The Corrente Review Of Games: Volume I, Number Eight (English Edition)

Masthead
The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:
Aeryl, BDBlue and danps.
Please contact any of us with submission ideas or feedback.

The God of War Collection: God of War I & II (BDBlue)

In November 2009, Sony brought its highly rated PS2 games, God of War and God of War II to the PS3. The games remained the same, except for trophy support, but were fully playable on the PS3.

When I first played God of War on my PS2, I was blown away by it. It had been years since I played video games and the difference between Space Invaders and God of War is the difference between the telegraph and the internet. God of War II was, in my opinion, even better. The games looked fantastic. They were violent, but it was classy violence (heh) - all wrapped up in Greek mythology and narrated by Academy Award winner Linda Hunt. The games had beautiful music. They had sex minigames that showed nothing, but still made playing somehow seem a bit naughty. Or perhaps it just made it seem all the more Greek. A little Aphrodite with your Ares and Athena.

Then there were the puzzles. Some battles could only be won certain ways and you had to figure those ways out. Sometimes rooms could only be gotten into or out of by figuring things out. You had to think. And all of it was wrapped up in a compelling story. I used to stay up too late trying to get to the next "chapter" to see what fantastic place that I'd get to go next and who I'd get to meet.

But that was years ago on my PS2. I've since discovered RPGs and upgraded to the PS3. Would God of War and God of War II hold up?

Mostly, yes. The mixture of fighting and puzzles still managed to make me think. While I remembered quite a bit of the tricks, I didn't remember all of them. The games can at times tend toward button mashers, but the programmers did a good job of making the button combos fairly intuitive. Ares, who serves as the ultimate adversary in the first game, looks fairly ridiculous. But then he looked fairly ridiculous on the PS2. The Colossus of Rhodes in God of War II, however, looks fantastic. The Steeds of Time, also in God of War II, are even more stunning in hi-def than they were the first time around. These games clearly cost a lot of money to make and it still shows. There's a luxuriousness to them that existed on the PS2 and continues to exist on the PS3.

There are a couple of things about the games that I found annoying both on the PS2 and the PS3. You cannot save at any time. You can only save at check points and so if you quit the game or it crashes (rare), you're stuck going back to a check point. Second, you cannot change the level of difficulty at any time. If you repeatedly lose a battle, the game will ask you if you want to move to the easier setting. However, after the battle, you cannot raise the difficulty of the game back to where it was - it remains on the easier setting for the rest of the game. There are a few button combos I struggle with - I find evasion to be particularly difficult to do in the midst of battles - and battles that require me to hit these combos often don't go all that well, even if I'm easily beating the game the other 95% of the time. The result is that where one of these combos is required to win a boss fight I either have to fight it a gazillion times and hope to somehow make my middle-aged fingers move the right way or I have to commit to playing the rest of the game on an easier level. That's very frustrating.

Overall, however, the God of War Collection is bloody good fun and it's a bargain. You get two excellent games for around $30.