Monday, May 26, 2014

Stay Hidden In Those Shadows, And You Can Lord Over Them All You Want

One of my coworkers went away over the weekend, and asked a few of us to look after her pets in the meantime. Even offered use of their extensive video game collection, which is how I ended up playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and ugh.

I guess if you enjoyed the God of War games, it might be more fun. I've watched people play them, but never felt any burning urge to do so myself. Not that I don't play a lot of games that are essentially, "run into a room, kill everything, then everything in the next room, then maybe flip some switches". I started Deadpool this morning, thus far that's nothing but killing everything in one room before moving to another room, where you also kill things. I suppose I like to think the games I play in that vein don't take themselves so seriously. God of War was nothing but angry-faced shouting. There wasn't much shouting in Lords of Shadow, but it still seemed to take itself very seriously. Guy's wife died like 2 days ago, and he's already off on some quest, not to save her, but just to find her spirit so she'll tell him why Heaven has been cut off from Earth. Take a little time to grieve, guy. They even hired Patrick Stewart to do their breathless, important-sounding voice-over narration. My friend and I were both tired of it before the first loading screen had even finished, because it was so dire and overwrought, it didn't allow Stewart to show any range.

The combat isn't bad against standard foes, but the boss battles are all terribly tedious. You hack them down to almost no health, then you have to correctly perform some sort of timed button press sequence. Screw it up and they recover health somehow while you get smashed to the ground, and have to start all over. Just let me slash them to death with the stupid whip if I feel like, and leave that nonsense as a way to earn bonus points. The last boss fight I got into was against a giant stone statue that was in a frozen lake in the land of the dead, which makes no sense, and the game had a funny idea of what constituted contact. I'm up on the side of its head, trying to smash a rune, I see it reaching its hand up to swipe at me, I crawl around, it maybe, maybe, grazes me with a fingertip and I go tumbling off. Which leads to a while mess of climbing back up and it trying to buck me off, and it was horribly tedious and here I am complaining about it.

So yeah, if I'm going to play any more Castlevania games, I'll stick to the 2-D versions.

Tomorrow, a movie!

No comments: