So, I just beat darkSector. It was a game that I picked up on a whim when it was on sale from newegg for less than $20. That fit within my general rule of thumb which suggests that I purchase any game with an average review score greater than 70% and a price less than $20 (obviously, the game must not belong to one of the genre blacklists: racing, sports, etc).

The game itself was rather decent if a bit short. It certainly wasn't anything groundbreaking or amazing, but it was fun enough to kill an afternoon. It was mainly a third person shooter with a handful of odd gameplay mechanics such as making use of a chakram as a primary weapon and not allowing you to use weapons dropped from enemies for more than perhaps a minute due to various plot machinations. Rightly or wrongly, it appears as though the second shotgun available in the game's shop could be better known as the "win button" because of its ability to decimate most enemies even in the late game.

Immediately previous to playing through darkSector, I had been playing The Force Unleashed. The gameplay in TFU is actually quite decent and the game is generally fun. I found the plot itself to be interesting as an explaination of how the Jedi were hunted down as well as a bit of expounding on how the Rebellion formed. My main complaint with the plot, however, is the complete lack of explaination for why the main character's attitude changes over the course of the game. My best explanation is "spite", but it seems strange that a character would turn to the light side of the force out of spite.

The game also has a few gameplay issues: it is easy for enemies to destroy you by juggling; there are lots of ledges to shove enemies off of, but no way to recover if you fall off one; checkpoints are arbitrarily spaced. Also, the game's acheivements consist primarily of "kill 100 enemies using x" and "kill 500 enemies using x" which is just laziness in a game where they could've instead had "throw an enemy out of the window of a space ship by hitting them with an exploding barrel", "kill an enemy by throwing a jawa at it", "use every force power on an enemy without killing it", or "make three gripped enemies hold onto the same object, impotently hanging on for dear life".

Previous to TFU, I'd been playing Resistance: Fall of Man. It was one of the early PS3 titles and is, again, a decent but not amazing game in its genre. It had a somewhat interesting plot, but was hampered by a couple of issues. Firstly, it was a first person shooter on a console which made the game much harder than it needed to be. Secondly, it used the now-standard "hide to regenerate" health system. Unfortunately, it divided the heath bar into quarters and only let you regenerate up to the next highest level requiring healing items to bride the gaps. This made it very easy to get into the same sort of condition that the "hide to regenerate" systems were implemented to negate: being one hit away from death with no health in sight.

Even before that, I had been playing Infinite Undiscovery--an action RPG for the 360. It is actually one of the more interesting RPGs that I've played lately. The character development of the protagonist is especially interesting (especially since the development is interesting and few games bother to do any advancement anymore). Of course, it is a Tri-Ace game which means that it involves item creation. This, coupled with the free DLC which adds items to shops, means that I spent most of the game with equipment far better than what one would expect to have at such a point.

Finally, going back to Xmas, I got Chrono Trigger DS. It was a very good port of the game--it had none of the problems that the PSX port had with slow transitions. It also added some new content in the form of a few new dungeons and a new ending that helps to tie in the link to Chrono Cross. Unfortunately, the dungeons seem a bit pointless because they open when you get wings on Epoch, but mainly provide equipment that is between the best available for sale and the best that can be found through the end game quests. This led to me going through the dungeons and finding equipment that provided me now benefit. The dungeons are also rediculously full of money (individual chests with more than 100 kilogold in them) despite the fact that there is no reason to ever spend more than maybe 20 kilogold in the entire game. Nevertheless, it is a faithful port of the game and the extra ending may be worth it to long time fans.

I should also note that all of the games that I listed in this (aside from CT:DS) can be found for under $30 with a bit of hunting (at least that's what I paid for them).

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