Boring Video Game Update, August Edition
I’ve actually had a chance to play some games in the last little while (being sick has its benefits!), so I thought I’d go over some recent highlights.
Guitar Hero: Metallica
The formula is pretty simple – a Guitar Hero game featuring songs from Metallica and other hard / metal-rock bands. Guitar Hero (and its various incarnations) have been discussed to death, but I will say that this game was an awesome workout for the hands. Trying to play along with these songs, even on a fake plastic guitar, has given me a new appreciation for Metallica, and before I had beaten the game (which I managed to do on expert guitar!), I had taken out my old electric guitar that’s been gathering dust since high school. Some new strings and a guitar -> USB connector later, I’m playing Metallica (very poorly) in real life – now that’s an inspiring game!
Lost Odyssey
I’ve seen mixed reviews on this traditionally-styled JRPG, but I really quite enjoyed it. The art is beautiful, probably one of the prettiest games I’ve seen, and the characters, while being a bit cliche, develop nicely. The battle system has quite a bit of depth, combining elemental matching with real time events, and at almost every point in the game you would encounter challenging enemies that could be defeated with the right choices. Probably the most unique thing about this game was the various dream segments, where the lead character remembers bits of his forgotten past through short stories presented as text. Although the presentation of these dreams are simple, the music, text styling, and content of the stories were compelling – a mix of Zen koans, depressing tragedies, and funny anecdotes. The plot is long and engaging (40+ hours of gameplay, and there were plenty of unfinished sidequests), and the ended was pretty satisfying. A great game, especially for the story-driven RPG lovers out there.
Fable
This game was pretty hyped when it came out several years ago for the original Xbox, so I was excited to finally get around to playing it. Unfortunately, while it had some fun parts, it didn’t live up to its high expectations. The music was decent, the world was well-imagined, and the graphics were okay for their time, but the much-touted alignment / cause-and-effect system left a lot to be desired. There were some neat aspects to it – your character’s appearance changed based on how strong, weak, good or evil you were, and people reacted to you differently as well – but a lot of the interactions seemed superfluous. So, my character can drink beer, get drink, then throw up – what does that gain me? Why would I bother to do that except to see the animation? Apparently eating too much food made your character fat, but my character ate a lot of food throughout the adventure (food resulted in healing) and I never gained a pound – too much running I guess. The entire marriage / dating / sex subsystem was equally lacking – sure, it was there, but there was no motivation at all for me to take part in it. The plot was also a bit thin, a “previously unknown super bad guy is now the last boss” type of thing, but the game ended up being good enough that I am looking forward to trying out Fable II for the Xbox 360.
As the winter comes I’ll have time to play a few more games (currently looking at Jade Empire, Gears of War, Tales of Vesperia, and a few others), so I may continue to write about them. At the very least it’s getting me writing 
