Rohit Mordani’s Blog

It is way too late in the night and I am still awake and so frustrated that I am actually writing this blog entry. I am playing the Challenges in God Of War : Chains of Olympus (don’t ask me why but I am) and it is absolutely stupid ! I think there was a lack of QA support for this part of the game ! I have restarted the challenge about 300 times and I am not exaggerating one bit ! These Challenges are so bad that I don’t know where to start. Here is an attemp. I hope someone from Sony and/or Ready at Dawn reads this blog entry of mine and does something about it.

1. To start of with – Why do I have to kill 20 bad-ass enemies without getting hit even ONCE ???
2. The enemies just swing their swords at one place and even though I am far from them I get hit and of course I die cause the challenge is to kill all of them without getting hit even once.
3. There are 5 of these guys coming at me at one time
4. The shield I have is LAME !!
   1. It has to be activated at the exact time. A fraction too soon and a fraction too late and thats it – you’re dead !
   2. Some times the shield doesn’t even activate !!
   3. You can’t keep the shield up for a long time. It works only for a second after you activate it
5. If you press a key to use a combo to kill an enemy then you are a 100% sure to die ’cause you can’t press any other key at that time to block your self
6. It seems that when 5 guys are hitting you at one time all you are expected to do is block, ’cause the moment you try to run, jump or hit back, you’re probably dead !
7. You cannot jump to escape the enemies, so even though the enemies are swinging the swords on the ground and you are in the air – you get hit and die !
8. Sometimes you can’t even see the enemy attacking you because of the camera angle

And the worst part is – this is only the second challenge !! I barely crossed the first one after like 20 retries !!
Don’t get me wrong – I love the entire God Of War series and I have finished them all, but I really hate it when developers go super-crazy and do shit like this. I wonder if the developers ever played the Challenges themselves and finished it !!

My sincere question is – What is the point of making the game so difficult?

Update 1 : I have seen some videos of Challenge 2 on Youtube and I am impressed with the skills and patience some players have. I guess I am old now and don’t have that kind of patience anymore ! I still don’t understand why the developers are so anal about these things. Why don’t have these Challenges on different difficulty levels? I am surely sick of this and if I owned this game (I am playing a borrowed copy) I would take this shit and trade it in for peanuts !

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Update 2 : I have given up on the challenges and will be returning the game back to the original owner !

I just finished playing God of War II a few nights ago and it was awesome ! For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, check out the article on God of War at Wikipedia . God of War is one of the best PS2 games that I have ever played !I can’t wait for the next one – however the 3rd one (and maybe the final one) will come out on the PS3 – I have to get that by then – I think I have 2 years at least for that – whew ! However, there is a God of War coming out for the PSP – that should be interesting too !
I finished the game in exactly a week – that is a record for me. The playing time was approximately 24 hours – a lot of which was spent replaying parts of it ’cause the game is not exactly easy ! I think I enjoyed the story line of God of War I much more, however the gameplay of God of War II was much better – the end of course was left hanging as expected – The tag line for the game had already exposed that – “The End Begins”. The end does not end in GOW II though

To come to think of it – I really never knew about this game at one point of time but once I saw this video – my gaming experience would radically change !! Its the Hydra boss fight.

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Ok – the gameplay in the video above looks really easy – thats probably because the user was playing the game in “Easy” level but it is much tougher and more enjoyable !

Here is some more video of the gameplay…Enjoy !

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As a follow up to “a Brief History of Gaming”, here is a lit of all (well – mostly all) the games that I love

My favourite games throughout the ages
(Though there naybe some more that I maybe missing out….will post them as and when I remember….)
Can you think of any one that you played and is not here and should be? Let me know

PC
+ Prince of Persia
+ Prince of Persia 2
+ Doom
+ Doom 2
+ Descent
+ Descent – Freespace
+ Mortal Kombat
+ NBA Action ’98
+ Need For Speed 2
+ Max Payne
+ Quake 3
+ Unreal Tournament
+ The Incredible Machine
+ MDK
+ MDK 2
+ Mortal Kombat 4
+ EA Cricket

PS2
+ Prince of Persia – Sands of Time
+ Prince of Persia – Warrior Within
+ Prince of Persia – TwoThrones
+ Madden NFL 2003, 2004, 2005
+ NBA Live 2004
+ Ratchet and Clank
+ Need for Speed – Hot Pursuit 2
+ God of War

PSP
+ Killzone:Liberation
+ Ridge Racer
+ Need For Speed : Most Wanted 5-1-0
+ Wipeout Pure
+ Tomb Raider : Legend

XBox
+ Halo
+ Halo 2

XBox 360
+ Gears of War
+ Lost Planet

NES
+ Excite Bike
+ Road Fighter
+ Tiger Heli
+ Pro-Am
+ Super Mario Brothers
+ Metroid Fusion
+ Contra
+ Road Fighter
+ Street Figher

Sega GameGear
+ Sonic the Hedgehog

Really Old Ones (Handheld Nintendo)
+ Donkey Kong Jr.
+ Fire
+ Popeye

It was a really long time ago when my cousin, Manish, actually came back from a vacation (from Lucknow – in Northern India ) and he told us about this cool gaming system that he had played while he was on vacation. He played Super Mario Brothers when he was in Lucknow. I had no idea what he was talking about. A few days later, we all came to know that a store in Shillong (yeah – thats the little town that I am from in North-East India) called “Lila Brothers / Super Bazaar” was actually renting out the “Nintendo Entertainment System” for Rs. 100 per day ! We were shocked – Even though we didn’t know what it was we still knew it was something really nice !

That was a lot of money for those days ! Anyway, somehow we got our parents to give us that money and we rented the NES for a night – of course it wasn’t a school night ! That night has changed my life forever – I know that sounds cliche but that has been the turning point in the gaming work of mine as far as I can remember !

When I played the game I was in shock ! We had NEVER played a game like that. We loved it. Prior to that, the only games we played were the single screen or dual screen black and white Nintendo games such as “Fire”, “Donkey Kong”, “Popeye”, “Snoopy Tennis” and at the arcade (which had 2 games) “Galaxian” and “Pac-Man” . Those were nice but nevertheless it was just some static sprites and nothing like this ! After that – any holidays we got were spent either trying to convince our parents to let us rent the NES or playing it !!
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