

The Lost and the Damned is the first of two downloadable side stories to add to the overall experience of Grand Theft Auto 4. In it, you play as Johnny Klebitz, vice-president of The Lost, a notorious biker gang.

At the beginning of the story, The Lost's president, Billy, is released from prison, he insults you, kills rival gang members, insults you, drinks at the biker's bar and hideout, insults you, has sex with your girlfriend, and then, oh yeah, he insults you some more. I don't know, the amount of times Billy makes fun of Johnny and basically makes him out to be a loser piece of shit, it just kept making me think "Aren't I vice-president? Why is he treating me like some kind of new recruit?" And this keeps happening right down to when (spoiler alert) Billy gets arrested again for stealing drugs from rival gang members and being an overall miserable asshole. Then you become president, which makes sense to me, you've basically done all the work for everyone since day one. Hell, do you even need the rest of your gang?

Actually, your gang can be pretty handy. On every job except the first few you can call up your pals Tracy and Clay to help you out, and considering how many of the main missions in this game are based around just killing a whole bunch of dudes, coming into them with three people is waaaaay better than going in it alone. I recommend doing it right after every single mission briefing that doesn't already have your gang following you.

With Niko in the main storyline, I would almost always avoid stealing a motorcycle like they were infected because he would basically go flying off of them, barreling end over end through the air with even the slightest bump into the smallest child. It's much better with Johnny, you only go flying with head on collisions, and he's much better at driving the motorcycle as well. But, he's terrible at driving cars and seems to have Niko's disease of flying end over end whenever he gets in them.

I have one final complaint, and that's the number of missions. Niko had over 90 missions to plow through, here there's just over 20, what's up with that? I guess there's gang wars and races added, but it just seems like there could have been so much more.

Overall: C+, it's alright, not enough missions to make it really substantial and compared to everything Rockstar's ever done, this doesn't really stand out as a great achievement or anything. Good, passable anyway, but nothing special.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Wow, I have not been on here in a minute. I want you all to know that I have been beating games and I could probably review one game a day for the next week.

Hmm, maybe I will...

Anyway, GTA 4, Grand Theft Auto has come from a long line of great games. Rockstar is one of my favorite game companies. Ever since I played Grand Theft Auto 3, I knew this company would come far.


The story of GTA 4 is this: Niko Bellic, badass psychopath from Eastern Europe (his accent is similar to Russian) after hearing from his cousin Roman how great America is, decides to catch a ride on a big ol' freighter and come over to Liberty City, which has nothing to do with New York City at all. Nope, definitely not New York City. I don't know, I guess I never really saw the point in pretending to be a nonexistant city when everyone knows that Gotham City is really New York anyway, so why hide it.

Anyway, once Niko comes over to America, he finds out that the American Dream really only looks good on TV and in reality it's just a bunch of blind consumerism, so it's on to doing jobs for crazy assholes like you do in every single GTA game. Also, killing random people on the street of course.

GTA 4 has its problems. The driving is really klunky, I think they were trying to make it more realistic or something, but really it's just more a pain in my ass. Basically, if you've ever played any GTA before this one, you're going to have to retrain yourself how to drive in these games. Also, look up how people do quick turns with the hand brake in real life, then do it over and over again in this game until you've got it down. It will make things a lot easier.

Before I move on, one last thing about the driving. Niko is flat-out terrible at it! Unlike San Adreas where you can level up all your stats, Niko's driving ability never changes. So every time you get up to speed in any vehicle it's like you've just become the worst driver in the world. Every slight turn you make could suddenly send your car careening out of control, oh and here's something I'm not sure why they added, every time Niko hits something even slightly, he goes flying through the windshield of his car. Just to remind us that in the GTA universe, they never invented seat belts.

Other than the driving though, this is actually a pretty great game. You can make friends and then take them out to the theater or bowling or whatever. You do jobs for crazy people all over Liberty City which is now  twice the size of San Andreas which was supposed to be a state if you all remember. I suppose I was a little disappointed that many of the missions are just there for the sake of it. After the first section of the game, it's not so much a story anymore (except for the occasional mission for Roman here and there) as it is just more criminal activity. Niko isn't really a human being as he is a dog, just going out and fetching or killing whatever anyone wants him to, just so long as he gets paid. No morals what-so-ever.

Overall: B-, the last mission in this game is just about the most frustrating thing ever, the story sucks sometimes and the driving blows, but other than that I had a really fun time playing through this game, and just like every GTA, it has enough side stuff to do that it practically guarantees for hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is the first in a fairly long series. One that they'll probably keep making the next sequel to until everyone involved is dead. But I digress, the first Assassin's Creed game was produced by Ubisoft and released in 2007. In it, you play as Altair, master assassin from the Middle Ages. Oh wait, actually, you play as Desmond Miles, loser bartender who was kidnapped by some pharmaceutical company and forced to relive your ancestor's memories.

Confused? Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Essentially, you have been kidnapped so that this company "Abstergo" can find an object that they've basically misplaced. So they have to kidnap people who are distantly related to assassin's from the Middle Ages because they might know where to find them. The reason for this is that Abstergo has these machines called Animus's in that allows for the access of genetic memories which can be found in anyone's DNA in the world.

I'd argue that's not how genetic memory works, but that would destroy the plot of EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE SERIES, so I'll just pretend that's how genetic memory works and move on with my life. And I am still having PTSD flashbacks from that time my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather fought in the Hundred Years War back in the thirteenth century.

I can forgive this game for being reliant on a plot that doesn't make sense, after all, it's a video-game, and it's not like most of them make sense anyway. One this I can't forgive this game for, however, is the massive amount of unskippable cutscenes, most of which are boring as all hell. Lasting a good fifteen minutes every time you want to start the next assassin mission, and it's just them talking and talking, if they had hired better voice actors, I might not care as much. But it's just really shitty when you just want to kill people and your being held up by the guy at the assassin's guild talking at you about how much you fucked up at the beginning of the game, when all you want in is that stupid feather so you can go kill some fat merchant and take his piece of Eden back to your boss so he can kill you with it. It's just rediculous, and unskippable cutscenes are the pits.

When this game first came out, it was pretty awesome. A small country to explore, with three major cities which are all really conveniently close to each other. Who knew that Jerusalem was just a short horse-ride away from Dalmascus?

Sneaking around in this game is pretty fun. The one complaint I have is the same complaint everyone had when they played GTA3 ten years before this game came out! That it's really stupid when the cops/guards don't care about anyone except you. I mean, why is it that when I run past a guard they're immediately like "there goes an assassin!" I mean, does no one else run ever? Or are guards just always on the lookout for a

man matching my description? You know, white cloak, can't see his face because of a hood, covered in sharp weaponry. I don't know, I just wish it was a little bit hard to get spotted.

Overall: B-, good but not great. Unless your such a fan of this series you have to get this one, or you've played any of the other ones and want to see how it all started, I'd probably avoid this one. I mean, it's fun and all, but when compared to later ones in the series, this one just isn't as good. Hardcore parquor is awesome though, which is present in every game of the series, but gets its start here.

Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

I have this problem with beating games. Mostly I'm like always playing six things at a time and often things will get put to the sidelines never to be picked up again. Anyway, here's my review of Operation Anchorage:

Something I really like about games like Fallout 3 is that they are incredibly open ended. Unlike Japanese RPGs there's rarely a time in them when you get stuck looking for the exact one thing that you need to do in order to get to the next thing. Here, you can almost always just think of something else. Sneaking not work? How about trying a more action oriented approach. That not working? Try hacking the computer nearby and reprogram that annoying turret to kill its own guys. Not good at hacking? How about we say screw this mission and kill everyone involved and never look back.

What I don't like about Operation Anchorage is that it doesn't have this formula. Not even a little bit, you can't just back out of it. You go to help these group of ex-Brotherhood of Steal refugees calling themselves the Outcasts. All they want to do is open a safe filled with a cache of weapons, but in order to do that they have to go into a virtual reality training program and only someone with a PipBoy can do it.

The problem is, once you decide to do this mission and start it, there's no backing out. You get into the training program and you just have to keep plowing through it until you beat it.

It's completely linear, and just as completely combat oriented. I was only level 8 when I entered and I was playing someone who was more geared towards stealth than combat. It really annoyed me, after the first part which is stealthy, you get a silenced pistol (awesome), but after that your "commanding officer" takes away you stuff and lets you pick a small group of weapons. My explosives skill wasn't bad, the highest of my combat skills, so I took a rocket launcher and 10mm submachine gun. They didn't have any stealth weapons, and everything after that was basically running along a clear-cut path to the eventual end. Unlike the Pitt, which I'll probably review later on, which was another little world to explore and find interesting people, places and things, this felt more like a Call of Duty game where you're just running along a linear path, following orders from someone you have no emotional attachment to (though, since I'm playing through with an evil cannibal, I don't make any emotional attachments), to complete a mission you couldn't care less about.

Oh, I forgot about the snipers. Fuck those fucking snipers. They're invisible, incredibly hard to hit, always far away from you cause their fucking snipers. To the right here is a picture of them. I couldn't find any gameplay pictures, probably because their almost always invisible. Oh, and you don't take any of your items with you into the game, so if you get injured the only way to heal is by going to little health machines to heal you.

Overall: D, sorry. I feel bad for giving it this grade. Partly because I'm such a fan of the series. But that's also the very reason I gave it that grade. It feels like something out of an alternate dimension or something. Like it's very makeup doesn't belong in the Fallout Universe and kind of just leaked into it from some other game universe. Doom, maybe?

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Los Santos

Howdy everyone, I'm really busy all the time. Just thought I should mention that. Because of this I almost never beat video games. That's why I started this blog. Also, I have this problem wherein I'll sit, play a game, but after awhile I'll slowly get a little bored with it and start playing something else. And that's why almost every game I've beaten so far has been a short one.

So I've decided to try something new, just for this game anyway. This is a game that's incredibly epic and kind of feels like they break it up into different sections anyway.

So, the first section of Rockstar's excellent game, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. This is where the main character Carl Johnson, or CJ for short comes back home to Los Santos, he had moved away years ago after his older brother died. His other older brother, Sweet, welcomes him home, and explains that since he's left, Grove Street Families, the gang you and your family is in, has lost influence and someone driving a green Sabre had driven by and killed CJ's mom.

So, it's onward to bring back the Families. Missions are fairly easy. This area encompasses the first 25 missions or so. But, after a few, you'll unlock Big Smoke's missions, which I think is funny because then you have a mission marker that says BS and, truthfully, most of his missions are pretty much BS, at least they let you level up the motorcycle skill.

Oh, that's something I should mention, this game has a great feature of character customization. You can make yourself really fat if you want, or very muscular, change all your clothes, get a haircut, tattoos. Which will also help you to evade the police, as something as simple as changing your hat will get rid of any amount of stars.

There are some problems with this section of the game though. One is that it takes over half the missions before you unlock Ammunation and can by weaponry, of course, this also unlocks gang wars, which is definitely the best part of this section of the game (which they then take away from you when your exiled from the city). Basically, you go to an uncontrolled section, kill some gang members and start a gang war. Then, if you win, you take that section of the city over and get more money for it.

Oh, and if you wanted money, this is pretty much the only way to get it. Missions in this section of the game almost always just give you Respect, which is just how much your other gang members like you. If it's greater you get to recruit more gang members to follow you around and help you create havoc. But I don't know why you would ever have more than three more guys since that's how many people you can fit in a four door car.

The last thing I'm going to mention is that some of the missions in this section of the game introduce things that are never used ever again. The most obvious example of this is Ryder's Break-In missions. Here you get a big van, break into someones house, have to play "Don't Wake Daddy," as you sneak around quietly and grab big boxes of guns and ammo to sneak out with and put in your van (Ryder, of course, doesn't help you with this at all). Anyway, at the end of this mission it explains that if you find another big ass van like this one, you can break into more houses and take their shit. But, what it doesn't mention, is that YOU NEVER SEE ONE OF THESE VANS AGAIN!

Overall: B, this is just for this section, as I beat more of it I'll put in what I think of those sections too. I do like this section a lot, but there's too many problems with it, no money, dumb missions, but the gang wars more than make for that. Also, when this section ends, it almost feels like the ending of the first season of a TV show, fade out of Los Santos, but tune in for the next season. I know I'm excited.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum was a great game when it came out. But I'm looking through a lens on a scope with "hindsight is 20/20" written down the side. Not to say I'm going to say it sucks now, and really, has a whole lot changed for video games since 2009? Probably not, but these are things I've thought about playing through this again, on hard, which I guess I didn't really notice before.

Well, the first thing I'll say is that if you're playing this game for the first time that you shouldn't play through on hard, start with normal, or, if you're not good at action games, easy.

Notice that picture up near the top, that's Batman with all the bosses in the game. The "bosses" however, suck ass. Here they are in order: Bane: actually, this one's not so bad, teaches you how to take down titans (tougher enemies you encounter later on), though that's mostly just dodging out of the way at the right time, and Bane was mostly about punching stuff anyway. Zsasz: hit him in the head with a Batarang (seriously, that's it). Harley Quinn: She stands in a box and sends guys at you while electrifying the floor at different times. Killer Croc: Avoid him by moving between fast and slow on some planks (lamest fight in the game, not  even an encounter, not fun in any way, why didn't they take this section out?) Poison Ivy: okay, this one's actually really good, she has powers to throw at you, it's really challenging (especially on hard) it almost feels like this should have been the end boss fight... Joker: Throws two titans at you, then, after a cutscene, takes titan formula himself, but when he's giant, all he does is throw more guys at you. LAME LAME ULTRA LAME! This is the final boss, and all it does is leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Other than the boss fights, I feel everything else is pretty good. The fighting is fluid and really fun (especially after you get the timing down). The sneaking around parts are good too, taking out thugs one by one as they search for you, using a whole array of gadgets to confuse and terrify. Makes it feel like the opposite of a survival horror game. Like you're the monster that everyone is trying to get away from or kill before it gets you. Also the scarecrow bits (not really a boss, more an element all his own) are really cool.

I suppose I should mention a couple of other things I had a problem with, the first thing is the extra, extra long opening cut-sequence, which is also entirely unskippable because you have to walk closely behind Joker and you can't pass him. I hate it when games do this, really takes down on the replayability, and really, I think every game should put us straight into the action, do we really need backstory before we start another game? Is that why we're playing? I don't think games really need a rich deep story to begin with, and when they do, it should be something that's incorporated into the gameplay, or side bits, like all those books you could read in The Elder Scrolls series, or everyone's quirks in State of Decay. Not really necessary to experience, but a nice touch. I mean, I'm a fan of good storytelling in videogames, but I also think that unskippable, long opening sequences is BAD storytelling.

One more thing that pissed me off, and that's the detective sequences. This would happen every once in a while where Batman needed to figure something out, like Commissioner Gordon gets kidnapped (again) and Batman needs to find him. So what do you do? You go into detective mode, find some object (in this case, Gordon's pipe), and then follow some trail that you can only see in detective mode to the next location. It's not fun or interesting, just tedious busywork.

Overall: B. It's a great game, don't get me wrong. But the shitty boss battles really bring it down. Challenge modes are cool, but the game could have more to it than that. The story is too linear, the ending is disappointing, it's too short. There's too many problems with it for me to give a higher grade.

Poker Night 2

I argued with myself about doing this one or not, but I really haven't beaten anything since Injusice. I suppose unlocking everything in a Poker game counts as beating it.

Poker Night 2 is the latest game coming from Telltale Games, the same studio that brought The Walking Dead and Sam and Max. If you like poker, I highly recommend it. You play against a table full of fictional celebrities, Claptrap from the Borderlands series, Brock Samson from The Venture Bros. TV show, Sam from Sam and Max, and Ash Williams from The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. Oh, also GlaDOS from the Portal series is the dealer.

It's a pretty solid poker game. Everyone has there own tells, and best of all, conversations occur between characters as your playing through the hands. These conversations are hilarious and they kept me coming back for more. Even if you don't like poker that much, situations like Claptrap Breaking while trying to say the word "Boobies" or finding out a little more about the relationship between Ash and Brock make losing hands worth it.

If you do actually win hands, or at least get in third or better, you'll win Unlock Chips which can be used to either unlock different themes for your decks, chips and table felts, or buy drinks for the people at the table. When you do this, they are more likely to show tells when betting.

Overall: C+, I had a great time playing this game, but it's not really anything special, the conversations made it all worth it, but otherwise, it's just like any other poker game. If your not a big fan of poker, you can probably skip this one.

Injustice: Gods Among Us

Injustice is a fighting fame developed by Nether Realms, the same company that brought us Mortal Kombat. Also, Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe. Which kept making me wonder why they made this game, but I digress. 

Unlike Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe, this game is taking a full 2D-control style, like classic MK, pushing up makes you jump, pushing down makes you duck and there's no other ways about it. I think this is a good thing overall, I was getting tired of every fighting game trying to be Soul Calibur anyway, and now Soul Calibur is trying to be Street Fighter for some stupid reason, but, once again, I digress.

I just played through the Story Mode, but I plan to go back and do all the other stuff too. There's a challenge mode with over 200 missions, plus classic and online play. But I haven't done too much of any of those yet, so I'm just going to stick to the Story for this one.

In the story, The Flash and Batman are chasing The Joker, only to suddenly be pulled into some kind of inter-dimensional vortex and taken to another universe. In this parallel Earth, The Joker killed Lois Lane, which drove Superman insane and turned him evil. So, the Justice League is now more a league of Superman's minions, because if anyone doesn't do what he says, he's going to kill you.

The thing I didn't like about the story though, is it was more like watching a movie, and every once in a while you fight somebody. Really, there were points when I'd put the controller down and just be watching the story develop, only to be taken by surprise when they through a battle at me. I liked the story, though much more in depth than you'd expect from a fighting game. Usually I'm fine with the whole "you're here to fight in a tournament," one-player mode style. I mean, that worked for Mortal Kombat 1-3, and every Street Fighter and Tekken. I don't know, it just seems like a little much for a fighting game.

Overall: B-. Once again, I'm only grading the story mode. I like the combat style and how free-flowing combos are, plus the easy to learn special moves for every character is pretty cool. The story's just kind of tedious though, too much story, not enough gameplay. I'm glad there's other modes, because if this was it I would be very disappointed.

The Walking Dead

Zombie video-games and zombie movies/books are two completely separate entities. In a typical zombie game, such as Dead Rising, Resident Evil, or Dead Island, chances are that if you get bit by a zombie your not going to die. Just eat some food, smoke some green  herb (at least, that's how I assume you consume it) or use a med-kit and you'll be right as rain.

Now, zombie movies and books, you get bit by a zombie you die and become a zombie.

The Walking Dead, Telltales latest interactive adventure game, is a zombie game that plays like a movie. Like any typical adventure game, the object is to solve puzzles in order to unlock the next part of the story. This one is a little more unique. Yes you still have to solve the puzzles to unlock the next parts, but in this one, the next parts usually come with choices, most of which usually dictate if somebody lives or dies.

In this game, you play as Lee, a man being transported from Macon, Georgia to an upstate prison. This is when the man transporting you hits a zombie on the road and crashes. And so your story begins, coming out of that you meet up with different survivor's of varying ages and go through the world trying to survive.

The Walking Dead does a great deal to impress me. The choices in throughout the episodes are exciting and tough, there was many points where I really wanted to go back and try it all again, just to see what my other choices would have done. I've read online though, that most people make the same choices and found, at the end of each episode when they showed you statics from other players, that many choices seemed to be favored in one direction and the other. I kept thinking about giving it another go, but now I feel it's meant only for a single playthrough. So my advice is to make all the decisions you would make and see how it turns out.

Overall: A+. I think this is the best game TellTale Games has ever made. As a long time fan of adventure gaming I'm really glad that it's finally making a comeback. Maybe TellTale could make another Gabriel Knight game now, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Banjo-Kazooie

Banjo-Kazooie is the story of a bear named Banjo and the somewhat annoying but infinitely useful bird that lives in his backpack Kazooie. The game starts when the evil witch Gruntilda comes down from her lair blows up Banjo's house and steal his sister Tootie. Why? Because she wants to extract all the cuteness out of Tootie and put it into her.

Banjo-Kazooie came out in 1998 for the N64. I played it on X-Box Live Arcade though, controls have been updated to fit the new format (if you remember, N64 had some pretty funky looking controllers). It's still a pretty solid platformer. It still has the same problems though that many games from that era do, mostly concerning camera controls. But this is only a slight annoyance at times. Mostly it's cool.

The goal of the game is to collect puzzle pieces, called Jiggies in the game. There is a variety of ways at doing this. Collect five Jingos in every level, beat a boss or sometimes use the abilities you gain as you progress through the game in a fun and interesting way. With ten levels and an awesome board-style game-show at the end, just before the final boss of course, this is definitely a fun experience for all ages.

Other than the weak camera controls, I really can't complain much about anything else. It's a fun, exciting game that was made before the days of things like level grinding games or free roaming sandbox games were everywhere. It's a fun game and it makes for a pretty good time, even in the frustrating Rusty Bucket Bay level, and especially in the awesome, Halloween-themed Mad Monster Mansion. Also, it's only ten bucks, so just buy it already.

Overall: A. Pretty damn good actually. It's like Mario 64 meets the crazy people who used to work at Rareware. Too bad their games suck now-a-days though, huh? Just reselling their games on XBL or PSN to try and recapture their former glory. Either that or its the only way they can make money anymore, sad.

X-Men Legends

X-Men Legends is a Gauntlet style beat-em-up RPG. It's quite fun, but there are a lot of things I'm going to bitch about. First off, this game is definitely geared towards multi-player, but there are these areas in between chapters where you only have one character, Magma a New Mutant coming into this game as the person who doesn't know anything about the X-Men. So for fans of the X-Men, you get to learn a bunch of stuff you already knew again, if your not a fan of the X-Men THEN WHY ARE YOU PLAYING THIS GAME!?

Along those same multiplayer-with-constantly-having-to-be-one-player bullshit, there are Danger Room modes where you can unlock  the best equpment for each X-Man but, once again, you can only be one character for these moments. Forcing this game to suddenly become one-player mode.


I suppose I shouldn't be complaining so much about that. I mean, I played the whole thing by myself, and it is pretty fun changing out the X-Men constantly, something I'm sure my friends would totally berate me for, but I wanted to get the full experience and use every character. Oh, and speaking of which. Another problem with this game is so many characters are being held back by having one move that totally sucks (or, in the case of Emma Frost, two moves) this is a real drawback since you only ever get 4 moves in total for each character. Jubilee has one shitty move, So does Nightcrawler, I mean, I like Nightcrawler and Jubilee but as the game wore on I used them less and less just because YOU CAN"T EVER SWITCH YOUR FUCKING MOVES!

Another thing, this game runs about 20 hour gameplay, 30 if your doing all the one-player and danger room stuff, but you don't get some characters until right before the end of the game. I mean, as previously mentioned, Emma Frost isn't very good (and it's really annoying when she and Jean Grey are stuck in the Astral Plane BY THEMSELVES, I mean Jean is awesome, but Emma only has one good offensive move and its her Power Move, oh and speaking of Power Moves, you get them level 15 but You can never ever put any skill points into them, meaning that they start out being awesome but never ever get any better, so by the last level they are all mediocre at best) But Psylocke you get right before the final two or three levels, so you hardly ever get to use her.

This would all be forgiven, I think, if there was a new game+ mode. I mean, isn't that the point of these games, level up your characters and beat the game, then level them up some more on a slightly harder difficulty level FOREVER. That's what I always thought anyway, start a new game, not having to go through all the story to get all those characters that took forever to unlock. I don't know, I guess it just totally eliminates any replay value at all for me.

Overall: C, I suppose this was probably a pretty good game when it first came out. Now-a-days, I'd save a game like this for when you have a free weekend and three friends who are all pretty big X-Men fans. Fast to beat, I'm sure you'd get a kick out of it, as long as you and/or your friends can stand watching as someone else plays through the one-player parts.

Critical Failure: "Goldeneye: Rogue Agent"

This is a new thing I'm going to do, whenever there's a game that, for whatever, I just give up playing the whole way through, then I'm going to say they failed.

This is my first failure. Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. And what a piece of garbage this one is.

The story and gameplay is nothing like the original Goldeneye, Rare's N64 game that allowed players to live through the movie in a whole new way, doing missions over and over again on different difficulty levels in order to unlock more objectives, and the multiplayer was pretty tight too.

Anyway, this game sucked. You're an agent, NOT James Bond but some other agent. During the very first mission of the game, you watch as James Bond (Pierce Brosnan version) gets killed by Dr. No, and then a war starts between Dr. No and Goldfinger. Then, you get disavowed by MI6 for some stupid reason but really it's all a ploy to get you working with Dr. No or Goldfinger.

Really, I could forgive the dumb storyline if this game had any redeeming qualities at all. This game is nothing more and nothing less than a straight FPS game. It still gives you missions, like in the first Goldeneye game, but they're always solved on a straight path through the game. No longer do you have interesting missions that you have to figure out on your own how to occomplish. Instead, it's just: go here, shoot some guys, or go here, blow this up, or NO OTHER OPTIONS.

I suppose there's one cool thing, you get special "eye powers." I only unlocked one before I gave up on this game, but it let me see enemies through walls. But really, one decent power isn't enough to save this poorly-crafted
first person shooter.

Portal 2

I forgot to mention last week, but when I played through the original Portal, I played with the commentary on. This meant that there were dialogue boxes that you could activate floating around all over the place. This also was very annoying because when you activated one and GlaDos was talking then you couldn't hear a damn thing.

But with Portal 2, they fixed this problem. When you play through with the commentary, anytime you activate a commentary node the voice will always be louder than the voice on screen. Except now you can't,  save with the commentary on, which causes all sorts of other problems...

But I digress, meet Portal 2, better and longer than the first Portal. You still get a portal gun and have to solve all sorts of physical problems with it. You still play as Chell, our silent protagonist who may or may not have brain damage as Wheatley, a small, lovable (but incredibly stupid) robot who breaks you out of a ruined Apature testing facility, only to inadvertently restart GlaDos, whose back and incredibly pissed at Chell for killing her in the last game.

What I like about Portal 2 was quite a lot, the puzzles were great and there were plenty of innovations from the last one. The inclusion of gels, light bridges, excursion funnels and aerial face-plates, all things that heightened the experience of puzzle solving and made the gameplay even more fun. What I didn't like was that oftentimes I'd find myself looking all around the place just for the one place to put a portal, especially when you're traversing the old, unused areas below the Apature Science Center. At one point, this happened for so long that I invented a fantasy of myself being "King of the Rock" and I'd shoot 2 portals just so I could look at myself and have someone else to talk to.

Other than that, Portal 2 offers at least three times as many hours as Portal 1 did, solid puzzle solving and, other than a few hours of being stuck here or there, is just plain fun. Overall: A+

Portal

Portal is a game for the ages. It's something that's not only fun, it's a completely original idea for a game. It's a puzzle-first person game created by Valve in 2007. It's a fairly short game, the first time through you can beat it in one sitting, and most people only knew about it because Valve had thrown it on The Orange Box as a bonus feature. But really, this became one of the most iconic games to come out five years ago and even after all this time (five years is eons for videogames) it's still has a few hours of amazing gameplay.

The story of portal is that you wake up from a sleeping chamber in order to be tested by the AI GlaDos. GlaDos had been programmed to test, even after everyone else has died. You play a young lady named Chell, though I don't know how anyone knows that since your name is never mentioned and Chell never speaks throughout the whole game. But, as Doc Mitchell once said, "if that's your name, that's your name" so we'll go with it.

 You test and solve puzzles throughout the whole thing. GlaDos keeps insinuating that after the final test you might be immediately murdered, but is that what really happens? Play it and see.

The puzzle portion comes with the portal gun, you shoot one portal on a wall, shoot the other portal on another wall, go through one, come out the other. It teaches you a knew way to think about physical problems. It teaches you how to think with portals.

Overall: A. This is such a great game that I don't even mind that you can beat it in less than 3 hours if you know what you're doing. If you've never played it, you should.

FTL

Totally forgot about doing one of these last week. Oh well, I'll try to do two over the next week.

FTL is a kickstarter game that was released in September of 2012. The plot is that you've got information that can take down the rebel fleet (I'm assuming you're holding it on an old R2 robot). So you take your ship and go as fast as you can (faster than light, I'm assuming) to the other side of the galaxy so that you can save the Federation from the onslaught of the rebel fleet.

But wait, there's more: Not only do you have to get there before the rebel fleet shows up and take over the galaxy, but you also have to buy resources like fuel and missiles, experience random encounters every time you make a jump, fight ships, save ships, be uncontrolably mean to ships, oh and also DIE!

That's right, death is a big part of FTL. More than likely, the first few times you play you'll die before making it to sector 4 let alone sector 8 (the last sector), but don't worry about that, it seems that death is just another part of this game. And hey, as you play your one ship in your hangar can swiftly grow into more (there's a total of nine ships) and every time you die you just switch ships if you have one and try again. A bit of advice, if your ship catches fire, get your crew into a safe room and open doors to the outside to vent the oxygen and put out the fire.

Overall: B This is a very challenging game. Inspired by tabletop gaming and real time strategies, plus how quickly you can play a round before dying, it makes for a very addictive experience. It's lacking in a few areas, one being story, no actual explanation about why the rebels rebelled, no story for your crew or anyone else's crew for that matter. They just give you a ship and orders to get to the other end of the galaxy. Graphics-wise, it makes me think of old-school 16-bit systems, like the SNES or the Sega Genesis, which is kind of cool in a retro sort of way, but it does gives some desire to something more. The gameplay is solid and highly addictive, like I said, but without a real story and nothing to strive for but more ships. It doesn't give you a whole lot to keep playing the game for. My advice is to play it for a week, and then keep it on your desktop to remember what an exciting week that was (and then come back to it whenever your bored with the latest sub-par addition from a major videogame company, God knows there's enough of those).

Katamari Forever

Katamari Forever, for those who don't know, is a game made in Japan by Namco Bandai. It came out in 2009 for the PS3. It involves small beings who roll a ball known as a Katamari to pick up stuff. The more stuff you pick up the bigger your Katamari gets and then you can pick up even bigger stuff. Trust me, it's more fun than it sounds.

The Story: The King of the Cosmos has been rendered ill and fallen asleep. The subjects of the king need to be led by someone though, and so they build a giant Robo-King to lead them. So the Prince of the Cosmos goes to help the Robo-King to roll the katamari to make stars and planets, while also helping the King of the Cosmos in a more puzzle oriented environment. The Robo-Kings stages are more in the "make your Katamari really big" category. They do something in the King of the Cosmos stage too that I really like, it's all in black and white until your able to pick something up, then all things like that will turn to color, making it a whole lot easier.

 This isn't a true sequel though, which, as a long time fan of the series, kind of upset me. Almost all the stages are from previous incarnations of the Katamari series. Of it's 34 stages only 3 are new to this game, and truthfully, those 3 stages aren't very good. I much preferred playing through stages I've done before, well, to an extent...

There's a few problems with the controls. You don't seem to spin as fast, the quick turn is still as clunky as it's always been, but they added a jump which they explain you need to move your controller up suddenly in a "jumping motion" in order to use. But never bothered to explain that they didn't program that part exactly right and I ended up shaking my controlling in frustration for the first 12 levels before I figured out that you could also just push R2. Why didn't they tell me that? Why was I forced to figure that part out on my own? Are they just so obsessed with adding motion controls they'd rather tell you to do something with them even if there's a better way?

But the biggest problem with this game happens a little over halfway through the stages. All the levels, which were in the category of being simple, easy and fun, suddenly became frustratingly hard, as if they wanted to take every worst level from every Katamari and throw it in at the end there. I mean, was there a public outcry demanding we're forced to play the level where your Katamari's on fire and if you don't pick up things fast enough, or even touch water a little, it withers and dies. Or the one where you have to pick up hot stuff and any cold stuff will basically kill you. If you're a fan like I am, hopefully you know what I'm talking about. But really, if you're a fan like I am, you'll just go back and play the old ones and miss this Katamari's "greatest hits and misses"

Grade: C+, good, but not as good as previous titles in the series, despite taking most of its stages directly from them.