Be sure to keep your eyes on my main blog, Media Sloth, for more developed and prettier “Into the Gaming Wild” posts, as well as a variety of others! I still might post them here just so that I don’t fall behind on them, but the Media Sloth counterparts will be a lot more worth your time.
To be honest, there’s not really much to say here.
We’ve now realized that this game is definitely only playable in short doses or else you will be bored to death, so we only played this for a very short amount of time. Well, not really “we,” more like “he.”
This is because it takes forever to get through a mission with all of these random encounters! Seriously! Thankfully, he got through the tedious, annoying gates that you have to randomly activate in different patterns in order to open another, inconveniently out of the way gate and defeated the second targeted Digimon, so next time it will be time for me to play…
Wait, lemme explain.
My brother and I soon found out that Digimon World: Data Squad really is impossible to play by its self, or else we’d probably die of boredom. So we decided we would pick another game to play side by side with it, in order to ease the pain. With the pretty cool system I thought up, we decided on a game. Basically we let the almighty Fortune Cookie decide three games at random for us. After we got those three games, we would then each vote on which one we would like to eliminate as an option to play. Since there were three games and two of us, if our votes were the same, we would flip a coin on who would decide the one we would play out of the remaining two games. If we both voted to eliminate two different choices, then we simply would play the only remaining option.
Our three choices were Mega Man 3 as part of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection on the GameCube, Phantasy Star Universe on the PlayStation 2, and Half-Life 2 as part of The Orange Box on the Xbox 360. My brother voted to eliminate Phantasy Star Universe and I voted to eliminate Mega Man 3, so we were left with Half-Life 2. Simple enough.
We weren’t exactly sure where we would switch out on this one, but I volunteered my brother since I almost always played the first turn and because I’d actually played the first half hour a couple of times in the past. Then, he ran into the reason I stopped after the first half hour those couple of times: We didn’t know where the heck to go. But, he actually found what I couldn’t after a long time of exploring. Not that you can blaim us for it, it is really the most random thing that you have to do.
He didn’t really do much after the beginning, though he actually played for an hour because of how long it took to find the solution to that early problem. Then, it was my turn, where I got the real meat of the experience with my turn. Some interesting cutscenes ensued in the beginning, followed by tons of crazy, awesome action. I was glad to finally get a weapon in my hands after all of my brother’s turn, where he didn’t get to use a weapon even once.
Overall, it was quite fun and definitely my best first impression out of the games we’ve done so far, and I left off in the middle of a sewer part because I felt tired out, even though it turns out I only really played half of the time my brother did, so about a half an hour. I’m definitely looking forward to playing this some more.
So, Fortune Cookie chose Digimon World: Data Squad on the PlayStation 2 for us to play next… womp womp.
This cookie definitely hates me. Now we have to play this game, which I have attempted in the past, albeit for only a few hours. This games is known for its atrociously long and drawn-out length, for which I can already tell why.
We start off with a little opening cinematic featuring a variety of Digimon in some what I must say are pretty nice graphics. But then we thrust ourselves into the actual game which has pretty crappy graphics in actuality even for the last generation. Obviously I have no interest in judging a game based on its graphics, so I think, “Ah, whatever. No big deal. Let’s see how the gameplay is.”
I would’ve been better off judging it on its graphics, I probably would’ve been more fond of it.
The first mission was actually pretty fun, with our targets set on finding this weird floating lizard Digimon that is so unmemorable that I easily wouldn’t be able to remember two syllables of its name even if I was at gun-point. The combat system was interesting to say the least, but I won’t go into much detail because it is a pretty bland subject as it is. I guess it was something that I’d never seen before at least, but there were really no ways to strategize in the slightest within the battles, which was disappointing. But, the (hold on let me fight this Digimon real quick) frequency of the (wait, another random encounter) battles is easily the biggest (here comes another, hold on) flaw of the game. After the first mission, I switched the controller off to my brother and his took easily 3 times as long as mine and we aren’t even done with the mission yet because we got so tired of it. Let me put it this way: Every. Freaking. Five. Steps. Random encounter, random encounter, random encounter, random freaking encounter. I’ve never been a fan of random encounters to begin with, but this was just plain horrendous. The battles probably take up half of the entire game because they are long enough as it is without there being a random encounter every 10 seconds.
Here is my shortened version of that little rant: Digimon World: Data Squad has probably the worst pacing I’ve seen in an RPG or game in general.
This game has already annoyed us so much in the first hour and a half that we are already planning on tweaking the system for our next game we pick by randomly picking three games and then manually picking out of said three games as to at least have some say in not having such a tedious game again.
That is all for now.
If you’re reading this then you probably already know what it is! Basically it’s an exercise in slaying the demons of our game collections: the backlog of games piling up, unfinished or unplayed, being cast aside for the latest hotness. You submit your closet of skeletons to public scrutiny and…
So recently, a few weeks ago, my brother and I started this whole new thing we will be doing for quite a while where we co-op random games whether they can be co-op’ed or just by taking turns switching in and out on single player games. The first game we chose on our own, but after that, we decided, we would pick a game at complete random through a feature known as the Fortune Cookie on a website we use called Backloggery that some of you may know. We’ve already beaten two games through this and just a few hours ago we chose what our next game will be (randomly, of course). Unfortunately I didn’t come up with this idea sooner, but from now on, starting with this new game which will not be revealed yet, I will be recording my progress and thoughts after pretty much every gameplay session we do on this blog and possibly my other blog Media Sloth as well if this goes well. But for now, here is a bit of a backstory with some thoughts on the first two games we did.
Wario Land: Shake It! (Wii)
For our first choice, before we started picking our games randomly, my brother had the bright idea to try out Wario Land: Shake It! because he was interested in it. Bad mistake.
Maybe it’s just me because this game got some pretty good review scores, but I just really didn’t enjoy this game. I felt like it had no unique flavor to it with some bland environments and annoying enemies. It also had very annoying boss battles and I really was not having a good time with this game aside from the fact that I was actually playing it with my brother. One small thing that I thought was really annoying was the fact that you would constantly bump into the stupid enemies because they filled the bottoms of the screen, which I felt really slowed down and messed up the game’s pace.
As far as progressing through the levels goes, my brother and I simply swapped in and out after every stage. We definitely didn’t go for 100%, but we picked up as many treasures as we could and completed as many missions as we could along the way. So we basically did what we thought qualified as beating the game, which was getting 100% on Stages.
Overall, my brother enjoyed Wario Land: Shake It! more than I did, but still thought it was just okay while I couldn’t stand the game the whole time and just wanted to get it over with.
LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (Wii)
After my dreadful experience with Wario Land, it was only fitting that it would be my brother’s turn this time around. We basically swapped opinions from Wario Land, where as then I thought Indiana Jones was good enough to enjoy playing, while my brother was really frustrated with it because of the glitchy parts of the game and annoying puzzles, with the game as a whole not near as polished as the LEGO Star Wars and Batman installments. I completely understand and agree with those gripes, but I’ve been fond of the LEGO games overall and it wasn’t hard for this to surpass Wario Land for me, even if I do believe this is the worst LEGO game I’ve played so far.
An interesting fact was that before the Fortune Cookie chose this game for us, we had previously tried it a while back, but got too annoyed by the glitchy parts to continue on with it, so my brother really dreaded going back to this again after his ruined experience.
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Ultimately, even though it is a very flawed and poor LEGO game, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures for the Wii stands as my current favorite game of the games we’ve played in this co-op series thus far. Obviously that is not hard to do considering we’ve only done two so far, but after we finish each new game we play, I will certainly update you on whether this position changes or not.
There’s no boobs, so they must be very proud of the fighting/action. And it does look quite good.
What?! No boobs?!
The size of my GBA collection has almost tripled over the last week. Thank you, cheap games and sales at Play N Trade.
Great haul! Gotta love the Pokemanz!
