game – Page 19 – broom's blog

FFXIII-2

Beat FFXIII-2 last night. About 50 hours game time. It was a nice journey with old friends from FFXIII.

FFXIII-2 to FFXIII is kinda like FFX-2 to FFX, a mission oriented continuation of a story oriented origin. I gave up FFX-2 after 1 hour because I didn’t like Yuna’s costume in that game. On the contrary, Sarah in FFXIII-2 is very lovely, even better than Lightning , who is a little bit “neutral”. And the bikini DLC pushed the joy to a new level…

FFXIII-2 is a typical time travel story. Heroes jump among different eras, save people, prevent disasters. Not very interesting, you may even say it’s stale. So the whole attraction of this story is what happened to Lightning/Snow/Fang. Therefor, it’s VERY annoying to see “To Be Continued” at the end of this game! I know there are some more plots scattered here and there, after finishing the main story. But the main story still feels way too incomplete. Or let’s put it more directly: the ending CG is too SHORT! Come on Final Fantasy, where is your 5 minute ending CG??!

The fighting system is quite close to FFXIII. It’s fun to collect and grow monsters. However most fighting fun is probably left to the after－ending play, because when I beat the game, most monsters I used are “Early Peaker” style. It requires some farming to feed those cool “Late Bloomer”s. I don’t really like a Japanese RPG that requires you to farm. Well, maybe I’ll get back to it some day.

Music of this game is definitely a wonderful part. Lots of woman voices are well used. My favorite track is the Dying World theme.

In sum, I would recommend any FFXIII player to play this successor, any Japanese RPG fan too since there are very few good Japanese RPG games today. It’s not a good choice if you’re neither of the 2 types above.

CoD:MW3 and FFXIII-2

These games have really long names, ha.

MW3 single player campaign is as short as it was criticized. I started it around 1pm and finished it at 1am. Total play time should be less than 8 hours. In fact it was a very nice experience, to fight in NYSE building, watch Eiffel tower collapsing and shoot enemies with super modern weapons. I can imagine some player would be pissed off if they bought this game for single campaign. This is a game designed for online play.

I tried it on Xbox live the next day, and found it wasn’t a game for me. It is so easy to kill or be killed in this game, 3~5 bullets, less than 1 second. Usually even before you realize which direction you’re being shoot, you’re gone. It’s very different from GeoW3, in which those “Gears” are much more tough and can eat more bullets. I’m not a CS lover so I’ll just return this game and continue my FFXIII-2.

I’ll talk about FFXIII-2 later after I beat it. So far it’s better than I expected. Time travel plot is always attractive to me, though I’ve prepared for a broken ending because it’s quite difficult to make a time travel story logical.. The battle system is OK, and Sera is good-looking. What else do you expect from a “FF*-2”?

Super Mario 3D

最近通了3ds上的mario，总的来说相当失望。个人认为是敷衍之作，跟ds和wii上的mario正统作品比相差太远。

手感应该说还是保持了水准，3d操控方式，视角转换也没什么问题。致命的缺点就是几乎毫无新意。依靠3d特性做出来的机关都相当无聊，关卡里面视觉效果是更加3d了，但玩法没什么变化，感觉就是在玩一个有3d效果的旧mario。而且由于3d的原因画面还没有以前的作品亮丽，我感觉是得不偿失。

再说游戏内容，整个游戏几乎只有狸猫和乌龟两个变身，远逊于ds的巨人和小人变身的乐趣。马银里面奇思妙想的关卡和boss战也不见踪影。更不要提wii上的多人配合。3ds上第一作正统mario只有这个水平实在让人失望。我要考虑把3ds出掉了。

Gears of War 3

Defeated Gears of War 3 last weekend at normal difficulty. As always, not a very long shooting game. Walkthrough length was about 15 hours. This one put an end to the trilogy story. Frankly, I can hardly remember the story now. This is just a game to shoot monsters, saw them, and watch blood on screen.

The big difference this time, for me, is I finally can fight online… Played versus mode a few times and found I’m not a big fan of CS style games. My kill/death ratio is between 1/5 to 1/10. This is not fun. Then I moved to the Horde mode and really enjoyed it. That’s a mode that players cooperate to survive waves of enemies. Though my best score was only about 20 waves (there are 50 waves in total), it’s much more fun to kill monsters together with ppl.

The best part of GeoW2 in my mind was playing as a sniper. It was super enjoyable to watch monster head blast in the scope sight and hear the crack sound. In GeoW3 enemies are a little bit more clever, so it’s not that easy to snipe them anymore. Assault rifles became obviously strong and I had to use them a lot, which is kinda boring.

Another weird part of GeoW3 is most enemies in ACT 1 are locust. Their blood is golden! For a long time I thought there was some violence setting and googled how to disable it. Until I finally saw some red blood from beast enemies…

Skyrim All Achievements Done

Race: Khajit, Level: 50, Main Combat style: archery/sneak, Game time: ~150 hours.

skyrim

It’s no doubt Game of The Year for 2011. Many many awards. And the “arrow in the knee” meme was a quite unique phenomenon for a video game. I guess most ppl who used this joke never played Skyrim, lol.

This was actually my first time to finish a “sandbox” style game. This game style tries to give player as much freedom as possible. Skyrim did give you FREEDOM. There are 9 cities in the world map, except the first one (Whiterun), you can visit the other 8 cities in any order, any time! And the huge huge world map is full of villages, caves, ruins and tasks. There is an achievement for “discover 100 places” but it was done in a pretty early stage. I guess the total number of places may be around 300! And sometimes I got over 20 open tasks and 4 to 5 story lines going on simultaneously. I’ve never played a game with so many free choices. If you play it in a mood of “finishing tasks quickly”, it would make you anxious and a little bit uncomfortable. But once you stop rushing and begin to wander on this huge land, you will immediately feel the pleasure. Every character has his/her background and small story; numerous and various animals running around; new tasks come in and open tasks are closed like a flow; you’re the hero and resolve every difficulty on this cold continent. It’s a ridiculously addictive experience.

Don’t be too critical to its fighting style. It’s shooting(archery) can’t compare with real shooting game, and its action combat is far from a real action game too. The spirit here is possibilities. Many skills can be combined in any way. Lots of interesting combat style can be created.

The last achievement I got was “Reach level 50”. All other achievements were done at level 43. Then I tried to level fast, by pickpocketing every person I met, enchanting lots of junk weapons, spending money to train skills, etc. The only missable achievement is “Get 15 daedric artifacts”, because you need to choose the right option in every daedric quest. Just remember to follow those evil god’s instructions then you will get all those artifacts.

Btw, I’m going to trade in the game (XBox version) this week. Let me know if anyone wants to buy it…