Panzer Dragoon Orta (xbox)
What a stunning game. It’s a gorgeous and brutally hard shooter on rails by members of the same team who did the first few Panzer Dragoons. You get a 360 degree view around and almost 180 up and down. You have to be a fan of this niche genre to get into it, but boy once you do… wow.
The story is typical ‘weird Japan’ but with minimal dialogue (and really, it’s probably for the best); even so, it’s hard not to have even a slight emotional attachment with the dragon by the end. It offers a ton of replay value – you get the original Panzer Dragoon, ported from the Sega Saturn, plus side missions that extend the PD universe.
Once I finish a majority of my games, I’m going back to this one for a long while.
Sega GT 2002 (xbox)
It’s a racing game by Sega for the xbox which was intended to take on Gran Turismo 3. Graphically, it’s much prettier. Driving wise, it’s significantly more arcade like. Car selection wise, it’s limited. Fun wise? Far and away, tons of fun, with some caveats.
The game does require you to tune your cars (as compared to Forza, where the depth is limited by your imagination). In a race between tuned AI versus a non-tuned player, the AI wins every time. Further, you get to buy new AND used parts. The used parts are a crapshoot. A $1,000 turbo may last sixteen races or just one. Used tires may have a lot of tire wear already on them. And so on. Blowouts happen while you race, which was jarring the very first time it happened.
You can sell cars in this game, as with GT3, but in a manner different than any other racer I’ve played: you can sell them only one at a time, and you have to set the selling price. If you need to unload it quickly, you have to set it under market value. It could be weeks (in game time) before car sells.
I was scraping by with my broken down car when I learned you can sell cars for almost 2.5x their value. It takes longer, but once it sells, you’re set. I managed to a win Ford GT, and after selling that for $500K, I managed to buy several cars and outfit them with top of the line equipment. After that, the game was cake.
There’s no way to set the difficulty of the game. I raced one race in my favorite Lotus Elise, and noted that the car in the #1 position was an Acura NSX, so I backed out, thinking I can get a real challenge using an even faster car. Re-entered driving a GT50, and the #1 car was now a Subaru WRX.
The game has some serious flaws, but it was incredibly fun for the time it offered, which clocked around 10 hours to finish all the seasons.
The Conduit (Wii)
High Voltage Software set out to make a game as gorgeous as the 360 and PS3 counterparts. In some respects, they managed to do it. They made very pretty models and scenery. They forgot to make a full game.
Don’t get me wrong, it was fun. And it was short, which is good, because the game was brutally repetitive. Enter a room, clear out the Drudge. Rinse, repeat. Dialogue and voice acting was largely horrible. Kevin Sorbo does most of the voice acting, which is good, because he’s the only bearable one. But his lines, at time, were horribly cliched.
And the ending was lousy – a sequel/to be continued ending. No closure. No ‘job well done’. None of that. You clear out a room of drudge, enter a portal and BAM! ending credits.
It had it’s moments. It was cool to see the final battle in DC was in our old metro line. The battle at Jefferson Memorial was definitely memorable. Some of the weapons are amazing. Granting cheat codes at the end does add some value. Multiplayer is fantastic, but also suffers from being rather repetitive. If you’re a pure console gamer, you won’t notice; PC gamers get mods and such to keep these sorts of things interesting.
It was fun but $50 worth of fun? No. $15? Yes, absolutely. (Thanks Ray)
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