So I've played a good amount of Nier, and I can say these honest things about it.

The gameplay is satisfying. It's almost like if Legend of Zelda and God of War had a baby. It's got enough action in it to not make it boring. The graphics are alright, they're no Uncharted 2, but they're good enough for a PS3 game.

The quests are a different story though. You do quests in this game in order to get money, which is semi-difficult to come by early on. Here's the thing, though. Most quests are very bland and have you doing a lot of back-and-forth type stuff. And then there are the quests that are completely pointless. One quest had me travel to the next town just to find out someone had passed away. That's it, no reward, no fulfillment, nothing. (Though based on the quests preceding it, it was kind of touching.)

You can't say the game doesn't take up time though. I've spent a good while on it now and I've only just unlocked weapon upgrading. The upgrade system is pretty standard. Find raw materials, bring them to the guy, pay him, tah-dah your weapon is now level 2. However, some(and by some I mean A LOT) of the things you need to find in order to upgrade these are rare drops. So you have to painstakingly look for these things before you can upgrade your weapon to the next level. I can imagine upgrading every weapon being a long and time-consuming process.

Now for the story. The main character is named whatever you want, so I will call him Nier for the sake of this review. The game starts with a man in a broken down city being harassed by a book to trade his soul for infinite power. After fighting off monsters called Shades, the man decides he must make this deal in order to protect his sick daughter. After he fights off more Shades with his newfound power, he discovers his daughter is succumbing to whatever illness ails her.

Fast forward 1311 years. You are now Nier, an older man who can run like Usain Bolt. His daughter is also sick, but no one is sure what it is. After going on a hunting trip, he returns to find his daughter nowhere to be found. After saving her from Shades, he discovers that she has the Black Scrawl, a virus which slowly corrupts the host. Nier then embarks on his way to find a cure for this illness. Along the way, he will meet Grimoire Weiss, a talking, stuck-up, wise-cracking book. Hilarity ensues. He will also encounter Kaine, a mysterious scantily-clad girl and Emil, a powerful magic doll.

Nier is an alright game. Not the greatest, but not the worst. In an effort to be unbiased, I will give it a score of 7.5. It could've been better, but it's fine for what it is.

I should probably review something... eh, later.

BTW, the reason I use my blog for reviews is that I feel the character limit for user reviews on Gamespot isn't enough to do a game justice. If I want to praise a game like it was an angry and righteous god, or if I just want to tear it apart and throw the bits into a wood chipper, I want more than a paragraph or two to do so. (See: Baldur's Gate blog post)

So anyway, yeah, I'll probably have something new later today.

ON an unrelated note, I took the SAT yesterday. The essay topic royally screwed me. That is all.

Alright, so every so often I need to let my inner nerd out of the closet. Baldur's Gate is one of those occurences. (No, not that Dark Alliance crap, I'm talking about the REAL ****ING DEAL.)

Baldur's Gate is a game by Bioware that plays similar to Dragon Age. And by "similar to Dragon Age" I mean EVERY BIOWARE GAME THERE'S EVER BEEN. But I digress.

Baldur's Gate is based off of the Dungeons and Dragons Roleplaying game, to the extent that it even uses the D&D rules. The game is heavily text and story based and can get a bit confusing at times if you don't pay attention, but luckily you have a handy journal in which your character writes down every little detail he hears. However, the journal has practically no interface, so it can be difficult to find "the goblins are south of beregost" in between the useless entries like " Bandits on the road" or "Iron Shortage" or "Clowns burn down orphanage."

Moving on... The combat is a bit lacking. It's pretty much "click this, click that, then fight, then kill, then win. Then cake." (cookie for reference. Though it is paraphrased.) I haven't quite figured out the magic system yet, though it seems to work like this: Go into the magic menu, choose what spells you want, then use them ONCE. Now you have to camp for the night or find an inn, then go into the magic menu and choose what spells you want again. WHY?! Why do I have to do all that?! Can't I just use my spell, nuke the enemy, then move on so I can immediately nuke the next enemy? It doesn't help either when I run out of nuke spells and my frail mage is exposed to the cold steel of the enemy's swords.

Gold seems to be hard to come by. But that's ok, because the many people in Baldur's gate are willing to part with their hard earned money in exchange for a trivial task, like unclogging their gutter, or running an errand, or ramming your blade up yet another troll's ass. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that the best equipment you can buy costs about the same as a summer home in Prague. It doesn't really matter though, as the equipment you find in your travels will greatly outclass the stuff in the shops to the point where you'll eventually have enough gold to buy every health potion in the district and still have enough left over to buy up every room at the inn.

I haven't gotten too far into the story yet, what with all the sidequests, but I've gathered this much so far: You're a young man or woman, about 20 years old, and have been raised by a mage your whole life. When assassins start showing up at your doorstep, your foster father decides it's time to hit the old dusty trail. Then an armored figure shows up and slays your father like he was a snowman in Hell. You escape and meet up with your father's friends and you embark on an epic adventure that I can only assume will lead to you finding out the world is in danger and you just so happen to be the savior of all mankind. No pressure there.

All in all, Baldur's Gate is by no means bad. It's just average. Other's would say differently, but that's just me. So if you're the type of person that's into all the dragon slaying and trivial task fulfilling, go right ahead. Personally, I'll stick to my Assassin's Creed and Castlevania.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?! O_O

This game is... AMAZING. Now, I've always loved the Castlevania games. But as a kid, I stuck with Nintendo all the way up to the GameCube, so I missed out on this masterpiece of a game. Now that I'm playing it, I can now say that the Belmonts can go to hell, because Alucard is just that much of a BEAST. (Yes, the main characters name is Alucard. Kinda unoriginal, but oh well.)

Still... I do have one gripe with this game. Every 5 minutes I'm finding myself screaming "WHERE THE HELL AM I?!?!". This castle is more of a maze then Metroid! Ok, maybe not that bad, but my point still stands.

Take a look at this map. Not only do I have to go through it once, I have to go through it again UPSIDE DOWN. I mean, give me a break!

But still, this is an outstanding game. If you can get it in any way, shape, or form, you will NOT be disappointed.

Unless you don't celebrate it, in which case.... go out and buy some chocolate anyway! XD

Ok, video game zombie mode time. See ya'll in about 36 hours. =D

So yeah, the cool new banner is thanks to kamikaze_pygmy. If anything I'll switch sporadically between this and the lucario one.

Just giving credit where credit is due. :3

Until I finally get Just Cause 2. From what I've seen in that game, you can blow stuff up, fly aircraft ranging from a hot air balloon to a fighter jet, blow stuff up, cause obscene amounts of chaos, blow stuff up, and explore an exact replica of the island from LOST.

Did I mention the blowing stuff up?!

Now, on a more serious note. Is it just me, or do PS3 games seem to be coming along slowly these days? The only games I've heard of/seen advertised are Nier in April, the new Prince of Persia in May, and Alpha Protocol (which I'm now slightly worried about cause of that half a year pushback...) in June.

I mean, that's only 3 games, and they're all a month apart.

And... now I can't think of a witty way to end this post. So... yeah. ^^^That Stuff^^^

When in doubt, BURN it

That is all.

So I uploaded a new banner image, hit apply change, but it won't change. It's within the filesize and size limits, but it's just not changing.

Note: PROBLEM FIXED!