Zenonia post game thoughts

I'm going to stop planning to record the Saturn videos on a Monday, it's a hard day and I just don't feel like being all chirpy down a microphone after having to deal with that.

So now I've got that out the way, let's talk about a game I beat today! Zenonia!......and it can go fuck itself!

If you remember a long long time ago, back when this blog was still fairly new, I did a Free Game Friday feature on this little iPhone RPG, and I think I said some good things about it.  Well after getting through the last section of this game, I can say that most of what I said was complete and utter bullshit.  There are good points to this game, it is fun, but the last two dungeons suck so much fun out of everything that the whole thing feels like a slog. 

The second to last dungeon is this stupid fog of war cave where you can't see shit and getting blindsided by some asshole monster is fairly commonplace.  It was at this point that no matter how long, boring or delayed my trips to work became, I didn't want to touch this damn thing.  So today I just thought "fuck it" and blasted my way through the final part of the game.  I would die constantly getting to the end, but for a mere 3000 gold you can revive with no penalty, and when you do get to the boss, it can't even fucking touch you.

The final dungeon and the build up to the final battle is even worse.  It's a huge fire cave filled with crap, copy pasted enemies and hard to spot floor traps.  It's not a difficult dungeon but good lord is it dull.  After slogging your way though the mobs, you get some piss easy block pushing puzzles, and then you fight the final boss, who I killed using nothing but my overpowered AoE and simply mashing the "hit it with my sword" button.

The sad part of the whole thing is, everything BEFORE these two areas was actually pretty good, I was having a blast with this thing until then.  It just dropped the ball so hard right at the end that even for a free iPod game it's difficult not to be a little bit pissed off.  Oh, and I won't spoil it but the ending sucks too.

So you know what? Even though I told you a long time ago to give Zenonia a go, don't fucking do it.  Despite having not played them, I'm sure Zenonia 2-4 are better games, so don't make the mistake I did and try to play through the series in order unless your some kind of masochist for video game bullshit.

Now that's some BULLSHIT! #1: Nasty Fog of War discoveries

Well this is a segment I'm going to start periodically on here called "Now that's some BULLSHIT".  What this segment is, is little rants from me about shit that happens in games or whatever that makes you just throw you arms up in the air and call bullshit.  There is lots of instances of this both in and out of gaming, so we're probably going to hit a pretty high number for these one day.

Anyway, the first piece of bullshit I'm going to needlessly get angry about today, is the nasty shit you'll find in fog of war in some strategy games, mainly turn based ones.

What I mean by a nasty fog of war discovery is when your playing something like Advance Wars or Civilisation or something like that, and you're happily uncovering the fog of war when BAM! one of the other assholes on the other team has some kind of superweapon that just wrecks your shit.  This is double bad if the game does that thing of letting the enemy get off a free turn because you blundered into it like a retard.

Now, I'm going to make this clear right now.  If you're playing something like starcraft 2, and you walk into some kind of Protoss deathball (or a big fuck off army of tough shit for all you none SC2 players), that's YOUR goddamn fault.  You didn't scout it well enough and it's your own dumbass that caused you to lose that game.

(Unrelated picture lol)

 No, what I'm talking about is like shit that happened to me today when slogging through R-Type tactics.  I'm scouting safely, making sure I can see whats ahead of me before I go throwing all my ships to the grinder, when I encounter some enemy ships.  I'm dealing with them in a manner that allows me to keep my scout ship safe, when all of a sudden a HUGE FUCKING CHARGE WAVE comes out of the fog and just destroys 2 of my units. 

Whats the point of having a scout unit if it can't effectively scout the HUGE 10 panel ship blasting me from the fog!  Now I'm not saying Fog of War is a bad thing, it adds challenge and depth and shit would be too easy without it, but that right there, is some bullshit! 

Anyone who plays strategy games has had this moment at least once, where there has been some unseeable, unexpected sack of arse waiting 3 like spaces of a map away.  So fuck fog of war sometimes, and double fuck the nasty shit that lurks in it too.  Turning missions into trail and error crap, shit off....