Army Corps of Hell

If you think the title is awful, wait until you play the game.



Don't be fooled by the fact that SE was involved.

 The idea behind this game is that you're controlling an army of minions, in this case they are goblin-looking things, and you need to fight your way through hellish landscapes to regain your position in the ranks.  The core game play has you moving your skeleton general around from platform to platform while you throw your minions at whatever assortment of monsters jumps up at you for the 50th time.

Once you chuck a few of your little guys onto an enemy they start using whatever weapon they're equipped with based upon the type of minion they are.  Soldiers use swords, Spearmen are obviously equipped with spears, and Magi use staves.  Each type of minion has a different special attack and are useful against different enemies.  Soldiers generally do the most damage with a special attack, Spearmen attack monsters that come close to them, and Magi have a good distance strike.  There's not much else to this thing; you move from stage to stage killing things with the same old strategy.  It gets boring very quickly.

It's tricky; looks like it could be good, but it's really not.

To spice it up a bit, you can alter the # of each minion type you have in your army at one time.  Some combos are better than others, but for the most part it doesn't really matter.  The customization options are very limited.  There are different weapons and items to create, you collect materials to make them from fallen monsters, but there's very little reason to not use the newest one that you've created.  Why allow for customization if it doesn't matter?

You can also equip different hats for your minions and different cloaks for your general.  Once again though, the newest one is going to be the best and you run into the same issue with the weapons and items.  IF the customizability was better, this could be a fun game.  I've already mentioned that the combat is really bland, but even more bland is the variety of enemies you encounter. 

You fight the same stupid creatures over and over again.  Once you've seen a set of monsters, the game switches it up by changing their colors and adding an ability.  Yeehaw.  Honestly, I could only play this game for up to ten stages, and after that I just gave up because I couldn't stand it.  I think the only thing that I was really impressed with in this entire pile of crap was the music; that was freaking awesome.  It's all heavy-death-metal-ish and not anything like the rest of the game.  I would buy the soundtrack for this game any day.

I expected a LOT more from Square-Enix's first title on the PSVita, especially since it's a strategy game.  I know that the Vita is still pretty new and that the system is still finding its own niche of games, but this garbage shouldn't have ever existed.  The worst part is that it's basically a horribly butchered Overlord port from the Xbox 360.  Overlord featured similar combat and customization options, but fleshed it out more.  You get a castle, a forge, different spells, etc.

Had SE taken even a small amount of the lessons that came from Overlord, I could have seen Army Corp of Hell being a decent game.  Since they decided to go a different direction, I feel like this is one of those few times where they really fucked up.  I expected more from you Square-Enix.

BF3 Rent-A-Server Update

I think I'm a bit behind the times in posting on this update to the console version of Battlefield 3, but I needed to weigh in on it today due to the amount of BF3 that I played, or rather tried to play, over the weekend.

For those of you that don't know, the Rent-A-Server update basically took all of the servers that were publicly hosted and placed them on a list for private users to rent and use as they see fit.  So for x amount of Microsoft Points you can rent a server, that you customize the games on, for a day, week, or month.  This is a great deal for anyone that wants to shell out the money to play the game they already paid for, but for the rest of us it blows.

The first time that I attempted to do a quick match to get back into playing BF3, I ended up on a server with a description of, "snipes or pilots only."  When I spawned as an Engineer I was immediately booted.  To avoid this type of garbage I was able to go into the Server Browser and pick and choose what I wanted to play there, but with a controller that takes about 15 minutes and feels like a waste of my time.  I want to be able to jump into the game and play within ten minutes, not look around for a server that I'm going to be able to tolerate.

A few other issues that I've had with people and their servers are games having too many tickets and lasting too long, no variations in maps, and a lack of players.  When a game has 900 tickets the game is just unbearable.  After the first half hour, you're weeping to just have the thing finish.  You'd leave, but then you'd have wasted that much time for no points.  Even if you're dominating the match, the amount of tickets that owning all of the capture points bleeds from the other team is too minuscule to speed up the end.  Combine that with playing the same map over and over, because you don't want to leave a decent server that won't kick you for no reason, and you end up with a pile of shit. 

Finally, the lack of players on some servers is disturbing.  I started a few games where it was just me and my friend, and some where it was just me.  I think that the lack of players just sums up how awful this whole update experience has been.  Like myself, I would bet that most players are getting fed up with how this whole game has been handled.  If the servers are going to continue to be set up like this, Battlefield 3 is going to suffer a huge lack of me, not to mention other people that are pissed off at the changes.

Why Most of Today's MP Modes are Awful

I was playing some Battlefield 3, for the first time in awhile, the other day and realized why I don't play it as often as I do Halo: Reach.  Not only do I enjoy Halo: Reach more, but there is a skill difference that it has from those other "modern" multi player games.  For the purposes of my explanation, let's pit Call of Duty against Halo.

Call of Duty's ranking system and it's guns, kill streaks, and death streaks to buy makes for a pretty fun game if you're looking for something where your ranks allow you to develop your MP experience on a hierarchical level.  The higher your rank, the better stuff you can buy and the better you will end up being at the game. 

Halo's ranking systems are just to group comparable players together in matches.  Rather than allowing you to buy better and better equipment, this game has you rely on only your skill and wit when playing against others.  The ranking system may have higher numbers than others, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a greater chance at beating a lower number than that lower number has of beating you.

Since both of those are pretty terrible explanations I'll solidify my point here:  Call of Duty's ranking system allows the best to get better.  When you have large amounts of credits, you can buy the best equipment and start with the best load outs, most of the time.  So when you start a game on whatever map, those players with the best stuff have a greater chance of winning than those players just starting out.  Skill can be beaten out by better equipment or a chance kill streak from a care package.  When you look at a game like Halo, without the option to buy better stuff or get a random, awesome kill streak reward you can see a huge difference.  Since everyone starts off with the same weapon and the better stuff is lying on the ground, where all players have an equal chance to get at it, the game is much more balanced.  The only division between players in Halo is skill, and that's what it should be across the board.

Balance is the key word here: Halo is balanced and CoD isn't.  Halo stays balanced all of the time while CoD can only have brief moments of it when all of the players have the same load out, and that mostly happens never.  If we take the load outs out completely and eliminate that factor, we still see that CoD allows the best to get better.  How is that?  Because of the damn kill streaks!  It's ridiculous that the best player on the map is allowed to call in an air strike and just increase his/her lead.  Shouldn't the least effective players be getting death streaks that are huge air strikes and the best player get kill streaks that aren't as effective to balance the game out?

So as you can tell, I'm horrifyingly biased against CoD, but for good reason.  I don't want to play a game where there's no balance.  That makes for a flawed game experience.  To tell you the truth, I'm not even half-bad at CoD, I just can't stand the game based mostly on principle.  It just makes me sick...Makes me fucking sick!

PS Store or Xbox Live Marketplace?

In recent months I've been able to experience the PS Store.  Since my main console of choice at the moment is still the Xbox 360, I can't help but compare the two online stores to hopefully come to a decision on which is better.  It also has to be said that the version of the PSN that I'm using happens to be on the Vita, so the features of the network are limited by a mobile version so I won't be comparing the Xbox Live features to the PSN ones, that just won't work with the discrepancies in the versions.  Hence, we'll just talk about the shopping experience.

I think the biggest item on everyone's mind when it comes right down to it is the price of the games.  Full-fledged video games, those released in stores and as a downloadables, are priced the same as what they are in stores.  A brand-new 360 game hits the $60 price range while a PSVita game lands at about $40.  Since both networks seem to price their download games at the same rate, equal to that of a physical copy, neither have an advantage.  However, when we come down to the prices of other games, things change.  Advantage: Neither

On the Vita there's the option to download full PSP games, the prices on these range from $5-30 depending on how recent the release was.  The most common games hit the $10-15 amount.  When we look at how the 360 compares, we see that the original Xbox games that are out there don't get quite as low priced as the PSP games.  Though we're looking at the difference between a console game and a portable game, I still think that the PSN gets the advantage here.  I'd much rather get FFT for $10 than some crappy original Xbox game like Prince of Persia.  Advantage: PSN

PS Store on the Vita.

I want to talk about Apps even though the Xbox 360 is a console and the Vita is a new mobile device.  Essentially I'd just like to compare Netflix, since both systems have that as an option.  Neither really beats the other, Netflix is Netflix, and I'm sure we'd see the same when we compare the two Facebook apps to one another.  Advantage: Neither

Let's now talk about Safety and Security...  The PSN track record is awful, we all know that.  I've had my Xbox Live account hacked into though, while my PSN account is still perfectly fine.  Even though my Live experience has been worse than my PS Store one, I have to give the advantage to the Marketplace here.  Even when I had problems, my issues were resolved successfully with my money being returned within a two week time period.  On top of all of that I got a free month of Xbox Live for the issue.  The PSNs recurring issues and vulnerabilities are just too much.  Advantage: Xbox Live

How the Marketplace is organized is pretty aggravating.  You have to figure out what category the game you want is in; Indie, Arcade, full, etc; and then navigate there to find it.  The PS Store is essentially the same way, so there's really no deviation between the two.  I find that both frustrate me unless I know exactly where I'm going, and browsing is usually out of the question.  Advantage: Neither

Last, but not least, let's talk about content.  What do both of these network stores contain?  Obviously we're looking at games the whole time, but what kind of games?  The PS Store has cross-play, PSP, PSVita and Mini games.  The Marketplace has Arcade and Full.  Now, the PSN may have some more variety, but the Arcade for Xbox Live is a powerhouse for games like The Simpsons and X-Men.  However, both systems have a large amount of Indie games, and I hate Indie games...violently hate them.  So with the Indie games balancing out, I have to give the Marketplace kudos for content; bringing back awesome Arcade titles just can't be beat.  Advantage: Xbox Live


Okay, so I can't come up with a clear winner, but, hey, who cares?  I'll have fun getting demos and games from both of the networks and take advantage of the best of both worlds.  Did you really think there'd be a different outcome?

Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational

If you've read any of my earlier posts, you may have learned that I have little tolerance for the Sports genre.  There are few exceptions to this sweeping generality, and one of those is the Hot Shots Golf series.  I barely consider golf a sport, sorry golfers, and I usually don't even acknowledge that there are video games that replicate it.  The mere thought of wasting my time on a golf course, virtual or real, is just horrifying.  Why is Hot Shots different, you ask?  Because I said so.

My introduction to the series was on the PS2, and its cartoon characters and easy to use controls lured me in.  What made me stay was the unlockables and career mode.  A career mode makes everything better.  Rather than unlocking everything within the first couple games that I played, I needed to progress and get better than the AI.  It's maddening when you get to the point that you're really good, but the computer is still better.  That frustration makes you just irritated enough that you have to beat it no matter what; even if you hate the game itself.  To add to that frustration is that set of clubs or music track that awaits once you clear the game.  It doesn't add any replay ability, but just the feeling of satisfaction that you have once it's attained is enough to sate any achievement hunter.  All of the above is included in Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational and gets an added bonus with the DLC and online tourneys.

Actual cartridge size.

This game was hailed as one of the best launch titles, if not the best, for the PSVita.  I tend to agree.  The game isn't too deep in itself, but the online tournaments really add a whole other level.  The same could be said of the downloadables.  It's pretty generic in its goal: golf until you can't golf any more.  Be better than everyone else and get more points to spend on unlockables.  Pretty basic stuff, but it's well done.  Each course that you play on is broken down into 9 holes front and back, as well as 18 holes and mirrored, which makes for a lot of ways to play each course.  The good thing about the 9 holes is that, like we've seen with all the Vita games so far, you can play the game for short periods of time and move on to other activities.

The controls on the Vita are great, I've never had any problems with using the touch screen or the regular buttons.  It's a little tough getting the good shots to work when you have to shake the Vita just as you hit the ball, but after working on it for awhile you can get it down.  The only real issues that I have with the entire game is that some of the rules are just awful.  For instance, there's a rule that if you wait longer than 15 seconds to take a shot, you get a +1 on your hit.  What a bunch of crap!  What if I have to run to the bathroom or get the door?  I can't set the game down for 15 seconds or I get penalized?  I know the game is designed to play quickly, but we don't need to play speed golf and screw over people who happen to have to take a short break without pausing.

The game looks really sharp.

I don't really have any other complaints about Hot Shots Golf.  Like I said above, it's really basic, and since it's designed well, there's little that really grinds my gears.  The customizability with character clothing, clubs, and balls allows you to adjust to any style of play.  Whether you like to curve the ball or just hit it really hard, there's a set of items for you.  As far as the collectibles are concerned, there's a ton of them.  Songs, concept art, characters, clubs, and the list goes on with stuff to get with the points you earn after each course.  The weirdest thing in the game is this little freakish character on the main screen.

In the shop there's a slot machine where you enter some points and get back a random piece of the character.  In the design modes you can change this main screen character by selecting pieces to put together.  There are some really fucked up designs you can throw together, like an insane Mr. Potato Head.  I like to play with the random and see what abominations the game can come up with for me to stare at every time I have to go back to the main screen.

While I don't like sports games, Hot Shots Golf just has those few qualities about it that really make it a good game to play, no matter what genre.  For what it's worth, this game could be a starting point for any gamer that's never really been introduced to a sports game with content, instead they've just been blasted with Madden games all their life until they've been desensitized to how fun a sports game can actually be.  You don't need all that real-life crap, just throw in a crazy-ass Mr. Potato Head; some fun, easy-to-learn game play with an addictive career mode; and you're good to go.  My suggestion is to put down that baseball simulator and pick up Hot Shots Golf, you won't be disappointed.

He's out of control, but he can still go the distance, fairly.