What I Played Today: March 7

Mass Effect, Kingdom Hearts: 386/2 Days, Shadow Complex

Keep on plugging with Mass Effect, still haven’t gotten to where I want to be, and I’m in trouble because a game I know I’m going to want to play a lot comes out on Tuesday. But I’m getting into the late third of the game, so hopefully I can blaze through it sometime this week. I’ve also noticed a ridiculous trend in pretty much every mission. It’s always running around and shooting alien races that shouldn’t exist. The Geth, the Thorian, the Rachni, these are races that have either been completely extinct or supposedly living in regions of space that nobody goes to. Why are they everywhere? Yeah, yeah, the futile and terrible curiosity of man, but could we please shoot people that have a good reason to be there? Like...pirates. Okay, there are a couple of pirates, but not nearly as many as those damn Rachni. What assholes those guys are.

I’m finished with Kingdom Hearts. Not done, by any means, but I’ve seen enough, and I’ve gotten to a puzzle level, which is just obnoxious on such a small screen with limited movement options. Translating a game straight from a PS2 onto a Nintendo DS is a stupid prospect, because the graphics suffer greatly (to make it almost laughable) and the storyline just gets stupider in time, mainly because the dialogue seems to be written by a 15-year-old whose having trouble at school. So, back it goes.

I also jumped around a lot more in Shadow Complex. It’s mostly leveling at this point, and trying to collect more treasures. The fights are a lot harder on this harder difficulty, so I’m constantly getting frustrated and quitting. I’m pretty deep in the second playthrough now, having rescued the lady, but I’ve gotten to a stupid bossfight whose weakness I don’t even understand. I’m supposed to use the hookshot to pull off...something, but I can never find it. Whatever.

What I Played Today: March 6

Kingdom Hearts: 386/2 Days, My Pet Protector 2

I’ve been playing a bit more of Kingdom Hearts, which has convinced me that the story is ridiculous. I’ve gotten to the point where I could see the overlaps with the other games, and I can only say the story doesn’t make any sense. It’s pretty pointless, and there’s never any reason for anything in the game to happen. The constant intrusion of Disney elements just start to wear upon the storyline, because it just feels stupid whenever you wander into a Disney icon. Oh look, it’s Aladdin, which doesn’t collude with the other characters I’ve seen before at all. This little crossover is actually a horrible idea, isn’t it?

I’ve also been playing a Flash game that is beyond stupid. It turns out to be a very confusing simulation, where you play a kid growing up in the fantasy realm. There are about 30 statistics, half of which doesn’t do anything at all. It’s goofy; you spend half the time resting, and the other half wandering through pointless dungeons and looking at screens that don’t make any sense. You’re simultaneously building your village, managing your inventory, working pointless jobs that do nothing, learning skills, and adventuring, and oh my god it’s boring. But it’s so addictive.
Watching so many numbers crawl from 0 to 1000 is just so intriguing, and yet, not at all relevant. The game is supposed to end after 7 years, but I haven’t yet gotten to that point. It’s just the draw of an RPG, the constant moving upward, that keeps drawing me in. Lord help me if I ever play it again.

What I Played Today: March 1

Plants vs. Zombies, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Mass Effect

I played a bit of Plants vs. Zombies on the train, getting through the 3rd stage and getting to the stage where the game starts to fall apart. The latest stage is identical to the last, with the huge pool in the middle that you can’t use regular plants on. Now it’s dark, so there’s no free resources falling from the sky (although I can use mushrooms, as good as that does me), and now the entire right side of the screen is obstructed by fog, so I can’t see the zombies coming at me. It’s officially become a chore...but I’m going to plug through it so that I can get to the roof level and see what that’s all about.

More Kingdom Hearts today; the game has finally opened up after a couple more introduction missions, and it’s...Kingdom Hearts. It plays exactly the same, just with a different leveling up system and a different set of allies, now completely from the Final Fantasy side of this screwed-up hybrid. I still haven’t got a clue what’s going on, or when exactly this is supposed to be taking place (I think inbetween the first and second game, but I cannot be sure.) But it’s jumping, slashing, and being confused by the most ridiculous mythos I’ve yet seen. (So...we get hearts from the Heartless? But...they’re heartless. They don’t have hearts! It’s in their name!)

Also got a little further in Mass Effect, going to the ice planet to convince some jerks to let me borrow the car and visit some chick at her secret laboratory. There’s a lot of corporate intrigue and I remember it being really boring when I watched my friend play through it the first time. I was right. I pretty much sprinted through it, doing everything I could to get the most ‘good’ points. Luckily it didn’t take very long, and after some driving I got to Peak 15, where I was immediately killed. So...yeah, I’ll get back to that later.

What I Played Today: February 28

Professor Layton and the Diabolic Box, Mass Effect, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days

I got through Professor Layton a bit fast then I expected, still took a while, but I just plugged through it. Once you get near the end it’s pretty straightforward, just follow the path and bat away all those puzzles they throw at you. All the mysteries got solved in time, and there was my favorite part, where Professor Layton does something awesome that you can’t participate in at all, and then everything gets tied up in a bow. The big reveal wasn’t as ridiculous as the last game, but it was still pretty weird.

I’m almost convinced that Layton is gay, and that the gentlemen’s code that he follows is specifically designed to prevent him ever being near a women in a romantic manner. I know it’s a cheap joke, but this game doesn’t even try to create a single moment of attraction with him. There’s one point where a woman that’s actually close to his age is on the screen and he seems completely uninterested, instead trying to keep his young protégé away from her. It’s just...give us less fuel, guys.

I finally said screw it to the sidequests in Mass Effect, and managed to get a fair distance on the story tracking, getting through an entire chapter and shooting a great deal of geth. I had made it through 10 hours of gameplay before accidently finding out that I have a missile launcher on the vehicle that I’m forced to drive on all the planets. That would have been nice to know...pretty much anytime. I’m reminded of hearing that someone couldn’t figure out you could apply upgrades to weapons, despite that 60% of the loot you get is upgrades. But it was a lot more entertaining when I was following the story, even if it did feel exactly like an episode of Star Trek.

I started Kingdom Hearts 368/2 Days, which is probably the stupidest title for a game I’ve heard in a while. As far as I can tell, it follows the 368 days in which Roxas, Sora’s Nobody, is active as gets dragged into the Organization, and I really do not know who this game is for. I can guess; they wear a lot of black and listen to MCR, whoever the hell they are, but it definitely isn’t a game for me. So far every time the main character has opened his mouth, he’s had his chin buried in his forearm, for christ’s sake. This is an emo-ass game, and I’m really not sure why I rented it. An unusual adherence to a ridiculous franchise that’s gone terribly astray, maybe, despite the fact that I’ve no real reason to like it? I shrug lightly, and will continue to play because of forces that I cannot begin to understand.