lördag 13 oktober 2012

The Top-5 Worst XBOX 360 Games In My Collection.

I have about 70-80 games for Xbox 360 and I have had more before. This is a list of the five worst games I ever had, that I've been the most disappointed or frustrated with, or simply have a pure hatred against now. So let's go ...


5. Borderlands (2009)

I love wasteland-themed movies and games, post-apocalyptic sci-fi style with the classic, cliché desert savages, small town camps, and super vehicles and so on. One really good game with these features is Rage, but unfortunately I can't say the same thing for this game. I bought this because it was supposed to be such a good game that very many people's got, but I guess opinions still relies in oneself and not the public. While not necessarily a very bad game in its classic sense, I found it pretty mediocre-boring while playing it by myself.

As I only played it once by myself, I've had it laying around for times when I have friends over so we could play it in co-op mode, which is a hell lotta more fun. But not anymore ... I'm generally a solid FPS games, half of my games are FPS I imagine and I've been playing FPS games almost exclusively lately. The last time we played though, we pretty much died once a minute. I mean it was really frustrating. I had the best weapons I had been able to find / buy and just shot, shot and shot the enemies, at times in the face for a long time - almost whole mags - without them dying! I mean, that sucks so badly. It's not even fun anymore when it gets like that. I rage-quitted the game and don't wanna play it now. It's very repetitive anyways, too. So ultimately - I did not like Borderlands.


4. Crackdown (2006)
 
This was one of my like 5-7 first games I ever got for the Xbox 360. At the time I had an old white Premium 20 GB, which is kind of nostalgic now. The reason I wanted this game was because not too many games really interested me, besides Grand Theft Auto IV that is. I'm a huge GTA nerd and it was pretty much the only series I played for some years in the mid to late 2000's. So looking up other, "similar" sand-box / free-roam kind of games, I found out about Crackdown. I got it from my stepdad who worked in a kind of media-disc warehouse where they had movies and games, so he brought a copy home. Since I didn't have too many games at the time, I believe I played this one quite a lot, almost finishing it actually. Though I played it so much, I couldn't help but to feel that it was very repetitive all the way through.

It's really the same thing you do over and over and over again from the beginning to the end, and I hate that with games. I really think game developers should actually develope a game, not develope a mission, repeat it lots of times and call it a game. You're a super-cop or agent or whatever, and you can jump and climb on buildings, collect green orps and then you assassinate some drug dealers, mafia bosses or whatever. It's really the same route over and over in this game with everything, not a very fun one at that. Needless to say, I got tired of it before I finished it and stopped playing it.


3. Duke Nukem Forever (2011)

I'm gonna stay short on this one. 14 years in development, the hopes of the gamers pretty much dead, no high expectations anymore, this was bound to fail.
I played Duke Nukem 3D as a kid, maybe I played the others too, I don't remember anymore. I got this without really expecting anything from it rather than the obvious - that is was gonna be bad. Therefore, I wasn't too surprised either. This game lacks pretty much everything it shouldn't. The graphics are horrible as they differ from stage-to-stage in the game, pretty mediocre / lame gameplay overall and the humour wasn't really that funny no more neither. Bulletstorm, also released in 2011, is what Duke Nukem Forever should've been. But ey, at least I had that 3D poster on my wall for a while.


 2. Fable III (2010)

First off, I never played the original Fable game, I started with Fable II for Xbox 360 maybe a year ago? I liked that game, pretty much playing it non-stop until I finished it. As Fable III had already been out for a while at that point, I had heard things about it and no good things, I can tell you. Actually, what I heard about it was so much bashing that I kind of thought it was ridicolous, really. So then one day I was at the local media store and found it for 99 Swedish kronor (about 13-14 bucks), so I thought I'd get it, it wasn't so much money to lose anyway.

So I came home and started playing it. At first I didn't really think too much of it, I was just kinda trying to see if it either sucked or was better than people say. As time went by I started to recognize the issues pretty much "everybody" had been talking about. I also found myself missing Fable II a lot during the playthrough of this. It's certainly a huge step down in every good way that was Fable II, and then I've heard that the second one was kind of that to the first one as well. But I liked the second, after a short while I did not think fondly of the third. I did finish it, however, but it wasn't too long either so I guess that explains it. I was ultimately very disappointed with this game. A huge let-down after the great Fable II.


1. Dead Island (2011)

And here's the crowned winner of my top-5 worst Xbox 360 games in my collection! This game is pretty much everything bad about a game and I don't think I've never been more frustrated by a game than with this stupid piece of shit! I generally love zombie games and have a bunch of them - Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Dead Rising 1 and 2, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare,  and I had the first four Resident Evil games and I even played the zombie bonus on Call of Duty: Black Ops, but this motherfucker takes the fucking cake for being a real bad, piece-of-shit-game which should never have been released! It's a fucking blasphemy amongst zombie games.

I bought this a while back after it dropped in price (THANK GOD I did that ...), at a cost of 199 Swedish kronor (about 25-27 bucks I think?), a price which is just too much for this crap. I do realize that I'm using lots of silly words and shit right now, but it's just my angry fucking frustration of this game that is getting out through my fingertips. I somebody mentions this game to me I also get in a very bad mood because it reminds me that I payed that much money for this shit!

Where Left 4 Dead are the zombie games I currently like the most, especially the first one (I thought the second was a little flawed and mediocre and that game frustrated me some as well, but that's another story), this is pretty much an obvious rip-off of Left 4 Dead. Now the style of this typical zombie-apocalypse themed game is pretty much bound to be "like the rest", especially Left 4 Dead when it's an FPS game, but the ripping-off doesn't end there. This is very much a total rip-off of Left 4 Dead - its "special infected zombies" looks similar too and ARE similar to Left 4 Dead's special infected. The boomers are here called Floater, the tanks are called Ram, hunters are Butcher, and so on. It feels so obvious that I get really mad at this game. How little imagination can there be to come up with some original ideas for special zombies? Very little I see!

The gameplay is probably even worse. I think it's kind of flawed in many ways. It's like often very frustrating when fighting zombies and you clearly see / feel / know you're hitting them, yet they get no damage and damage YOU instead. I also don't really like their melee-weapon system, that weapons break and you have to repare them (for large sums of hard-found cash!). I mean, it could be there to make the game more challenging, but I think the weapons break way too fast in the game = frustrating. It's also unbelieveably repetitive. Every mission is the same over and over. You go to some motherfucker and get a task to do for them, then you go do it. Now this is mostly retrieving things around the world for them as they're not bad-ass enough to fight the zombies themselves. The things are mostly unimportant shit too, the prime example being some girl in a bungalow who wants her fucking TEDDYBEAR back, which is located half-way across the fucking map! Was the teddybear meant to be funny or something? It certainly was NOT, just fucking irritating, nothing else. The people are often cocky or ungrateful towards you as well, making me think of how I hate most people in real life = making me angry. As said, it's very much the same thing over and over and it gets boring and uninspired real fast. Many times during these missions you also encounter other motherfuckers mid-mission, maybe denying you entry or passing if you don't GO BACK A WHOLE FUCK-LONG WAY to get them a fucking apple or whatever! During these encounters I just felt like I wanted to kill them and go on, but guess what - YOU FUCKING CAN'T! WHY did they leave out the option to chose whether to be good or bad? It would've been better if you were able to chose to be bad and kill survivors as well, but no. So when the missions were already irritating and boring, they make it even worse with all these stupid characters!

Now this is also a level-game. You get points, level up, yada yada yada, you get the point. The thing is though, no matter how fucking much you level-up, upgrade your feats ans so on, the zombies also levels up as much as you do, and the shit you upgrade pretty much doesn't make any difference, not a big anyways, meaning that this game's level-system is fucking worthless as you never get superior to the zombies anyway! On top of that new special-infected are regularly added to the world, making the level-sytem even more and more and more worthless all the time. I mean, WHAT THE FUCK were they thinking?! It also hasn't got a manual save option and the auto saving system sucks just as much as everything else in this game. There's an icon which flashes (if I remember right) when it's saving, but it does that at odd times so you can pretty much never quit when you want without being sure if it's saving or not, making it even. more. frustrating! The characters are nothing funny either. They're boring, uninspiredly created and just typically done like "we gotta have each of one race". As for the facial expressions, well they doesn't exist in this game. Surprised? They always look the same neutral, bored, fuck-faced fucking way and the dialogue is worthless as well. *Sigh*

This game is so fucking bad, I HATE it. It's not fun, it's not good, the mechanics, graphics and so on are either very bad or average. I've never been more angry, frustrated or even disappointed I think I dare to say, than with this fucking game. It's the worst thing I've ever played on Xbox 360 and I almost finished it, too! Go on and get Left 4 Dead instead. It's the same game but a thousand times better, only it hasn't got an open-world format. If you must have that, go and get Dead Island instead. It's a TPS game, but a hell lotta better than this. Dead Island is bad. Bad, bad, BAD! Fuck this game, don't buy it.

måndag 8 oktober 2012

80's Raw Power Hard Rock 'n' Roll

So I'm too early for the first time in like several years (woke up a little after 5 am) and am currently listening to some old school raw power-hard rock band that I love. Most of the bands mostly came out in the late 80's and tried to survive during the early 90's grunge outbreak. Though I love some grunge bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone (I'm more into death metal and alternative bands like Faith No More, Jane's Addiction, Rage Against The Machine, etc. rather than grunge, not a big fan of Nirvana or Pearl Jam for instance), I still prefer the old, ballsy hard rock stuff that was like if AC/DC had have a threesome with Motörhead and The Stooges. So here are some classics that I really like rocking out to....





söndag 7 oktober 2012

Some personal thoughts on: Skyrim


I recently was lucky and got a copy of Skyrim exactly a week ago. As most people most likely know, Skyrim's a hit game that very many players have been discussing. Though I never was too anticipated about it when it was announced, maybe because I had only heard about Morrowind and Oblivion but not actually played 'em, I recently felt it was about time that I got this game myself.

So now a week has passed, I've had some time to play it and feel what it's all about. I'm going to do a review of it right now, I believe there's still way too much to do in it before a review, but I'm gonna share some thoughts I have about it so far. I'm close to 40 hours of gameplay now, I'm at level 20 as of this moment, and my obsession of playing it has decreased more and more during the last few days. I guess that is a first step in seeing what I think about the game - it's ultimately not as fun for a long time as it's in the beginning, not for me anyways. It's not like the GTA-series. I played Vice City from when it came to when San Andras came, probably almost every day, then it was pretty much the same with San Andreas. I kinda "lived" in those game-worlds back then. I believe GTA IV has the record now, though. Having been out since early 2008, I myself got an Xbox 360 in January '09 and GTA IV was my first game. I still play it today, it's the game I play the most and keep going back to over and over again. Now the point by all this GTA-talk is that I don't believe Skyrim will by like those in the long run.

Though I'm at almost 40 hours now, I guess I already around 15-20 hours felt the game was getting somewhat annoyingly repetitive. In my opinion it's just way too much of the same "speak to him and get a quest, go to that cave and get that item, return it to the quest giver". I would've liked more different tasks and environment than just caves for most of the quests. While this tends to be somewhat bad with the game, it still has tons of other great things to weigh it all up. Just pointing out a few other bad things quickly, which would be the stiff facial expressions during conversation, some bugs, and many annoying loading screens.

Now I'm going to focus on the things I really like about this game and what makes it unique. First off - character creation. Rather than having different human races, this games has different races all-in-all. Now I do not remember the race names, but you can be a human-like cat and lizzard, orc, elves, and of course some human-looking races. Being half Swedish, half Finnish myself, I play as a Nord because I'm fascinated by the old, nordic vikings and that stuff. You also join different factions which I really like. I instantly joined the Stormcloaks and fought against the Imperial. That's what I would've done in real life too, I guess - being revolutionary. After that I joined the Companions, whom I really as well. The third and so far last faction I've joined are the Thieves Guild. Them I do not like. I do not like their attitude at all and only does it all for the quest. Other than these three factions, I don't think there is any other I'm really too interested in, but I will probably do them anyway.

This game also has a great system of weapons and magic. I really like the possibility of having magic and (one-handed) weapons at the same time. There are also plenty of spells and weapons to use, as well as expand the weapons with magic and such, though I'm not good at this yet. I also like to go and wander around the world. It has its charm and places. I really like the college of Winterhold, I think it's a beautiful place when it snows a lot, and I can find myself just standing there and looking around. It's also very beautiful when it's raining. The "cities" are also great in this game, majestic and beautiful. My favorites are Whiterun and Riften I think, but Solitude is great too, especially when seen from the outside.

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All in all it's a great game so far, but in the long run I think I will let go of it, unfortunately. I do not see why there is so much fuzz about this game. While it certainly is a solid play, there are many games that I would easily prefer over this. But then again, I don't play games like Call of Duty any more. I do not see what's so special about some of those biggest names, with CoD as a primary example now. I really thought Black Ops (the last CoD I played) was nothing special at all. There are too many overrated games out there, Skyrim unfortunately being one of them. While I love many, many things with it, there are too many things to not make it "crush the competition". While I can probably say it's better than its closest rivals, like the Fable-series, I would rather pick up and play games like GTA, Gears of War, Deus Ex: Huma Revolution, Sleeping Dogs, Saints Row 2, and so on. But then again it's all just opinions.

My current rating for Skyrim: 8.2 / 10