PixlBit

                               

   This week's gaming started with my purchase of Pandora's Tower and my not playing it all week because I didn't have the time. Then came the weekend and I decided to stick with playing Xbox 360 at my friend's place so we could banter back and forth over what we were playing. He was playing Angry Birds and I constantly told him he was playing a baby game. He of course told me the same and then I went on to rag on him every time I got an achievement. This is just what we do and it's all just for laughs.

      I finished Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Saturday afternoon after 62 hours of gameplay and finally got the 100% completion achievement. What a long trip that was, but a fun one.

    On Sunday I played all day long as usual and began with my backlog of games from 2006. I'm playing just about anything that has the slightest interest to me from that year. The games are cheap and I like the variety and surprise that comes from playing a game I have no expectations for.

     First though was the legendary easy achievement game Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth which my friend got on Amazon and I borrowed for the quick 1000 points. First though, I watched my friend get all 1000 points in exactly 3 1/2 minutes and that's including watching the first cut-scene - yes, I timed him - . When I started it up I was planning to beat his time and so skipped the cut-scene to do it. But it took me a few hours before I got all the achievements. There are only five of them and they are all linked to the number of hits you get in a row, the last one being a 50 hit string. I wonder why they didn't attach achievements to finishing the story. It seems like they tacked on the achievements last minute with little thought.

     I went on to finish the story of the game which follows Book 2 of the TV series pretty closely where Ang is looking for an Earth Bending teacher. I loved the TV series and so even though I played this game mainly for the achievements, I wanted to see how the game played all the way through. i finished it in about six hours and it was pretty enjoyable. I have no interest in replaying any of it however. The fighting is decent but nothing special. Boss fights can be annoying because you aren't very quick in your moves. It's wise to keep some distance and power up your ranged attack. Melee fighting is not too good against bosses.

     Then I started up my '06 backlog proper with Eragon, the game based on the movie and book of the same name. I read the book and saw the movie. The book was good, written by 15 year old Christopher Paolini and published when he was 20 in 2003 and made into a movie in 2006 which was less good. This game interested me initially not because of the licence but because it had co-op. I found out later though that it had only local co-op and not online. I decided to give it a go single player but my disc had a scratch and, after a few hours playing, I had to go out and get another copy to continue. That ended my Sunday night.

     On Monday I picked up another copy at Gamestop for $4 and started playing again in the late afternoon when my friend got home from work. After about 2/3rds of the game I was really getting into the fighting system and beginning to feel like i was playing something akin to God of War or Demon Souls. Eragon is, I found, very far from such an eperience.

     You fight in 3rd person with a sword, bow, and with magic. All of those skills work pretty well in the heat of battle. You can slice and dice and if you get several hits in a row you can grapple your enemy and deliver some extra punishing blow. You can also use magic to push an enemy off a precipice, disarm a shield bearing fighter, or interrupt a large enemy's attack among other things like manipulating the environment to solve puzzles and calling your dragon to give you aid. You can also hang back and power up an arrow with magic to lay low a whole group of enemies. The longer you hold the A button to pull back the arrow, the more accurate the shot. 

     The game also has dragon flying segments which give you limited control of your dragon. You fly along a set route as you shoot enemies below with magic arrows. At times, the rail that you're clearly on pulls you towards obsticles and if you don't adjust you take damage. I finally got fed up with this one area and flew as high as I could while mashing the arrow shooting button to hit enemies that were just off the screen below me. It's cool to dive low and blast away but you just take too much damage from unseen enemies and obsticles that you can't avoid. This is no Panzer Dragoon that's for sure but it is just enjoyable enough to keep me moving on in the game.

     What inevitably frustrated me and made me rage quit was this one level on foot where you are being swarmed by enemies both large and normal and having little room to maneuver. There just wasn't enough time to wait for your magic to recharge or space to dodge. I'd get worn down and then have to repeat a fairly long battle and get just a little farther every time. After many attempts to pass this one area, I gave up feeling like I was unfairly challenged.

     Eragon is not a horrible game, but it's not worth putting up with its clumsy battle system. If you can take enemies one or two at a time, it works well, but larger groups are a real pain.

     After I rage quit Eragon, I played some Full Auto. This is an auto combat/racing game that reminds me strongly of Burnout Revenge but with weapons mounted on your car. Your objective changes from race to race but mainly you try and destroy as much of the environement while still beating a field of cars that are trying to shoot at you.

     The control of your car is pretty good but I got frustrated with this one race where you have to destroy a certain amount of environment while still coming in at least second in the race. Most of the destructible stuff is just off the road and so you find yourself driving off the road to target them and then loosing a lot of time getting hung up on a building or piling through lots of debris, I found it difficult to catch up even with boost which I found tricky to build up because there weren't too many obvious ramps to jump. I had fun with Full Auto for a while but it kept reminding me of how I'd rather be playing Burnout Revenge.

     Then I put in X-Men: The Official Game and played about an hour or two. So far it is doing the barest minimum of what a game should do. It's cut-scenes are just barely motion comics with almost no animation, telling the story with drawings that seem directly referenced from stills from the movie X-Men: The Last Stand. The voice work is by the actors which is nice though. The environments are pretty sparcely detailed and one gets the impression that they are barely disguised tech demo spaces. I played Wolverine, Iceman and Night Crawler so far. Wolverine is pretty slow compared to the wicked fast Wolverine in X-Men Origins Wolverine I played recently. Iceman mainly flies around and handles fine. Night Crawler is my favorite so far because you can teleport right behind an enemy to get in a couple quick hits. It reminds me of the leaping ability of Wolverine in the X-Men Origins Wolverine game which makes the fighting quick and exciting.

     I think I'll continue this game next week and see if I can avoid rage quitting at some lousy bit of gameplay. We'll see.