Much Ado About Everything

What the…? Is this for real? I just went to Best Buy Canada website as I do almost daily, and what do I find? Preorders for Halo 3, scheduled to be released on Nov 30, 2006!! For the love of XBOX360! That can’t be… can it?

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When I first started watching this anime back in January, I didn’t know anything about its background. Apparently, it is based on a role-playing game. But it’s a hentai (perverse, or more accurately, with sexual content) game – and if I’m guessing it right, it has harem and dating sim elements in it. That might not sound so strange, until you realize that the game actually has considerable depth – as much as any average japanese RPG!

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I finally finished Deus Ex: The Invisible War a few days ago, after starting it at least 3 times since it came out. Only now I could get the performance to be acceptable enough for the game to be playable. That alone – needing a machine 4 years from the future – should be a telltale sign that this game is bad. Which it very much is.

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I somehow managed to finish Oblivion (meaning, finished the main quest). The game started in fun, but ended in frustration. If you want to play it, do yourself a favour and read a character creation guide to figure out how to level up properly, and pay attention to fatigue and enemy health during combat.

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So I reinstalled Oblivion and continued to play it. So sue me. All I said still stands. The reason I continued is the same one as always (this certainly isn’t the first time I did something like that) – I just can’t stand to leave things unfinished. Well, that is not true either. It’s only when you talk about games or anime that I can’t stand not to finish, even if I don’t like them.

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Lack of balance and lack of realism where it really counts (battles) – when at the same time realism is being hammered into your head everywhere you look – took away all the fun of playing Oblivion. I can’t see why it’s getting so rave reviews. Perhaps people keep forgetting how crappy the framerates are or – more likely – they put up a review after playing a dozen hours or so. Well, guess what. The game is fun the first dozen hours or so! Then it goes sharply downhill.

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Last week I finally got around to playing Outcast. I got it back in 1999, and started playing it back then, but the learning curve was too intimidating and I gave it up. I guess the sole reason for replaying it was the symphonic soundtract – I’m a sucker for those. I decided to play it through using walkthrough, as the reason I gave up on it years ago was that I didn’t want to waste too much time trying to figure out what the hell is going on in that game on my own.  The world is just too big and there are just too many enemies to simply go and play without some kind of a plan.

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Independence War: The Edge of Chaos is the shortest I’ve ever played a game before getting fed up with it. In the first real mission, I was being given a guided tour of the system I was in. I left my base, speeded up to the first waypoint, received a bit of radio chatter and then received a message that went something like “surrender your ship or die”. My ship’s AI said “oh, soonoer than I expected, but don’t worry, this ship can take them”. As I was reaching for buttons on the joystick to steer, speed and prepare to find the enemy and fire, I was “treated” to what I thought was a cutscene. A ship was shown in the center of screen and it blew into pieces. Wow, I thought, the ship really did take care of them, and on its own. After all, it’s been only a few seconds. But then the game over screen showed up – the one who was destroyed was me!

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Well, I finished another game, this time on my PC. I played the original game on my Xbox so this was a good chance to compare them. I guess controls worked fine on PC, using all three mouse buttons in combination with keyboard. The result was a game that was easy to control, which is a relief. The only problem was the occasional incorrectly marked location for your squad to take cover at. Those controls were a bit finicky but it wasn’t a major problem. Graphics were very nice and even on my GeForce 6600GT, at 1600×1200, they seemed snappy enough. It wasn’t super smooth, or even just smooth, but it worked out ok, with occasional major drops in framerate which overall made only a minor impact on gameplay. It can never be smooth on a 16ms LCD monitor anyway.

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Yes, I finished the game a few weeks ago, but just yesterday I had a 12 hour marathon watching the recap of the game that I got off Ebay.  It’s basically as if you’re playing the game, sans random battles.  Must’ve been a lot of work to make it.  Anyway, the fact that I managed [...]

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