Role-Playing

For my next big review, I've been working on Risen 2: Dark Waters (Xbox 360). I was a big fan of the first Risen, and I was always disappointed that the game never got the credit I felt it was due. It was rough, to be sure, and I can understand why a certain section of people wouldn't give it the time of day. That said, there was a lot of great stuff happening in that game once you got past appearances, and people who I would've expected to dig into it never did.

More Tera-ffic than Tera-ble

HIGH Getting a rare enigmatic drop from a dungeon boss.

LOW Spending thousands of gold trying to enchant that engimatic weapon to +9.

WTF Why do all the female characters look like prostitutes?

Released in 2006-07 as an Xbox 360 exclusive, probably with the goal of helping establish the console in Japan, Blue Dragon has inexplicably spawned sequels and a minor multimedia empire. It's reasonably fun, if you like turn-based role-playing games, but Blue Dragon is clearly a bad game.

Where High School is Literally Hell

HIGH Performing an attack that deals over 9 million in damage.

LOW Level grinding can get tedious.

WTF The post-game abandons any pretense of sanity and slathers itself in crazy sauce.

Saw the promotional trailer for this mash-up called Fistful of Rupees and I thought that while it looked interesting, it would be as forgettable as The Legend of Zelda fan-made video tribute things tend to be. However, having seen all three parts to the "film" I have to say this effort is surprisingly good on many levels—the acting is surprisingly good, the action is surprisingly good and the production quality is surprisingly good as well. Never thought I'd want a Zelda game based on a Spaghetti Western until now.

In this episode we have a good old fashioned "What have you been playing?" Discussion. We then have a debate sparked by an email over Sniper Elite V2 and round it all out with some thumbs! With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Richard Naik and Dylan "I have no witty nicknames" Collins.

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Ten-legged Tactics

HIGH A bigger role for gunslinger Clint.

LOW Getting stuck on a level by overlooking a very obvious switch.

WTF When's the next episode coming out?

Your Myths! I Must Have Them All! No Symbolism There.

HIGH Landing that perfect AoE spell attack!

LOW I have to break open chests over multiple actions? With a rogue in the party?

WTF That's what you call a tutorial?

Perfect Synthesis!

HIGH Seeing what finally became of the kingdom I worked so hard to build.

LOW I just want a Lvl2 fire resistant item, and I know it's here somewhere!

WTF Well, that bath scene was certainly unexpected!

You probably never thought about it this way, but while playing The Legend of Zelda, you were going into boss fights at a severe disadvantage. Not only were you probably low on health, but you had to deal with that incessant chiming. Dorkly shows us how Link should have used it to turn the tables.