M is for movies...

Got my copy of Metroid: Other M today, and it came with a set of art cards. I haven't opened the set yet sine I want to avoid the spoiler glimpse I had with the Persona 4 art book, with my luck the first card I look at would be a robotic Mother-Brain or an evil Samus clone... One thing that suprised me was the size of the set, I was expecting normal playing card size but they are actually almost as big as the DVD case.

The game itself is an odd mixed-bag... it lays very much like a 3rd person version of Metroid Prime but with more frantic fighting. Also the odd choice of having it not only 3rd and 1st person interchangeable but also not using the nun-chuck makes for some rather odd game play. But the game is pure Metroid, with all the power ups (staking like in Prime Trilogy), huge levels that you have to back track as you get new abilities to unlock places, and a lot of the clasic style monsters (like shriekers).

One thing that's oddly missing is that the visor dosen't analyze things like in Prime, so you don't get that in-depth information on the monsters, environments, or history. But it sort of makes up for it in really intresting cut-scnes and monlogues from Samus about her past at the end of each key section of the game, not sure where it's goign though or if it has much relevance to the plot. Samus' new voice is kinda flat (Jennifer Hale would have been much better) but it has sort of a Yuki Nagato quality so it's ok.

The plot so far is that Samus responds to a distress signal and when she get to the location she meets some people she knew from her time as a space marine ( which actually fits the original back story of Samus). The space station appears to be abandoned and something had killed all the crew, also it looks like it was some kind of artificial reserve for alien animals (with holo-deck environments). What caused the distress signal and what the military really is doing there is still unexplained, but I'm only half way through the second at of I don't know how many.

Well that's thirty-one down...

Well the Westside Rollerz missions were surprisingly short, and fortunately only one racing mission. The main bad guys of the mission were really interesting, one was a reserved cool business man and the other was a lot like Vin Diesel, too bad they both had to die. The final like of the quest the main character got was complaining on the phone how the Vin Diesel character nearly ran him over with a truck.

After 100% of the map is controlled the leader of the Saints is kidnapped by a crooked police commissioner who is running for mayor orders you to kill off a candidate for mayor. After that mission you turn it around and kill off the commissioner, and in the final mission the last remaining mayoral candidate thanks you personally on his boat for giving him the election...

Then you get blown up real good.

The ending didn't come as much of a surprise since when I played a couple minuets of Saints Row 2, to see if the disc was ok, it starts off with the boat exploding and you waking up in a prison hospital a few years later. What was surprising was that there was no set u or explanation as to how the boat blew up, why, or even who did it.

There are still a lot of achievements I could still get, but I wanted to finish the game off in the to start playing Metroid Other M when it comes out tomorrow!

The Los Carnales

Finished the Carnales missions and now own about 80% of the map. It does seem that the main charactert has a line of dialogue out of nowhere at the end of each quest line. This one ended with him pointing out that some one's shoes were actually last seasons fashion.

The number of missions were less but they seemd to be tougher, I don't know if the game is scaling up as I finish sections or it's just was balanced like that from the start, but I seem to be dying a lot more than in the King missions.

So now all that left are the Westside Rollerz missions, which I hop don't involve too many races...

King me!

Well after doing a few side missions today they started to get a little dull since they are mostly based on the unpredictable AI. In the hist games the cops will slowly follow behind you for 12 block as you lug the item to the pawn shop, while in the insurance fraud games the cars will avoid you with perfect reflexes. So I started on some of the main quests.

The Vice Kings quest (wasn't that by sierra?) seemd the most interesting ( the leader not being a gun sporting moron) so I stuck to playing through that whole story line. Surprisingly enough, The character you lay as is normally totally silent (except for screaming while on fire), to the point where many other characters comment on this, but out of nowhere in the last Vice Kings mission he just makes a lame joke.

So now it's on to take over the other two gangs and do some side missions along the way.

Grinding done!

Well I'm finally finished all the CD/tag/hit-man quests, and now thoes are out of the way i'm much better prepared to take on all the side quests with the following stuff unlocked:
-Super pistol
-Super SMG
-Super shotgun
-Super rocket launcher!
-Discount on all other weapons
-50% more stamina
-Entire map revealed

Also I got a bunch of achievements along the way, but since several achivments are on line only I won't be going for the full 1000.

So tomorrow it's on to all the crazy and action packed side missions!

Return of the dead doods

Collected a few more of the tags/CDs today but mostly spent my time hunting down the 2nd set of hit-man targets.

Next thing I need to do is find the last Hit-man quest trigger and get the last 30-40 tags/CDs...

The game's a hit man!

I'm about half way through collecting up all the tags and CD's and I manged to complete one of the 3 hit-man mission sets. When I'm done with those I'll run around and maybe do the story missions.

Also, since I re-installed the game it has only crashed once, but it was in the middle of my car exploding as a dozen police cars rammed it, so it was still cool.

crash and burn

Well I started off going for all the hidden CD's and tags, and collected about 8 of them, and then the game crashed...

So I restarted and got 10 items, and even one of the targets of the hit-man mission, and then the game crashed again...

So then I got 22 items, another hit-man target, and now I save every few minuets...

Checking out the sights

Well I started on Saints Row, and aside for doing a couple of the earlier missions I spent most of the time just exploring around the huge map and seeing all the odd side quests available.

The plot so far is that the purple gang wants to take over the territory of the yellow, blue, and red gangs. Doubt it will get much deeper than that later on.

Tomorrow I'm using a map to explore around and find up all the CDs and graffiti around.

Well that's thirty down...

The rank 2 match was surprisingly hard, it was aginst an insane woman with a powerful baseball bat and a instant kill trick move, but after a few tries I managed to beat her.

The final match was a huge blob of surprise exposition if the form of Travis' half sister who had kill his family as revenge for her father (also Travis') molesting her. It was a tricky battle since she moved so fast, but I found that just constantly attack weakened her just a little faster than it did me. Also there was some 4th wall breaking jokes about how the release may be delayed and it become "No More Heroes Forever".

The standard ending has a cliffhanger ending of Travis being ambushed while on the toilet buy some one gunning for the #1 spot.

The true ending has Travis' twin brother (the guy who cut the brain bomb in half) show up and explain that the woman Travis has been interested in the whole game was his wife, and they battle off into the sunset making 4th wall breaking comments. I didn't get this ending since it requires winning a ridiculously long fight with the twin and I didn't feel like spending another day just to get the better ending, so I just you tubed it.

Tomorrow it's on to Saints Row!

Presto! A giant cannon!

Now at rank 3!

The weirdness of the levels continue with the 4th ranked match where the lead up to it was not a gauntlet of bad guys like the previous fights, but a vertical bullet-hell shooter during a dream sequence. The actual boss fight was a little weird too since it was against a magician, and some times during the fight the screen would flip upside-down, fortunately this also let the boss off guard and I could get in the most hits right after the flip.

The 3rd place match started with a bus ride when I had to kill a bunch of goons, and then went to a very long street with an old lady with a shopping kart that turned into a gigantic cannon. The real fight of the boss battle is to get to the far end of the street, duckling in and out of the way of the cannon as it fired. After a few attempts I managed to get to the end and kill the boss, getting the 3rd rank.

just 2 more ranks to go, and then I'm betting some final surprise battle.

Epically anticlimactic

Another two ranks down, but this time it was a little weirder...

The 6th place ranked match was was a relatively short one, I just had to run down a short beach killing some soldiers, avoiding landmines, to get to the boss. It was a lot shorter and had less bad guys (easier too) than previous missions. The boss was a woman with a bionic leg and liked to throw around explosives and dig holes for you to fall into, after a couple attempts I was able to defeat her and win rank 6.

Normally to get to the next rank fight you need to save u enough money, and to do that you need to go on assassination mission, and to unlock those missions you have to do silly little part time jobs like pick up trash. Now after this last mission I was able to do a job that unlocked a real winner of a assassination mission. Basically I just had to kill 100 super weak bad guys in 5 minuets to get 90,000$, which i normally do in 3 minuets, getting me 3 times the money of most other jobs. Since each rank cost about 150,000$-200,000$ more than my current savings, I'm now able to get to the next level in about 10 minuets, instead of running around town for half an hour.

I also got a 4 beam laser katana, which really helps with the killing too...

The 5th lace match was the one that was really odd.
It started off with no information as to who my opponent was, and the only clue was a trail of blood stains leading from my motel to an odd hatch under ground. The hatch lead to a tunnel where I chased a shadowy figure for several minuets, killing some medium grunts along the way. The hatch then opened up to the middle of an empty rode with wind turbines off in the distance, and boss standing beside what looked like a giant bomb with a huge brain on top of it. After some talkign the giant bomb starts preparing some ignition system as the boss counts down, all the while Travis tries to run closer. Just as the count reaches 0 Travis is about to strike when some guy falls from the sky out of nowhere and cuts both the boss and the bomb in half with a laser katana! The guy then disappears before Travis can fight him, but Travis still gets to rank up since he was the one who the match was arranged for.

Next match hopefully actually has a boss fight.

Ninjas and actors

Went up two more ranks today, now at rank 7.

The first fight was the hardest, it was against a samurai ninja school girl, and despite sounding silly she was quite deadly. It took me a lot of tries to finally defeat her, and by the end of it I had gotten really good at dodging. The second boss fight was rather easy in comparison, it was some actor guy in a super hero outfit that shot lasers everywhere. The this is that he was so slow and announced his attacks so much that I could easily side step them and was able to kill him in my first attempt.

4 down, 6 to go.

Struck out

I was really tried when I started playing and took a mission when I had to hit a ball and knock out a row of guys, I missed all but one guy and then went to sleep.

More tomorrow.

Moé!

NMH is a rather odd game so far...

I didn't expect Travis Touchdown to be so cocky and arrogant about his assassin abilities, a personality trait that doesn't normally go with his otaku obsession with magic girls and luchador wrestling. The action in the game is an odd mix of mashing the A button and wiimote waggling, and so far it's changeling on normal mode. I have moved from Rank 11 to 9 and so far just died once, but I bet that will change as I go up in rank.

If I go up in rank about 1 or 2 places a day I should be done the game in about a week, I hoe it doesn't get repetitive before then.

Well that's twenty-nine down...

After getting the last piece of the airship it was time to gather a team to go out of the world, not knowing what to expect I brought one of each job type and about 10 fighters and 10 archers. After acending in a odd shoot-em -up type levle (minus being able to shoot) it's revealed that the whole world is actually inside of a little cardboard theater stage and populated by characters made by a small boy. Also it's revealed that the reason the world was shaking so much is because of 4 rats gnawing at it, so the final battle is against theses rats.

Unfortunately, all the utility classes I brought were not much use in this fight, so after a few futile attempts I reloaded from an earlier point and launched with an army of 30 fighters. After a couple of tries I managed to kill all the rats and it's revealed that the boy who made the word is the same boy as the king, and then it just end with out explaining anything...

Weird ending but a really good final boss battle. I also found it neat that the all the characters are actually about the same size as Olimar, making the Pikmin comparison come full circle.

Tomorrow I continue with the Wii and return to mindless violence with No More Heroes.

Multiple choice

Another weird king fight, this one was in the form of a quiz, and getting an answer wrong resulted in death by chicken. The most frustrating part of the fight is one question where you have to identify NPCs based on the sound of their gibberish voices, which is almost pure luck unless you get one of the distinct voices at random.

After many tires I beat the king and got the princess, and now the whole world is under my control, but the earthquakes are threatening the world so I have to find the last space ship part to save the day!

Educational boss fight?

Beat the TV king today and it was yet another surreal battle. The fight starts off zooming into a big TV and then playing a bunch of weird TV programs before cutting to the king, who has a TV for a head. The king then disappears and says that he has to be found some where in the world, the gradually giving hints on his location. It took me a while to then realize that the ground of the area was a giant map of the earth and little red dots were place at major cities and could be dug up.

So the battle consisted of trying to figure out his location from the hints before the timmer ran out and then di it up on the map. If you guessed wrong or ran out of time you get a punishment round based on the TV shows show in the intro (cooking show, base ball game, Sci-fi...), and to make things worse, after the first couple places the king would give false hints at first to throw you off!

In the end though I manged to beat him and claim another country, now only one more to go!

The daily grind...

After the last king battle I was down a lot of fighters and archers, since the chicken head part of the battle would randomly change the class of any one caught in it's beam (it was weird). This resulted in having a lot of new cooks and carpenters but much less fighters, and it costs 1,000,000$ to make a fighter, and 100,000 to make an archer. So now I'm mostly taking odd hero jobs so save up enough to get a full fighting force again.

Things would be going faster if dragon tail oni didn't keep one shotting half my group and costing me 10,000$ each in death benefits...

What a piece of junk!

Got another kingdom overthrown, and the king fight was one of the most challenging but interesting ones yet. The king was a giant creature made out of junk and stationary supplies, and had 3 stages and tons of attacks. What made it interesting was that each of it's strongest attacks could be countered with the right skill class, cooks killed the chickens it lays, lumberjacks destroy the giant pencil missile, and miners blow up the rolling stone presses. So while at first it seemd to be chaotic and over powered, it was actually more strategic, unlike the pinball king that was pure luck.

Also with my better fighting strategy I was able to get a large amount of money and develop nearly every part of the kingdom to the max. Soon I may even get mages!

Progress is progress...

Well I seem to be making headway again in LKS, after an insane battle against a radish.

The fight was much harder than any previous one since the main attack of the giant evil radish was to splash orange liquid around, and if it hit any one it turned them into evil turnips. So this has three layers of problems, first it instantly kills any of my forces that can't get out of the way, second it makes all new monsters to avoid, and lastly it puts obstacle between the fighters and the radish, making it really hard to target with the remaining forces.

After getting my entire fleet of 23 fighters/archers killed in the first fight, I was too far from a save point to just start over, and I couldn't just wait until morning for them to re-spawn since an invading force was scheduled that evening. So I saved and then converted every strong peasant into a grunt fighter and 3 into archers since I didn't have enough left over for more after paying off 23 death benefits (which is a rip since 99% of them come back the next day). Then I discover that the invading force is a UFO that only at least 4 archers can kill, which meant I was 1 short. So I reload the save and go to every house collecting taxes to pay for 3 more archers before the aliens show up, and manage to beat them.

So now that I'm learning to play smarter and save often, the next morning I collect up my previously dead fighters from the beach (1 was lost), but only bring my old archers and the ones I made the night before to the radish for round two. This time I keep hammering it with only arrows from a distance and retreat when it gets too close, this way I defeat it and only lost 2 archers. This has the unexpected benefit of opening up a new area for development, and while it dosen't give me a new skill class (just more cooks) it does give me more civilians to pick from and unlocks more bonuses.

From there I was able to unlock two more areas of expansion, using the same hit and run technique and heading back and saving whenever I collected a large pile of money. So after building up my forces and fortune again I ventured into the realm of the mountain king and after a few tries beat his mountain of obstacles and facial hair to beat him in a test of height (this game has weird boss battles) and got another Princess.

Tomorrow it's into the TV king kingdom.

well that was pointless

An hour and a half of game time lost because some monster off screen killed my king.

Seelp...

Took out a mini boss that was a Oni riding an undead cow, then was too tired to play any more.

more tomorrow

Another day, another princess.

Took over another kingdom today, and the fight with the king was a normal boss fight, well as normal as fighting a shirtless drunk man standing on a tower of beer crates can be...

The game is taking a monotonous turn though, even after taking over these new kingdom the areas I can build on remain the same. So there are no new units and I'll soon run out of new building for citizens. If this keeps up, fighting the next 4 kings will be the same thing as the last 3.

Also it's getting a bit annoying that even though some of my guards have up to 10 live points, my king still has the starting 3, so if he gets hit 3 times it's game over. so I have to get into the habit of saving often in game just for time when I get kill of without warning (which happened 3 times).

Fat man pinball?

Along with a lot of building up my kingdom I managed to beat another king and take his kingdom (and princess), and boy was it a weird fight...

The king was a giant fat man and the battle field was set up like a cross between pinball and break-out, with my troops as the paddle and the king as the ball. Each time the King hit something he would loose weight instead of gaining points, and the objective was to get him small enough to be struck by a fork that was only uncovered by breaking a rock in the bonus round. If the fat king gets past the bumper he stuffs his face with food to gain back some weight (with "nom nom" text even) and if my little king got hit twice he dies.

Due to it being like pinball and the objective being mostly luck based, it took me nearly an hour to get the frustrating weird battle over with. At least the game was decent enough to put a continue screen when you lose, and not the standards "Life Over" screen sending you back to the last save point.

pik-men?

So far LKS is a fun game and it plays basically like a combat driven version of Pikmin.

You play as a child who becomes king after finding a crown and then has to take over the other areas of the land in order to rule the world. The game play is split between developing your kingdom (to gain more troops) and using troops to conquer new lands (to develop your kingdom). Combat is done just like Pikmin, where you have a large group followers with different skills and you throw them one at a time at the target.

I have just finished the tutorial and first quest and so far I have these units avaiable:
Slackers - Can just dig holes
Farmers - Open up holes, break small objects, dig, simple attack
Guards - Strong attack, break small objects
Builders - Build objects, break small objects, dig, simple attack
Hunters - Ranged attacks, dig,
Woodsmen - Break large trees, dig, simple attack

I don't know what other units I can get other than "merchant" when I have enough money to build a market, but there is still 6 other lands to invade!

Well that's twenty-eight down...

Finished Assassin's Creed today, and oddly enough the last mission is the only time they actually change things up. The target of the mission turns out to be a decoy and you have to go through a gauntlet of guards to get to the real target. Then there is a big boss fight against the leader of the assassins (big surprise he was evil...) and you actually have to use different methods to fight him in several forms. I hope that the second game is more varied than this, but unless I can find it for 10$ I'll probably never get it.

And in the end I did mange to get 100% of the achievements. Tomorrow it's on to Little King's Story.

It's about time!

Well after hundreds of dead guards I managed to make the 32 combo kills necessary to get the achievement. By the end of it I finally got the timing down that I can now pull one off about once every 5 guards (not that I need to any more).

Also I finished the second to last mission, so now I just need to collect up 30 flags, do a few side missions and kill the finally guy to be finished! Well at least get to whatever happens after that...

Only thing that I'm a bit anxious about is if I missed some where one of the conversation/video cues that are needed to get some of the achievements. It would suck if I got all achievements except for one because I didn't talk to some one when i didn't know I could.

Guards wanted

Another day another mission done, and I never have to go to Damascus again!

Aside for plot related achievements, or those related to completing the game, the only one I have left to get is combo killing 50 guards. the thing is that combo kills are really hard to pull off and almost random, so only 1 in about 30 times it works, and they are more dangerous to do than counter kills (where you block most of the time). So I have been running all over the city trying to kill every guard I see, it's getting to be more violent then MadWorld. At this rate I'll have to kill off 1000 more guards before finishing...

Light at the end of the tunnel

Well there is just 3 missions left now and I have over half the achievements, so the game is nearly over! It's an ok game, but doing the same thing every day is getting monotonous. Pickpocketing, interrogation, eavesdropping, and killing guards is getting dull, and thank goodness there's only about 60 flags left! Saving towns folk is still fun though.

He's a little slow...

Finished another mission, and aside from the part where I get to run around and save people like a lethal spider man, this game is getting rather dry and repetitive. Dragging down the pace is also the main character's slowness to catch on to he's being used for evil deeds, and when he actually does question his actions he believes whatever he is told.

Also today, since it's a new month, I bought my planed game for the month : Harvest Moon Animal Parade. Although considering that I bought 7 games last month, the rule is rather pointless currently.