Meh. Nothing else seems to be happening, and I got some time till I finish with Bad Company 2 and God of War 3 (which was donated by a fan...omg I have a fan; thank you Thomas!) so why not? Oh yea, because I'm a game critic, and this aint a game. Don't give me some philosophical bullshit about how this changes the nature of video games or some shit like that because it don't. You can get the same effect with an interactive DVD except I guarant-damn-tee you it won't be 8-10 hours long. Is it interesting? Yes. Is it engaging? Yes. Will you see it to the end? Probably Yes. Would I recommend it for purchase? You know what, Yes. So it's a game? Heeeeeeeell the fuck no.
In this story, you "play" through the perspectives of 4 people who, each for their own reasons, are looking for the Origami Killer, a guy who kidnaps little boys and leaves their dead bodies somewhere in a wasteland days later with origami figures left in their hands. Nice. To be a successful serial killer, you always gotta leave a calling card of sorts, and make that card as unrelated to the crime as possible. If you like to behead your victims, leave beanie babies. If you like to torture them to death, leave copies of Sonic Unleashed. If you're into choking, place a Mets jersey over them. Okay, now it's starting to get a little relate-able, but the point is be random with it. That way, you gain notoriety and yet no one will know what the fuckin point of it is. The story starts off incredibly slow...turtle slow...fuckin paint dryingly slow, but stick with it then something remotely interesting will happen. After that, THEN the story shows excellent pacing. Each character you play as is somewhat interesting, but only one of them sparks any emotional interest, and that's the dad trying to get his son back. Everyone else I can take or leave (or in this case...kill off). The story is heavily dependent on the decisions you make and will change accordingly. In other words, there's no game over. The story moves on no matter what you do. That's cool and all, but there's one fatal flaw in the design: the killer is always the same person. Murder mysteries aren't fun if you know the killer already, so it kinda kills the replay value, especially since you can just watch the alternate endings on youtube. There's also one big glaring plot hole, but people normally disregard it anyway.
Someone asked me how do you play it? Simply, you push buttons. That's it; you push buttons. The whole game is quick time events, and if you know me by now you know I HATE quick time events. Luckily, you don't get dinged too bad for missing one or two in this game. I will admit that the moments are intense and since it's a core part of the gameplay it doesn't feel like a burden. Still, pressing buttons when prompted to isn't really that interactive. When you're at a ballgame and the announcer tells you to stand up and cheer, do you really feel like part of the game? I don't remember you striking out the batter so I guess not. It's more like a choice your own adventure book (I used to love the Goosebumps ones). There are times when you can walk around and talk and/or interact with shit, and these moments play like good old fashion adventure games, except it's boring as hell. All you're doing is touching random shit to try to make the story progress, and it's just tedious. Why the fuck am I'm juggling? What purpose does this serve? This ties into the slooooooow start I was talking about because shit like this unnecessarily eats up time, time I could be spending finding the killer.
I give the development team credit for trying something different (something games tend to NOT DO anymore), and once it finally got going, it was a kick-ass experience, but this is definitely not for everyone. A little bit more interactivity would have been nice, and for god sakes, let's try something else besides quick time events for a change.
Rating: Fuckin Awesome, Sweet, Meh, Ass, Bricked!
NOTE: I tried to be a spoiler-free as possible, hence no videos.
I'm still in the mist of editing, but here it is, 10 Rules of Gaming, a blog about general video game discussions. No more will this blog be an xbox exclusive, and to prove my point, my first official 10 Rules of Gaming review will be a....wait for it....Dreamcast review.....yea. suck on that.
So, I borrowed a friend's webcam, but it's not compatible with windows 7....nice. Now how will I film my latest sexcapades? Besides that, people who said they would be involved dropped out (like I knew they would) and because of time, money, and resources, I won't be making any official websites anytime soon. So now I'm in the process of turning this blog into a new one called 10 Rules of Gaming (patent pending). If you see posts disappearing or changing, you'll know why. I should be back in full power by April 15th.
This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'm still missing key components to make this new site work, components that I don't wanna say because nothing is final (plus it's a surprise *wink*) . I got people who say they want to contribute, but knowing them that'll fall by the waist-side. I'm trying to import the reviews from here to the other site, but so far that aint working out. More importantly than any of that, I don't have a name for this damn site. So, it may be a while before everything's finished. In the meantime, visit theaveragemans360.blogspot.com on Wednesday, March 24 for my thoughts on Sonic 4.
I know March has been.....very quiet, but there's a lot to be done before I start posting in earnest again. First the BIG news. Like many games in the industry now, this blog will no longer be an Xbox exclusive. For now on, I'm just gonna talk about games in generals whether that be PS3, 360, PSP, DS, and (when I get the money to buy it back) the Wii. I'm also in the process of getting the Sega Dreamcast again because dammit that system was awesome! So, there will be a name change to the blog or I'll just outright create a new one. The name however has not being decided yet. Some posts may be deleted to fit the changes if I decide to just change this one, so just in case you love this blog so much, I made a copy called theaveragemans360.blogspot.com. If any new work I do relates to the 360, I'll post it there.
Secondly, I'm in the mist of playing and reviewing 3 games: Heavy Rain, MLB 10 the Show, and Bad Company 2 with more games planned. Here's the list of games I have planned:
Motor Storm Pacific Rift (PS3)
God of War Collection (including 3)
Perfect Dark (XBL version)
MLB 2K10
LittleBIGPlanet (PS3)
50 Cent: Blood in the Sand (PS3, 360)
Marvel vs Capcom 2 (yea...still)
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (PS1 if I can find it)
Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PSP)
Sonic Rivals (PSP)
GTA Chinatown Wars (PSP)
Sonic Shuffle (Dreamcast)
Forza 3 (360)
Of course, some of these won't get done. In fact, most of these might not get done. And these are just the games IN MY POSSESSION at the moment (except JoJo's Bizarre Adventure). That doesn't including future releases coming soon like Splinter Cell or Just Cause 2. No, I am not planning to do a review for Final Fantasy 13 nor Pokemon SoulSilver and HeartGold. I don't like JRPG, and even if I get it, I'll have no time to finish it. I'm still not even halfway through with Dragon Age. As for Pokemon.....I'm a grown ass man. I refuse to get involve with that shit. No, I don't wanna hear how it's okay for a man to play Pokemon because I don't care. Besides, Pokemon is a JRPG.
Yup, a lot of shit needs to happen, so I better get to it. By the way, yes I heard about Sonic the Hedgehog 4. Yes, I have an opinion on it. What a fitting topic to end The Average Man's Xbox blog....well, not really, but hey.
Well I'll be damned. I actually get to preview a game for once. I feel so official now. Anyway, after spending some time with Blur and playing over an hour (that's an hour total playing time, not hour as in real time) I can honestly say that we are in for....yet another ripoff. Mario Kart mixed in with Full Auto pretty much sums up my experience, and yet somehow this mix kicks ass, as long as you have a large group of racers to frag with.
Like Full Auto, you use realistic cars (or in this case actual real life cars) to race to the finish line and shoot others. Like Mario Kart, you can pick up weapons via item box. Like Full Auto, your car can completely wreck, putting you in deep shit. Like Mario Kart, learning how to drift is really important. You see where I'm going with this? As far as the beta goes, you get 8 items to choose from:
Shunt - homing missile Nitro - take a fuckin guess Barge - a shockwave taking out anyone near you Shield - take another guess Bolt - 3 energy blasts that'll mess with drivers (like green shells) Repair - ........ Shock - fires 3 EMP fields in front of the race leader Mine - acts as a landmine; spins racers out
The thing I like about these weapons is that when you get hit, it other feel like the end of the world. They do just enough damage to give the attacker the advantage needed without being too much of a hindrance to the victim. I hope there are more items in the full version, but the ones here are well balanced. The thing I like about item pickups is that they are labeled so you know what you are picking up as oppose to some random drawing decided by the game. Need a shunt? Grab that item box if it shows up. You can hold up to 3 items at once, and you can cycle between them by pressing the X button. If you don't want an item or see something better, you can drop the item you're holding. Wherever you drop it though, other racers can pick it up. This can play into strategy a little bit. If you drop a good item, you can place a mine in front of it. Anybody going for that item, will have to avoid your mine. I've done it twice; it works.
The controls are simple enough. If you played a kart racing game before, you've played this. In terms of driving, I'm not entirely happy with the drifting. I'm not expecting to drift like say Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, but you slow down so much when you do in this game. Speaking of slow-downs, unless someones connection is shitty, the game runs pretty smoothly. Not bad for a beta, especially with up to 20 people racing at once. Like Call of Duty (all of things), you rank up to earn new cars and abilities. In the beta, it caps at 15, but the full version it's said you can reach level 50. I wonder if their will be a prestige mode. Probably called transmission mode or some shit. There's also an arena mode where you can beat the holy hell out of each other. Think of it as a light-hearted Twisted Metal.
It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out, especially in the single-player department. I haven't seen everything in this beta yet, so when I have new info I'll update this post.
[Update]: turns out the rank cap is actually level 10, not 15. Damn; really wanted that Corvette.
People seem to get the wrong idea about me and my fandom of Sonic. Half the people think that I just love to bash the holy shit out of it, so I play them just for providing me ammo, and the other half feel I'm so dedicated to the blue fucker that I just can't let my NON-GAY, NON-FURRY love for him die, so I keep playing. Both sides couldn't be more wrong yet be very close right. Any new Sonic game I play now is because I'm doing it for the blog, or I'm really curious about how they fucked it up this time. For me, I was pretty much done with Sonic the Hedgehog after the game Shadow the Hedgehog, which was undeniably horrible to the point of herpes. After that, I never bought another Sonic game until I was asked to do a review on Sonic Unleashed (my fourth review here). Every other game I've played was either rented, borrowed, or pirated off the internet (which I no longer do and I no longer endorse) because I knew they were shitty, but I was so curious as to how shitty they were I couldn't help it. It's like when your friend is known for doing stupid shit and you just can't help but to watch. The funny thing about Sonic is that when I expect terrible, I normally get something worse, and when you can't live up to low expectations, that is the saddest shit in the world. And if you really want to know whats really sad, they FINALLY made the definitive 3D sonic game....and they had to actually find a way to fuck it up. I mean, they really had to fuckin search deep within their souls to figure it out, and they came up with the werehog. So now that I am thoroughly convinced that Sega is purposely making terrible Sonic games (probably because they like fuckin with fans), I go into this game knowing it will be terrible. Why would anyone believe this kart...racing...game...would....oh shit. This aint a real Sonic game. Whoops. My bad.
Holy hell, the rip-offs just keep coming. It's bad enough Dante's inferno is a straight rip of God of War; now Sega's doing it with Mario Kart Wii. Now, this is by no means the first time someone copied off of Mario Kart (*cough cough* Crash Team Racing cough*). In fact, this isn't the first time SEGA has copied off of Mario Kart (*cough cough Sonic Drift cough*). I guess the question is if all this copying bad. Well, for originality yea, but if can pull it off like Bayonetta and Darksiders did or what Dante's Inferno tried to do, then you have a great game on your hands, which leads to the next question. Are you willing to pay for a game you probably already have and/or played the holy hell out of? In this case, why the hell not? Besides, if you don't own a Wii, what choice do you have? Well...you can...choose...not....to play....at all, but the point is this is an awesome exact copy that should be played. Too bad this isn't really a Sonic game. There would have been joy in my heart.
First off, the average person may not know half the racers in this bitch. The roster isn't so much a 'who's who' of classic characters but more of a 'who's that' kind of thing. You'll know the Sonic characters who make up a good chunk of the roster, but why not just stick to the Sonic class, and why the fuck is Big the Cat here!? Check out the line-up. There's Beat from Jet Grind Radio for the Dreamcast, but the game ignores that and just references Jet Set Radio Future for the Xbox. Why it's called Jet Grind Radio in America when the rest of the world calls it Jet Set Radio is fuckin beyond me. There's Amigo from Samba de Amigo For Dreamcast and Wii. Okay, there's someone people might know. AiAi from Super Monkey Ball is also sorta well known. There's Jacky and Akira from Virtua Fighter and BD Joe from Crazy Taxi. After that.....who the fuck are these guys? There's Ulala from Space Channel 5, a game nobody bought on the fuckin Dreamcast. There's Ryu Hazuki from Shemmue one, two, and thr.....I-I mean one and two. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg star Billy makes an appearance, but non-Wii owners may not know who he is. Well, he was on Gamecube so maybe. Then we really dip into crazy. The ChuChus from ChuChu Rocket? Robo and Mobo from Bonanza Bros.? What? Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone? And here's the kicker. Zobio and Zobiko are in this game. Who are they you ask? EXACTLY! They're from House of the Dead EX, a game that was released in Europe and never saw the light of day in America. Aint that a bitch. Oh and there's also Alex Kidd. A lot of people don't know that Sonic wasn't Sega's original mascot. It was this little boy who had a game for the Sega Master System. I don't know why they just stopped with Alex Kidd though. They should bring him back just for the hell of it. Now that's the roster for every version of the game except maybe for DS, but we 360 owners get an exclusive character (YAY!). It's Banjo and Kazooie (BOO!). What? Their N64 games were awesome. Sure Nuts N Bolts fell flat, but still. Some of you are probably wondering about Nights from....well, the Nights series. Well Nights is the flag holder in case you were. Of course, being a rating E game, some people were omitted for obvious reason like people from Golden Axe and House of the Dead, although HOTD is referenced in the game as Curien Mansion (I think that's the name of the game in Germany). Would be interesting to see if any more racers show up as downloadables, but I doubt it. If it does, don't expect Bayonetta.
After defeating Robotnik, Sonic is chilling at a beach side resort where he gets an invitation to participate in a race. After reassuring that this will be nothing like Sonic Riders, Sonic decides to enter the race. The catch is that it's a car race, so Sonic isn't allow to run. After getting hooked up with a car from Tails, he and the rest of the man-animals head towrads the competition where not only do they run into people from different universes who all got the same invite, Robotnik was there too. At first, it seemed like some sort of ploy by the fatman, but Robotnik was able to prove he got the same invite as everyone else and is unaware of what's going on. A figure instantly appears over the contestants and explains to all that they will all be racing for his amusement, and the winner will get a cash prize and be hailed as the best racer alive. What the racers don't know is that this mysterious man, Dio, is actually plotting to fuse all the universes together and rule them all at once. What I really love about this story is that.....I made it up and there is no story. It's a fuckin Kart racing game; of course there's no story. Pick a character and get your monkey ass (no offense AiAi and Amigo) across that finish line.
Well, I'm four paragraphs in, and I barely talked about the game at all besides the roster, but I'm assuming everyone has played Mario Kart or some ripoff so it feels pointless to really get into it. One thing about Sonic & Sega is that you really can't get far without learning how to drift properly, even more-so than Mario Kart. Even on Beginner, you need to drift or you won't win. Almost every weapon in this game has a Mario Kart counterpart except for two: A missile that explodes when you deicde, and the All-Star moves. All-Star moves are specials moves each racer has to help them get to the front of the pack, and each move is different per person. I guess the best way to describe it would be to compare it to the smash ball from Super Smash Bros. Brawl or the star from Mario Kart except more flamboyant. I thank Christ that this game doesn't have a equivalent to the blue shell because that shit pisses me off in Mario Kart. I only have two gripes with the game. When playing online, the game always starts out buggy and laggy as all hell. It eventually catches up, but still annoying. Then there's the fact you can't pick different cars for people. I know that's a small complaint, but fuck you; I want choices.
How should I end this post? Should I go out with a joke? No, not this time. Should I bash Sonic some more? No, I'm tired of doing that. Need to do something different. Reference another commercial like I did for Dark Sector? No. Maybe I should talk more about the gameplay, but what's there to talk about? Hmmm. Okay, I got it. Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing is...what...really....right now? Can't this wait till I finish.....okay fine
Rating: Fuckin Awesome, Sweet, Meh, Ass, Red Ring of Death
NOTE: Bayonetta would have been awesome. Her car would be shaped like a shoe made of hair and her All-Star would be summoning monster to bite other drivers. That would kick ass.
