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Slummin' It, but Lovin' It


On 04/23/2013 at 01:58 AM by KnightDriver

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                               Eragon360Raw

   This week's gaming started with my purchase of Pandora's Tower and my not playing it all week because I didn't have the time. Then came the weekend and I decided to stick with playing Xbox 360 at my friend's place so we could banter back and forth over what we were playing. He was playing Angry Birds and I constantly told him he was playing a baby game. He of course told me the same and then I went on to rag on him every time I got an achievement. This is just what we do and it's all just for laughs.

      I finished Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Saturday afternoon after 62 hours of gameplay and finally got the 100% completion achievement. What a long trip that was, but a fun one.

    On Sunday I played all day long as usual and began with my backlog of games from 2006. I'm playing just about anything that has the slightest interest to me from that year. The games are cheap and I like the variety and surprise that comes from playing a game I have no expectations for.

     First though was the legendary easy achievement game Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth which my friend got on Amazon and I borrowed for the quick 1000 points. First though, I watched my friend get all 1000 points in exactly 3 1/2 minutes and that's including watching the first cut-scene - yes, I timed him - . When I started it up I was planning to beat his time and so skipped the cut-scene to do it. But it took me a few hours before I got all the achievements. There are only five of them and they are all linked to the number of hits you get in a row, the last one being a 50 hit string. I wonder why they didn't attach achievements to finishing the story. It seems like they tacked on the achievements last minute with little thought.

     I went on to finish the story of the game which follows Book 2 of the TV series pretty closely where Ang is looking for an Earth Bending teacher. I loved the TV series and so even though I played this game mainly for the achievements, I wanted to see how the game played all the way through. i finished it in about six hours and it was pretty enjoyable. I have no interest in replaying any of it however. The fighting is decent but nothing special. Boss fights can be annoying because you aren't very quick in your moves. It's wise to keep some distance and power up your ranged attack. Melee fighting is not too good against bosses.

     Then I started up my '06 backlog proper with Eragon, the game based on the movie and book of the same name. I read the book and saw the movie. The book was good, written by 15 year old Christopher Paolini and published when he was 20 in 2003 and made into a movie in 2006 which was less good. This game interested me initially not because of the licence but because it had co-op. I found out later though that it had only local co-op and not online. I decided to give it a go single player but my disc had a scratch and, after a few hours playing, I had to go out and get another copy to continue. That ended my Sunday night.

     On Monday I picked up another copy at Gamestop for $4 and started playing again in the late afternoon when my friend got home from work. After about 2/3rds of the game I was really getting into the fighting system and beginning to feel like i was playing something akin to God of War or Demon Souls. Eragon is, I found, very far from such an eperience.

     You fight in 3rd person with a sword, bow, and with magic. All of those skills work pretty well in the heat of battle. You can slice and dice and if you get several hits in a row you can grapple your enemy and deliver some extra punishing blow. You can also use magic to push an enemy off a precipice, disarm a shield bearing fighter, or interrupt a large enemy's attack among other things like manipulating the environment to solve puzzles and calling your dragon to give you aid. You can also hang back and power up an arrow with magic to lay low a whole group of enemies. The longer you hold the A button to pull back the arrow, the more accurate the shot. 

     The game also has dragon flying segments which give you limited control of your dragon. You fly along a set route as you shoot enemies below with magic arrows. At times, the rail that you're clearly on pulls you towards obsticles and if you don't adjust you take damage. I finally got fed up with this one area and flew as high as I could while mashing the arrow shooting button to hit enemies that were just off the screen below me. It's cool to dive low and blast away but you just take too much damage from unseen enemies and obsticles that you can't avoid. This is no Panzer Dragoon that's for sure but it is just enjoyable enough to keep me moving on in the game.

     What inevitably frustrated me and made me rage quit was this one level on foot where you are being swarmed by enemies both large and normal and having little room to maneuver. There just wasn't enough time to wait for your magic to recharge or space to dodge. I'd get worn down and then have to repeat a fairly long battle and get just a little farther every time. After many attempts to pass this one area, I gave up feeling like I was unfairly challenged.

     Eragon is not a horrible game, but it's not worth putting up with its clumsy battle system. If you can take enemies one or two at a time, it works well, but larger groups are a real pain.

     After I rage quit Eragon, I played some Full Auto. This is an auto combat/racing game that reminds me strongly of Burnout Revenge but with weapons mounted on your car. Your objective changes from race to race but mainly you try and destroy as much of the environement while still beating a field of cars that are trying to shoot at you.

     The control of your car is pretty good but I got frustrated with this one race where you have to destroy a certain amount of environment while still coming in at least second in the race. Most of the destructible stuff is just off the road and so you find yourself driving off the road to target them and then loosing a lot of time getting hung up on a building or piling through lots of debris, I found it difficult to catch up even with boost which I found tricky to build up because there weren't too many obvious ramps to jump. I had fun with Full Auto for a while but it kept reminding me of how I'd rather be playing Burnout Revenge.

     Then I put in X-Men: The Official Game and played about an hour or two. So far it is doing the barest minimum of what a game should do. It's cut-scenes are just barely motion comics with almost no animation, telling the story with drawings that seem directly referenced from stills from the movie X-Men: The Last Stand. The voice work is by the actors which is nice though. The environments are pretty sparcely detailed and one gets the impression that they are barely disguised tech demo spaces. I played Wolverine, Iceman and Night Crawler so far. Wolverine is pretty slow compared to the wicked fast Wolverine in X-Men Origins Wolverine I played recently. Iceman mainly flies around and handles fine. Night Crawler is my favorite so far because you can teleport right behind an enemy to get in a couple quick hits. It reminds me of the leaping ability of Wolverine in the X-Men Origins Wolverine game which makes the fighting quick and exciting.

     I think I'll continue this game next week and see if I can avoid rage quitting at some lousy bit of gameplay. We'll see.


 

Comments

Super Step Contributing Writer

04/23/2013 at 03:08 AM

I liked the Airbender TV series as well, nice to know the game isn't as awful as the movie, I guess. Or one of the games (if memory serves, there's more than one? Is there one based specifically on the movie, I'm guessing?)

Sorry to hear about X-Men rage quitting, I forget exactly which game it was during the PS2/GCN/XBOX generation that got it right, but man playing as Wolverine was as fun as it should be in that one. From my memory, anyway.

KnightDriver

04/24/2013 at 02:13 AM

There are some other Avatar Last Airbender games from last gen on PS2/Xbox but none based on the movie. The last one on consoles was the one I just played and it's all about the TV series.

I haven't rage quit X-Men yet. Nightcrawler is still cool to play and I've really only just finished the training missions.

Atlus*Aspect

04/23/2013 at 04:47 AM

I forget how many strange moves were made in the early days of this generation; before there was Horse Armor, there were games with five Achievements (and irrelevant ones at that). If 360-haters needed more ammo in the senseless console fueds, our gold star-pat on the back-awardables gave it to them.

Of course, it was then replicated by almost all but the Old N.Guard, and is one of the driving design philosophies behind Call of Duty's success, though few publishers seem to fully grasp that ("if we slap on some deathmatch they'll play forever, right?").


Eragon...*sigh*. What could of have been a LotR for my generation has fallen from my graces; I suppose I outgrew it. Even now, the 4th volume in the series stares with dusty jealousy beside my read-to-tatters "Ned Stark & his Amazing Friends" series. 

Then there was that damnable film. I sat thru 20 min. of it (then skipped another 30) before I relized this was the actual, under-budgeted film proper, and not some over-budgeted spoof. To this day, my cousin and I have a running inside joke based entirely on the opening scenes of this movie. It's probably one my most hated films of all time, and yet John Malkovich(?) only comes out of this being cooler. Crazy right?

KnightDriver

04/24/2013 at 02:18 AM

No one knew how to do achievements that first year of 360. 

I remember seeing the film and not hating it but thinking they really missed the unique part of the book which was the way the main character related to his dragon.

Chris Yarger Community Manager

04/23/2013 at 06:25 AM

I love Full Auto, I completely forgot about that game until your mentioning of it.

If you want a fun game with weapons and some similarities to Twisted Metal, you should try Blood Drive. It's just like Twisted Metal but it has zombies in it. The zombies don't really do anything, but the game has different mini-games involving them. So instead of just destroying other cars, it may have a round or so of who can run over the most zombies.

It's actually a lot of fun though, try it if you ever find it somewhere at a decent price!

KnightDriver

04/24/2013 at 02:22 AM

When I stopped playing Full Auto my buddy asked to borrow it. I think he saw me blow up stuff real good and wanted to get some himself.

Blood Drive looks cool. I'll have to hunt it down.

goaztecs

04/23/2013 at 11:29 AM

Wow 60 hours in Lego Star Wars. That makes sense considering it's two seperate games. Love that game, but I don't think I'll hit 100% on it. 

I actually wanted to try Eragon on the consoles. I tried a bit of it on the PSP but I didn't like it. After reading this I'm glad I didn't get around to playing the console version

KnightDriver

04/24/2013 at 02:40 AM

Yea, I had to play all six episodes four times: once for the story, once for the collectible red bricks and white mini-kits, once for the blue mini-kits, and once for the Super Story which is playing a whole episode in under an hour. Add to that the bonus missions, bounty hunter missions, and arena battles and you got at least 50 hours of gameplay. Funny, it never got boring.

Visually speaking Eragon is pretty dark and gritty like Dark Souls and it was ok in the fighting department before I got mauled. In looking at the controls in the walkthrough, I neglected to use the block. It's possible I just didn't study the battle system well enough for the late game challenge, but there was little tutorial in the game to teach you how to fight well. I was on the last part of the Ruins of Orthiad when I quit which is only six levels from the end of the game. I may have to go back to it sometime.

ThatKidOverThere

04/23/2013 at 05:25 PM

Ahh, Avatar. That's probably one of my all time favorite shows. I watched all of the episodes and all of The Legend of Korra which is also as brilliant. As for Eragon, I borrowed the book from a friend once and I was getting pretty cozy with it when all of a sudden I was distracted and I couldn't find the time to pick it up again. I got through about a good fourth of the book and then I just lost interest. Oh, and if you haven't watched Korra, do so now. Immediately. Heck, just go preorder the bluray: http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Korra-Book-Blu-ray/dp/B00BC0JCJW/ref=pd_sim_b_2

KnightDriver

04/24/2013 at 02:43 AM

Yea, I was about to tackle Legend of Korra when my friend, who I watched all of Avatar with, went off to Austin Texas on an adventure. If he shows up around here sometime I'll have to mention it as the first thing we have to watch together.

BrokenH

04/24/2013 at 02:47 AM

Eragon as a movie was "alright". I admit compared to other movies it could be long winded and boring at times but there were parts that were rather decent. It was no Lord Of The Rings, Avatar, Aliens, Blade-runner, or Harry Potter by any stretch of the imagination but it wasn't terrible either. However, I can understand why some people lost interest 10-30 minutes in. It took awhile for things to pick up the pace.

By the way,Air-Bender was a great series! I imagine I'd enjoy Legend Of Korra just as much!

smartcelt

04/24/2013 at 04:33 PM

I remember getting very angry trying to play Full Auto online multiplayer. Visually it is very stunning,but the mechanics of it suck. It was like a crappier version of the great Burnout Paradise to me. But it had it's moments of genius,too. Blazing fast corners and destruction with weapons? I'm down with that. Eragon is one I never tried. But after what you said,I don't know if it would even be worth it.

KnightDriver

04/25/2013 at 01:59 AM

One fun thing about Eragon was that you could push enemies off the edges of bridges and such with your magic. You could also light them on fire and they would run off the edge by themselves.

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