Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

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** VIKING: BATTLE FOR ASGARD **
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This is a simple, 3rd person hack and slash adventure. There's no multiplayer and no online play, but I'd still give it a good 7 out of 10 simply due to it's enjoyable, mindless fun. It's got just enough variety to keep you interested but nothing too over to the top. You learn a few combos, find a few beer kegs, and kill everyone that gets in your way. Sweet graphics, cool moves, decent violence, and a fairly sweet soundtrack... for those of you into Heavy Metal, I suggest turning off the game music and listening to a Dimmu Borgir album the entire time you play this game. If you do... 8 out of 10.

You're a viking named Skarin that dies on the battlefield only to be revived by the goddess Freya in order to lead the mortal 'army of man' against the evil goddess Hel and her force of undead 'champions'. It's up to you to rally what's left of the viking warriors into battle in order to fight your way across the land to Hel's mighty tower and defeat her once and for all... thus releasing her evil grip from the mortal lands.

Gameplay is pretty straight forward. You'll start on the shores of an island with a few viking warriors who are trying to set up a base camp. Your numbers will be low and you'll be tasked with exploring the island looking for other vikings to join the fight. The island is completly open ended allowing you to go wherever you please but regardless of where you go or what order you do the tasks in, the gameplay is all largly the same.... kill stuff.

Each island will have a castle... and that castle needs to be seiged. To do so, you'll have to meet a small list of requirements. This list is short, and sounds like it has a lot of variety to it but in the end, each task is the exact same: Go to a place, kill some enemies. It sounds boring, but if your a fan of hack-n-slash, it's really a lot of fun. The maps are all well made, and there's a good variety in where you can find viking warriors. Sometimes you come across a few tied up to a pole in the middle of nowhere, other times you'll be tasked with liberating a conqured lumber mill... and sometimes, you'll be required to sneak your way through a heavily gaurded outpost looking for runestones that will help you summon dragons when you finally choose to seige the local castle.

And, impressioned vikings are in areas controled by Hel... you can always tell prisioners are nearby due to the lack of color and overall dreyness of the surrounding area. Once a section of map has been liberated, light returns to the area and the flowers and grass grow healthy again. It's a nice touch and a good way to guide you in the right direction... when in doubt, head towards the darkness.

You got your basic combos to start with and you'll instantly realize that Vikings don't take the act of killing lightly... within the first 5 minutes, you'll be hacking off heads and severing limbs in no time. Each kill garners you a little bit of experiance and money, and with enough experiance and money comes the oportunity to buy a few new weapons and a good variety of new limb-severing moves. By the end of the game you'll have a huge arsenal of ways to cut a man in half and best yet, killing blows happen in slow motion... which somehow rarely seems to gets old.

When basic swordplay isn't enough, you'll be able to buy a few magic spells... these aren't anything fancy, but it is enough to change up the fighting a little bit. Activating the spells gives your sword a magic power that, depending on the spell, stops the enemy dead in his tracks. You have the usual three.. fire, lighting, and my personal favorite, ice. You'll find that these come in quiet handy towards the end of the game, but none are ever required to do anything.

The game takes place on 3 diffrent islands. Each island is representational of a 'level' so although each island is completly open-ended and can be explored freely, it is not possible to travel between islands at will. In otherwords, you can't get to island 2 until you finish all the tasks on island 1. But once you reach island 2, there's no going back to island 1 ever again. Then again, outside of the achivement based collectables, they'll be no need to go back so you won't mind.

Building your army is pretty straight forward. Find some guys in a cage, kill some guards, open the cage and release them. After releasing the prisoners, they'll help you fight and kill any nearby enemies you may have left behind... so it's up to you to decide if you want to try to kill everyone yourself, or just the few you have to kill to reach the cage in order to recruit help. A nice, little touch.

Ocassonally you'll have to enter an area where there are too many enemies to kill by yourself. That's not to say that you can't try... but it's pretty damn hard, if not downright impossible. In areas like these, you'll be able to sneak around undetected and use your wide array of stealth-killing moves to dispatch only those enimes that you have to. Stealth kills are easy to execute and often times result in cutting a person in half from behind. Simple, but enjoyable.

There are a few mini bosses you'll come across, Giants and Champions, but they largly play out exactly the same. They're just like every other enemy, but much larger and require far more hits to drag down. Once injured the final blow can be dealt through a series of button timing events.

Once you've completed all the sub tasks you'll be given the option to seige the local castle... which is where the real fun comes in. When you seige a castle, you'll be placed in a huge army vs army meele fight where you'll be tasked with finding, and killing, local summoners who are constantly summoning undead to the fight. It's a lot like Dynasty Warriors but way more compact and chaotic. Best part, dying has no effect here as each side has a summoner that's willing to bring anyone who falls in battle back to life.

This is where the one flaw in the game starts to show though. The combat, although good, is lacking a key feature... a targeting system. As you fight, your character will just randomly jump from enemy to enemy mid-combo with no real user control. Most of the time, this works well... but durring big fights like this it's largly undesirable as there are just far too many targets nearby to worry about killing them all. Instead, you only need to focus on the summoners. Summoners, however, protect themself with a series of Totem Polls located in a small area around them. You have to destroy each totem poll before being able to attack the summoner directly. The problem occures when you try to attack a totem poll, but find your character ignoring the poll for a nearby enemy often times resulting in many undesirable deaths. These large scale fights would be so much easier if there was a way to tell the character to ignore the mass of enemies nearby, and focus only on the improtant ones. The final boss features the same general mechanic and becomes far more dificult to defeat because of it. It doesn't ruin the game, but it can get a bit frustrating.

Once a castle is seiged, you'll move on to a new island where the tasks of rebuilding an army start again.

That's pretty much it... explore, kill, upgrade... rinse, repeat. I personally loved it. The graphics where sweet, the water effects where the best I've ever seen, and reardless of how complex other games get, it's always fun to just button mash your way to victory from time to time.

Also, it comes loaded with lots of easy achivements. One solid play through on 'hard' is all you'll need for all 1000 points.

Personally, I'd like to see a sequal...

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** INFINITE UNDISCOVERY **
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This game is about as badly sterotypical as you can get for a JRPG... you're a lame, socially outcasted teenager with no self esteem who mistakenly joins up with a small party of wondering warriors on a mission to save the world. The party itself, is just as equally bad. Your cast of characters includeds all the basic sterotypes... the generic strong man, the sensative leader, the untrusting overbearing jerk, cute children for comic relief, a robot, an animal, and of course, the super attractive female that runs around in a short skirt all day giving you the sex eyes. You, of course, are far to under-confident in yourself to notice.

Story wise, the game is no diffrent. Like a lot of failed JRPGs it's long, and needlesly drawn out with little or unsuprising plot twists. The idea is that, in this land, everybody born under the light of the moon is given a magical power as a gift from the widly worshiped moon-God. These powers vary and can give the person containing them anything from the ability to control fire, to the ability to heal the wounded... basic RPG stuff. There's a catch though... the moon isn't always shining and sometimes people are born when no moonlight is present. These people are outcasts... being unblessed by the moon-God they are considered unworth to live amongst the blessed and are thus, forced to live outside the walls of the big cities without the protection of the government and armies within. One day, a really power madman creates the 'Order of chains' and begins traveling the world using all of his power to chain the Earth to the Moon... nobody really knows why, but doing so has caused many of the wild animals in the area to become mutated or overly agressive. Only a small band of warriors lead by "The Liberator" have the power and the nerve to fight the Order, sever the chains, and free the people once again.

It probably sounds kind of interesting, but it's not. Instead of a thrilling story of adventurers fighting an evil army of villians with the power to create and control magical chains, you spend your time wandering flatlands killing snakes and sitting through tons of badly rendered CGI films that contain little action. This is probably the biggest issue the game suffers from...

There are TONS of CGI movies in this game. I get that it's an RPG so there's going to be a lot of story, but this game over does it. Every time you enter a new map, you get a cutscene. Every time you go to a new town, you get a cut scene. Everytime you meeta new character you get a cutscene. When you walk back outside from meeting said character... you get a cutscene. Everytime you run into a boss you get a cutscene... seriously, you can't take 15 steps in this game without being forced to watch a cutscene. It's just too much. You open a door... cutscene. You go upstairs... cutscene. You leave the building... cutscene. Anytime you do anything that just slightly progresses the story, it's fronted with a cutscene. If you need to leave town to continue the story, leaving town will bring on a cutscene. Sometimes they even appear when you find save points on the map. It gets old fast, and becomes very annoying because none of these cutscenes are skipable.

That last part is pretty important... NONE OF THE CUTSCENES ARE SKIPABLE. It's not a problem at first because you want to watch them. But it becomes a huge problem later when you realize that often times, long boring cutscenes come between a save point and a boss fight... meaning every time you die, you have to re-watch the same movies over and over and over again just to try to win one fight. It happens a lot and there is no way around it. Worse yet, the last save point in the game comes before 15 minutes worth of movies... meaning if you die durring the last boss fight and have to try again, you have to watch the same 15 minute long movies again. It literally took me hours just to try the last fight a small handful of times. Very agrivating.

What's worse, is that none of these cutscenes are exciting... they don't feature explosions or swordfights. No, almost every cutscene in the game is a CGI film of the characters standing in a circle talking to each other. Considering the game was originally japanese and there's no way to turn the japanese text on, you're forced to watch tons of badly voiced acted scenes of people standing around talking... and often times, their mouths don't even match up with what they say. Which is even more annoying when the dialog is moronic and often revolves around people repeating what others have said. Example...

He's not sick.
He's not?
No, He's getting stronger.
Stronger?
Yes, stronger?
GASP! How can that be
Let me explain
Yes, please explain
It's the magic spell
the magic spell?
Yes, the magic spell.

Picture hours of that... badly voiced, hours of that. What's worse, is that not all the scenes contain audio. Although most of them do, other, more improtant scenes, don't have any sound to them at all... and these are usually the scenes that inform you of where you need to go. Why didn't they finish the american audio? Not enough money to pay the actors? Lazyness? We'll never know...

Gameplay wise, the game doesn't improve. The combat is in real time so no more waiting for your turn to choose "Attack". Instead, you have your basic array of combos and the ability to use special moves from current party members. But this is widly flawed. For instance, you have to hit one button to bring up a list of characters, then another to select the character... then another to choose which move to cast. Sometimes here, you're forced to then aim the move, and yet another button to execute it... the action doesn't stop while this happens so it has to all be done in real time. It's largly impossible and just not worth it.

Teamate AI is alright... but they strangly refuse to refil their own MP when it runs out. Which wouldn't be so bad, but accessing the menu to use items, doesn't pause the game. This means, you can get attacked and killed while trying to find a potion to use on yourself or a teamate. If a teamate runs out of magic durring a bossfight... that's usually the end of their magic, you won't have time to refil them.

The game world looks amazing and maps are huge... but largly empty, confusing to navigate, and have almost nothing to find. They're pretty to look at, but you quickly learn that there is no need to explore them. Ocassionaly you'll find a chest containing a potion, but that's about it. And the time required to reach the chest, wasn't worth the reward. Cities are no diffrent and most of the castle rooms buildings are completly empty, or contain little more then random NPCs withzero information to offer.

I don't get a lot of time to play video games so often times I play 2 hours tonight, and not again for 3 days. Because of this, I ran into another problem... It's easy to forget what's going on, what you're suppose to be doing, and where you're suppose to be going.

Unfortunitly there are no ingame hints or directions to be found... if you forget, you're fucked. The start menu offers a little, one sentance, summary of the current events; but it's rarely helpful. One example, "The team needs to return to Edward and give him the medicine". This may sound helpful but it's not. It's only helpful information if you already know where Edward is. If you don't know where he's at... there's no ingame way to find out. Why the game doesn't tell you to "Return to [town] and give Edward his medicine"... I'll never know.

Overall, the game is long, predictable, and boring. The monsters are lame, the controls are bad, and there's zero content outside of watching the story (no minigames, no collectables). If you're a lonly 12 year old with very few friends and no chance of getting a girlfriend in the next 10 years, check it out... this game is aimed at you. But if you're an adult or a socially accepted person, you'll find the generic characters annoying and the story downright laughable

0.5/10

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--- TURNING POINT: FALL OF LIBERTY ---
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I knew this game was going to be kind of clunky when I rented it (it has a user score of a 4 out of 10) but I just couldn't help myself.... I'm big on experiancing the story of a game and this one seemed unique.

The idea is that Winston Churchill dies before WWII starts altering the history of the events that got America into the war... so America stays out of the fight, until Nazi Germany invades New York.

The game starts off with you as a New York construction working building a skyscraper when the german planes start flying overhead. You have to climb down the steel beams, get yourself a gun, and start fighting back... it's WWII, but on American soil.

It's a FPS... but a pretty mediocre one. The game is clunky and slow, the enemy AI is terrible, hit detection is questionable, and the game is riddled with bugs. None of these are show-stoppingly bad, but it makes for a sub-par game overall. The fact that the game is only about 4 or 5 hours long, doesn't help either (or does it?)

My biggest complaints come from the games lack of overall polish. For a game that's all about fighting WWII in America, they don't do a very good job of reminding you that you're in America. Most of the game takes place in ally ways or empty streets that look like the could be anywhere... there's a distinct lack of American culture in the game. There's a few minor scenes featuring the Sears Tower and the White house, but that's about it... I'm 3 stages away from finishing the game and I think I've come across one American flag the entire time. With most of the buildings being generic shells and almost zero reffrence to American pop culture (music, movies, scenery, etc..) I often forget that I'm in America at all when playing.

The stages can also be annoying to navigate. They're pretty striaght forward for the most part, but it's often times confusing to figure out just where the map is trying to lead you. Sometimes you'll come across a hole in the floor that the game expects you to jump into... but other times, a real similar looking hole will be an instant death trap. It's the same with rubble... sometimes rubble will turn into ramps or will be a crossable byproduct of a newly created hole in the wall... other times it's use as an unpassable stage boundry, but it can get confusing to figure out which is which. Many times, in the first few levels, I've almost gotten my character stuck by trying to jump over rubble that's suppose to be an invisable wall. To make matters worse, the developers tried to add in a bit of platforming so on occassion you'll come across a stack of boxes or a wall you can climb, or edges/ropes you can hang from to reach new areas... but there's never any really clear indication of when this is possible. Once you do it, it seems so obvious, but durring your inital playthrough it's hard to figure out what wall is there as a boundy, and which one is there to be climbed.

None of this would be that bad if it wasn't for the terrible checkpoint system. Checkpoints are far and few between and dying means going back to the start of the last checkpoint. It's annoying to have to kill the same 4 rooms of enemies multiple times just because you mistakenly jumped in the wrong hole. There was a particular fight I kept losing not because I wasn't good enough to win, but because I didn't know what to do. It turns out, in this scenario, that my enemy is immune to bullets and must be punched to death. I sure wish the game would have told me that before my 10th try... it doesn't help that there is no punch button either. Instead, when you approach an enemy a fist icon appears on the screen allowing you to trigger a close combat fight. This would be ok, but like all interactive objects in the game, the icon is hard to trigger and often times doesn't display when you think it should. Often times I can't trigger the fight simply because I'm too close.

Too close for close combat?

The stages are littered with your typical trash... abandoned suitcases or building rubble. But unlike modern games where these are free floating objects that get kicked out of the way when you walk... these peices of trash are actually parts of the map. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten backed up into what feels like a corner durring a gunfight just to find after the carnage is over, that I'm being blocked by a suitcase on the floor... backing into objects is an unavoidable aspect of FPS games, but I find it happens far to often in Turning Point. Constantly I'm struggling to back out of doorways and I somehow always manage to get stuck on the stupidest of things. Annoying... especially when you have to reaload at a checkpoint after getting unfairly killed by a doorknob.

Durring the game, you're given objecives that tell you where you need to go and what you need to do next. Unfortunitly, the game does this poorly. Durring the game, all you get is a message that says "Objective added", and it's up to you to pause the game and read what that objective is. These objectives are small and vauge making me wonder why they don't just appear on the screen... there's plenty of room for the words "Destroy the tank" on screen... why do I have to pause the action?

There's a small variety of guns but nothing to brag about and story wise, the game is hit or miss. There's not a whole lot of 'story' going on outside a few one or two minute cut scenes between stages. Most of these are generic bullshit though... you meet some guys in the army, ride in a truck, watch a new story about the Nazi attack on TV. It's enough to keep you interested, but not enough to make up for the shortfalls of the actual gameplay. There's a few scenes that you can tell are suppose to be 'epic' but fall short due to the general bland gameplay... blowing stuff up is only satifsying if it was satisfying to reach the point where you set off the bomb. Sadly, this game lacks that thrill.

Loading times are bad and you'll experiance a fair amount of lag durring the single player experiance while the game tries to load new parts of the stage or the next scripted event. Planes crashes just aren't that great when you miss most of the crash due to single player lag. It does little but make an already clunky game come off as that much more clunky and unresponsive.

That's not to say that it's all bad though. There are some cool experiances to be had and although the story in generally bland and uneventful, it is interesting to hear the story of WWII through a diffrent path in history. Regardless of how average the gameplay is, fighting in a Nazi controlled white house does have its fair amount of joy... the graphics are decent and the music, although nothing that reminds you of being in america, is solid and fits well with the game. There's a few scenes where you run into American refugees that are cool, and it is cool to walk onto a scene of Nazis searching apartment buildings or fighting with random citizens trying to protect their families.

If you got nothing else to do and you like FPS games, rent it. It's not terrible, it's just not great... it has a ton of flaws that drag it down but none of these make the game difficult to play or too overly frustrating. They'll be the occasional "I'm lost" moments and you'll probably have to replay a few sections of a stage... but I've played games that where better made and far more aggrivating to play. I'd consider it a casual shooter... it's a bit short (4 hours) and the enemy AI is stupid and slow, so I wouldn't suggest buying it. I'd say it's worth a rent if you're really really bored but just don't go into it with high hopes.

At 5/15/09 02:01 PM, rsslee43 wrote: sounds fun.

After beating it, I may have been a bit hard on it... but everything I said is true. It's not absolutly terrible, it's just not that great either. I found it far less annoying to play when some friends came over to keep me company while I played it. But alone, it seemed long, tedius, and boring.

At 5/15/09 03:00 PM, XxTheWorldIsYoursxX wrote: Great idea, it just wasn't finished.

Yeah... this game is one that would have greatly benefited from a six month delay.

It's a decent game, but it's just missing so many obvious details... like enemies don't show any sign of being hit so I'm never sure if the hit detection is off, I missed, or it was a hit.

It probably doesn't help that FPS games aren't my favorite. Don't get me wrong, I like FPS games, but FPS isn't at the top of my favorites Genres... I tend to go hard on FPS games because of that. I'm willing to overlook some basic shortfalls in a sandbox game cause I love 'em. FPS fans might be able to do the same here.

It's not that bad... there's a lot of crime but it's not usually random crime.

There's a lot of criminals on criminals crime. Drug dealers killing other drug dealers or gangs killing other gang members. We get a lot of 'overaction crimes'... fights in a bar turning into a shooting outside, or a broken home turning into a murder scene... but it's not like this is generally a dangerous place to live.

If you mind your own business and you don't go out of your way to give someone a reason to hurt you, you'll generally be left alone.

I knew this game was going to be kind of clunky when I rented it (it has a user score of a 4 out of 10) but I just couldn't help myself.... I'm big on experiancing the story of a game and this one seemed unique.

The idea is that Winston Churchill dies before WWII starts altering the history of the events that got America into the war... so America stays out of the fight, until Nazi Germany invades New York.

The game starts off with you as a New York construction working building a skyscraper when the german planes start flying overhead. You have to climb down the steel beams, get yourself a gun, and start fighting back... it's WWII, but on American soil.

It's a FPS... but a pretty bad one. The game is clunky and slow, the enemy AI is terrible, hit detection is questionable, and the game is riddled with bugs. None of these are show-stoppingly bad, but it makes for a sub-par game. The fact that the game is only about 4 or 5 hours long, doesn't help either (or does it?)

My biggest complaints come from the games lack of overall polish. For a game that's all about fighting WWII in America, they don't do a very good job of reminding you that you're in America. Most of the game takes place in ally ways or empty streets that look like the could be anywhere... there's a distinct lack of American culture in the game. There's a few minor scenes featuring the Sears Tower and the White house, but that's about it... I'm 3 stages away from finishing the game and I think I've come across one American flag the entire time. With most of the buildings being generic shells and almost zero reffrence to American pop culture (music, movies, scenery, etc..) I often forget that I'm in America at all when playing.

The stages are also annoying to navigate. They're pretty striaght forward for the most part, but it's often times confusing to figure out just where the map is trying to lead you. Sometimes you'll come across a hole in the floor that the game expects you to jump into... but other times, a real similar looking hole will be an instant death trap. It's the same with rubble... sometimes rubble will turn into ramps or will be a crossable byproduct of a newly created hole in the wall... other times it's use as an unpassable stage boundry, but it can get confusing to figure out which is which. Many times I've almost gotten my character stuck by trying to jump over rubble that's suppose to be an invisable wall. To make matters worse, the developers tried to add in a bit of platforming so on occassion you'll come across a stack of boxes or a wall you can climb, or edges/ropes you can hang from to reach new areas... but there's never any clear indication of when this is possible. Once you do it, it seems so obvious, but durring your inital playthrough it's hard to figure out what wall is there as a boundy, and which one is there to be climbed.

None of this would be that bad if it wasn't for the terrible checkpoint system. Checkpoints are far and few between and dying means going back to the start of the last checkpoint. It's annoying to have to kill the same 4 rooms of enemies multiple times just because you mistakenly jumped in the wrong hole. There was a particular fight I kept losing not because I wasn't good enough to win, but because I didn't know what to do. It turns out, in this scenario, that my enemy is immune to bullets and must be punched to death. I sure wish the game would have told me that before my 10th try... it doesn't help that there is no punch button either. Instead, when you approach an enemy a fist icon appears on the screen allowing you to trigger a close combat fight. This would be ok, but like all interactive objects in the game, the icon is hard to trigger and often times doesn't display when you think it should. Often times I can't trigger the fight simply because I'm too close.

Too close for close combat?

The stages are littered with your typical trash... abandoned suitcases or building rubble. But unlike modern games where these are free floating objects that get kicked out of the way when you walk... these peices of trash are actually parts of the map. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten backed up into what feels like a corner durring a gunfight just to find after the carnage is over, that I'm being blocked by a suitcase on the floor... backing into objects is an unavoidable aspect of FPS games, but I find it happens far to often in Turning Point. Constantly I'm struggling to back out of doorways and I somehow always manage to get stuck on the stupidest of things. Annoying... especially when you have to reaload at a checkpoint after getting unfairly killed by a doorknob.

Durring the game, you're given objecives that tell you where you need to go and what you need to do next. Unfortunitly, the game does this poorly. Durring the game, all you get is a message that says "Objective added", and it's up to you to pause the game and read what that objective is. These objectives are small and vauge making me wonder why they don't just appear on the screen... there's plenty of room for the words "Destroy the tank" on screen... why do I have to pause the action?

There's a small variety of guns but nothing to brag about and story wise, the game is hit or miss. There's not a whole lot of 'story' going on outside a few one or two minute cut scenes between stages. Most of these are generic bullshit though... you meet some guys in the army, ride in a truck, watch a new story about the Nazi attack on TV. It's enough to keep you interested, but not enough to make up for the shortfalls of the actual gameplay. There's a few scenes that you can tell are suppose to be 'epic' but fall short due to the general bland gameplay... blowing stuff up is only satifsying if it was satisfying to reach the point where you set off the bomb. Sadly, this game lacks that thrill.

Loading times are bad and you'll experiance a fair amount of lag durring the single player experiance while the game tries to load new parts of the stage or the next scripted event. Planes crashes just aren't that great when you miss most of the crash due to single player lag. It does little but make an already clunky game come off as that much more clunky and unresponsive.

That's not to say that it's all bad though. There are some cool experiances to be had and although the story in generally bland and uneventful, it is interesting to hear the story of WWII through a diffrent path in history. Regardless of how average the gameplay is, fighting in a Nazi controlled white house does have it fair amount of joy... the graphics are decent and the music, although nothing that reminds you of being in america, is solid and fits well with the game. There's a few scenes where you run into American refugees that are cool, and it is cool to walk onto a scene of Nazis searching apartment buildings or fighting with random citizens trying to protect their families.

If you got nothing else to do and you like FPS games, rent it. It's not terrible, it's just not great... it has a ton of flaws that drag it down but none of these make the game difficult to play or too overly frustrating. They'll be the occasional "I'm lost" moments and you'll probably have to replay a few sections of a stage... but I've played games that where better made and far more aggrivating to play. I'd consider it a casual shooter... it's a bit short (4 hours) and the enemy AI is stupid and slow, so I wouldn't suggest buying it. I'd say it's worth a rent if you're really really bored but just don't go into it with high hopes.

I only still come here, because it's one of the few active forums I can visit at work. Once I leave the office, I don't even think of this place.

I think the decline comes from the mods and their attitudes as well as the new 'family friendly' mode that was brought in once Tom started making console games.

In the glory days, we could post tits and make spam topics until our heads blew up. Unfunny spam topics where just that... unfunny. They got few replies and left the front page in a hurry... but every now and then you got some good ones that gave us all hours of entertainment.

But it's all changed now... if you make a funny random remark, it's considered spam and you're booted from the forum. Making unfunny topics results in the same thing and this hurts creatvity on a whole because every post you make is clouded in a fear of being baned. Even when people work up the never to make random topics, there's not enough ballsy people to reply for fear of getting banned simply for posting in a 'spam' topic.

The end result is a bunch of scared people having the same handful of safe conversations over and over and over again.

Bigbadron started it, Ozcar drove it into the ground, and Zeroks "i'm a perfect little goody two-shoes" attitude enforces it. We need mods that know how to have fun... not mods that think that they have to run this place with an iron fist or it'll implode. It's just the internet, no harm comes from a topic about peeing in somebodies butt... regardless of how stupid and immaure it may be.

At 5/14/09 06:00 PM, Saen wrote: Oh boy i live the mental attitude of the twisting extremists!

Says the guy who wants rap to go away simply because he doesn't personally find it enjoyable... completly oblivous to the fact that lots of other people, all over the world, do.

Yes... there is nothing wrong, crazy, or creepy about asking a person out on a date.

It's normal human behavior and it's the only way you're going to get a date... after all, dates dont' just appear magically out of thin air. You have to talk to the person, and ask them out.

Worst thing that can happen, is that he says no. But so what? At least you have a chance of getting a date if you ask... not asking always results in the date simply, not happening.

We should destroy every type of music I don't like!

Sounds logical... fuck what makes others happy... this planet is all about ME!!!!

At 2/28/09 02:54 AM, TheOnlyJBK wrote: Its called hair metal

How where GNR a hair metal band? At any given point in time there was maybe two members with big hair, if even that.... and none of the members ever wore make-up, high heels, fancly clothes, or performed dance moves on stage.

Musically, they avoided most of the hair metal band sterotypes... things like love ballads and track after track about sex.

At 3/17/09 09:47 PM, Killing-joke wrote: it's not what I call metal

What would you consider metal?
What makes one band metal, and another just 'hard rock'?

At 3/17/09 09:58 PM, MexicanGun wrote: So how the fuck are we going to discuss if you're not going to take different opinions?

How are we going to discuss it if I just agree with everything everybody says?

They're not agressive enough to be Metal, as someone else said.

By who's standards? 2009s? Keep in mind, GnR started in the early 80s... Metallica where still an opening act and Bruce Springstein was Rock N Roll. Given the time period, I'd say GnR where pretty aggressive.

At 5/14/09 04:13 PM, phanaj wrote: They're hard rock. If you listen to paradise city, sweet child o mine, or November rain, you can't possibly tag them as metal.

What's not metal about any of those tracks?

I'm not trying to sound like a jerk... I really want to know... why is it ok for Ozzy to slow things down but it's not ok for Axel? And what about Paradise City isn't metal? The drums? The fact that it was a huge radio hit?

I personally don't get it... the 80s sucked. Everybody was into Neon and doing group dances like the Electric Slide. You Spin me Right Round was a new song and Michael Bolton was kicking ass on the pop charts.

Put yourself in that area. Imagine a time where Footloose is not only new, but toping the billboard charts. You've never heard Cannibal Corpse and Nirvana are still a decade away. YOU LOVE FOOTLOOSE... and then you hear GnR... would you really, in all honesty, at that point in time, consider what you are hearing as "rock"?

How could you, Footloose is rock, and GnR are heavier then that... it has to be metal. Hard rock didn't really exist yet and the attitude of the member didn't live up the rock standards... it was a metal lifestyle through and through... played by metal guys... doing heavy metal shit... on tour with heavy metal bands... and selling their albums to heavy metal fans.

how is it rock?

At 4/14/09 11:42 PM, xSinHarvestx wrote: By the year 2000, more than 100,000 Americans a year were seeking treatment for marijuana dependency, by some estimates."

By some estimates? What does that mean? Are there 100,000 people seeking help for marijuana addiction or not? And where are these people and why are they seeking help? You can't say it's addicting because the court forces someone arrested under the law of possession to go to a counsiling class.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2006, 14.8 million Americans age 12 or older used marijuana at least once a month. Only 100,000 of them went to seek help for it... doesn't sound very addicting to me.

Besides that, it comes with zero withdrawl symptoms and quiting is as easy as just not doing it.

I was informed by my doctors that Xanax is a diffrent story... I can't just choose when to take the drug, I have to take it once or twice a day every day. Refusing to do so, missing a dose, or not filling my prescription will result in withdrawl symptoms that, believe it or not, my result in more panic attacks. I can't choose to stop either, for the same reasons. If I feel like I no longer want to take the drug, I have to go to the doctors and they have to ween me off the drug through use of other presciption medicines that may come with any number of other side effects.

Choosing to take Xanax is a life long decision. One that ties me to increased healt insurance rates, constant visits to the doctor, and makes me a slave to a presciption pill company that has me physically addicted to a drug that actually makes my problem worse.

Not only that, but the drug effects me all day. I have to take Xanax when I wake up and keep in my system until I go to sleep. If it changes the way I act, it's a permanent change... marijuana effects you for maybe 30 minutes at a time. I can choose when I can get high and just how high I want to be.

Worse yet, I don't understand why it's supposably ok for me to take one mind altering drug made in a lab by mistake-prone humans who are splicing together any number of unknown chemicals but it's not ok for me to take a natural growing mind altering drug that doesn't come with the addiction or negative side effects... why is it ok for me to use drugs if they have a pharamacutical companies label slaped on the side?

It's ok to smoke, drink, and take pills for everything from heart problems and blood preassure to erictile disfunction... but fuck me if I smoke pot to insure I don't stab my eyes out with scisors in a panic induced rage right?

This isn't a thread about drugs though... but I'm just trying to point out that it is a decision I made wisely. I was 26 when I got high for the first time. And I did so only after looking into the facts and comparing the positive and negative effects of both pot and the prescription pills.

Marijuana is the obvious choice. It's effective, safe, cheap, and isn't addictive.
Xanax, on the other hand... is just safe. And even that's questionable... how many of those "have you taken ____ recently? Then sue... " commericals have we seen in the past year?

At 4/14/09 11:31 PM, galatea1 wrote: You refuse to take a prescription drug because it's addicting but you smoke pot. I've nothing further to input.

Since when has marijuana been addictive?

Also, sorry for the tripple post...

At 4/14/09 10:55 PM, TheAztek wrote: But my neighbor called the paramedics of a panic attack once.

I went to the emergency room twice when I first started having them. From what I understand, this is common.

At 4/14/09 11:01 PM, Sensationalism wrote: There are these two pressure points on your chest your can rub that's supposed to calm you down. Counting tiles or something,

I count my breathing... I inhale for 7 and exhale for 11. It sort of works, but not as fast as I like.

Med that worked the best for me as far as panic attacks went was celexa.

Did it work? After research I was lead to believe that the medicines have more side effects then they do positive effects.

But I get more and more tempted to get medication every time they kick in...

At 4/14/09 10:51 PM, Judzfell wrote: I dont get it, what exactly are you afraid of while in these attacks?

Mainly, death. It doesn't always have to be immediate death though... it's the type of feeling you would probably experiance when the doctor comes into the room to tell you that you have brain cancer.

It's uncontrollable, unchangeable, impending doom.

you could just be alone in your room, whats the problem?

Thats the thing... nothing has to be wrong. It just sort of kicks in out of nowhere. One moment you're fine, the next moment you're not.

For me, I can usually feel it building up. I get a little jumpy or things start to startle me. Maybe a weird thought creeps into my head or I have trouble dealiing with a common aspect of life. But by the time you realize it's going to happen, it's already too late.... like OCD, once the idea of panic gets in your head, you can't get it out.

how do you usually suffer from these attacks [reason why]?

One condition usually leads to another. For instance, the initial sense of fear might cause physical side effects... the heart starts beating faster and your breathing rate increases. Normally this is healthy... IE: You're trying to run from an attacking wolf... but if you're just sitting in your room it's unsettling. All the sudden you feel like you can't breath right and the short quick breaths pull in more oxygen then you're use to. The resulting feeling is that you feel like you can't breath... you start to hyperventillate and limbs start to go numb as a result.

Suddenly you're sitting in your room, your hearts beating fast, you're having trouble breathing, and your left arm is numb... now you're unjustified fear has turned into "I'm having a heart attack"... which just brings on more fear and worry.

So who here besides me has these?

I get 'em all the time... they fucking suck. I've had 3 in the past 2 days and all I can do is take deep breaths and try to calm myself down... it doesn't work. I mean, it does eventually, but not as quick as you would like. Fuck what everybody thinks, 'calming down' isn't that easy.

People ask me what they're like and I'm not sure how to explain it... for me, I guess it's a feeling of complete and utter helplessness. It's like living out the last seconds of your life time and time again...

It's not so much a fear of dying like you might think... it's not a relegious thing, it's an instinct thing. Fight or flight... it's the feeling of ultimate unavoidable doom... every second is your last, they're ticking away faster then you'd like, and no matter what you do, who you ask for help, or how many times your mom says "It's going to be ok", you know it's not.

The doctors wanted to put me on Xanax but I refuse to take it because it's addicting. I smoke pot instead... it seems to do the job for the most part, but I go through phases. I won't have any attacks for a long time, but then when my pot intake gets too high a reverse effect occures and I start to get multiple ones back to back.

Just curiouse to see if anyone else is in the same boat. Do you take medicine? Does it work? How do you get through them? What are yours like? What triggers them for you?

It was funny... but damned annoying.

Not having any funny posts to read or respond too made for an extra long day at work... I would say it's for the better but I still didn't do any actual work so it wasn't. :)

At 3/31/09 03:59 PM, possum2 wrote: If your 20 hours in on disc 2 then you must not hate it toooo bad!

I beat every game I play... even if it sucks. I like to experiance the story of a game just like people like to see the end of a movie of read an entire book. People sit through bad movies all the time so why is it so odd one would sit through a bad game? There are more to video games then sniper riffles and online death matches you know.

If you really want to know, Gamefly sent it to me on March 10th. It's taken me 21 days to clock 20 hours... that's how much this game sucks.

At 3/31/09 04:49 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote: Yeah, I got to the chase through the forest about 15 minutes in, and thought to myself, "this is terrible". It suffered from poor lighting, poor controls, awkward battle system, bad VA, and just plain questionable game design. I know it was really quick to judge, but if I'm hating every second of it 15 minutes in, is it really worth my time?

The only thing that changes, is the lighting... but only because after that, you don't travel at night any more. Everything else stays the same.. or gets worse. They force you to do a lot of unfun things like that chase... like save a child from a bear, or escort villagers through the desert. My favorite... traveling through the swap... a map that contains 'warp points' that jump you all over the place with no marker on the map to tell you where these things are at and no in-game key to help you learn how to navigate them.

It's pretty bad... if this is any indiciation of what Square-Enix does these days, I expect them to file for bankrupcy shortly after the new FF comes out. I mean, X-2 was complete and utter shit... this is equally as bad, just not as gay.

It varies per region I find...

On the east cost it's usually a slap of the hands and a quick grip of the fingers.

A little further out small changes where added... like snaping your fingers at the end.

But in California, it was completly diffrent... I kept trying to grip with my fingers and everybody else just kept trying to slide their hand away.

I'd say it's probably pretty universal with it's own cutlural twist depending on social class and region. Like everything else in life. :)

At 3/31/09 05:20 PM, yurgenburgen wrote: Nobody on this board genuinely 'agrees' with the Unabomber. If they did, they'd be living in cabins somewhere, fending for themselves and living against the flow of this so-called destructive society. Instead, they're sat in central-heated houses stuffing their faces with junk food and downloading porn.

I do... I'd give up everything I own and live a life of zero possession on a buddhist monistary somewhere if it where plausable. But it's not... society has me in traped in a role I can't escape without facing dire consequences and abandoning loved ones.

If I just up and quit my job and gave away my home what would my family do? I do what I do because others rely on me... trust me, if I could give it all up, I would.

Even if I did, it still opens up a world of problems that shouldn't exist... like, where will I live? Man is under the impression that he OWNS the land... so going out into the woods and building a home just isn't an option. Even if no-one is using it, somebody owns it and they're not going to allow me to stay there... especially if I'm viewd as a crazy person in the eyes of the public for simply trying to escape the rat-race we all openly admit to despise.

Like I said... we're trapped. Unless you want to live in a gutter... you're trapped. Living in a gutter isn't the plan... I still want to be civil and provide for my needs, I just don't think I should have to sacrafice almost every waking moment of my life as a slave to a corporate machine to do so. Think early native american life... except in the year 2009.

Whats wrong with that?

At 3/31/09 11:49 AM, Serbian-terrorist wrote: Goverment represents the people, especially when it comes to the countries that follow the HURR DEMOCRACY HURR WE ARE GONNA LIBERATE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU principle.

And hate is too much of a strong word, maybe something soft as... dislike.

Not true... we get a limited selection of choices and these are formed by other parties and narrowed down to a limited few before we're even allowed to pick from those. It's really hard to find someone to represent you when the choices are "this really rich white guy" or "this other really rich white guy".

We get to vote, but we don't get to pick the president. The Electorical college does and they don't have to agree with the population. They always do, but they don't have to. Worse yet, points are divided uneavenly so it's possible, and has happened, that even though the majority of the nation voted for this guy, the other guy still wins because he won the majority vote in a few select states.

Not wanting to open a huge pile of shit... I'll ignore the idea of ballet fraud and the whole florida re-count thing.

Nobody under 18 is allowed to have a voice... neither are convicted fellons. And not everybody votes for the winner... some of us voted for the guy that lost and never once agreed with anything the winner did or said. The government doesn't represent all of us.

I'll tie you up with rope and beat you until you say the word "Banana"... $30 an hour. Latex is optional.

I'm not cool with the idea of killing innocent people... but everything else, was spot on and I think I strangly support it.

Before you reply, you might want to take a minute to read this... only to understand not what he did, but why he did it.

Me, I hate this shit... work, money, bills... it's a big fucking trap. Once you get into the loop, you can't get out... society holds you prisoner where every day they force you to wake up when you're still tired, go to a place you don't want to be, talk to people you don't want to talk to, and slave away your soul to a corporate money machine in the hopes of earning a few worthless peices of paper that do little more then spawn needless greed and crime in the world all so you can maintain the exitance you didn't ask to have in the first place with basic surivival needs like food and shelter.

Worse yet, you can't take any of your wealth with you when you die and we're all going to die making everything we work for, pointless.

I don't know what the fix is, but there has to be a better way.

True, it's better then Africa or some 3rd world country... but it still sucks. There's still a huge fundemental flaw in the system and anybody that spots it, realizes that no matter how much they hate it, they can't escape it. People start to feel traped... and thats when we snap, and start shooting each other in shopping malls.

The unabomber might have been on to something... maybe we should have listened?

I was never a fan...

Outside of tetris, I considered all puzzle games to a huge waist of both time and money.

I've wondered the same thing... I use to see it on all the time and then one day, it just dissapeared without a trace. No big season ending, no new made-for-TV-movies, no nothing.

I can't believe they'd just cancel it... it was pretty popular, there where a seires of movies, and Bloo had become a pretty big spokes person for Cartoon Network. He was the star of a series of short lived advertisments that plauged billboards and signs across the country. Red ones that had pointless quotes like "It's hot in Topeka"... others featured other Fosters characters, including the guy that likes ceeerreeaall.

i figured it was a business thing... IE: The creator of the show wanted more money since his show was so popular and CN wasn't willing to pay... or something like that. But I never found out what really happened.

A part of me hopes there's some secret new episodes or a movie being worked on and nobody has made the announcement. Another part of me, is afraide it got droped for new "Ben 10" spin-offs.

Oh well, such is life I guess. On the other hand, we do have Flapjack...

The only people that should be allowed to respond to this thread are those who have never pirated anything off the internet.

In other words, nobody.

At 3/30/09 08:46 PM, SniperWolf1564 wrote: Anyone else think that Metallica is an overrated metal band?

Yes. More so then you can imagine... my goal in life is to punch each member in the face.

They would need to go the hollywood route and just start the whole thing over from scratch...

Just like how the new Batman movies deny any other Batman movies exist and they've started telling the whole story over... fixing things that went wrong the first few times.

Same idea... get rid of the sword, the time travel, the transformations, the human girlfriend, the unneccessary friends, etc... maybe update the look of the character to something a bit more modern (don't over do it)... and re-think the idea of the game.

Start all over... the next Sonic game should be a clean start... act as if no other Sonic games have ever existed. I might be inquired to give that one a good look, until then, there's nothing they can do to sonic to make him good again.

Oh, and also... no more shitty theme games with Mario.

At 3/30/09 10:53 PM, Blaze-Heatnix wrote: Then why did you review this? If you don't really like JRPGs, should you really be entitled to a review?

Everybody is entitled to an opinion... just because my opinion differs from yours doesn't mean it's any more or less valuable.

Besides, I liked FFVII, and FFX is one of my favorite games. FFVIII and FFIX where OK... I bought and beat both of them. They weren't anything spectacular, but they weren't bad either. FFX-2, on the other hand, was God awful.

I hadn't played an RPG on the 360 yet and the Square games seem to be pretty good on average so I figured I'd give it a try.

The problem is, it's not just bad, it's terrible. It's the epidomy of what JRPG haters think of when they think of a JRPG game. It's so sterotypical it destroys itself in the first few minutes. Everybody is 14 years old, even the villans... the lead character is shy and has some dibilitating condition that makes him an outcast to society but somehow ends up on a trip with the hottest girl in the land who develops a crush on him and he's too shy to make a move... everybody hates him but he's the only one that can save the world so they tolerate him... that is, until he saves a team members life and becomes the leader of the crew. There are cut scenes every 15 steps to give it a long epic feel, and everytime you go to a new town you get a collection of new team mates who all have terrible backstories and even dumber costumes then before. I litteraly just picked up a guy 30 hours in on the second disk who wears a plastic bunny mask when he fights. Is this neccessary?

And don't even get me started on the story or dialog again. It sounds like it was written by a fith grader... it's like Square had a 'make your own RPG contest in the back of Nintendo power one month and this was the winner". It's not that I hate games with a lot of story... it's that this one is just done horribly.

We need to go to Halgata
Halgata?
Yes, Halgata
Why Halgata
Because that's where the chain is
There's a chain in Halgata
Yes

Why couldn't they just shorten that down to:

There's a chain Halgata that must be cut! Quickly, we must hurry!

It takes them 3 loading sequences and 7 moves to tell me one sentance worth of facts. And there's hours of this shit. And worse yet, usually the scenes that tell you where you need to go don't come with a soundtrack... why not? Why are only 80% of the cut scenes voiced? And why are the non-voiced scenes the most important? What, did the staff quit half way through the recording process?

Besides that, the game is pretty bland. New equiment doesn't show up on the character model, there's nothing to collect or find, the maps are huge and vastly empty requireing a lot of needless runing for unnecessary amounts of time, and the game has a bad tendancy of forcing you to fight the same group of monsters over and over and over again. The story is shallow and predictable, and the game itself (outside of the cutscenes) appears to be realativly short. It seriously feels like I've played barly an hour... and I'm at the end of disk two... the other 19 hours where me watching bad movies YOU CAN'T SKIP.

And if you die, you have to re-watch them... all of them. So, don't die... ever.

JRPGs could be cool... but this one isn't. ANd it's overuse of lame sterotypes is a clear sign to me that the people behind the genra aren't even trying anymore and it would be better off if they just let the genra die all together. If all JRPGs from here on out are going to be this lame and predictable, why even make them? It's reached the point where if you've played one, you've played them all... so lets save everybody some time and just stop making them.

It's like Rap after Rap got to it's "I'm rich in the club" phase... complely pointless and just downright insulting to intelligent people and other artists of the same craft who take more pride in the work.

Square Enix sucks. I was never that huge of a fan of the Final Fantasy games but I'll admit that I had my favorites (X, VII)... but this game, this game is a new low in shit.

It's about as badly sterotypical as you can get... lame teenager with no self esteem joins up with a group of wondering warriors containing a super hot broad that runs around in a skirt all day giving you the sex eyes in badly rendered CGI films that happen to occure about every 15 steps in order to save the world from an evil villian bent on becoming a monster to take over the world.

Every time you enter a new map, you get a cutscene. Every time you go to a new town, you meet new people. I swear, the only thought that went behind this game was "lots of cutscenes where homosexual males in bad costumes meet and greet other homosexual males in bad costumes"

It's 2 disks but I swear there isn't 15 minutes of gameplay... it's just bullshit cutscene after cutscene. And worse yet, they're not even interesting... the dialog is terrible and everybody always repeats what everybody else says. Example:

He's not sick.
He's not?
No, He's getting stronger.
Stronger?
Yes, stronger?
GASP! How can that be
Let me explain
Yes, please explain
It's the magic spell
the magic spell?
Yes, the magic spell.

Most of these are voiced with terrible voice actors whos dialog doesn't match up with the mouths of the characters. Strangly, other, more improtant scenes, don't have any sound to them at all... the cutscenes with sound, are terribly boring. Nothing happens, they just stand in one spot and talk... and usually it has very little information inside. It's usually followed by lame gags and slapstick comedy... usually involving the lead character and his awkword shyness when dealing with hot girls that keep offering to do "anything" for Lord Sigmond. If it sounds funny, it's not. If it doesn't sound funny, it's worse then you can imagine.

You can't save whenever and save points are always hard to find. Every section of the game has a huge map that looks wonderful but contains nothing. Ocassionaly you find a chest but it has junk it in... some food or a potion. Most of the rooms are empty or containg NPCs that have zero information to offer.

It's easy to forget what's going on or where you're suppose to be going, especially if you're like me and turn the game off and don't get to turn it on for days. Unfortunitly there's no hints or directions to be found... if you forget, you're fucked. The start menu has a little one sentance summary but it's rarely helpful. One example is "The team needs to return to Edward and give him the medice". Helpful... only if you know where Edward is. I didn't... thank God for walkthroughs. It makes me wonder why this just simply didn't read "The team needs to return to [town] and give Edward his medicine"... or something like that.

The battle system blows. It's all in real time so that's cool but every tap of the button is two or three swings and so far there doesn't seem to be a lot of combo options. mayber there are and I just don't know because the menu system is complete shit and better left untouched. Regardless, you're team is pretty good at fighting and ecah memeber has a special ability but it's pointless to care about these things as their descriptions are meaningless and the moves are too hard to pull off with very little reward.

I don't know any real names off the top of my head, but they all say things liek "Dancing Rapcity"... that could be a million things... whats wrong with "Triplle combo" or "flying jump kick"?

I'm 20 hours in, on disk 2, hate every second of the game.

.5/10... death to the JRPG!