Mirror's Edge

Well, I just beat Mirror's Edge and I find that there is a lot to say about such a short game. The game stars a character named Faith whose name represents the main theme of the game, not in story mode so much as in production. I think that all of the actions EA took were based on faith, and lack there of.
First of all, the game is a great idea, let the player control a person with supernatural abilities as she runs, jumps, climbs and punches her way through a major metropolis. The character is an expert at Parkour, "[A]n activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body."(From Wikipedia) and move from one point to another she does. The big step of faith EA took here was that they took a well known form of gaming, platforming, and made it something unique, which was really well implemented, and presented an overall enjoyable experience.
But EA wasn't quite ready to make something entirely unique just yet, I imagine that they couldn't visualize a target audience who would buy a first person platformer, so they added combat into the mix, believing that this would broaden the audience and bring in more sales numbers, showing a lack of faith in their own idea. The problem here was that the combat was very poorly implemented, there were very few options of attack, and the player was at a huge disadvantage beginning combat with their bare hands. The player had to first disarm an opponent, a difficult task when being shot in the face with an assault rifle.
Then taking some faith away from the combat, slow-mo was implemented to make disarm moves easier, to a point where if the player could not disarm their opponent in the time gratuitous time that the slow motion allotted, there must be something severely wrong with their mental capacities. This lack in their combat system, as well as lack in their players was evident, and I for one was a little offended that such a large company would make a product intentionally dumbed down to serve a broader audience.
To save you the time, Mirror's Edge had fun moments, but was not worth playing.


Playlist: WC3, Counter-Strike Source, Bejeweled

I can post here now, and I'm going to do so

Everyone has a friend (or perhaps, as in my case, IS the friend) who plays the GTA games for hours, loves them, but only completes two missions the entire time the game is out and relevant. Yep, you're talking to that guy right now. I've owned every GTA game that's been released for the xbox, yet I've never gotten remotely close to finishing any of the games. Not close.

Here's why: Killing random people is the BEST part of GTA. Picking up girls and taking them places and watching the cutscenes with the blatant racism, blah, blah, blah...who cares! Kill people! Blow up cars! I try - I really do - I try to complete the missions, but I just don't care enough. It's just so hard to take freakin' Michelle bowling yet another time. It's hard to care about some stupid get-away van when you can find many perfectly not exploded vans everywhere in the game.

That's where the cheat codes come in handy. I assume a certain level of gamer readership on this site, thus, I will not deign to actually putting the codes on here. You know where to find them if you haven't already used them. As I expanded upon in my blog (shamless plug), dropping boats out of the sky onto cars over and over again is an inexplicable joy. Also you can get lots of weapons. And boats. The best part about dropping boats on people is that when they die, from the boat that just dropped on their head, no one knows that you did anything. The cops don't bug you. They just do their thing, and you can take all the money. It's a sweet deal.

Going over to my other recent obsession, Oblivion has destroyed me. I've played for close to 120 hours so far on this character, yet I cannot bring myself to do the last couple of things I need to do to complete the main quest. "Think of the gamer points!" I think to myself, yet a strong, more deeply-rooted voice tells me "Think of the side-quests!" Yes, I know you can do the side-quests after the main story has ended, but I want to be a beast when I defeat the game.

Playlist: Oblivion, Wii Sports, COD4, GTAIV

How epic can one game be?

Sins of a Solar Empire is my latest addiction. Already it has sucked almost as much time as the entire single player campaign of COD4. It is too much fun and epic on a scale that it can only be compared with The Lord of the Rings and Jesus himself.
Playlist: Sins