Andrew Derry

So I haven’t posted in awhile, and much to my friend Justin’s dismay I am going to talk about Assassins Creed Revelations. I haven’t played the game for more then an hour but I feel that I can comment on first impressions and I’ll post again after I have completed it. Now I sit here listening to Tenacious D’s new album, which is a mighty fine peace of work if I say so myself. Back to Ass Creed, I would like to start off by saying this game is very pretty. It is simply a gorgeous game. Now that being said the mechanics leave something to be desired, granted as I said I have only played about an hour, but still this is the fourth game in the series so I feel like the tutorial shouldn’t be mandatory. It was very annoying sitting there for twenty minutes “learning” the same controls that I have known for the past few games. I’ll give the game the fact that a few controls have changed but not enough for me to have to go through a complete tutorial on how to play. I feel like it would be the equivalent to having a mandatory tutorial for every new Street Fighter game,  or Metal Gear Solid. Nothing really changes between the games except for a few controls that you can easily look up if you really want to. That aside they did add a few new weapons/bombs, and a new way to help you climb, plus zip line esc areas. I will not spoil the beginning of the game but it seems very convoluted and full of shit which is honestly why I play the Ass Creed games. The story is and will always be a convoluted pile of fun, sort of historical, with good game play.

In the mass boredom that comes from going to college and having long waits in between classes and no hand held system to occupy my time. I went in search of a game on my droid. What I found was a free game that actually doesn’t feel like I need to pay in order to get a good experience. Defender II was that title. This game has quite literally been eating all of my free time away, and what little free time I have I would like to spend writing. Well that isn’t happening much right now.

So the game doesn’t have a story and it has a lot of elements that other defense games have, but for some reason this one does it differently. Now I haven’t played the first game, and from screen shots that I’ve seen it looks completely identical to the second. What I can say is that you do earn coins in this game very quickly and the crystals, which are used for magic, take a lot more time to save up. So while your waiting to increase the fireball, ice, or lightning. You can increase your arrows, power, and speed in which they are shot. It just seems like they actually made a game that allows you to progress at a steady pace without paying for all the things you could earn at a decent rate. That’s not to say that you can’t pay and be add free and have all the cool stuff from the start, but I think that the game is actually challenging if you don’t.

Harvest moon back to nature is by far one of my favorite games of all time. It is still to this day extremely fun, in the “I can’t stop playing it” kind of way. I first played this game back when I was in middle school, and proceeded to play it for six hours strait until 3am in the morning. Which back in the day was a mighty feat. If you have never played any Harvest Moon game before and you were looking for a starting point, well look no further. Harvest moon back to nature is absolutely the cream of the crop even after all these years. Now I’m not bashing the other games, except for Save the Homeland, that game was as much of a disappointment as my future son will probably be, but that is for another talk. What I’m trying to say is even after all these years Back to Nature is still an amazing game and I don’t think that it has lost any value over time. I played it for several in game years, or until my brother accidently erased my saved games and I was so sad that I made a new game. I called it sad farm and never did anything right, hoping that some guard would arrest me only to fail and be sent back to my hometown. That’s not the point, the point is that if you have never played a harvest moon game in your life you need to start with this one, there are so many different aspects of this game that make it the greatest.

            Now I really don’t know what else to say, for those that don’t know what I’m talking about and have no idea what Harvest moon even is let me explain. Harvest Moon is a game series that sounds like the worst idea on the planet. You get a farm usually from a dead relative and you have to make it work, make money, get animals, get married, and have a kid, or two in some games. Sounds fun right, doing all those chores on the farm, that regular farm kids have to do on a daily bases. It sounds like a horrible prank their fathers would play on them. “Hey son got you this Play station because you’ve been doing so well on the farm, but there is only one catch, you can only play this game where you do the exact same chores…” Sounds like a great time right? Well actually right is the answer. Harvest Moon some how makes farm life a fun experience filled with tragedy, comedy, girls to marry, and a kick ass dog that barks at you. The whole point of the game is for the first three years you fix up your uncles farm to be accepted into your new community. After the three years are up you are either in, or you get kicked out and probably go back to living in the big city, which is where you’re from. Come to think of it, they should make a harvest moon game where you are in the big city. Sorry got side tracked after the three years you are free to keep doing the same exact thing until year 99 when the game resets.

Starting out I would like to say that as a whole I enjoy Mass Effect games, and to be completely fair ME3 was not really that bad. If you like playing a game that really doesn’t tie up those loose ends. While simultaneously leaving you wonder why you just spent the last 20 hours finishing a game series that ended like a turd sliding down the back of a whale, then I guess it’s a game for you. Now I spent the time and finished the side quests and played enough online to get a taste for it, but was still kind of board. Don’t get me wrong, I was actually pretty board and irritated through the entire thing. I suppose you could say that I’m just angry that I couldn’t import my saves from my pc to my Xbox. You may be thinking that I could just go back and play the games over again, but then I would have to rip my face off from the sheer disappointment of playing the game a second time. I think after beating it I really wasn’t upset and now that it has been sinking in for the past two weeks I realize how much of a piece of crap the entire game is. Most people just complained about the ending, but in a game where nothing really changed gameplay wise, and story wise I felt they just pored more convoluted crap on you. It just felt like they didn’t care about changing anything.

El Commander Shepard is here once again to save the day. This time he will just kill himself and possibly everyone else because he’s gone to far to turn back now. I really would have accepted an ending where the entire galaxy explodes and absolutely everyone dies because Shepard is an idiot. That would have been fine, at least I don’t have to buy another one of those games again. I’m new at this so I’ll just give you a hint.