I haven't forgotten to post again, truth be told I've just not been all that arsed about gaming over the last couple of weeks, so I've had little to write about.
I suppose the biggest news is my acquisition of a second-hand Nintendo 3DS, Which set me back a meagre £149.99, less than the proposed price cut and I'll still get the freebies from the Ambassador Programme. Also, the dumbassed previous owners had left an 8gb SD card in the machine, further sweetening my deal. If you're reading this by the way, I deleted your holiday photos.
The only games I've picked up, and indeed the only currently available 3DS games that I'm interested in, are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition (Yes, I'm fully aware that they are both games I already own, I'll buy what I want, you're not my real dad), and I'm saving Zelda for my week in Wales next week, but I'm suitably impressed with SSFIV. It looks better than I ever expected it to, with character models that look almost on a par with it's PS3 counterpart. The backgrounds don't hold up all that well, being made up of layered, stationary 2D sprites, and it gives the whole thing a look like one of those 3D picture box things from Art Attack. The backgrounds are also very low-res, but that's only noticeable in the cutscene before you fight Akuma in Arcade Mode.
As far as gameplay goes, it's about the best version of SFIV I've played (keep in mind I haven't had a go on Arcade Edition yet), must notably because it's got the unreasonably priced DLC costume packs bundled within. Also, the touch screen displays shortcuts to two of your character's Specials and their Super and Ultra, which takes the skill out of it somewhat, rendering them even easier to pull off than Mortal Kombat's all-too-accessible X-Ray moves, but it makes some of the ridiculously difficult moves like Zangief's Ultimate Atomic Buster actually useful, and the charge moves like Guile's Sonic Boom able to be pulled off without being overly obvious to your opponent.
So yeah, good game. The only other thing I've really been playing, albeit at a snail's pace, is Bethesda's Hunted: The Demon's Forge on PS3, and, well, it's alright. I commented the other week on how every game tries to rip off God/Gears of War, but Hunted is the first game I've played that tries to do both. The two lead characters are each equipped with a Bow for cover-based shooting, and a sword and shield for close combat, with sadistic elf Elara specialising in archery and tribal-covered meat head Caddoc majoring in, well, being a meat head. To be honest, the close combat is that dull, boring and most importantly difficult that I've spent just about all of my time behind the cross hairs of the bloodthirsty elf, partly to take advantage of Caddoc's seemingly unlimited reserves of health when under the AI's supervision, and partly because the ranged combat is pretty fun, infinitely more so than the tiresome swordplay.
Occasionally the game attempts to plagiarise a third genre too, the Dragon Age/Dungeon Siege archetype of RPG, with levelling up, short conversational segments and a magic system that is utterly pointless, as it brings nothing to the table. And to say it prides itself on it's split-screen coop multiplayer, it handles that woefully - the fact that even on a widescreen TV the screen is split horizontally, resulting in neither my wife nor I being able to see pretty much anything even on our 40" screen because our letterbox views were too tiny, is unbelievably under-researched, and to add insult to injury the already sub-par graphics are noticeably downgraded too. As this was my first impression of the game, I can't say I was too delighted.
But after a couple of hours with the single-player game, despite it's faults, I find myself strangely endeared. For a game so destined for failure, a surprisingly deep history has been crafted, reminiscent of that of the Dragon Age series. I keep hearing about towns that I'm unable to visit, and discover myself wondering what they look like, how the architecture looks and so on, and with every hint at the fate of the apparently all but extinct Elven race that Elara hails from, at the hands of the so-far-unseen Minotaurs, I yearn to learn exactly what happened and itch for revenge. Yes, Hunted is an okay game, but it's an okay game in a sea of excellent games this year and as such will fall into obscurity.
So, as a parting note as I head off to the Welsh countryside, I put forward a conundrum that has bothered me for some time: Why is it that Bethesda's grasp of the open-world RPG is completely unrivalled - nobody else even comes close to the experience of games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 - yet they seemingly find it so hard to conquer any other genre?
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