I honestly thought I’d talked about a few of these games in the blog, but APPARENTLY NOT, so, here we go.
Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus
You play as FF7’s Vincent some time after the events of FF7 and FF7: Advent Children. A tutorial stage is set in the time before FF7’s events, so you bookend his life from his time with the Turks.
It’s a third person shooter. There are combos, but they are not as intricate as in the Devil May Cry series. Being able to set aiming to semi-automatic or fully automatic makes up for some of the deficiencies of using a controller in a shooter, though the game does support the PS2 mouse and keyboard.
Being a shooter instead of a JRPG, Dirge of Cerberus never seemed to fit into the Final Fantasy canon, but it’s fun enough.
Battlestar Galactica
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this game is based on Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica a few years back. The PlayStation 2 was still a big deal at the time, and there was really no hotter science fiction on television. That’s probably just what the developers of the game wanted you to think.
It’s actually based off the earlier show from the 1970s. You play as a young Captain Adama, a Viper pilot during the First Cylon War, before the Twelve Colonies were destroyed.
Battlestar Galactica is a space dogfighter in the vein of X-Wing, which makes sense, as the show itself was an attempt to cash in on the enthusiasm around the original Star Wars movie.
In this game, the Cylons have taken out a Viper Patrol and have jumped to the Galactica. Your job, as leader of Blue Wing, is to kill Cylons until the Cylon Leader spawns and then kill that before it destroys the Galactica. Unfortunately, the Galactica is always blown up. I’m just not good at this.
Those who can master the aiming and stuff will find a game stuffed with extras, like clips from the show and so on. Presumably.
Avatar: the Last Airbender
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this game was based on the popular cartoon. But it was actually based on… nah, it’s based on the cartoon.
The game generally follows the cartoon. It’s a mix of questing, killing, murdering, becoming blood crazed and all the other things that never really happened in the cartoon, but it’s a video game, so there has to be a certain amount of killing. You start out playing Aang in the village of the Southern Water Tribe, but along the way you will be able to play the other members of Team Avatar.
Pro tip: when the Fire Nation attacks, just keep killing them. Hundreds, thousands of them. Aang will level up and can pretty much carry the rest of the characters.
I found the game slow and boring. YMMV.
I have many, many more games to review, but I have to play through them at least a little bit. Retroworld Expo is this weekend, I have some more stuff to do on the dragon for D&D, so cool stuff coming out, watch this space, have a great day, etc 🙂
