Clearing off some dust

It's been over a year since the last post here. The blog has been more or less abandoned, it seems. I don't know if I'm going to continue to update it, but I wanted to chime in on a few things from the past year. This may get a little long, but who knows if anyone is going to read this. :)

One of the biggest releases of 2008 was Grand Theft Auto IV. A game I got used a few months after it came out. I have yet to beat it. In fact, I haven't played it at all in 2009. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game. The online play can be fun, too, but only on the Free Mode. Yeah, the racing can be good, but I had the most fun in Free Mode. Somewhere along the lines I picked up the Zombie costume, which (at the time at least) was only awarded to those who killed a Rockstar employee in an online match. I have no idea who it was.

The mission I got stuck on was one where I had to go to this garage and blow up four or five vans containing drugs. I tried several times and never found a working strategy. The one that worked best, though, was to park my vehicle out front (I tried to make it an ambulance) and take the path to the roof. I remember I almost had it beaten, but I missed taking out one guy and he got me first. I would have kept playing the game to just play around in the sandbox world, but it just didn't seem as fun as previous GTAs. I guess because in previous games, most of my sandbox fun would come from Infinite Health and Infinite Ammo cheats (thanks to Codebreaker). GTA4 seems to have no such cheats. Sure, there are restore health, ammo, etc. cheats, but you have to pull out the phone to input them. Which isn't very useful when you're being shot at.

Changing direction here, another big release was Metal Gear Solid 4. As a Metal Gear Solid fan, it was awesome seeing the final chapter in Snake's story. Several moments made me quite emotional. Act 4 remains one of my favorite levels of any game. Going back to Shadow Moses, all run down and nothing more than a shell of its former self. The audio flashbacks in that level are so well done, and the atmosphere and emotion the level evokes, for fans of the series at least, is just amazing. It makes me wish that Kojima would remake the original MGS with MGS4 gameplay and graphics.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising, announced at E3 2009, makes me worry about the series future. It stars Raiden, but in his cyborg suit from MGS4. I have a hard time believing this will be a traditional stealth game, because Cyber-Raiden doesn't give the impression that he'd be sneaking around. He looks like the star of an action game, and I don't think he'd be taken seriously as a stealthy guy looking like that.

Also from last year came MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, an excellent racing game. Pacific Rift is a real blast to play, and it improves on the strategy element that the original MotorStorm featured. Not only do tracks have multiple paths, each one ideal for certain types of vehicles, but it also has two element types: water and fire. You get too close to lava and your engine heats up faster. Drive into water, and your engine cools down quicker. But water slows down smaller vehicles. Overall, it's a really fun game, and racing fans owning a PS3 should pick it up if you haven't already.

LittleBigPlanet is next up. I think most people know what that is, so I'll keep it short. The official levels are a blast to play. A select few of the user created levels are great. But it seems like the quality stuff is more difficult to find. The game is great fun, though. Especially online.

Prince of Persia, the current-gen re-envisioning of the Prince of Persia series, still has the great gameplay of the Sands of Time trilogy. The combat is radically different, and will probably be a sticking point for most people, but I feel it flowed well enough. The lack of enemy variety, however, makes battles rather tedious. The story is the most irritating aspect, however. After what should have been the ending, you have one more thing you have to do, in gameplay, no less, which results in undoing everything you worked for up till that point. Then, for another $10, you get to buy the Prince of Persia: Epilogue, which adds another hour of gameplay and gives you yet another non-ending.

Ubisoft, listen, placing Elika on the pedestal should have been the end of the game. The Prince undoing the seal should have been a cut-scene at the start of the sequel, and the "Epilogue" should have been the sequel's first chapter. I hate that you gave me a total bull**** ending for my first $60, and then got me to spend another $10 thinking I was going to get a real ending, only to be jerked around again. I understand you want to turn this into another series (a sequel to which hasn't been even announced yet, which worries me), but at least give me closure in the first game. Don't leave me hanging.

Next on this list that I just made up is Fallout 3. Granted, I haven't played much of the game, but it isn't that bad. I don't think I have enough experience with it to say definitively whether or not it's great.

A few months ago I resubscribed to Gamefly, so the next few games were rentals. I'll keep it brief. Resistance 2 was a pretty good game, as was Killzone 2. Two really good shooters for the PS3. Mirror's Edge was okay, but the first-person view really hampered gameplay. Parkour is great in games, but it really needs a third-person view. I know the idea is to bring the player into the head of the character, but a real person has peripheral vision, which a first-person video game cannot give.

Now into some more miscellaneous stuff. The Wii Virtual Console and Gamefly have helped me enjoy The Legend of Zelda. I think I may have talked about my dislike of the series in the past, but playing Ocarina of Time on the VC and Twilight Princess on the GameCube have showed me that 3D Zelda games can be good. Unlike Wind Waker. A few years ago, I played the Game Boy Advance version of A Link to the Past, and I enjoyed that. But Wind Waker gave me a poor impression of the 3D games. An impression I have since learned to look past. Twilight Princess was an amazing game, and while I have yet to finish Ocarina of Time, it too is excellent.

Games I plan to buy in the near future include Bomberman Ultra (PS3), Bomberman '94 (Wii VC/TG-16), Super Dodge Ball (Wii VC/NES), and Kirby's Dream Land 3 (Wii VC/SNES). I'm a big Bomberman fan, and already own Bomberman '93 on the Virtual Console. If they start putting the Super Bomberman games on there, I'll buy those, too. Bomberman Ultra on the PS3 has me wanting it because of the featured 8-player online play. I don't think I've ever played an 8-player Bomberman. I only hope you can play online with a spot reserved for a second local player. I'm also a fan of the Kirby series, but never played Dream Land 3. I plan to remedy that. Super Dodge Ball is by far one of my favorite NES games of all time. Probably the only game above it is also part of the Kunio-kun series, Crash 'N The Boys: Street Challenge. I can't wait for that to come to the VC.

I'm sure I'm missing many things from the past year of gaming, but I'm honestly drawing a blank at this point. So, until next time, whenever that may be.