I’m not really sure why I do these things to myself. I just found myself thinking, completely unprovoked, about this game after years of blissfully having finally shuttered it from my mind. I was one of the kids who didn’t like Zelda II much because of its toughness, change of format, incomprehensible townsfolk, and not having the innate dullness of adulthood to make level gaining tolerable. However, being still kind of a nerd, I was really into Greek mythology for a while, especially all the bizarre monsters they came up with. So, when I was looking around Blockbuster looking for something to try I hadn’t already, this game just happened to jump at me.
The Drive (A Rambling Post Of Nothingness)
So, I’ve been shuffled around a bit at work of late, filling in at other stores in the chain since they’re running out of people who can handle a ‘wet’ picture center. Normally I’m within walking distance and in my home town, so this isn’t a factor, so just between you and me, I have the worst sense of direction in the world. So on my first day at each new locale, I usually wind up a half hour or so late after getting ridiculously lost. Not so this last couple times, though. It’s kind of reassuring for once. Especially after the unholy fuckness that my last fill-in position was.
Huber Heights is a town I usually don’t delve into aside from the movie theater and art supplies once in a blue moon (seeing as how nearly everything I’ve been drawing has gone digital or been on cheap sketchpads), so I was kind of wondering why my friends all seemed to hate going there- and that kind of kept me out of there in itself. Well, it turns out that the town is full of pushy a-holes who like to cut you off from the lane you need, and when you miss a turn, a MAGICAL PORTAL opens up and transports you into a cornfield. Seriously. It’s a densely-packed shopping center surrounded on all sides by the boonies. One missed turn puts you on a country road- and not the good kind either, the kind that’s all two-lane road with steep ditches and narrow-ass gravel driveways about a half a mile apart from each other. I thought people who lived off those kind of roads needed massive, looping drives for their threshers, ATV’s, and incest*. The weeks I spent working out of the Huber store usually meant a 30-45 minute trip to and from thanks to it taking 5 minutes to find a place to turn around each time I got blocked out of a turn and ended up lost, which was on the first couple days, basically any time I had to turn.
So, while the most recent fill in may have been pretty boring, the commute was easy, and actually pretty relaxing. It was kind of nice to have my brain wander off to something other than brainstorming fiction ideas, video games, looming deadlines for projects, work itself, upcoming classes or becoming monstrously lost. Just me and a curvy state highway instead of stop and go downtown gridlock or the endless monotony of the freeway.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why exactly I haven’t been posting as much lately. It’s true I have been pretty busy, but no worse than when I was putting reviews up pretty much weekly. I guess part of it goes with all the modern games I’ve been playing. Wonderful, wonderful ‘modern’ games where play is measured in hours and everything has to be sweeping, epic, and cinematic. You know, in other words, endless time sinks. With something like The Lost Word of JeNnY, I could put a couple hours into prodding it from every angle and sit back thinking “well, that was screwed up. But it was short.”
Well, that said, I’m gonna try and get more back into form soon here. Hope ya enjoy. Mwahaha.
Nonstop Climax Innuendo
It took me long enough to get around to this one, but there’s just something about high-action current gen spectacle brawlers that makes them kind of exhausting to sit through, no matter how much awesome might be delivered. I loved Platinum’s prior kill-sim, MadWorld to death, but I played that one a stage a night, which actually kinda helped with the ‘fictional death sport OF THE FUTURE!’ theme by breaking it up into episodes. Basically, in short sittings, I’m all for mowing down legions upon legions of four or five of the same enemy broken up by over-the-top QTE’s and cutscenes, but if I wanted to sit down and play Bayonetta from beginning to end in an afternoon, I’d probably yank all of my hair out the sixty-five thousandth time Two Little Angels And A Big Angel appeared after I thought I was free to continue down the hallway.Continue reading Nonstop Climax Innuendo
Ya know, this pretty well sums up what I hate in Star Wars.
The War Is Over
Welp, finished Transformers: War for Cybertron last week. I must say, I’m impressed. The game was good- not good for a liscense game, or good for Transformers, but genuinely good to the point my biggest gripes with it are just niggling fanboy issues. In particular, I liked the approach to campaign mode where they’re not just both doing the same missions in WHAT IF…? format. The Decepticon missions take place first, with the conquering of the planet, followed by the (longer) Autobot arc attempting to reclaim the planet. The only thing that really stinks is that for as awesome as the climax is, the actual ending falls pretty flat. It’s not a case where they’re clearing baiting for a sequel, it’s more like… “Yep. That sure happened. Now to wander around til we end up on Earth in the 80’s.”
The thing that surprised me most about the whole production is how much of the goofy feel of the 80’s cartoon managed to carry over. You have your episodic substance ex machina, DAAAAARK ENERGON which can seemingly do whatever evil thing is needed (it corrupts doors open and turns robots purple, mainly) and a chapter where your squad pretty much takes the existence of giant space slugs pretty much in stride.
No mermaid fountains though. Maybe in the sequel.