Hey, it’s been a while since I wrote. That time – a good amount of it between jobs – has been spent starting and finishing a few gaming single player adventures. It’s good to see that some games are still worth playing, for entertainment and I guess for enrichment.
Here’s a quick recount.
Heavy Rain is a murder mystery, exploring the quintessential father-son relationship and some of the sadder notes of humanity. It tries to tell a mature, engaging story, playing out through the perspectives of four lead characters, and I’d say largely succeeds in drawing the player into the plot and making him care about what happens. The gameplay revolves around a series of contextual actions, so players are “acting out” cutscenes; in a few particularly tense scenarios, I really liked what you had to do as a player in dexterous mimicry of your played character in-game. This one’s really different from most games out there and worth a playthrough, though be forewarned that the game is quite depressing.
God of War III doesn’t pretend to be deep or psychological. It’s the supposed conclusion to a trilogy about an angry dude pissed off at – first a few, eventually all of them - Greek gods and goes on a journey to basically slaughter them all. It follows the same action-heavy, light-puzzle, epic graphics and myth-revisionist storytelling that the series is known for, and playing it on the PS3 just showcases how pretty this game is. This game, along with the God of War Collection, make for some awesome stress relief after a long workday…well, had I had work.
Final Fantasy XIII is…well, it’s set in the typical Final Fantasy science-meets-magic, sword-and-guns world where a group of unrelated characters go on a grand adventure to escape a town but eventually save the world. It’s stapled with that brand of unique JRPG cheesy melodrama and capped with nonsensical plot twists, but since it’s Final Fantasy all the annoyances are at least wrapped in a layer of high production graphics and a pretty good soundtrack. The saving grace here is probably the simplified but strategic battle system; the game now does a lot of the tedious manual commands for you (e.g., it knows you’re fighting a fire monster and will automatically use ice magic), but you’re still controlling the general flow of combat and roles that your party members play. Sadly though, the linearity and “meh” of the first 20 hours probably makes this the first Final Fantasy that I’m not going to play through twice.
Just Cause 2 features some guy on some make-believe Asian island out to cause destruction. I don’t even know what the plot is supposed to be; the game doesn’t even try to make you care about the story, just as long as you’re blowing stuff up with helicopters, miniguns, and plenty of explosives. The game’s basically an impressively giant sandbox (think Grand Theft Auto) with a lot of towns and locales to discover, a pretty good physics engine for some creative stunts and kills, and plenty of vehicles on land, air, and water to aid in said creative destruction. For whatever reason, I’m having more fun messing around in this game than in any of the other sandbox games I’ve played in the past; I think it speaks to the appeal of untethered bullets and explosions, which also makes for welcomed stress relief after a long day in my cube.