Back from hiatus

Hello friends!

My my, it's been a while! 1 year and 21 days, in fact!

After a long period of feeling pretty uninspired and lazy, I'm back! With the new year and the dawn of a new decade, I've made but one resolution: to attempt to see things through as much as possible.

I think back in 2008, I was a naive person. I'd just finished school and I had my whole life ahead of me. Although the latter is still true, a year has passed and I see that life is something we all take too easily for granted. In the span of a year, I've been to university, I've dropped out of university, made friends, lost friends, gotten jobs, quit jobs. It has taken a long time to settle down, but I think finally I'm at that stage where I can say, "Yeah, life is now heading in the direction I want it to go." All you existentialists out there are probably simultaneously shouting at your computer screens, blasting me for my choice of terminology here. Largely, I think that everything that has happened has been my own doing and not the doings of a higher power like 'God' or the universe.

I work a couple of jobs and in those, discovered a tight-knit group of people who I have come to love and look forward to seeing as much as time allows. In my time off work, I try to play a videogame or two every now and then, but sleep comes first and, given how much I work, I do it often. Videogames are - though not so much a part of my life anymore - something I do enjoy coming back to on occasion.

I bought an Xbox 360 on Boxing Day. I'm not particularly fond of it. In fact, I've never really liked it, even before I had one. With its shoddy design and insatiable online community, it's a machine I've never really wanted to go near. However, for a $150 price tag, I thought 'what the hey?' and took one home. Besides the cheap price tag, the only reason I bought it was so that I could play some of the exclusive titles that aren't available on my Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii.

First impressions: it's loud. My god it's loud! When I put my first disc in there, I thought I'd put it in incorrectly. It sounded like a cow that had fallen on it's back and couldn't get up again. But alas, with some fiddling and researching, I found that this unfortunate noise is normal. Oh.

After I created my online identity (which I doubt I'll use very often, if at all), I was told that I had to create an online avatar. For those not in the know, the Xbox avatar is one of the later additions to Xbox Live which allows you to create a character who looks like a retarded version of yourself. My avatar is no different. With not enough facial designs and and only stupid, cartoony features to choose from, Xbox Jono looks like he's done one too many doses of crystal meth. But whatever, I don't actually need to look at him ever again, right? Wrong. Every time I turn on the damn console, he's there looking at me with eyes that pierce the soul and that tell the story of a lonely avatar wanting to end it all but can't because he's only virtual after all. And of course he's child-friendly.

Microsoft one day decided that they would take a leaf from Nintendo's book by taking a piece of the casual market cake to capitalise on. There's nothing wrong with making a few extra bucks here and there but come on, Microsoft is no starving country in Africa. And as you look at your avatar, you can't help but feel that you've seen this all before. Avatar, I'd like you to meet Mii (I think if that ever happened, it would cause some kind of paradoxical anomalie that would surely destroy us all). There is no subtlety in the differences at all. I mean ok, Avatars have proper hands where Miis have only a spherical ball which leaves much to the imagination. But the copying is blatant. My other bane is this asphyxiation with the casual market. God I hate the casual market. They've essentially destroyed what could have become a viable gaming console in the Wii and now they've set their sights on something else. Already on the Xbox Live Marketplace, you can find games where you play as your avatar and seek to uncover some kind of whacky mystery in a Scooby Doo-esque affair. And don't even get me started on this whole motion control nonsense...

Anyway, back to my impressions. I bought a couple of games with my new console purchase; mainly RPG's which Square decided they didn't want to release on the PS3. Infinite Undiscovery is a stupid game with an equally stupid name and The Last Remnant is so poorly built and the game mechanics so convoluted that it's going straight back to the game shop to build up dust. The next game however turned out to be a real gem and segues nicely into the next section which I like to call...


GAMES I'M PLAYING THIS WEEK

In this section, I briefly describe the games I'm playing this week (hence the title) and rate them using a fairly basic scale which looks like the following:

Highly Recommend: This game is awesome. I love it and you should too
Recommend: It's a pretty good game but nowhere near perfect and will only appeal to certain people
Hardly Recommend: It's hard to find things to like about this game. Certain aspects are good but the game as a whole doesn't play very well
Don't Recommend: I wouldn't go near this game with a ten-foot stick. Nothing about this game is good

It's a shallow system, but I'll always note who each game will appeal to. I will not use the arbitrary system of number rating. Ever.


1. Lost Odyssey, X360

Since Final Fantasy X, I don't think I've played an RPG that fully encapsulates everything I love about the genre into a full-fledged epic. I like a good turn-based battle system, and Lost Odyssey does not disappoint. It's deeper than just 'I attack and then you attack', but by the same token it doesn't try to add so many ifs, ands and buts that you simply don't know what's going on.

The story is equally as intriguing, taking an immortal mercenary who is slowly piecing together the last 1000 years of his life while the whole world comes to terms with the magic-industrial revolution. The game has a lot of back story which you don't have to involve yourself in but which I have. There are dreams which are so poignant and well-written than I have to admit that one or two may have brought a tear to my eye. Let me tell you, that's well-written.

Although I don't consider myself to be a graphics whore, the game is very pretty and one can tell that RPGs have come quite a way since the days of the PS2. It's a 4 disc affair, and 15 hours in I've almost finished the first disc. This game is going to be a long one.

Highly Recommend to fans of the genre.


2. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, X360

I've wanted to play this ever since the game was released, despite average reviews and fans saying the series has taken a turn for the worse. I played Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie back in the glory years of the Nintendo 64. The bear and bird have always had a special place in my heart, but their 360 debut doesn't quite live up to my expectations.

Don't get me wrong, I like this game, but it's impossible to hold it in such high esteem is the prior iterations. It seems like Rare has forgotten its platformer roots and decided to change up the series simply for the sake of it. Although there's occasions where you do travel on foot, it's the vehicle building which asks for the most attention. Pretty much in each of the worlds, you must take up different kinds of challenges that involve you using a vehicle in some way. Whether that's racing to the finish line or driving people from point A to point B, as you're playing you just kind of ask yourself, 'What's the point of this all?' Obviously, it's all for the purpose of getting Jiggies so you can take on Gruntilda in one final showdown to end all quarrels, but in the context of a Banjo-Kazooie game, I don't think any of it is necessary. I think Rare could have taken this idea and applied it to a new franchise and spared their resources for a proper B-K game. But alas this is what we have and it's still pretty fun nonetheless.

Recommend to fans of the series and/or those who like getting creative with building cars, planes and boats.

Also, with an unfinished Stop 'N' Swop feature in this game, a future Banjo-Kazooie title is kind of implied. Something to look forward to, I hope.


3. Dragon Age: Origins, PS3, X360, PC (I'm playing the PS3 version)

This game is massive. When I realised the full scope of this game, I actually said "Wow" out loud. It's truly incredible how much effort Bioware has taken to create a truly immersive game world that keeps you coming back for more.

I decided to play the path of a Mage to change things up. I usually go Warrior class when given a choice, but this time I thought what the hey. The mage's story begins quite interestingly. You are given the task of proving yourself as a Mage by going into this kind of limbo-world where spirits go before finding a new body to consume, and defeating a fearsome demon. After completing this task, you become a full and proper Mage and prepare for your life in the Circle of Magi. However, in the outside world, things are not looking so bright. The Darkspawn, fearsome beasts of the underworld are taking over the realm, and the Grey Wardens, a conglomeration of Warriors, Mages, Rogues; men and women alike are the only hope of thwarting the Darkspawn blight.

It's hard to describe the story in all its majesty; it is well-told (far better than I could tell it in a couple of paragraphs) and shit hits the fan real quick. In terms of gameplay, it plays pretty well with the menus being easy to navigate to select skills and spells and what not. The fact that all of your actions affect the world and the people around you is pretty awesome too. For an RPG though, it lacks some pretty useful options to equip things as soon as you buy them and easily compare weapon and armour stats. It's not bad by any means though. The console versions are far more limited than the PC version but they're still very good if you don't have a powerful enough computer to play it (which I think would need to be very good).

Highly Recommend to RPG fans, people looking for an game with engaging story or people who want to devote a lot of time to a game.


4. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii

There's not a lot to say about this game. It's Mario, you either love it or you hate it. I love that this game is very challenging, has local multiplayer and lots of replayability but hate that it doesn't have online, there's no real original mechanics and that it looks almost exactly the same as New Super Mario Bros. DS.

I Highly Recommend this to anyone who has enjoyed Mario in the past and/or enjoys sitting back to have fun with a game.


OTHER THINGS OF NOTE

Still being the holiday season, there is not much happening in the gaming world at the current time. Darksiders comes out on the 7th of January, and it has already received good reviews. I played it a while back at THQ headquarters in Melbourne and it truly was incredible. Look out for it on PS3 and 360.

That's pretty much everything I've got this week. It's good to be back to writing! Hopefully I can live up to my New Year's resolution and you can all enjoy reading some of my musings sometime soon.

If you've got any questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, please feel free to comment or email me:
jonosasson@hotmail.com
and I will gladly reply. You may even find these comments in the next post in some sort of FAQ or Mailbag section.

Jono

Links:
Check out the following for some laughs!
Unskippable: Lost Odyssey
Unskippable: Infinite Undiscovery

Endnote: any hyperlinks you find in this post will take you to screenshots of the game. All links should be safe. The image at the beginning of this post is my Avatar.