Okay, so I've only got one more psych article to write, but I'm actually enjoying games again. For a week after PAX, I had no interest in touching a game. Well, technically I was interested in Mercenaries 2, but user HotSake on the PA boards told me the PC version was pretty terrible, so it'll wait until I get a 360. This means I will probably pick it up for $20 much later on. It can join EDF, Crackdown, and Dead Rising as guilty pleasures for the 360.
In the meantime, I got sidetracked from blogging to play through God of War 2 finally. I don't feel like writing up a full review. It had nice production values but not so nice gameplay. Difficulty was very uneven, resulting in really difficult bits followed by pushover bosses. Techniques didn't build on each other, so the game never really felt like a progression. Some of the puzzles made no sense and killed the momentum. And as the second in a trilogy, the ending was lame by design. 3 of 5.
The more important milestone came as I finally wore out my original PS2 controller (namely the L1 and L2 buttons). That controller served me faithfully for so many years, through so many games. It will be missed.
I decided to wander over to Kingdom of Loathing. I was pretty impressed with the amount of extra content in the game. I think the main thing missing now is a way to manage it. My character's inventory is pages long. I always have the walkthrough wiki up in another window because with only so many turns per day, if I fight five fights and don't make any progress towards my goal, I want to make sure I'm not wasting my day. I'm kind of dreading the final confrontation in the game. It was ridiculously arduous and long when I first beat it. I shudder to think how much longer it's gotten.
For no good reason (or possibly because of the upcoming Aliens game being developed by Gearbox), I reinstalled Aliens vs Predator 2. I enjoy that game. There are some minor graphical glitches, which isn't unexpected on a game that old trying to run on modern hardware and drivers. But it plays fine. I think this will be my third time through the game. Once per PC, and trust me, that first PC was not equipped. Of course, by modern standards the environments are often pretty barren, but the second the motion tracker picks up movement, it doesn't matter what anything looks like. There's nothing but fear and firepower, in the marine campaign anyway.
My favorite is actually the Predator campaign. It has the best toys to play with, by which I mean the marines. Playing hit and run with them never got old for me. Fighting the aliens generally sucked as it was mostly just the same thing as in the marine campaign, by which I mean running backwards and shooting.
The alien campaign is really great the first time, but the opening stealth bits felt a bit tedious the second time through, so I'm guessing they won't be very interesting this time around either. But in general being able to run up walls and pounce on people from fifteen meters away is pretty fun. And you get health back by eating brains. Who doesn't love that?
I also ran through the demo for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic a few times. I'd heard the way to play the game was to simply kick every adversary into conveniently place spikes and off of ubiquitous cliffs. That appealed to me and the demo delivered. It may be worth the ten bucks they're asking for it on Steam just to enjoy kicking people in more varied environments. Kicky McBoots in the Land of Cliffs and Spikes. :)
Also, I'm thinking about picking up Yakuza 2. There's only one review posted thus far (and from IGN :P ), so I'll probably hold off for another week, but barring any giant red flags, I'll probably pick it up. In the short time I had with it at PAX, I was impressed with the atmosphere. Learning that it includes the Japanese voiceovers and is coming out for PS2 at $30, well, it's the kind of effort I like to support. Yay! I'm an art house gamer!
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