Dragonchasers

I’ve been remiss in my duties in not relaying that all week this week, TechTV’s The Screensavers is running a series on modding your XBox. Now, since Microsoft was kind enough to sell me a defective XBox (A tragic story of ‘dirty disk errors’ that is still much too painful for me to relay.) forcing me to buy a second one, I’ve got this half-working doorstop that just might need to be modded. Why? Um, just cuz, of course.

If you don’t get TechTV, you can still read the online article about this fascinating new hobby. 🙂

Like a good little gaming consumerDroid, I ran right out and bought AC2 when it was released, even though I’d been in the beta and had been unimpressed. It wasn’t any better after commercial launch, so once my free month ran out I stopped playing.

The other day I got an invite directed to people who’d cancelled their accounts, inviting us back for free for 2 weeks. Since I’m between MMRPGs I figured “What the heck” and went back to check it out. I spent more time updating than I did playing. It’s still “ick” to me.

And I still can’t put my finger on why. Continue reading “Asheron’s Call 2”

Well, there I was, breezing along, loving life as I unravelled the puzzles behind why this Darkness is Eternal and what the heck am I supposed to do about it anyway, when BAM! it turned into a combat-based game. Honestly, I preferred having to find gold necklaces to make stone statues happy and would’ve been pleased if the game kept on that track.

Not that this new phase is bad…it’s just different. By now I have an arsenal of spells and so have few worries about dying or going mad unless I’m up against a boss. This means boldly striding through the levels whereas I used to timidly creep, cringing at every pebble tumbling down an incline, every floorboard squeaking.

I did resort to a walkthrough at one point (ok, a few points) when I returned to the game, since after 6 months I’d basically forgotten what I had the capacity to do, and in doing so noticed how many chapters there were, so I know the end is near…I’m just hoping that it doesn’t totally spike up in difficulty at the very end.

With the leviathan Xenosaga behind me, it was time to press on. I needed something engaging but not too long (after a 60 hour game, it takes me a while to recharge my batteries enough to take on another monster). Eternal Darkness (Gamecube) called to me from the shelf. I’d played it about half-way through some time back and got distracted.

Eternal Darkness is one heck of a creepy game. You need to play this one in the dark. It’s a bit like Resident Evil with better controls, more magic (I think…I’ve never played very far into a RE) and really varied environments. It is not for the kids. We’re talking human skin lampshade stuff.

The idea behind the game is that you’re a girl investigating her familiy’s history, and in doing so, you keep ‘flashing back’ to different places and periods of time. So far I’ve been back to Persia, circa sometime BC and as far forward as 1952. You tend to visit locations several times, hundreds of years apart, which brings a neat “been here, but wasn’t able to do that” feel to the game.

Of course, the big hook was the whole way the game tries to scare you by breaking out of the box, so to speak. Sadly, this has been so publicized that it probably won’t scare anyone now. If you’ve heard about it, you know what I mean (most of the things that happen rely on you being taken unawares). If you haven’t heard about it, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Suffice to say the game plays with your head pretty effectively in the early stages. Once you get deeper into the game, you have ways of controlling your sanity, plus most of the games ‘tricks’ really only work once.

Anyway, so far, this is a really good ride. Sound and graphics are great, level design is really neat. A real sense of claustrophobia in some dank dungeons. Lots of “Indiana Jones” style trap avoidance, and most of the puzzles are easy enough that they’ll make you think for a few moments, but won’t stop you in your tracks. This allows the engrossing story to keep its talons in you. Oh! And you can save almost anywhere so it’s a good game for short sessions. While it might fall all apart in the endgame, I rather doubt it. But I’ll be sure to let you know.

Well, 58 hours or so since first slipping the disk in, I finished Xenosaga (ok, more like 70 or so hours if you count restarts). It still dumbfounds me that the game is getting so many average reviews. This is easily my third favorite PS2 game so far (1st is Ico, 2nd is FFX). Sure, there are some annoying aspects to it, but any game you play for 60 hours is going to have something that eventually starts to grate on you. But I really enjoyed the ways you could build your characters up, the mini-games, the graphics, and especially, the storyline. I’ve heard the storyline referred to as highly deriviative, but I didn’t get that. Yes, there were some scenes that were very evocative of certain scenes from various movies, but the plot, as far as I could follow it (heh) didn’t seem at all derivative to me. Well, with the caveat that certain common anime themes were included (giant robots and all that).

When I hit the end, I had enough emotionally invested in the characters that I had a few real ‘lump in the throat’ moments, which is always the mark of a good game for me.

All in all, a great game, in my opinion.