NLU Weekly #23 (March 1, 2007) - Up In a Tree or Secret Area #1 |
 Enchanted Arms or Enchanted Autobattle So this week I started playing Enchanted Arms again, mostly so I could get the final 425 points in the game and have another full completed retail title. Besides I paid nearly $90 for a highly average game and well I wanted to get at least something of value out of it. I look at it this way Average games can be fun, they just need some sort of hook to keep you playing it, even though the game as a whole is just "meh". Enchanted Arms just doesn't have that hook, unless you include the 1000 points you can get out of the game, but you can only get those once, so that's not really a hook. For example, my 10th and 6th favortie games recieved 5.1 and 6.4 respectivly from GameSpot, but they are obviously among my favorites of all time. Of course I realize that these games are fairly average games, but they both have something that you can latch on to. In Rush 2 (game #10), it's the amount of options and settings that the game has and in Legend of Dragoon (game #6) it is the entertaining battle system. If you are going to be average, you need to do at least ONE (even little) thing specially well. But, back to Enchanted Arms. Everything about the game is mediocre, drab, cleche and nothing special. I'm not going to go on and on here, because otherwise this is going to enter rant territory, but let's just say I was not impressed that often by the game. Wondering why this section is called "Enchanted Arms or Enchanted Autobattle" because once you have a decent party you can just Autobattle your way through all of the random fights (bosses are too tough to take that approach) all they way to the end of the game. If you are not ready for the end boss, good luck with that, after getting fed up with the first part, I found out via FAQ (in which the writer used the word "converse" in place of the word "conserve") that it is a 8 part boss battle, I'm not in the mood for that. Besides, that would mean I would have to change the party that I had been building JUST for the end boss. So if this is the case WHY did I waste all of those 40 hours just to get to the final boss and have to change everything up? On a side not that is one of things that I hate about some games, I get through the whole game with relative ease and then get to the last part (race, fight, area, level) and NOW you decide to make the game difficult... annoying!! I will probably take the time to get the last 225 points from the game one time, I just need a break from the game for a while. RushJunkie or AchievementJunkie I have lost the fight... I'm sorry to say... They got me... Damn IT! They GOT me! I'm addicted to achievement points. It started with Oblivion, then Enchanted Arms, then NHL 2K7, then Tony Hawk's Project 8. Not to mention Gears of War. In February alone I gained 815 points, it's gotten to the point where I wasn't looking to buy something like Crackdown, but then saw the achievements list and exclaimed: "Those achievements look like they would make that game more fun!" I have also been having trouble playing anything without achievements. Why'd I play 22 games (with 2 minute periods) of NHL 2K7, a game I didn't really like? Just because I needed that many games to get 100 offline wins and get 150 points. I only played THP8 again because I only need 5 more secret areas to get an easy 25 points (though they weren't quite as easy as I thought, see Closing Out). Those things are the bomb, they really give game buying junkies like me a reason to play through games. And if you like the game, different little challenges to grab as you play through the game again. Nice call Microsoft. Closing Out or Finishing Off Okay, that THP8 thing, so I had 31 of 36 secret areas in the game so only 5 more to find. So I use this sweet video guide to the secret areas I found on YouTube and find four that I missed bringing me to 35 of 36. I can't seem to find the last one, I looked in every spot. I figured it's in one of the locations that I assumed that I got before and I just overlooked it. So I spend nearly 3 hours on something that should have took 20 minutes. Turns out it was the first secret area in the game "Up In a Tree", hence the title of this week's NLU Weekly. In other lesser news, I tried out the demo of MLB 2K7 and that was pretty fun, it seemed better than usual and the game looks really nice. I also tried the XBLA trial version of Alien Hominid HD and that was pretty cool, hard, but cool. It also has really sweet art, which looks really good in the higher res of this version of the game. I think that about covers it, I'm thinking of going after the 35 points for getting all the gaps in THP8 and getting a couple of more of the online achievements in Gears, Executions and Grenade Tags seem like fine choices. Come to think of it there are couple I could still get in Saints Row... or I could get those last 90 in Oblivion... Ahem...sorry, enough about points, nobody really wants to hear about those. I'll have something for next week, definitely NLU Weekly 24 and possibly, a retro-review or something, I'm not sure. RT then A then hold Y! Loading Complete! |
POSTED ON MARCH 1, 2007 |
