Hot of the presses on the interwebs today it looks like Ready At Dawn will be making a new God Of War game called Ghost Of Sparta which will chronicle Kratos’s rise to taking Ares’s place after he kills him in God Of War one. If i just spoiled that for you sorry and where have you been!? According to the article at Joystiq Ghost Of Sparta will utilize state of the art technologies. I don’t know what that means because I heard the last God Of War on PSP pushed the limits. I mean there was a lot of slow down on the last one. Who knows! The important thing is there will be 25% more game play. Considering the first one was five whole hours does that mean this new one is going to be seven!?!? I hope they squeeze ten out of it, but who knows. Either way I’m going to get it and find out!

…the light has finally come to show the way! To what? MARVEL VS. CAPCOM 3!!!!!!! Marvel VS. Capcom and Marvel VS. Capcom 2 are arguably two of the greatest fighting games ever made and now finally after ten years of wondering if there would ever be a third one. It’s finally on the way. BEHOLD this trailer! I don’t know if it’s 3D, 2.5D, or 2D, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is it’s coming out next spring. Another year, but what’s that compared to ten years of waiting and wondering. It’s all down hill from here.

I heard a lot of talk about Bioshock 2 when it first came out. I heard things like it’s not as good as the first one or they didn’t need to make a second one or it only gets good halfway through and all that noise was WRONG!!! It is just as good as the first one. They did need to make a second one because Bioshock is totally awesome!!! The one thing that was kind of right is that it doesn’t get good until halfway through. That’s kind of true if you don’t enjoy looking at the beautiful ruined environments and searching every little place for more loot. That’s half the fun for me looking for more stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff all over the place. As far as changes from Bioshock 1 & 2 there’s not much. It looks just as sweet as the original. It has all the awesome powers, but different guns and hacking machines is different. Some people think it’s easier to hack machines, but I thought it was harder and less fun. Hacking in Bioshock 1 was like a mini game of Pipe Dream. The one major difference between the two games was that in 1 you were fighting Objectivists who were running wild and in the second game you were fighting Communists who were running wild. So Objectivisim didn’t work in Rapture and neither did Communism. Both ideologies destroyed the city so who will take it over in Bioshock 3. I don’t know, but I’m kind of sure who I’ll be playing as and I can’t wait to play it and this brings me to my one and only problem with Bioshock 2. I was playing it, it was awesome, and then all of a sudden it was over. I think I only got 10 hours out of the whole game and that was looking for as much loot as possible. It was the shorter than God Of War 3 and it was maybe the shortest game I ever played. I guess they figured you can make it super short if you put in multiplayer, but 10 hours is too short. You could speed run the game in like 6 hours if you wanted to. I hope there’s some DLC for it soon and I also hope that when Bioshock 3 comes out they put at least 5 more hours onto it and 10 wouldn’t hurt! I haven’t done this in a while but when Bioshock 3 comes out I might play Bioshock 1 & 2 again just to remember how sick they are and kind of get my money’s worth out of Bioshock 2.

SPOILER WARNING!!! I can’t really tell you how sick God Of War 3 is without a SPOILER WARNING so if you don’t want it spoiled read no further! So how sick is God Of War 3. Absolutely the sickest!!! Here’s how it goes down you start off by killing Poseidon in a exceptionally brutal fashion and then continue to kill god after god and titan after titan as you make your way through the game. Each time you kill a god the element that the god represents goes out of control. For example when I killed Helios the sun went out and the rest of the game was dark. When I killed Poseidon the oceans went out of control. Also, after you kill a god you acquire their power. So for example when I ripped off Helios’ head I obviously used it as a flashlight for the rest of the game!!! So that’s how the game goes until I get to Zeus and then finally kill him for good. Unlike other God Of War games this one takes place in only three areas. Hades, Olympus, and the space between, but the areas are super huge and you go back and forth between them. Also, unlike other God Of War games I found the puzzles in this game to be a lot harder than the boss fights. Some things like Harpy jumping, Flying up or down between Hades and Olympus and this one thing where there were spikes on the floor and I had to kill all these dudes and then jump and catch the Harpy before all the spikes got me were really tough. I must have done that room like thirty times!!! On the other hand by the time I got to the third boss or so I wasn’t ever worried. They were all cinematic masterpieces of carnage! I still remember fighting Zeus in God Of War 2. I thought I would never beat him. Anyway, I can’t say this was the best God Of War ever because they all have some excellent things the others don’t have. However it’s excellent in it’s own way and you should have already played it ny now if your a fan and if your still on the fence all I wouldn’t even know what to say. Who could still be wondering if they should play it? Of course they should!!!

I don’t usually talk about world views and stuff like that here because it can get a lot of people angry. In fact something made me angry which is the whole point of this post. See, I used to subscribe to Electronic Gaming Monthly, but then they ran an article about video game villains and singled out Andrew Ryan from Bioshock. The first thing to note is Ryan isn’t even the main villain in that game. The second thing I took note of was how then went on and on about how evil Ryan’s view of capitalism, dog eat dog competitiveness and free market economics were. They even cited how evil Ayn Rand was since her book Atlas Shrugged was an influence on Ryan and Bioshock as a whole. Well, I happen to be a fan of Rand’s and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back with my relationship and subscription to EGM. I called them up and told them I wanted to cancel my subscription. They told me I had eight dollars or three magazines left so I told them I’d take the three magazines.The next month EGM went out of business so I lost my eight bucks and three magazines, but it seemed quite ironic to me that that happened to them right after they wrote that article about how evil free market economics were so I didn’t mind eating the eight bucks so much. I should also note that the views of that one writer might not reflect the views of everyone at the magazine, but still it angered me enough to cancel my subscription and in so doing help author the demise of the magazine as a whole. So I was out eight bucks or three magazines and several months passed and I almost completely forgot about the entire incident. Then this Maxim showed up in my mail box as a way of honoring the three magazines I had left. Tomorrow: Maxim Pt. 2

There were some really fantastic things about Star Ocean 4: A New Hope like how beautiful and detailed the character designs were and how awesome looking the the maps were and at times it was really fun to play and that’s one of the main problems with Star Ocean 4 because it was only fun to play some of the time and not all the time. My friend put it best when he said the problem is that developers spend so much time making a game look good, they don’t have time to make it fun and that’s how it turned out with Star Ocean 4 for me. There’s a moment in any RPG or any good game really where it hits you and you’re like Oh now I’m all in on this one hundred percent let’s go, but that moment never came in Star Ocean 4. I kept playing it hoping for that moment to come and it never did. It might have almost come once, but then it was ruined by some ridiculous thing half way through the game that made me not care about it for a long time, and then once I started caring again the game was almost over. Another thing that I didn’t like was the fact that when you arrived at the last place where your supposed to go back and get some grinding in or some good weapons or some secret stuff you couldn’t even do that easily because you had to change discs. I did not find it fun to do some stuff on one disc then have to changes discs to make material out of the stuff I collected on the other disc. It gives me a headache just explaining it. So I said forget this I don’t care about doing all this extra stuff I don’t care about the arena. I don’t care to collect some thing to make my weapon better. I just wanted to finish the game at that point. The problem is I cared that I didn’t care because it didn’t have to be that way. Normally you have less and less movies and sound on the end of the game so that you can put all the maps and stuff on the last discs, but Star Ocean decided that it would be better to fill up every disc with 40 minute movies and private actions. Am I watching a movie or playing a game? There must have been 10 hours worth of movies in the whole game. It all goes back to the problem my friend pointed out. Too much glitter and not enough gold. In the end it went down like this: OK let’s concentrate on making the sickest looking character designs ever. (Check) Let’s make some awesome looking maps. (Check) Let’s have a lot of different looking worlds to go to. (Check) Let’s make the cut scenes minimal because this is a standard RPG with a good guy battling evil to preserve his people. (Fail) Let’s make some spots where the player wants to go back and get some extra stuff without him feeling like he’s putting the main story on hold. (Fail) Let’s make this all blazing hot action and move the story along at a good pace where the player feels like he’s totally into this. (Fail) When we get to the last part let’s make it something the player wants to go back and do some extra stuff to make his weapons and armor better because he’s all into the fact that he wants to beat the bad guys. (Fail) The worst part is it didn’t have to be that way. It’s never that way with a Tales game and it wasn’t that way with Infinite Undiscovery and after playing that game I was excited for Star Ocean. I was like if this is how Star Ocean is going to be I can’t wait cause it’s going to be way better than this! Well, I guess it’s kind of my fault when I got all excited about it. Star Ocean has a spotty history with me anyway with 3 not being that great, 1 being totally awesome, and 2 being just OK and here we are at 4 and it’s kind of OK maybe Ho Hum and I’m left wishing it had been super awesome. So is Star Ocean four The Last Hope? I hope not! I hope 5 is going to be a lot more like 1 and a lot better than 4. But, maybe it’s just me Maybe my hopes were too high, but I know what I like and I like to have fun when I play a game. I know Tri-Ace can make fun games since Radiata Stories was one of the best games I ever played. There’s a new RPG coming out by them via Sega too. So will it be any good. I don’t know I guess I’ll have to wait and see if they knock back on the bling and add some excitement instead.

I never was able to play Star Ocean 2 because i missed it the first time on PS1 and by the time i wanted to play it you could only get it on Ebay for ridiculous amounts of money, but Square Enix changed all that on January 20th when they re-relaeased Star Ocean 2 for the PSP. I played this right after Star Ocean so I was already used to the set up with the Skill Points and all and I knew who need what skills and all so I was off to the races in this game. I put in about fifteen more hours into it than I did in Star Ocean 1, there were some tough spots in the beginning that I had to grind for levels on, but I spent a lot more time grinding for money in this one than the last one. That’s because the Coliseum is near the end of the game not near the middle like Star Ocean 1, also the Coliseum wasn’t set up as good as the one in Star Ocean 1 in my opinion either so I spent more time there than I did in Star Ocean 1. As far as everything else goes it was a great game. You can pick one of two character so I picked Claude, started out, gained some party members, had some magical fantasy adventures, went into space had some more adventures and beat all the bosses without much effort due to careful skill point allocation and grinding because like I said I’m still pretty steamed about how I jammed myself up on Star Ocean three. There were several twists and turns in the story that made me go whoa that’s weird. Like normally in a game like this the hapless hero joins up with the girl first thing and they fall in love as the game continues on. This didn’t happen right off because the girl had another perosonal interest besides the hapless hero and that added some tension. Another thing that was weird is that all the bosses in the game were named after Angels. This might not be a problem for a lot of people if they don’t know Angel names or vdon’t care, but it was just kind of weird to me. One thing I hated was that there was some fixed fight you had to lose in order to move the game along. This could be a pain because some you can lose right away, but some you have to lose after a certain amount of time. There’s some signs to look when this happens, but it’s a big headache if there’s a tone of cut scenes and you lose wrong and you have to go through all of them again. Also, there were some returning characters from the first game which was pretty cool. If you played Star Ocean 1 then you would put two and two together on some back story not really spelled out for you. In the end I’m glad I got to play Star Ocean 2 after wanting to for so long. All in all it was pretty awesome RPG all around. Now I’m moving on or have moved on because I got my hands on Star Ocean 4 earlier than expected so I’m already about 5 hours into it and it’s turning out super sweet so far.

I just finished playing Star Ocean: First Departure on the PSP a couple of days ago. It was pretty fun, but the real draw is the skill points. You add skill points to your characters to maximize their stats, the way they level up, the way they use healing items, the way they fight etc. It was really fun going in and customizing different characters to do different things, like for instance I wouldn’t have my fighters learn to cast spells real fast like I would my healer and so on. Skill Points aren’t new they were in Star Ocean 3, but they seem to work better in Star Ocean 1. Star Ocean 1 starts off a lot like Star Ocean3, except backwards. In both your a blue haired guy, but in Star Ocean 3 you start off in space then land on a medieval world and then go back to space. I Star Ocean 1 you start off on a medieval world then go to space then go back to the medieval world. I learned something from Star Ocean 3 which was to have many saves and max out your characters for the final boss because I never beat the final boss in Star Ocean 3. I was stuck on a save with not a lot of healing items etc. etc. so I never beat the final boss, but I watched a video of it. Anyway,the point is I wasn’t going to get into the same sticky situation like that so I made an effort to grind up all my main characters in the arena, cook a ton of food, and have a ton of healing items. One of two things happened either my strategy worked or the last boss was a lot easier in Star Ocean 1 than in Star Ocean 3 either way I beat him easily and I’m moving on to Star Ocean 2 on the PSP before I tackle Star Ocean 4 later on this year.