Re: Games Discussion Thread
Supposedly to maintain server costs, microsoft doesn't directly get any money when you purchase a game for the 360 (they still get a bunch from the companies involved in making the game though). And since you have to connect to microsoft's live servers to connect to games that use dedicated servers, or to the other people playing the game in the case of P2P based multiplayer it does make sense.
Though that's only in the scope of the machine's abilities, which microsoft put in place exactly for these reasons.
On another note, I've been playing games other than ME3, they just took a while to finish due to the amount of time I do spend on the multi.
First up is Radiant Historia. I really liked this game, however I ended up taking about a month long break from it because of ME3's and kingdoms of amalur (fuck SP) releases.
Combat is a mix of traditional RPG/tactical/combo and it works quite well, focusing on getting as many enemies in the same square and hitting them with something hard to take them all out, quite enjoyable unless you have party members without specific enemy-moving attacks but you'll be able to work around that usually. One thing I didn't like about the gameplay was that unless you strike an enemy with your sword (stunning them, though it only has a chance of working each strike) before they touch you the encounter is going to suck, with each party member's turns broken up and often the enemy going first and destroying you. So I ended up using a cheat to make them always stunned which made the combat much more enjoyable.
Sometimes it becomes a difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do to continue the main quest, or a sidequest. This is easily remedied by finding a guide, unfortunately it's that or spending a large chunk of time figuring it out for yourself .
The story is quite long and well done. There are some parts that just don't make sense, but they're easily handwaved by the fantasy setting for me. Character development could have been a bit more emphasized, but that didn't really hurt the story. One thing that bugged me as I was playing was the constant points where someone doesn't want to tell you something and the main char says "It's ok" well it isn't but it ends up being neccessary to set up the ending twist which I didn't guess straight off the bat so + points for that.
I'd say Radiant Historia is a solid 8/10 with a little help from a guide and the cheat I mentioned. Though without those it only loses about a point making it a 7/10 if I hadn't had access to the aforementioned things.
Next up is the stinking turd known as Lunar Dragon song. This game should have never even hit the shelves, and to be honest I couldn't even stomach playing this for more than 5 hours.
You're forced to choose wheter you get crappy items to sell (for very little money) or experince from fights, enemies level with you so you can't become overpowered but if you don't level you'll definately become underpowered. Some enemies can steal the items you gain to sell, while others can break the god-awfull expensive equipment you spent hours grinding to get in one hit. The story is almost non-existent, to the point of you have no idea why you're going someplace, you just go there. Oh and did I mention that you're pretty much on auto-pilot for combat? Even worse than ff13, you can choose to let the game do everything for you (all it does is attack untill you or the enemies are dead), or you can pick manual where you can choose between attack, use item, or use skill. Oh and on top of that, when you choose attack you can't pick what enemy you're going to attack so your main attacker is going to constantly be hitting the lowest priority target (and often the one with the lowest HP) wasting all that attack power and your weak shit mage will be hitting another instead of focusing on low hp targets.
There are some things about this game that aren't horrendous, most overland maps look quite nice, and characters are drawn quite well, there's a feature that lets you choose what building you go to in towns, which is neccessary only because there's no way to tell what building you're going into on the map untill you're on top of it unless you really want to waste your time memorizing the towns in the game.
Lastly I don't usually mention sound but god damn, there were several points in dungeons where the game would put on this high-pitched sound that just didn't fucking stop. This pile of shit gets a firm 0/10, don't play this game if you like RPGs, don't play this game if you're a fan of Lunar, just don't play this game.
