Bigtruckseriesreview Motorsports

Portal 2 expands on the original Portal in just about every way, making the original look like a prototype in comparison. Portal 2 , similar to the first game, walks the player character through the game mechanics and teaches you slowly how to maneuver and to manipulate the portal gun - which is capable of creating instant pass wormholes between any two points in space so long as the portal entry can adhere to the surface of a space. You essentially replay the first game as the initial third of your adventure. That’s because the first game was disappointingly short. By the time you finish the first third of the game, the original antagonist, GLADOS has been replaced by a new antagonist, Wheatley, who is megalomaniacal and short, sightedly, ignorant by design. An artificial intelligence designed to make stupid decisions. For the next portion of the game, you play through legacy chambers buried so deep beneath the prison-like Aperture science installation that even GLADOS didn’t know about them. She will serve as a comedic foil and a guide until you can make your way back to Wheatley‘s main chamber in order to fight him. The legacy chamber maps are where you’ll learn a little more about the history of aperture science and its founder Cave Johnson who accidentally developed the portal gun simply trying to figure out ways to make money. The game will also hint about your player characters, parents, and make vague references to the possibility that both her mother and father were key elements in the creation of this facility. The puzzles get extremely imaginative, creative, and difficult as you play through the legacy chambers. You must take everything that you’ve learned from the initial game if you’ve played it to help you continue onwards towards this games ending. Many of the puzzles are so difficult that the answers are completely obscure and you may need to consult online resources for solutions. The biggest problem that I have with this game and its predecessor are the fact that there’s often only one way to solve the puzzles. The designers developed the solution and then worked their way backwards in order to take away any and every element of a map that was not necessary. This can create extremely frustrating moments where you absolutely have no idea what to do because the solution is so obscure. The game tries to teach you new mechanics as you go along, but it’s done in a very minimal way which some people might not be able to pick up on. Even though they have scaffolded your learning when they finally throw a bunch of different mechanics at once you become dumbfounded and just don’t know what to do next. Once you do learn the solution, whether it’s on your own or by cheating using YouTube speed runs, you can move ahead, knowing that the solution is there and it’s never going to change. This is why I have a problem with the game’s replayability. The difficulty curve goes from extremely difficult to extremely easy instantaneously once you understand the solutions. The Multiplayer component where you and a friend or partner work together to solve puzzles is a great addition, but nowadays, you have no idea if there are enough available people still playing to cooperate with. This can also hurt replayability factors and leave the entire multiplayer component null. Overall: Portal 2 is a masterpiece, but it isn’t flawless.

The player takes on the role of Prisoner 849, aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. During transport to a moon-based prison, the ship is pulled to an uncharted planet, before reaching its destination. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of savage yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids, who also have an army of genetically engineered Brutes and an enslaved race of warriors, known as the Krall. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, except for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship. The Skaarj seek to strip the planet of its minerals- specifically "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystals. You ultimately become a savior to the Nali And fight alongside them to help them free their world from oppression. When unreal was released, unfortunately, it was released at the same time as HALF LIFE Which ended up dominating the news and causing many people to overlook Unreal. It was also released after Quake 2, which had addictive multiplayer online. Some might say that Unreal is criminally overlooked but if you were around back then like I was, you would understand why. What Unreal ultimately had going for it was its large maps and sense of exploration. Unlike the slightly more focused Quake 2 and Half Life, Unreal felt like truly exploring on an alien world, but that alien world wasn’t so alien as most of the locals took the place of temples, mines, and holy sites before narrowing into a battle against the Skaarj’s military industrial complex. Unreal also really didn’t look as good as Quake2 or Half Life. Characters were blocky (like Minecraft) and their detail was lacking. Gunplay wasn’t really as fun in Unreal as it was in its competitors. If you wanted to get bang for your buck, you would buy Unreal because it kept you playing for a very long time. some might argue that the maps were actually too large and that progressing from beginning to end took too long. There are some memorable moments in this game, but they are far and few between. Most of the time you’re exploring through what could have just as easily been castles from medieval times on Earth. The level which holds my memory is the Sunspire where you must make your way up a gigantic tower to reach a special escape pod near the top. Later levels are so similar that they blur together into a stereotypical first person shooter trope. If you buy this game nowadays, you’ll probably get it for less than five dollars. It’s absolutely worth a play through especially if you’ve never played through it before.

I bought MM:ZX in a steam sale with the ZX collection. Just $10 for 6 games. I play them on the PC just like the Mega Man/X Legacy collection. Google doesn't give you a huge amount of space to write reviews so I'll summarize as best I can: I personally think that while it suffers from some difficulty/ balancing issues, Mega Man ZX may actually be the best evolution of Mega Man X games. It's fun, addictive and overcoming the frustrating parts is personally rewarding. The music is mostly J-pop/electronic and its loops are as catchy as they are memorable. The DS graphics scale decently enough to my 34" Alienware Widescreen PC monitor even if limited to a boxed window - unable to stretch from corner to corner. MM: ZX is basically the same as every classic Mega Man game. You take on the role of Mega Man and must defeat boss characters in order to copy their abilities and take on other boss characters - hopefully being able to use their weaknesses to chop away at their health. You fight through minibosses and bosses until you reach the final boss and use your upgraded repertoire to take him down. MM:ZX's departure from the classic formula is being a METROIDVANIA style game with an open world map. I originally didn't want to pick up the game because I knew these games were long and difficult, but naturally I got addicted to seeing the journey to its end and gave it a playthrough. The game's major problem is that although targeted towards kids who own DS, the difficulty is LEGENDARY. This is mostly because the boss' health bars are triple yours until can find the LIFE UP items and the 4 ENERGY SUBTANKS. The life ups, energy subtanks and the upgrade chips for the armor are a must have. Without them you don't stand much of a chance. Unfortunately grinding for them is a slog as many items are hidden behind some of the most obtuse challenges I've ever seen. Nothing is explained well and simply "exploring" isn't enough to find them. The world map is confusing and takes time and play to understand. It isn't communicated to the player very well how areas connect as the map isn't 2D like a classic NES game. Side quests are not communicated well either. You can only do one quest at a time and the quests won't give you enough clues as to how to proceed. I could NEVER have completed this game without YOUTUBE VIDEOS. That's poor game design. You'll need side quests and exploration to grind through the game for currency and energy refills for your sub tanks. Currency will be needed to repair the items you find if you don't defeat bosses in a perfect manner. All in all, after playing through the entire Mega Man collection from 1 to 11 to X8, I have to say that ZX is a criminally underrated game which if remastered into HD like MM:11 could be an amazing action adventure game. All the Mega Man games have flaws that could be edited out, but the flaws and difficulty almost give each one character and memorability . Fantastic music and interesting stages make this game worthy of 4 stars. It's FLAWED, but it's nevertheless an instant classic.

Mega Man X8 is essentially an apology for the failures and shortcomings of X7. While X7 tried to present the traditional Mega Man in 3D: the lack of polish, lack of playtesting and lack of bug fixing left it feeling irreparably broken. Mega Man 8 keeps the polygonal characters and environment features while pinning the camera to a mostly 2D perspective - with a few exceptions in stages that have over-the-shoulder-3rd person perspective. This fixes the main issue with X7, but it opens up new issues. The ride chaser sequences are long, difficult and riddled with instant death traps. This decision makes for a frustrating and irritating situation more often than not. Though the game controls smoothly, the characters feel almost like weightless marionettes while jumping and then feel like 1000-pound rocks while falling. This causes excessive anxiety in the stages which are littered with instant-death spikes which kill you even by touching them from the side. The gameplay is balanced to support all 3 player characters: X, Zero and Axl. Each character feels distinctive and fans will enjoy playing through the game as them. The game's item collection isn't that great however. There is a store to buy items and power ups with currency gained from killing enemies, but it's not as straightforward as it was in the other Mega Man games with shopping. There are 3 hidden female characters, several defensive upgrades and several weapon items - all with expensive price tags. You'll need to play through the game no less than 10 times to 100% the game. The bosses aren't too bad with some exceptions. The Ride chaser levels: Dynasty, Central White and autoscrolling of Inferno frustrated me immensely. The final bosses by comparison were nowhere near as annoying as the stages. I didn't mind the obligatory boss rush simply because I knew I wouldn't need to play the stage to reach them. The Graphics are quite good. I personally liked the graphics in X7 and X8 - and noticed a lot of good ideas. Sound is even better with metal tracks and some electronic alternative. Perhaps the worse possible aspect is the lack of unlimited continues - a staple of virtually every other Mega Man game. You can use in-game currency to buy "retry chips" but you only get up to 5. When maps are filled with instant-death traps, 5 just isn't enough. Add to this the lack of fairly placed checkpoints to continue from and you WILL be FRUSTRATED beyond belief. Even X5, X6 and X7 got this part right. X8 even removed the classic collectible Energy Tanks in exchange for "energy bottles" you need to grind through the item collection game to find. Having to get an S-rank in Troia Center is more trouble than it's worth just for an Energy tank. Yet another dumb move. X8 is an AVERAGE game. It's definitely not the best in the franchise or the "X" series. I finished the game and then went back to grind for items - which actually took me longer than simply playing through the game. Like X7, the item game of X8 can be addicting, but it's also very tedious and frustrating. I needed to play through the game 10 times before I had enough money to 100% the game.

After having played through the entire Mega Man "classic" franchise, MM1 through MM11, I decided to play through the Mega Max X franchise. In my observations, MM1 was a good game hampered by some poor technical design issues. MM2 was Mega Man perfected with a fairly perfect balance of challenge, excellent music and memorable presentation. MM3 was a rushed, difficult mess held afloat by memorable music and characters. Every single Mega Man after 3 got easier and more formulaic - copy pasting MM2. The MMX series which debuted on SNES was an upgraded and updated Mega Man for the 16 bit era. It's essentially a PERFECT game. Unfortunately, each MMX game after has tried to clone the best of MMX while adding gimmicks. You'll still need to find armor upgrade capsules, heart tanks and energy tanks- only this time they are even more convoluted to find. Without strategy guides, you'd NEVER find them and face an extremely difficult game to play. The box art makes it appear Mega Man will use a hoverbike often in the game. In reality, this section is maybe 4 minutes long and then it's right back to running and gunning. Personally, I'm no fan of the side scrolling bike levels - especially when it's so fragile it explodes if it hits just about anything. It's very difficult to see obstacles ahead and before you know it, your bike has exploded and you're back on foot. MMX2's true gimmick is THE MAVERICK HUNTERS: a band of mid-stage bosses who serve as bonus battles. If you find their hidden locations and defeat them, you can retrieve ZERO's parts so that you can avoid being forced to fight him near the end of the game. If you don't beat them, you'll be forced to fight ZERO - a boss more difficult than the game's antagonist: SIGMA. The game's bosses are somewhat interesting - but many of them are quite difficult. Crystal Snail is ridiculously hard without his weakness: magnet Mine. A good Mega Man game makes the boss characters easy for a newbie to kill using the default weapon, while giving the experienced player who has the boss' weakness weapon an even easier battle. Some players criticize the curb-stomping of bosses in MM2 and MMX4 with the boss' weakness, but I actually like this and it comes in handy when you are forced to complete the boss rush. X2 is a good game, but not as shiny as X1. The formula for Mega Man X games wasn't actually perfected until Mega Man X4.