The Georealm

So I finally beat Conan for the 360. It was actually pretty good. I had a lot of fun playing it. The game play was kinda off and on when it came to a few things, but I played on the hard difficulty to get the special bonus gamer points, so I cant bitch much about it being hard. The fighting style was much like the old Onimusha, or you can relate it to God of War, but a bit slower. It was significantly faster than Viking, so if you played/liked it you will enjoy Conan.

I thought the story line was a bit whack, but then again who cares… just a game. Turns out Conan was going to raid some temple, and he released some big dog wizard who steals and imbues his armor with some magic powers and gives it out to various creatures. In turn you run around killing these guys and getting your armor back with the help of some Amazon woman. You save naked women along the way and smash up various bad guys from Spartans, to Egyptians.

The thing I liked the most about the game was the actual build of Conan. You had different weapon options, and the environment provided plenty of interactive weaponry. You could use a single weapon, a weapon and shield, a two handed weapon, or two weapons. This was pretty cool, as you had to learn the weaknesses of each type of enemy and try to utilize your skills against them. You got experience for each skill as you used it, and up on master some of them gave you bonuses for a successful completion of that skill. That turned out to be pretty handy when you were low on life, and you could do a back breaker or shield smash to get some life orbs out of a baddie.

All in all pretty cool, and I enjoyed it. I would say if you like hack and slash games this is a good one to pick up cheap at the local game store. Think I payed about $10 for it.

Alrighty, to keep things simple a good friend of mine writes over at http://www.bonesnap.com and he covers just about everything that has to do with COD4.

But I just wanted to blurb about it and say that I was actively using my XBox live membership again and playing online. I was probably the one pissing everyone on my team off because its been forever since I played and I suck pretty bad once again.

On to COD5. I really don’t have much to say about COD5. If you haven’t caught on yet I’m talking about Call of Duty 5: World at War. Take COD4, remove the awesome weapons, take away the interesting story line, dumb down the lighting and graphics, add in a few glitches, and BAM you got COD5.

Set during the world war, you don’t have too many cool guns. Just the boring shit they used back then. The game play was chaotic, but once you beat (by reading my relentless glitch post and getting past that…) it you got the actually fun shit. Nazi Zombie mode and the full campaign in split screen co-op. The split screen co-op was the reason I got the game so my wife and I can play together, but you can only start up to where you have left off on single player, and you cant get Nazi Zombie mode beating the game in co-op. Needless to say I took a few days to beat the bitch and we played it for a few more days and quit. Now and again we break out and play a 2 player Nazi Zombie, but back to COD4 for me.

If you like the game style, COD5 wasn’t a complete waste of money, especially since I caught it on sale for like $25 a month or two after it came out (Thank you best buy marketing screw up number 2! The first was a whole season of Avatar for $11). I would recommend this one to the gamers who like the style, but please do not expect it to bring you into the style. If I hadn’t fallen in love with COD4 I would have ditched COD5 at the curb side and moved on with my RPG style games.

Ok, so everyone has the new Call of Duty 5: World at War. If you dont.. its OK, but I still hold COD 4 far superior. Now the cool thing about the new one? Once you beat the game you can play Nazi Zombie mode… Freakin amazing. But on to the purpose of this post…
If there are any of you out there half as pissed about that stupid bug on COD 5 regarding the Relentless quest where you get to the very end then it just hangs there… ok turns out that freakin Polonsky is stuck somewhere on the map… to fix it? Grab some grenades and go find him. Use the grenades to force him to break free of where ever he is stuck at, then follow him back to the ralley point in the artillery bunker. Quest over and on to the next horrindously difficult quest (if your not playing recruit/regular).. Enjoy and YAY for getting past it…

I just recently finished the the XBox 360 version of Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. It was pretty good, but honestly not nearly as good as the XBox version was. The XBox Kingdom Under Fire and Lineage were very similar in this “realm” of video games. I would call this “realm” massive hack & slash. This new one is still a massive hack and slash but here are some big differences.

First off the maps and “flow” of the game are much different. In the old one you would do quests, where you would go to very large maps and run around it until you finish what you needed to do. On the new one you simply run from area to area in different “regions” to get to the end of the game. The quests and skills actually lead you back and forth between regions needlessly, but as a game it wasn’t horrible.

Next the characters and controls. Same characters of course, as with every KUF lol. I did just 1 this time as I am so far behind on my games I cannot play the same maps OVER and OVER much like Diablo 2 just using different characters. The controls are much different than the XBox as well. In the old one you would be able to do series attacks and special moves by collecting some points from dead folk, but now you run off SP. The SP controls everything, so the more you have the more you can do attack wise, but no impressive special moves or combos. In a hack and slash that is a bad thing… I beat the game fully unimpressed.

Finally the skills. I dont recall any skills in the XBox version, but this one allows you to learn skills as you go. You pick your skill then you have to go kill specific things to get it. Then you can use it. Also extremely unimpressive. I used dash so I could get through the maps faster, and heal cause you had a limit to the number of pots you could carry. The attack skills sucked and used so much SP you could use em for about .25 second. Not very handy.

As I said it was worth playing, and it has a nice co-op feature for 360 to 360 play (no hotseat sorry). I got it clearance at Target for about $19 if I remember correctly. I give it a 2 out of 5.

I must admit first off I only made it through what appeared to be 50% of this game before I finally said it was time for another game.  I got all my goblins and played for a while with em all, but then it just got too demanding. 

The good:  this game is very funny, and has some pretty decent graphics.  Very intriguing storyline, but not enough to keep me happy on my game time.

The bad: The game is very intense in the fact that your must rely on your minions.  You go through the game doing quests to clean up (defeat good and sometimes evil) your dark domain.  I was not able to run around anywhere by myself because the hand to hand system is very unstable.

The ugly: The reliance on your minions is very difficult to control.  You must swap what groups you are controlling and make sure they don’t kill themselves and other very aggravating items.  Lack of items and overall in game help makes for some difficult long battles.  Of course if there is a difficulty setting then I would have chose hard, so one of these days I’ll either finish or start over.

If you have the time and patience then this might be a game for you.  I feel awkward rating a game I didn’t finish, but then I’d have a post I didn’t finish.  On what I played I rate Overlord a 3 out of 5. 

A close friend of mine has written a review on this one that I agree with 100%.  You can find this review at:  http://www.bonesnap.com/blog/?p=26

With that I will not waste your time with more glorious talk about how great this game is.  COD4: Modern Warfare is a definite 5 out of 5. 

So I picked up the game Bioshock a while back after I talked with a guy at work about it.  This game redefines the world we live in to a sad truth.  Bioshock is a new look into the world of FPS, and brings in the popular use of magic.    This combination of shotguns, chemical throwers, electricity from your finger tips, and the ability to control a swarm of bees will take you into an FPS experience that will flood you with stunning visuals, and smooth game play. 

Basic storyline of the game consists of you surviving a plane crash to enter this lighthouse that leads down to an underwater city called Rapture.  In Rapture you will encounter other users called “splicers”.  You and these other splicers get their power by collecting the magic commodity called “Adam”.  Adam is harvested from the dead by little orphan girls who have been corrupted into thinking the dead are Angels who can be collected and stored in a slug like organism implanted in the stomachs of the little sisters.  So your goal is to get this power no matter what it takes, but there is one small problem, Big Daddies.  Big Daddies are bums who are collected and fused into this giant suit of armor and equipped with the ability to kick ass.  Throughout the game you kill off these splicers and Big Daddies, and harvest the Adam out of these little sisters to in the end grow to an ass kicking machine yourself.  You go through the game solving the mysteries of Rapture and what has happened since its inception, and it’s a storyline that will sit on your brain and make you think for hours. 

Subtle drops such as “Look Mr. Bubbles an Angle” from a little sister, “Would you kindly” from good ol Atlas, and “The parasite has his eye on Rapture, keep your eye on the parasite” a classic advertisement in Rapture all add to the vast environment you are left to explore.  Based in the 60’s in a government free world Rapture will leave you longing for more. 

With a great storyline, stunning visuals, and great game play I give Bioshock a 5 out of 5.