Frustrating Ninjas!

***WARNING***THIS POST MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS REGARDING NINJA GAIDEN II ***END WARNING***

     I finished Ninja Gaiden II yesterday. It's not something I was playing diligently, I would pick it up every once in a while. For the most part it lacked some of the ridiculous difficulty that the first game had. For the most part, I said. The last two levels were filled with somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 boss battles. The frustration come in two parts. Number one Ninja bass battles are Hard...usually. That is to be expected with this game though. The second, more frustrating, issue is that I thought I was fighting "The Last Boss" no less than 4 times. I could expound upon how irritating that bosses were, but I feel that would just be belaboring the point.
     I've been playing a little bit of Dragon Age, but I've stalled a little on that game. Dragon Age deserves it's own post, so I won't go into detail right now. I finished Gears of War since my last post and started Gears of War 2, but am taking my time with it. I really want to play both games' campaign as co-op, so I sent feelers out on the Fear the Boot forums for some people to help make that happen. I think playing that co-op will be a game-changer.

   















   
     Finally, every 3 - 4 years I try to play through Final Fantasy III (that's VI if you use the original Japanese numbering system) and I've gotten the itch to try it once again. I've never actually finished FF3/6, not because it is especially difficult, but because I hit a certain (optional) dungeon in the game that I really want to finish, and that dungeon (the Magic Tower, for those who have played it) is especially difficult. Since I always get hung up there, at the very end of the game, I've never actually beat it. But hey, 8th time's the charm.

Cogs of War

Real-life has been interrupting postings the last week. I'm updating because I've got a minute to spare, but I haven't advanced the cause of gaming too much recently. A few days ago I picked up the Gears of War pack that includes Gears 1 and 2 and much if not all downloadable content for Gears 2. I've played the single player campaign before, but I'm sending out some feelers to hopefully find a co-op partner to play with. The only other remarkable moment has been getting to play Last Night on Earth again. Always a treat.

 











I've been playing some multiplayer recently, because it's easy to pick up for a bit then put down. In most cases it's very easy to put down. Anyway, I'm not bragging about my "mad skilz" but I've gotten to the point that in most multiplayer matches I play (not game specific) I usually end up in the top 3-5 players in the match. Gears of War is the exception to this. I've got a couple theories, so get ready! #1- I'm just not good at Gears of War. This is possible, but it feels like an easy answer. I prefer theory #2: Each Gears match provides significantly less opportunity to hone your playing skills. Most multiplayer games allow for and are based around respawns. Some dude explodes your head with a sniper rifle, you wait about 8 seconds, then you're back in the fight to get said head exploded again...in seconds...by the same douche bag. Many of the Gears of War multiplayer games don't allow that. Once you die, you're dead for the match. Clearly, for many of the games that means, as a new player, you run out, get killed and you're done. Quite a 180 from games like Dead Space 2 or Halo where, if you're tenacious, or bad, enough, you can get killed again and again, racking up as many as (possibly) 20 deaths. So you have opportunity after opportunity to try to not die. I can't think of any verbose ending to this post, so I'll just end it abruptly here.

Aftermath

I waited a few days before posting anything new. I wanted to give myself time to let it sink in that the vast majority of my previous game collection is gone. It has. I don't miss it. I was holding on to a bunch of crap titles that I had finished and kept around because I told myself I'd go back and get those last few achievements. Or for the mythical time that I "got into" the multiplayer. Well no more. A game surfaces in my head every few days that I miss for about 5 minutes, then I'm over it.
     Now: Portal 2. It was great. Finished single and mutliplayer. It was short, but I was anticipating that. It was also really fun (also anticipated that), but I think the multiplayer was stronger than the single player game. Some downloadable content is supposed to be out "this summer", whenever that is. And best of all, it's going to be free. Don't believe me? Check Joystiq!
     When I was talking about Dragon Age I had not yet given the game a fair shake. It is awesome! I am more enthusiastic about Dragon Age then I am about Portal 2. It's so good, and so similar to Star Wars: KOTOR that it makes me think: if I had KOTOR on console instead of PC, maybe I'd actually finish the game, instead of finishing the first 8-10 hours and never picking it up again. Wow. I really need to go back to that game once Dragon Age is done.

I also picked up Star Craft 2 for PC. I've played 3-4 levels of it and am overwhelmed with my lack of an opinion. Not that it's bad. It's probably really great, but I'm not feeling the Real-Time Strategy right now.

Last, and certainly least, I started playing the free trial of Warhammer online. I'll describe the game like this: World of Warcraft. Same thing. If you've ever played WoW you know exactly what to expect. I'm not criticizing the game; I haven't played enough for that yet, but I've already been there. Done that.

Game Collection: Purged

I made a rather rash decision yesterday. I sold the vast majority of my game collection back to a local imperialist game-trading company. I got  a surprisingly large amount of store credit for everything and left with Portal 2, Dragon Age: Origins (Ultimate Edition), and a new controller cuz my 360 thumbstick has been twitchy for a long time. In this case "a long time" means "since I bought it. A word to the wise: sped the extra money and buy a new controller, don't buy used.

So far Portal 2 is really fun. Valve has built on the concept significantly so that it's not just a longer version of the first one and the story has taken some surprising (and fun) twists so far. I haven't touched multiplayer yet, but I hope to do some of it tomorrow. I don't really want to rant about it because there are probably a million and one sites that expound how great it is. I will probably write at about it at length once I've done some multiplayer and have finished the single player which seems like it is going to be pretty short. It's not like the first installment which you could only call a full game if you had the most jaded sense of humor, but I'm going to guess that it will clock in at around 10 hours for a full play-through.

Dragon Age seems pretty good for the hour or two I've played. However, I think I had some misconceptions about it before I got it. I expected to be playing a Mass Effect clone in a fantasy setting. I think it would be more appropriate to say that Dragon Age spans the gap between Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. On top of that, considering the game is less than 2 years old (according to google) the graphics look disappointingly dated. That may not be the case if I has an HDTV, but I'm playing it on a tube television. That's not really a complaint, it's just that Mass Effect looks so good that I was expecting the same caliber of quality throughout Dragon Age. But, like Portal 2, I'll probably have more to say once I put a little bit more time into it.

My friend bought Descent: Journeys in the Dark the other day. As you can see above, it's an extremely elaborate boardgame. We had a good time, but no one had played before so we played this very complex boardgame and tried to learn the rules (rule book is like 30 pages) at the same time. It was fun, but it took forever because no one knew the rules or the strategy. The game is like an adaptation of an old-school Dungeons and Dragons dungeon crawl. What that means is that one player runs the dungeon and wants to kill the adventurers. The other players control said adventurers, they work together and try to kill all the monsters in the dungeon and steal all their stuff (gold, potions, weapons, etc.). It's a good game, but I think the intense learning curve would turn off players who are not pretty intense gamers.

To conclude, my EVE online subscription expired. Will I be renewing it? Maybe, but Portal, Dragon Age, and Lost Odyssey to play, so the jury is still out on weather I will come back to EVE or not.