How Low Can You Go? (derp) A Limbo Review

Today was the day, it was the long awaited day! At the time of this writing it's the day Limbo was released on the PC. After seeing it come to the 360 last year and the PS3 a few weeks ago, it was the PC crowd's time to play it.

Limbo is at it's core a 2D platformer like Super Mario Bros or any of the numerous other games. There is a dash of Another World with the way the game feels. The one thing that you'll notice about Limbo from the outset is the art style. It's a silhouetted look with the boy you play as being all black except for his white eyes and everything else is either grey or black. It looks nice but now I've see a few games do it too so it's not as special anymore.

Game play is simple, you move through the world and solve puzzles. Again a lot like Another World or other similar games. But I insult Another World mentioning it in the same sentence as Limbo. Why you may ask? Because Limbo is a giant piece of shit, it sucks so hard.

What the hell? The indie darling of last year is a bad game? Yes it is, for starters you can barely call it a game. It feels like a tech demo, it feels unfinished.

Where to start? I don't know, I guess on the story or the total lack of one. I can understand minimal story but you are NEVER clued in on what's happening. The game starts and ends and you never find out what's going on. The developer said it's open to interpretation, well here's my interpretation! You're all lazy and just didn't want to write a story so you went with the old let the players decide what it all means. LAZINESS!!!

The puzzles are simple, it's obvious what to do at all of them but Playdead made most of them a pain in the ass to complete. One in particular I did the solution multiple times but the game just didn't except it. Eventually I made it past, I guess the game decided to let me continue. A lot of the puzzles are repeated multiple times in different levels. The one in my mind right now you have to deal with 4 times! You get this worm on your head that makes you only move in one direction until you get hit by the sun. It's not fun it's poorly designed and you have to do it 4 freaking times, absurd! I prefer puzzles that are tough to figure out but actually doing the solution isn't the hard part, this game is the opposite. Like I said above every puzzle's solution is easy but doing the solution is infuriatingly hard to do most of the time, because a lot of the puzzles are time based. You throw a switch and you have to hurry to do the next part before the time runs out, THAT IS NEVER FUN! And it's never fun here, the controls have a clunkiness to them that makes rushing to do these tough but for the wrong reasons. Then when you mess up a part you have to wait for everything to reset so you can try again, it doesn't have to be an instant restart like Super Meat Boy but waiting like that is horrible.

The checkpoint system to garbage too, you die and sometimes it sends you way to far back. If I die on a puzzle I should start before that puzzle not the one before it. I've passed the old one, I've proven I can do, what do I have to do it again? Because this game is crap and the developers are assholes.

I played Limbo for 3 hours today, it took me 3 hours to beat it and that 3 hours I will never get back. The game is utter and complete crap, overhyped and I have NO idea why the gaming world was so in love with this game. It boggles my mind! A lot of people compared it to Braid, Braid wipes it's ass with Limbo. It's crap, I hate it, it's one of the worst games I've ever played, actually it may be the worst because it's getting the lowest score I've ever given a game. If you like the art style go to Newgrounds and play Coma it's actually fun and it's free. DON'T waste your money on Limbo, don't, please don't!

Limbo - 0 out of 10 (Fuck this game)

Fallout New Vegas!!! Not so fast there dude!

So I was lucky enough to get into the Fallout New Vegas Beta and let me tell you... Hold on, wait, no I paid for this game. It's a full retail release! Holy crap!

Yeah so last week Fallout New Vegas was released. I stayed up until midnight waiting for it to unlock on Steam and was so happy when it finally did. Only this happiness wouldn't last very long, soon it turns to sadness then finally great anger!

At first the game was running great for the whole introduction and tutorial stuff with the doctor it was all great. As soon as I stepped into the wasteland it all went to hell. The first thing I noticed was the massive drop in frame rate. At some points it was like watching a slide show of someone's visit to New Vegas and not playing a game. Now my PC isn't as cutting edge as it once was but I can still play most new games maxed out and I could 100 percent play Fallout 3 maxed but this game, nope runs like mud. I thought I should fight through this and just enjoy it but it was so hard. Next up I noticed some of the enemies getting stuck in the environment, some of the Geckos you need to fight at the start were hard to get to due to them being stuck, sometimes more than half way into some of the rocks. Another thing with the frame rate it seemed to slow down the most when a NPC was in the area then just go to the single digits when you looked at or talked to said NPCs.

So, okay I can deal with this I'll just play the game. Well I decided to save and go check out some forums to see if this is just happening to me or if it's widespread. I save the game and exit. As I'm reading about all the other people having these frame rate issues I see that the auto and quick saves aren't working right and something is causing the Steam Cloud to revert back to an old save. Panicked I loaded the game and saw I had lost about 3 hours of play time. Garbage! This is just crap!

Through out the next day I checked the various forums to see what was going to be done. A patch for scripting and quest issues was released and that's all well and good but if people can't play the game who cares about broken quests? Some people even almost a week after the game came out can't even load the game without it crashing. Apparently they fixed the save issue by shutting off the Steam Cloud support but I've still heard of save issues. Also there is suppose to be a fix for the frame rate that involves a modded .dll file but I won't try it. I don't feel comfortable with trying to solve an issue with a modded file downloaded off the internet. Lot's of people have said it worked and makes the game run at a smooth frame rate but I'm not going to bother.

My initial thoughts were this is the game Fallout 3 should of been before Bethesda but their "magic" touch on the series and just made a boring Oblivion with guns. In the few hours I spent with New Vegas it felt more like a Fallout game then Fallout 3 could ever hope to be. Obsidian programed this one and they're made up of a lot of the old Black Isle Studios crew who made the First two Fallout games.

Besides all that I can't believe this game was released like this! It's a freaking beta at best. I've heard the console versions constantly crash and have their own set of problems. For a big triple A title like this to ship unplayable is a disgrace. PC gaming is so past this when you bought a game and hoped it would work period like back in the DOS days.

I've given up on New Vegas I should of known better. To me Obsidian hasn't ever really put out a great game. KOTOR 2 was a travesty compared to the first one. Neverwinter Nights 2 kind of missed the whole point of that series and I never played Alpha Protocol but we've all seen the reviews and heard about the large amounts of bullcrap in that game. The the blame is also on Bethesda for this garbage engine. Gamebryo has been janky sense Oblivion and because they're Bethesda they get a free pass? Listen Daggerfall was brilliant, Morrowind was a good game but Oblivion was a boring wank fest and Fallout 3 was Oblivion with guns, another boring wank fest, bang bang!

If I were to give New Vegas a review number right now it would be a 1 out of 10. The 1 is because I had hope for about 45 minutes. Will I review it in the future? Probably not, I've given up on it, even if it gets fixed I'll probably never finish it. But I'll say this here, it's the last Bethesda or Obsidian game I'll ever buy, screw both of them!

IOS4 for the iphone. A testimony in pain.

So I like many upgraded to the new iOS4 for my iphone. Everything was okay for a couple days but then the crap started to happen. My apps would crash randomly a problem I never really had before except for one but even then it didn't happen all that often. Then as the apps themselves were updated to be in line with iOS4 the problems grew. Espgaluda 2 my most favorite iphone game became a barely working piece of crap. Constantly crashing, not booting right, it was like I couldn't even leave it without the OS thinking I wanting to multitask so I'm assuming the app was running in the background all the time. All the time until it finally crashed again to shut it down and down it's stayed. I loved being able to play this game but now I can't. Cave put out an update for it that I hope fixes the problem but I'm not ready to deal with trying it out. If it doesn't work I'll be really bummed.

But overall my phone is really laggy now. I'll hit the home button to leave an app and it takes a few moments to leave it. The loading of apps can be hit or miss, sometimes they load sometimes they don't. It's like flipping a coin, the hot new Apple iphone game! Gamble on apps starting!

So today I figured I should get the new 4.02 update with the PDF security hole and what not. Well after taking forever to download it installs, restarts my phone and then the phone never comes back up in itunes. After a long time I decide to pull the plug on the phone and plug it in again. Nothing, the PC let alone itunes doesn't recognize the phone. I shut the phone down and decide to restart phone and PC. Well the phone shuts off but my PC crashed with a blue screen upon it trying to shutdown for the restart. Some USB driver error, whatever it was I'm blaming the upgrade process for my phone because I've never had the error before. It's crap plain and simple, Apple should be ashamed of themselves. It's like they wanted to put out the iphone OS version of Vista.

I've decided that now is the time to roll back the OS on my phone and jailbreak this bitch. Hey Apple! I tried to follow the company line and stick with what you're doing with your phone but I've already felt the pain of the real Vista I don't need your iphone version screwing me over.

Prototype, fucking Prototype...

Fuck where to begin. Prototype the newish open world game from Radical Entertainment makers of Hulk Ultimate Destruction, well I just played through this game. I have mixed thoughts on it. One minute it's fun as shit to run around the city jumping super high and throwing cars at helicopters then consuming some soldiers in a very violent manner. Then all of a sudden it's a game that suffers from loose awkward controls that seem to be fighting against your every move. One minute your a super badass slaughtering untold numbers of mutants, then all of a sudden you're so fragile could fall over when anything even touches you. Overall I liked and fucking hated this game at the same time. I'm not discussing any story stuff because I don't feel like it and there would probably be spoilers if I did. But I did like the story and I thought it played out well. It's what made me keep playing.

Briefly the positives. When the game is going right it's just a blast to play. Combat is okay and you have a large number of moves available to you. One complaint I heard a lot was about the weird way you had to press buttons to get some of the moves to work. The only thing I noticed was when you need to hit X and B (square and circle on the PS3, I played this on the 360) at the same time. But it's only for a few moves and except for using one of these moves at one part in the game I never needed them. I guess you'll never need them either so you shouldn't let that steer you away from this. Besides that the controls work, for the most part. I also liked that the whole city is available to you from the beginning of the game. You can go to any part and not see any kind of loading except at the start and end of a mission and that loading is not long at all. The graphics do suffer for this as they do in most open world games but the character animations especially for Alex are fantastic.

Now when the controls work it's great. When are they a factor? When you need precision movement mainly during the timed events you can do during the course of the game. You have timed foot races where you need to touch orbs placed around the map in a set amount of time. War events where you team up with the military or the infected to fight the other side. Kill events in which you by yourself need to kill a set amount of enemies in a time limit. And finally you have the glide events, you just need to glide and land on a marker some distance from where you start. Any other time I can fly and run around stopping and turning on a dime no fucking problem. Just doing really cool amazing things to get around. Then when I start a timed foot race all of it goes to shit. Alex Mercer (The guy you play as) just starts saying "fuck it" and does whatever the hell he wants during these. Not going in the direction you press or not gliding when you need to. Before you go "Well you must just suck" I'll offer this. I platinumed all the events so they can be done but it's frustrating. I don't know how many times I'd airhike and Alex would just fly off away from where I pressed. The war events are equally annoying. Mainly because they're timed and on some of them you can't use your powers at all. Two come to mind where you are disguised as military and you have to use a grenade launcher. Fuck they were tough. To platinum them I had to constantly spam the lock on to slow down time. It's would be like doing one second of fighting in .8 seconds. If that what Radical had in mind for you to beat it that's bullshit because I think I fucked up my left trigger doing it. But these war events are so random in the spawns you can be so close but one last enemy will spawn to far away for you to get to them. Now the solo Kill events aren't that bad but the lock on makes fighting lots of guys at once kind of bullshit.

When you lock on to a enemy in Prototype the game slows down to allow you time to start fighting. Well for me this would throw of my timing. It took me about half the game to get adjusted to it, but the lock on in general was still a problem. When you hit the left trigger it locks on to the biggest threat on the screen, not the biggest threat near you. So if you're looking at a soldier all the way down the street and a tank is right behind you but out of site the lock on will get the soldier way far away as the tank owns your ass. You can select to either toggle lock on or have it to where you need to hold down the left trigger to keep the lock on. I usually like the toggle method but in Prototype it's shit. Usually in a game with toggle lock on when you kill the enemy targeted the lock on stops. In Prototype the lock on switches to the next enemy on the screen no matter how far away he is and this can fuck you up. I switched to holding the trigger and had better luck. But a big thing to me with this is the camera. When you're locked on moving the right analog stick which usually moves the camera switches the lock on target. When you're using toggle it can switch you all over the place when you instinctively go for the right stick to swing the camera around. Sometimes when you have to run from an enemy you're locked on to the camera can't keep up and you end up losing sight of the enemy. This is prevalent during boss fights. Not a problem when you have just a boss but most times the boss has helpers with it so you'll end up losing your lock on to the boss and targeting a minion. Bullshit.

You're built up to be this super badass dude with all these powers and can destroy all kinds of shit but you're frail as shit. You can regenerate health but only half way. You have to consume enemies to raise it to full. You lose health really fast. When you're fighting a few enemies it's not a big deal but when the numbers are large, which is often you lose health way to fast. You can consume enemies for health but an attack from an enemy will knock the consumed target out of your hands, even in the middle of a consume animation. This can lead to cheap deaths and feelings that the game just doesn't want to let you do what you want to do. Any explosion can knock you down. Now I know it's a freaking explosion from a missle or grenade or whatever but you're suppose to be super powerful. Can't he just sometimes shrug the blast off? Hunter infected can knock you over just by bumping into you. This sucks ass during kill events involving infected. You're trying to slaughter civilian infected but they always spawn one Hunter that can jump from far far away to knock you down then combo you as you stand up. Kill him and another comes in to replace him. It's takes Alex so long to get up it's painful and then you lose the event.

Over all I liked Prototype. I would of liked to see things done differently and hope if they make a sequel they fix this shit. I bought this when Amazon had a deal of the day for it at 40 dollars and feel like that's a good price for this game. I put about 30 something hours into it all together playing through the story, finding all the Orbs and Web of Intrigue targets and getting platinum times in all the events so I feel I got my moneys worth out of it and I still need to play through it on hard mode. If you see it for 40 or cheaper I'd say get it. At 50 if you've played it and liked it then go ahead, you'll probably spend a lot of time with it.

If I was Activision I would of released a demo of the first prologue level. It was fucking awesome and they'd probably have sold a lot more copies of the game.

Prototype - 8.5 out of 10

Guitar Hero World Tour

I've been a big fan of the previous Guitar Hero games. Always fun to just throw it and play a a couple of hours. I played up to GH2 on the 360, but when my 360 RROD on me I traded in all my 360 stuff including GH2. Since then I haven't owned a GH game. Well a few days ago Amazon had a one day deal for GH World Tour. One hundred dollars off. I said what the hell and decided to order it. I ordered for the 360 (My fourth) and it came a couple days ago and I've been playing it. I love the wireless guitar. I've prefered the GH guitars over Rock Bands and this one is also great. My one big complaint on the new guitar is the star power activation is way to sensitive. Any movement whatsoever make Star Power go off. I ended up turning the tilt off. But the button to activate SP is right next to the strum bar and very easy to use. I havent tried the drums or vocals yet because I've been going through the guitar career. I've also read that the GHWT instruments work with all the other music game. Rock Band 1 and 2 plus all past GH games on the 360, so I can buy others without having a ton of plastic instruments sitting around.

Now I have a complaint. A big fucking complaint. The song list. I mean what the fuck. Now I haven't gone through all the songs but man some of this shit is just fucking boring to play. Then a bunch of these bands I've never even heard of. I mainly listen to Death Metal, Grind, Noise and shit like that but I know a bunch about music and I still havent heard of some of this. Who in balls name are the Hushpuppies? Negramaro? The Living End? The Beatsteaks? You may know but I don't. A lot of times in these games I'll not know the song but when I hear it I'll go, "Oh I've heard this." In this game no, just goddamn boredom. I read the Rock Band 2 band list and I've heard of almost all the bands and then I know the songs they have featured in the game. The Linkin Park song in GHWT, "What I've Done" hardly has any fucking guitar in it. I'm standing there looking like a jackass for more than half the song. I'm not a Linkin Park fan (Breaking the Habit is awesome though) but I know they have songs with lots of fucking guitars in them. Why not get one of those? If I wanted to stand there and listen to Linkin Park I'd do that and I wouldnt have to hold a plastic guitar while I do it. I'm figuring MTV having a stake in Rock Band helps them get bands to sign up for that game a lot easier but GH needs to get something. I really hope GH5 has a better song list. This is very important because the DLC support for the GH series is piss fucking poor.

But I do think some of the songs on GHWT are great and lots of fun to play. Dammit by Blink 182 was fun and Eye of the Tiger was a fucking blast. Others have been fun to but I'm bored more than I'm having a good time.

I'll probably just end up picking up GH Metallica and Rock Band 2 and being happy with that.

Unlockable Difficulties in Games

It's complete bullshit. Just an artificial way for developers to make their game longer. I've been playing games for a long time and I'm good at them. I like a freaking challenge when I play. If I'm stuck on the normal setting I'll blow through a game in no time. I like to crank it to the hardest setting and blow balls all over it. Sure as shit after I finish on normal I'm going to want to try my hand at the harder mode so I go through the game again. When I could be playing something new.

I give credit to the Call of Duty series, Veteran mode is available right from the get go. Same thing with the Halo games, even fucking Halo Wars has Legendary opened at the start. I know more games let you choose the hardest setting right from the start but those are just two examples.

Now two big triple A titles that make you unlock their last difficulty. I'm looking right at Gears of War 1 and 2. What the hell! Another series, Resistance 1 and 2. Just give me what I fucking want from the start. Then on top of the unlocking Resistance 2 was a fucking cake walk on Super Human.

They let you pick easy from the outset so players that may not be good enough or just want a casual play through can get their kicks. Game developers need to understand that a game being to easy can bore someone good, just as a game being to hard to frustrate someone without top notch skills.

I'm not bashing people that play on easy or whatever. I'm just saying it's a dumb thing to have as an unlockable.