Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

The Good:
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Customization: Customizing your character is fun (Faces, clothes, lightsabers). It's a shame there wasn't as many faces as KoToR though.
Moves: Running around and jumping on the walls, doing summersaults, backflips, siderolls, crazy acrobatic moves--Yeah, it's pretty fun. Fun as in cool to look at and not helping you kill the Bad guy. Except that one move where you roll and stab the guy, man that saved me from certain death many times.
Missions: At the beginning of the game you could choose from missions! It was fun. The missions themselves as stand-alone are good. But I wish they would've tied into the main storyline better. It was just basically, Part 1: Bad Guy does something. Do some missions until we find out where Bad Guy is. Part 2! We found Bad Guy! Fight him and then he escapes. Do some more missions until we find out the next part of his plan!
So yeah, the missions were pretty much unrelated to the main story, except for the fact that sometimes you fight the "cult" in some of the missions and the main story.
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The Bad:
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Voice Acting is awfulish. They should've got the guy who did Luke's voice in Rogue Squadron, or Mark Hamill. Dialogue is terrible. And Kyle making fun of Luke Skywalker? Run away!
Not Polished: This means that. Uh. I could walk over the edge of stuff and I'm standing on the air and I don't fall.
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The Ugly:
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The Story was okay, but it was kind of shallow. Compare it to KoToR, or KOTOR 2, and you'll see what I mean. I think. It's not very deep, and everything is just shallow, like there's nothing more to it. I just wasn't too impressed by it...
Graphics were pretty good. They were all taken from JK:II? Anyway, Rosh Penin's face was ugly to look at in the intro.
...
The animations are pretty good, (the fighting animations when you see your character from 3rd Person) but I hate it when they walk around like action figures (stiff-limbed, disjointed, kind of floating-like). That was mainly in those awkward cut-scenes.
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I wasn't too impressed by the game. Graphics were yesteryear, but still good. Gameplay was same as JK:II and such, so it was okay.
It wasn't REALLY bad, and it wasn't REALLY good. Kind of like an average game.??????
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
SCORE: 8.00/10.00

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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Psychonauts

"I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign."

SPOILER CENTER!

Graphics:
The graphics were actually better than I thought. I thought they would be super cartoony (They are) and kind of ugly. But they're super cartoony and with lots of polygons!

Animation:
The animation is excellent.

Gameplay:
I found it sort of tedious the whole way through (collecting things). When I played the demo, I thought it was super fun (collecting things). When I play the real game a year later, I find it like... When I start a level, I immediately have to start collecting every figment, every tag, and crack every safe, or else I'll kill myself if I don't.

Levels:
The levels are probably the best thing about the game. They are insanely crazy and funny.
Basic Braining: Was kinda boring, since I already played it on the demo.
Sasha's Shooting Gallery: Fun. Things start going wrong and you have to fix it.
Milla's Dance Party: Was a little boring with all the jumping puzzles. Levitation is the best power though.
Brain Tumbler Experiment: Interesting, especially since you have no idea what's going to happen next.
Lungfishopolis: Funny, yet kind of a nuisance.
Milkman Conspiracy: I thought this level was pure genious. It was so crazy, funny, interesting, and ingenious.
Broadway Stage: I found it quite fun. Especially chasing the phantom.
Napoleon vs. Fred: The concept was really interesting and fun, but the idea that I had to run across that whole land collecting figments and killing bad guys tired me out.
Bull Fight City: I thought this was an awesome and fun level. Talking dogs can never go wrong.
Circus : Kind of tedious, especially when little Oliander keeps dying and I don't know where he is, or when I keep falling into the water pit. Annoying.

And regarding the actual park and locations: They're cool. The asylum was well designed too. And fun.

Story:
Before I played the game, I heard the story was: You go to a psychic summer camp to become a psychonaut but then everybody's brain gets kidnapped and you have to rescue them from the evil bad guy (which is 90% probably the coach).
I played the game, and that's exactly what happened. So, it was a little boring. But one interesting feature was the backstories of the characters, and how they played out into the levels and were revealed through cracking safes which showed a slideshow. That was interesting.

Sound/Music:
It wasn't bad. It was good. It created the right atmosphere.

There was also a ton of cutscenes.

I think playing games when you know nothing about gameplay/story/puzzles might be better for you.

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Call of Juarez

I liked this game. Sort of.

Ray
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Ray's mission was pretty straightforward and not too exciting. The graphics are pretty good, but Half-Life is still better in the character animation department.
The mission was fairly standard FPS except for the Bullet Time feature, where you draw your guns and kill people in a split second. I thought it was pretty cool but they probably copied it from some other recent FPS but I don't play many FPS's so I'll never know.
But it was cool. >:]

And thanks to the sequence in the barn, I now know that Physics puzzles are not cool.

The Draw-Your-Gun-Before-The-Other-Guy-&-Kill-Him fight was cool, but I thought it was kind of out of context.
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Billy
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Billy's mission was 5x better than Ray's.

Sneaking through the forest and a wolf attacks you? That was pretty cool/scary.
Sneaking through the guy's house and stealing a horse? That was pretty fun. Alot of Quick Saving and Loading though.

Riding the horse across the wilderness? Fun! Different gameplay styles are good. I liked riding horses, sneaking around, doing bullet time, swinging on whips, and doing some cool movie style sequences. But when they had the standard "Kill Bad Guys" in Ray's mission, I thought it was boring. And that was pretty much what I perceived PREY to be. Standard KILL BAD GUYS, with a couple of nifty features, and a puzzle here or there.
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Overall, I thought Ray's mission (TOWN) was average/okay. Billy's mission (HORSE-RIDING) was good/great.

Total Score: 8.6

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