So two things have happened in the land of blogtopia recently.
1:I'm not commiting to one post a month because I haven't really been motivated to do so anymore.
2:Polls stopped working for the time being so there won't be any of those for a while O_O
On another note summer vacation is one day away for myself and many others and that means video games! Over the past weeks I've been messing around with a lot of new games but I decided to take a break for a while and go back to one of my old favorites,
Kingdom Hearts:Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advanced.
Anybody that still owns this dinosaur of a video game console probably has about a 5% chance of playing this game (50% if they own Kingdom Hearts for the PS2). For those who hasn't played the series as a whole then I can start with that. Kingdom Hearts was one of the first fun games coming out onto the PS2 that I remember. The idea was essentially Disney and Final Fantasy fusing together to make an epic RPG, platforming, action, adventure game for one console. When commercials came out everybody laughed but after release, Kingdom Hearts instantly became a PS2 classic and people went beserk waiting for it's sequel. That's where we head off to my game of today.
After the huge success of Kingdom Hearts along with it's cliffhanger ending many fans waited patiently for the sequel. However the waiting period was far to long and multiple false release dates drew many to lose their patience so a Kingdom Hearts game was released for the Gameboy Advanced to quell fans and to tighten the story between Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2.
Unique to the rest of the series, Chain of Memories changed the battle system from an X mashing hit and run battle to a hybrid of card games and beat-em up. Essentially the hero of the game enters a castle and forgets all his past abilities from his previous adventure(forcing the player to start at level one) and must unlock his old abilities using cards that he collects in the castle. Each card has varying strength and results along with most cards being numbered 0-9. The battles play out like a child's game of poker; 9 beats all smaller numbers and 8 beats all smaller numbers all the way down to 0. However 0's tend to play out like Aces do in most playing card games; They can be the lowest number value but also the highest number value(pick up the game or wiki search if you need to understand this).
Along with these mechanics are many other parts of Chain of Memories that made it feel more strategic then it's PS2 counter parts but all battles still take place in real time as you walk around the battlefield and attempt to dodge attacks while swinging you're own weapon back at enemies. All in all this is one game I would definitely recommend to those Kingdom Hearts players that never bothered to try the GBA version and crave a more strategic version I would hunt this game down(try e-bay or some old game store that sells GBA).
Well that's about it, wait was I supposed to have some deep message about what influence this game gives us?
In the game Massive War made by Belugerin games Earth has been sucked dry and although colonies were established on Mars and Pluto it only caused humanity to split into three factions fighting over a new planet with similar topography to Earth before it was resource dead. On the planet "Bluegreen" you play as a commander of one of the three factions fighting for control of Bluegreen using careful troop selection and spending upgrades appropriately.
The interesting part of this game is that each faction has very similar units due to them all being humans originally from Earth but the small differences are made only by less than 100 years of adapting to the new environments each faction controls. The Earth army has some of the most technologically advanced weapons in the game thanks to any reserves of resources they pumped out of Earth to fight on Bluegreen. The Mars army has been forced to adapt to the harsh conditions on their planet and as a result have the toughest and roughest troops available. The Pluto army has been so far away from the Sun that they began to mutate in strange ways even to the point of gaining almost psychic powers.
If I could pick three armies that appear in RTS games and WWII alternate future theories that are represented in Massive War it would be the US showing off their big guns as Earth, Soviet-era Russia toppling out against big odds and surviving the harsh conditions of the Motherland, and Pluto, although not representative of any one country, could possibly just represent any army that made use of biological warfare and more specifically chemicals(almost like the GLA from Generals)
All in all it's a quickie, addicting to play, and the pixel style art makes it run smooth on any computer without you paying a penny.
