Games: What games are you currently playing? [OT!]

[phaq]

^which ya wouldn't have to had you the patience to wait for the english release.

[Cataferal]

I really liked GIII. Nutshell summary: wasnt an epic, but it was a nice, tidy RPG with possibly the best battle system ive ever used.

Hmmm, bought Sonic and the Secret Rings recently, so naturally heres my...

Sonic and the Secret Rings review:

Graphics: The most visually arresting game on the Wii so far (Twilight Princess included), and all running at a thankfully consistent 30fps. Some beautiful water effects decorate Sonic's accelerated charges through colourful, often tropical stages, reminding you that you are, in fact, playing on a next-gen console. If its of any relevence to you, I always considered the level design and effects to be very reminiscent of Panzer Dragoon Orta's, only with an Arabian twist. 9/10

Sound: Horrible indie-rock music ripped straight from Myspace. No custom soundtrack feature available. No BGM volume settings available. The mute button is your friend. The one saving grace this game has in this area is the option to switch to the Japanese dub. 3/10

Gameplay: Thankfully, the minimalist approach to controls (revolving around simply tilting the Wii-mote left or right) is effective in keeping the gameplay simple, and making for a much more intuitive platforming experience akin to Sonic's halcyon 2D era. Additionally, the on-rails premise implies that you dont have to worry about the camera, which means your attention to the gameplay should remain undivided.

Any cons to this revised formula? Yes: Sega, in all their wisdom, also decided to put in an RPG-esque levelling system, which means Sonic runs and controls poorly at the start, and will consequently repel some people from the extended play this game deserves. Nevertheless, its a bold and original effort from Sega (NOT Sonic Team), and im glad to report that after over 10 hours of play, i havent found a single bug or glitch. 8/10

Replayability: This game is difficult, sometimes to the point of being beyond an enjoyable challenge. You play each level through as normal, but to proceed to the next, you have to complete a variety of special missions (ie, Collect X rings, kill X number of bad guys etc...). Some of these can be extremely tedious and frustrating, especially when Sonic's at a low level. Replayability is high overall though, as there are loads of optional missions, skills to equip, extras to unlock, times to beat, and items to collect throughout the levels. On a side note, multiplayer is included in the form of mini-games, but for the most part they're mediocre last-minute attempts at bulking up the package, with very little new to offer people who already have either Banana Blitz or WarioWare. 7/10

Conclusion: While not the valiant return to form Sonic fans are bitterly waiting for, this is still an encouragingly solid reprisal of Sega's token franchise, and could be considered the Wii equivalent to the DS's enjoyable Sonic Rush. To those that are still skeptical, i'd advise waiting until the price drops a bit more, or even renting. At the very least though, this is a far cry from the hell that was Sonic 360, and if you give it enough time, this will definitely leave you entertained.

Overall: 8/10

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ March 04, 2007 07:45 PM: Message edited by: Cataferal ]</font>

[Xellos]

IRT Phaq: Most of the games I import aren't coming to US, or aren't likely to.

[Xellos]

I've felt like playing Oblivion again sometime, but my mods are a mess, and I'm sure there's much better by now. I think I'm just going to start fresh.

Any recommendations on what to download for it?

[mrwiseman]

Here's what I'm using in my current Oblivion distributions. Things haven't changed too much from October though. These mods are ordered, the first in the list has the newest modification date and is thus loaded last. You an edit file dates with some utilities suh as FAR Manager. I think the Oblivion Mod Manager (OMOD or something) does this for you too. Mods with a star in their name ★ are mine.

http://web.madritel.es/personales1/cmpm/obmods.xls

[mrwiseman]

Tried the full version of Sonic on the Xbox 360. It was pathetic. It's amusing to see how lame it could be.

Gameplay
Same crap as Sonic Adventure 2, probably even worse.
+ It's a good thing the adventure fields are back
- Control sucks. It feels less and less like Sonic. Terrible precision, unresponsiveness, characters stick to walls, you can't properly control them in the air (there's a bug making them uncontrollable after using bumpers - lame).
- Where did Sonic's speed go? This is lame! It could be a Mario game. Sonic runs moderately fast, but when he jumps he even loses speed. Tails runs slower than an old lady. It's no longer Sonic. It blows.
- Minor control and camera bugs of all kinds.
- They managed to fail using the Havok Engine. This has to be the first game using Havok that sucks for physics. Most objects simply disappear when you hit them. And what's with Tails shooting rings? That's the most stupid thing they could come up with. Now you can tell your own rings from whatever you're shooting. Plus there's the fact you don't get all your rings out when you're shot.
- What the heck is up with the load times? This is insane. When entering a quest, the game will load full Soleana for 15 seconds for an old man to say a line. Then it'll load full Soleana for 15 seconds for the quest to start. After your one-minute quest, it'll load full Soleana for 15 seconds. Terrible. I hadn't seen loading times this long in this century.
- Again you fall fall fall fall and fall all the stupid time. They should kick the level designers. And levels are still linear, half of them playing in automatic.
- Most importantly, the gameplay is simply not funny.

Visuals
+ Occasionally average to good. Animation is average; Sonic is good, Havok is great but completely misused, and other stuff is mediocre.
- What the heck. Save for the resolution and some not too impressive shader effects, the Dreamcast could have done this perfectly. I was expecting much, much more. I can model Soleanna with Google SketchUp.
- Effects are mediocre for today's standards. Mediocre shadows with certain bugs, mediocre water effects (only the surface shader is good), underused HDR or bloom (can't even tell what they were trying to do), unimpressive explosions, etc.
- I've seen some slowdown when playing in 1368?768. For visuals like these, I'd expect rock-solid 60 fps.

Sound
+ Voices are ok, at least up to the first stage. Ok means they haven't annoyed me yet.
- The music sucks, as always. I think Sonic only had nice music in the MegaDrive, and partly Sonic CD. A couple of tracks from Sonic Adventure 1 at best.
- Sound FX is mediocre for today's standards; I can see they've tried to do better but I can see they've failed.

Overall
- Sega is stupid and sucks. Sonic Team is stupid and sucks. Yuji Naka or whoever was responsible for this is stupid and sucks.
- They keep crapping on Sonic. They only needed to do the MegaDrive Sonics once again. Even 2D if they can't make a proper transition for 3D, I don't care. But no, they have to fag things up like always. Innovation, more features, more characters. All crap. Almost anything they could change from the MegaDrive Sonics will turn up shitty, so the best they could do is take the Sonic 3 engine and just do more levels for it, maybe with 16 times more resolution (converting the MegaDrive 8?8 hardware sprites to 32?32 textures for quadrangles, giving 1280?896). Keep the music as it is, the modest YM2612+PSG+DAC music was much better than today's. Then you'd get a perfect game.

I agree with the reviews rating the new Sonic as 2/10 if 5 means average. This game simply sucks; not only for today's standard, but for yesterday's. Sonic games should be rated proportionally to how much they resemble the perfect Sonic games, the MegaDrive ones. A perfect transition to 3D or a new 2D game in the MegaDrive style would rank as 10/10. The more they "innovate", the lower the grade.

So if anybody from the industry randomly bumps onto this trying to find comments from Google (not likely to happen), I'd like to say: DON'T FUCK WITH SONIC, INNOVATARDS!

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ March 31, 2007 11:54 AM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[mrwiseman]

I've tried Viva Pi?ata on the Xbox 360. The game is original, though not all new gameplay, as this kind of reminds me of Theme Park and Rollercoaster Tycoon crossed with Pok?mon.

Gameplay: This is a sandbox type game. This alone speaks highly of Viva Pi?ata, as long as you like this kind of thing. There's a reasonable amount of things to do in the park, and I understand there are many differents ways to play. The menu system is alright at first, but it gets cumbersome fast, and buying and selling sucks. To sell any crap, you have to press B, A, Y, A, and by the time you do, some bastard Pi?ata already ate it. The whole menu system is cluttered with useless characters and chatter. ("Hi, I'm miss Vagina, what would you like to buy today? I like money you know.") This is more or less a minor problem though. Another minor problem would be the overly long tutorial designed for babies.

But the main problem I found is the lack of a Pause feature to let you work while time, pi?atas and characters are frozen. The whole game was very overwhelming and stressing for me. You have to micro-manage absolutely everything. Nothing can be left alone, not even plants. You have to care for visiting Pi?atas, how to make them stay, find them couples, how to make them mate, have several couples of them, what needs to be built, how to lay out the garden, evil pi?atas, trash in your garden, pi?atas fighting, pi?atas eating each other, sick pi?atas, non-pi?ata characters walking around your garden doing stupid things, etc., all while being completely swarmed with idiotic alerts and cut-scenes. The alert system is completely screwed up; that moron Leafos spams you more than those stupid viagra online shops ever did, and every fifteen seconds some idiotic character does something stupid like handing over a new shovel or some new pi?ata showing up. I was getting constantly interrupted, averaging 5 seconds between alerts and cut-scenes. Maybe I was too effective building the garden and things were going too fast, but whatever it was, it was not nice. I couldn't possibly take proper care of my garden and plan anything; I was barely able to attend to most alerts and manage to make some money which I had no time to spend. I had to stop playing because I couldn't take it. It was much worse than work on monday morning when two partners call to discuss some completely unreasonable issue and want to talk over the phone over three hours each; 10 customers call to ask if we can work for free and some of us even expect we do; our data center catches fire; the drinks machine is out of everything; I have two deadlines for completely different projects before lunch; meetings with people during lunch; I have slept 3 hours; I'm feeling sick; and my desktop computer explodes. Seriously, after playing Viva Pi?ata, work will seem like relax time, just sit there and work, even having time to think on what I'm doing! I can't wait for monday; even if everything I said actually happens, I know it could be worse [img]smile.gif[/img] .

Visuals: What can I say, this is nearly perfect. You could argue that you love or hate the style, but matters of taste aside, the visuals are perfect. (Only the transparency of buildings and shadows could be improved.) Personally, I like how colourful everything is, how vegetation looks, and how pi?atas seem to be made of scales, though the freaky characters I could live without.

Sound: Music was just average. Sound is pretty good. There are lots of sound effects coming from everywhere. Pi?atas sound like somebody making stupid noises (and that's probably how they're made), and voices were so annoying I had to disable them. They are not too annoying per se (at least in the Spanish version), but they say such stupid things.

Overall: Viva Pi?ata is a good game that feels fresh and looks great. If you like real time simulators and Pok?mon, and you don't mind being stressed to the point you want to kill yourself, give Viva Pi?ata a try.

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ March 31, 2007 06:54 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[Xellos]

Thanks for the Oblivion mods list, elped alot!

[Cataferal]

Nice reviews Wiseman! Glad to see the Sega hate is still burning brightly (and hell, do they deserve it). I really thought this would be the game (along with PSU) to change their fortunes, but it looks like they're going to have to learn their lesson the hard way.

[Rant]

Someone should buy the Sonic franchise from these lazy whores, just so Sega will stop churning out these broken products. Secret Rings was adequate as a return to their previous standard (Heroes, Adventure), but i wouldnt be surprised to see another Sonic 2006 quality title from them this year. After all, they have to keep their yearly revenues up somehow, and its not going to happen with worthwhile, credible titles like PDO or ShenMue.

[/Rant]

Glad to see a little love go towards Viva Pinata as well. At the very least it a refreshing break from all the "Call of Medals For Brothers Honorably doing their Duty in Arms" games.

Whats your favourite/most played game on the 360 so far, by the way? Im thinking of buying one this summer.

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ April 01, 2007 02:24 PM: Message edited by: Cataferal ]</font>

[phaq]

not that i've really played these, but some translations have come out over the last couple of weeks or so.

Twinkle Tale - Genesis:
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1103/
described as a shooter, but from the one shot i've seen, the only game i could compare it to, again based on the screenshot, is arcus odysey.

Dark Law: Meaning of Death - SNES:
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/307/
rpg with, according to the translator, a battle system similar to treasure hunter g(which was a great battle system, strategic and real time at once). also seems to be one of those multiple storylines that converge toward the end thing.

Battle Mania Daiginjou - Genesis:
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1075/
sequel to trouble shooter. this one may have been done long beforehand, but i noticed it was translated by the same group who did the next one(and also twinkle tale) as i checked on it...

Pulseman - Genesis
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1099/
platformer, not sure what more need be said really, if you like sonic or mario, just go for it. although you actually attack your enemies instead of jumping on them.