Friday, June 26, 2009

Ghostbusters (PS3) Postmortem

I finished Ghostbusters today. I'd say it was about 8-10 hours of gameplay total for the single player campaign. I haven't touched multiplayer, and don't really plan to. Instead of talking about good points and bad points, I'm going to just list the bad things that really stood out.

Uneven difficulty. I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Certain parts of the game were cakewalks, while others were exercises in frustration, for no good reason.

Load times. Again, it's so bad I had to mention it again. I don't mind failing missions if I can jump right back in and try again. But waiting a good half a minute to do so, all the while listening to Ray Parker, Jr, is not a good thing. Yes, it's a good song. Yes, it gets annoying after a while.

Save game bugs. While I didn't experience a complete loss of my savegame, the game did somehow manage to lose my scans of paranormal activity and cursed artifacts I had collected halfway through the story. Gamebreaker, no, strange and aggravating (as it cost me some trophies), yes.

That's all I didn't like. Everything else, the controls, the story, the graphics, the voice acting and sound, all spectacular. But that short list of bad stuff (and the fact I finished the storyline on a 5-day rental period) is enough to make this a rental recommendation only. Maybe once the price drops to 30 bucks or below and my homies pick it up too, I'll buy it and get some multiplayer ghostbusting action going. Until then, though, it's just not worth $60.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

D&D Post #3

It's almost time for another session of D&D, but first, here's the log from the last one!

Same players as last time: David the DM and TB the halfling rogue, Kevin the demon-born druid Alyster, Liz the rat fighter Liz, Trish the half-elf sorcerer with no name, and me the dwarf cleric Kelgar.

Another two parter. Both are available just as last time, streaming audio or mp3 download. Each part is roughly 2 hours.

Enjoy!

Streaming:
Part 1

Part 2


Download:
Get Part 1 Here
Get Part 2 Here

Monday, June 22, 2009

Ghostbusters (PS3) Impressions

I've played for about 3-4 hours, through the first 3 missions.

It feels very much like Ghostbusters, which is not unusual since it stars all four of the OG Ghostbusters and was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. It has enough callbacks to the first two films to feel very familiar, and yet has enough new thrown in to be a solid extension of the universe.

The difficulty level is a bit ragged, due mostly to the fact that the game holds your hand during certain parts, and then lets you flounder in others. Also, load times after failing a mission are absolutely criminal, and I experienced some slowdown - no, slowdown isn't the right word, it was more like stopping - in the visuals during a sequence with darkness and smoke. Stuff like that is almost common place with badly coded PC games on poor hardware, but it's completely unacceptable on a console.

Still, I'm enjoying it, and haven't had a gamebreaker yet. It's Ghostbusters, after all.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

D&D Post #3 Coming Soon

There is a new recording of D&D as we had a session on Sunday night. However, I have not had a chance to do some cleanup in Audacity and upload it yet. Soon, I promise!

Sent from my BlackBerry® on the MetroPCS Network