I’m still working on that review of Prince of Persia and actually playing the game is still the hardest part. Ugh so enjoyable. I would actually prefer to outsource this at this point; have someone play the game for me and just describe it to me. It just has such a sluggish boring progression in both the gameplay and story. There isn’t a single likeable character yet.
Agh. Anyway, I thought I would update with some podcast recommendations in the meantime since they’ve been taking up so much of time recently. Since reformatting my Zune I’ve been trying a few different ones so coming up in the next post is a list of some of my old favorites and a few new ones as well.
So, it’s been quite a while since my last post and its promises of a God of War III review. I never finished that review but if you’ve been paying attention to the gaming community at all in the past few months you must know by now that it’s one of the highest rated games of the year. Great game, no doubt about it.
Recently I’ve been spending my time playing Red Dead Redemption as much as possible. What a magnificent game. The atmosphere is so immersive, so complete. I never realized how much I wanted to play a western game until I first played this one. Everything about that game is about as perfect as it could be, within reason of course. There are some very minor glitches but I haven’t run into any that actually impede upon gameplay or anything so drastic as that. Just your garden variety collision glitches and things like that. I may write up a review on that game but considering how well it’s selling, I think the consensus is out anyways so there isn’t much point. Not only that, but I think I’ll be reviewing the new Prince of Persia game. There’s only one problem: It’s soooo bad I don’t even know if I can play any more of it. So far I haven’t had the patience to play it more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. It is just so abhorrently unimpressive in everything it does. The puzzles are just horrible God of War rip-offs from what I’ve seen thus far and the combat is spectacularly dull. All combat I've experienced up to this point has consisted of pressing square a lot, occasionally holding it for a boring and painfully slow “power attack” and then jumping around on enemies heads—mostly just to give some buttons other than square a fair chance to participate. There is a very, very small chance I will get much further into this game. I rented it and have it for about another week but I expect to play some more and write what I can about it before bringing it back to Blockbuster and overwriting the painful memory of this game with some quality time in Red Dead Redemption. I cannot stress enough how little I enjoy this game—and I’m really trying my best to get some entertainment out of it to no avail—but I will do my best in expressing that in a short review to come soon.
I really shouldn’t be surprised to be so disappointed by this game if you consider how my review of the last Prince of Persia game turned out. You can find it HERE. Looking at it now I realize how easy I went on that game, giving it a 7.2 out of 10, when it really deserved much less.
Anyway that should be coming up soon and I might actually start updating a little more consistently in the near future, not all about videogames even; but no promises.
Unfortunately school has dominated my life since spring break as well as the play I’m in.
I’ve started my review but I’ve yet to finish it; and I want to do the game justice. I should be posting it soon but it’s definitely pretty late for a review so I want it to be pretty conclusive and thought-out well.
In the meantime, I may make some random posts; game related or not.
It feels like Christmas Eve. I’m going to need to heavily sedate myself in order to get to sleep tonight.
Tomorrow I wake up early, eat breakfast and head to Gamestop when it opens. Then I’m going to play it for several hours, possibly all day and I’ll be updating every hour or so with some spoiler-free impressions.
Sometime after I finish I’ll post some final impressions before putting a full review together.
Also my friend Mike may be updating as well or just sending me some final impressions to post alongside mine.
I will do my best to update pretty consistently and not get sucked into the game indefinitely.
The average play-through time is probably 10-15 hours and although I’ll be playing it almost non-stop I will be savoring every moment; so who knows how long it will take.
I just ran into this video interview with Adam Puhl, Combat Designer on the game, who you may remember from one of the interviews in my first God of War entry. In this video he just goes more into some of the details involved in the combat design and how it turned out, very cool.
Before you get too much of a hard on let me start by saying there is NO GOD OF WAR MOVIE. There are some rip-offs, such as Dawn of War which for some reason recently changed it’s name to that from it’s original “War of Gods.” What’s it about, you ask? Well, it’s plot description on IMDB is:
“Greek warrior Theseus battles against imprisoned titans.”
When I first heard about it it was described as,
“Greek warrior Theseus battles against Gods.”
Interesting… There’s also Clash of the Titans which is respectably a remake so there’s no “ripping-off” going on but I just found it funny that it’s release was pushed back from the week after God Of War:III comes out, to a week later. Funny, is that their official reason was “to accommodate the addition of 3D to the film.” I’m sure it had nothing to do with the highest selling Greek Myth-based media in history coming out around the same time.
Anyway enough of that, I also wanted to share a humorous hypothetical about the possibility of a God of War movie. G4 did this short segment about casting a God of War movie that isn’t very serious, but pretty funny to imagine:
I am pretty curious as to how serious they were by suggesting Vin Diesel…that’s a horrible, terrible, repulsive idea. Kratos may not have the broadest of emotional spectrums (pretty much just angry, and really fucking angry.) but if a movie was made they would need a great actor to not only be badass and angry, but nail his voice and play out that whole anger part really damn well. I know who my only acceptable choice for an actor to play Kratos is, the same one David Jaffe suggested when the God of War movie was actually in the works and fully scripted back in 2003: Djimon Hounsou, a man who not only looks the part, but is also a pretty exceptional actor from what I’ve seen. Seriously, can you name a better resemblance to Kratos than Djimon?
If you can, please share, I’d be interested to know.
Now I’m actually going to get back to that whole school thing, I’ll update again over the weekend.
With God of War:III one week away I thought I should make an update. Last night when I got home from my miserable Astronomy mid-term, I was greeted by my newest edition of Playstation Magazine featuring a God of War:III review. It took all of my strength to not peek at it…for about ten minutes and then I did. Luckily, it’s very short and spoils very little, which makes sense since it’s still a week from release. Not surprisingly it got 5 stars. Currently Metaritic.com has it listed as 94 with a lowest score of 80; pretty awesome. There’s nothing that could stop me from being completely enamored with this game anyway, but it’s good to see the reviews are indicating the game is everything I hoped for.
I’ve been particularly careful to avoid certain GOW:III news recently, hoping not to cross over any major spoilers but I have been keeping up best I can. Two Commercials, beginning to air next week at release, are the first things that come to mind. One is just some clips and review blurbs and the other is the inevitable GOW commercial I’ve been waiting for, with Kevin Butler. If you don’t recognize that name you’ll surely recognize him when you see the commercial.
That first one exemplifies how God Of War:III will affect my social life. If I currently had a girlfriend I would choose Kratos over her in a heartbeat.
Next up is a brief interview with Stig Asmussen (Game Director) with Adam Sessler on X play.
Next up—and most interesting I think—is Adam Sessler again giving his thoughts on the game. Of all the pieces of God of War news floating by in the past few days, this video revamped my excitement the most. Probably because Adam was admittedly very excited to play the game and clearly had a great time with it. He talks about how great the controls feel, not only for the Blades but the other three weapons as well, how great the pacing is and how badly, upon completion, he wanted to play it again. All great things, as expected.
Did anyone else find it a horrible tease to see the XMB in the background with God Of War:III in the PS3 just begging to be played? Or how badass the games background wallpaper is? Ah, the anxiousness with which I await to play this game is downright painful.
Well I have a big paper due and a good 80 pages of reading to do before Thursday so I’m going to get to that. I’ll try to make at least one more update over the weekend and I’ll plan to document My first days with the game as much as possible before posting a review..whenever I stop playing the game.
