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03/01 - Halo 3: ODST (Master Chief Collection)
06/01 - Halo 3 (Master Chief Collection)
09/01 - Hotshot Racing
25/01 - Halo 4 (Master Chief Collection)
29/01 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
03/02 - Heavenly Sword
05/02 - Need for Speed: Carbon (Battle Royale)
09/02 - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
20/02 - ICO
24/02 - Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD
25/02 - Halo 5: Guardians
05/03 - Asura's Wrath
09/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Normal mode)
30/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Hard mode)
30/03 - Forza Motorsport 3 (100%)
01/04 - Muramasa: The Demon Blade
11/04 - Forza Horizon 2 (100%)
17/04 - The Darkness
20/04 - The Darkness II
25/04 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Normal)
29/04 - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
29/04 - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (X360)
06/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Hard)
07/05 - Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
10/05 - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS2)
18/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Very Hard)
21/05 - Umurangi Generation Special Edition
27/05 - GRID Autosport
29/05 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Revengeance)
02/06 - Lost in Random
03/06 - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
12/06 - Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix
13/06 - God Hand
25/06 - Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams
28/06 - Gungrave
30/06 - Zone of the Enders HD
01/07 - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
06/07 -
Gungrave: Overdose
Unfortunately this one ended up being a rather disappointing follow up to the first game, although in a counter-intuitive way. On paper it sounds like a big improvement, making a lot of changes that seem obviously good, and fleshing things out a lot. In practice though, it doesn’t come together at all.
Gameplay mechanics are expanded significantly, and the controls are less clunky and more responsive too. There’s something of a melee system here now, which aside from letting you attack things right up close, also allows you to do things like deflecting rockets. As such there is a wider range of enemy types too, that require more varied methods to deal with. There’s also more variety in the moment-to-moment mission objectives. It’s not much, but sometimes it will add a bit of a twist on things more than just blasting your way through a stage like the first game had.
But the actual experience this all creates ends up being a mess that doesn’t flow very well, and can at times be pretty frustrating. The rocket enemies are just a pain, as they always carry a shield and so can’t be hit with normal shots. You can sometimes hit them with a dive shot, but it’s unreliable. The main intended method is deflecting their rockets, which requires you to halt your pace of whatever else you’re doing and focus just on that. This is often while there are a bunch of enemies surrounding you at the same time. If you get hit with a rocket you get thrown to the ground, with the camera jarringly snapping around at the same time. It’s a really disorientating pace-breaker, and it’s very easy to miss a rocket in the chaos, or get shot from behind. The game is also fond of throwing just way too many enemies at you at once. In those times it makes trying to evade hits basically impossible, and you can’t see what’s going on with all the visual noise on screen. These encounters will also often have multiple rocket enemies dotted around making things worse too. Generally encounter design gets worse as the game goes on, simply dumping more and more enemies on to you, exacerbating its issues. The lock-on is very unreliable, and has a habit of disengaging at random when you least need it. The boss design is also garbage. There’s one in particular about 2/3 of the way through the game that you can’t kill by directly hitting it, and you have to destroy some furnaces on the outside of the arena instead. So you’re forced to turn your back on this thing while it’s sending a barrage of attacks at you, and while there are explosive hazards whizzing around the arena, all while you have no room to dodge any of this anyway. It’s simply awful. The final boss also makes the absolutely baffling decision to run the game in extreme slow motion, making the fight intensely tedious and sluggish. The audio also peaks and makes an awful cacophony for the whole thing. It was so bad I went to look up videos of other people playing this to see if this was an emulator bug, but it seems like it does this on real hardware too. This was intentional design!
The story and presentation also seem like a step up at first glance, but later show themselves to be a lesser experience than the first. This game has more characters, with a more fleshed out plot, more dialogue, and a much longer runtime too. Although it is still pretty short. The dialogue is pretty bad though. The voice acting is of very low quality. This game is dubbed in English, while what very little dialogue the first game had was all Japanese. Here it comes off as very stilted and unnatural. It makes the tone of the game feel dull and amateurish, missing the dark and mysterious mood of the first. I don’t think it’s necessarily the actors’ fault though. There’s several big name voice actors in this thing, and they have had much better performances elsewhere. The audio quality of voices is compressed and peaky as well, making it hard to make out at times. Even though the characters having a lot more words this time around, they don’t have much more to say. Despite the plot having much more attention given to it, it is still threadbare, and doesn’t do anything remotely interesting. Yet there are a lot of drawn out dialogue scenes that consist of nothing but text boxes and character portraits. It drags down the pace of the game a lot, filling up time with unnecessary and poorly executed scenes. The pre-rendered CG cutscenes do make a return here too, but they are very few and far between. I don’t know if there’s actually fewer than in the first game, since they could just be spread out more through the longer runtime. They aren’t used well though, often failing to take the opportunity for striking visual moments as the first game did. They are also dragged down by the bad voice acting ruining the mood.
So in the end this game squanders its potential. In theory it sounds like an obvious evolution, taking things to the next logical step and making up for the shortcomings of its predecessor. But in practice it gets bogged down in its own nonsense and loses what made the first game compelling. Gone is the experience of a swift, simple arcade game with a stylish flair. Now it’s a clumsily constructed mess that somehow manages to feel like a slog despite its short length. The final results screen said I took 4 hours, but it felt more like double that time. After this I’m not feeling confident about the future game. But at least the anime still holds some promise.
I’ve really got to stop playing games I don’t enjoy. For some reason lately I’ve been felt compelled to finish stuff even when I’m not having a good time with it, out of some strange sense of obligation. From now on I’ll try to stop wasting time on stuff like this.
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07/07 -
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
I’ve been pleasantly surprised going back to this one, and seeing how comparatively well it holds up. While I never thought it was amazing or anything, and still wouldn’t rate it particularly highly, playing it relatively close to the first game helps put in context what it actually manages to do fairly well.
Combat mechanics are basically the same as the first game, but this time around they have been improved by quite a margin. It feels way more polished and like you can actually perform the actions you’re trying to pull off. While it’s still pretty shallow, it at least doesn’t feel like the whole thing is about to fall to pieces at any moment. The physics stuff is still there, but reigned in to a degree that makes the game far more playable. I suppose it’s a little bit of a downgrade when it comes to environmental destructibility, but I’ll take that if it means that I can actually control my character properly. Bosses are a step up from the last game too. There aren’t many of them, and one of the earlier ones is bad, but aside from that they are far better than what the first game offered. The upgrade tree has been simplified too, and at first that seems like a bad thing, but on reflection all it’s really doing is cutting the fluff. It streamlines a system that didn’t need to be as complicated as it was, and you don’t really lose anything. When it comes to the core systems, this game feels like a decent refinement that realises what the first game was going for. It still has a long way to go to being anything close to a high quality action game, but it's a big step up for this series.
When I first played this game it was with the PC version, but this time I opted for the Xbox 360 version, and that did make a difference for how playable it was too. That PC port is not good. Limited to 30fps, very buggy, and somehow manages to have screen tearing in pre-rendered cutscenes. Before I started this run I did boot that version up again to remind myself of it, and discovered that it had an issue of whenever you tried to juggle an enemy in the air, they would usually teleport down to the ground the instant after the launch. So a bunch of the more interesting combat abilities simply don’t work in that version. Not an issue on Xbox. While it still has some jank here and there, and some short frame dips in a couple of isolated spots, it functions much better than on PC. It doesn’t look noticeably worse either, still a very clean image.
The graphics and overall presentation still holds up really well too. The first game looks a bit rough looking back now, outside of some areas. On release I remember it looking decent, but still not top tier for when it came out, and time has not been kind to it. This sequel still looks pretty attractive though. Environment and character detail have taken a big step up, with much better material work and lighting too. Some of the levels have this really nice rain effect that makes it look like water is flowing over everything, and it looks great. Another early level is set in this golden city in the sky, which has some fantastic architecture and sunsets. The cutscenes look much better as well. Even though the story is pretty bad, the way it is presented is aesthetically pleasing at least. Character animation and cinematography are well done. There are also some big set piece moments where you’re flying through the air, falling down some immense height, and it really nails that too. It creates a good sense of speed and scale with them.
But it’s impossible to ignore this game’s big flaw. There’s hardly any of it. There’s basically only four levels, and that’s being generous and including the intro sequence. And even in that short runtime it reuses one of the very few environment styles it has. Both of the games in this short series had a troubled development, and this game got the worst of it. You can certainly feel the scars of a tough, rushed dev cycle here. As if they had no time to make anything like what they really wanted to, so just cobbled together what they could, and tried to get that in as good a shape as possible. In that context, I think they actually did an admirably good job. They managed to polish what little they had to a pretty decent degree, and made something that is a fun romp through some very pretty backdrops. It makes me sad thinking about what this game could have been though. If the devs had the time to simply create more of the level of quality that they did here, and were able to come up with a better story to string it all together, this game could have been something much more fondly remembered than it is.
Unlike with the first game, I’m not going to bother playing the Wii version of this entry. The whole reason I started revisiting these games was to see how specifically that PS2/Wii version of the first compared to the one I already knew, given how there are people out there who swear by it being the best game in the franchise. No one is making such claims about the paired down version of the sequel. And even if they were, I had such a bad time with that last one that I don’t want to even entertain the idea of possibly repeating that. It’s nice to end this on something of a high note anyway.