Mid way through March huh? I’m not complaining, my life has been pretty shit since last November and with the fixing of my car last weekend, hopefully things calm down for some time. So I been playing some games; here are some of said games!

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon

Well, I guess I’m not surprised. I’m about half way through my first play through on normal (thanks @video_game_king) You can certainly tell this is a remake to the first Fire Emblem game release for the Famicom in 90s. The main one being there is barely any story with it really only being there to bring you into the next battle. The characters are also hardly flesh out and are nothing but walking tropes. Now this really is not a damming thing since the Fire Emblem games are not know for rich storytelling; but what makes the best fire emblem game for me so good is the story and characters with bring along your emotions into battle that make you invested in the gameplay. FESD not having this is a big blow for me, but still not surprising.

Now the gameplay is, just FE without the newer features. If you want some raw ass FE then here you go. So far there is not much I really have not seen new except for the Ballistas. Now the Tellius games have those ones that stay in place and use archers units, but FESD is different in where the unit itself is the machine(!) Which means being able to recruit them also. But after using one for a few missions they kind of seem like laguz units, in that they are neat but not something you will use. I’m almost done with the mission with a ton of Ballistas and that mission has been interesting.

This seems like a good remake overall. The graphics are what they are but good enough and I don’t give a shit about graphics anyways. The added gameplay things help makes this game playable in the modern era which is really nice. Reclassing seems cool but I still don’t find much use with it yet.

I will probably finish this up by next week so I will write my thoughts on the ending there. The most damming thing I can really say so far is that this game was made 20+ years ago. But this is the last easily accessible fire emblem game I needed to play. I guess I will have to finally get through Fire Emblem - Thracia 776 already.

Risen 2

I finally finish this one up cause man this game was not as good as the first sadly. For whatever reason I play Risen 1 like six months back after getting it in that humble bundle. Of course I wanted to play the sequel after that when I enjoyed it and I did. It started off promising with the inclusion of crew members and multiple islands to explore. Now this sounded cool but it really just meant less focus. I think the combat had to take more of the work this time and the combat is not the thing in this game.

Risen 2 is your action role-playing game from Germain studio Piranha Bytes (ha) which means some great jank, and boy does it. You control you dude and you have your weapon of a melee weapon and a side weapon. The fighting is serviceable but good stuff is the RPG part. The big choice early-mid way in is to either help out the guns man or the native. Helping the guns man means you can use muskets as your main and helping native means you can use voodoo. Since I helped out the guns man I never touch any voodoo stuff which is always nice knowing a game has more to it. I went with a musket heavy combat since I used swords last time and boy, that may have been a bad idea. By late mid game almost nothing could touch me as I kindof stream roll through everything. All this really mean is boring ass boring combat. Problem was I felt like the latter part of the game had much more combat. It does not help game when you have a 40 minute collect this shit mission near the end.

The gear stuff would have been nice, but I rarely founded anything that could beat my gear I did have. The game would have been much nicer with more loot. The way you “level up” in this game is by spending your glory points (XP) on a number of stats including Sword, Gun, Thief and so on. On stat having 3 smaller traits in them like small guns and shotguns. I never felt like leveling up did much to the combat so I focus it all in Thief early on so I could unlock all them chests.

The story is the world is even closer to being fuck and you’re going to make it less fuck by killing a titan, the things that are making the world fucked. You have to gain all the things to kill said titan by getting them from the pirates that awaken the titan. It helps that you have to gain all the things to kill said titan by getting them form the pirates that awakening the titan. It helps that you became friends with the daughter of one last game and friends with him early on this game. Too bad it is only for early on. By the time you get past the third island I feel like the story does not even try to be interesting and just does it thing. There is a twist nobody did not see coming but that was just about it.

The main thing that attracted me into Risen was the idea of bad guys that did not respond. I really liked that idea in the first one and was happy to see it here. The problem is that there are too many bad guys and you never felt that pleasure from killing all the bad guys because there are always more around the corner.

Risen 2 tried to be a better game by adding more stuff, but I just felt like it made it lose the focus and added more filler. With weak ass combat half way through and boring story and RPG elements I can not say great things about this game.

IOS games

I been playing a couple IOS games a fair amount. The less well known one being Autumn Dynasty. This is a RTS game (I know) on the phone that actually works surprising well. The controls work well enough where you press a button and circle the units you want to control and drag where you want them to go. Since you will never have more than like 10 units and troop placement is not that big of a deal the controls work well enough where I was not that frustrated by them. When I wanted to drag I accidentally selected a different unit which happen a number of times and made me think a IPhone was pushing it with it screen size.

The story and set in ye old Asia where one scholar went to check out things in the south part of the dynasty when he got caught in a civil war along the way, and he has to join up the famous General and a history scholar to find out what’s going on. They try and do a couple twists in there but the problem is that out of the two story threads, one never gets a closing and the other gets a semi closing with a hole for a sequel. I felt like it could have been better with more time and money.

Now with it being ye old Asia, the units are swordsman, pike man, horses, archers, and catapults with the whole men Triangle of swordsman> pike man> horses> archers> swordsman and so on. Catapults are good against buildings and groups of units. The game also has buildings that are needed to keep your army strong; the interesting thing is determining what to build since there are limited slots to build and if you have enough money making buildings or archer towers.

Most of the missions also offer something different. In one mission the goal is to destroy a giant enemy army going through allied outposts that you need to stop with like 5 units by using their unit powers. The difficultie is not too bad, but I usually failed a mission the first time before I knew what was coming at me. The game also has a look similar to that game with the white fox that drew things, which I like the look of a lot.

The game was a pretty good bite size RTS. With interesting missions and decent controls the game was able to overcome the poor story and characters. I would recommend it easily.

I may have also been play Disco Zoo. The latest in NimbleBit games (makers of tiny Tower and Nibble quest), this time you are in charge of a zoo. A funky zoo. Wait a sec… The meaty part of this game is the puzzle gameplay. You have a 5x5 board and a list of animals that are in that board above it. Each animal has a specific pattern they are made of and you have to figure where they are in the board. The fun part is trying to remember what that animal’s pattern is and tapping away at the blocks to find them. It’s a neat puzzle game finding the animals and filling out your zoo. Your zoo is an area for each animal and that area can hold up to 25 of them. The progress is each section of a zoo has 6 animals. To gain access to start finding the next section of animals you need to buy a better aircraft and have a certain number of animals saved.

Now this is a F2P game and I know people have a slightly unfair opinion of them around these parts. The game is pretty good about it though where whenever I hit the wall I felt like I did not need to continue and could wait till I got more money to continue exploring. Yes the animal that make the money do fall asleep and you need to wake them up which is pretty shitty, but that was about the only thing I did not like. The music is pretty good and the visuals are cute. You can also hold disco parties with the premium monies and that is cool in my book.

Ok, that was longer then I was expecting but what eves. I will hopefully start Tomb Raider this weekend and finish FE. See you then.