The cost of freedom!

Over the past few weeks I have picked up two different games for one simple reason:  they were cheap.   The video game industry moves so fast and is so fickle that it’s pretty amazing how quickly the titles lose their value, or have their price dropped to reach a wider audience.  But, i’m not really gonna complain about it, because so many great games came out last fall and I didn’t get a chance to play them all, so I’m psyched to find them on the sunny side of $30.

First up was Bully: Scholarship Edition on the Xbox 360. Made by Rockstar games, it is definitely in the spirit of the GTA series with an open world but the setting is much more confined and exact.  The game takes place at a fictional private school in the New England area where your heartless parents sent you because you are a jerk.   Once you get there you realize everyone else are jerks on par with you, including the staff, and the whole point of the game seems to be about being the biggest jerk.

So far the game just isn’t moving me, I’m finding the gameplay to be shallow and pedantic.  Yes, shallow and pedantic.  Seriously though, from what I have seen so far it’s just a series of fetch quests, run here, do a thing, run back over here, do some other thing.   I think the biggest issue I have with the game is that I don’t like any of the characters.   In fact the main character is such a little shit that I kinda like letting him get beat up.

I have heard from multiple people that the game picks up once you get further into it, and I’m gonna try my damndest to get there.  But right now I am having a hard time forcing myself to play.  Without characters I give a damn about it makes the story a non factor, so the only thing left is the gameplay…  and games existing in an open world just aren’t enough to wow me anymore.  Yeah, it’s cool I can run all over the school grounds, but I wish I had a compelling reason to do so.   Basically, i’m glad i bought this game on the cheap.

On the flip side, however, I also picked up Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 this week, for a measly $20, which is highway robbery if you ask me.   I don’t even remember my reasoning for not getting it when it came out, being that I love most if not all Bioware games (probably had to do with my insane World of Warcraft addiction).  But when I saw it for $20 I just couldn’t pass it up.

I’m only about 3 hours in, and the game certainly isn’t perfect, but it is definitely far cooler than 90% of the other crap out there.   The basic story is several hundred years in the future us fledgling humans having dug up some alien technology on Mars are now out colonizing our section of the universe, while maintaining relationships with other aliens who have been doing the same for a much longer period of time.  Evidently these aliens speak english, so that helps with diplomacy.

You play the role of some sort of space marine (yeah, I’m sick of them too) who has been nominated to join some sort of alien council, you would be the first human ever to take the position, or something like that.  I don’t know, the plot is kinda convoluted, as most SCI-FI RPGs tend to be.  But, the game itself is pretty cool.   All of the character interactions and dialogue have branching paths which you decide what tone to take while talking, which supposedly has an effect on the game as a whole, but so far I’m not seeing it.   I played through the opening mission twice now, answering questions completely different each time, and nothing at all changed about the mission.  Maybe later in the game your decisions have more of an effect, but right now they seem to have purely role playing uses… so if you get into games where you get to pretend to be a jerk, or really nice, you’ll enjoy it.   If you are like me and just want to get to the action and skip this dialogue that doesn’t have any effect on what you are about to do… well, it’s kinda bothersome.   It’s a missed opportunity and something I thought was gonna be much cooler than it has been so far.

The gameplay itself is pretty stellar though.  The controls are tight, the weapons seem very similar but they feel and sound good… and the graphics are flat out gorgeous.  The story so far is OK, I can’t say it’s sunk its teeth into me, but I don’t hate it, which i guess is praise for a video game.   The game may be a step backwards from Knights of the old Republic on the Xbox (the last great Bioware game) but it’s still a pretty awesome game and for the $20-$30 range you really can’t afford to pass it up.

It also released this month on the PC, which I haven’t played, but supposedly is the superior version of it (especially if you have enough of a rig to push all the eye candy).

And speaking of free games, I ran accross this Squidoo lens last night that is an A to Z listing of all (well, probably *most*) freeware games out on the net. It’s a pretty extensive list, I plan on checking some of the stuff out.  I’m sure most of it is crap, but hey – it’s free.  And free is even better than not free.

Hop on the forums and discuss this post and other games you have found on the cheap HERE.