Ok so right now I am going back to finish Dynasty Warriors: Gundam after having played it quite a bit in the past. As a little background, I shamelessly love the Dynasty Warriors series and every spinoff and even my wife will play with me for endless hours of button mashing.

  See, the problem is almost a year ago I managed to delete all my saved games, and this was one of the games I managed to erase all my progress in. Now the main issue with this is the fact that the achievements were once again created by some sadistic, kitten-killing, mother-bashing prick who wants me to kill 100,000 baddies and complete 100 boards.

  For those of you who aren’t Dynasty warrior fans, my Avg kill count for a mission is about 600 and it can take anywhere from 10 to 30 mins to finish a full level. I also need to beat the bonus mode with every character. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

  Achievements should not be based around making you play the game for endless hours, as I’ve said before. Games are, unlike sex, not fun the more you do the same thing over and over again. In fact the more you do the same thing in a game the more it begins to hurt. Someday I will find a way to make all the people who come up with these ideas pay……

  So as of this writing I have just finished getting 1k points in both Fallout 3 and Cars. Yes, I am willing to shamelessly use children’s games to boost my score, though in this case I nearly paid for it with my sanity. (Cue flashbacks of hours playing Open Season…*shudders*)

  Firstly I want to say that, unequivocally and without a doubt Fallout 3 is one of the best games I have played in the past 10 or so years. It’s Oblivion without all the same sword and sorcery bullshit that I have been playing since my father winked at my mother and she thought he might not suck. It is a game in which not only do we have the moral flavor of the month club, but things ACTUALLY change depending on what you do. Towns are wiped off the face of the post-apocalyptic planet or become more important to you depending on your choices. Still, how hard is it in this day and age to write a game with just one extra ending in it?  I mean an honest-to-god real, no fakes, no whammies, different ending that depends on the choices you made. I know somewhere out there I have played a game that had more than one ending. Maybe even two.

Aside from that, I think it has one of the most interesting combat systems I have seen in a long time and on top of that, I never felt that I was playing just for the sake of playing…. But that being said, here is why I want to sterilize the developers:

  They took one of the best games I have ever seen and tried to make you play it more than once -  not for the sheer enjoyment of the game (which I would have done) but no… they tried to make me by giving me achievements to fulfill for EVERY FREAKING MORAL PATH. The only crappy time I had was making sure I didn’t level past one of the achievement marks without first saving my game, then reloading and making the damn level AGAIN for each path. I can only hope that every time they think about using this whorebag of an idea again in the future, a monkey leaps out of a nearby closet and rapes them so they snap out if it and help us, the people they are actually making the game for, avoid unnecessary monotony throughout a long, long game. 

  Now what could this possibly have to do with Cars do you ask? Here is a cute little racing game, modeled after a Pixar movie that is both funny and had great amounts of charm. So what do they do?  They remove all the clever and funny and replay a few songs and clips from the movie till you are vomiting so hard it is spraying from your nostrils. And that’s really all you have to look forward to as you proceed through the next 10ish hours (give or take with your trips to empty your bucket-o-vomit).

  But even if you were smart enough to turn the sound off (admit it, you other achievement-whores out there, it didn’t occur to you to do it until an hour before you finished the game), once again the lords of achievement-making decided to hide 20 postcards in the three sectons of a kid’s game in places that no child would ever think of going. It made me want to punch a baby, how’s a kid going to deal? They hid them so well, in fact, that I had to search for a youtube video of someone else getting them, then watch it and mimic what they were doing. I never thought a game targetted for kids would make me want to smash my TV into small bits and force feed the jagged parts to an innocent bystander.

So in the end, all I can conclude is that I seriously think that the achievements for games are planned by cannabalistic clowns. You’ll never convince me otherwise.

So this Atlantica game, it’s actually pretty fun! It’s not the quests, or the world, or the community..they all seem lackluster to differing degrees, it’s the combat that is very engaging.

You actually control a full party. It starts out with Just you, then you recruit two mercenaries. As you level, you gain access to more mercenary slots, and classes. I currently have 5 mercenaries and my main, for a total of six party members. A full group would be nine.

To fight, you actually walk up to a monster and go into one of those Final Fantasy style mini-fight worlds, where it is just you and the enemy. Your party and theirs have formations and you have to beat the living tar out of them. It’s turn based, in the your side, then their side take turns fighting style. Each side has a time limit of 15-25 seconds, so as your party gets to a full size of nine, you’ll have to make decisions quickly.

It looks like there is some group content too. I’ve ran into a dungeon that said I should group with another person, where mobs come in two groups, so instead of 6 characters, my side could have had 12 to group with.

There are a lot of other little neat things it does that are novel for mmos and neat. It’s definitely missing some things too, and has that korean-grind feeling, but hell, it’s the first mmo in awhile I’ve actually felt compelled to grind for hours, just because the combat kicked that much ass.

http://atlantica.ndoorsgames.com/

Feel free to bug me if you have any questions. It’s one of those F2P things, it looks like they may charge for items or something if you don’t want to grind them out. The details are sketchy, but if it isn’t too big a deal, I could definately see keeping an account going, and playing now and again, for the combat if nothing else.