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| Wednesday, February 9, 2005 11:39 AM |
| There Are Other Worlds Than These |
 by Fëanor |
First of all, a link to an SNL sketch, which I got via Yagathai. It's a commercial for a geek phone sex line, and I understand every single reference in it. I feel so dirty.
I also feel tired this morning, and it's all Stephen King's fault. I stayed up late last night finishing his Drawing of the Three (book 2 in the Dark Tower series). And I'd already read the book! I mean, it's not like I didn't know what was going to happen. But he's such a damn good storyteller that he made me keep reading anyway. The bastard.
Btw, when I say King is a good storyteller, I don't mean that he's a good writer. He's not. He's actually a pretty crummy writer. But he's fantastic at instilling in you an almost inescapable desire to continue following his stories--to see what happens next.
Anyway, I did end up finishing Drawing of the Three last night. And prior to that, I also finally finished Third Age. I was a little disappointed in the ending. Admittedly, I can't think of a really good way to end such a game. What do you do for a final battle? In the book, what defeated the ultimate baddie was a little wrinkled dude dropping himself and a trinket into hot lava. Not exactly any room for a turn-based combat sequence there. So for their conclusion, the game designers pretty much threw the book in the trash and had you fight Sauron himself.
Yep. Sauron. Maiar, demi-God, right hand of Morgoth himself.
Here's how it happened: I finally got the hang of using the map in the Pelennor Fields area and found my way to where I was supposed to get to. The game then plunges you into a series of really tough battles, all in a row with no time for your characters to level-up or rest, interspersed with in-game cut scenes and some Ian McKellan narrated film clips. First there were three trolls at once, then one of the characters in my group was eliminated in a cut-scene (luckily, she was the least useful character and I didn't miss her at all), and I had to fight the eight other Nazgul, four at a time. But the Nazgul are surprisingly not that tough in this game. Their attacks take off a goodly amount of hit points, but they don't have any special effects that cripple you in any way. Basically you just have to outlast them, which isn't too hard, especially with Aragorn on your side. Every time he got a turn, I just called in the army of the dead. They do enormous amounts of damage to all enemies. Which reveals a small flaw in the game. If you give a character a move as devastating as Call the Dead, make it cost 255 action points to use, but then give the character 3000 action points to start with, why do you also give that character other moves? Why am I ever going to do anything else but Call the Dead? I'm just saying is all.
Anyway, after I wiped out all the Nazgul, I was presented with a couple more cut scenes. I was expecting what would happen next is that either the game would simply end (which would have been pretty anti-climactic), or they'd give me a chance to rest up and use all the stat points I'd gotten from leveling up multiple times while fighting the Nazgul, and then they'd send me out to help fight the battle before the Black Gate--which is kind of the climactic battle of the story. Instead, Gandalf says something like, "Well, we won a battle here today, but Sauron's still there behind his walls in Mordor." And then all the sudden I'm on top of Barad-Dur staring at the giant flaming eye! WTF?! I nearly peed myself. You want me to fight a demi-god now? And how exactly did I get here, anyway? Did I just walk in through the Black Gate, wave to the guards, and take a leisurely stroll to the dark tower and up the stairs?
But logic and faithfulness to source material aside, I have to admit, it was pretty exciting to face-off against Sauron himself. And he was pretty tough, but I kept my head, planned the battle well (with a little help from poppy), and ultimately "defeated" him--although what that really means in terms of the story I don't know, as Sauron was obviously not defeated in combat in the book; in fact, it was pretty clearly not possible to actually even face him in combat. And his defeat was really anti-climactic, as there was no animation of him exploding or anything. My character just did his usual victory animation, and then I got a final cut scene about how there's more of the story that I wasn't going to be a part of, but that my story had only just begun. And that was it.
So they do actually suggest the possibility of a sequel, though I don't really know how they could do it. They'd basically just have to make up a completely new story set in the Fourth Age, and I don't know who I'd be fighting in such a game, since at that point all the wars are basically done. But hey, they made up a lot of crazy stuff for this game, so maybe they could pull it off.
Anyway, after that rather lame finish, I was still itching for more--some kind of further conclusion, or some kind of extra feature that could be unlocked. I discovered that a final Evil Mode stage had now been opened, so I played through that and finished off by becoming Sauron himself and killing the crap out of my characters. I then was rewarded with a bunch of new items, and was left a little confused. What was I supposed to do with these items? I already beat the game. I guess I could play through the end again with better items, but that's not very exciting. It was also kind of annoying that I kept leveling up during the last series of battles but was never able to take advantage of the new stat points to better my characters.
Maybe just for the heck of it I'll go back into the game at some point, travel back to older levels, and just pump up my characters more. I think there are a lot of "feats" or whatever you want to call them that I haven't learned yet. But that might be kind of dull. I'll also probably eventually play the game on the Hard difficulty level (this time through I had it set to Medium), but that won't be for a while, as I'm a bit tired of the game now.
To sum up, Third Age is a pretty great game, but it's also ocasionally buggy and repetetive, and is ultimately anti-climactic.
KotOR 2 comes out today, so it's time to finish up KotOR and pick that one up.
Before I get to that, though, I guess I should probably do some work... |
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