I've just opened the news and I could not believe my eyes. Is this really happning... unfortunatelly it is :(.

Best wishes to anyone living in Japan! Hope everyone is safe!

Just in case you need or have info on anyone in Japan this might help you:

http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/

The long awaited Dragon Age 2 release date for Europe has finally arrived. So, like a faithful little gamer I placed my Amazon order today. Along DA 2 I also order BulletStorm, DoW Retribution, Agarest Generations of War and by mistake(which i made) I also got Battle Fantasia which I decide to keep since it was very cheap.

Valkyria Chronicles, has been a title i wanted to buy for a long time and due to a problem with my shpping adress (Romania) i had to place a distinct order for it which will arrive at the end of the month :(. Anyway, I hope these games will last for a few months since my buget has run dry...

On a different note, with much less optimism and a lot more frustration, I decide to complain about to distinct things:

1. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is a piece of crap. Before you feel offended, note that I think the game is very good, but some issues are just sent from the underworld to torment me. Overall the game is very enjoyable. The battle is fast paced, yet a little technical, it's flashy and yet manages to bring great satisfation. This is until you reach the boss fights. It is clear to me that this game was intended to be trial-and-error learning game when fighting bosses since for most of them only a single weapon will help you kill it without significant health loss. So at each boss you have to try each weapon until you find the one that is required. Also most bosses can initiate an animation in which they beat you up and you can't escape and I have played through boss fights that spammed a single move until I died. Which is lame and infuriating.I'm on chapter 14 now and I don't think i want to play it anymore... I've seen some "masters" playing the game on "master difficulty" with no health loss on thought boss fights... they also pi**ed me off.

2. Hater gonna hate. This I understand, since I hate cheese for no reason, but when it comes to good games I don't like people giving scores of 1 or 2 just because they found a single aspect that is not cool for them. I have read at least a dozen DA 2 reviews in which people said things like "They removed crafting, this game sucks" or "The hero can only be human..." and many other stupid reasons to justify bad scores. As a software programmer I understand the effort put into a 40 hours game, with at least decent graphics and awesome sounds (both acting and music). I also understand the fact that the changes are DA 2 are the result of the comunity feedback (for example check JustAdam's blog about DA Origins). So I feel it is not fair to give such a low score just because people are haters. I also saw that for Starcraft 2. The game is litterally a masterpeice. The campaings is great, it looks awesome and the multiplayer never gets old yet there were people who gave it 1 and 2....

Thoughts? Opinions? Cute and funny videos ... anyone?

If there is anyone playing Dragon Age 2 please tell me your thoughts ?

I still have 2 days until the game is officially realeased in Europe and I want to know if I should order it or not.

I have seen the review GS made and I find it misleading. They don't actually give reasons to why the game recieved an 8, so, since the worlds of the people are stronger than the words of paid editors please give me some feedback.

Also, if you are a hater or troll please keep it to yourself....

I just got Marvel vs Capcom 3 and two older games i could not find until now and I played a an hour each just to make an impression... so here it is.

Marvel vs Capcom 3:

Fighting games have been long been a passion of mine, and while my favourite stil remain Namco Bandai it seems Capcom is making considerable efforts to make games more accesible. It so happens that MvC 3 is a step forward in the Capcom jurney to make better games. If you are a patient man you still have the tedios combinations that push your dexterity to the next level but now you have the simple version of things that allows oyu to enjoy the game without the "drama". So, fighting is nice, looks good and has plenty of replayability. The characters are original and put on quaite a "fireworks show" with little effort. The graphics are enjoyable, the stages attractive and the character models look great, even though some models look a little different than the previous games that feature them. Unfortunatelly the fighting is still 3D characters in a 2D perspective which is rather old-school. Overall the game is enjoyable and can keep you glued in front of the TV at least until you play all posible combinations of characters... which is a lot :).

Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes:

While this type of games is enjoyed by less people I still found this SBSH to be a nice experince. The game looks great, especially when talking about fighting animations and hero models (they have manga "writen" all over them). The story is interesting even though it is told in a simple and childish way. If you like fighting hundreds of enemies that mindlessly run around the battle field than this game will surlely appeal to you. Many things were improved from the last games I played for Koei (the PC ones) out of which item creation, materials and story paths are the most obvious. Overall the game promises a lengthy campaing and lot of fightinging with original charactes each with unique moves and gameplay.

NInja Gainde Sigma 2:

Thiis game was released in 2009 it was only now that I was able to get it and.... I was impressed. Aside from the terrible camera, this game is a masterpiece. It is dinamic and flashy, original in many ways and requires some tactical gameplay, since button mashing does not seem to work :D. The story is nice but kind of weak and it has a "deja-vu" felling glooming over it. Even if the game is old the graphics are still good, models and animation are great and level design is inspired. The variaty of weapons and techniques make the game entertaining. Missions are interesting and enjoyable making sure you have a lot more to do after you finish the main story. As a side note, thropies are kind of ridiculous (a lot of "execute a technique" for the first time and a lot of "execute a move" X times)... but hey, it was launched 2 years ago :).

I also installed Dead Space 2 on the PC but i only played the first ten mintues. At first glance the game looks great and promises to be a hit.

It's been a while since my last post because my program has been hectic these last few weeks. In my limited free time I played Super Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 6. After a few days of random matches of each game I had a revellation: THEY LIE!. SSF 4 is rated 9 and is editor's choice while Tekken 6 is rated 8.5.

So I will make a comparison between the two and and prove that they lied...

1. Playable characters: SSF 4 has 35 characters while T6 has 43. While the numbers are not enough to make a difference, it is the original design of each character that puts T6 over the top. Just to name a few Jack, Panda, Mokujin and Yoshimitsu. (Winner: T6)

2. Fighting stiles: simply refering to what fighting stiles the characters use we see that SSF 4 has some made up, super power using, energy ball shotting fighting which in essence is the same for each characters. In SSF 4 all characters have a limited number of special moves that hardly resemple any real fighting technique. On the other hand T6 has a great adaptation of some of the most famous fighting techniques that actually exist in real life: several stiles of kung-fu (Law, Lei and Ling), capoira ( Eddie, Christie), boxing (Steve), sumo (Ganryu), wrestling(King), combat sambo (Sergei), muay thai (Bruce), vale tudo(Craig), taekwondo (Hwoarang) and the list go on. Don't get me wrong it is not like this is a real life simulation, but the posible moves and the animation bare a striking resemple to the real thing. So considering that SSF4 has a made up stiles similar for all characters and T6 has a wide range of stiles that are different it is clear that the complexitity and posible combinations of fights and moves is greater in T6. (Winner: T6)

3. Actual fighting: there are several issues to cover here.

First, as presented above, all characters in SSF 4 have a limited number of moves that are similar and predictable. depending on the characters you use in SSF 4 you might have trouble doing a move that requires a lot of buttons while for other chars have move that are simple and very easy to repeat. While this is true for most games in SSF 4 you can abuse and spam a single move on some chars and win most of the time. In T6 spaming a single move like Kazuya spin kick does not guaranty victory since you have a wide variety of conuters and acctacks to make any spammin inneficient. (Winner: T6)

This brings us to the second issue regading actual fights. In SSF 4 fighting is 2D so block, jumps or moving back are the only way to dodge an attack. In T6, in adition to these, you can step aside, roll to the side when grounded, roll to the front and back, hit while grounded, jump on your feet while grounded hitting the enemy. The counter system is also impressive in T6. You can counter throws, counter special moves, counter counters and like that was not enough they all depend your position to the adversary. You can side step and the throws change, dodge and get to the back of your oponent and they change again. Do a jump while they crouch, press the approriate buttons and land on them etc.... Also there are juggling combos... (Winner: T6)

The controls are easy to master in both games. While SSF 4 has a small bumber of moves and combos available, for some characters doing certain moves requires a lot of dexterity. It is true that for T6 some moves are very had to do, but because there are so many moves available and most of them are so easy to use you don't feel the frustration of an innacesible move like in SSF4. (Winner: T6)

4.Character customisation: in SSF 4 there are two presets and you can buy several packs of costumes. it is true that they are cheap but you still have to pay for them. In T6 you can play, earn money(in game) and buy a wide variety of items for you characters to use. You can change the hair type, color, lenght, ****and aura. you can add scars, glasses, hats, masks and other items depending on the characters. In fact you can do some cosplay with the characrters and re-create a ton of memorable characters from other games, including SSF4. In SSF 4 the characters look the same but might have some other costumes if you pay for it. (Winner: T6)

5. Game modes: all is standard in SSF4: fighting other characters, destroy car, destry barrels, fight the stupid boss, fight other players. IN T6 you can play an entire campaign of 3rd person action using any character. There actually is a story to it, you unlock stages, earn items, find secrets stages and earn money. It's like a game within a game. Aside from campaign which you can also play online with a friend, there are the usual fighting game modes like: arcade, survival practice etc. and ghost fight (which means you fight the AI of ther players you meet online). In conclusion SSF 4 offers a minumum of game modes while T6 provides at least 2 games in one. (Winner: T6)

6 Other stuff: it is true that SSF4 loads faster and lags less in online mode. So this point goes to SSF4 (Winner: SFF4)

In conclusion SFF4 rides the hype of melancholy for the old days when Street Fighter was the boss of all fighting games, but considering all aspects, it is a mediocre game with limited replayability and fun. It is hard to master (including the thropies) and it has multiple weeaknesses in balancing the characters. It provides limited customisation and very few game modes. On the other hand Tekken 6 is still not recognised even if it is the 6th installment in the series. IT provides a action campaign and all standard fghting game modes. Most charcters are easy to master and can be highly customised. Fighting is more dinamic and even if it is more complex it is still easy and fun to play.

Yet SSF4 is editor's choice and is scored higher that T6.... THEY LIE!

1. Extraterrestrials made contact with Earth but the governments kept everything a secret. This basiclly explains how humans are able to travel from one planet to the other in the not so distant future.

2. Earth uses space travel to explore and colonise other planets. While this is another key element of the story, it also makes a lot of sense to use spacetravel to find other civilisations and preferably other planets for humans to colonize. In a several hundred years this planet will be unable to sustain humanity thus expanding our reach seems the best solution out there.

3. It is not aliens that come to destroy Earth, we are pretty capable to do it ourselves. Most games take one of two approaches: either there is an acident that make earth inhabitable or there is an alien invasion. While intentional destruction of Earth has been used in other games (all Fallout games), in Star Ocean it is cleverly used as an incentive for developmant and change rather that the depiction of a desolant aftermath.

4. Alines come to help. Several other games have used this before, but have always considered human inferior than the helpfull visitors. In Star Oceans (pretty much like in Avatar) humans and aliens establish strong friendships motivated by various fellings. While this is also not that new it is the attention the games gives to such details that is most impressive.

5. Almost all developed races are humanoid. While the games provides a large variety of mosnters to fights it also concetrates around the fact that most races really look alike. Some have adaptations ar mutations but in the end they respect the "2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, simetrical body" rule of the humanoids. In most of the books I have read it seems to be a general concensus that the probability of aliens being humanoid is greater that the posibility of finding strage monsters out there.

6. Faster than light travel distorts time. This is used to explain while after a "warp" travel accident ships get out of "worm hole" at different points in time.

7. Parallel universes. While most will consider this a clique it is still a great SciFi idea. In Star Ocean paralle universes play a important role for both the story and the main theme of the game.

8. Smart humans are not terrified of alines races but rather interested and curious. Hopefully if there are aliens out there and we ever contact them we will be willing to listen first, before nukeing the s**t out of them.

9. Young races, in their early stages of development might consider other alines (with spaceships) to be GODS. This is a very common conception about most of the unexplained misteries of the world, like piramids and cave drawings of astronauts. Aliens visited us when we were primitive and we though gods came. This happens to humans that visit primitive planets in the game.

11. Cyborgs (combination of human and robots) can be made and they can prolong life for various creatures. One of your companinons is a cyborg. His body was destryed and he now lives in a robot body. (yes, like RoboCop)

12. Primitive races are violent and evolved races don't want to share technology because it may be used for a wrong cause. It so happens that we humans give tons of money on weapon developments, testing and improvement and tend to give much less money for medicine, research, agriculture or environment. Aliens are smart and know this is typical savage behaviour (they are masters of psychology and sociology).

13. The universe is our home and we are responsable for it. Again, most SciFi author tend to agree that is aliens existed they would most likely form a galactic council and work together for the greater good (execpt if there are Sith around - they are not team players :D).

14. Genetic research may be the key to unlocking our potential. The main human characters are the result of genetic manipulation and posses extraordinary gifts. As a secondary idea, information and special genes get passes along from parent to offspring in various forms. Genetic research might be able to discover and enable/disable ancient or normal genes.

15. Forced evolution is risky business. While this is a rather logical statement it hides the fact that Evolution is considered to be true. In star Ocean everybody talks about Evolution like is the general accept view about life ... everywhere.

These are just a few of the ideas iIrememeber from the game .These are all very nice and very well explained in an accessbile way. It is true that they are not really original and that they have been found in other games, but think about this: while for other games only one of these ideas was the main theme in Star Ocean they are all perfectly put together to form a great and logical story... which is awesome... like a boss :) .

This weekend I beat Vanquish and Star OCean Last Hope.

Vanquish was a very plesant experience. While the story and dialogues were realy simple and predictable the game was awesome. I finished almost all missions in one run and I was very sad when it ended after only 4 and half hours. Yet the game is very good, it offers a decent amount of replayability value and great boss fights. Hopefully they will launch a sequell in the near future.

Star Ocean remained for the 45 hours I played it a source of mixed reactions. While i loved some aspects of teh game I could not avoid seeing all sort of bad aspects as well. Fighting takes a repetitive and boring turn in last few hours of the game and, while the story is good, it still unpolished and stops without any actual conclusion (the real bad thing/guy - missing procedure - is still out there). Another thing i didn't like is the fact that all those interactions with party memebers don't really help you with anything (for example: perks, bonuses, items). They just give you some more details about the story or about heir badkground stories. Still the games feel great, fighting can be exciting and certaintly is original. The characters are unique and very likable and the graphics are good.

As an original aspect of awesomeness I will point out the super collection of the most famous ideas about science fitction and their perfect cobination with the actual story and the characters of the game. Star Ocean is probably one of the few games out there that manage to fit a ton of famous sci-fi elemens around a group of characters and still be able to make a great and logical game. I think i will dedicate some posts to this :).

Meanwhile: off to the post game dungeons ;).

Happy New Year from Romania!

I seems santa has been cool this year and i got , in advance, my present: Vanquish, Castlevania LOS and Star Ocean Last Hope.

So these past few days, after finishing AC Brotherhood, i played a little of each. So i'm here to share my first impressions.

Vanquish is totally overhyped. Don't get me wrong it does seem a good game, but it does not feel "Editors Choice" material. The shotting mecanics are plain and derivative, while the weapons lack originality both in design and fucntionality. The special moves (dash and bullet time - o forgot their names) can be ignored while playing and don't seem to bring any advantage in the fights. I also found something ridiculous at the begining when the US army attacks the space station. Those dudes in the space station left the front door wide open and began to close it only when one of the US ships was right next to it... Why didn't they close it when they saw a bunch of ships comming ?

Castlevania, on the other hand, left a nice impression. While it is clearly derivative, combining Prince of Persia and God of War in the same game seems like a very good idea, especially if the implementation is done corectly. I have played the first two chapers and the only thing I didn't like is how Gabriel looks like... I always seems like his face is to small for his massive body. Aside from this this game is cool.

Star Ocean is probably the first game in years to produce mixed reaction. For most games a few hours are enough to decide if i like it or not, but with this one is different. I'm 5 hours into the game and I still can't make up my mind. It has become regular to see a thing i don't like followed by something that is awesome. I was particullarly impressed by the crafting system which is both original and easy to use. Also the fighting is pretty good, considering i grinded a bit for my first two quest and it did not feel boring at all. While many critics said that some things don't make sense in this game (like the fact that the main characters are teenagers or that they fight with swords) i think that the game offers a pretty good explanation for those things. At least from my point of view this the story is great so far and i'm not bothered by the fact that main characters name is Edge ( which some critics stated it was wierd or uninspired). Another thing a really liked about the story is tha fact that aliens did not come to kill us or enslave us. We actually destryed our own planet and aliens came to help.

The end :)

I finished Alpha protocol a few days ago and aside from the AI problems and the cover mecanics i don't really agree with the GS review. yes the enemy and ally AI is retarted and in some levels you will just kill everything without being shot at, and yes the cover mecanics can be ignored but GS got it wrong. The problem with this game is not the story which, in a "Mission Imposible + James Bond" persepctvie, is actualyl really nice. it's not the RPG elements that are basicly useless, but nice to have, nor the skills that are basiclly just for show. It's none of these things.

The problems with Alpha Protocol are DESIGN and PRODUCTION.

The game is poorly designed! Levels, missions, quest, sub-quest, navigation, maps, doors are all just placed there in a liniar and boring patern. Boss fights are uninsipred, lame and predictable. Items, gadgets and weapons are just for collecting and make absolutelly no difference in the game. The game was designed around dialogue options which were very well developed, to bad they only focused on these aspects and forgot about the rest. Production is bad because the producer allowed for such a bad design to be implemented and when faced with the obvious fail of a release it still went ahead with it. Another year of fine polishing would have made this game a true master piece. To bad they go greedy and launched a poorly designed game.

Alhpa protocol was fun to play but at the final mission i reasiles i didn't use any gadgets, o any otehr weapons or armors. I just went in there, guns blazing and, while this was fun almost every other aspect of the game was ignored. Enough with Alpha Protocol (i will not be doing a review :) ).

AC Brotherhood is still in the slow pace of the begining even though i played for a few hours. Yet, I still haven't foubnd something worth mentioning. The game is good, but is based on the previous game, so no surprise here. I found some visual problems in it, mostly bad textures or glitches in the animations but overall it is a great experience.

And this brings me to the COD BO bi***s that whine about the "tubers". As you might know Nuke is very popular these days, in order to get fast XP so there are a lot of servers that run only Nuke. But wait there is more. Servers have begin to emerge that have rules... special rules... like no grenade launcers, no flamethrouwers and so on... And if you break the rules get kicked... how immature can these people be? It's not like only a single person can play with the grenade launcer. Anybody can use it! And if you make a "tube kill" eveyone wants to "bash you" like you physically violeted them or something... As it turns out the game is starting to lose my interest just because of these things. It is very difficult to play a game in which a grenade tripple kill gets you kicked.... I hate whiny bi***s.