I beat the single player of Splinter Cell: Conviction today and have mixed feelings about the campaign.

The story is pulled off rather well. That's all I'll say regarding this...definitely one of the better storylines in recent memory and it has a few twists a long the way, with great locales for the campaign.

The game itself is a mixed bag. There are a few levels that I really enjoyed (Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Michigan Ave. Reservoir) because they either took a step in a different direction or nodded to imo what really made the past games good. I don't like the Iraq level because it is for all intents and purposes a third person shooter, and the Third Echelon level I thought was a retread of everything about the past games that I tolerated then, but can't stand now (avoiding lasers got old a long time ago). Mark and execute is a feature that I love, but why do I feel that, because it exists, Ubisoft decided to load the game with about twice as many enemies as you'd ever find in past games?

All in all though, it has been well worth the wait, and I'd give it about a 9 as well.

I haven't played Empire Total War or WiC, sorry. I do play a lot Warcraft III though.

Well you have to think strategically in the multiplayer. The imbalanced ruined this a little bit though. You knew what the opponent will do and you still had a very hard time to counter it. I haven't played online after the patches went live, so there might be an improvement now. It is hard to do a comparison with other RTS, because they are on PC or they just suck on consoles. It is like comparing a Halo FPS to counterstrike. It is not as strategical as CS, but it is fun.

Go out and pick it up, you will find this for $10 now.

I finished GOW3, it was a good game but man is it overated, its no where as good as MGS4 or Uncharted 2.

Id even say GOW2 was better than it.

GOW3 is so damn short on my first playthrough on Medium trying to get trophies took me less time than my second playthrough on GOW2 when i did a speed run.

The story was a mess, unlike GOW2.

It was pretty easy even on Medium and the game just threw away the puzzles of the other two.

I was expecting from the end of GOW2 it was gonna be a huge epic battle between Gods and Titans with many epic battles, i was wrong the titans play a unimportant role in the game it just felt pointless why Kratos went back to get them then he attacks em all. You only had Gaia & Kronos in it for a few minutes. The rest were at the start except for the Lava Titan. And wheres Atlas?

Out of the 5 main gods besides Zeus you kill the two strongest first, Poseidon and Hades then you run into fodder like Helios and Hermes, shouldn't it be the other way around?

The final battle was very very weak and so was the ending.

It just shouldn't be so much more epic, the first half hour was amazing after that it became a watered down GOW2.

8/10.

Jak III. They really should've spent more time developing the game. The new weapons and Light & Dark Jak powers made me feel ridiculously overpowered and if I died, it was in a vehicle mission or a minigame. Not once was I taken down in a gunfight.
Also, the damn Freedom Fighters, who are supposed to be my allies... Suck. They ALWAYS get in the way, and then I have to finish them off, or they'd start shooting at me...
Other than that, nice game.

Metroid (NES) (not on the VC)

So I just finished Metroid. For an NES game at the time, it is top notch. I wouldn't even think detailed objects like the metroids could be made on the NES. It is apparent there was an artistic mind at work in this game.

Even for the amazing gameplay and graphics, I do have a couple frustrating gripe with the game. One thing is that you can easily miss very important items and have no indication you missed them. In Zelda, things are amazing hard to find. However, most of those things you cannot progress through the game without. In Metroid, there is no indication you should be even looking.

I guess that means Metroid is truly non-linear, where you only need to complete about 30% of the content to beat the game. I was lucky, the only reason I beat the game this time (as opposed to many other failed attempts) is I found the screw attack very early. This was a very essential ability that I wouldn't have been able to get anywhere without (it can be used to protect Samus from harm while jumping).

The only other thing that is annoying is cheap shots. The biggest one is that you can get hit while moving through doors (noting that you cannot move while you are going thru doors). This can be a particular problem when the threat is on the other side of the door, as there is no way to avoid the damage. This is something that should have been fixed during game testing.

Only a couple other gripes: Going to 30 health after every death is annoying, and there is a lava pit right in front of Mother Brain that in inevitable death if you fall in.

All of that being said, Metroid is a very good and unique (for the time) experience. The game has such a weird feeling to it that when I was a kid, I thought I had dreamt of playing the game. It wasn't until I saw it at the game rental store that I realized it was a real game. Just be sure you have some patience, as it can be frustrating at times. It is inevitable with NES games.

Your thread ain't official! Especially with this one already in existence!

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=25604

I just finished Treasures Island on PC. This game is a classic point n click adventure based on the world famous book. The graphics are a pretty cartoonish even though the story is serious. This is a strange, because the look reminded me so much of Monkey Island, but the story was not as funny as the one in Monkey Island. When someone dies in this game it puts you back to the actual game and you realise, hey this is not meant to be a comedy-adventure.

Anyway, this game is not about the graphics, it is about the gameplay and the puzzles. The puzzles are sometimes challenging but never frustrating. This surely is a good thing. There were one or two situations where you had to talk to the right people in the right order. That didn't make any sense to me. I had to read the walkthrough for this certain situation. I completed all the puzzley, found every object and talked to everybody... but not in the right order. That was stupid IMO.

There are some issues with the controls. The character tries to walk to certain areas, but was blocked by an object and kept running without actually moving. But this only happened once in a 10 hours game, so not a big problem for me.

If you are a fan of classic point n click adventures with some puzzles / riddles, you should give this game a try. My father bought it and he only paid 10€ for it. It was worth the price. 1€ for 1 hour of good entertainment.

8/10

    9/10                                      

I  usually don't like sandbox games and Infamous was pretty amazing. It's a long game, cool power's, excellent gameplay and an interesting plot. I took a point away because even though the game look's very good for the genre, the game glitched twice (fell through the floor) which meant that I had to restart the mission. Zeke is also horrible (the sidekick).            

      6/10

I bought the game for $15 and it was a pretty decent purchase. If you find it cheap and enjoy hack 'n' slash games, then you might as well give it a go. I've never watched the anime and unless you have then you won't understand the story that well, but what shined for me was the excellent voice acting by Samuel L Jackson and the rest of the cast followed by a fantastic soundtrack which has long list of song's of great Hip Hop artist's. The presentation is pretty with a cell shaded design and the combat was surprisingly solid. The enemy type's are limited, the game could get repetitive and the boss battles (though interesting) were kinda frustrating sometimes. It's a decent game, but it wouldn't quench your God of War or Bayonetta thirst.                                                                                                                            

Just finished God of War 2 (in the collection)

Thoughts: Amazing Game! Seriously, my favorite of the series. Even though the first game does the best job of telling a story, the gameplay in this game is the best. I really can't tell you why I liked it the best, but it just felt great. On the story side, well, Kratos is an unabashed dick. He really is an anti-hero of the first magnitude, and not someone that I can personally root for. So the lack of coherent story in this one was actually a net positive.

9.5/10

Also finished God of War 3 this weekend

Thoughts: Very, very good. I loved the Nimean Cestus, and there were a couple of great set piece battles that are pretty epic (I'm thinking of Cronos for some reason). The graphics in places are the best I've ever seen, but like Heavy Rain there are some weird inconsistencies. Kratos looks so real that it's completely obvious when there are flatter textures around him (there are not "flat" textures in the game, it really is a graphical masterpiece in that regards. The scale is so huge in some of the game, it boggles the mind.

Gameplay wise it's a small step down from 2, however. The weapons except the aforementioned Cestus are all interchangeable and never made me really want to switch out from the Blades of Exile, there's just no point. Also, unless I got magically a lot better between ejecting 2 and putting in 3, the game is quite a bit easier. I died about 5 times at the hands of enemies (as opposed to probably 15 in 2, at normal level in both games) and had the obligatory 40 or so run through by ground spikes, didn't land right after swinging, etc. That's my biggest gripe with the GoW series, the platforming flat out stinks. Give Kratos about 50% of Nathan Drake's climbing and jumping skills and I would be a happy CommonMan.

Storywise, Kratos surprised me for a bit, when dealing with Pandora he acutually acts like a person for 15 seconds. It was a great break from yelling "I WILL have my vengence!" every 3 minutes, and I wanted more. Good wrap up to the series, and Kratos killed everyone, so that was to be expected.

9.0/10