Wow. I finally hunkered down and finished Ninety Nine Nights (N3). Main reason I did it was to get the extra 500 gamerscore points. Okay, it’s a fun game too.
A quick review of N3:
- The graphics are great (not Gears of War great, but good nonetheless)
- The save system bit me in-the-butt a few times by overwriting a certain character’s save spot with another’s, causing me to re-do the overwritten character’s missions again. Grrrr!
- On the surface the game appears to be a button-masher (which you can do with fairly good results), but it’s fun pulling off the better moves/combos when you know what you’re doing.
- There is some strategy involved in order to complete missions with an A or S rating (S being the best – don’t ask me why, it’s a Japanese game).
- There are plenty of guys to slaughter. Literally hundreds on the screen at once making for some killer action; very fun
- The dialog is very corny, don’t even try to follow the story line. Vik Vak (the troll) probably has the best story line and he only has two missions; very touching IMHO.
- Bosses are a bit cheap in that your blue spark (mega power) won’t even touch them and if it does, it’s a small amount. I’d expect it to do some damage. For crying out loud I just obliterated 400 guys and the boss just gets to stand and block?! I don’t think so. At least damage the boss a bit.
- Speaking of cheap (or just bad physics), during Tyruruu’s (can’t spell, she’s a sorceress) mission in the mountains, boulders are littered everywhere which you can push with a water blast. However, depending on which way the boulder’s are programmed to roll, if you are in front of the boulder and try to push it away from you, it’ll actually roll back toward you. Yikes! Can we say glitch?
- Cut screens can sometimes be skipped. If there was one rule I’d impose on every game developer is that cut scenes should be always skip-able. I’m okay being forced to watch a 1min clip the first time but then let me skip it. I just want to get to the action after I’ve died for the umpteenth time.
- The achievement for leveling all of your characters to level 9 is a bit excessive and confusing. Since this game was an import from Japan, the wording for this achievement changed a bit. In the US, the requirement is to level all your characters to level 9 but in actuality you have to play through every character’s missions while at level 9. Ugh. That took close to 8hrs for me to complete.
I admit that I had to go to the Xbox.com forums and get some tips to complete some parts of the game. It wasn’t cheating as there are no cheats involved, but there are strategies which I desperately needed.
Overall, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I not only completed my first 360 game, but achieved all 1000 points from the title as well. Before I was okay with just finishing the game, but the achievement revolution that the Xbox 360 created makes me want to push farther and extend the life of the game. Will I push through every title I have like that? Maybe. Maybe not. Some titles may not be worth it.
I finally cracked the 5000 gamerscore
I was an achieving fool Saturday and Sunday. After completing N3, I cracked off achievements in Gears of War, G.R.A.W., and Lego Star Wars II. My Xbox even blogged about it. On to the next milestone. What is that? About 500 more points to net me a little prize for raising my gamerscore by 1500 by April 22.
