I have high expectations
I’ve recently discovered I have high expectations of the things around me. Moreso, that this “character trait” is well known among my friends. I guess that’s how it is, you don’t know things about yourself that are readily apparent to others.
But I’m not going to bitch about how Silver is a bad colour for a new car. Instead, I’m going to bitch about Guild Wars & Puzzle Quest, both game I recently purchased.
First Puzzle Quest. This game is addictive. I’m not sure if it’s in a good way, but you sit down to play it for a few seconds and five hours go by. That part’s all well and good, but there are issues as well. I’m going to assume you all know about Puzzle Quest, but just quickly it’s like Bejeweled with levels. The game works by you “battling” an enemy, and you and the enemy take turns on a bejeweled board matching things up.
Since the game rewards you doing well, it also rewards the other guy for doing well, which means it punishes you for doing badly. Because the game is essentially random, this means that once one of you ends up on a lucky break the fight’s essentially over. That’s not to say it’s all about luck, but the elements of luck there mean sometimes you get.. lucky.
The single worst thing about the game is the music. More specifically, the sound samples. There are strings which loop really badly, so there’s an awful lot of clipping when they’re playing. Another thing that is bad is slowdown. For a puzzle game on the DS, a hand-held which can run Mario Kart with no slowdown, it’s really weird to see that kind of slowdown.
Onto Guild Wars. It was on sale (AU$35) and I figured since my little brother plays it and so do a couple of my friends from work I should give it a shot. The Lore and the intro sequence made me feel like I’d made a grievous error:
Erol, the first of the mages they had rescued from the Charr, had seemed fairly certain the horn was the answer to all of Ascalon’s problems. Devona wasn’t so sure, and she was in good company; the prince had registered his reservations as well. How could a horn hold the key restoring a ruined kingdom to its former glory? Well, no matter what role the horn played in the kingdom’s future, it didn’t hurt to have another weapon in the war against the beasts from the north.
That was from Book 1 – The lore of Guild Wars. The emphasis was mine. Sorry if you threw up, I didn’t give enough warning. Anyhow, it sounds like a five year old writing his own version of Harry Potter. Why is the lore so bad in a game which involves what I expect to be a lot of reading? Hopefully there’s something other than the hott chixxorz which make the game worth my while.
And I wasn’t even expecting much from this game...