Surprise Hit - UFC Undisputed 2009

I am a huge Forrest Griffin fan. Dude went to high school less than 15 minutes from my house and one of my former bosses actually went to school with him and witnessed quite a few lunch room brawls of Mister Griffin. The thing I always loved about Forrest was while he had decent ground game, he would usually stick to stand up and I couldn't stand ground.

UFC Undisputed 2009 changed that for me. After playing the single player and being forced to learn the ground game, I began to understand and it became more than two guys tangled up. When watching the UFC, I could see the struggle to get a dominate position such as side control or mount. While I still prefer a stand up fight, I don't dislike UFC fighting anymore when it goes to the ground and this game changed that.

It stands heads and tails above any past UFC game, Wrestling game, and even Boxing. I think UFC outdoes Fight Night...and after the Fight Night Round 4 demo...that doesn't change. Graphics are great. Controls are damn near perfect once learned. And you will get your monies worth because I played the game for 70+ hours.

Phantasy Star - A Non-Gamerscore Review

I assume that most of my audience (if not all of it) are 360 score whores/achievement junkies. One of the ideas I had when the blog first started was occasionally tackle a game that did not have achievements. The first game I had wanted to do this with was an awesome first person action game from the original Xbox called Breakdown. Unfortunately, I underestimated the addiction to whoring points and never got around to it. After hitting 200k, I was feeling semi burned out and I knew Phantasy Star 2 was coming to the arcade. I took this oppurtunity to playthrough Phantasy Star 1 created by Sega in 1987 for the Sega Master System. Phantasy Star, along with Square Soft's Final Fantasy were two of the first games that exposed the West to the genre of JRPG's.

Phantasy Star starts off with your brother, Nero, having his ass beat to death. Nero sends you off on your quest for vegence and rebellion against the evil king of the Algol System, Lassic. You play the game as Alis, Nero's sister, and your first mission is to find a strong dude named Odin to help you go after Lassic. You bounce from town to town trying to find out about this Odin dude and you find his talking cat.

Apparently, super strong dude Odin, got turned to stone by Medusa and Myau is wearing the antidote around his neck. So you go and find Odin and restore him from stone form.

After finding out that you (a chick) is stronger than the strong dude Odin, you go and find a 4th party member named Noah.

I think Noah is a chick, but who knows with those crazy japs. You go around collecting items and armor so you can finally reach Lassic by turning your talking cat into a flying cat.

You kill Lassic and return to a port town to speak with the Governer only to find out that he is possessed by the real evil... Dark Falz.

After you kick ancient evil's ass, the governer is back to normal and he lets the cat out of the bag. Your father used to be king of all of the Algol System of planets. He wants you to claim your throne as Queen Alis. The End!

Why the summation of the story, when you thought this was a review? Well I didn't want you guys to have to suffer through this game for what little bullshit backstory you need to enjoy the later games. Here is the real review. The graphics are decent for an 8 bit system game. The fighting is that of a typical early style jrpg. The game also suffers from bad design choices and localization issues that the early jrpg's suffered. The item menu is just a 8-10 item list with a next choice for flipping pages. You run into strange named creatures.

How is a spider, a Ant Lion? There are a few instances of this and just bad dialog translation overall. You start the game off super weak and pretty much have to start farming xp and money right away. The only issue is that for a couple levels (and until a new weapon) that you can only consistently win against 1 enemy out of the possible 3-4 that you randomly face. The interesting thing I found was that the dungeons were very first person...at least it was interesting until all the dungeons look exactly the same outside of colors.

The game is a 20 hourish affair, but most of that will be grinding and back tracking all over the worlds. The first Final Fantasy outclassed this game and I just hope the 2nd one is better. I wouldn't say this game was good but I can't call it outdated trash either. It was just poorly done even for the time. I give it 2 out of 5 Fro's.

Dead Boxes

No that's not me or my xbox, but I needed dramatic oh noes music/video dealing with dead boxes. I have officially now lost count of how many broken xboxes I have suffered in 20 months of owning my first one. To give you an idea of how this could happen...I currently own 4 xboxes and yesterday 3 of them were in some way in the process of Microsoft repair. These aren't launch xboxes or even 2 year old xboxes. My Elite was my first box. It had a disc tray error. I bought a 2nd box when I sent that off around 5 months after I got it or 15ish months ago. The first console I got had the same error within 2 days. I returned it and bought another.

I decided to buy a 3rd xbox for another room in the house. So I am up to 3 around 8-9 months ago. By this time, I had to send my Elite in for another disc drive error. Less than 6 months ago my Elite E74'd. My 2nd box dies a week later (disc drive). So I buy a 4th box. It died 1 month later (disc drive). And it died again another month later (disc drive). Then my Elite died again (disc drive). And I think maybe another console or two died between that point and mid May when the 1st, 2nd, and 4th consoles went out in succession. Quite frankly I am getting tired of this. I have had at least 11 xbox failures that I can remember and I am pretty sure there are a couple more.

Only good news is that I got my Elite back today and yet another free month of xbox live.