Budgeted Pixels

Steam impresses again by offering an amazing game for 75% off. Right now you can snag Borderlands for $7.49 including all 4 DLC packs. That is an absolute steal and if you don't already own this game now is definitely the time to buy. Get it now and get prepared for Borderlands 2 later this year. Hurry though, this offer is a daily deal and won't last long.

Blade Kitten is being featured as a daily deal on Steam and you can net it for $4.99. True it has a meta score of 56/100, but if you want a hack and slash platformer with crazy over the top anime antics, $5 ain't bad.

In what they're calling "Game Week", Redbox is now offering the first day free on any games reserved online until this Thursday (March 8). This means that should you return it the next day, your rental will be completely free of charge. While their selection is by no means perfect, Redbox often carries many recent titles, so if you've been curious about Twisted Metal, SSX, or Final Fantasy XIII-2, now might be a good time to try it out for a day.

Today's quick deal is a limited time sale on Steam. You can pickup a copy of Gish, the popular indie platformer based around a jiggly oil blob for $2.49. Pick this up quick before the sale ends and have a great game to play instead of eating food. Who needs food anyway?

Thanks to Scion owners of the PS Vita will get a bonus tomorrow (3/6/2012) when MotorStorm RC releases on PSN. The game releases for $9.99 ($7.49 for plus users) on Playstation, but for Vita owners it will be completely free for a day. The game looks to be a fun homage to the classic racing games like Super Off Road. Don't miss out.

Mari0 recreates Super Mario Brothers to its fullest and has a huge focus on making sure that the remake plays just like the original, that is until they decided to hand Mario a portal gun. This mash-up game will have you running through the classic world we all know and love with a new tool to help cross gaps and get around baddies. This isn't a standard vanilla conversion however as there are also a heaping helping of extras including level editor and 4 player co-op (portal guns for all). With the amazing price tag of 'Free' this is the type of lovingly crafted projects that budget gamers love to see.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is Square-Enix's direct response to complaints and criticism regarding their last outing in the franchise. By opening the world a bit more and giving players a dose of temporal freedom with a dash of insanity, they hoped to rekindle the fire inside the hearts of their fans. Even though I only spent a day with the game, I found myself greatly appreciating this philosophy, resulting in an experience that was every bit as entertaining as it was perplexing.

The story here begins with Lightning (XIII's heroine) living as some kind of warrior goddess locked in what appears to be an eternal battle, when our time-travelling protagonist Noel literally falls from the sky to meet her. Without delay, she sends him to retrieve her sister Serah, who currently is plagued by memories of a timeline that she never experienced. Upon meeting, Noel and Serah discover that the timeline has been corrupted by a mysterious force and must leap from time to time, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that their next leap will be the leap home.

For the player, this means that you'll be travelling to different time periods and resolving paradoxes in order to open time gates. This is done through exploration of the locations you'll visit, where players can occasionally unlock side-quests from NPCs. Primarily though, this exploration is combat-driven, which is where XIII's biggest strength was derived. In XIII-2, the combat system is mostly unchanged, relying no on brute-force attacking of the enemy, but rather on constantly changing battle roles to quickly adapt to changing fight conditions. It's a system that rewards smart play and patience, and unlike XIII, is revealed to you in its entirety in an hour or two.

At the end of these battles, you'll sometimes earn monster crystals, which allow you to use the enemy monsters as party members in battle. At first, this seemed rather gimmicky, like a cheap way to not bother making a third character. However, as I started collecting more monsters, leveling them, and using them more often, I found them to be a fun addition. Each monster can also be infused into another, destroying them and transferring their abilities to make the other stronger. This led me to a point where I was actively trying to level a monster solely to sacrifice to and make my primary casting monster stronger. This system strongly evokes the "catch 'em all" mentality of what makes the Pokemon games so addicting.

Like most JRPGs, XIII-2 was a bit of a grind-fest for me. In one day, the game had presented me with two rather amazingly large bosses that I seemingly had no hope of defeating without first turning my character into some kind of god. This is done in a modified version of the Crystarium. Similar to FFX's Sphere Grid, the Crystarium gives your player bonuses by applying experience points to nodes along a path. Where this differs from XIII is that you're not leveling each class separately, but all on the same path. This means that you must choose between boosting your commando, ravager, or sentinel roles on each node. When you fill all the visible nodes, you are able to choose between unlocking a new role, boosting an existing one, or boosting the number of available combat actions. Each time I was confronted with this, I found it to be a terrifyingly difficult choice, as each one seemingly provides an excellent benefit. This gave me a surprising amount of control over how my characters developed, and after a few hours, I had successfully refused to give my Noel any additional roles, making him a rather formidable commando. It may not sound like much, but I feel like this is an important and great change in how character progression is typically handled in a game like this.

Technically, the Final Fantasy series has always been known for impressive cutscenes that can push hardware to its limits. While its predecessor had substantial issues on the Xbox 360, XIII-2 ran almost flawlessly for me. Playing on the 360, I never noticed any serious drop in the frame rate or any video compression artifacting. Saving and loading was, to my surprise, handled mostly automatically, and I was granted the ability to save anywhere at any time - a feature that I feel might be the most significant advancement that JRPGs have seen in a very long time. However, on the flip side of that, the game uses an overabundance of quick time events, a mechanic popularized (in my opinion) by Shenmue over a decade ago. I'm not saying they're terrible, but using QTEs for something as trivial as a monster attack or to maintain attention during a cutscene just seems a bit lazy.

By playing the game as a rental, my cost of entry was a mere two dollars. In this regard, I find it easy to recommend as a weekend distraction. There's no shortage of content, and most areas can be revisited to unlock hidden items. I probably put around 8 hours into the game, and judging by the game's chapter selection screen, I probably only made it about fifteen or twenty percent of the way through the story. As a retail game for $60, I find it impossible to recommend to anyone that isn't staunchly a JRPG fan, but as a cheap rental, I found it to be a pleasure, and I look forward to playing more of it in the future.

Breakdown:

Good: Great combat system, addictive monster collection, time travel silliness

Bad: Excessive QTEs, nonsensical story, typical JRPG underpinnings

Money Spent: $2 via Redbox

Rental Verdict: Decent experience despite being unable to make significant progress