Game Time - 4/1/2012

I've had this blog for quite a while now. It's awesome to see the viewers roll in when I post new content, so it makes me feel a little guilty when I don't post anything for a while. Take this past week for example, I didn't post anything. That was super lame and I apologize. My lack of blogging was partially due to the fact that I started a job this past week, and partially due to a lack of new games in my life. I've been pretty busy, but I still managed to get some gaming in.

Even when I'm busy I still find time to play video games, which means that I can find the time to blog as well. This is where I came up with the idea for a series called Game Time. It's more or less a weekly update, but I felt like calling it a weekly update would be equal parts lazy and lame. A name like Game Time is arguably just as lazy and lame, but I like it. Perhaps in the future I'll change it. Especially since it is easily confused with the name of the blog itself! Regardless of your feelings on the name, Game Time is now officially a thing.

What the Hell is Game Time? 

Every week I play a ton of stuff and I don't necessarily write about it on here and that's about to change. Now when Sunday rolls around I'm going to set aside some time to make sure that I write about my gaming exploits from the last week. This way I get some quality content and people who come here to read can actually do that. It's a win-win for everyone involved. 

Today, April 1st marks the first Game Time. Although it is April Fools Day this is not an April Fools joke, because I don't have nearly enough followers yet for that to matter at all. Let's get into it!

Skyrim

I bought Skyrim a week or two after its release. I tried to tell myself that I didn't want to buy it, which was mostly true before the game came out. See, I wasn't really too keen on Oblivion, but on the other hand I loved Morrowind. I was pretty apprehensive going into the Skyrim launch, because I didn't want to be disappointed like I was with Oblivion. Upon seeing Skyrim played live and in front of me I knew that I had to have it, so I immediately rushed off to pick it up.

Now here I am months after it's release and I still haven't reviewed the game and I'm never going to. While I try to review every game I beat it doesn't always end up happening. Sometimes life gets in the way and I just don't have the time. In the case of Skyrim, Skyrim got in the way. When I review a game I want the experience to be mostly fresh in my mind, so if I take a break for a few months and come back to a game I'm most likely not going to review it.

My Kajiit is ready to roam Skyrim once more!

The reason I took a break from Skyrim was because I made the mistake of buying the PS3 version. As most people probably know the PS3 version of Skyrim was busted, especially if you played it for a long time. For the first month I had a great time with Skyrim. I completed most of the guild quests and my play time was up to around 50 hours. The problem with Skyrim on the PS3 is that the more you do, the larger your save file size is. Once it got up to around 10mb the frame rate would often slow to a crawl, making the game more or less unplayable. I was lucky and managed to avoid it for a long time, but my game eventually slowed down too. I stopped playing the game until they released a new patch, which only made the problem worse. Instead of a ridiculous frame rate drop the game decided that locking up the entire system would be a better option. Fed up with all the issues I decided to shelf Skyrim, until this past Thursday.

Bethesda has released quite the cavalcade of patches and the game works great for the most part now, so I decided to finish the main quest. Turns out I only had a few more quests to complete, so the rest of the main story only took me a little while. The story of the main quest was pretty disappointing, so I was glad to get back into the random questing and world immersion that makes Skyrim so awesome to me. After playing for a few hours my previous anger about how broken the game was faded into nothingness. Now I'm pretty much hooked on Skyrim again.

Metroid Other M

On Black Friday I made the mistake of going out to Best Buy. My original intent was to buy Babysitting Mama for $5 as a joke, but they didn't have it. Instead I walked out with a copy of Pac-Man Party and a highly discounted copy of Metroid Other M ($5!). I left Metroid in it's shrink wrap, because I didn't really intend to play it. I just wanted to marvel at the fact that I payed $5 for it when it was being sold for $50 everywhere else. Now that I'm in kind of a new game drought I broke the seal and popped that sucker in my Wii last night.

I only played it for a few hours, but it was enough play to know that the game is really weird. Metroid Prime was something that I never really liked. For some reason I couldn't get behind a first-person shooter version of the sidescrolling games I used to like a whole lot. So when Metroid Other M takes the Metroid I don't like and marries it with the Metroid I do like the final product is just plain weird. To make things even more crazy it's made by the team that makes Ninja Gaiden.

Since Other M is made by Team Ninja Samus can so some crazy stuff

So far the story doesn't seem very good. It takes place directly after Super Metroid and sees Samus exploring a pretty messed up bottleship with some of her old alliance friends. Flash backs happen every so often and they're filled with a whole lot of talking. I've never been too interested in the Metroid fiction, so I guess I'm not the right person to judge what's going on without seeing the whole picture. The voice acting isn't helping me accept the story either. No one is doing a very good job and Samus sounds like an emotionless robot, which she isn't.

The gameplay has been the most interesting part so far. Movement is odd, because it's 3D on a 2D plane. It's because of this that all of Samus's shots are auto-aimed at enemies, which doesn't always work right. For the most part it feels pretty good though and I'm looking forward to seeing how everything progresses. My main problem with the gameplay is when you have to go into first person mode. If you aim the Wii-mote at the screen Samus will jump into first person mode. You have to go into first person mode to scan objects in the environment, which doesn't control well at all. I especially don't like when the game forces you into first person to scan for objects that seem to be a pixel in size. 

It's still too early to tell how I really feel about this. All I know is that I payed $5 for it!

There Was Multiplayer in There Somewhere

For the past two days I've been trying to play Fortune Street with a friend. That Monopoly/stock market hybrid will forever puzzle me. It's fun to play with friends, but infuriating to play against computer players. I have some deeper thoughts on the game that I'm going to try and post later in the week. 

So there you have it, this has been the first installment of Game Time. I hope you enjoyed reading about the games I played in the last week. Sadly I won't be getting a brand new game until the 6th when Xenoblade arrives, which I'm pretty hyped up for. Why can't Nintendo just release games on Tuesdays like everyone else? Until then I'll have to make due with what I've got already. 

     -Manny