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.