Is this the right picture? I wouldn't know. I didn't want to look at it so I saved and uploaded it with my eyes closed.

Ok, so I really didn’t like this game, but whatever, lets start with something good. The music in this game was fantastic. I mean, really, it was one of the few things that kept me playing and I think that is saying something. It isn’t composed by Nobuo Uematsu, but its still pretty awesome.

Its actually composed by Masashi Hamauzu and I think this guy needs to do some more, because he is awesome. He composed some very memorable music for this game. I still hear the main battle theme in my head now and then. Also, I never thought jazz would be very good for running around in any game, however I seem to be stupid because it turns out jazz is pretty awesome.

Another plus is Final Fantasy XIII looks pretty. It is definitely a step up from previous Final Fantasy games. Still, like any other game with flaws, XIII cannot be carried by good graphics alone. Sure, it is nice to look at, but there really isn’t much there to admire. Most people have complained that the game is just running down corridors for about 20 hours or so. This is true and while you run down these corridors, there isn’t a whole lot to see. Once you enter an area, the first part will be what the whole area will look like.

That brings me to the fact that there are no actual places like cities or towns to visit in this game. All shops are conveniently in every save point, so there isn’t any need for city destinations to stock up on supplies.  I feel like most RPGs are remembered for their places like dungeons, but also the cities and towns of the game; XIII doesn’t have those. This just makes the world seem lifeless and dead when you are just running past most of the interesting areas.

Oh yeah! After those 20 hours or so of running down lifeless corridors, you do get to a kind of open field that is just as lifeless as the rest of the game. This seems pretty cool at first, but then the player is ushered into another corridor and the first 20 hours starts over again.

Characters are an integral part of an RPG. XIII has some interesting and fun characters. It also has some annoying ones. Lightning is pretty much female Cloud. In fact, I think SquareEnix said that about her. Sazh is an awesome pilot with a chocobo in his Afro. He also uses awesome gun fu when he fights. Snow is the over the top brawler hero archetype that I personally love so very, very much. Fang is the tough hot chick. Hope is the angsty teen who learns stuff along the way and has the most character development out of all the characters.

Oh, but there is one more character and boy oh boy does she ever piss me off. Vanille is the bubbly, ditsy, girl character of the game. Normally I love this kind of character, but not Vanille. It starts with her irritating voice actress who can’t decide if she has an accent or not and ends with the sheer stupidity of the character. Honestly, it is a bit hard to convey how bad this character is. I hate saying this but, you really have to see for your self and make your own decision. I know I am in the minority for this view, because everyone else I talk to seems to like Vanille. Most people seem to hate Hope, but I found him to be interesting even if he had all that angst. At least that was understandable since the dude watches his mom die, but still manages to go on to have some character development.

This is how I feel about the game. Kinda.

Then there is the battle system. I was under the impression that the battles in Final Fantasy XIII were going to be epic and dynamic. This is not quite the case. At first they do seem epic, but soon you will realize that every battle will more or less be the same tapping of a single button until it is over.

You see, each character can switch between different kinds of attack. These are things like a warrior kind of class, a black magic caster, and a healing class. There are also support classes that either use defensive magic or status affecting magic. Each character has access to three of these classes, but later on can use the ones they didn’t have. However that doesn’t really matter, since it takes way too much experience to level them up in their new classes.

You can set up different variations of these classes with you party, which are called paradigms. Paradigms can be switched in mid battle if the fight calls for it and you will be doing this a lot. This certainly adds a different kind of strategy than other Final Fantasy games. However, the characters pretty much pick their attacks for you and all the player does is press the attack button over and over again until the fight is over. I’m not kidding here. I once went to the bathroom in the middle of a battle and told my friend to keep pressing the X button while I was gone. When I came back my friend had mastered the game.

This whole battle system gets very tedious later on when every battle starts taking almost 15 minutes to finish. My friend has argued that previous Final Fantasy games where pretty much the same. You just press the attack button until the fight is over. This is true and hard to argue against. Still, at least these games created the illusion that the player was in control and doing something. In XIII, I pretty much just watched the game go by and switched my paradigms sometimes too. Its like they just put up a no fun allowed sign.

I really can’t say to much more or else I would be here for ever. If you play Final Fantasy XIII, be prepared to waste a good 40 hours of your life pressing a button and staring at the screen. Actually, that sounds like almost every video game out there. Basically take that, but make it way more boring and even enraging at times.

If you aren’t into Final Fantasy games or RPGs in general, then you are going to slash you wrists if you pick up Final Fantasy XIII. If you are a fan of the series you have probably already played it or if you haven’t, I don’t think I can convince you not to play it. But please, even if you are a fan, do not play this game Seriously, it will ruin you. I can’t even look at the game’s box with out bursting into tears and trying to drink the nearest poisonous liquid.  I really hate where Final Fantasy is going and I would rather not give this game any support. Although, maybe Final Fantasy XIII versus will fix everything. Yeah right, that would be as likely as valve releasing Half Life episode 3.

So, if I had to give this game a rating I would say it gets a 2.5 out of 10. Don’t play it unless you are stupidly optimistic like me.

Now I’m just angry again, so I will post something to make me happy. And that is…

PONIES!!!

It looks like it should be fun, right? WRONG!

I don’t want to go into to much detail because this isn’t a review but, the whole game just seemed lazy. The level designs were so bland really out stayed their welcome. The switching riders feature feels a bit pointless. The music is bland, uninspired, and is nothing like the classic Yoshi Island music. Honestly, a port of the SNES version would have been better, but I think they did that already on GBA

Then I started playing Katamari Forever. This game was fun, but it makes it painfully obvious that they are running out of ideas for the series. A large chunk of the levels are rehashes of old levels or the exact same level from a previous game. There doesn’t seem to be much new music either since most is just remixed versions of old songs from Katamari Damacy. 

I did enjoy playing the game, but it just felt so unnecessary. I really believe the Katamari games should have ended after the second one, because that one was perfect.

I like sequels as much as the next guy, but some games really do not need sequels. Sequels have chance to take a game and improve upon it while keeping everything that was great about it, but these are just lazy copies of the first with some new graphics or gimmicks.  I really wish some developers would realize when a franchise is getting stale and how to fix them or just let them die. I would mention the Sonic games, but that would be way to easy.

Speaking of sequels…

I picked up Marvel vs Capcom 3 and have had some fun with it. However, it made me start thinking about some things. The main thing being the fighting game community. I mostly mean online fighting game community, since I haven’t really been to any tournaments.

and I really wanted to like sentinel

I have struggled trying to figure out the fighting game community. What I have found is that most of them are, for lack of a better word, assholes. It seems like every game I play online with MvC 3 is full of people who employ the cheapest tactics to win. I hate to sound butthurt, I mean, I am mad. However, I just want to have a fun little fight, but everyone is just out to win and make their e-penis bigger.

Also, every time a new fighting game comes out, it seems like everyone is out to break it. What I mean is, everyone looks for the cheapest, most broken character and exploit a cheap move or combo. I mainly noticed this with MvC 3 and Sentinel and even though he has been nerfed, that doesn’t stop people from using him cheaply.

That guy in this picture is so me.

Another thing is from what I have heard, most of the major street fighter players are jerks. Again, I have never been to a tournament, so this is only what I have heard. I hear people who aren’t very good are shunned by the elite players and that they are pretty mean to newcomers.

The point I am trying to make is we as gamers should try to be less of assholes. So many people wonder why video games can’t be taken seriously and I do not think this is the main reason, but it certainly doesn’t help our image. Video games are supposed to be fun, not trolling machines. Its not like winning is a bad thing, but I feel like we should do it with more style and grace; victory should be obtained with a lot less hadokens and with more actual punches and kicks.

This is a link  to a video on an awesome website.

This book looks pretty freakin’ awesome.

Also, I love Benzaie

Borderlands

I just finished this game the other day with a friend, so it’s still fresh in my head. I started out very skeptical about this game. It really did not seem all that special to me and I didn’t think it would have the bazillion guns it promised. Basically, I was a bit wrong about this game and I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

The game is a first person shooter with some RPG elements in it. This can be a double edged sword at times. The RPG elements give each gun specific stats for things like firepower, accuracy, fire rate, etc. This means if you could pretty much find a shotgun with good enough accuracy to be a sniper. However, the stats can makes thing a little annoying, like when you have a sniper and can’t get any headshots because the accuracy stat says so. Also, Rocket launchers are terrible in this game.

Like I said before, the advertisements for Borderlands promised copious amounts of guns. This is true, there are a lot of guns in this game, but only about seven different kinds and the rest is tweaks in stats and possibly having some status affect. I was hoping for a little more variety in the weapons for this game, like a shotgun that shoots bees or something. Even so, the gun stats can be pretty fun and exploring the land for that perfect gun can be enjoyable and rewarding.

Next comes the different classes the player can choose from. There are a total of four: Siren, Berserker, Soldier, and Hunter. Each one has different weapon specialties, but can use any gun they want. Also, ever class has a special ability, like the soldier’s ability to drop a turret to help in a fight. Each one has different stats you can increase when they level up like bullet velocity or defense. All the different abilities are fun to play with and you can easily redistribute level points for a small fee whenever you want, so you don’t have to worry to much about powering up the wrong things. My only real problem with the classes is that they are all tied to a character. If the player wants to be a certain class they are stuck with the character that goes with it. You can rename them and switch some of the colors, but that is it. It just seems like an RPG shooter would have a character creator in it.

As far as looks go, Borderlands is pretty good. I’m glad they didn’t go with the dark and gritty look that most shooters do. Everything feels a lot brighter and that really goes with the humor of the game. Most enemies are fun to look at especially when you are fighting a shotgun midget that gets blown on his butt every time he shoots.

There is a lot to do in this game and it’s hard to do it justice in a quick review. There is plenty to explore and plenty to shoot in Borderlands and playing two player is even better. I even played with a friend who normally doesn’t like shooters and he was the one who recommended this game to me. I would say it is worth buying. If you don’t like shooters but like RPGs it is worth checking out, but still might not necessarily be your thing. If I had to give it a numerical rating I would say it gets an 8.5/10.

A pro gamer is someone who plays video games competitively and takes them very seriously. Basically, pro gamers compete in tournaments for cash or prizes, but sometimes just play games online. The types of games they play are most often first-person shooters and real-time strategies. The more popular games to play are Counter-Strike and StarCraft. Also, most of the games are played on PCs, so pro gamers to need a pretty good computer to stay in the competition.

This is what a tournament usually looks like.

This is a type of gamer that may be coveted other gamers, since this is a way to make money by playing video games. However, being a pro gamer is serious business and not everyone can just choose to be one if they aren’t willing to put everything they have into it. It isn’t always fun to play these games professionally since pro gamers play them a lot and sometimes compete in tournaments for a living. Pro gamers are usually very skilled at what ever game they specialize in and they probably had to spend a lot of time practicing. It’s kind of like playing an instrument, because any one can pick up and mess with a guitar, but only the ones who take it seriously and practice every day can hope to make money from playing it.

Most pro gamers require headsets so they can easily communicate with the rest of their team.

As far as pro gamers look, they can vary from the usual greasy looking nerd to a normal person or even to a bro gamer. The easiest way to spot a pro gamer is by there gaming computer. Usually they have specialized computers built specifically for gaming. Its hard to describe what these computers look like, since they can look different from one another. However, even so, you will know it when you see one.

Here is my video about gamer stereotypes.

It seems like the video game market is just like movies these days; it’s full of sequels and remakes. It seems everyone is pumped for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2. Sequels are not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is nice to see a good game get a sequel that manages to surpass the first one, but this might not always be the case.

It seems like there is not much room for original concepts for games these days. When something original comes around, like Beyond Good & Evil, it usually gets brushed aside for bigger titles like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. Gamers seem to focus on what they know, instead of exploring new territory.

Admittedly, I have not actually played this game.

It is true that video games have always had lots of sequels, even back in the day. We had 3 Super Mario Brothers games and 6 Mega Man games on just the NES. What I say about today can still apply to back then, gamers wanted more Mario and Mega Man because they knew the previous games were good.

Not counting most of the Wii Sports type games, Nintendo hasn’t even made a original game that stuck since Pikmin and Animal Crossing back in 2001. Even so, it is a bit of a double edged sword. By this I mean, when an original game is actually accepted, it will usually spawn sequels and possibly remakes years later, thus making it another unoriginal franchise. I just think that as gamers, we need to do the industry justice and pay more attention to the original titles instead of the next Call of Duty game or something with Halo slapped on the box, but we don’t have to forget all the games we know and love.

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