Brief Reviews: Video Games
Brutal Legend - Thumbs down. So much promise in its setup: Roadie travels to badass land based on heavy metal album covers and kicks ass with magical axes (both choppy and guitary. The writing is fine, the voice acting is great, and the animation is good. It's just the gameplay that I don't like. The demo made it feel like you'd be playing a brawler, kicking ass and taking names, when actually you were playing some sort of hybrid RTS. I like RTSes, I just don't like them getting in the way of me blasting things with my guitar.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - Thumbs down. All the promise of the first UA was tossed out the window. The animation is a bit better, but the gameplay has been dumbed down. Gone is the depth of story and look into the history of the Marvel setting (seriously, you go to Murderworld, a place no Marvel character has visited since the early 90s) and instead you are left with a storyline based on the Civil War event that is now dated and does not make sense. By the time UA2 came out, most of the Big Changes of Civil War were undone. Comic heroes should never fight comic heroes out of some ideology, they should only fight when there is a 1) brief misunderstanding 2) an impostor or 3) mind control involved.
Borderlands - Two blistered thumbs up. This game only existed on my radar as a sort of, "Hey, that kinda looks like Fallout 3" game. And then I started reading the reviews, which were all pretty positive. Borderlands is a sort of Western In Space set on a frontier prospecting planet that's a mix between Mad Max and Firefly. And there are guns. Thousands and thousands of guns, each with different characteristics for you to collect and compare. Some guns shoot bullets made of electricity. Some shotguns shoot rockets. Some rockets are made of acid. Add in witty writing and enough quests to satisfy a Gotta Catch'em All completest and you have the sleeper hit of the fall.
Dragon Age: Origins - This is the game that Brutal Legends was supposed to tide me over for. It'll be arriving at home today, but I'm unsure if I want to crack it until I get at least one Borderlands playthrough set. Dragon Age is by the people who brought us Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, and those Jedi games. It looks crazy fantasy geeky.
All that said, I heartily recommend Amazon.com for game purchases. They have a 'get it on release day' feature for most games that will get you your game delivered on day of release for less than it would cost at Gamestop. Also, preordering will usually get you goodies. I got a 10$ coupon for another game from ordering Dragon Age, which I promptly put towards Lego Rock Band, bringing its cost down into the low thirties.
Lego Rock Band's main draw is not the game, but the ability to bring over all its tracks to Rock Band 2, ala Rock Band 1 -> 2, and dammit, if you don't think I would leap at the chance to play The Final Countdown or the Ghostbusters theme in Rock band, you can just go get out right now.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - Thumbs down. All the promise of the first UA was tossed out the window. The animation is a bit better, but the gameplay has been dumbed down. Gone is the depth of story and look into the history of the Marvel setting (seriously, you go to Murderworld, a place no Marvel character has visited since the early 90s) and instead you are left with a storyline based on the Civil War event that is now dated and does not make sense. By the time UA2 came out, most of the Big Changes of Civil War were undone. Comic heroes should never fight comic heroes out of some ideology, they should only fight when there is a 1) brief misunderstanding 2) an impostor or 3) mind control involved.
Borderlands - Two blistered thumbs up. This game only existed on my radar as a sort of, "Hey, that kinda looks like Fallout 3" game. And then I started reading the reviews, which were all pretty positive. Borderlands is a sort of Western In Space set on a frontier prospecting planet that's a mix between Mad Max and Firefly. And there are guns. Thousands and thousands of guns, each with different characteristics for you to collect and compare. Some guns shoot bullets made of electricity. Some shotguns shoot rockets. Some rockets are made of acid. Add in witty writing and enough quests to satisfy a Gotta Catch'em All completest and you have the sleeper hit of the fall.
Dragon Age: Origins - This is the game that Brutal Legends was supposed to tide me over for. It'll be arriving at home today, but I'm unsure if I want to crack it until I get at least one Borderlands playthrough set. Dragon Age is by the people who brought us Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, and those Jedi games. It looks crazy fantasy geeky.
All that said, I heartily recommend Amazon.com for game purchases. They have a 'get it on release day' feature for most games that will get you your game delivered on day of release for less than it would cost at Gamestop. Also, preordering will usually get you goodies. I got a 10$ coupon for another game from ordering Dragon Age, which I promptly put towards Lego Rock Band, bringing its cost down into the low thirties.
Lego Rock Band's main draw is not the game, but the ability to bring over all its tracks to Rock Band 2, ala Rock Band 1 -> 2, and dammit, if you don't think I would leap at the chance to play The Final Countdown or the Ghostbusters theme in Rock band, you can just go get out right now.