Topic: The Weekend in Gaming
So, what has been coming out for every console in sight recently, or at least the 360 and PS3? Games with dragons, and I have duly gone forth and acquired two of these highly anticipated games to try out for myself. The two games I speak of are Blue Dragon for the Xbox 360 and Lair for the Playstation 3. After spending a moderate amount of time with both, I feel qualified to put forth a preliminary opinion of both.
Blue Dragon is a fairly straight forward, paint by numbers Japanese style RPG (Role Playing Game) with a couple of twists brought to the 360 by some of the developers of the Final Fantasy series. So far, the story has been what I've come to expect from these types of games: Young hero forced to take action to save his village/nation/world/whatever. The graphics are nice, except for the strange haze they use liberally that can take it's toll on the eyes, and odd frame rate hits that I didn't expect for a game that doesn't really seem to push the hardware very hard. I enjoy the combat system, especially the way that combat can be initiated with several enemies at once, sometimes resulting in monster fights. Overall, at this point I would recommend the game to fans of the genre, but I don't think that it does anything to appeal to anyone outside of that group.
Lair on the Playstation 3 is a completely different animal than Blue Dragon. Lair is an action game from Factor 5, the developer of the Rogue Squadron games. Anyone that has played the Rogue Squadron games will find Lair very familiar, with the exception of the motion controls that are inexplicably forced on the player. The motion controls aren't abysmal, but it would have been nice to have a choice of control schemes instead of having one forced on me. The game is beautiful, graphically speaking, but does have a few minor issues. One is the lack of responsiveness of the 180 degree turn control mechanism. It only works rarely. The other issue I have so far is the mission structure. It mimics the structure found in Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike far too closely and does a great disservice to the story being told in Lair. Overall though, I've had fun with the game and would give it a recommendation to folks that aren't bothered by having to use motion controls.
Tags: dragons, lair, blue dragon, rogue squadron, rebel strike, factor 5, games, gaming, rpg, ps3, playstation 3, 360, xbox 360, action, adventure, motion
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