Recent comments

  • Beetle Adventure Racing!   14 years 20 weeks ago

    This game strikes me as really funny. Racing Beetles through the locales you mentioned, at those speeds? Wow.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King   14 years 20 weeks ago

    I pretty much agree with your assessment, although I'll admit I was able to enjoy the game a bit more than it sounded like you did. Although you nailed it with this comment, "You will like this game if: You already beat the Two Towers game and just can't get enough." Which is pretty much how i felt after beating Two Towers. Plus, by the time I played Two Towers, RotK was already long out so I was able to jump from one to the other with no downtime. One of the problems I had with RotK was that the combat animations just didn't look as nice (something I probably wouldn't have noticed if there had been a year between my playing them). The combat in Two Towers looks very much like in the films but RotK was a little more robotic. I still liked the game, but it was clear that a different studio developed it. I don't recall having nearly as much difficulty with the camera, but I'm not overly aware of most cameras anyway so perhaps I just didn't notice. I also had a bit of difficulty with Gandalf as a playable character. I mean, in the movies and even moreso in the books, he really is out of the picture alot, in the background, running from here to there in preparations for whats to come. He wasn't a frequent combatant and he sure as hell didn't run around shooting countless white balls of energy from his staff. But perhaps I'm being a bit too finicky in that complaint. But again, great review.

  • Chrono Trigger   14 years 21 weeks ago

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King   14 years 21 weeks ago

    I agree with this review: The Two Towers was a reasonably fun hack n' slash game that was well-paced and fluid. Return of the King was uncomfortable and forced. I can't remember if I beat it or not, but I definitely did not enjoy this game at all.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    that SOLD me on hack n slash. I never cared for them before, but now I play them quite a bit. In fact, I'm sad that the genre has gone so underrepresented in the current gen. Although, LOTR: Conquest is quite good. It marries the 2 genres of Hack n Slash and almost an RTS style gameplay where you have to control certain points on a map like the Star Wars Battlefront games.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    Firstly the Wargs acted more like jackals or some sort of cat, when clearly in the book Wargs are extremely large wolves (would have been more impressive to me).

    Aragorn didn't die, I don't know what makes you think he did. The Aragorn/Arwyn love story was sort of a sideline in the book, so they could pretty much do it the way they wanted to without mucking things up too much.

    As far as getting the sword before the battle, I think it makes it a much stronger statement visually. You wouldn't have been as impressed if he had the sword through most of the movies, I think that's why they did it. It made more sense cinematically. of course I read the books after I had seen the movies on purpose, so this may have colored my judgement a little. I still like the books better than the movies, but I think what they did was pretty good.

    The only other real issue I had was with return's extended version, I didn't feel it was up to the quality of the others, but that's just a dvd thing mostly.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    I've played somewhat more of this since I wrote the review; the moves really do feel great, the flow of the action is nigh on perfect. I'm not much of a hack'n'slash fan, but this game has almost sold me on the genre. I love how you can go back and play levels with other characters to gain experience and buy new combos.

    You won't have to wait long for the next one!

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    Nice review Paul. I personally LOVED this game, but I suppose it's also true that I loveloveloved the movies as well as the books. I was really impressed with how well they merged the live action cutscenes (pulled from the movies) with the in-engine transition cutscenes. It's EXACTLY the way I would have wanted them to do it. It really helped make you feel like you were "playing" the movies. I also really enjoyed the combat. The moves felt great and when you worked the combos right, you could really be devastating. I played the game in its entirety with both Aragorn and Legolas and some few levels with Gimli. At the end, you can unlock Isildur again for some "challenge" stages, which are really just cheap play extenders, but fun. The 2nd to last level is one of the most challenging of any game I've ever played. It took me dozens of attempts to pull it off.

    To the commenter above, I HIGHLY recommend picking this game up. It was fantastic and it's available on all 3 last gen platforms, so whichever you prefer, you can play it on.

    And Paul, I can't wait to see what you think of the next one. I played it to completion as well and have some thoughts on that I would enjoy sharing once we get there.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    Although many of the aspects of the film are impressive (locations, casting, costumes, parts of the score) I feel that Peter Jackson let the series down with his brand of film-making. It's far to much to go into here, but he doesn't care enough about quality control, leaving parts nearly perfect and other parts lacking.

    He also defiled the story. I understand leaving parts out, like Tom Bombadil, but he also added parts (like the warg battle in Two Towers where Aragorn dies and his dream of Arwen brings him back to life. Seriously?) and changed parts around (Aragorn gets Anduril right before the final battle instead of when the Fellowship sets out).

    I have many more specific reasons, but that's an entire article, and one that probably won't be published here.

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers   14 years 21 weeks ago

    You didn't think the movie adaptations of the books was that good? "This is a really good game-to-movie adapation. The only weak point is the book-to-movie adaptation that preceded it...."

    I think the movies were really well done and were actually probably the best adaptations of the books that could be done.

    In any case I have a game cube, maybe I should look up this game somewhere (only downside is that it's not progressive scan and looks terrible on my digital tv, who knows maybe I'll get a wii and grab the gamecube version and play it on that).

    Keith Weatherby II

  • Fallout   14 years 22 weeks ago

    This game looks pretty good by your review, i like a lot the way you are writing this, is so detailed, hope you write more from a lot of games.

  • Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne   14 years 22 weeks ago

    I'll go buy it right now, thanks!

  • Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee   14 years 22 weeks ago

    I have the second game but haven't played it yet (I bought the two-pack from Steam), so that's good to know.

  • Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee   14 years 22 weeks ago

    In the sequel, Abe's Exoddus, the gameplay as a whole is more apparent, and the game is as a whole much better.

  • Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne   14 years 22 weeks ago

    Dude, haha, they do have a novel just about their early adventures, it's called New Spring and is the prequel novel to the series! It's about Moraine and Lan and a bunch of other Aes Sedai about 20 years before Eye of the World.

  • Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne   14 years 22 weeks ago

    Ug, I really enjoyed reading about him and Moraine. I would buy a Novel just about their early adventures. They were great characters and a really interesting pair. As I read the books, I found myself really hoping they would get "together". Oh well, Thanks for the tip.

  • Turok: Dinosaur Hunter   14 years 22 weeks ago

    The controls can take a few minutes of gettng used to, but the C buttons are far easier to deal with than the joystick or d-pad. The stick provides better aim and freedom when used for looking instead of running.

    Also, jumping puzzles are easy with the map on. When the centre of your triangle is over the chunk of land, so are your feet.
    Its better than Doom, thats for sure.

  • Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne   14 years 22 weeks ago

    The best has come and past by this point, in my opinion. Also, Rand gets a third girl to fawn over him, and Lan (Moraine's protector) is even less of a factor. Well, I may be getting ahead of myself a bit there, since I read 11 books, but not much actually happens in like the last three.

  • Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne   14 years 22 weeks ago

    Sad to hear that the book wasn't much of anything special. Glad to see the nod to the wheel of time. Which raises a question. I think I made it to book 6 in the Wheel of Time series and then grew somewhat weary of the neverending melodrama between rand and the 2 women (one of them was an angry cleaning lady type if I recall). And I hated to see the story move away from Moiraine and her protector whose name I also can't remember. Should I pick that series back up again or has the best already come to pass by the end of book 6?

  • Lux-Pain   14 years 23 weeks ago

    nice article thanks for sharing ! japanese game female-characters are always sexy !!!

  • Chibi-Robo!   14 years 23 weeks ago

    I've continued to play this game for several more hours and it gets even better. The story starts to come out more and really starts driving the game. It also gets stranger.

  • Chibi-Robo!   14 years 23 weeks ago

    This is one of those games that I've always heard great things about, but had no idea what it actually was about. I never imagined you would play as some household robot, so weird, yet right up my alley.

  • Mistborn Trilogy and Video Games   14 years 23 weeks ago

    I really liked the "video game"-style of review. I was thinking that it would make a great movie w/ all that leaping around (although hopefully a film company with a substantial budget would attempt that), but I can totally see the vid game aspect, too.

  • Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction   14 years 23 weeks ago

    This is another one of the many games that I "first houred". I played it a few years ago for one sitting but never went back to it and I'm not sure why. I still own it though, which is curious. (I buy WAY too many games) I don't recall having trouble with the controls and I even remember being impressed with the fully destructible environments. As I recall, there is a bad guy in a building you're supposed to take out. I had some plastic explosives and thought, "heck, I wonder if I can just blow the entire building" and sure enough, it worked. I was totally shocked when the entire 2 story building came down. Sometimes, on paper, games are really good, but they just fail to hook me. The same thing happened with the sequel. I played the demo of the 2nd mercenaries and didn't really enjoy it at all. It felt like a directionless mess of a sandbox game and I'm a guy who really needs direction in a game, otherwise, I'll just devolve into nothingness play and quit.

  • The Sims 3   14 years 24 weeks ago

    I played sims 2 and i had a lot of fun with it. Cant wait for this third part. Hey in SIMS 2, my visitors can die and theres a ghost. HAHAHA. well that was funny. love the sims!