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| Scrabble, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix by Last 03/16/2009, 10:26am PDT | ||||
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| Scrabble - Negative!
The interface is spectacular, but the brutally optimal enemy AI means you won't have any fun. There is no difficulty setting so prepare to get demolished when the AI plays the ideal move each turn. It really shows how broken and unfun Scrabble can be when your only chance of winning is be a rules lawyer and cram those Scrabble-exclusive words like "tef" or "towie" or "ghat" into the smallest possible spaces instead of having fun and spreading out the area of play with longer words. I get that the game rewards you for playing like a cunt, but it just isn't fun. Speaking of which, I did appreciate that it allowed me to lay down "cunt" on my turn without complaining that it was a swear. What's worse is when you play tournament style (everyone gets the same letters each turn, everyone plays a word, only the best word stays on the board and that player gets the points) and you tie the AI and they give the points to the AI rather than you. =( There is a "campaign mode" but in name only. Campaign mode means you scroll past walls and walls and walls of lore until finally you get to an opponent to play but then the game suggests your move for you and you can't progress until you play the move that they just showed you. There's multiplayer but I haven't tried it. GTA: Chinatown Wars - Positive GTA 1 on the GTA4 map. They use the touch screen for stuff like hotwiring cars where you need to unscrew plates and twist wires together. The cars handle like go-carts and take a little getting used to. The people are all relatively enormous - like 2/3 the size of a car, so it looks a little wierd and makes it hard to avoid hitting pedestrians with your car. (I know a lot of the fun in the GTA games comes from being reckless around pedestrians, but we should at least have the option to avoid them.) The story and dialogue are fantastic. You play a spoiled rich kid whose dad is the big boss so all of the other gangsters have to kiss your ass even though you don't deserve it. There are some unexpected twists very early on that are interesting. I like that it focuses on the Triads in Liberty City rather than retread the same territory as GTA4 with the Slavic gangs. It's a lot of fun once you get used to the look and feel of it. I've only played about 20 minutes of it so there's still a lot I haven't seen. For one thing, it looks like they'll re-introduce gang factions like in GTA2? Hopefully there will also be some crossover with GTA4 like maybe Little Jacob will appear or something. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix - Positive, I guess. The load times in this are atrocious. The story/dialogue are atrocious and bland and they rip-off the same 'snarky robot' character from KOTOR that has already been ripped off a dozen times since KOTOR came out. The puzzling is decent but it seems a lot harder to set up chains than in the first Puzzle Quest because new blocks come in from all sides of the screen rather than only dropping from the top of the screen like in PQ1. Probably once you have enough practice with the new scheme you'll be able to reliably combo again. The load times are truly ridiculous and made worse by the fact that the game has an auto-save feature that you can't disable. The procedure to do any puzzle is this: maneuver to warp gate -> load time -> autosave -> choose destination on world map -> load time -> autosave -> initiate puzzle -> load time -> autosave -> do puzzle -> load time -> autosave -> (repeat). The times when you are actually in a puzzle are more fun than not, though, so it still rates a 'positive'. I hear that the PC version doesn't have the load time problem so if you need to get a version you should get that one. |
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Scrabble, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix by 03/16/2009, 10:26am PDT  fucking scrabble fucking fuck by 03/16/2009, 1:08pm PDT Ray don't read this post (oshit I can't watch this hey everybody I can't watch t NT by 03/16/2009, 1:11pm PDT stacking two-letter words into corners is not wordplay IT IS TETRIS by 03/16/2009, 1:14pm PDT Don't read this post, Creexul! Ray, don't read the title! NT by 03/16/2009, 5:00pm PDT The worst is "challenge" mode by 03/16/2009, 9:03pm PDT scrabble sucks, even if everyone is a noob by 03/17/2009, 5:35am PDT chinatown wars sounds like it will be sweet I read about it in gameinformer (wha NT by 03/17/2009, 5:42am PDT |
