Cheap Gaming on PS3
Earlier this year I ranted about how it's just not possible to walk into a store with under $100 and walk out with a satisfying load of PS3 games. Today I defied that assertion by purchasing three PS3 games for only $40 on the online Playstation Store (although one of those games is actually a Playstation One game): Soldner-X, Castlevania Chronicles, and Wipeout HD. I've only spent a handful of hours with these games collectively, so I can give only quick impressions on them--but the bottom line is that none of these titles is a serious "must have".Soldner-X is a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up in the same vein as Gradius and R-Type. It looks nice in HD, but it doesn't seem to do much to distinguish itself within this decades-old genre already saturated with classics. While playing it, I found myself considering switching to the PS1 game R-Types (definitely recommended) and wondering when they'll finally bring Einhander to the Playstation Store in North America. That said, I have to cut Soldner some slack since it is only $10. I will probably get my money's worth out of it before tiring of it, but it hasn't got much chance of cracking into my top 10 list of favourite shooters.
I was pretty excited about Castlevania Chronicles, but it turns out that my enthusiasm was somewhat misguided. The good news is that the X68000 version of the original Castlevania is pretty good, and the bad news is that the extra "Arrange Mode" manages to be pretty freakin' ugly. At least, that's the impression I was left with after playing the first couple of stages of the Arrange Mode and then switching to the classic version.
If you're the kind of Castlevania fan who can still sit down and enjoy the original NES version so much that you'd like to see more of it, then Castlevania Chronicles will be a slam dunk for you. If, on the other hand, the idea of sitting down to play the original Castlevania makes you cringe, Castlevania Chronicles isn't going to have anything for you.
As for Wipeout HD, it's a rock-solid entry in the Wipeout series. I've never really been much of a Wipeout fan; I find the gameplay to be awkward, although it's possible that I'll warm up to it with time. Wipeout HD is pretty enough that it may be up to the task, so I'll give it some time.
On a different note, one game that I've been spending some time with this week is Diablo II. I hadn't really played it before this year, mostly because I wasn't really a Blizzard fan for roughly ten years after I got sick and tired of WarCraft II back in, what was that... 1996? (December 1995 according to Wikipedia.) I'm not really sure what happened there. I thought StarCraft was good but overhyped, and I was too busy to play Diablo.
Fritzkrieg and I have talked a lot about how JRPGs just aren't as good these days as they used to be. Final Fantasy XII was really good, and I'm getting some entertainment out of Blue Dragon, but even titles like these can't compare with old-school classics like Chrono Trigger. And speaking of Chrono Trigger, it seems like Square-Enix is doing better with a re-release of a decade-old classic than they are with new ventures like Infinite Undiscovery and The Last Remnant. This just goes to show how far they've slipped.
One difference between Fritzkrieg and myself is that I've turned to Blizzard to fill the gap. I've come around to realizing that not only is World of Warcraft an RPG masterpiece, but Blizzard's other games (including Diablo II and WarCraft III) are also truly great. I've just been too busy looking the other way this whole time.
One of the things that occasionally grates on me about World of Warcraft is that it demands so much time. Such is the trade-off made in exchange for WoW being the epic experience that it is, but I sometimes find myself unwilling to fire up WoW because I know that it's difficult to only play a quick 30 minutes of it. Diablo II makes a nice compliment to WoW in this sense because a short session of Diablo II can still be enough time to cover a lot of ground. I find myself turning to Diablo II when I need a quick fix of Blizzard action.
More ranting later, more gaming now. :) Family's coming to town for Christmas, so I'll be unable to game-it-up for a while; gotta do some questing now while I still can.
posted by Parappa @ 10:18 PM
1 Comments:
Diablo II was an instant classic and a vast improvement on its already great predecessor. One can only hope Diablo III lives up to that hype.
When I started playing WoW, I marveled at how much it was like Diablo II and it really is. Blizzard learned a lot from the Diablo games, particularly about how players like to play these games.
I took the opportunity last night to start a Death Knight (that opportunity being that I finally had a lvl 55 character). I was very impressed at how well the story was told. Blizzard has a lot of talent working for them.
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