Problem? I'm on my way!

Let me take this opportunity to take you back to the year 2000, the year when George W. took the Earth by storm, the Pace 3D Edge AGP Voodoo Banshee 2D/3D card was teh shit, and a little-known game called Majesty came out. Let me give you a bit more background; some time in early 2000, a younger me was looking through the demo disks that came with a subscription to MacMall Magazine (or something similar). Starved for something to play on my Bondi Blue iMac, I stumbled onto a superb game called Myth II: Soulblighter, incidently made by Bungie, back when they made anything worth playing. This sparked an nterest in the fantasy genre, and so, for my birthday that year I was given a game called Majesty. I was instantly in awe of it, the wit, the charm, everything about it was stunningly well done.
Now, time accelerates, and in the year 2003 or thereabouts I heard about Majesty Legends. I was suppoed to be everything we hoped for, Majesty except that it had 'ZOMG it h4s 3d gr4f1x lololol!1!!'. Unfortunatly Cyberlore, who made Majesty, collapsed before it could be completed. We were all sad.
Finally once more hope has dawned upon the horizon, for yet another company has attempted to strike that elusive chord once more with the creativly titled, Majesty 2. It releases in a few weeks on Sept. 18.

Zenophobe

WTF?

      On tuesday I picked up Zenoclash from the Steam store after being assured by the marketing department that it was the Portal of 2009. Predictably however this statement was a little off. For those who don't know Zenoclash is an interesting amalgam of Heironymus Bosch and Soul Calibur. You control Gaht, as he kicks the asses of the denizens of Zenozoic.

    The developer Ace promised a wonderous mix of brutal melee combat and ranged combat with guns made of scrap metal. They achieved this to some degree but overall it falls a little short of expectations. Granted, I only played for about 2 or 3 hours, but the game seemed intent on pissing me off. For one thing, all of the enemies in this "Brutal hand to hand combat action game" seemed to have impeccable aim with all weapons that did massive amounts of damage to me with every shot. Needless to say, this effect wore off as soon as I picked up the same weapon.

     Moving on, the aiming system is extremely frustrating to use. In order to aim with a gun you are holding, you have to hold down the right mouse button in order to bring up the crosshairs and actually shoot at something. The problem with this is that in order to aim you need to stand reletivly still while the other enemies charge you from all angles. 

      For that matter the game seems to focus far too much on ranged combat rather thatn the proudly touted melee combat. Apart from that though the environments are quite possibly the epitome of source engine graphics. The characters are very imaginative and have a lot of personality.  That alone is honestly enough to keep this game from being a total disappointment.

     All things considered, Zenoclash is fairly good game with excelent graphics(not Crysis good, but still), and an engaging story. Overall, i'd give this game an 8.5 because nothing that I really have a problem with is unfixable with a patch. 

         And no, the saving thins didn't give me any real problems...