Star Wars - The Force Unleashed

Recently, I have been playing around with the demo for SWTFU. The premise behind this game is that you are Darth Vader's secret apprentice. The game is set between episodes III and IV and details how you hunt down and kill some jedi masters. What makes this game so exciting for Star Wars fans is that you get to use various dark side of the force powers to kick ass during the game.

As a Star Wars nerd, and a huge fan of Kotor, you can imagine that I was really looking for to this game. Unfortunately, the key word there is "was".

After playing the demo, I have to say that I am disappointed. At first, I couldn't pinpoint why I found the game boring. Eventually, I realised what it was - the game seemed to lack depth.

For the demo, all of the powers had been unlocked (although I don't know what level the powers had been set to). However, when running around killing stormtroopers, it really didn't feel like I was a powerful jedi. In fact, the tactical combat options seemed very limited. Each combat scenario resolved itself in the same way - either run in and lightsaber people using various combos or use force grip to throw something at them. Force lightning was available but quite frankly, not only did it look crap, it also seemed pretty feeble.

To be fair, I don't know if this is a case of poor demo or a case of poor game. Possibly, once you level up your skills, the game opens up in terms of options. Possibly.

Either way, my enthusiasm for this game has taken a dive.

Walmart finally enters the 20th century

Haven't made any game related posts in a while - primarily cos I don't have any new games and not much has been happening in the game market that I can add to. However, one of the things I have done is to update the links section on the right with some of the gaming sites that I keep track of.

In particular, Kotaku is a good source for gaming news and rumors. And every once in a while, their humor knocks one out of the ballpark.

GTA IV - final impressions

I've finally finished GTA IV - according to the ingame clock, I spent over 70 hours on the game. I gave my impressions of the single player game a while ago (click here) and, for the most part, those impressions have held through the game. In terms of final impressions, there is only one more thing that I would add.

In my initial impressions, one of the strengths that I listed was that the game had so much you could do in terms of hanging out with your (ingame) friends. However, it turns out that this is also one of the games weak points.

In the second half of the game, you build up a small repertoire of friends. One of the achievements in this game is for all your friends to like you at least 90% by the end of the game. This also has ingame benefits as each friend confers benefits to you if they like you enough (for example cheap guns, car bombs etc).

The problem is that you have so many friends (and girlfriends) that they just end up getting in the way. Any time you are on a mission, or hanging out with one of your friends, another one of them invariably calls up and you end up having to bail out which leads to a drop in your friendship rating. In the end, you spend so much time hanging out with your friends that you don't seem to have time for the actual missions themselves! Furthermore, although there are lots of different things for you to do, you spend so much time hanging out that it actually gets very repetitive.

In the end, I just gave up trying to butter them up and just completed the missions. This really destroyed the immersiveness of the game for me near the end. At that point, it was painfully obvious that you were playing a game, as opposed to living out the life of a former Euro soldier in USA.

In effect, great game - shame about the ending.

Baldur's Gate Trilogy

I have always enjoyed BioWares RPGs and the Baldur's Gate Trilogy (from BioWare!) is without a doubt, my favourite RPG series of all time. The original Baldur's Gate was very much a dungeon crawl and had all the issues that classic dungeon crawlers have (ie how to engage your interest over long periods of just killing things). BioWare managed to solve this riddle for BG2 when they really beefed up character interaction and allowed you to romance some of the NPCs.

However, some enterprising modders have been able to mod BG2 so that you can play the original BG using the BG2 engine (enhanced graphics!). To take advantage of this, I recently started to replay BG using the BG2 engine together with a few other mods.


This is the character that I'm using. An elven archer - one of the kits available for rangers in BG2. And yes, he looks like Legolas (from Lord of the Rings) because I downloaded a picture of him off the web.
:)


This highlights one of my favourite tactics with the Archer. The archer has decent sneaking skills so I generally use him to scout ahead and see where enemies are (before sending in a fireball!).

I also downloaded and installed the BG NPC banter pack. The banter pack is a great addition as it really beefs up the NPC interactions. It even allows you to romance some of the NPCs. Here you can see a running dialogue as I try to romance Dynaheir.


In terms of where I am, I have cleared out most of the wilderness areas and I'm just about to enter cloakwood forest. You can see here a brief video that was taken just after I cleared out the bandit camp (unfortunately, the quality isn't good enough for you to read the text - still, you can hear the voiceover which may bring back some memories!).

btw - I'm using FRAPS to record the movies and screenshots. However, I am using the unregistered version so I'm restricted to just 30 second movies. Shame as I originally wanted to record the dream sequence which comes after this.