The first few hours were very enjoyable, much like the first Overlord was. I didn’t see much new stuff, other than that the minions could have mounts that would let them get to other places. I really liked the original Overlord, and in fact while i was playing it, Laura was pregnant with Easton. In one of laura’s first ultrasounds, easton looked just like the overlord, so that was funny timing. But the new spider mount feature for the green minions is one of the reasons i stopped playing….

I generally don’t “give up” on games after several hours of gameplay. I might give up in less than an hour if i know right away that this game just isn’t my style, like Supreme Commander (never been an RTS guy) or Mirrors Edge (first-person jumping-puzzle game). If i make it through the first hour, i will probably finish the game, or at least the main storyline.

The “point” of overlord is that you’re literally, an evil overlord. You have minions. In the game, you have direct control over the overlord, and partial control over the minions. You point where you want them to go, and they go do what they do. Brown ones are bruisers, green ones are assassins (poison and hiding and backstabbing), red ones throw fire, and blue ones can walk on water and resurrect the others.

I got to a point in Overlord 2 where you’re supposed to “drive” your green minions (on spider mounts) on the wall of a cylindrical room. As they go up and around, they step on pressure points that raise the water level in the room, in order for the platform you are on to float to the top. The problems with this “puzzle”:

1. The puzzle is timed. If you don’t get around fast enough to each trigger, the water stops, and you go back to the last full level.
2. The green minions can die. There was something going on, which wasn’t obvious to me, that was causing the green minions to die from falling or something after the platform went down
3. You have a limited number of minions. Combined with the first two, not only are you time constrained, but resource constrained.
4. Limited/no real camera control. When driving the minions, the camera is always fixed near your original position, and follows where you are “driving” the minions. So you have a very limited range of looking ahead or behind to figure out where to go next. Sometimes you’d get to a point after you dropped back to the bottom that the minions were still on the wall, but now you couldn’t see them to drive them back…There are some points where you’re in direct control of a minion and that was fun, and probably would have made this part much easier.
5. The minions are “walking” on the wall, so the perspective and control is screwy compared to the rest of the time when you’re walking on the ground.
6. horrible control of the minions. You aren’t driving them so much as you’re “suggesting” where they should go. The further up the wall you got the more of a maze it became. As such, most of the time the minions were getting stuck on a barrier or a wall or something and then sticking or stopping there. If you had a group of minions, they also bump into each-other, so that didn’t help either.

I got through the first couple parts of the puzzle pretty quickly, but the third part was insanely frustrating. Sorry CodeMasters, your game shouldn’t devolve into a fight against the controls and the camera. I was to the point i was moving one minion at a time, stopping them (if i could) on top of the switch i needed to trigger, placing a marker there so they’d stay there, then starting with another minion. But even that didn’t work because for some reason they kept falling and dying. After about half an hour of being stuck on this puzzle, i just said “f-this!” (I’d been swearing pretty regularly up to this point, good thing Easton was already sleeping), turned it off, and sent it back to gamefly. There are too many other good games out right now to waste time swearing at a game because the controls suck.

I really liked it! It had a few glitchy things at the beginning, though. You’d think that if you were making a game about ghosts you would maybe maybe write your code in such a way that said ghosts don’t get stuck in the environment. Several times i’d get to a spot in the level where nothing was happening. All of the other ghostbusters are standing around, obviously waiting for something to happen. So i had to run around in the whole level, looking for that one stupid ghost that was stuck somewhere. On one of the first levels, he was stuck between a building and a car. Other times, having the ghosts stuck somewhere turned out to be very convenient, as it meant that there was one less ghost to deal with.

The storyline was pretty good, the flow was pretty good, the acting was “meh”. It has all the original actors in it, but it would appear to me that they recorded all the audio sentence by sentence actor by actor. The conversations between characters didn’t seem like they were all in a room together talking, like it should. One cool thing was how when you got “killed”, the other ghostbusters could come tag you and bring you back, so you only “died” if all of the ghostbusters died. In some of the boss monsters or other places where there were tons of ghosts at once, this meant that you spent most of your time running around reviving the other ghostbusters, and spending what little time you had left actually trying to catch ghosts.

The weapons were mostly cool. I loved the standard proton pack thing, it worked exactly like you’d think it would. The “blue” gun mode thing i hardly used (some kind of freeze ray and a semi-shotgun thing?). The “green” gun was a slime gun, similar to what they used in ghostbusters 2, and towards the end of the game you had to use it far too much. I want to be a ghost buster, wrangling ghosts, not a slime pump! The last gun you unlock, the “yellow” gun was like a ghost-busting machine gun. It was useful in some places, but not many. About the only place i really used it was one of the last bosses.

All in all i thought it was a really good game; it had the feel of the first movie, so it was really entertaining for a movie based video game!

In haiku form:

mirror’s edge, the game
it is a jumping puzzle
and that’s about it.

Well, maybe it had other things, but i never found them. I just couldn’t get into it, because it was just jumping puzzles, so i gave up. I’d just finished Tomb Raider before that, and at least it had puzzle puzzles. And swinging puzzles, and fire puzzles and shooting puzzles, etc. There are just too many other games out to play something that pisses me off.

Fallout 3, by Bethesda Softworks is probably the best game I’ve played so far in 2009. Personally, i think the world felt a lot bigger and a lot more immersive than GTA4.

There was so much to do, and so many places to go, i found myself just wandering unexplored areas of the map to see what i could see. There were some great quest chains, and other not so great, but on a whole it was a great mix of RPG and action. There were some quests that were secondary that could be completed regardless of the main quest, and then there were a fair amount of “mini” quests that don’t show up in the quest list, but showed up as notes instead…which was annoying. Some of the mini-quests were literally seconds long: a dude ran up to me in the middle of the wasteland, and said

Help me! I’m wired with explosives!

And then ran away, and exploded! ooooooops! Sorry dude!

I really enjoyed Oblivion, and this was like a futuristic post-apocolyptic version game using the same engine, minus magic, plus guns. How can you go wrong!?

It started off a little hard, running out of ammo all the time, but towards the middle that ceased to be a problem. Inventory/weight management was probably the most complicated problem in the game :). The recent “Broken Steel” DLC was pretty good, raising the level cap and adding some story after the end of the original game, so that was pretty cool too.

One of my favorite parts was how it took place in Washington D.C., and took a fair amount of geography and history into account. There are several chains of quests that have you go through the D.C. area museums/etc to find/recover artifacts that weren’t destroyed in the wars/bombings, like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta. Another set of quests has you finding Abraham Lincoln artifacts (including the head of the statue at the Lincoln Monument!) to help out a group of former slaves (slavery running somewhat rampant in the times that the games take place).

Most of the quests and things in the game let you be good or evil, although none of these games with alignment has really gotten “evil” correct yet. So far, most of the games let you either be a saint, or a dick. There’s no really evil stuff, where you do the good thing only to manipulate people into doing some really evil things. Force Unleashed is probably one of the few games that came close, but you didn’t have a whole lot of choosing there.

The huge amount of voice talent in the game was great too. The people feel a lot more real when the conversation is real speaking, however i always have the subtitles on whenever possible in all games. Its surprising how many games do not have that feature, but to me i like to be able to skip through conversations when i can read them, or have already listened to the speech before too. I only wish some of the background chatter that took place had subtitles as well. There are a lot of places where you can just stand around in the crowd and people are having converations, or the radio is on in the background and ThreeDog is talking about things you’ve actually done in the world. That was a pretty cool touch!

Along with CoD2 and CoD4, this is only the third game i’ve played that i’ve had dreams that take place “in the game world,” so to speak. To me, that’s the definition of immersion. Although with the CoD games, those dreams were more like nightmares of some point in the game getting played over and over and over because i couldn’t get through it. The fallout3 ones were like real life quests in the fallout universe, which was really cool!