So, it's been a month since my last blog post. As I said before, I will start doing this every month. But this time I'm gonna trim some fat and rip off Indiana Jone's movie titles and logos for special effect.
I've seen mixed reviews of Lost Odyssey. Some praise it as the best J-RPG on the 360. Others make note of how it does nothing new or innovative. Personally, I think both of these are true. But there are still things about this game that bug the hell out of me, so I'm going to nitpick.
The Disc Case
You've probably already heard this one before. The North American case sucks.
If you haven't heard about this, here's a good shot of it: http://kotaku.com/355825/american-lost-ody...n-half-measures
I could understand if the case was a little bit thicker in order to allow the discs to fit comfortably, but it's not. It's actually the exact same size of another of 360 case. The only difference is the little spool in the middle goes slightly deeper and is slightly taller (longer?) to make 3 discs fit it. Then the 4th disc is kept in an envelope with with only the plastic "clips" to hold it in place. The same clips that fail to hold the game manual place so that it falls out every time you open the case. What was so wrong with the Asian case design that they couldn't use it here? I'd rather have a thicker, snugly-packed case then a thin, tightly-packed case that feels like it's going to bust open and send my discs sliding across my floor if I happen to drop it on a couch cushion.
It's fine if you're going to be playing only this game for a while and no other, because you'll only have to deal the packaging every time you move on to the next disc. But if you're like me and need to change games ocasionally due to wanting to play something else for a bit, it's a pain in the ass.
The Voice Acting and Text
The voice overs are awful. It's like watching a badly dubbed anime. And that means a lot coming from me because I actually like and watch most of the American-dubbed animes that I always hear other people criticize and bitch about. On top of it, at the beginning and end of a battle, one the characters usually recites some old, over-used saying, such as "Look before you leap, I always say." or "You're not very smart, are you?". It gets old quickly.
The other thing that bugs me is lack of voice acting. Even if I have the voices set to Japanese due to the irritating dubs, I'd still like to hear people actually speaking when they are supposed to be speaking. Even some of the unavoidable story dialog between the main characters is done only in text.
The game comes on 4 DL-DVDs. That's about 32 GB of storage. Could they really not afford to fit some voice acting somewhere in there?
I haven't finished the game yet, so I don't have a good estimate of how much content is in it. Mass Effect crams into one disc awesome graphics, lots of content, plus voice acting for each and every character's dialog. When I think about it, I wonder why Lost Odyssey takes up 4 discs. We're a few generations ahead of the PS1 now. They should have been able to execute this better.
And one more point about the reading and lack of voice acting; the dream sequences. MOAR READING?! These sequences make me feel like I'm reading a book. Each chapter is long, but interesting at least, but damnit, I get tired of reading after a while. And just like when I read a book, after reading a chapter, I start to feel like I need a nap, even if it's a good book that I don't want to put down.
The Little Things
- The save points don't restore your HP/MP.
This is irritating when you've gone a long way to just find yourself at a difficult boss and low on items and MP. If you do have recovery items, you'll have to blow most of them before the battle leaving only a few to use during the battle. And even when I try to stock up on as many as I can in each town. I still end up finding myself needing more when I reach the next boss. - Every time you save, it has to "reload" the save screen to show the new save. I've always hated having the manually save and having to wait several seconds for the game to save. This just makes to process take even longer because the "reload" isn't very speedy.
- Every time you sleep to recover HP/MP, a dream selection menu pops-up. I already saw them... sorry, read them the first time that I got them. If I want to read them again, I'll open the menu in the main menu or the title screen menu. Stop interrupting my game and give me my HP/MP.
- There were other things, but I probably won't remember them until I start playing again.
I'll finish it eventually since I already paid for the damned thing, but it's not a priority.
The Orange Box is an old topic by now. I bought it on Steam the day before it was released and started preloading it.
But for some odd reason I was compelled to buy it for my 360. And for some odd reason, I was glad I did.
Overall, my FPS skill on the 360 has improved. I was able to beat HL2, EP1, EP2, and Portal just fine. Only I did find one test chamber in Portal to be more difficult than I remember due to having to aim with the right analog while being flipped upside while in midair (this the long test chamber with the very high platforms at the end).
Along with beating the games, I was also able to grab achievements that I either never could get on the PC versions or just didn't feel like going back for. Including the famous Little Rocket Man achievement.
Rather than playing through each game more than once, I crammed as many achievements into one run as I could. So the gnome one turned out to be especially difficult. The main bit that gave me the most grief and made me cuss so loud that my neighbor came over to make sure I was ok, was driving while being chased by the hunter chopper. Even when I tried god mode, it was a pain in the ass. If you put the gnome in the car, the chopper shoots it out, hovers so low that the wind blows it out, or just moving the car will make it fly out. Even holding it with your hands or the gravity gun, the chopper seems to aim for it and shoots it away from you.
I eventually managed to get this done by finding cover, grabbing the gnome and shooting it as far as I could in the direction I was going. Then I would drive to that spot, find cover again, suck up the gnome with the gravity gun, and shoot if off again. After destroying the chopper, keeping the gnome wasn't too difficult. Surprisingly, it's easier to keep it in the bit between the trunk and the seats, where it hovers over empty space, rather than in the front with you and Alyx. When I did finally sent the little bastard in to space, I was very satisfied.
There's still some more achievements to get, but I'll go back for them some other time. I've got a good chunk of them so far. Of all my games Orange Box has my second highest gamerscore, right behind Assassin's Creed which I've been stuck at 98%, missing one achievement.
Despite being the 2nd time I played EP2, I was shocked to see a hint in a larger connection between Black Mesa and Aperture Science. When I first got Orange Box on the PC, I had played EP2 before playing Portal. So when the name Aperture came up the first time around, I didn't pay attention to it, and didn't recognize it when I played Portal later on. But this time around, I knew what Aperture was and my face went
A tale told over and over... for the past month.
I preordered Brawl last summer from Newegg. Received the game via Fedex Monday afternoon, and of course could not play it due to my Wiikey. The dump was already downloading, but wouldn't be finished until late that night after I've gone to bed, and of course I would have to go to work the next morning and wouldn't be home til four.
So I went ahead and tried to dump the game myself out of curiosity. I had already read that the Wiikey dumper wouldn't work, so I tried SD-DVD Backup Utility 0.1c which is what I've been using to dump my own games from rentals. The dumper actually accepted the disc as a Wii disc and began dumping. I was hopeful, but was sure I was gonna see some error popup in the middle of dumping. Then at 10%, I noticed that the size completed was at 450 MB. 450 MB times 10 = 4.5 GB. Shit. So I thought I might atleast get the first layer and let it keep dumping so I could play it while I wait for the full game to finish. But when the dump finished, the entire ISO consisted of zeros.
ARGH!
I gave up and went back to Lost Odyssey for the rest of the evening.
Tuesday afternoon came and I rushed home from work, booted up my laptop, tossed in a blank DL DVD and began burning the downloaded ISO. An hour later, it was done. I popped it in the Wii, and it asked to update. I let it and it reboot the Wii. Ran the game again and got the 001 error.
AARRGGHH!
So I started digging through the Brawl topics on the forums looking for a solution. Seems the only solution is to use Trucha to the patch the main.dol. Great, I hadn't messed with Trucha as I had no interest in it. Now I have to use it. So I started looking at the tutorial and saw that I needed this key.bin file which can't be legally posted for download. Reminds me of the bios file required for ePSXe. Anyway, the tutorial says to google it. So I google it and what do I find? More sites saying to google it. In fact, most of them are the same exact tutorial copypasted on to other forums.
AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!
I can't believe I have to go through this stupid shit just to play the game I paid for! Fuck it! I'll disable the Wiikey using the Wiikey update disc trick and get a new chip.
Tried 5 times and the fucking thing wouldn't disable.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGHGGGGHHHHHHHHH! FUCK!
I sat down and watched Dr. Who for a bit and cooled down. Went back the computer to try removing the 001 error again. Finally, 5 hours after I got home, I was playing Brawl.
I'm still going to replace the Wiikey with a new chip. Or just remove it completely, there's still not much on the Wii to keep me interested enough to go through the effort of pirating games on it. I'll still be buying the good games that are actually worth paying for.
That's all for my monthly rant.
