Moving the Blog

Since I have had no comments or views of my writing since creating this blog (besides my friends) I shall be moving to another website. I will still post here, but I suggest you go to my other blog websites to see a well maintained blog. If someone stumbles on to this blog and says hey this is half decent I want to see his new blog my new blog is xanga.com/retrospecced

Thank's for taking our money Nintendo

I am a proud owner of a Nintendo Wii (aka the system for kids and Nintendo lovers) however, even I must say that Nintendo needs to stop taking their costumers for a free ride. Nintendo truthfully I have had enough of your failures when it comes to the Wii, but to make matters worst you continue to try to take our money. Stop coming out with attachments for the Wii. What's next, a Nintendo nose picker simulator so you can have the enjoyment of picking your nose without feeling gross? It was so much better when all I had to do was pretend I had a gun in my hands rather than buy a piece of plastic shaped as a gun. The Wii wheel was a piece of crap. The Wii zapper was just a little bit better than the Wii wheel. And I don't understand why you couldn't let the wii speak come with animal crossing (the only game it works with). Nintendo stop. Please, stop torturing us with new payment after new payment with useless attachments. And what was the last good game besides COD and Animal Crossing to come out? Boom Blocks! Nintendo you can do much better than that.

World of Warcraft

Time to take a trip to Blizzard land and tell you why you should and should not join the insane World of Warcraft movement. For those of you who don’t know World of Warcraft (WoW) is considered the ultimate MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game for the pc. It has hundreds of realms and more than enough players to sate anyone who wants to waste hours of their time in front of the computer. So from what you’ve heard now I am pretty sure you must be thinking WoW must be epic. Now let me word this correctly or a WoW lover might kill me and spam my email and this blog with hate comments. WoW can be a great game. You can have fun playing WoW. To explain where this fun comes from I’ll have to explain how it feels to enter WoW for the first time.
You start off as a level 1 nooblet standing right next to a guard with a yellow exclamation point on his head (if you’re human of course). If you were like me you were just dying to kill something so you ran to the first thing you saw you could kill (usually a wolf). After killing a few of these unlucky animals you will hit level 2. Now you start thinking time to get serious so you pick up a quest or two. You will quickly go through the 3 most common myriad of quests: kill blank of these creatures, collect blank of these items and kill this person. Remember those three quests because they will come back to haunt you a lot. After you’ve done several quests you will hit level 18. This is the best time to go into your first dungeon (yes, I know you might’ve 4-manned VC at level 16, but level 18 is a good level to do it at). You will go through the dungeon most likely finish most of it without any issues and enjoy the core of the game. It is fun to do dungeons with other people (most of the time) and it is when your doing things like dungeons, raids, etc. that really convince you why you are paying 50 cents a day to play this game.
Now that I have sung WoW’s praises let me explain to you why WoW can make you want to quit from a few days of playing it. After you pass level 20 and go onto levels 30, 40 and 50 you will notice that those three quests I told you about before are almost the only three quests you will be given throughout the game. And yes I know that there are escorts and chain quests, but to be honest the multitude of your time is going to be wasted on killing the same monster over and over for a drop that might not even drop that many times. I once had a quest to get eight orbs it took me 20 monsters to get the orbs. As you might believe I didn’t really feel like playing anymore after that annoying quest. But I can hear the naysayers bring up the praises I gave to the dungeon environment. Yes it was fun to do dungeons, when you are in a good group. There are several ways a group can be ruined. It can range from noob who doesn’t know what he’s doing to asshole level 70 who has way too many characters for his own good. This part of the game play is a big turn off. And yes the people on ventrillo can be assholes; I’ve dealt with them before and the way I deal with them is by just leaving the channel. Half of those guys are losers anyways.
So should you get WoW? If you have friends who play the game I definitely suggest you get it. As long as your friends are half decent people you will enjoy playing with them. But if you’re joining the game alone be wary. You might have fun at first, but then realize doing the same repetitive boring missions just isn’t worth your time. There are alternatives to WoW though, I suggest Warhammer. Though I’ve never played it based on what I have heard it has everything WoW doesn’t. So that is WoW in a nutshell, you either hate it or love it.

Ninja Gaiden a dying breed

Hey guys this isn't going to be a regular review. This is basically a raw first draft write of a specific idea or thought I had about video games please give me your input about it.

It seems we have hit the point in video game history where the success of the player is the main goal. The idea which has now formulated is that if I cannot win outright then it is not fun. Gone are the days where you would spend hours frustrated playing megaman trying to beat unbeatable bosses with everything unlocked. Ninja Gaiden tries to bring this concept of difficulty back and let me say for the most part it does. Easy is annoying, Normal is hard, Hard is scary. I am of course talking about the Ninja Gaiden for the ps3. Is it in any way fun? Yes it is at times enjoyable. But what separates it from other hack and slashes? Well the difficulty really is it. However to me making games like these really doesn't make any sense. If a gamer wanted true difficulty he or she would pick up a copy of megaman nine. Ninja Gaiden is just difficulty with good graphics.
Now that we've hit this point where gamers can never lose we will see more and more of games like ninja gaiden disappearing. We will no longer enjoy levels and levels are hair pulling stress. But then again who actually ever enjoyed pulling out their hair?

Spores

Yes the genius from the game the Sims finally decided to take a crack at the whole scope of life and I must say he didn’t do a terrible job. Customization is great in this game; truthfully even if someone used the exact same colors, patterns and items as you, your spores will not look the same. The customization was so great they made a Ds game based on just creating characters. So this might have you wondering if they didn’t screw up in customization where did they screw up in.
Well it’s not a completely straightforward answer. The game play wasn’t terrible in the first few stages. But the amount of time spent in those first few stages is little to none. It took almost 4 days (yes I know a bit slow) to actually reach the almighty space stage. In that time period I loved my spores. They grew on to me as I saw them grow into a mighty empire. Best thing that happened in that time period was the freedom. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. This power made me feel great because I was entertaining my self with the menu of things to do.
But once you hit space the game does the worst thing possible to you. It cuts you off from your empire. Sure you can go visit if you wanted, but there is really no point when all you need to do is go into their star system and call them. That is the first major offender. The second is the loss of freedom. Throughout the whole game not once did they tell me I had to do something, they strongly suggested it. However, in space the whole beginning part is a series of missions giving you a tutorial on how space works. This might be fine if those three missions didn’t become the three outlying themes of the space stage. The three missions end up boiling down to: how to make money, how to kill other civilizations and how to create colonies. So of the three I decided to do the one that sounded the most interesting. I soon found out that creating colonies is useless. In fact you will soon find out almost every game progressing function becomes inferior in the face of your military might. To win in Space stage all you have to do is kill crap, which in turn gives you money for more parts, which will allow you to kill more crap with. There is no real reason to do anything else. Yes, I know you can play the spice trade or look up artifacts. But why waste tons of your time going from planet to planet and then waiting for things to become opportune when you can just go ahead and make your opportune moment with a simple missile button. There is no fun in doing the other things, everything is tedious and the little failures in the space stage in conjunction with the giant failures make it become pointless and boring.
There is no feeling of accomplishment because all you really did was spam with your missile button. If you didn’t then I wonder how you managed to find the same three tasks interesting. And yes you can make the argument that the other stages of the game did not suck, but you spend so little time on them what is the point of even having them count. If you want to create things from the ground up my suggestion is a civilization game. The only thing the game Spores gives you is disappointment. You’re disappointed because you wanted to see your giant empire become a mega republic, but it was so boring to get there you gave up.

Rockband

Just yesterday I had my first experience with the game Rock Band. For those of you who don’t know Rock Band is a rock and roll band sim where you get to be your favorite part of a rock and roll band. When I say rock and roll band part, I mean the typical guitarist, drummer and singer. Now before I insult every Rock Band lover in the room let me say that as a party game this game works well. Its simple and when you have a simple game several people can play at once it is bound to be a hit. I thought I was going to pee on myself when I heard my friend try to sing “Enter the Sandman”. The playing system is pretty simple as well you basically click color coded buttons in correlation with the screen. The singing is just karaoke.
However, after a few rounds of the game some obvious issues jumped out at me. First off the game culture can be a real turn off at times. More experience players will usually encourage new players to start at a harder difficulty level, which in turn causes them to immediately fail. This instant failure will have you wanting to go back to the sheltering easy levels, but any suggestion of such change will cause the experienced player to begin laughing at you (luckily I sang).
But, if you’re with your friends they probably laugh at you anyways so this isn’t that much of a complaint. The karaoke on the other hand was a giant turn off. Sing karaoke to several rock oldies or some cool rock song you’ve never heard of. Sounds great until you find out that the game has only several oldies and the rest are no name songs nobody really wants to sing. Of all the songs “Fall out Boys” have why did you pick the most obscure one? Karaoke only works when you’re singing a song you are familiar with and truthfully only 5 songs there were familiar to me. Guns and Roses, Led Zeppelin, Queen. Those are the names I expected to see in Rock Band. Sure there are some great bands in Rock Band, but not enough to convince me to embarrass myself in front of my friends over and over again.
In the end Rock Band is fun and for those of you who need a party game and don’t own a Nintendo Wii , I recommend this game. As for those of you who want to live out rock glory or even want to explore rock musically; buy a guitar or Wii music.

The Retrospect

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. I created this blog so that I might talk about the gaming world in terms gamers and non-gamers can understand. Most of what I write is going to be strictly opinion based so feel free to voice your opinion in a respectful way. I will appreciate anyone who clarifies any errors or misinformation I have. As for the name the reason I am calling my blog the retrospect is because I will be focusing on past games. However, don't worry I will have a cascade of new release info and a review of any game I feel like reviewing. There may be more joining the Retrospect crew sooo I hope soon there will be a variety of writing on this blog. However, for now I will be working on my own. Thanks to anyone reading this.