PixlBit

So Sunday saw me doing some serious gaming, something I haven't done in awhile. I played some Half-Life 2 for about an hour and was actually having a decent time. That game must've been amazing when it first came out but now, I find it to be so outdated. I tend to love old school games so for me to say that is really telling. To be fair though, I'm not a big first person shooter fan, which is to say it's just not my favorite genre, not that I dislike the genre. I would constantly die in the worse spots and then the last checkpoint dropped me off where I didn't have much health left and I found myself dying over and over at the same spots until I figured out a way to manipulate the path in some way to either get me out of the area or give me a better position in a firefight. Worse of all is where I stopped for the day. I'm in the boat thing going through the sewers and I just finished blowing up two tanks that were shooting me but now there's nowhere to go. I do see a opening in the wall into a sewer pipe or something and across from the hole is a wooden ramp. My guess is to build speed and use the ramp to jump up and land in the hole so I can continue on. However, there's no way to get to the ramp as far as I can tell. There appears to be a way to it underneath the pier that's being held by tree trunks but there's no way to get underneath it and I can't destroy the trunks. I drove around the area trying to find someway to bypass it but after 15 minutes or so, I gave up.

Ahhh!!! Kill it! Kill it! Stab it in the face!

Next I loaded up my Steam copy of Sonic Adventure DX. I've already beaten it but I'm still trying to get all the emblems. I only played for about 20 minutes and did Gamma's level A emblems, bringing my total to 99 out of 130. Sonic Adventure is such a flawed game but fun. I've always wanted Sega to do a remake of it. Not an HD remake (as they sorta already did that) but a completely redone from the ground up remake. It'll fix the many glitches, improve the hit detection, animations, voice acting (and lip synching, thank god), and improve the controls to give you a better sense of, well, control. I think that'll be the topic for another time...

How the hell did he do that!?

Next I played some Sonic Colors on my Wii. I went through and beat six acts and a boss for the underwater zone whose name I can't remember. I'm not going to say this is a great game because it's not. IGN gave it a 8.5, 1up gave it a B+, and Gamespot gave it a 8, I know, but it doesn't deserve that high of a score. However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that its a bad game either. It has its problems, such as a lack of control sometimes for some of the more twitch reliant sequences, reused locations and bosses and it suffers from the same platforming problems that I talked about in my feature article, but this is still the best Sonic game to come out since Sonic Heroes meaning this is the best Sonic game in seven years. When you stop comparing it to previous Sonic games and compare it to video games as a whole, it's not the best and will easily get lost in the shuffle (unless you're a Wii owner exclusively). However, if you want to play a Sonic game and you get it for $15, like I did, you'll enjoy yourself. Just turn off the console when you run into an annoying level, like I did, and come back to it later. Seriously, what's up with the second act in the astroid zone?

Sindel: Are you having trouble back there? Jax: No, no. Hmm, damn it. Are you sure it doesn't unhook in the front?

Finally, I played Super Mario Galaxy. Again, I've already beaten it but I want to get all the stars. I think I'm up to 84 stars but I'm not sure. Only played that for about a half an hour. I've actually been neglecting Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando recently, which I was enjoying but then I started focusing on Half-Life 2 and Sonic Colors. I think I might put it on the backlog for now because of two reasons. One, I'm already playing a platformer (Sonic Colors) and I want to be playing something different. Two, I didn't know you can get the older weapons from the first game in Going Commando. Although I beat the first one, I didn't get all the gold weapons and skill points and whatnot. That's incentive enough for me to go back to the first game and do that. So in the meantime, I'll go back to the first Ratchet and beat that 100% before going back to Going Commando, I think. Also, I bought the Mortal Kombat Kollection for my PS2 and its just been sitting there. I did play Armageddon a little bit but that's all. Maybe I'll start playing that more. Maybe Shaolin Monks also. Not that I think that'll be a good game but you can unlock Mortal Kombat II in that game. That's worth the twenty bucks alone! Well, enough rambling. What have you been playing recently? I bet its something better than my games. Probably something more current. Let me know in the comments and if you have the mind to, also tell me about what you think of the games I discussed.

Peace and Love,

CoLoRWinD