Long weekend, what are you playing?

It's Holy Week and we got ourselves a long weekend to relax, or reduce our backlog of games to play. What are you playing?

Quash: Love the long weekends. naturally I abused the free time I had and invested hours into games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Super Mario Galaxy 2. During the start of the long Weekend I continued playing Star Wars: The Old Republic using my cousins account. A friend of mine just bought a copy, so we started characters together as a bunch of Jedi's exploring the galaxy. While the story telling in this MMO is nothing I've experienced in past online games, it's actually better with a friend along for the ride.

Last friday was just Star Wars non-stop, we went through the first 24 levels just like the WoW days. But like I said, the story is something else. Each quest is fully voiced and you engage in a conversation with the NPC as if your playing Mass Effect or Dragon Age 2. Having a friend along for each conversation makes it a bit more enjoyable. When choices on what your characters can say is given, each player rolls from 1 to 150(I think) and whoever player gets the highest number gets his choice picked. This brings a lot of fun and keeps the ending result of each conversation a mystery. My friend picks to save this certain character, but since I win the roll, my choice to kill him goes through and his reaction to my choice was priceless. it keeps things fresh and we see each other picking all the quests in each area.

Now that' s not the only games I get to spend some time on. I played a bit of Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time and it just reminded me how Super Mario 64 is one of my personal favorites. Another game I tried and will continue after this post is Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I started playing and saw three hours go by just like that. It's been awhile since I played a Zelda game so I can't wait to get back into playing. My last Zelda game was actually The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Yes, it's been that long, I haven't even played Wind Walker, but I'm definitely going to give that game a shot.

Migoy:

Another late entry for me as I am still trapped in the bowels of the "no internet at home". For this weekend you could say I've gone retro. Not completely retro but I have been playing a lot more games that are 1 to 2 generations old from our current gen systems.  Got my hands on a copy of Rival Schools: United by Fate, the Evolution Disc version, and had some nostalgic button mashing fun with that. Bust A Groove 1 and 2 still took at LEAST half an hour of my time each which is around the average time to clear arcade mode with a single character.  Didn't get to play as much Mega Man Legends as I thought I would but I got to sneak in a bit of zenny grinding on that.

I guess you could say that the highlight of my weekend was Chrono Cross. Nowadays usually spending an hour or 2 straight on a modern day single player game is a rarity and usually has me exhausted but playing Chrono Cross had me going so smoothly and 2 hours just breezed by without me even noticing.  There's just something about this RPG that hits the right spot.

Now that we're done with the 2 generation old games, let's talk about the games that aren't as old. Had to dig up some AA batteries because I plugged in the Wii cause I felt like playing what I'm guessing isn't a very popular GameCube game. That game is Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom. A game based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! world that isn't a card game, in fact it's a game that mixes 2 very different genres, namely RTS (Real Time Strategy) and the Final Fantasy style ATB-esque (Active Time Battle) though in this case it's more like an Active Turn Battle. I just felt like revisiting this fossil because I'm re-watching the old Yu-Gi-Oh! anime series and it got me in the mood for some Duel Monster action.

Finally, I did get to play a game within this current console generation. I finally got Lost in Shadow for the Wii. A sort of unique side scrolling platformer as you don't control a character per se but instead you control his shadow. A shadow who has been separated from his body that's being held atop a mysterious tower and is trying to reunite itself with said body. Aside from the straight forward platforming and puzzle solving, what makes this game unique is that you are indeed a shadow and thus interact with the shadows of things in the environment. Though I guess you could still say that it changes the plains of the game but not really the basic point, only when you start messing with light sources and angles of the shadows that you really get the point that the developers where trying to make. The art style and design of the tower sort of resembles that of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, even the story seems a little similar since it seems a little twisted and mysterious. If anything this sort art style of delves on the verge of most Indy titles right now, especially with games such as Limbo out on the market.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbuXx6vXeZ8[/youtube]