In the early 90s, Coktel Vision (which later became Sierra On-Line) released a quirky point and click adventure game titled Gobliiins which had players bouncing between three different Goblins to find a cure for good King Angoulafre.
Sometimes when you are browsing the internet for information on how to do something, you stumble upon ideas or projects or even games that people might be working on...
What a meow-gnificent evening it is to send your paw-rcels out to those family and friends! Are mew looking to pick up an item or send something out? Well at Cat Mail Co. we can send and receive all your deliveries!
Have you ever grown up feeling like you don't belong? For our Heroine, that's the feeling she lives with everyday in her small farming village. But it's not her only secret...
STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions is just that! Massively co-operative and not an MMO! When you first run the game you are instantly into the tutorial...
Today we’re looking at what has rapidly become an absolute favorite in the open-world RPG genre for me. An interesting story, memorable NPCs, stunning visuals, and a setting absolutely dripping with flavor, Dread Delusion sets its tone immediately and sticks with it.
I enjoy simulation-type games, and I enjoyed the original release of House Flipper, but I never got around to getting the DLC. When the remastered version of the game was released, I figured it would be the best way to experience the DLC while checking out how the base game was upgraded.
GranBlue Fantasy: ReLink released in 2024 bringing the GranBlue universe to an action adventure JRPG format. With a party of up to four members, this band of skyfarers set out for new skies, adventures, and dangers. Two years later, Endless Ragnarok...
70s-Style Robot Anime Geppy-X is a mouthful of a title, but you know what? It’s quite the challenging game to describe as well. At its core, 70s-Style Robot Anime Geppy-X is a shooter...
A lot of things can make a video game memorable to gamers. A fantastic soundtrack, amazing graphics, characters and stories that you genuinely care about are all valid reasons to look back at a time spent with a game fondly. However, there's simply something to be said about achieving some sort of victory in a game. Maybe it's beating the game itself, handling a secret boss, a difficult achievement or just bragging rights over your friends. Here's a handful of our team's favorite in-game victories.
Whether it's watching the credits roll at the end of a game, besting a super secret hidden boss, reaching max level, completing a particularly taxing puzzle or something altogether different - what video game moments were the most satisfying for members of the CGR team, and why? We capped it at four entries each, and here's the first round of them.
It is hard to believe we have done twenty five of these articles so far, but here we are. Given the recent release of the popular game Dark Souls III, I thought we would make this edition of Memorable Music in Gaming all about the Soulsborne (as Chris calls them) games. Let's go ahead and tackle these from newest to oldest.
Despite not being around quite as much as I would like over the last week, I have gotten quite a few posts up both here and at Otaku Gaming. I'll start with the oldest stories and work up to the most recent. That starts us off then with the announcement of Record of Agarest War 2 and its limited edition.
Good morning - I hope you all have a nice weekend and survived Monday with flying colors. The last week was a busy one for me at Otaku Gaming (Internet Archive link) with quite a few screenshots and announcements that I would like to point out. A bit later on the week, I'll touch on my thoughts on The Elder Scrolls Online on this blog, continue to drop some more reviews on slightly older games and more.
Also, for those of you new to my blog, I have a links page listed below my banner and a blog roll in the far right tab of the right sidebar here. There are so many great gaming sites and blogs out here, and when I get a chance I like to call them out in relevant posts, but don't just wait for me to do that. I realize that not everyone's blog is for everyone, but there are some really interesting reviews, opinions, announcements and more to be found on this collection of sites. If you are reading this and you don't see your site linked/blog rolled and want me to? Feel free to drop me a comment in this article or an email at Chalgyr@yahoo.com and I'd be more than happy to add you.
Gamers are a community unto themselves and those of us passionate enough about our hobby to share our thoughts through blog posts and comments are yet another community that we should take advantage of.
Now, then - a recap of my articles on Otaku Gaming last week...
I had quite a few articles go up on Otaku Gaming over the last week or so, with several more on the way. One that was particularly interesting to me was the the email from Atlus talking about the end of Demon's Souls receiving online support.
So, recently I loaned out the game Splinter Cell: Conviction to a buddy of mine at work and he made a comment to me about how he put it on the easiest level of difficulty to beat it. This is something I have found myself doing a fair amount over the last few years as well. Sometimes, it is more fun to get through the storyline and not deal with frustrating death after frustrating death. I did the same thing, playing through Splinter Cell: Conviction in an afternoon. Sometimes, not always. Sometimes I will give the game a second playthrough at a higher level of difficulty.
I admit that sometimes achievements and trophies can affect my difficulty decision. When I played through Halo: Reach I choose the normal/default difficulty in part because the achievements for completing chapters could not be earned on easiest. I am currently slugging away at Record of Agarest War one more time - having gone through Normal already but on Hard now to see the true ending. Then again, sometimes for games like Madden, I turn up the difficulty most/all of the way just because there is no storyline really, and I need a good challenge.
When talking to my buddy at work, he said he plays most of his games on easy - like Call of Duty. It is not that he is a bad player -in fact, in multiplayer he's about the best I know in Black Ops and Modern Warfare, often finishing tops on the map, but for him he just wants to sample the storyline in single player and then move on.
I also really like difficulty adjusters in general. Would games like Demon Souls be less appealing to people if it had an easier mode? Probably, but does that make it the right choice? I don't know to be honest. I have some friends who proudly puff out their chests at having beaten the game, and I have others who gave up on it or refused to play it due to the difficulty and reputation the game carried. The software developer is obviously fine with this choice as their spiritual follow-up is supposed to be even harder. Will I purchase it? Probably not - the first one frustrated me a LOT at times, and I would rather just play something else despite the fact I did enjoy Demon Souls. If the game had an easier mode where you could still earn trophies and get through the storyline? I'd probably pick it up. It's an interesting dilemma the developer gets to figure out for themselves.
I read a report a few months ago that most players do not finish their games. The vast majority of games have something like a 30-40% completion rate, and many of them in the 20's or lower. If I was a developer, I would be a bit disappointed if I put all of that work into a game knowing that most players never saw the content I made. Personally, I like the idea of multiple difficulties and still offering 'rewards' for people who best the easier ones, though there should be better rewards for the greater levels of difficulty.
What about you? Do you like multiple difficulties? If so, are you someone who always goes for the hardest, sticks to the defaults, prefers less of a challenge or vary it by title and number of playthroughs? Any games out there you wish had variable difficulties but did not?
Demon’s Souls has been out for awhile now in the US, but only recently has gotten released in some other locations. I put off picking this up because while it looked and sounded good, I tend to wait until games are a bit cheaper to acquire them. Additionally, the game is always being touted as insanely hard, and in my ‘old age’ I’ve grown to enjoy slightly less taxing games. Sure, as a kid I walloped on Ghosts & Goblins, the Ninja Gaiden games, Contra without the 30 lives code and plenty of others. However, I’ve gotten to a point where getting my butt handed to me by lines of code does sometimes get frustrating and I wasn’t sure I wanted to take this particular plunge.
However, I can say after giving this game a good long play, it was a lot of fun – despite some frustrating moments along the way. That said, I feel like the game can be had at an incredible value, if you are someone who can enjoy a challenging game without getting too frustrated with it.
Graphics – 8.5:
The animations sometimes feel just a shade off, but the magic and fire effects are nice, and the world is imaginatively presented. I’ve also seen some slowdown at odd times; and a world of lag and slowdown when one of my matches got invaded. That might fall under something other than graphics, but it was graphics that seemed the most affected (I was blocking but taking huge damage from a guy who also appeared to be blocking. Things were just not lining up at all). That said, the rest of the game looked really good, with some very impressive scenes – some of which really stood out (like the dragon sweeping the bridge to burn everyone on it).
Music and sound – 9.0:
All in all, it sounds good. Narration is solid, sound effects are somewhat varied with voice acting at most interactions. The voice acting is not always great, and I wish I could just skip through the repetitive people sitting in the Nexus. I have surround sound however, and it should be noted that it has been a lifesaver for me at times in this game; on par with the zings of Modern Warfare’s bullets. The music is also very impressive. It fits the theme of the game wonderfully.
Gameplay – 8.5:
This is a tough one for me. The game responds pretty well most of the time, though the lock-on mechanism can get you in trouble early on until you master it. As I’ve mentioned, the game can be hard. Now, I don’t think it’s quite as hard as some people make it out to be, but there are some cheap deaths in there (a pit you see that it looks like you should be able to descend but actually leads to death, any time something knocks you back when you’re on stairs/a ledge, or a ridiculously hard enemy you have no business fighting but might not have any idea of).
Intangibles – 9.5:
New game plus is cool, if brutal. Tons of customization. A deep game that makes you feel like you’re genuinely learning as you play. I mentioned above that there were cheap deaths, but most of the time it’s just your own fault for not handling the situation properly. Also, the online aspects really deserve to be mentioned. There’s a unique, almost beautiful in my mind, system of online play where you can see bloodstains on the ground and see the final moments of a player’s life. There’s been several times I touched it and watched someone barrel ahead only to get dropped from an attack they never saw coming – but I did thanks to that experience. Also you can leave messages that you can rate as useful as well. There was one part with a bridge and a dragon swooping down where the advice saved my arse. The PVP aspects I’m kind of down on. It’s creatively handled when you can invade someone else’s realm, or they can invade yours, but almost every time it’s happened my game stuttered and broke up pretty badly. I’ve seen others complain about the same thing and the general response from others is: play offline. In my opinion, you’re doing yourself an overall disservice if you do so. It adds a tremendous sense of ‘life’ to your world when you see ghosted images of other players, bloodstains and messages on the ground.
Overall – 8.75:
Demon’s Souls is hard. It’s meant to be hard. There is no easy mode. It doesn’t hold your hand or give you easy replays like Final Fantasy 13 does. It does however create a challenging, atmospheric adventure that if you can play without getting too frustrated, will provide you with a good deal of accomplishment as you conquer new tasks. The online features are pretty unique and for the most part they’re enjoyable, if not perfect. Adding to the game’s value in my mind is how much cheaper it has gotten of late. Gamestop had new copies for $40 and used for $26. Not bad for a game that many people thought of as Game of the Year for the PS3. I’m not sure I’d give it that particular title this year or last, but it is a solid action-RPG game that gives you a lot to do on your adventures.
