I reinstalled the Kindle App after amazon informed me there are free books to be had. Immediately, I downloaded “A Nail Through the Heart” which turned out to be a brilliant page turner.
A Nail Through the Heart takes place in Thailand, and delves deep into the seedy underbelly of child and adult prostitution. The author ventures into the minds of the abused; it’s a world I could barely comprehend but it exists, every minute of every day.
The main character is compelling and likable, the characters were all well defined and interesting, the plot moves quickly. I couldn’t put it down last night.
If you have an ipod touch, iphone, kindle, blackberry, pc, mac, android phone, you can download the kindle app and read this gem for free. It is absolutely worth it.
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I finally (!) finished Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2. It was a gift from my sister shortly after I got the Wii. Let me explain why by backtracking to about ten years ago.
Ten years ago, my main console was a Sega Saturn. I imported games regularly from Japan, and one of them was Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu. I spent hours upon hours playing and replaying that game, on harder and harder difficulties. The game didn’t have a soundtrack, so you’d just hear random Japanese battle cries for hours on end from my room. In that spirit, Jaya picked it up for me.
I hadn’t played it until recently because the game inspired awe and fear. The game uses the Wii motion controls, so if you wanted to do a Kamehameha you’d have to mimic the motions of a kamehameha. If you wanted to do a spirit bomb, yes, you’d have to stand there like an idiot for a moment, and then pretend to throw a spirit bomb at the tv. Without losing the wiimote. The tutorials themselves take over an hour to complete.
I figured out that I could use the gamecube controller and went with that instead.
With that out of the way, DBZ:BT2 takes all the battles starting from DBZ all the way through the end of DB:GT but it takes liberties with the GT storyline. You see, DBZ was based on the manga which was being written at the same time as the comic, so that’s why there were so many filler episodes – they were waiting for the next manga to come out. The battle between Frieza and Goku on Planet Namek where they had five minutes before the planet blew up took an impressive six episodes. However, GT is an anime only, and that series was the shortest of all DBs. It’s considered by some to be non-canon for many, many reasons.
So that being said, you fight nearly every fight that took place in DBZ.
The game is a true 3D fighter: left, right, forward, back, up and down. The battle arena is shaped like a cube, which is one of the few things I didn’t like. Previously mentioned IDBD had huge battle areas. You could fly to and fight in cities that you saw in the background, for instance. Here, the border is very clear, which can be jarring in the midst of battle.
That being said, land effects are pretty neat. There are valleys, rivers, lakes, gullies, cliffs, ridges: all of these things affect the battle.
While it is a fighting game, there is an experience and money system. There’s no way to beat the game without leveling your character, which required either fighting extra battles or using your money to buy upgraded character stats. Given that you use over 30 characters to finish the game (the various forms of characters throughout the game require separate stat building), it gets pretty time consuming.
The game does something interesting with the plot: if you win a battle that you weren’t expected to win (some matches simply ask you to survive), you unlock a ‘what if scenario’. The what-if scenarios played out brilliantly, and the writing was stellar. Clearly, the writers and designers took the extra step of creating some worthwhile and long lasting, and it shows. I absolutely loved Raditz’s last fight, which was a dream sequence as he was dying where he fought with his father one last time.
Other things I liked: the dynamics of each character. Namco-Bandai did a great job making each fighter feel different from the last. Taipon felt different than Trunks, even though Namco could’ve just cloned the two characters. Some characters are just massive, and I was impressed as to how well they played, especially over varying environments. If the game is buggy, I wasn’t seeing it.
Onto the things I didn’t like, and there are only a few: I absolutely hate the layout of the evolution system. It was an incredibly tedious affair, especially if you’re trying to level and equip multiple characters at once.
The borders are kind of odd in that some spots are flat and others are curved, so it was jarring at times to knock a character back, only to watch them take a parabolic flight path.
Sometimes the AI was as dumb as rocks allowing you to wail on them without much of a fight, and other times they put up a spirited fight (the aforementioned Raditz vs. Bradock was one of them).
After all that, there’s a DBZ:BT3 which is supposed to be the best version of this game. As much as I enjoyed BT2, I think I’m DBZ’d out for a good long while. The game plays much like an action RPG and demanded as much time as an aRPG should (over 15 hours). Still, I loved it, and I’m glad I can tell Jaya I finally finished it.
Thumbs up, way up.
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One Comment
That book sounds really depressing. Interesting, but depressing.