I didn't play anything at all tonight.

When I was in the woods earlier, I saw three deer eating. I was able to get pretty close to them, and they didn't run off. There were some swarms of little bugs I had to walk through, and it seemed like they died when they came into contact with me. Strange and gross.

I guess I can talk a little more about what my NGX experiences the last time I played, especially since I was so brief last night.



I looked at a couple of reviews of the game, and even the negative ones (like on jaded gamer) say the game looks good. I've complained about the game being too brown before, but now I'll go even farther and say it's just downright ugly and unpleasant to look at.


When I got went through the pyramid, I had to fight some monsters that looked like trilobites. You had to fight a lot at once, and they regenerated quickly, so it seemed like a good place to use the Vigoorian flails and some button mashing.

I might have to be careful about the phrase "button mashing". I did get a game over or two there, so you can't literally just mash the button and ignore everything else, though I did get several 50+ hit combos when I did that (and I got at least one 50 hit combo when I succeeded). You kind of have to keep moving around, and facing different directions, so no enemy goes without being hit for too long. If an enemy isn't hit for a while, it'll rear up and quickly leap at you, so you might have to jump out of the way. However, when you're in the middle of a combo, you move more slowly than usual.

It's an odd scene. I think it's fairly obvious that you're *supposed* to mash the button there (the enemies are armored on top, so the usual flying swallow move doesn't work, and the sword in general isn't very good; and the war hammer and diahabili...whatever seemed clearly out of the question), plus the enemies attack infrequently, so it's natural to play aggressively rather than defensively. But it's like the designers weren't willing to just have a button mashing scene, either because they knew that would be lame, or just wanted to have a defense against it being lame, so after you've attacked 60 times, an enemy will attack once -- and be unbalanced enough to take off maybe half your life.

I guess I can almost justify it (the point is, can you still spot enemy patterns, even with a bunch of flashing and distracting weapon combos being performed? It could almost be argued -- not by me, though -- to be like a modern version of having to keep an eye on the ghosts while clearing out the maze in Pac Man). The problem with that justification, though, is that again the game can't keep up with your reflexes, and you might see an enemy getting ready to attack, but Ryu might be too tied up with his combo to effectively move out of the way (or counter). It's like they made button mashing both a necessity and a liability, making it unclear exactly what they wanted to do (or wanted the player to do) with that part.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell