Impressions: Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II

Here's an impression for you, loyal readers of this here blog: This game is shit.

I mean, really awful. So bad that you are literally (and figuratively, if that is even possible) better off renting Xanadu and dancing around your apartment like a freak on speed than renting this game and hoping for more than the easy 10 achievement points gathered from the first stage, along with a healthy dose of boredom. Ok, so I perservered through the second stage (in hopes of getting more Gamerscore), but while I held out through two (count 'em, two!) playthroughs of Eternal Sonata, I seriously could not bring myself to continue with this game. It was insanely laggy, as though I was playing online in a dial-up connection, even though it was single player and not online. And when the Xbox can barely run your totally mediocre game, something is horribly horribly wrong.

Beyond the lag that made my army stutter across the screen, the game was just plain boring as all hell. I was bored, my roommates were bored, even my Xbox360 was emitting a high-pitched plaintive wail, begging me to release it from the torment of running this game. Or maybe that was just the bastardized version of the excellent LOTR soudntrack, crying into its milk. At the end of the second stage, a "Watcher" rose up from the ground to assault my army. It was a giant squid thing (like the one outside of the Mines of Moria in the first movie) and apparently it summoned a lake with it when it rose from the depths of a snowy mountain. Riiight. Regardless, I was clearly meant to use archers to attack it, as it had flailing limbs that threw any of my foot soldiers across the screen if they got remotely close to it. Unfortunately, there was almost no way to tell the archers from the foot soldiers because the screen was so ridiculously jumbled, and even when I did, I am not sure there was even a way to select all of my archers to make them attack it. What I ended up having to do was move all my guys far enough away that the foot soldiers stopped committing suicide and the archers got bored and moved forward automatically to shoot the squid. Ghey. What's the point of me playing if I have to manipulate the AI to play?

So, I finished the first two stages, getting the achievements for completing all objectives for each stage, plus the one for buying my first power. 15 points and the game took 5 days to get to me. OMG GameFly, sometimes you make it so easy to hate you. I went and wrote a bad review of the game so that others are not suckered in by that 6.7 rating I saw. 6.7 my lily white ass.

Here's to the next game being better. Oh wait, it's DMC4 (for xbox 360 this time!!). Of course it will be better.

P.S. - My boss thinks I'm hot.

Gamerscore, or Someone Help Me

My name is Jonathan Singer and I have a problem.

I'm totally addicted to collecting Gamerscore. I know this is bad. Everything about it feels wrong. My recent readings on Buddhism have been telling me that collecting things is a bad thing, representing the attachment which leads inevitably to suffering. (More on Buddhism at some later time.) But it's a little sick, the time and effort I will put into eking out just a few more points in a game.

Case in point: Eternal Sonata.

I have had this game out from Gamefly since 2/21/08. I realize that it is a JRPG, and those tend to take a long-ass time to finish. But I should have long since sent this game back to the hell from whence it came, freeing up that spot on my Queue for other, better games (like the recently shipped Orange Box, though I question whether I will play any of Half-Life 2. I tend not to like getting involved in things part-way through, hence my not watching season 4 of BSG when it starts this Friday, because I'm still not done with Season 2, let alone started and finished Season 3). I mean, I already wrote about having finished Eternal Sonata and gotten the 300 and change achievement points that are possible on a first playthrough.

Of course, the game was made by a bunch of sick Japanese sadists, who require you to play through the Encore mode (basically New Game +, except you start back at level 1, with none of your equipment and the enemies all have twice the HP and 1.5 times the strength and defense) in order to get the other 600some points. This is awful. Who thought of this?

[Ed. note - At the same time, I have to grudgingly give the developers respect for making the second playthrough punishingly difficult. Once you got the timing of counterattacks and blocks down in the first playthrough, it was childishly easy. I could wipe out even the bosses that my walkthrough told me were really challenging. Really challenging for people who suck at video games, but not really challenging for me. I am a master. Well, this was before I played Encore and had Captain Dolce (oh the names are so awesome, so awesome. {cf. Polka}) sweep the floor with my bloomer-covered ass. I find myself again looking at how the course of the game has been changed forever, which is how I felt every time I got a new party level and found that the battle system was upgraded with some new quirk or other, that totally made things fresh and clean again. It's quite nice to find a game that I've spent so many damn hours on continue to surprise me, even if part of that surprise is discovering the inner depths of anger as I shout obscenities at the TV screen.]

Anyway, basically I've spent another 10 hours or so on this game, after having completed it once, just to get to the first of the second round of achievements, which was worth 79 points. So that's cool, but brings the time vs points ratio to like...7.9 points an hour. Hard math that. I actually busted out a calculator. No, really. I feel I can admit this to you, friendly reader types.

Now, the next few achievements will be easier to get, as I near the end of the game. And one of them is worth a cool 321 points, which is hott as Paris says, but really, it's a bit sick. I've pretty much lost enjoyment in the game and am now playing solely to get the achievements and send the bitch back to Gamefly, never to grace my sexy black Xbox ever agains! My replay(s) of Mass Effect will be far, far more enjoyable, because at least in that game, there are no children at all (yes!) and the adults are, on the whole (Preparation H feels good...), pretty sexalicious. And there is interactive sodomy, as they say.

Irregardless, I feel myself coming close to the end of Eternal Sonata and already, my spirit feels lighter and free. I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself when I don't have a bunch of Japanese schoolchildren babbling at me about Piu Grave and Shade Cometu. I'll miss you kids!

Mass Effect, Part 1

Howdy partners,

I figured I would just keep a lil' diary to bring everyone up to speed on my progress through Mass Effect and the elaborate universe within.

Just a few short days ago, I surpassed where I had been previously in the game--just about to finish up the Citadel section. This was good, as I had seen this first bit played as both a Paragon (goody-two-shoes) and Renegade (giant evil ho), so I wanted to see what happened next. New space dramz!

And boy, oh boy, did I get space dramz! After basically re-creating the woman I had made on Brennon's Xbox (only hotter, and with red lipstick...and evil), I toyed with the idea of pursuing hottie Kaidan, but then decided that obvs lesbian sex would be superior, especially if that Fox newscast was right and I could decide exactly what each person did to the other! Hot sexy minigame! So I nipped Kaidan in the bud and told him to keep his personal feelings to his damn self cause I was having NONE OF IT! None, you hear me? And since my character is a full biotic and Liara (the lesbian alien wench!) is a full biotic, I decided I needed some combat strength to fight the hordes of aliens and eeeevil machines I was sure to face on my galactic travels. Thus, I brought along a little woman named Ashley.

Ashley was totally miscast in the voice acting. She should have been voiced by Wanda Sykes. And I'll tell you why, reader-folk. Because Ashley has a (totally incredible) habit of proclaiming, "Daaaamn!" just the way Wanda Sykes does. It's amazing. Plz go buy this game right now if you don't own it, so that you too can be amused by shouting, "Daaaamn! Commanda' Shepahd! That alien's face is whack!" And in most instances, it's true. That alien's face probably is pretty darn whack. Also, Ashley is a total butch and loves to chime in while my evil ho is talking by pointing her gun at people and saying, "You want a bullet through the head? Back down!" You tell 'em, Soulja Boy Wanda!

In other Mass Effect news, my lesbian relationship with Liara is progressing nicely. I'm afraid to snub her by being my typical evil self, so I play it totally nice only with her, and then on the side, manipulate people into killing one another. It's actually quite fun when you get the hang of it, though I had reservations at first, cause my ho is REALLY mean. She constantly tells people to shut the hell up and give her money and has (once or twice) brutally murdered someone who dared oppose her.

Liara though, is a lovely woman who stands really close to me and says how much it means to her that I saved her sorry ass on that crumbling ruin. Plz. When does mama get some lovin'?

I'm almost done with my second main mission since leaving the Citadel and you know what that means! Well, maybe you don't. But it means that I get to have another conversation to bring me one step closer to finding the lesbian within, and that's never a bad thing. I want my character to be able to appreciate the wonders of the female anatomy, not run screaming from it.

Achievements so far: 75 pts. Pretty pathetic, to be sure, but it's a start. I haven't yet gotten to Two Worlds, which will no doubt be a frolic in the land of suck, but I'm seasoned at that game now. With luck, someone has found new ways to cheat and make it easier to get the achievements. I don't relish the idea of playing through it for another go, because the first go...pretty bad. Maybe they patched it and fixed the bugginess. Who knows!?

Stay tuned for part two, in which I save some more stupid aliens, kill some more stupid machines and come closer to unraveling a mystery that will change the course of the game...forever!