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I guess my previous whining didn’t help much, I am more annoyed than ever. I now always end up on the losing team, always stuck with a bunch of noobs that do not seem to have an idea of how to play this game properly. All they do is rush out and get shot from all directions. Why do I deserve this? My winning ration was 1.35 yesterday and now I am struggling with a 1.31 because I have lost basically every game today, be it a real lost with noobs on my team or one of those annoying disconnects.

But what annoys me the most is the fact that I am always the only one with a decent score, well most of the time. The rest of my team would just contribute points to the other team by dying. It really felt like its me against the other 13 players instead of 6 on 6. If my team was able to contribute a bit more towards winning I would have no problem losing, at least we tried and the game was fair. In my case it was just pure slaughter by the opposing team.

Maybe I should just take a break and stop playing Modern Warfare 2 for a while. Let myself cool down a bit. Then again, what difference does that make? I will still be the only one, most of the time, with a positive kill / death ratio. What’s the point?

I have never been so upset in my life over a game, never happened with the original Modern Warfare.

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I played the demo for Lost Planet and at that time I didn’t like it at all. At first, I had doubts when I saw trailers for the sequel. Honestly after watching the trailers, I might just grab myself a copy of the first one, since its more than one year old and should be cheap, so even if I ended up not liking the game it would only be a small lost to me.

The reason why I’ve changed my impression for this game is the fact that there are actually huge monsters/insects to fight against (I know about the mechs already) which really reminds me of Monster Hunter and that game was a blast to play as well, specially with 3 other people. After watching one of the “epic” boss battles for Lost Planet 2 (I almost typed out LittleBigPlanet haha) I was impressed and surprised. I seriously didn’t know there were huge monsters/insects to fight against even in the first Lost Planet and I thought it was a new addition to Lost Planet 2. I was wrong, very wrong. So I quickly looked up Lost Planet: Extreme Condition’s review on Gametrailers and it rated the game 7.9 overall, though failing the story side.

I checked on eBay and the game is roughly $20 USD after shipping, one of the cheapest I’ve found. Looks like I will give this one a try. Lost Planet 2, unfortunately will only be available for Xbox 360 and release date is still unknown.

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Previous Gundam related games like Gundam Seed: Rengou vs. Z.A.F.T. Portable, Gundam Battle Royale and Gundam Battle Tactics were all great games, specially Gundam Seed: Rengou vs. Z.A.F.T. Portable that had, at the time, the latest mobile suits from the Gundam Seed series. Now, Gundam vs Gundam, the newest Gundam game has released for the PlayStation Portable in Japan (no date for North American release yet). Is this one worth buying at all? Read on…..

For those that haven’t played the games or even heard of Gundams before, they are basically transformers but only look 100x better. The games mentioned above basically put you in one of the mobile suits, not necessary Gundams because there are different robots in the series. You will be controlling and fighting against one of the other sides, usually two sides each with different mobile suits and mobile armor (these are not necessary robots but can be fighter planes etc). Its really a third person shooter, just replace human/monsters with robots.

  

If I remember correctly, this game was originally from the arcade and it was ported over to the PlayStation 2, then to the PSP. Gundam Seed: Rengou vs. Z.A.F.T. Portable was a great game that offered hours of play time and great replay value because you can upgrade many of your mobile suits’ stats such as how fast the weapon can fire, more ammo, more fire power as well as more health, jump higher and more booster power etc. This is pretty much level grinding though, which I think was necessary in order to pass some of the harder levels.

Game play
Gundam vs Gundam is really just the arcade version ported over to the PSP. At first I thought there was a story mode just like Gundam Seed: Rengou vs. Z.A.F.T. Portable. I should have figured that out from the name of the game, stupid me. The controls are basically the same or really similar to the other games though – jump, boost, shoot, melee, shoot 2, special shot, special melee and special. The three specials are hard to execute because you have to hold triangle, plus either the shoot or melee. The special move is slightly easier and its executed by pressing triangle, square and cross (might as well press your right thumb onto all four buttons)
I have yet to even execute any of them. How did I even figure out how to execute these hard to do moves? They are actually mentioned in one of the game options. I will update once I figure out how to execute them. I have never had such frustration over special moves from previous Gundam games.

[Update: I have finally managed to execute the special attack (only when your special gauge is full) by pressing.....L and R together twice]

  

Aside from the standards, now you can assign orders to your computer teammate, commands like attack, dodge and surprise attack. You can also call in support where an additional mobile suit for a second and throw in a few more shots at your current target, as usual, the calls for support can be recharged with time just like recharging your gun’s ammo. I find the support useful because, if I remember correctly it was able to take the hits for me as well as acting as a decoy for a short time.

Enough with the controls, the game has three game modes – “normal” mode (I call it the normal mode, was going to say story mode but its not a story) where you fight through 8 stages with the last stage as boss stage, quick play and multiplayer that supports 2 on 2 battles. I think the 2 on 2 is the selling point here, just like the arcade version, the fun is from shooting and slashing other human piloted mobile suits. Once you have selected a mobile suit from the list with 20+ of them and more can be unlocked by completing the “normal” mode. They range from the oldest 0079 series all the way to the newest ones from the Gundam 00 series. The objective of any of these game mode is the same, you and your enemies both have a life bar, you will lose if your side’s life bar reaches 0. When you and/or your teammate dies (same goes for enemies), the amount of life your team loses is based on the mobile suit you picked. The stronger the mobile suit, the higher points its worth, which means when it blows up, your team loses a bigger amount of life. So that means its not always better to pick the strongest from the list. I picked my favorite Freedom Gundam and its worth 3000GP, I lost one of the games once by dying only twice!

  

In “normal” mode, you will fight in random locations and you will have a random computer mobile suit to fight along side with you. There are a total of 8 stages with the last one being the boss stage. The boss is huge, relative to your mobile suit and it took me 2 tries to beat it, I was one hit away from losing the game for the second time! I guess I just need to practice more with the controls, a training mode would be a perfect game mode for this game.

Quick play is no brainer, you pick your mobile suit and pick up to 3 other computer to fight with or against you. You can modify options like how long the match lasts for, how fast your special gauge fills up or different stages/music.

Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try out the multiplayer.

  

So as you can see, there isn’t any level grinding here. Although you can still unlock more mobile suits, intro movies, endings and images for the multimedia galleries.

Graphics and audio
Graphics are again, PSP quality, the mobile suits are nicely detailed, environments are plain but the game is so fast paced you won’t have time to appreciate or pay attention to, not that there is anything to appreciate here. Music is actually real sound tracks from the Gundam series, so based on which Gundam series’ stage you are fighting in, you will be listening to that series’ soundtrack. The soundtracks bring back a lot of memories by the way.

Final verdict
Overall I think this game is OK. I still prefer Gundam Seed: Rengou vs. Z.A.F.T. Portable because it has a story mode and level grinding although you can still unlock more mobile suits, maybe its just me. For those that are looking for fast paced arcade style game play, Gundam vs Gundam should suit your needs. Skills really matter in this game since there’s no level grinding where you can easily overpower your enemies by powering up your mobile suits and weapons. If you have lots of Gundam loving friends with PSP, I suggest convincing them to get a copy so up to 4 of you and your friends can fight each other anytime without going to the arcade.

7.0/10

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I saw the trailer about a month ago and was really impressed, then again, its only a trailer and probably not the PSP version. I took some time to play around with the PSP version of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and I was not impressed. Another disappointment. Again for the PSP version and does not necessary imply the PS3 and the XBox360 versions are just as bad.

You start off at the top of some building, typical. You will basically be swinging around from left to right or right to left, occasionally you will get inside some buildings, you have your basic punch combos and kick combos by repeatedly pressing square for punch and triangle for kick. You shoot out your web by pressing x, as well as holding a direction and press R to perform web swinging. You can also walk on walls and I had experience a buggy situation where Spidy was literally flying up instead of walking up vertically along the wall.

  

Overall the graphics are…well…pass, I think Lego Batman has better graphics than this game. So far I have only seen 3 to 4 variations of enemies PLUS Venom, which is the boss for first level. Oh yea after defeating Venom, you also get infected by the black matter and you can now turn toggle between original Spidy and black spidy with different abilities / attacks by pressing select. And basically you are just moving vertically and horizontally.

  

After the first level is complete, you can purchase new skills by spending you good Spidy points and bad spidy points, you can’t purchase good Spidy skills using bad Spidy and vice versa. Now how do you get Spidy points? When you interact with people, you get to choose good answer or bad answer, obviously good answer will give you good Spidy points and bad answer will give you bad Spidy points. You will get more by accepting quests from people that you encounter as well to gain more Spidy points.

  

So far that’s all I have discovered after playing Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, it was too linear and down right boring after a while that I’ve decided to turn off my PSP. Oh yea did I mention the voice acting is bad as well? I suggest sticking to the PS3 and/or the XBox360 versions. Or better yet, rent to see if you like it or not.

5/10

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For those that are interested in Mirror’s Edge, based on information from EBGames there will be a demo released on November 6th. Pre-order of the full game starts shipping on November 11th.

As a side note, my Spider-Man: Web of Shadows for the PSP will be up later today!

And I’m STILL waiting for my Little Big Planet, hopefully I will finally get it tomorrow.

  

Today I had a chance to spend some time on Garnet Chronicle, an anime style RPG game but unfortunately its the Japanese version and as far as I know there is no release date for the English version.

Story and controls

  

Since its in Japanese, I vaguely know what is going on, so far! Your hero character is a knight student from a Knight academy. Your first quest is to bring a recommendation letter from the principle of the academy to the commander somewhere near the village. All of a sudden the entire battalion is being attacked by an evil looking character and his werewolf like companion, to no surprise, the entire battalion is wiped out and of course our main hero survives but barely and saves by a sexy female elf thief/treasure hunter. From then on, she joins you in the quest for the “Stone of the Evil Mind” (sorry that’s a direct translation from Japanese to English). Then once inside the “Tower of Lost” you meet up with another character, this time he’s a wizard class and he joins you afterwords. That’s how far I am in the game.

  

The controls are typical walk with your analog stick, R will bring up the map but so far there is no map when venturing inside dungeons, circle is confirm while cross is cancel, typical Japanese style, the American version might have these two buttons reversed. Unfortunately there’s no run button so walking around might feel slow at times. You can also save the game anytime and thankfully the menus are in English as well as the Japanese explanation, only the menus though.

Game play and graphics
Game play is pretty much the same old turn based RPG similar to Final Fantasy (up to Final Fantasy X-2 since the battle system has changed starting FF11). You and your enemies will take turns to attack/defend/cast magic on each other. Which is fine except it feels really slow and rather boring, it would make a huge difference if the attack was smoother and faster such that attacks are executed as soon as the one before finished its move. But as you gather more people on your team, the fight gets more interesting and faster so its not too bad after all. Level grinding is also part of the game but not necessary. It is surprisingly fast to level up though, at least for the first 20 or so levels which can really speed up the grinding. As you finish each battle you are rewarded with money, experience, random items and skill points. Skill points can be spent on each character’s skill tree to unlock more powerful attack and support skills. Skill points are shared among all your characters unfortunately! And last but not least money you earned from each battle obviously will be for buying weapons, armors and support items. There are also cards and stones that can enhance your weapons such as turning your sword to have ice element and upgrade your special abilities. Treasure chests are scattered all over the map, inside buildings, out in the woods or anywhere in the villages. Some are less obvious as I have found one hidden one so far.

  

One interesting feature that I have never seen before, at least in an RPG, is the “sneak” feature. When you approach your enemies from behind without being spotted, you can deal damage to them before the battle starts. Same applies to the enemies, if they spotted you, they would run to you and if your back is facing them then you will get attacked first. You will know when your enemies have spotted you when an exclamation mark appears on top of their heads. This feature is independent of who attacks first when the battle begins, so that means there’s a chance you can attack twice before an enemies can attack you, same applies to the enemies. If you can utilize this feature you can really gain an upper hand when fighting and makes battles a lot easier.

Graphics are nothing fancy but well drawn anime style. Everything is 2D based but don’t let that get you because even though the characters are simple 2D sprites, their expressions and body gestures can be seen clearly depend on the situations. There are also nice flashy special effects when your characters use their speical abilities.
One thing I don’t like is the fact that, all enemies look the same on the map, so you don’t know what kind of enemies you will face until the battle screen comes up. I don’t see why the developers cannot make the enemies show up on the map as well. But then again, what if there are more than one type of enemies, which one would they show? Maybe that’s the reason why.

  

Sound

Your typical anime music, your characters and enemies will say something before they attack which makes battle less dull. Sometimes your characters will even voice over during conversations. I can imagine the English translation will be bad and takes away the Japanese “atmosphere” just like any other games that went through the Jap to English translation. In general the music is great most of the time, but sometimes they can get a bit too repetitive and get annoying afterwords.

Final Verdict
Overall I think this game is worth a try, this type of game is nothing new but the game is still enjoyable. I had problems turning off my PSP until it went out of batteries while playing it. That should give you an idea of how addictive and enjoyable this game is, specially for level grinders like myself. Hopefully the American version will be released soon so you English speaking people can enjoy this game as much as I am now. And for those that can read Chinese, Japanese or don’t care about the story, you should be able to get a copy from ebay or YESASIA.

8/10

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I had a chance to play a bit of Midnight Club LA Remix that’s released recently. The game really reminds me of GTA and Burnout Paradise, well go figure. After playing it for about an hour and a half, I called it a quit because I was getting bored and annoyed.

 

The game play, as I have mentioned reminds me of GTA and Burnout Paradise because back in the previous Midnight Club games, you would simply go through the story by beating your component(s). Midnight Club Los Angeles Remix allows you to roam freely in a city just like in the other two games, on the map there will be markers showing you where you can race opponents with green being the easiest, yellow is harder and red being the hardest. You flash your lights to initiate the race when you reach the parked area. Even the yellow level isn’t too much of a challenge, haven’t seen any reds though. Conversation between characters is done through a mobile device (T-mobile branded). I have also come across the garage where you can customize just about anything from styling your ride with fancy spoilers, rims, body kits to performance upgrade like intake and turbo etc. I would say the level of customization is quite impressive with so many things you can choose to mod your car.

 

The controls are a bit different and takes a bit of time to get used to, strangely the triangle button is now your brake/reverse, L is gear shift, R is your “drift” button while cross is your gas, square is nitro and circle is special ability which I had not had a chance to experience. I find the controls odd and inconvenient even though you can change them. You can also change the music by holding L and choose by pressing up or down key.

 

The graphics are in most cases acceptable and nothing eye catching but they look rather nice when at night with all the lighting effects. There is no damage to your car unlike Burnout, you will only see pieces of glass fly out from no where and your car will never be totaled, at least I wasn’t able to. If you manage to hit another car head on at full speed, the worst that will happen is slowing your car down which is really unrealistic. Unlike Burnout, Midnight Club LA does not have sense of speed at all, maybe because I started out with a somewhat slow ’98 240SX?

 

As you can tell, I am kind of disappointed at this new Midnight Club, at least for the PSP version, maybe because I was never a fan of this type of racing games and Midnight Club. But the game play and the graphics both contribute to why I managed to bored and annoyed of this game in less than two hours. Maybe its just me but I suggest you rent this one before you actually buy it for your PSP. Otherwise you might as well play GTA or Burnout Paradise instead.

6.0/10

 

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I was going to wait til Friday (day off) to get a copy of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice from EB Games, I couldn’t wait and got it yesterday I have been waiting for an RPG game for my PlayStation 3 since I got it last November. Until Final Fantasy 13 comes out, which is hopefully end of this year, I would need some RPG to satisfy my RPG hunger til then. And what can suit me better than a Japanese anime style, level grinding RPG game? None except this game. Obviously I have not finished the game, and most likely I won’t in the foreseeable future. Here are my thoughts so far.

As mentioned, this is a RPG game and turn-based with 2D sprites with 3 camera modes (bird’s-eye view, zoomed in view and really zoomed in view). First thing I noticed about this game is the graphics, which is pretty outdated in my opinion. They remind me of an online RPG gamed called Ragnarok Online, which has been out since 2001 and still remains popular even after it started charging monthly fees instead of being free like in the beta period. This shows that a game can still be a considered a good game even without fancy graphics, a game with fancy graphics but with no game play value is still a bad game, well most of the time. Disgaea 3 is exactly the case, even though its graphics are outdated. Its game play more than made up for the short coming.

The game starts you off with your main character, a netherworld student from Maritsu Evil Academy called Mao, a son of the overlord in the Netherworld. You actually play on the evil side for once as oppose to other games where most of the time you are on the “good” side fighting off evil. Here’s the fun part, in the netherworld school, an honor student is a person who skips class and not doing homework as much as possible, whereas a delinquent is a person who acts the exact opposite. And as you can guess, Mao is an honor student. The story is ok, its more suited for teens since most of the conversations are pretty childish, which is ok because the characters are after all, kids. There are also humor here and there as well and some are pretty funny. There is also an option to skip any story telling and conversation between characters by pressing triangle button which is a huge plus since I don’t find the majority of the story interesting, at least not yet. You can also change the voice over from English back to Japanese, which is yet another big plus since it just feels different having English voice over.

  

Game play of this game is what made me want to buy this game right away as oppose to wait for a couple of months and let the price drop. The play value as well as replay value is amazing. For those of you that are into leveling up your characters, you can level them to level 1000 and each stage can be played repeatedly or you can just play through the game by clearing each level once. Since it is a turn-based game, you get to move and attack/use item and end the turn, then your enemies will do the same. A very noticable difference, or I should say improvement over any other turn-based games is that the enemies move all at once as oppose to one at a time which can be annoying. The game pace is fast even under normal speed setting. Your characters can counter attacks and enemies can do the same randomly, so you can see counter-counter-counter attacks for example. Characters, again enemies as well, can combine attacks and form combos and which also happen randomly. There are also monsters in the game and they can “magichange” which pretty much means morph into weapons and allow human/demon characters to wield them, another fun feature. I’m pretty sure there are other fun features as I play more, but as you can see, this game is packed with so many features. Oh and by the way, I look forward to my first million point damage!

Control is pretty standard and straight forward like any other similar games. You can rotate the map 360 degrees so you don’t miss anything and 3 different views mentioned above.

While I like this game a lot, there is one thing that really bothers me, the music. While the music is very upbeat, it gets boring and down to annoying if you remain in the same area or in the same battle for too long.

That’s all I got to tell you guys for now, I’m sure I have missed something but there are just too much to talk about and I need more time to digest. So if you are an anime fan and are into level grinding, you should really check this game out.

You might save some money by buying on ebay link. I saw some good deals there, even the limited addition version. I would buy games off ebay if there were more Canadian sellers, sending from the US is not worth it and is often more expensive than buying in local stores.

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