When it comes to gaming, the scope of possible discussions are limitless.  Periodically, I discuss music, review some contemporary games and write articles based on more current releases.  Of course, I have a periodic classic gaming project to accompany Video Game Music w/ the James in the works, but what about everything else?

Weekly Reflections is meant for those games that I don’t have room to cover entirely, but feel like talking about, because as much as I love writing about my 3DS and my Pokemans, that’s not everything I play in the course of an average week, and some of those other games deserve at least a shout-out.

This week on PSN a game by the name Moon Diver came out.  A Strider-like action game by the guy responsible for the original Strider, additions to the old formula include a RPG like leveling up system, spells scattered throughout the levels, multiple characters to play as and coop abilities.  I’m in the process of a 4 player run with some friends, and it seems that while it’s a really cool game, and the music is great, the multiplayer in particular was poorly done.  Trophies and progress made in multiplayer sessions apply only to the first player, the camera doesn’t expand to accommodate when one or two players move outside the boundaries, and if you happen to fall off screen, you respawn somewhere a little bit in the center of the screen, and if there’s nothing below when you respawn, you just keep falling down bottomless pit.  Thankfully you don’t take much if any damage, but it’s annoying.  On the other hand, single player is a blast with a camera that actually follows the player making exploration (needed to find some of the spells) a little more possible.  Also, the game tries to artificially jack up the difficulty part of the way through by spamming laser turrets that kill a character in one or two shots.

The most frustrating part of any 4 player experience.

For the Saturday gaming group, while we wait for something 4 players and awesome so we can get back to the usual people, after finishing Grandia last week, we started Shining Force.  Since I’m too lazy to set up the Genesis or order a copy of Shining Force, our only option to play came in the form of a PS3 title : Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection.  Despite a lack of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the collection is very well done with its 9 or so Genesis RPGs easily accessible (including an awesome looking Zelda clone in the unlocks, Golden Axe : Warrior for the Sega Master System).  It’s an easy platinum trophy, and the selection of games is near perfect for the low price it should be selling for, I definitely recommend taking a look.

The opening text to Golden Axe Warrior is classic.

The Tactics Ogre : Let us Cling Together run I’ve been going through with Prota reached a slowdown with the death of my tv input cable.  Valuable lesson that I learned from this experience : don’t buy third party cables, even if they boast a longer cable than first party.  Their construction is as miserable now as they were years ago when third party products earned their bad rep.  At least we got a couple of fights in this week… we’ll never get our review in at this rate -_-.

My Vindictus character is the king of the rape face.

Finally, out of boredom, the group of us looking for something to play started this action MMO called Vindictus.  The available list of characters is a bit limited, but we all ended up with somebody we like playing with, so it worked out.  My early verdict : I feel more involved playing this than WoW (I fucking hate that game after being suckered into playing by 3 people on different occasions).  At least here I can hack, and I can slash, while going through all those features typical to a MMORPG : leveling up skills, buying stuff from the marketplace because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to make it myself, finding items that are used as quest items which turns out to be an incredibly rare drop…  Definitely something to check out if you want a MMO experience that has a more engaging battle system than heavy hitters like WoW and FF11 (not counting 14).