Bendable Blog

I stayed up late because I knew I was right at the last stage of Ghostbusters, the new game which is set between Ghostbusters 2 and Ghostbusters 3 movies.

Ghostbusters seems like it should be a very good game, all original voice actors, fairly good digital rendering, and new gadgets added on to the standard proton pack.  The game plays fairly well, and the story is decent enough to keep you interested.

I just quit the game in frustration and I really doubt I’ll put it on again, let me explain why.

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There is a new Transformers Movie and a Game released to go along with it.  This is not the review of that game, this is the review of the game that came out with the first movie, which I think was last year?

I don’t know, anyway long story short the game blows.  I started as an autobot, which means you play as Bumblebee (fail already).  Literally within 5 seconds of playing the game, all the cars in town got into a huge pile up, and I was no where near them (bad game AI).  I eventually tried out the Decepticon side, you play as Blackhawk, it was a bit better since your basic goal is to shoot and blow stuff up, but ultimately that got old very fast.

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Since I never bought my PS3 at launch, I easily skipped over this launch title which already has a sequel available.  Natalie was nice enough to let me borrow her copy and I beat the game over the last week.  I wasn’t expecting to like it, it’s basically a first person shooter like Gears of War or Halo, but then as I started playing it I remembered that I loved those games.

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I just finished Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena, the sequel to 2004’s Escape from Butcher Bay.  I’m very impressed, it has the same level of fun, with just increased graphics and some new weapons.  The stealth elements are still very fun to play, and they gave plausible reasons why you wouldn’t have guns at the begining and middle parts.  

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I literally (at 3:46 AM) finished Star Wars Force Unleashed.  It’s pretty fun running around as an all-powerful Jedi, you don’t really fear anything you come up against and you have all the coolest powers.  What I did come to hate were the so called “quick-time events”, this is the first game I’ve played with this mechanic since Dragonlance and I don’t care for it.  The character is doing some amazing combo that the developers feel the player wouldn’t be able to do themselves, but the whole time I am staring at the middle of the screen to see which buttons I have to hit.  At least some of them, once you get in them don’t kick you out if you make a mistake, they just start the sequence over again.  
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I had heard a lot of good things about Dead Space for the PS3, so I finally decided to rent it a couple weeks ago and beat it over the course of two weeks.  In the end it took me over 15 hours of game play, which I feel is more than enough.  When I was younger some games lasted only a few hours, and I beat one game on the demo machine in Blockbuster.  Fifteen hours is also not too long, I never finished long games like Final Fantasy 7 or Oblivion mainly due to getting bored with such a long game.

Some of the really interesting things they did with Dead Space that I hope show up in other games is the lack of a HUD cluttering up the screen.  All relevant information is displayed in the game world.  The weapons have ammo counters on them, there is a health indicator on the character’s back, and any actual menu’s show up as 3d panes in front of the character, as if a hologram generator was displaying it in the real world.  The game wasn’t exactly scary, though I imagine it could be for some people, but I found myself getting tense at certain spots when I wasn’t sure what was around the corner.

When you beat the game you can play on “Impossible” level with all the weapons and armor you collected from the first time, but I still don’t think it has a lot of replayability.

Definately worth a rental, 9/10.

I finally got around to cancelling my World of Warcraft game account today.  I forget all about it until I get my credit card bill, which unfortunately is sent out the day before the subscription is charged.  This means the statement I’m looking at is the charge from December 15, and I’ve already been charged for January 15; I’ll get that statement in a month.

When I finally got out of playing Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, and Anarchy Online I figured I was done with persistent MMORPG titles that require a monthly subscription and never end.  Then Jason got me into WoW with their free trial account.  I spent two years playing WoW, I started about a month before the first expansion pack came out, and stopped about a month after the last one came out.  I just stopped having fun playing it, and what’s the point of a game if it isn’t fun?  The problem is you get talking with other people, and it becomes something you do for them instead of with them.  This is basically the feeling you get when you help a real-life friend do something that you would rather not, but instead of having the benefits that come with helping out friends, there are no real-world reciprocity in online games.  With real friends, you would feel bad if you decided to not hang out with them anymore, but I don’t about these online friends (really more like acquaintances).

Right now I’m enjoying playing games that have an end (of sorts), I just finished Assassin’s Creed, I’m halfway through Mercenaries 2, and now I have plenty of time to try out different games because I’m not spending all my free time playing WoW.

Tysun at work loaned me his spare Rubik’s speed cube, it moves so fast and easy I was able to get my time down under 4 minutes.

I’ve been playing around with this Rubik’s Cube for a few weeks now, and I’m down to about a 6.5 minute solve. Which isn’t anything to people who obsess over it, but is still better than most of the people on the planet.

I still get messed up every now and again when I don’t know a shortcut and just try one of the combo’s I know which makes a bit of a mess, but in 6.5 minutes I was able to fix the mess and continue on my way… twice. At some point I might look into the shortcuts which will probably reduce my time a lot.