You like Castlevania, don’t you? Part V

Now Playing: Echo Night 2 – The Lord of Nightmares (PS1)

Now Playing: Nightmare Creatures 1 & 2 (PS1)

Now Playing: Parasite Eve 2 (1999)

Dear internet diary,

today I played Parasite Eve 2. Parasite Eve 2 just about entirely threw out the rpg elements and went almost full on Resident Evil with superpowers, tank controls and all. This worked out pretty well for the series and there is a lot more intense combat with a lot more bizarre creatures than the previous game. There is also a lot less dialogue and plot, which is good and bad, I suppose. Good because the first game was a little too heavy on the exposition and without all that there should be much more time for hot parasite action, but bad because the story doesn’t end up making a whole lot of sense in the end and the characters are all kind of worthless cardboard cutouts with nothing important to say. The heavier focus on the action kind of makes up for it, but action can’t fill ALL of a game, can it?

No, and the result is a lot of game-padding backtracking. The backgrounds in the game are littered with almost entirely useless crap with boring, pointless descriptions that make you want to stop trying to look at everything, but the game punishes you if you stop looking. You will miss a lot of items that you have no way of knowing are there unless you blindly try to search every surface in sight or even if you do look at everything, you’ll be told an object is useless only to find out an hour or two later that “oh wait, you totally DO need something like that. Hope you remember where it was!”.

I do not appreciate guy telling me I need to bring him a gas can and then he hands me a key to a locked room and I go to the locked room and find a locked thing that requires a code that requires me going back to look at documents in rooms I already went to hours ago, which opens the thing, which just gives me another key, which then lets me get into the room that has the gas can. Then I bring the gas can back to him and notice that there’s a big red fucking gas can sitting 10 feet away from him on the pre-rendered background. Fuck you gas can and fuck you bad filler puzzles.

I mean the game is only about 9 hours long. Cut out all the damn backtracking through the same areas over and over again and it would probably be down to 6. It’s still a fun game, but damn that’s lazy. Maybe this is why we didn’t get another sequel until 12 years later (which I hear is not so good, but I’m gonna try the damn thing next anyway).

Now Playing: Parasite Eve (1998)

Now this is a story all about how, my mitochondria got flipped-turned upside down, and I’d like to take a minute just don’t you leave, I’ll tell you how I became the guy that wrote a post about Parasite Eve.

Now Playing: Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (and more) Part 3

Next…Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Welcome to the FUTURE, where the battlefields are full of soldiers full of networked nanites and ID locked weapons and a bunch of mini-Metal Gear drones that sound like angry cows for some reason, all of which are controlled by the same computer system, because what could possibly go wrong with that?

Now Playing: Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (and more) Part 2

Next up on the Metal Gear marathon is, of course, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Now Playing: Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (and more) Part 1

It’s summer time and you know what that means. Why, it means playing just about every Metal Gear game ever made, naturally! Over the last year I’ve been slowly working towards catching up on the PS3 titles I’ve missed, one of them being Metal Gear Solid 4. Come to think of it, I never got around to playing 3 either, and I definitely never played the “real” original versions of Metal Gear 1 and 2, so hell, why not make a thing of it. Sadly, the PS3 doesn’t even have a standard screenshot feature so I can’t fill most of these with tons of my own fascinating footage. You’ll just have to settle for a few random stock photos. Oh well.