Shoes

Just befiore handing in all my uni work I went out and bought three and some xbla points so I could download a fourth. Bioshock 2 was one of the three I bought. The original was one of the games I bought when I first got my 360 and I enjoyed it alot, buying the sequel was an easy choice.

I returned to the underwater city of Rapture, this time playing as a Big Daddy, a giant monstrosity that protect the Little Sisters. I’d taken down my fair share of them in the first game and I would be doing so again. There were only two types of Big Daddy’s in the original and they weren’t known for their speed so you play as a special type of Big Daddy known as Delta. All of Raptures standard enemies return plus a new type of Splicer and three new Big Daddy types. The most noticeable addition being the Big Sister, I’ll get to them in a bit.

Like the new enemies, new characters have been added. The two main antagonists of the original are well and truly dead along with every other boss you encountered along the way. This means there was a fair bit of Retconning going on. The into shows you protecting a Little Sister when a woman called Sofia Lamb shows up, takes the Little Sister who is really her lost daughter Eleanor. Lamb then makes you shoot yourself in the head. You’re revived some years later and begin a quest to rescue Eleanor from her mother.

The main gameplay of the game hasn’t changed much from the original. You’re still duel wielding guns and plasmids, following quest markers, gunning down Big Daddy’s to get at the Little Sisters. What’s different this time around is what you do with the Little Sisters. You’re given the harvest option which nets you some ADAM (a special currency) or to adopt them. If you adopt them you can take them to gather more ADAM or take them to and air vent and cure them or harvest them. The cure/harvest option is the moral choice system again which effects the ending and a few item pick ups. The taking the Sisters to gather more ADAM is an interesting change. You gain more ADAM but you have to defend the Sister while she gathers it making the player debate if the risk is worth the reward.

Each level has up to three Little Sisters and once you’ve dealt with the third in whatever fashion you choose you will get a warning. A Big Sister is coming for you. Big Sisters are a special form of Big Daddy and are the most powerful enemy in the game. They can jump around the room making them hard to hit, they can use plasmids and they dish out alot of damage.

These Big Sisters are the closest thing to bosses the game has. Bosses are this games weakness. You bump heads with various characters throughout the game but all but one boils down to you having the choice to spare them or kill them. No fight, just a choice. It’s a little disappointing. I can think of a few moment which could be classed as boss fight but barely. One of the bosses is just a more powerful version of a Spider Splicer, a type of enemy you have to gun down dozens of just to get to the boss. I didn’t even notice I was fighting him until the fight was over and I’d finished killing the group of other enemies he had in the room with him. The other bosses are just scripted Big Daddy or Big Sister fights. The boss fight for the second last level was two Big Sisters at once. The final, big battle of the game was fending off waves of enemies. Very disappointing.

Difficulty wise it’s a bit odd. The game starts out easy like it should, got quite hard as it went on before becoming easy again and finally very easy by the end. The last stage of the game you trip over health packs, money and ammo. Heck, they give you a plasmid that allows you to summon your own Big Sister to fight with you. It makes that final fight that much more disappointing.

Last two paragraphs aside the game is still very good. It’s well made, the level design was kicked up a notch and the story and new enemies were good even with all the “They were there all along, you just didn’t see them in the last game”. It’s a very good game and I’d definitely recommend it but I’d suggest playing Bioshock first. There are some back story stuff that won’t make sense otherwise.

Oh yeah. There’s also a multiplayer mode (vs, not co-op) which is also well done and fun to play but the match fixing times are stupidly long. It’s good for a look but waiting around to play all the time kinda ruins it.

I got Fallout 3 some time ago and loved it. To me it felt just like Oblivion but with guns. Not surprising really since they’re made by the same developers. I played it and completed it and was disappointed like most that you couldn’t continue to play after you completed it. Time passed I played other games and a five expansion packs for the game came out. Just before Christmas a game of the year addition was released which contained the game itself and all five expansions. Christmas day I tore open a present to find it was Fallout 3 GOTY. Expansions installed to my hard-drive I put in the game disc and sat down to continue the story my character.

I’ll do them in the order I played them:

Broken Steel:

The first expansion I played. It continues on from the end of the main game, upping the max level cap from 20 to 30 and adding some new perks to learn. Also added were some new enemies and weapons to go with the new, higher level cap. The story follows the Brotherhood of Steel who you helped activate Project Purity, a device used to clean  a large body water of radiation in the main game. After taking back the project from the Enclave, the remains of the US government, the Brotherhood are set to wipe them out of DC for good. You help raid a base for intel, go find a tesla coil for a new weapon and blow up a giant moving Enclave base with a giant laser cannon in space. Good times. The story was pretty standard to the game but that’s fine, it felt like a proper conclusion to the games main story.

Operation: Anchorage

You stumble across a group of Outcasts from the Brotherhood who’ve discovered a sealed vault containing old weapons and equipment. They want in. Unfortunately the only way in is to complete a computer simulation of Operation Anchorage, a engagement by the US government to fight off a Chinese invasion of Anchorage in Alaska in 2066. You enter the VR simulation and take the roll of an unnamed trooper, parachuted into a mountain to take out some artillery cannons. Once that’s done you’re given a team and told to blow some more shit up. Unlike the rest of Fallout 3 you’re unable to loot dead enemies, you can’t pick up random items and you can’t sleep or wait. The devs went out of their way to make the expansion feel like you’re playing a simulation within the game. This expansion was one of my favourites, it went more for the shooter feel than the usual rpg feel. It’s a shame you can’t go through the simulation again.

Mothership Zeta

You’re abducted by aliens. You bust out your cell and then start putting your foot up some little green men’s arses. The story is fairly meh and the missions are simple “go here, blow up this generator, kills some aliens along the way”. The weapons though are great and you get some series healing items, gems for selling and some goop stuff that fixes your weapons. The whole affair is a great big shoot them up leading up to taking control of the ship and having a big laser battle with another alien ship. The expansion was worth it for the experience points and items found. The great thing is once you’ve finished you become captain of the ship, you’re able to return and pick up new alien supplies, something I find very useful.

The Pitt

This is the most meh of the expansion. Some guy asks you to help him over throw the man in charge of the Pitt, a giant slave camp. The story was meh, the new enemies were a walk in the park to fight and there just wasn’t any challenge to it at all. There’s new weapons and armor but most of it is out classed by equipment you get in the other expansions. The Pitts one saving grace however is an ammo press where you can turn scrap metal or ammo into other types of ammo, very useful for getting the hard to find .44 magnum rounds.

Point Lookout

The best of the expansions. New weapons, equipment, general items and enemies who who pose a threat. You take a boat ride to Point Lookout to find riches and fame only to stumble across a man holed up in a mansion being attacked by members of a nearby cult. You help out and agree to infiltrate the cult to find out why they’re attacking, getting stoned out of your mind and having a chunk of your brain cut out along the way. Unlike the other expansions Point Lookout has a number of quests and random things to do other than the main story. It has a fairly large new area  which you’re able to explore freely unlike the other expansions. Point Lookout itself is swampland and adds more colour to the distopian browns of the main game. This was easily the most fun to play out of the five expansions.

I’m glad I got to play these expansions. They enriched an already great game. I can’t wait to see what Fallout 4 or the rumoured Fallout: New Vegas will be like. Especially with word that developers Bethesda are building a new improved game engine, capable of handling world far far bigger and the current one can.

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (known as ToS: Knight of Ratatosk in Japan) is a Wii sequel to the Gamecube hit Tales of Symphonia. The original ToS is considered to be the best RPG on the Gamecube (not a hard task really). I loved ToS, it was great, it sparked a keen interest in me to look out for and play the other games in the series. Since then I’ve played Tales of Phantasia, bought Tales of Vesperia on 360 which I absolutely love and now ToS: DotWN.

Being a direct sequel to ToS this game had alot to live up to. This time we have a new main character, Emil and two other new companions for him, Marta and Tenebrae. All but one of the cast of playable characters from the original ToS return and join and leave Emil throughout the game. In addition to this Emil is able to “capture monsters” which you can then use as characters in combat. This may seem like you have alot of characters but there are some restriction which drastically alters how you play. Emil and Marta are your usual characters, nothing odd there. Monsters can’t equip weapons or armor but can evolve into other monsters at certain levels. The original cast of ToS you can’t alter at all, they don’t even level up until the story makes them.

The story picks up two years after the end of ToS. The two separated world have come back together as one world and a new form of racism has emerged between the people of the two worlds. The world itself is in trouble, unnatural disasters have made the new world more dangerous. Lloyd, the main hero of ToS, is destroying towns and cities who oppose the church. A group called the Vanguard is planning to destroy the church and anyone who sides with it. The world isn’t the nice happy place players were led to believe was created at the end of ToS. Emil loses his parents during an attack on his home town by Lloyd. Emil then meets a girl called Marta and agrees to become a Knight of Ratatosk to protect her. The pair set off to find and awaken the servants of Ratatosk and Ratatosk himself to try and return balance to the disasters throughout the world.

I’ll leave the story at that because as the game progresses you learn that nothing is as it seems. The new characters in the game annoyed me at first. Emil was the wettest blanket I’d ever seen and Marta was crazy clinging to him. Around the half way mark of the game though they both began to develop as characters and by the end I actually liked them both. It’s a shame they were so bloody annoying during the first half.

The story at first was ok, there were ALOT of hints throughout of events and people that had been important in ToS but played no part in this game. It was nice to see that some NPC characters didn’t just vanish from the world. In one particular scene two of the ToS characters complain about all the crap they had to do just to get through one dungeon. I thought that was quite cool.

The combat isn’t as refined as I’d hoped. Emils Artes (special attacks) don’t seem to get stronger as you get new ones, they just look/hit differently to each other. The Unison Attack has taken a major kick to the face in terms of strength. You’re able to use it waaaay more frequently but the amount of damage you deal is greatly reduced and dependant on which characters join in with the attack. The Mystic Artes (big massive super attack) for your characters has also become more frequently available for use but reduced in power.

The graphics are nice but nothing too amazing. The music is split 50/50 between old ToS music and original scores. Like the graphics they’re nothing too amazing.

Over all the game was good but just below the standard I’d expected. It felt unrefined and it took half the game before it began to get really interesting. It’s not as good as ToS but it’s made me want to play Tales of Vesperia again which is a plus…..I think. Hopefully Tales of Graces, the second Tales games for the Wii will be better. We’ll see.

Kingdom Hearts has made it’s second appearance on a handheld console in the recently released Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days on the DS. The games story doesn’t follow main series hero Sora but Roxas, the character you briefly (although not brief enough for some people) at the start of Kingdom Hearts 2. The story revolves around a year in which Roxas was a member of Organisation XIII which was only briefly alluded in KH2 and takes place between Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. The plot is mainly filled with short story lines all of which resolve themselves fairly quickly but manage to flesh out the character of Roxas and a few other members of XIII. The events of KH: Chain of Memories are mentioned and play a significant role in the overall story of this game.

The gameplay is great, the development team has managed to recreate the main series combat and control set up brilliantly. The camera control does suffer though without the use of an analog stick to control it. However the game offers you three alternate methods of control, it’s just a matter of picking which one works best for you. The story is mission based with you travelling to a number of the worlds repeatedly. Instead of giving you the ability to explore the full world, each mission has specific areas of each world that you can travel through and only towards the end of the game missions use all the areas available for a world. Mission themselves break down to being either: Investigate, kill a specific enemy, kill a certain amount of enemies or kill a specific amount of a certain enemy.

The graphics are great for what you can do in 3D on the DS.  My game artist knowledge has picked up on a few things which they’ve done to save memory space on the graphics side of things, something I’ve been doing on games alot recently. The games music is good but doesn’t really stand out. The theme songs for both Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 are used and it would have been nice if this game had it’s own theme music.

The game itself is suprisingly long, taking me a good 30+ hours to finish the story and there’s quite a bit of replay value doing all the challenges and playing the mission mode. It may be a while before I finally do finish the game.

The game is a gem and I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. If you love the Kingdom Hearts games then you’ll love this too and I definitely recommend getting it.

The good professor and his assistant Luke make their second outing in Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box. Layton receives a letter from his old mentor detailing the story of the Elysian Box. It is said to kill anyone who opens it and Layton’s mentor is supposed to be close to solving it’s mystery. His curiosity gets the better of him however and Layton and Luke find him dead and the box missing. It’s is now up to the duo find the box, uncover it’s mysteries and find the killer.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box follows near identically the gameplay set in the previous game of the series, Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Everyone in the game will present you with puzzles for you to ponder and solve, some easy, some hard and some just cruel. The sequel takes what was set out before it and makes it a bit grander. There are more, all new, puzzles to solve (150+). The story seem longer and the cartoon cinematics make a wonderful return. My one gripe with them though is they’re not as impressive as the ones in Curious Village with the big exception of the finale.

Some of the puzzles can be very difficult to work out and the hint system in the game isn’t as useful on some puzzles than on others with one puzzle offering trivia instead of hints (based on the style of puzzles though it was understandable). The whole tea making side quest seemed a little out of place. Brew the different types of tea with the different ingredients was a matter of trial and error which seems really out of place and tedious in a puzzle game.

Few bad points aside the game was great, nothing really that new gameplay wise from the last game but the style of game means it doesn’t get old. It’s a style that works and it works well. I’m looking forward to the third game, Professor Layton and the Last Time Travel. I also look forward to the feature length film, Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva.