I've written up a few game reviews this week. You may be surprised to see what I thought of Dark Souls after all my ranting. You may also be equally surprised to see what I thought of Diablo III. My thoughts on Transformers: War for Cybertron won't be all that shocking.

I'm currently working may way through some Portal 2 achievements, and intend to get back on track with finishing up May Payne 3 after it briefly interrupted by Dark Souls marathon. So far I really like it, but I just wasn't ready to move away from Dark Souls at the time. Also, I'm FINALLY getting started on Assassin's Creed II. A little behind on that series, but I think I can get through a few of them relatively quickly.

So yeah, STILL playing Dark Souls. I had something of a turn of sorts after my last blog post. It's amazing how therapeutic cranking out my thoughts on a game can be. After making that little rant of a post I went back and tried to see if my complaints had answers to them within the game, and as it turns out they did! I still have plenty of complaints, but right now I am definitely loving the heck out of the game.

I still don't believe that the game is hard. There certainly are challenges, but the bulk of them can be countered pretty easily. Every single boss has some kind of method for exploitation that turns them into a laugh. At least up to the point I am now at (Just got the Lord Vassal warp thing). If you have no patience, the game becomes extremely hard.

My gripes about the character animations are still valid. They can be really slow. However, you can avoid this by using lighter armor, or faster weapons. But.. I would have NEVER known this had I not gone to a Dark Souls wiki and read it. The fact this is not information given to you within the game, at least not outside of swapping armor around and seeing how it changes things, is pretty ridiculous. The huge number of different stats you get for your character are great, except for the fact you are given basically zero information on what they actually do. Context is an important thing to include when describing all this stuff, and the developers left it all out.

I really really hate it when games REQUIRE the player to find information outside of the game (like visiting a wiki for example..) and simply do not have the info right there in the game to see for yourself. I can understand this with certain aspects, like where to hit an enemy for the most damage, but leaving out basic information about how your character functions is just stupid, and more than a little bit lazy. At least let me know what the puzzle pieces are when you expect me to put together a puzzle you made. Discovering the puzzle pieces through monotonous "play testing" is not fun. Not even a little bit.

The repetitive aspect of the game is still way too strong. I appreciate that they bring you back to older areas to branch off in new directions, but it still feels like I am seeing way too much of the older areas over and over. The game at least introduces some quicker travel mechanics by opening short-cut doors and introducing warping, but it still gets old having to return to the same blacksmith repeatedly, and to chop through the same few enemies to get to him. Not to mention how utterly confusing the item upgrade mechanics are in the game. Why they couldn't have compressed all three "types" of upgrading into one menu is truly a mystery.

What I have started to truly love about the game has been the sheer amount of discovery involved in it. It happens more than a few times that you will fight through a few new enemies to find an entire set of awesome armor that you really want to use, to then find yet another awesome set of armor immediately after. This may sound annoying, but it turns out that you will continue to use older armor just as much as you use the new stuff you find. You have a lot of choices to go with. Right now I am carrying around 6 different sets of armor that I rotate regularly for different situations. The same can't entirely be said for weapons though. I've used basically the same two weapons the entire game and will be shocked if I ever upgrade the sword I am using.

The combat itself is still maintaining a high level of entertainment. From the very beginning I started off enjoying smacking enemies and seeing numbers pop-up during combat. This is still really fun. It's a little unfortunate that almost all the enemies are of the "hit them from behind" variety, but at least it is still satisfying to kill things. The only continued fun from killing older enemies over and over is that you eventually get to kill them a lot faster as you get upgrades, but otherwise I'd prefer to just not have to kill them for the 200th time.

PVP is a total crapshoot. There are quite a few extremely high level players that are simply trolling the low level people for kicks. This effectively takes away a huge part of what the developers intended the experience to be. Getting your business pushed in without any chance what-so-ever of winning is NOT fun. It's just annoying. And, it can often be unavoidable. If you had to change to human form for any reason (and there is one very specific reason you might do this several times throughout the game) you can count on being invaded and killed very quickly. As I've upgraded I've managed to win a few more times, but most of the time it's over before I even know it started.

I'm over 70 hours of gameplay in, and I am thinking I might be able to finish it up by around the 100 hours mark. This is pretty significant. There are only a handful of games that I've put that much time into!

This game is supposed to be "hard!" or something. So far I've found it to be monotonous. Do you die a lot? Absolutely. But, all that comes from the abscenely slow character animations where standing up off the ground takes a full 4 seconds and drinking a health potion takes around 2-3. It's cheap to ramp up the difficulty by making the player character so ridiculously slow.

To top it off, you can't turn down the difficulty if you are interested in just playing through the game on a fun setting. And even if you could, it wouldn't matter much because the character animations probably would not speed up. Playing through the same area several dozen times, fighting the same enemies several hundred times (because so many are exactly the same) is the exact opposite of fun. That stopped being fun back in 1982.

Everything about the so called "difficulty" in this game comes from an era of arcade games designed to suck up quarters. It's cheap. It's sluggish. It's repetative. And worst of all it's just down right ugly. This game came out in 2011 for crying out loud, why does it look like a PS2 game?

Oh right, and you can't pause. Ever.

Been playing just a wee little bit of Star Wars The Old Republic since it came out last week and I am mighty impressed. I've got a bit of history playing MMO's over the years which mostly includes World of Warcraft, but also includes just about every "WoWkiller!!" that has come up since WoW launched (Warhammer, Aion and Rift being the noteables). Also, several MMO's prior to WoW including Star Wars Galaxies (which died a silent death immediately prior to the SWTOR launch), Dark Age of Camelot and Planetside. I put in about 30 minutes of Everquest time before declaring is "Utter crap!"

Anyways, that's the backstory context. Today, I have grown tired of WoW after enjoying the Cataclysm expansion for only a few months. I thought I might have been tired of MMO's completely, and spent a good deal of time playing other genres. However, this whole time I was aware of a Star Wars MMO on the horizon that I was already committed to trying out.

That day arrived last week, and it is all I have been playing since. Fortunately I was able to "finish" Skyrim around a week prior to launch, so the ability for me to fully commit to a new game was wide open and waiting. So what exactly is so great about it? First and foremost.. it FEELS a lot like you are living in a Star Wars universe. This is due to a pretty slick presentation and structure that knocks down a few of the usual MMO walls that players have been used to, and perhaps have never considered an alternative too.

Getting and completing quests is a much better experience in this game than I have ever seen in an MMO before. If you've played either of the Knights of the Old Republic games (or any of the Mass Effect games) then you know how Bioware dishes out quests. Conversation wheels! Yes, in an MMO you get to actually pick how to respond. Your character has a voice, and not just one that is limited to a handful of laugh social commands. You get a full library of voice acting to enjoy. Conversation wheels also mean you get to make good or evil choices, which I am particularly fond of. I have decided my character will be dark whenever possible. As an Imperial Spy Operative (Imperial Spy is my initial ****selection, Operative is the archetype I chose at level 10) this means I am often killing "loose ends" and sacrificing others for the sake of the mission. Or, I just blast people that I find to be utterly stupid or useless. Great fun indeed! The extra dimension to these conversation wheels that I will not say too much about is GROUP conversation wheels. Yes.. think about that for a second. It involves dice rolls and is great fun. Especially when your friend wants light points and you keep winning the dark point choices. Hillarity ensues!

Another more subtle trampled wall is an idea that I had great difficulty fully wrapping my mind around is "Instant instances". What does this mean exactly? When you walk into an instance you literally just walk through a green transparent wall and you are in it. No load screens. You can jump back and fourth in and out of it without and hesitation. They are, quite literally, instant. I didn't understand what was going on when first experiencing this until I made a connection between the green walls and "Heroic areas" and realized that other people would vanish when THEY walked through the green walls when not grouped with me. Apparently the big text across the top of the screen "Area belongs to (my character name)" wasn't enough to clue me in. This makes grouping a lot quicker.

In addition to this, everyone gets a "pet" and a ship. In this game the pets are actually called companions, and they not only talk to you, but they participate in quest conversations and have all their own armor and such. They are also the focus of the crafting mechanics in the game. You don't actually make anything yourself, you make your crew do it for you! This is particularly handy when running around doing non-combat activities because you can get crafting done while doing other stuff. It's great. I haven't ever had this much fun with a crafting mechanic in a game before. I spent the last two days doing nothing but gathering and crafting.

Anyways, those are just a few of the details I find interesting about the game. I made a pretty good effort of actually avoiding all information about the game before it came out other than general positive or negative comments about it. I think this approach has let me enjoy finding out about this stuff a lot more than if I had read everything about it and knew this all going into it. I am excited to spend the weekend playing the game with my wife who became very interested after seeing me play it and bought herself the game a few days ago.

.. and I still have a ton that I want to do. My wife and I both picked up copies the day it came out and have been spending quite a few days sitting together on the sofa both playing. I get the big screen and she gets my PC monitor on a table. I'm WAY beyond where she is in the game, due mostly to the amount of time I have had available to play, but she has done a good job of ignoring what is going on in my game so nothing is spoiled for her. I find it hilarious every time I turn to check out what she is doing and she is chasing after a butterfly with a very "focused" look on her face.

This game is absolutely loaded with stuff to do. It is true that the main campaign story is actually kind of short, but you are really missing out on a lot of that is the only thing you focus on in the game. The side missions, and what I would even call "side campaigns", are all very fun and lengthy.

I've spent probably 15 hours of game time just doing the crafting mechanics to make ridiculously overpowered armor and weapons. There are some tricks you can do to stack up smithing abilities and alchemy abilities etc, to metagame the heck out of your gear. It's a ton of fun making a brand new sword that is a full 50% more powerful than the one you were using before! Nothing says "satisfaction" like going through all the effort to make a new weapon, and then going out and chopping down bad guys that used to take a few dozen hits. ROAR!!

Hell, I've even gone a bit OCD with buying all the houses I can find in the game, and stashing old armor sets in them. That is a bit ridiculous, I admit, but it is nice when I dash into a house to swap out weapons and run past the cool set of assassin gear that I rarely wear but like looking at.

Someday.. the structure for how this game works will be built into some kind of "mini MMO" or something.

My two biggest complains about the game are 1) THE LOADING SCREENS OMG THE LOADING SCREENS SHOOT ME NOW!! and 2) I can't give my wife the awesome bow I just made. She is stuck in her game with a little wooden one that barely kills rabbits.

It scares me to think how much time I would have spent on this game if I had decided to never use the fast travel feature. Yikes, that would be crazy.

Howdy! I am still around. I haven't posted much over the last year or so. As of the last month or so I burned out on WoW again and have been getting back into playing console games more and more. Specifically...

I tossed up a COD: Black Ops reviewthe other day. No surprise here if you've read my prior COD reviews... it's just a big recycle as usual. While certainly not a surprise anymore, still always a huge disappointment.

Call of Duty is what happens when you sit on your thumbs and milk the cash cow. We are venturing into Dynasty Warriors territory here...

Since my WoW habit has kicked it back into full gear a few months back, I've gone back into that phase of neglecting all the new releases that have come out. At least to the extent that I've only played them for a short time (maybe a few hours) after they come out, and then I get back to my Warrior. It doesn't help that my WoW buddy can text my phone with short messages such as "ICC10?" or "RS?" or the always hard to ignore "ICC25?". This usually pulls me away from whatever I am doing really quick.

I am making a focused effort this weekend to play some other games. Specifically, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is going to get my attention along with some more Red Dead Redemption. I am writing this from the safety of my work computer, in my cube at work, so I can at least put out a plan in my mind before getting home and unconciously turning on the PC. If you don't see any new achievements show up on my profile this weekend... well.. that means I failed. Wish me luck.

Oh, did I mention Halo: Reach is out next week? That should be good and fun for a few days at least. I'm going with the over the top Legendary Edition because I am a sucker. I am very curious to see how the end of the campaign plays out since the end of the book suggests.... a lot of death. We shall see.

So I've been sober from World of Warcraft for about a year and a half. I had quit playing in August before the last expansion came out and had occasionally considered going back. I'd always decided not to because of all the problems I'd had with the game that were too frustrating to deal with. And, because when I was playing, that is all I did most of the time. I recognize that this game is not very good to my other hobbies that I enjoy.

Well, here I am. Installing the game again. Starting with the old disks from the original copy of the game I bought back around a week after launch. This isn't my decision I might add. My wife has begged and pleaded with me for the last few weeks to play it with her. She has tried to play it alone since we both quit, and has had a very minimal amount of fun doing so. After much pleading I finally said "Ok, fine. If you really want me to, I'll play it. But I'm not going to be happy about it." I thought that had got her off the topic since I added an extra layer of potential wife guilt to it, but sadly that did not work.

I came home from work yesterday to find a copy of Wrath of the Lich King on my desk and a big grin on her face.

At least she is paying for the subscription. I suppose that's a plus.

I've been playing Final Fantasy XIII the last few days and so far it has been great. I've only played through one other Final Fantasy game the entire way through at that was FFX on the PS2. I loved that game and so far XIII has brought back a lot of that familiar enjoyment. The quality is top notch and the story is pretty darn interesting, although not entirely immersive. Apparently it's normal in Japanese RPG's to start off the game with all kinds of unknown terminology and then slowly explain what the heck it all means throughout the game. This one has plenty of that.

My favorite thing about this game so far is easily the combat system. At first it's confusing and frustrating since it's done in real time. No slowly thinking about your next attack with this game. You have to act fast or you will get crushed. Once you get used to it you can swap play styles on the fly back and fourth super easy and effectively.

I did hit a wall last night with a particular boss that out of no where is all the sudden super hard compared to other encounters up to that point. I spent a good chunk of last night grinding through easy fights to build up my characters and equipment. That was a bit frustrating as I would hope the game could scale better as the gameplay goes on, but not really a huge problem. Grinding can be satisfying if it means having a bunch of new abilities at the end that you can use to slap around whatever was giving you trouble.

This early in, roughly 10 hours, I'd definitely recommend checking out this game if you haven't tried it yet. I went with the PS3 version to experience the HD cutscenes, and I already feel like it was well worth it. I do miss those achievement popping sounds, but not a big loss.

I finished the game quite a few weeks ago, but I finally found the time to write up a review for it. Overall the game is absolutely amazing. The few very minor quirks about the game are completely overshadowed by all of the fantastic elements that add up to make this a truely epic experience.

My anticipation for the 3rd entry in the series is already nagging at me. I've resorted to picking up the comic books to fill in while the wait grinds on day after day!