fade
Staff member
In my series of "Fade gets around to playing older games", I've played both of these.
ME2: Very nice. Beautiful art, immersive environments, excellent voice acting, and an intriguing story. They best parts about this game were the stories. It sat at a nice difficulty level on veteran (one up from normal), though perhaps a little too easy. The female Shepard voice actor was much much better than the male. I played through a female paragon adept with humans ruling the council, and started a male renegade engineer with the old council intact. Adept + sniper rifle was a sweet combo. Singularity + scope = dead baddies. A great deal of thought went into the background story, and the codex was fun to read. Not too many gripes, actually. LOAD TIMES, holy crap. Those were stupid. I don't understand this new gen paradigm of reloading after death. I don't get it. Is it intentional as a punitive thing? I mean, the level is already in memory, what's to load? Also, no real bosses until you get to the very end. The "bosses" before that are just regular joes with a tougher shield. Could've done without the hammerhead stuff, too. I know it was (free) DLC, but still, it was there. The mining mechanic got boring after a while. Starting a new game was fun, though, because they give you a ton of upgrades for a second play. I'd go so far as to give this a 9/10, with one point off for the load times. They were bad enough to be intrusive.
Batman: Arkham Asylum: Okay, I know I'll take a fade hit for this one, but I have to go against the grain, at least a little. It was nice seeing the old voice crew together again, but damn, the character models were not very appealing (except Harley, grrroowwl). Batman looked like Wolverine, and Gordon looked like a toothless Garfield the cat. They did the mo-cap shuffle to the point that I thought they looked like marionettes. I went from Uncharted 2 and ME2 where fluid motion and facial expressions were the norm, to batman action figures on strings. Especially the facial expressions. Nothing like watching a dead-faced Harley talking in Arleen Sorkin's awesome voice, but with an unchanging face. That's like PS1. Even on HARD, this game is easy. It punches for you, and gives a block AND a stun AND an evade. Plus, you can batarang the baddies! Cakewalk. Only the knives and stun batons ever really posed any challenge. That and the two Titans + assload of baddies pouring in in the endgame. Joker's fight was a ... joke. Speaking of easy, they give you a MAP for the secrets! A map! And detective mode practically spells out how to get the goodies, even if you forgot.
Still, it was fun playing Bats. The scarecrow levels were my favorite because they did the scary stuff well. I'm not saying it was a bad game---just really easy (and short, even collecting all 240 riddler puzzles, since they're on the way). It's fun having action and puzzles in the same game. The whole feel was like a nice, less frightening survival horror without ammo issues. Overall, good game. I'd give it a 7/10. Points off for dead character animation and unchallenging gameplay.
ME2: Very nice. Beautiful art, immersive environments, excellent voice acting, and an intriguing story. They best parts about this game were the stories. It sat at a nice difficulty level on veteran (one up from normal), though perhaps a little too easy. The female Shepard voice actor was much much better than the male. I played through a female paragon adept with humans ruling the council, and started a male renegade engineer with the old council intact. Adept + sniper rifle was a sweet combo. Singularity + scope = dead baddies. A great deal of thought went into the background story, and the codex was fun to read. Not too many gripes, actually. LOAD TIMES, holy crap. Those were stupid. I don't understand this new gen paradigm of reloading after death. I don't get it. Is it intentional as a punitive thing? I mean, the level is already in memory, what's to load? Also, no real bosses until you get to the very end. The "bosses" before that are just regular joes with a tougher shield. Could've done without the hammerhead stuff, too. I know it was (free) DLC, but still, it was there. The mining mechanic got boring after a while. Starting a new game was fun, though, because they give you a ton of upgrades for a second play. I'd go so far as to give this a 9/10, with one point off for the load times. They were bad enough to be intrusive.
Batman: Arkham Asylum: Okay, I know I'll take a fade hit for this one, but I have to go against the grain, at least a little. It was nice seeing the old voice crew together again, but damn, the character models were not very appealing (except Harley, grrroowwl). Batman looked like Wolverine, and Gordon looked like a toothless Garfield the cat. They did the mo-cap shuffle to the point that I thought they looked like marionettes. I went from Uncharted 2 and ME2 where fluid motion and facial expressions were the norm, to batman action figures on strings. Especially the facial expressions. Nothing like watching a dead-faced Harley talking in Arleen Sorkin's awesome voice, but with an unchanging face. That's like PS1. Even on HARD, this game is easy. It punches for you, and gives a block AND a stun AND an evade. Plus, you can batarang the baddies! Cakewalk. Only the knives and stun batons ever really posed any challenge. That and the two Titans + assload of baddies pouring in in the endgame. Joker's fight was a ... joke. Speaking of easy, they give you a MAP for the secrets! A map! And detective mode practically spells out how to get the goodies, even if you forgot.
Still, it was fun playing Bats. The scarecrow levels were my favorite because they did the scary stuff well. I'm not saying it was a bad game---just really easy (and short, even collecting all 240 riddler puzzles, since they're on the way). It's fun having action and puzzles in the same game. The whole feel was like a nice, less frightening survival horror without ammo issues. Overall, good game. I'd give it a 7/10. Points off for dead character animation and unchallenging gameplay.
