The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

There is a video game series out there known as The Elder Scrolls, available for computers and now the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms. I haven’t played the first two games in the series, but I know someone who has played Morrowind, which was the third game. This one is called The Elder Scrolls 4 and is called Oblivion. The name refers to a hell-like realm in the game. You have to close gates to this realm because monsters are coming out. There’s other stuff to do in the game as well, though. This is my review of The Elder Scrolls 4.

You know that story I talked about? That’s almost it. For some reason the emperor is killed, and for some reason that causes portals to Oblivion to open. That makes no sense, though. You have to close these portals while getting some other guy on the throne. For some reason, though, he needs an amulet, which you have to track down at the same time. What do amulets have to do with becoming an emperor anyway? Did Tony Blair need to wear a ring to become Prime Minister of Europe? I know it’s supposed to be a fantasy, but it still makes no sense.

Anyway, your character is an escaped prisoner who for some reason is the only one who can do anything about this stuff. You would think they wouldn’t trust a prisoner to save the world, though. Would you trust Al Capone to run the Department of Homeland Security? Anyway, along the way you can join a bunch of “guilds” that have you do jobs for them, but you don’t really get much for doing them, and the quests are all the same. Every Dark Brotherhood (one guild) quest has you kill someone, for example. It’s pretty unrealistic how little variety there is. I doubt the only thing a mob member would do is drop people in rivers. They would have variety, something the guild quests for some reason don’t have.

Also, what exactly ARE the Elder Scrolls? They’re mentioned every now and then, but are they really important enough to have a series named after them?

A lot of games, movies, etc have distinctive themes that you remember. When I say Pirates of the Carribean, you probably think of that “Du du DUH DUH DUH DUH da da duh duh DUN DUN DUN” theme that it has, for example. This game just doesn’t have a memorable theme. None of the music is memorable, even. It fits the mood, but you don’t remember it at all. Maybe they didn’t put much effort in because the Xbox 360 has custom soundtracks. You’ll want to play your music during the game, but when you play music you can barely hear the characters, so you have to read the subtitles. I don’t play games to read. If I wanted to read, I would pick up a book. They didn’t balance the sound well at all.

Also, the sound effects aren’t great either. When you put away your sword, you’ll hear a metal-against-metal sound. Yet the sheath isn’t metal, and some swords aren’t even sheathed. When you drop a potion on the ground, you hear a sound that sounds like rock-against-rock, even though the potion is glass. When you hit a tree with your sword, it makes a metallic clanking sound instead of a wood-like sound effect. In real life, if you were in a forest, cut down a tree, and heard it fall but the sound was the sound of rock-on-rock, you would be creeped out and think you were in some kind of Truman Show starring Jim Carrey. You would no longer be engaged in the task of cutting down the tree. The poor sound effects take you out of the game and may as well scream out “THIS ISN’T REAL!” Fun.

The graphics definitely look nice, but they aren’t that realistic. There are all kinds of different races, but none of them look like humans. They don’t even seem proportional. When you go to make a character, you can’t get them to look real either. Actually, why do you get to craft your character. When you have a baby, you can’t just choose how he’ll look. You have to get expensive plastic surgery. What happens for most of the game is that the grpaphics look good, but the make no sense. For example, there are nice looking streets, but no cars, carrages, or anything else that would necessitate a street. You can look into the sky and see moons, but they’re IN FRONT OF THE CLOUDS. Also, your character is static. He never changes. Dive under water and his hair stays the same. If the YMCA pool didn’t affect your hair, you would either be wearing a ton of product or you would sue the Y for putting crazy chemicals in the water. Is the water in this area polluted or something? Also, the towns are nice, but almost all of the wilderness is the same. Hills, trees, dirt, and grass. That’s it. And maybe some caves. The point is they didn’t put a ton of effort into the outside areas.

Everyone talks about how open-ended this game is, and it is, but at the same time it’s not. You can only fast travel (an alternative to walking) to a few areas, which really limits exploration. You can play as a lot of characters, like a mage or fighter or thief, but you won’t get very far if you aren’t a fighter. It’s very unfair. It’s like if a bank refused to loan money to anybody who wasn’t an accountant. We would get a ton of accountants, but nobody else and thus our economy would collapse. You see, enemies get stronger as you level up, but if you level up thief-related skills, you can’t beat them very easily. Those Oblivion gates you have to close are much harder if you aren’t a fighter. To close them you have to find and then climb a tower in the realm, and at the top grab a stone-like thing to close it. It isn’t explained what this stone does or how you escape after closing it, but the point is that there are enemies in those towers that will give you a lot of trouble if you aren’t a fighter. In real life you can drive to the store even if you aren’t a racecar driver, so why should it be different in this game?

Let’s talk about weapons, shall we? You can get things like bows and arrows, swords, short swords, long swords, and axes, but nothing better than that. That means no guns, no missles, etc. Wouldn’t the giant, menacing creatures be easier to beat with heat-seeking missles? This game takes place in 4000 something, and they’ve gone that long without inventing those kind of things? I know it’s a fantasy, but civilizations used concrete before the Romans invented it, so why couldn’t guns and missles be invented in this realm?

There’s also the issue of the camera. You can play in first or third person, but in third person the camera gets really weird and you can barely move. For some reason, you can only see the back of your character, though considering how horrible they look that’s probably a good thing.

You really can’t replay this much. After you finish all the quests for the guilds and beat the quest, what else is there to do? They say you can play it gain, but that’s stupid. If a great band came out with one album, and everyone said they should make another, they wouldn’t say “listen to our first one again,” Yet that seems like what Bethesda (the company that made this game) thinks. It took them 5 years to make this game, and all we could do while waiting was replay Morrowind, which had even less replay value to it. Why does it take them so long to make these games anyway? Ratchet and Clank has a new game every year. So does Madden, Burnout, Pokemon, and Mario Party. So why does Bethesda take years and years?

Everyone claims this game is great, but it isn’t. It’s repetitive, unrealistic, and poorly balanced. There’s no replay value to be found, and too many bad things. The Elder Scrolls 5 might fix this stuff, but it probably won’t come out until the Xbox 720 is released. Until then, we’re left with something mediocre and lame. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion gets a 3 out of ten. That score is not an average or anything, but does it need to be? No.

Okami

There is a game out there known as Okami, though I’m not really sure what the title has to do with the game. Basically, the whole game is about a wolf who somehow has to paint things with a brush. By painting things you can change the world. With paint. Yeah, the game is pretty lame. See, a wolf can’t hold a brush. They don’t have the thumbs, or the hands, or the telekinetic psychokinesisness to hold one and draw a picture man. Do these games not want us to think and instead just assume everything can happen ever? Well, guess what? I won’t.

So in this game there’s also a story thing, like this. There’s a sun goddess from some Japanese Native American legend or something, and in this game she has to possess a wolf and come to life from a statue. If this isn’t making any sense, now you know what the game is like. Why does she come to Earth (or this place called Nippon or something) as a wolf if wolfies howl at the moon and like night time but don’t always like the day as much? Wolves don’t like the sun. The game doesn’t make sense.

The basic plot of the game involves this cute wolfie wolf using her magic brush of fun to get rid of this dragon demon guy named Orochi. As you do this you also fight lame things and do cliche things like go inside somebody’s body and lame fetch quests where you have to feed dogs. The really dumb part of the game is that you don’t have a real plot to watch, cause the plot keeps changing. You do one thing and it says “Yay, now do this!” The game’s plot is really repetitive also, since you have to keep doing things like fighting this Wakka guy or convincing a guy that he can cut things down by cutting them down for him.

While doing all this there’s also a bug guy on your face called Issun, and he’s like Navi except Navi was less annoying because he was Navi. Issun keeps talking to you all the time. He’s a perverted lame man who hates things and is rude to people, and he doesn’t even have a voice. In fact, none of the people, not even the wolf, have voices. There’s just a ton of text everywhere. They made this game like a book, but I don’t like books, and the text moves slowly so you can’t even skip it. Couldn’t they have people talk and didn’t people have those voices in Nippon or Japapan or wherever the place with not-sense-making wolves this game was set in? They just didn’t want to put work into this game.

So let’s play the game. After a ton of text at the lame start you get to draw things by holding R1 and moving the stickly stick. You first have to draw a river, but why do you do this and how? If you can draw water, couldn’t you like drown the world? No, you can’t, because this game is way too linear and doesn’t let you have fun. You can draw lilly pads in water, but they don’t let you have fun by drawing them in the air and making a staircase of lilly pads. That would have been fun. Why don’t the makers of this game want me to have fun? That happens a lot in this thing. See, you can do things like plant a tree, but it just dies in a few short amounts of time and then it turns invisible. Why not plant things and watch them grow while raising cows and giving eggs to girls so you can get married? Why can you only draw lines from things to other things to use water or fire or lightning bolts of lightning until way late in the game when you can do lame sidequest things? If you’re the goddess man, do some fun things, don’t be a lame person, but she is, as is this game, which isn’t fun.

The really horrible part of this game is that it could have just been called “The Legend Of Zelda: Brush of Ink and you play as a wolf.” The game is so much like a Zelda game. There are dungeons with keys and you get a sidekick who tells you stuff and there are all sorts of collections and little sidequests to get lame stuff. Even playing a wolf was ripped off from Zelda, that new “Princess of the Twilight” one. They don’t even steal good things from Zelda, though, since you don’t get cool items like a hookshot or spinny thing. You instead just have to draw more stuff, and can’t use it very often. You can draw a vine from a little flying flower thing that doesn’t have roots and shouldn’t be able to survive, but there aren’t a lot of them. Also, there are random things like a space ship buried underground. The game doesn’t make any sense.

Along the game you get to do things like throwing cards at ghosts and climbing a tower with some fish, but nothing that’s really that new. The game feels lame and not original at all, since you do the same thing a lot and the story makes no sense. Why do people talk to a wolf? If I saw a wolf walking around my fun American town where I live I wouldn’t go and talk to it and tell it I wanted it to draw a boat or something, I would call the control of animals and tell them to bring a trap to trap the wolf, since I don’t like wolves. Why did they think I or other people would like this game? People don’t like wolves.

The graphics are really horrible also. The Clover guys felt like “Oh, we aren’t good enough to make a wolf look good”, so instead of good graphics they just used some weird cel-shaded watercolor thing. Cel-shading, another ripoff of Zelda, is just a lame excuse for not drawing well, and watercolor is just making things blurry so they don’t need to be detailed. All the trees and stuff are 2d and always face you, which is so unrealistic. Trees don’t turn towards you all the time, they only do that in a game made without enough money by a lame studio. No wonder Capcom made them dead, since their games didn’t sell, which is good, because they aren’t.

See, the game is weird and lame because it’s too long also. You do this thing and the game should be over but instead of credits they made you go to a new half of the Earth and do lame things. After that you just do random things like time travel and digging bamboo rockets from a hot spring and climbing a tower to give fish to a kitty. It’s like they just kept trying to come up with random things to make the game long so nobody would see the credits ever and find out who made this bad and not fun game.

You can also try to collect these beads in the game, but there are too many of them and the only reason you can use them is to replay a game which nobody would want to do with this one since it’s too long and you can’t skip the text and the graphics are lame as is everything else.

So this game of Okami doesn’t offer anything fun or new or not involving wolves. As such, I don’t like it and you shouldn’t either.

Mother Died Today (Mass Effect)

In case you aren’t aware, the title for this review is from the book by Albert Camus. Camus wrote a lot of things as a writer, but if you took everything he wrote it wouldn’t have as many words in all his things than all the words in Mass Effect, because Mass Effect has too many words and horrible gameplay and everything else that could be bad. Reading a book by Camus is also more fun than playing this.

At the beginning of the start of Mass Effect you get to make yon characters. However, you only make one and you can’t really make them fun at all. You can choose between a couple things like whether you’re the hero man or if all your friends died, but not many choices exist at all. You can only choose a few option and you can’t even write your last name. The whole game is based on this idea that you get to choose to do things, but they don’t let you choose who you want to be at all at all.

You can also design how your person man looks, but only the face, and only from a couple of choices you put together. Why can you not do more? Why not change how the rest of him looks? Why not let you actually control the character making things instead of just having to choose between nothing and also nothing good? It’s because Bioware was lazy and only wanted to make this game lame. That’s why so much of it is unoriginal and bad.

There’s a story, but it’’s basically Star Wars and Halo thrown into a Blendtec total blender ™ and made into this horrible existence. You get these alien counsils and the aliens who are sometimes bad, and even sometimes other ripoffs. Of course, those things weren’t as much text involving. For every time you want to learn of the game you have to hear some monologues and people rant and talk for a long time about nothing while repeating themselves a lot as they talk about nothing. There are long cutscenes and a ton of more text and choices you can make to give you more text. They have voice acting also which makes it take even a lot longer since people pause and then wait a while while still talking so everything takes too long to hear. Everyone in this game is American also, since nobody has a foregin accent even if they’re from all of Earth. Why not have some Australians or stereotypical French people who walk around with cigarettes and white flags and socialized medicine? So many things would have made the game better.

There are a lot of these other aliens of course, but the good ones still look like the people. They have arms and legs each of two and the only difference is their faces look like zebras. Other aliens are the same way, with too many of them being just like humans and speaking English. How do they speak English or even have yon vocal cords that are the same? Why do all the aliens breathe the same and why do all the planets have oxygen and water? Shouldn’t planets be different? Again, they should, but aren’t because Bioware was lazy and thought to not make the game fun but instead lame.

Also involved in that are the choices idea. You can choose how you talk to people, but it’s basically a choice of more text or also more text, none of the effects make much of a difference. There are only two endings for all your choices, which is lame. Nothing makes a difference except which too much text you have to hear. All you can hear is the dialogue anyway; there’s no music because again Bioware was lazy. I ended up having to listen to Five to One and 16 Military Wives and Digital Love and Holiday in Kampuchea or whatever it’s now called and other songs by artists whose names begin with a D.Why not have fun music in this game?

But what about gameplay? The game is kind of like the shooters and the Western RPGs at the same time, but neither are original at all. The WRPGs parts are like Oblivion but now in space which is like Mario Galaxy and nothing at all is new or remotely fun because there’s too much talking and many words. When you walk around though you get to carry a gun, but only four or so. You aim at evil things like you do in Gears of the Wars while taking cover, but they aren’t even good like Gears by giving you a button to let you do things.

The guns are really lame as well. You don’t have to reload because you have a brick instead of bullets or something weird, and you don’t need to worry about ammo becausse it’s space? That makes no sense at all, yet that’s how this game pretends things are. You also have to do a lot with them and other things anyway. Everytime you pick things up or level up or do anything else the game basically tells you to “Go to that menu a lot.” So you go there, and there’s a ton of horrible menus in the menu and it’s hard to navigate because there’s too much text. Again. Wow.

For the game, you’re mainly doing the same things all the time, even though sometimes you might be in a car which is hard to move. You keep having to get missions which are almost all the same since all the planets are the same. Really. All the “unexplored super secret planets of secrets” are about a hectare (I think it’s a hectare, I’m not always as sure about how metric is used because I’m American and we don’t use the metric system) and the others all have the same type of bunkers and other things. It’s not realistic at all. In our solar system of eight planets, there’s a not planet which is small and frozen, gas planets, the good planet with oceans, moons that are other atmospheres, etc. Why is it that everywhere else the every planet is the same? It just breaks the idea of it being real at all.

There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t real at all, in fact. Your shepherd man since you can’t rename him can disarm bombs by looking at them from a while away, he can’t jump, he can crack safes with jello, and there’s no mulitplayer at all. You can’t have fun doing co-op or Capture those flags or anything else that would be maybe fun.Why? This is on the 360, the console with the good online. Every game should have it, why doesn’t it?

Bioware was way too lazy with this game. If they had spent time to make its story original, its gameplay fun, it have music, or something else instead of just writing dialogue all the time this game could have been fun. Instead it’s a lame repetitive and ripoff game which isn’t a good WRPG or shooter. Instead of this game, buy a better one.

Heroic Guitars. Three of them.

This game, Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is not a very enjoyable game. It tries to make it sound like you can be the man to play the guitar, but it doesn’t really let you. You supposedly get to see the legendary people of rock, but even that is lame and not existing. All in all, everything in this game is a lie and you should never give it to anyone ever.

You will see if you buy the game that it has a guitar shaped controller that looks and is held like a guitar. Unfortunately, they want you to be like “I can be the guitar hero”, but you can’t. At all. The guitar doesn’t look at all like a real guitar. A real guitar has a lot of long strings. Six of them. You have to hold different positions of the different strings while playing the six strings with a pick or your fingers if you’re a cool man. Anyway, the Guitar Hero guitar only allows you to have five buttons and a paddle thing which wants to seem like six strings but is not. Even though, then, it looks like a guitar, it’s less like a guitar than if they had just given you six shoelaces. How can they make you want to play a guitar when this is obviously not like a real guitar at all. They can’t.

So let’s say you realize you aren’t doing a guitar playing thing and this game should be really called “Thing that almost looks a bit like a guitar hero 3″ The next part of the title which is wrong is legends of rock. during the game it pretends to have a story, but it really doesn’t, but along the way you see these people called Tom Morello, Slash, and Satan man. Now, Slash is fun, but I don’t really like Guns and the Roses and he was better in Chrono Trigger. Mister Morello Man can’t sing very well and if I asked thirteen people who he was they would say “I don’t know who the Tom man is at all. Stop talking to me.” Then there’s Satan, who plays a fiddle song on not fiddle but on guitar. He tries to sound menacing, but he has a shirt and he looks not like Satan at all. Also, why did they have him here. Did Neversoft men just think “Let’s not make Christians buy this game” and offended them? These aren’t legends at all.

I was going to sue the Never soft men for not having a real title, but I’m not a lawyer man so I could not and decided to play the game instead. That was not a good plan. In the game you try to hold a button which isn’t strings and play the one not string to not play guitar in tune to music. The problem s the music is bad. There are different places and the first two had bad music and the rest had also bad music or songs by people who were already in Guitar Hero the second one. By the end, you’ll have heard only a few good songs and nothing by bands like Led Zeppelin or AC and DC or Paniclads at yonder Discohall. And then the game says that to hear more songs you have to either download them or play the game again and play them again but this time use more buttons.

See, there are five buttons, but you don’t use all five until the difficulty of Hard. For until then, it’s even less like a guitar, and then it’s like they made it be too hard now. You can’t do things in Hard, because the difficulty on a scale of 1 to 100 goes from like 20 on Medium to 642.9 on Hard. You have to have a ton more notes all the time, move your hand up and down a lot, and play Knighys of Cydonia on Hard which nobody can do ever. You can’t get past more than a few parts on those difficulties. Maybe they didn’t want you to play too far or you would realize how bad the game was.

The achievements aren’t even nice since I first beat easy and got only five. You never get a lot for doing anything even for getting a lot of things done on the hardest difficulty man gets you 30 or something like that, so it’s just they want you to do something impossible and get nothing in return. You ultimately still get the thousand, but not for fun things, but for impossible to do things and things you would do anyway. Neversoft doesn’t know how to make good games or achievements. Why did Harmonix men sell this series to them if they can’t even do these things on Tony Hawk games?

Then they also have online, where you do the same thing against other people. Instead of having to hit notes and notes with stars on them, though, you have to use powerups to hurt them. How is that like a guitar battle. If I was guitaring against you and I said “I played that well so you have to play yours left handed now.” he would just say No and then play guitar. It makes no sense and isn’t again like playing guitar. If you want to play other games, you can’t use the guitar for them since it doesn’t have analog sticks, though you can play D-pad games since it has those for a reason? I was playing Castlevaniamania with the guitar but I can’t do Halo 3. Do them both or none, not the one, which is random and makes no sense. You should also be able to play your own music instead of these lame songs, but again you can’t.

When you’re doing the career you have to choose between stupid looking guys or nymphomaniac girls and a singer whose face is a jaw or one with a cowboy hat who looks like a girl. You can play other guitars, but they don’t look like the one in your hand which isn’t a guitar which really makes it seem like you should be playing one but aren’t. The places your lame people play the guitar in aren’t fun and are just a bunch of lights so people with epilepilepsy can’t play it. Why? They can play the guitar, as can you. Why not buy a guitar and not this game, which is bad?

There’s really nothing that good about this game. The title is a lie, it’s not like what it tries to be like, the songs aren’t good, it’s too hard, the characters are horrible, there’s no replay value, multiplayer is repetitive and not fun, and the game is too expensive. With the guitar it’s 90 American dollars in America, and even more in Canada because their dollar is worth more than ours, which is unfortunate. You should really go out and buy a real guitar, a different game, or a dictionary, because the meaning of loquacious is more interesting than trying to play Fire and Flames by Forceful Dragons and failing because you can’t because the game is too hard. Don’t play this game.

SMG (Not the gun)

A few several weeks ago, I went into a store to by a gun since as an American I can have a gun. Inside I asked for SMG, and I got this game instead. This game is not a gun, in fact it does not even have guns; it has Mario. Mario is an old and often fat plumber man, but this time he’s in space. This SMG which is not a gun lets Mario breathe in space and he has to fight Bowser. Oh no! This game is bad.

In this game of games you start by seeing Mario pretend to be a plane, but you don’t get a wing cap. Peach is in her 3000th new castle and Bowser has a pirate ship. He takes he to this place where she sends Mario mushrooms and Mario goes to a dark observatory flying in space, where he can breathe.

To rescue yonder princess, Mario who can breathe in space has to get these fun yellow stars, except they aren’t fun. Stars are hot and big and not five-pointed; they are balls of hot big gas. Why can Mario find them and pick them up? You get these stars and then can fight Bowser, who jumps around and breaks things on mini suns. Why does this game which isn’t a gun not use new ideas, like fighting a person who isn’t Bowser in not space? That would have been more fun.

This whole game is really not realistic at all. There are black holes which are kinda red which are everywhere, enemies live on tiny planets where they have no food, there isn’t water on most planets except some which are only water, the same people and turtles and things are in the space as well as Earth or wherever these other Mario things are, and you can breathe in space. Mario can somehow jump and fly from the observatories to galaxies, but how? Our galaxy bulges in the middle 16,000 light years thick, you can fly across that? Nintendo didn’t bother to make this game actually seem like it could happen, so you just go around space.

Also, what will the sequel be? If you go through many galaxies you must be in the universe, so where next? Will it be Super Mario Other Parts of the Universe or Super Mario Parallel Universe where everything is a shade of purple and Mario is a lemur? That’s dumb.

See, in space you can move a lot. Actually you can’t, since you can’t breathe, and it’s cold, and you die, but Mario should be able to move, but he can’t. All the planets and things in the space are tiny and small and tiny, so you just jump a lot while finding coins which are in space, wherein Mario can breathe. In fact, space is like Earth in this game, since you have ghosts and penguins and those caterpillar things which get mad if you jump on head flowers. It’s just like Earth, and there’s no reason to be in space unless this was what happened in Ninty studios:

Shiguru: “I can’t make a Mario game.”
Iwata: “Make it in space”
Shigururu: “I’ll make it in space!”

And then he made SMG, which is not a gun, and is lame.

See, all the stars in a galaxy are a lot like the others, only sometimes you have to rescue green Mario. There isn’t variety, since all the galaxies are like the other ones and you have to keep doing the same things many times. Stars don’t take too long to get but you have to go along the same path many times until you’re like “I’ve gone down the same path many times.” At the point, you go off and play a fun game.

This game is mostly SM64. They didn’t want to actually change things, so they keep doing the same things. This time, though, they also stole from SMB3 and 1, since you have to jump over fire sticks, you get to shoot fire and have other lame powerups which you only use a few times, and you might as well have W-blue sky lives since Peach sends you letters with a lot of lives in them. When you fight Bowser it’s even mostly SM64, but without keys. You just get bigger stars, which are the same as smaller stars. Why are they bigger then? I don’t know.

You get those lives, and so you probably won’t ever die, since the game is easy. The only times the game is hard is when you have to hold the remote in some weird way to ride a ball or do something weird, and even that is easy. In most of the levels, you’ll just jump a lot and maybe press some switches or fight Bowser while breathing in space, but usually you won’t.

Let’s talk about multiplayer, except there isn’t any. You can’t go online because of some reason and if you buy a second controller and friend you can have him shoot star bits or make enemies not move, but he can’t shoot them with not star bits. See, this game doesn’t have any ways to kill things except two: you can jump or you can shake and dance and spin around and kill them. The first is lame, because how can people jump so high. Mario is fat, and he shouldn’t jump, unless he has the super duper boots which let him do so and breathe in space. For the second, not only is it a ripoff of Dead Rising’s Double Lariat, but it shouldn’t work and makes Mario seem like he’s decided to try Ballet. I didn’t want to dance, I wanted to play a game, and I didn’t want this game, but I have it, and I don’t like it, because it’s lame.

I don’t know what else to say. The graphics are obviously bad, since this is a Nintendo game, and the sound is obviously bad, because people don’t talk much and the game I think is MIDI. Maybe I should mention replay value, which this game has enough of not enough of. In other words, none. See, you only have a couple of stars, and you can play as a lamer guy and get the same stars again, but you can’t go online and play Capture the Flag or jump on each other’s heads many times. There aren’t any achievements or unlockables or a level creator. There’s no harder difficulty which would make the game actually hard, and nothing in this game was fun enough for me to say “I want to do this several times again” upon seeing.

Mario has been around for too long, and his games just aren’t all that fun or new. Why doesn’t Nintendo make new things and do fun things with them instead of doing the same things but now in space? The last fun thing Mario did was be in another dimension of three, but since then he’s just played sports and carried around a water gun. Maybe he should do things that are fun, like not be in games any more. Ninty should make the next platformer game they make involve other and better things, like guns and online multiplayer.

That Orange Box

The product of a US government special forces training program, The Orange Box is a green box with some orange covering up on it, which contains five actual games. Now, this may sound fairly interesting and amazing, until you realize that this game is a ripoff of Kirby Super Star for the SNES. The reason is fairly simple: both games have more than one game in the game, yet while Kirby offered the greatest deal that you’ll find outside of Costco, this game is simply two old games, a puzzle thing, some type of gameplay simulator for online, and a sequel for the old games. What you end up with is lame games, all sold together because nobody would ever buy them individually ever.

I think I’ll talk about each of the games, then I’ll talk about the game.

So, the first game is Half-Life 2. I’ve never played Half-Life 1, but I read the Wikipedia article. It seems to be about this scientist man who has to go to the outer space place and defeat a creepy baby. Anyway, this is Half-Life 2, and it’s horrible. Basically, you still play as the scientist man, but I only assume that, because you never get to look at him and see his face, not even if you look into a mirror because there are evil aliens. Basically, the aliens have taken over a city where everyone speaks in an American accent despite it being European. Europe isn’t America. These aliens have taken over the world and make people throw their trash away, and you have to blow up things while playing with the Havok engine.

See, this game pretends to be a shooting game, where you have a gun and shoot things, but you get a gun which lets you pick things up and that’s the only thing that a lot of the game wants you to use. Isn’t that why you have arms? You also have to run a lot and jump around on ledges. It seems like the guys at Valviclads said “Let’s make a platforming game where all you use is the Havok engine a lot”, and they made it, and then they decided to turn it into a shooter. It didn’t even have the fun regenerating shields that shooting games should have, because instead you have a box in the lower left which says “YOU HAVE THIS MUCH HEALTH!” It’s horrible.

After you play this horrible game, you can move on to Episode One. This is the same, except really short and short and it’s also short. That’s because it’s too short. You play for about fifteen minutes and then there’s a screen that says “You’re done, have fun not playing it tomorrow.” The whole thing isn’t that bad, though, since it doesn’t change anything and I didn’t really want to play it too much.

But then you go play Episode 2, and it is weird, because that same Valviclads designer decided to say “Hey, let’s move some of the game outside and put a gnome to carry around in a car while a helicopter shoots the car but you have a gnome.” That’s an achievement. You have to do all sorts of horrible and lame things, like killing baby ant things, which you shouldn’t do because killing things is mean, and killing babies is even worse, because they’re babies. Valve, you have no soul.

The main thing is that Half-Life 2, episode 1, and episode 2 are all pretty much the same game, just different. You never talk to anybody, see yourself, do fun things like not carrying a crowbar and hitting crabs, etc. The story makes no sense, and there isn’t really a lot of one, and why are the bad people named after harvesters at a farm? The whole game is absolutely horrible in at least 4 of 5 possible ways.

So, let’s say you’ve beaten these horrible games, which are essentially one game, and you decide you want to play something that’s actually fun. So you decide to play the other game, called Portal. In this Portal game, you get a gun that can’t shoot things, but instead you get to make holes in the floor and step through the holes to come out other holes. There are also a lot of boxes. What basically happens for Portal is that you get a gun and have to solve a bunch of puzzles, but there’s really only one puzzle that’s actually good. For the first 18 levels you just go a few feet and shoot some portals, then you beat the level in a couple of minutes. After all this, you play the nineteenth level, which takes an hour and then you listen to a song.

Portal isn’t really about anything. All you have to really have not fun doing is completing tests for this robot girl who talks about cubes with hearts on them. I would rather not go into more detail, because I played this game last time I played it and realized how bad the game was, which made me sad because I thought it would have been good and I paid $60 American Dollars for this game. There isn’t any music except the song, which isn’t very fun, and again you don’t get to see yourself. Why don’t mirrors exist?

So, finally there’s a game called Team Fortress 2. I never played Team Fortress 1, but in this game you basically don’t fortress while being a team. Now, when you play it you may be thinking something like “But I didn’t think this game was going to look like the Pixar movie, I thought it was going to be a game.” The problem is it does. This game looks like the Incredibles, that movie they made for kids, but it’s actually a horrible game. See, you have six maps which only have one game each, and there’s no Team Slayer or Oddball or something fun. Again, there are no mirrors. Why do people hate mirrors so much?

Basically, you play as a different character and do things like hold a gun, hold a gun, hold a rocket launcher, hold a gun, hold a wrench that you use to make guns, or hold a gun. Seriously, the game is horrible, I guess you can be a medic, but nobody does because there shouldn’t be a medic since health should regenerate, which it doesn’t.

Now, for some reason all the achievements are worth nothing at all, and there are too many of them. You have to do things like killing a ton of zombies in this dark city while only throwing saw blades while learning physics, or carrying a gnome a lot, or having to fall a lot by making holes in the ground. It’s like everything else in the game, which is lame.

The end of this all is that you have an orange box, which is green, and for the Xbox 360. It has a lot of games, but none of them are very fun at all and none of them will actually entertain you for more than a few minutes. After a while you’ll want to buy palm trees instead of this, because a palm tree is more fun than the Orange Box, which is green