The Blog of CCJAD

Well, finally got back round to posting something, so I guess I better make it half decent. Since I seem to be just playing/reading/listening to short bursts of things recently, I'm gonna give some of them mini-reviews based on my first impressions (hence the title, cause i r smrt) on them! Fun for all :P

Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin on Nintendo DS

Played a whole... ten minutes of this round at Calum's a few days ago, and instantly realised I need to get it. I liked the old AW games, despite never having managed to actually complete one (always get stuck at sky battles, just can't do them for some reason), but this one is fantastic looking just for the update in graphical style. If you don't already know, the basic premise is the world has been hit by some kind of disaster, meteors or some such thing - I'm guessing it'll turn out to have been a SUPER SECRET PLOT of some kind - and the bad guys are all having a massive looting murder party. The game opens with your character, a recruit with a name I can't remember, crawling out of some wreckage and getting saved from said bad guys by The Good Guys. The first thing that hit me was how realistic things were looking now, with them ditching orange jumpsuits for army fatigues suitably covered in apocalypse dust. The battle system seems more in depth too, and all reviews have been positive. So, all in all, instantly hooked on this one. Thumbs up get!


Lost Odyssey on XBox 360

Well, I'm about an hour into this one, and so far all I can say is 'What the hell?'. Here's some MSN quotes I've came out with whilst playing:

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I think I need to restart and play whilst paying attention rather than just running through it though. Despite these complaints, the storyline so far is really good, and has made me want to keep playing it, especially the 'recovering lost memories' aspect of it because they are genuinely interesting. Jury is still out on this one.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in Manga

Well, this first impression is of the first volume of the manga, which is good for it. Had I been reading it online, I would've stopped after the first couple of chapters. It suffers from trying to give us a lot of the japan-only backstory in a short amount of time, and dumping us into a slow-moving intro right after that. I was bored, and only reading on because I'd paid for it and I'll be damned if I wasn't finishing it no matter how bored I was. After the start, I was glad I did. Things heat up very quickly, and the fights are intelligent enough to keep you looking closely rather than skipping through to the next story part. The story follows Jotaro Kujo, the third or fourth JoJo in the proper story as he believes he is being haunted by a demon. He soon finds out that it is actually a mysterious psychic being called a Stand, which has appeared because of his will to fight after the families age old enemy Dio is brought back to the world. Soon, more Stands appear - both good and evil, and those in between - and the race is on to destroy Dio before he becomes too powerful. I've yet to buy more of this, but it'll certainly keep me interested if it keeps up the pace it sets towards the end of the first volume. Another thumbs up for this one!

I do have a couple of other mini-reviews to make, but this post is getting rather long so I'll keep them for another time. In the meantime, I'm going back to being excited about Auchinawa and working on my games programming.

Bai for now,
Chris