mmiasmostati

Empire: Total War

mmiasmostati — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:59:26 +0000

Is incredibly epic and most definitely a worthy sequel to the series. I’ll post more of my thoughts on the game later on, but for now I’ll just link to my bloggings about my Ottoman short campaign:

The Rise of an Empire

Diablo

mmiasmostati — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:17:55 +0000

I tried playing the original Diablo a couple of years ago, heard it was quite good. It turned out to be an endless clickfest with no real hook for me, yet I still tried out Diablo 2 afterwards. Diablo 2 was better, probably because it offered actual quests rather than the endless dungeon crawl of the original, though perhaps because I could actually see what I was doing this time and the resolution was better. I still didn’t enjoy it much though, like with the first, the continuous mouse clicking got old after a while.

I was nostalging with a couple of others on IRC and we’d decided to try and multiplay a couple of old games, unfortunately our original choice of Dungeon Keeper didn’t go through (nobody could be bothered setting up IPX), so we went to the next choice: Diablo 2. I was a bit wary of being bogged down in the button mashing again but surprisingly it was rather enjoyable. The addition of co-op with a friend added greatly to the game as we levelled up together and ran away with the hordes at our tails. So much so that I’m considering buying Diablo 3 when it comes out, so long as my fellow men pay up and we can battle the forces of Hell together.

BioShock

mmiasmostati — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:35:23 +0000

I finished the game a couple of weeks ago so I thought I’d post a few thoughts about it. I’m still not convinced the game lived up to all the hype it got, sure it was a good game and well worth playing but it was nothing earth shattering. The story of Rapture was well told and I enjoyed listening to the voice recordings strewn across the city, though other parts of the game let it down for me.

The intro was one of the best I’ve ever seen and the whole setting of the game and it’s atmosphere was well done. However, I felt that the different areas of the game were too disjointed, I think it would have been better if there was some foreshadowing of where you were headed next such as glimpses seen out of windows to future sections of the city.

The gameplay seemed to consist mainly of fetch quests and backtracking through areas I’d already been to, along with obligatory enemies that weren’t there before. I can’t say there was any part of the gameplay I was impressed with at all and at times I decided to stop playing purely because it was so dull and repetetive.

So yeah, I’m rather disappointed in it considering all the hype. A good story with solid atmosphere but let down by dull gameplay. Perhaps the sequel will be an improvement, though I’m not convinced of the merit of sequels for their own sake, BioShock seemed too self-contained for any real kind of sequel to be viable. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.