Let me start at the beginning, Thursday evening my wife and I drove two and a half hours to Lloydminster, Sk (I call it a black hole from which no happiness can escape) and spent the night with my mother. She's a lovely woman but she thought it would be worthwhile for me to sort through all the things I left behind when I moved away and label everything.fun! we stayed the night and in the morning drove another two and half hours to Saskatoon, Sk for a very religious wedding(some would say too religious, the rest would say crazy religious) after spending the rest of the day with my wifes family (lovely people) and a large group of religious loonies it was nice to hit the hay.an hour more driving and I was visiting with my dad and step mom.(this was really nice I don't see them enough). Our last leg of the trip was 5 more hours of driving back to Edmonton, Ab and when we arrived we got to help our best friends move. I love these people like family but they have a lot of stuff...heavy stuff...nine and a half hours worth of stuff.Needless to say I feel like I've been beaten by several angry cossacks. I like helping people but boy do I hurt all over.
Now then, for those of you who've read that riveting bit of literature and are still up for more I have a game review.
Monster Hunter Tri
I've been playing this game for just over 50 or so hours now and it's just fantastic. I have to say it's the most fun I've had on the Wii so far a system that's more of a toy than an actual gaming system.The Good:It's graphically very nice with the exception of the NPC characters who have apparently been copy and pasted from a game on the Nintendo 64. The Monsters for the most part are suitably large and terrifying (It's all very reminiscent of Beowulf)
It has excellent online Co-op which is very easy to set up and use and it also has a friends list that makes finding friends and people you met online and enjoyed playing with very easy. A very wide selection of armour and weapons make for excellent customization with the small exception of a few palette swaps.
The Bad: A new addition to this series is the under water combat which while an interesting idea should have been left out until they knew what the hell they were doing because it's absolutely dreadful. Every time I see that I need to combat a monster under water it makes me want to kill myself. while you're in the water these monsters savage you and relentlessly chase you, if you exit the water however they have very little interest in following you or harassing you with the exception of the Lagiacrus (that beasty on the cover) who shoots lightening out of it's mouth at you until you reenter the water(which now that I read that out loud sounds like a terrible idea). The major problem with the water combat is the sheer speed at which these aquatic monstrosities move through the water. They can be next to you one moment and across the map in another, which means you spend a lot of time very slowly chasing after them or dodging their attacks until you get lucky and they stop nearby you. The second problem is trying to follow them with the disastrous camera control. I've been playing with the Wiimote and the nunchuk which might contribute to the problem as I've heard it's easier using the classic controller but regardless this could have all been fixed with simple camera lock. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998 and they had camera lock-on. 12 years later we don't? there's no reason to leave this out.
The next problem I have with this excellent game is the collection system. To build armour and weapons you need to kill monsters and harvest scales, bones, claws and other grisly bits of monster however some pieces are more rare than others. I don't have problem with random collection quests that involve rare drops but when the whole game is based around this style quest you can't make things insanely hard to find. If I were to risk m y life fighting a three story behemoth to build amour from it's hide why would I collect two claws and some skin when all I need is a tail. I can see the tail, it's right there attached to the thing I just killed why wouldn't I take it! instead I'll take my claws and skin back to camp drop them in a box and head back out to kill yet another monster and hopefully I'll take it's tail...nope! bones and scales. It really doesn't make any sense. They could allow you to harvest less if you took rare items or increase the number of items needed to create items, but making it completely random just reeks of artificially lengthening the game on the part of the game designers. my last problem is the multiplayer. while the online is fine for one person at a time per system why not allow multiple people per system. You can play two players in the arena offline but not online and why can you only use the arena with multiplayer and why can't I use my equipment in the arena instead just a seemingly random mish mash of amour pieces and a choice of four random weapons.any way I'm starting to ramble so I'd better get to...
The Verdict: All in all I'd give this game a 7 out of 10. If you don't mind repetitive games there's enough going on in this game to keep you entertained for many hours. Now if you'll excuse me I need to say later days because I need to get that damn tail!
It has excellent online Co-op which is very easy to set up and use and it also has a friends list that makes finding friends and people you met online and enjoyed playing with very easy. A very wide selection of armour and weapons make for excellent customization with the small exception of a few palette swaps.
The Bad: A new addition to this series is the under water combat which while an interesting idea should have been left out until they knew what the hell they were doing because it's absolutely dreadful. Every time I see that I need to combat a monster under water it makes me want to kill myself. while you're in the water these monsters savage you and relentlessly chase you, if you exit the water however they have very little interest in following you or harassing you with the exception of the Lagiacrus (that beasty on the cover) who shoots lightening out of it's mouth at you until you reenter the water(which now that I read that out loud sounds like a terrible idea). The major problem with the water combat is the sheer speed at which these aquatic monstrosities move through the water. They can be next to you one moment and across the map in another, which means you spend a lot of time very slowly chasing after them or dodging their attacks until you get lucky and they stop nearby you. The second problem is trying to follow them with the disastrous camera control. I've been playing with the Wiimote and the nunchuk which might contribute to the problem as I've heard it's easier using the classic controller but regardless this could have all been fixed with simple camera lock. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998 and they had camera lock-on. 12 years later we don't? there's no reason to leave this out.
The next problem I have with this excellent game is the collection system. To build armour and weapons you need to kill monsters and harvest scales, bones, claws and other grisly bits of monster however some pieces are more rare than others. I don't have problem with random collection quests that involve rare drops but when the whole game is based around this style quest you can't make things insanely hard to find. If I were to risk m y life fighting a three story behemoth to build amour from it's hide why would I collect two claws and some skin when all I need is a tail. I can see the tail, it's right there attached to the thing I just killed why wouldn't I take it! instead I'll take my claws and skin back to camp drop them in a box and head back out to kill yet another monster and hopefully I'll take it's tail...nope! bones and scales. It really doesn't make any sense. They could allow you to harvest less if you took rare items or increase the number of items needed to create items, but making it completely random just reeks of artificially lengthening the game on the part of the game designers. my last problem is the multiplayer. while the online is fine for one person at a time per system why not allow multiple people per system. You can play two players in the arena offline but not online and why can you only use the arena with multiplayer and why can't I use my equipment in the arena instead just a seemingly random mish mash of amour pieces and a choice of four random weapons.any way I'm starting to ramble so I'd better get to...
The Verdict: All in all I'd give this game a 7 out of 10. If you don't mind repetitive games there's enough going on in this game to keep you entertained for many hours. Now if you'll excuse me I need to say later days because I need to get that damn tail!
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