McWilliams’ World

I recently received Ninety Nine Nights (N3) via yourFree360Games.com (I shelled out about $12).

Reviews of N3 are a mixed bag citing shallow, monotonous, repetitive game-play, crappy voice acting and plot. Whoopty-doo!

Playing for probably 6hrs, I’ve enjoyed it so far. I concur with some folks about the seemingly long missions only to croak toward the end and with no checkpoints, forcing you to replay the mission. Granted this game is not very difficult so playing the mission over gives you the chance to rethink your strategy and approach. I can deal with that.

I love hack-n-slash games and N3 delivers. At times you’re literally laying waste to hundreds of on screen enemies. As your character levels up, new combo moves, weapons and items open up for you to open a fresh can on the encroaching baddies. Once you leveled enough goblins or orcs, your orb meters max out and you can unleash some major carnage; almost flattening the entire battlefield. It’s very satisfying and pretty to watch. However, strategy comes into play farther down the road as a bigger, deadlier battle may be approaching and you may want to save that orb attack when you’re in pinch. I found myself a few times wishing I held off using it.

Overall, I’m enjoying this game. It’s easy to sit down and pickup. It’s not so involving that if you leave it alone for a few days or weeks and come back to you you won’t know what’s going on; unlike playing Oblivion or Morrwind. It’s just good, mindless fun.

I just finished playing through Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors. Here’s my review.

General Info

Otogi 2 starts off with a disturbing scene of 4 Generals summoned by a sorceress (Seimei) to resurrect Raikou (our hero from Otogi 1). In order to do so, these 4 warriors commit suicide releasing their ki and allowing Raikou to come back from the dead. It’s very spooky and like I said – disturbing. However these generals are not really dead, they’re just in “limo”.

I’m not going to pretend that there’s a great story or plot here because there really isn’t. Maybe it’s lost in translation from Japanese to English but the overall story’s lost on me. Apparently there’s this nine-tailed fox and our sorceress chick stole one of his tails and later on you acquire this orb-of-power that the fox wants back. During the game your generals get captured (however that happens) and you have to free them to get them back.

The atmosphere of the game is very mysterious with lush destructible environments, weird, fanciful characters, and spooky Japanese music. All those elements really get you into the proper mindset.

(more…)

I’m on a roll here, cleaning up my aging Xbox game collection. I’m mainly wading through all the games that are not currently backwards compatible on the Xbox 360.

Far Cry: Instincts (from here on out as FC) is a fairly straight forward first person shooter (FPS) with a few tweaks. At some point in the game you learn you’ve been experimented on and the result is that you have feral abilities; night vision, increased speed, super jumping, and animal-like attacks. You have the choice of using stealth or just run with guns blazing. Sometimes stealth works, sometimes blasting through waves of baddies is the way to go. I found stealth lended itself well in earlier levels (such as setting traps, luring an enemy over and he spring the trap) but not so much later on. Later on you’re pretty much blasting everything in sight; and taking cover to regenerate your health.

There’s a good selection of weapons and plenty of ammo to go around; pistols, rifles, sub machine guns, rocket launchers, shot guns, grenades…pretty much standard affair for FPS’s. You can also dual-wield some guns for that extra “ooohmph”. Since I’ve been spoiled by Halo, occasional weapon controls were a bit wonky for me like the sniper rifle. Most weapons also had a small zoom or “focus” view where your aim is a bit more on-target…it’s helpful in most situations where you need to get that bad dude from far away but forgetting it’s on is also easy to do. The designers also tucked away some goodies (health, armor, ammo, etc…) in out-of-the-way corners and behind areas you typically wouldn’t look; but I did, which helped a lot.

Most of the game you find yourself in a jungle/island setting with a few indoor levels. I particularly liked the nighttime jungle levels since they got the atmosphere just right. The moon shining, mist and fog; it just appeared real spooky. Couple that with all the ambient sound and you got some tense moments truding through the jungle with nothing more than your shorts.

Objectives within levels were fairly standard as well; find a key card, throw a switch, destroy a bunker…stuff like that but they made it fit within the story. Unfortunately some of the objectives were a bit vague (at least to me) and I spent a number of minutes combing over an area trying to figure out what I was supposed to do or find. Eventually I found it but it was frustrating. Some sections of a levels I just ran through since there was no way I’d survive just standing there trying to mow everyone down, so I just booked-it out of there.

Vehicles are also present in the game and are mainly just a means for you not to travel by foot the whole way (“Really McWilliams? Is that what vehicles are for?” you say sarcastically.) Shut up! I mean, to trudge all the way by foot would be pretty long and boring. The vehicles are somewhat difficult to control. Steering with one stick and then using the other to move your weapon within a very closed course caused me to do an eye-spit (like someone with two fingers together in front of you, then tell you to follow the fingers and they split them apart). The control scheme caused me to just drive to my destination and not worry about shooting anything. Controls were also a bit sensitive when in a vehicle (especially the ATV).

I’m a save-aholic. FC does not let you just arbitrarily save any time you want. Instead it uses a checkpoint/save system; you reach a certain point – it saves. Die before the save point and you get to start back from the last one. It wasn’t too bad of a system. Also saving before a boss battle also is a big plus. The save system did a good job of saving where it was appropriate, however, it does give away that something bad’s about to happen.

Graphically, FC is one of the best I’ve seen on the Xbox. I loved the lighting (or lack thereof) and rich colors.

As I mentioned before, the audio also plays a role in the atmosphere of the game. As you’re approaching a camp, or an enemy you may overhear them talking, having a conversation; it really helps you when sneaking up. Your character also makes a good amount of noises too. Using your feral speed, you’re character will begin panting and breathing heavier; coming out of it, he’ll start lightly coughing and catching his breath. I thought that was a nice touch.

Now the bad…

I ran into one serious glitch in the game; the garbled audio glitch. At some point in the game, the audio (mostly character/enemy sounds) became garbled. Apparently if you try to bust out of the opening intro movie (which is very annoying! Game developers listen up! Don’t force us to watch your opening credits, intro movies, etc…give us an out! Yeah they’re cool but after the umpteenth time, I just want to play the game!) by spanking the buttons on your controller, the game cannot load all the audio assets it needs, thus corrupting the audio. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t write the game. Doing some searching around the FC site and forums, most suggestions were to delete your game data and start over. No way was I going to do that! I figured there had to be a simpler fix. So here it is (this fix can be applied most Xbox games that are misbehaving);

• Start up any 3 other Xbox titles to the start screne (allowing them to play uninterrupted). Doing so clears the Xbox hard drive cache
• Put FC back in, allowing it to play uninterrupted
• Start your game. All should be well.

I was relieved when that was fixed. It was fairly annoying not being able to hear oncoming enemy or hearing garble when explosions went off or enemy screamed after you killed them.

Apparently there’s also a another BIG glitch during the final boss battle where if you attack him during a little speech he does, he becomes invincible. Didn’t happen to me, but after reading about it, I avoided doing so.

FC also has a multi-player/ Xbox Live mode, but I’ve only played on-line a few times. Some have really enjoyed the map maker that’s included with the game allowing you to create your own multi-player maps. I just haven’t had time.

Overall, FC is a fun, straight forward FPS with some welcome additions. It’s not perfect but I’ll give it an 8 out of 10 (mostly docked because of the forced intro movie and audio glitch).

My next game to conquer is Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors.

I just finished playing through Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (Xbox) over the weekend. It was an extremely fun game. The amount of freedom, variety of weapons, and the major satisfaction of blowing anything – and I mean anything – to bits was icing-on-the-cake.

I found most of the missions fairly fun. Some were down right difficult and made you really think on how you’re going to accomplish them, and some were as simple as waltzing in, grab whatever, and get the heck out of there.

The main story of the game is that you’re an army-of-one for hire. North Korea’s going nuts – threatening nuclear strikes (sound familiar?) and you go to work for the Chinese, Russian Mob, Allies and South Korea; doing all their grunt work. The twist is that China and S. Korea are working against one another – but you’ll take their money either way. Doing these “odd jobs” causes these factions to have a rating for you. If you do a job for the Chinese that screws over the S. Koreans…the S. Korean’s get mighty pissed at you and they’ll end up shooting you on-sight. To get back in their good graces, you’ll have to fork over some hard earned dough. So it goes back and forth like that.

Doing these missions, bring intelligence regarding the N. Korean deck-of-52. Nabbing these kooks, nets you further intel regarding the aces. Now you don’t have to nab every single card, but doing so, brings in more moolah. I found some of the card contracts to be fairly simple – some of the time. There were a few times where a card was just sitting there or very lightly guarded and I basically drove into the base, knocked the guy (or girl), and loaded them up on my truck and booked out of there. Some you just had to wade through a ton of baddies and try not to kill the card in the process of blowing the base to shreds. FYI…Killing a card only nets you half the bounty.

The bad? Hmmm… There’s a few funny glitches I saw while playing like floating items, tanks doing wheelies (that was cool), and various video glitches. However, it wasn’t anything that took away from the game.  The save system was a bit wonky since even if you saved your game out in the field, on a restore you always start back at the nearest safe base…which causes you to travel back to where you were.

One more bad thing. The Ace of Spades (last card) is dang hard! I tried and tried to complete this level under my own power, but I just couldn’t do it. It takes a good hour just to get to the last portion of the mission and by that time, I had a sliver of health left when the ace finally appeared. I saw a crate (which most of the time contains health packs and ammo) as I was going for him and smashed it open only to discover it was just full of grenades. NO HEALTH!!!. There were only a few guys guarding him but it was enough to take me out in my confusion. I was so frustrated I vowed not to finish the game. After several attempts and no saving during an ace contract, made going for it again very painful.

I left it for a while and came back to it, but I had to cheat – yeah I’m a cheater – but only in extreme circumstances. I turned on unlimited health. I still played through as if I didn’t have the cheat on, but it gave me the insurance I needed to finish the game. I figured, I already go to the end under my own power and to avoid having to do it all over again, I just wanted to finish it. So I cheated. Sue me. It would have been nice to at least have 1 save point during that mission. It’s very long and tedious.

Overall, I totally enjoyed this game and give it a 9 out of 10.

I’ve already started to play through Far Cry: Instincts (Xbox) and am probably over 50% through (as I had started it a while back just to get a flavor for how it plays). So far it’s been very cool. I love the night time jungle levels as it’s so spooky and the atmosphere is done so well. Very fun.

I’ve also been plugging away at Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (360) which I think is one of the best looking Xbox 360 games to date. Awesome atmosphere and lighting. Only thing I wished they would have done would be to incorporate live actors during the cross-com news feeds and intel dumps. Everything looks so real, why not add live actors?  Very fun and intense.

Edit: Updated screwed up links.

Just finished Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy last night.

I’m not going to go into any great detail regarding the game since you can find most of this info elsewhere…but I will go though what I liked and didn’t like.

What I liked

Psi-Ops is a fairly good 3rd person action-adventure game with a twist. Instead of running-and-gunning everything down, you have psychic abilities such as; telekinesis (TK), pyrokinesis (PK), aura view (AV), remote view (RV), and mind drain (MD). Although you can carry around a weapon, you won’t use them that much as it’s much too fun to pick up an enemy and smash him into a wall or pick up an exploding barrel and smash it into an enemy…the possibilities are endless.

It almost felt like cheating using these powers. I could go into RV and scope out the path ahead of me to get a feel for what I was going to be up against, then plan my strategy when I enter the room.

Health and Psychic restore packs are frequent throughout the level, so you’re never running around with a sliver of health left. However, they’re not littered around either. Just the right amount. There were a few times I were wishing that I had a health pack, but I soon came across one in a side room or find one hidden behind or under something. Mind Drain comes in handy when there are no Psi vials to be found; you just suck the energy out of a fallen enemy or sneak up behind a baddie and MD him live; causing your Psi energy to replenish much faster and his head explodes.

The use of the ever popular Havok physics engine provided some great fun when things exploded or when bodies flopped around. So when you chucked an enemy down the stairs, they flopped as they should. Very fun to watch.

What I didn’t like

Poor objectives 

I didn’t like the vagueness of some of the objectives within a level. I often got lost trying to figure out where I needed to go. A few times I had to consult www.gamefaq.com to get a clue as to where to go or what to do to get to the next section. Maybe it was just me, but I got frustratingly stuck a few times.

Guide Characters 

I certainly don’t like “guide characters” in games that seem to be a step ahead of you, always telling you which way to go, or asking you to meet them at the next section. Apparently those characters don’t have to wade though countless hordes of enemies and weird “aura beasts” like I did. If they know so much…then they should do it; otherwise, leave me alone. Now, I don’t mind that there are those types of characters, I just don’t think it’s very realistic that they know everything and will be where you need to get to by the time you get there.

Glitches

I do not like glitches in games; especially during boss battles. Apparently there’s a nasty glitch that happens if you save your progress just before a certain boss battle causing some essential exploding canisters to not appear as they should when you enter the fight. This one ticked me off to no end. Luckily I’m a save-freak. I had to restore my progress quite a ways back to undo the glitch (thanks to the guides at gamefaq.com for the notice). Had I only one save-point, I’d would have had to start from the beginning – I think I would have given up on the game.

Summary

Psi-Ops is a fairly fun game with some flaws. There are some extras and hidden objects sprinkled throughout the game to keep things interesting. The game does have some extra content such as bonus missions, different character skins, a making-of Psi-Ops video, as well as an arcade mode and co-op play. The introduction of psychic abilities makes for an interesting and entertaining way to play this 3rd person action-adventure. Not sure if this was the first game to utilize this type of game play but many games since have tried to utilize some type of psychic ability in their games (Advent Rising, Second Sight, Destroy All Humans…).

I’m glad I played through it but don’t feel the need to play through again, even with the extra content. Since the game’s been out for a year or two, you should be able to find this one in the bargain-bin at your local game or electronics retailer.

In-game stats states it took me a little under 5hrs to complete, but by my estimate (with all re-dos and such), probably closer to 15-20hrs. Basically a week playing 2-3 hours a night.

Rating

I give it a 6.5 out of 10.

I “completed” Morrowind today!  Yeah!

I say “completed” as the game really doesn’t end…you can continue hunting down general baddies, track down treasures, explore, and build your wealth. Now, why you would want to after the main quest is complete (and playing it for 8+ months) is beyond me… I heard a story from one of the Frag Dolls that a member was such a fan of the game that she spent time stealing pillows and began building a pillow fort in the game; now that’s going above and beyond – and a bit weird.

History

My history with Morrowind is a little odd. I initially picked up the regular edition, tried it out and was a bit turned off by how “open” the game is. After a few initial steps of setting up my character and some basic hand-holding you’re dropped off in the game with no direction. You literally can go off and do whatever the heck you want – for as long as you want. That can be a bit weird for most. But I found that that sticking to a quest or two at a time (and sometimes more as you run into people) can be helpful. The journal system help you keep track of your travels and what you should/could be doing.

Aside from how open the game-play is, the other item that turned me off initially was the combat system. I’ll never forget, right after I got my guy all setup and entering this town, I found a cavern and walked in. Immediately I heard a bad dude shout out and start to charge me. I whipped out my little blade and started to flail. And flail. And flail. WHY AM I NOT HITTING THIS GUY?! HE’S STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!!! That was frustrating. I’m used to – if I see something and I’m right in front of it…I should be able to hit it. The Elder Scroll series uses a dice/chance based combat system.  If the dice (all done behind the scenes) don’t roll in your favor, you won’t hit squat. That takes some time to get used to. Once your character gains some skill and some better weapons, combat gets better.

Beyond game-play, load times are another factor. It happens a lot. I remember when initially loading a game, I’d grab a magazine to read an article or two since it takes about one minute to load. Loading happens often in game as well and when you’re rushing to complete a quest or just get somewhere quick a load message pops up. It’s a bit annoying.

So, as I said I had the regular edition and having only experienced a few moments of the game and not really “getting it”, I used it to trade in (a long with a few other games) to get Fable.

I also knew there was a Game of the Year edition of Morrowind available and planned to get that in the very near future. This edition extended the game with two new areas and stories. Great, the regular game alone could take 300hr alone to complete – let’s at two more areas and stories. I bit and picked it up.

For the longest time, it sat on my shelf as I continued to amass Xbox titles.

Present

I think I decided back in Nov ’05 that I’d pick up Morrowind and go-for-it. I was ready for the task and knew that it’d take a looooong time to complete. That’s fine with me, I love a good adventure and I love digging around and checking everything out. So bring-it-on!

I had a great time going on quests and along the way stumble on a cavern or tomb to explore and plunder. Sometimes running into trouble and hightailing it out with my tail between my legs.

The extracurricular activities paid off in the long run as my character gained many skills making encounters with more powerful baddies much easier. I accumulated quite the stash-o-stuff, more spells and scrolls that I could even use - but kept them around “just in case”. I was a horrible pack-rat. I grabbed just about everything that was cool. I also ended up taking over a dead guys house and using  his body to store all the extra stuff I snatched up.

My character ended up on level 39 with mostly glass armor (except for Cuirass of the Savior’s Hide and Wraithguard). I had a number of weapons – mostly long swords and axes (Umbra being my favorite). A ton of spells, enchanted rings, amulets, and armor.

I could go on and on…but I won’t.

In Summary

I must say that I am so glad I took time to play Morrowind the way I wanted to play it. And I think that’s what makes this game so great – you can play it any way you want. If you want to roam around and pick plants and make potions or storm a tomb and plunder all the booty – you can. Yeah it took me nearly 8mo to complete it. Not sure if I could have finished it any sooner. Doesn’t matter – I made it my own. It’s not the destination that’s important; it’s the journey. And what a journey it was!

Rating

I give it a 9 out of 10.

“Which game is McWilliams going to play next?” you ask.

I’m not sure but I’m leaning toward Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. Wish me luck.