What are you playing? (Week of July 30th)

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We have fun on some other game related forums doing this, so I figured I'd try it here too. List what games you're playing this week, and your thoughts about them if you want.

-Loco Roco (Playstation Portable)-finished this a couple of days ago. It reminds me of Katamari Damacy in it's weirdness, and how natural and logical it somehow feels despite being original. If I have to complain about something, the worlds don't really have a theme to them, they're just a collection of levels.

-Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS)-hmm...just finished this last night. Graphically it's a huge step up from the Gameboy Advance games, and there are some fairly interesting new powers. But somehow I didn't like it, and I can't quite put my finger on why. The difficulty of the boss battles was too high for me. The theme kind of creeped me out. I don't like Soma. I don't know, I'm glad to be done with it, and I actually liked it less than all the previous GBA Castlevanias (and obviously Symphony of the Night).

-Morrowind (PC)-started this a few days ago and quit. I was having stability issues with it (possibly my fault for allowing other programs to switch away from it). And I just couldn't get in to it. Guess I'll try again with Oblivion this fall.

I'm going to have to decide what to play next. Obviously I want a break before I start another Metroid-style game, so I'm thinking I'll either start Gun (PS2) or if I keep my Wii, Fire Emblem and Odama.

EDIT: Changed the title from June to July

Last edited by Wolfpup on 31 Jul 2007, 10:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

Oblivion and Resistance, PS3.

I have some PS2 games to finish as well, but Oblivion is just too good!

Pokémon Pearl (DS). I know it's already old in the US, but here in Europe it was released only 4 days ago.
Call me childish, but it really is addictive to collect the rare monsters
Oh and this is my first Pokémon edition ever, just wanted to try it once.

That's brand new by my standards. I've got games left to play from 1999

I loved that game when it was new (on the Xbox 360), especially the graphics were totally stunning (and I guess they don't get worse on the PS3, to the contrary probably). I don't really know Morrowind except from some screenshots (and played it once for 10 minutes), it didn't fascinate me that much. But Oblivion I could play for hours and really had to put myself up to go to bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. The best single-player RPG ever if you ask me. You have to like "epic"-style RPGs though, there is a lot of story-telling in it, not just dungeon-crawling... good thing is the story is very open (e. g. the player has a lot of choices which order to do things in), a total opposite of e. g. Final Fantasy or Pokémon (where I sometimes feel like every step has been planned by the DMs in advance).

This is kind of embarrassing, but I just couldn't bring myself to get that involved with it, to concentrate enough to go through with this huge open world or that interface Oblivion seems easier to manage in some ways even though it also sounds like the world is more interesting.

Don't know if that was possible in Morrowind, but in Oblivion you can instantly "warp" to any point of interest you have been to before and, if I remember correctly, to any city (even though you haven't been there before). This development is kind of sad to me as a hardcore RPG fan, but I guess the feature is welcomed by many


For me graphics are part of what makes a game interesting. I wouldn't have said that before I saw Oblivion, but just looking up at the sky at night almost induces dream-like states. Or walking through nature and watching all the small leaves in the trees move with the wind - simply beautiful.

I didn't like the Oblivion portals and their worlds so much in Oblivion, the all-red environment just looks awful (I suppose it's meant to, but the contrast to the "real world" is a bit exaggerated for my taste) and searching for the right places (again, only in the Oblivion part of the world) became boring at times.

Apologies if this is a lot to read about one game but I'm quite passionate about it, Morrowind is my favourite RPG. It has an extraordinary self-referential world culture.

Take it's books for example; Morrowind has dozens of short stories spread out throughout the world. They're all related to the world of Morrowind, but they're interesting tales by themselves, and very well written. You're never at any point forced to read through them, they're just there - optional, so sadly most players will ignore them. These stories also tie in very closely with the game, but it may take you a while to discover actually how they tie in. There's a sense of revelation and joy when you do (revelation that you never expected something like that to be in the game, and joy because it's so damn cool).

Some of them are quite long and you'll probably spend a few hours just reading all the books in the game - if that sort of thing appeals to you.

Books is just one example. Another thing is plants; most of the fauna scattered across the world yield fruit or seed, which after some experimentation can be used to make potions and poisons. Take a look up at the (still gob-smackingly gorgeous) sky at night. Those stars, they're not random - the whole sky has been beautifully mapped. Thought that picking a birth-sign when creating your character was just fluff? Noo... it's there in the game - it's just one of many example of billions of little things that you discover even after you're a veteran of the game. Does having non-random stars, detectable only under close scrutiny do anything for the game play? No but this is a virtual world things like this just get you more immersed in the story.

Oblivion feels a bit of a clone in my opinion, a bit dumbed down - with more flair and less depth, but a decent game nonetheless. If you play the PC version of Morrowind there are some superb plug-ins to improve the graphics, sound, and everything else from little tweaks to full-blown player-made campaigns. The expansions are worthwhile as well.

Morrowind takes a very long time to fully appreciate, it's a game that you might have to force yourself to play before it finally grows on you. Once it has, you'll find yourself submerged in one hell of a story.

Yeah, me too. I'm tired of these Nintendo fanbois claiming it doesn't matter (a revelization they only came to with the beginning of this generation where the Wii is vastly less powerful than the other two (And of course ignoring all the new gameplay the better hardware nets you.)
Honestly part of the problem I had with Morrowind is the graphics haven't aged very gracefully. Last time I saw it I thought it looked incredible, but...not so much anymore. Honestly it looked terrible compared to World of Warcraft, which has a similarly huge open world.

I feel somewhat guilty about thinking Morrowind is "ugly" now, but...

I finally quit though when I couldn't figure out how to actually damage this enemy that was attacking me

Not to belittle the game, I guess I just want a little more hand holding right now

Playing Super Robot Wars OG for PS2.

I'm almost through my first play through of the OG 1 part. I've lost track of my battle masteries so I don't know if I'll get the proper ending or not. I might replay it from the other character, or move on to OG 2 after.

Neat, I didn't realize that was out on the Playstation 2-I was thinking it was just on the GBA?

Did you have to import it?

i am currently playing ar tonelico:melody of elemia for ps2; good stuff. it reminds me somewhat of atelier iris:eternal mana, another game developed by GUST.

I'm currently playing Etrian Odyssey and Animal Crossing: Wild World. It took me a while to get into Animal Crossing, but I really begun to play it a lot when my sister got it as well. Now I can go to my sister's village and vice versa - makes it a lot more varied.

As for Etrian Odyssey, it's taken up a lot of my time during the mid-semester holidays and I'm still only 4/5 of the way through the main game. It's a great RPG with a good level of customisation, quite old-school but fast paced.

I'm currently playing mainly Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (PS2) and LocoRoco just a moment per day (PSP, I cleared the game months ago but I'm trying to find all that I missed and complete the game).

Final Fantasy V

Tetris DS, just a little online play every once and a while

We Katamari

Guitar Hero II

Those last two games never get old...

Three more games to ad to the list:

-Wii Sports-Hate it. Shallow, and I can't get the controls to work right.

-Odama-hate this too. I can't really figure it out. Picked it up dirt cheap so I don't really care.

-Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (I think that's what it's called)-so far I'm loving it. I didn't like the first Fire Emblem on the Gameboy Advance, but this Gamecube version has more interesting writing so far, and an easy mode! The original GBA one was really frustrating to me, even right from the beining, but so far this is easy (which is a good thing in my book) and has a surprisingly enjoyable story, and walks you through commands as they open up. I just can't figure out what a few of the stats mean when you go to attack, like "MT" seems to be the amount of damage you're going to do...but why is it called "MT"?

Hopefully it won't get frustrating later on, but last night I was up until 1:30am playing this. Graphically I'm impressed with the amount of high quality 2D art in it. The actual battle graphics are kind of generic looking 3D. Not bad, but very basic. But the conversations and cut scenes use really nice art.

So far the game is fast paced and fun.

I've got to pick up We Love Katamari at some point! I kept hoping it would drop to $20, but I don't think it really did. I loved the original, and liked the Playstation Portable verison (it's not quite as good because it has to use digital control since there's only one analog stick, plus the graphics aren't QUITE as good).

Beautiful Katamari on the Playstation 3/360 sounds neat too! I'd love it if it can "cheat" less with how your Katamari scales up in size. Like if it could just do it smoothly rather than sort of jump between sizes, if that makes sense. Should be possible on the next generation systems.