I played the original Force Unleashed back in early 2010 on the PS3. If I remember right, I quite liked the early parts of the game, but lost interest later on with both the gameplay and the lore, as I didn't like how many Imperial enemies could neutralise your Force powers, when no such enemies existed in the films.
When the sequel came out, it got worse reviews than its predecessor, so I never considered it until I picked it up on sale from GOG about a year ago.
As I'd not completed a game for 7 months, I needed a fairly short game to get through, so went with this one. Well, I'm glad it was a short one, that's all I can say.
For a start, the keyboard and mouse controls that are supposed to be in the game do not work. I read online you have to disable all the controllers in device manager for this to work, but it did nothing for me. So I had to play with the controller, and its incredibly slow camera rotate speed. Urgh.
I also had trouble trying to unlock the frame rate, which in the original game is fixed at 30fps. I found a modified .exe, which did indeed let me run at 60. However, I had a lot of weird bugs and glitches in the game, especially going up elevators, which ended up being the fault of that modified .exe. So in the end I played with the original 30fps locked version of the game. But even that still threw up problems, as the cut scenes seemed to want to run at over 4000fps, and kept stuttering. I had to run RivaTuner to cap those at 30 as well, just to make everything work.
Even after getting it to seemingly run right, and using the original .exe, I still had some glitches and crashes. This was most evident in the level where the rebel fleet turns up at the planet Kamino, and you have to repel Imperial boarders in a hangar. Three times I had to clear that level. The first time, when the game told me to remove the boarding clamps, it crashed. The second time, I killed all the enemies, but the game never told me to remove all the boarding clamps, so I was just stuck in an empty hangar unable to proceed. Pain in the ass.
I really had no fondness for the story or characters in this game either. The original Starkiller at least had some character development. This clone of him is very one note, and very boring. I don't remember what Kota was like in the original game, but his constant orders and irritating tone really pissed me off while getting through this.
I suppose it doesn't really help that I'm really off Star Wars lately, ever since that ridiculously awful Last Jedi spoiled the entire franchise for me.
But at least it's a game done at long last.
Tickling an Acolyte
Stormtrooper loses his head
This very annoying boss has very bad breath
Wrecking some droids
Pushing some Stormtroopers around
Fighting my way through to Vader
Frying up a Sith Lord for dinner
Before playing Force Unleashed II, the game I had originally intended to blast through was Bloodrayne Betrayal, which had been installed on my computer all year just waiting for me to get around to it.
The first Bloodrayne game was one of the few games I ever bought for the PS2 back in the day, and though it was quite janky, I've always remembered quite liking it. Well, apart from the end boss fight, which took ages, that is.
I bought Bloodrayne 2 on the PC not long after finishing the first one, but for some reason that I can't quite remember I had trouble with the camera controls, and so ended up watching the story on Youtube instead. Thinking about it, I could probably go back to that one now and see if I can get it working. I could do with an entertaining Bloodrayne game after trying this one...
I so very much wanted to enjoy this, but alas it was not to be. It just seems that the entire game was made to frustrate me. My primary antagonist here was the backflip mechanic. Now, the controls for the game provide a regular jump button, and also a backflip button. This is a fact I have no problem with. However, while playing, if you change direction and immediately press the jump button, then Rayne will also do a backflip. So there I am trying to just jump around while slashing and shooting enemies, and the stupid dhampir just keeps backflipping all over the place. Drove me mad.
It did not help that I found a lot of my commands would be ignored, almost as if the game would not do one action until the animation for the previous action had completed. So if I tried to dodge just while Rayne was finishing up the last few frames of slash animation, then she would not dodge and I'd get hit. It sucked how many times I died to that.
The game became most annoying when I hit any kind of prolonged platforming section, especially after starting to play as the bird. When I play an action platformer, especially when I'm playing a cool character like Rayne, I just want to go thundering into enemies and smash some skulls, not fart about jumping over saw blades and avoiding spike traps.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when, on chapter 7, I started to get some hard crashes. I'd not really enjoyed the game up to that point anyway, and I promised myself a while back I would no longer play games I do not enjoy. The crashes just pushed me over the edge, and I uninstalled.
Now is not the time for a cuppa
Must have spotted a scary bug on the ground
Monster looks horrified when Rayne gives it a hug
Rayne and monster strut their funky stuff
Been thinking a lot recently about buying a Playstation 4, mainly because the first part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake comes out early next year, and I'll need a PS4 to play it. In addition, there are a few other PS4 exclusives I'd love to play, like Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man.
Some people may think it's an obvious choice to pick one up, but I think about my previous Playstation consoles, and how little use I've managed to get out of them over the years, and it just makes me wonder if I'd get my money's worth out of it. My worry increases when considering how much I've struggled to find game time even on my much-favoured PC platform all year.
So I guess in an effort to convince myself a PS4 would be worth it, I've been looking at picking up some old games on the previous consoles from ebay, just to try and get some use out of them.
Speaking of Final Fantasy 7, the first game I've found for the PS2 is Dirge Of Cerberus, which I never really fancied playing years ago, but immediately ordered recently when I found out it is playable with keyboard and mouse. That's pretty cool for the PS2. Granted, my plan will be to try and emulate it so I can grab screenshots, but my old console is always ready to jump in if needed.
My PS3, which will soon be entertaining some Deadpool hijinks, needed a little bit of TLC before I got any more real use out of it. After 10 years of barely any use, the battery on the motherboard had given up, and it no longer remembered the date and time every time I turned it on. This meant I had to take the whole thing apart for the first time ever in order to replace it.
Here we go
The old thermal paste barely even covers the CPU
There's the little devil