Zone Of the Enders
I went down to Apollo (British vid/DVD/game rental chain shop) yesterday, hoping to find SSX Tricky or Jak and Daxter. Sadly, my local branch is absolutely tiny, and they only ever have about 12 different PS2 games on the shelves at any one time! I might've had better luck if I'd walked down to Teddington, which is only 20 minutes walk away from Hampton Hill (the most boring, and probably the smallest, village in the LoBRuT), and has an Apollo shop about six times the size. However, I really couldn't be bothered, and I scanned the shelves for the fourth or fifth time, hopefully looking for something I could rent for three days (games are four quid for three days, which isn't bad considering they charge 3.50 a night for films!). Sadly, despite there being at least 60 PSOne games on the shelves, I had played most of them! And the remainder were shoddy titles which were mostly movie tie-ins. And I still haven't got my N64 up and running, despte having bought it around 2 months ago, so the shelfload of 40-odd Nintendo titles was out of the question. However, I had a fiver burning a hole in my pocket, and I was pondering whether to get something I hadn't seen and might or might not like (Evolution) for one night, or get something I knew I liked (SSX) for three nights.
And then I saw the ZOE box on the shelf, and decided I might as well rent it. I'd pondered whether or not to get at least the last four times in visiting Apollo, and despite the fact that OPS2M gave it a 9/10, I was wary of branching out into something new, especially a genre I had never played before and had no idea whether I'd like. But yesterday I decided why not, and borrowed the thing, thinking that if I didn't like it there was always the hour-long MGS2 demo to play with.
I didn't need it at all! ZOE is one of the best titles I've ever seen! Obviously, the graphics are superb (what else would you possibly expec from a game that runs on a 128-bit console?), but the gameplay is very engaging and very addictive. The story is saga-like and unfolds during gameplay. I was expecting it to be 'fly to town, kill bad guys, fly to next town, kill more bad guys, etc', but it isn't like that at all. The tasks you have to fulfil are very different and challenging, sometimes to the point of frustration, but once you work out what you were doing wrong and successfully complete it, you'll feel like a god! And a god in a 75-foot flying killing machine, come to that! This game really makes me want an Orbital Frame of my own (though I've no idea what I'd do with it, or where I'd keep it for that matter).
The controls seem so difficult at first, but after just 5 minutes, they literally become as intuitive as breathing. My only gripe is that I'm really glad I rented it instead of buying it. I completed it in less than 6 hours! It lasted me from Saturday to Sunday, but only because I started playinh at 3:50 pm on Saturday. If I'd started playing in the morning; I'd've done it in a day. So I'd be really cheesed off if I'd spend 40 quid on the real thing. But when it goes platinum and is on sale for only 15 or 20 quid, it'll definitely be worth a full purchase. The ending made me cry a bit, too, but I won't spoil it here.
And that MGS2 demo isn't half bad either.
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Hand me my flamethrower... it's the one that says 'Bad Motherfucker'.
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