Puzzle Quest

It's a great game, to much of my personal surprise! It's a puzzle Bejewled-like game combines with RPG items and stats element. It's fun and addicitive, well designed and an awsome game to play for an hour or so. It's quite satisfying to hear the female announcer saying 'You're victorious!' since the game does get unfairly tough at times (or maybe I'm just crap at puzzle games). I'm definately looking forward to next incarnation of this great title, hopefully with online play on the PSP. Hail to this great Aussies developed game!

There is nooooo power... for an hour

My electricity went down for about an hour today, not because I didn't pay the bill, but there was a fire in the local sub-station. Initially I panicked, quite a bit, so much that I started playing a real guitar! It would have been 2 years (maybe) since I even strum a chord on it. Since it's been so long, I just mucked around on it for a few mins before I put it down again. I also spoked to two of my neighbours about the outage, personal record.

Assassin's Creed

Or should it be called Jade Raymond's Assassin's Creed... Anyway, I had just completed the game, or so it appears... I hate cliff-hangers, I really do, especially in a game. You play as an assassin named Altair, assigned to kill nine historical figures in three cities; Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem in 1191. The animation of Altair is excellent, you can see him smoothly grab a ledge or window and pull himself up with some effort. The cities look quite good and realistic, except, all of them look pretty much alike with little variety to differ them other than just a colour filter. The most annoying "feature" in this game is however, the beggers and drunks, there are one or both of them every SECOND corner, sometimes more, and they harrass you ALL THE FREAKING TIME! So much that you would want to kill every single one you see, but... there's a penalty for doing it! For god sakes, do they really have to put that many of them in the game!? While the story is decent, the plot twist is quite good other than the non-existing ending. The major flaw of this game is that it's very very repetitive, beyond the point of infinite repetition and rep... you get the idea. To carry out an assassination, you first must gather intelligence on your target, there are a few ways of doing them; you beat them out of a dude, you steal them from a dude, or you sit on a bench and listening in some dudes talking, the whole game is rinse and repeat with no variation what-so-ever. While the sound effects and original scores are above par, the voice acting is stonic and emotionless, just like watching a dub anime. The one-button combat mechanic actually works, most of the time, requiring some precise timing to attack or counter-attack. This is a fairly well presented game, but the major downfall is the lack of variety in many aspects and the inconclusive and somewhat confusing ending.

Mass Effect

Mass Effect is a Bioware RPG, on the Xbox 360, which I finally received on Monday. Having kind of rushed the game on the first play, I'm definately going to spend more time on the second play thru. It has, by far the most seamless character interaction of any game I've ever play so far. The characters are professionally voiced and modeled, and the dialog system flows very smoothly and naturally. The combat system works very well, being a hybrid shooter/turn based rpg. The soundtrack is top notch and feels just like you're watching a great sci-fi flick. But it also has some very minor yet annoying bugs/glitches, and they stop the game being one of the greatest RPG ever created. The vehicle driving is insanely idiotic and handles horribly, it appears that no one in Bioware plays any driving games, ever. Also sometimes the texture loads very slowly, at few instances it didn't load fast enough for fast transition scenes. And what's the deal with the slow arse elevators?? So the human race has mastered faster-than-light travel and yet they are obviously lacking in that department. The menu interface is also not very intuitive and feels very clumsy. The tutorial (or lack of it) is short and not informative. Overall, the game has an excellent presentation, with a great story and high replayability, anyone who owns a 360 and likes action/rpg genre should try it out.

Dragonforce? More like Trashforce

I came to know Dragonforce from Guitar Hero 3, their song, 'Through the Fire and Flames' is no doubt the hardest song ever in the Guitar Hero series, so far. So I decided to Youtube their live videos, and the disappointment begins. They can't play in time, their guitarists 'attempts' to dual solo in unison with out-of-tune guitars, all they can do is play really fast, but not very accurate at all. The singer is average at best, the band made him looked foolish since they can't play in time and he seems lost half way thru the song, very trashy power-metal wanna-be studio band.