Saturday, May 18, 2013

Fat Princess (PSN)

This was one of the first games I had for my PS3 and was in fact the first game I had gotten off of PSN.  It was an interesting concept but as time goes on it just gets old.  It kept it's charm for a while but once you start playing with strangers, the fun drops sharply.

The game is plagued with little glitches and hiccups.  Most of these are just minor and don't really hurt the experience too much but some can be downright terrible.  When your entire team is wiped out because of one person glitched to where they can't be killed, it's not much fun.

The reason I stopped playing this game was simple.  The last match I played was with strangers and three of my teammates spent the entire match, throwing bombs at our own door.  No matter how much I tried to rebuild it, they would continue to blow it up.  That's when I knew the game was over.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS)

Going into this game, I had no expectations.  I had never played the first one and had no idea how I would like this game.  It looked nice and while I didn't play the multiplayer at all, that was a key decision to buy it.  Why didn't I play the multiplayer?  Because the story mode killed the fun I had.

The game starts out simple, albeit I did lose an hour cause you can't save in the tutorial mission.  Which is dumb cause I couldn't figure out what to do.  That was a common theme in this game.  Some of the puzzles and missions are not clear what you are supposed to do.  It really kills the game's flow when you hit a point where you are basically mindlessly backtracking to find what to do next.

The second part that really killed me on this was the mission variance.  Sure some can be unique but when you start hitting the Toad escort missions and the ghost dog, you grow tired of them.  In fact, those two types were boring from the start.  The only saving grace was some of the bosses were incredibly fun.

Lastly, the worst part is the incredibly inconsistent controls at times or poor choices for bosses.  The boss of the fourth mansion comes to mind in this.  I consistently lost to an incredibly easy boss because the game was not reading my hits as hits.  I hit the boss the same way consistently and each time something different would happen.  That is not good game design.  And yes, the Boo Train was just stupid and bland.  They could have done better.

All in all, this game started fun, dipped into tedium and frustration, and then ended decently.  There is some variance in what you are doing but nothing to be super interesting.  With times where you are just wandering around aimlessly.  Towards the end of the game, I was purposely just missing money and treasure to beat the game faster to make it end.