Hillyan News - The News Of Your Planet

We've seen a lot of small gametopics around here that just don't get the attention they deserve. Here, you can freeform about games and ONLY games as much as you want. You want to have a discussion about KOToR? This is the place. Want to express your love for The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, Videogame Freeform is your friend. Have fun and stay on-topic. Remember that we still have regular Freeform.

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So... to start things up, I'm going to glorify my work - all business on Tatooine (except possible future quests from Juhani, Canderous and Jolee, and the quest from Griff) done. I'm on Kashyyyk, Upper Shadowland.

Kingdom Hearts is a lot more daunting in terms of side quests and things like that than I thought. Beating it and completing everything is going to take longer than I thought, good stuff though :welldone:

yeah kotor....I have to finish tatooine too ^^, it's nice to see, that there is no mos eisley and that the only settlement is anchrohead.....veeeeeeeeeeeeery cool ^^

*plays Xenosaga*

Hmm... I just have 2 questions... Do all women wear skimpy clothes in the future? And... WHERE IS A DAMN TIME MACHINE WHEN YOU NEED ONE?

*cough* *ahem* *cough*

Now, then... if only I could get Episode III...

It shouldn't be there! It's 4 thousand years before "The Phantom Menace" and I doubt that Mos Eisley would be that old ;)

yeah I know

I guess that's why it's nice to see that it's not there. :D

I will most certainly get my hands on that Best of Star Wars Collection on the pc when the price is right.

yeah, Jedi Knight is just great! :D

Yeah, it's mostly for Jedi Knight. I wanted to get that game (JK II, at least) for the Gamecube a few years back. But I chose Bounty Hunter instead. I do not regret this choice, Bounty Hunter is a fun, albeit shallow game. But fact of the matter is, I could still buy Bounty Hunter last year for only 14 euros, Jedi Knight II disappeared from the stores just after I bought Bounty Hunter.

I like riding Dragons :)

(well, it is Videogame freeform isn't it?)

I'm so darn frustrated right now, I'm playing Billy Hatcher & The Giant Egg and it's so much of a mixed bag of bad and good, I have to rant about it.

the concept is just great, it's weird but still great in my opinion. You are a little boy called Billy who is destined to wear the legendary chicken suit. Now he can roll eggs, make them grow and eventually hatch for power-ups or creatures(some sorts of pokemon). All this to save Morning Land from the crows who want to make it night for all eternity!

Cheesy, corny and ridiculous, but a good excuse for a platform game with a unique feature: rolling eggs all around the level. to me, it sounds really great. Despite the mixed reviews from the critics, I still wanted to play this game, being the platform gamer that I am. I started it once, but after a while I got tired of it. Now I've picked it up again and I'm hooked. I'm frustrated by my addiction to this game, because it's so horribly executed, I just want to curse Sonic Team for not letting a more able developer handle this great idea. Billy is only "attached" to the eggs while he's running. Once you're standing still, you're loose again. You can imagine what trouble this brings with the abundance of platform jumps in this game. Or in a field full of enemies, you just run around like a chicken with its head cut off. And if you're hit by an enemy, you're completely defenseless because the egg rolls ahead of you. To make matters worse, there are terrible puzzles where you have to put the egg on a slide and you have to jump on a few platforms to get to the bottom on time to catch the egg before it falls into a lava pit. Problem is, Billy is terrible jumper without the egg. Billy is just a normal kid with a ridiculous suit, and you don't want to know how many times I failed a jump because it's impossible to estimate the distance between platforms in this game(unlike in a good platform game like Spyro or Mario) or the egg makes it but Billy himself doesn't.

The camera makes matters even worse. Never a good friend in 3D platform games, in Billy Hatcher the camera is even worse. You have to stay in movement constantly, so you have to adjust the camera constantly, all the while jumping platforms or defating enemies. I seriously need to catch a breath in between the enemies and jumps, because it's so exhausting to try and deal with the developer's inability to create good controls or even make leveldesigns that are fit for Billy's abilities.

I curse Sonic Team for all this, but most of all, I curse them for despite all the numerous flaws, the game is fun as hell. I can't stop playing, now that I've passed the point where I stopped the first time I played it, there's no stopping me. And then there's the coins you can collect, why did Sonic Team torture me with things to collect in badly designed levels? I want to collect everything, it's the platform gamer in me!!! Curse them, we hates them!!! And that's not all, there's a rating system with each level, but every time I almost reach the goal in a level that takes half an hour, I fall into a pit because of one of the flaws I just mentioned. I get returned to a checkpoint, I make the jump and I reach my goal, but everything I did in that level was reset by my fall into the pit, and I get a zero rating. A D, while I actually perfomored well up to the point where I encountered a terrible jump. As a gamer who wants to accomplish, I can't stand it. There is almost never a sense of accomplishment in this game. Ratings should be forbidden in games, it didn't make Chaos Theory any more fun than it was, and it certainly doesn't make me enjoy Billy Hatcher more. Sonic Team, why do you make fun games full of flaws??? I hate you guys!!!

Ratings... tell me about them...
Though I don't actually mind them in Chaos Theory, cause they made me want to interrogate every person in the game. Instead of shooting them with a sticky shocker for instance(off course, this has no effect on your ratings, but without the ratings, I might not have discovered how much fun the interrogations could be). Also, in Chaos theory, I got a 100% rating in 3 of the 4 levels I've played.
Plus, I think it heightens replay value of games... that is as long as the rating is fair(Like at least being able to get above 50% or C when you play it the first time).

In Panzer Dragoon Orta, where I'm happy to complete a level, the rating system only gives me C's and D's... It's kinda annoying, and it doesn't make you feel good when you see it. It's like "yay, I completed the level... oh wait.... with what ratings?".
Still, the game is fun, and I'll probably replay the levels to get better ratings. In Ninja Gaiden however, the rating is just annoying. Since you can't really pick an episode to replay, the ratings are quite useless. I don't even believed they are stored anywhere, there just there to make you feel lousy(although my ratings weren't always bad).

So, ratings... I donno, I like them as long as they are fair...

I really don't need them. They weren't annoying in Chaos Theory, though, but I would have interrogated ALL the guards regardless of a rating system.

To Denden... Don't go near Sonic Heroes. That game's rating system is not only difficult, it's also sometimes downright cruel! For example, a level that normally takes 10 minutes to complete has to be done in 5, while raising each character's levels up tp three, destroying enough enemies to raise the score, collecting many, many rings, not getting hit ONCE, all while fighting the camera and avoiding falling into the many pits. Damn you, Sonic Team for making so many bottomless pits. I swear, the levels in Sonic heroes are made of 35% land and 65% bottomless pits. And I still like the game. Curse me! (But still, kicking Metal Sonic's ass is cool. :D )