jsharbour

before anyone accuses me of not giving it a chance, I spent 50 hours in this game. every minute spent working on an outpost was a waste of my life that I will never get back. designing my ship was fun once I figured it out and I spent way too many damn hours fiddling with the damn thing to try to figure out how it works. And then you have to research for hours and hours and hours to get the stuff you need to make a proper ship. My advice: ignore all of the bogus crafting and upgrading features and just do the main quest line. All of the side quests are a complete waste of time. If I had just played the main story and ignored everything else, then I would have gotten maybe 40 hours of enjoyment out of it and then moved on. instead, I assumed the sandbox play was the most fun part of it so I started with that. that was a mistake. it is not the best part, it is not even necessary and a waste of time and frustrating. I've been playing Bethesda games for decades. starting with Morrowind. I have actually looked at arena and dagger scroll I think it's called but that was so long ago and I didn't play them through. Morrowind was my first Bethesda game played to the end. And interestingly, though I did love knights of the Old Republic 2, I did not ever get into New Vegas, which was done by the same third-party studio. just mentioning, New Vegas is not a Bethesda game. I played it for a while and the combat was stupid. All of the enemies just rushed right at you. so I immediately quit after a few hours. I played Fallout 3 through several times. And all of the DLC. played Fallout 4 several times, plus DLC. Skyrim, played it through six times on different platforms, and the DLCs were not very good but I did them. Skyrim is a 10 even with the issues and annoyances. I would say the special edition is the 10, while the original game was quite buggy and a lot of the achievements were broken. The original game on 360, I would give a six but the story was immersive. when the story is that good, then you're more willing to put up with bugs. like raining mammoths. which brings an average of like 8 for Skyrim? And Fallout 4 had its own share of bugs but the game was fun and immersive. I didn't enjoy it as much as three. it was like a 7 for me. such a gift Starfield a 4 after pouring 50 hours. actually 60 now because I spent more time on just the main quest storyline and gave up on crafting, etc. so a good 50 hours plus, and I don't ever want to play this game again. you can't go anywhere in Starfield. you go to like a one-room area and then go to another one room area. it's like the whole game takes place in the cube. remember that movie, cube? you exit one portal and go into another place and there's something new in there and even the space travel is just another room with a space backdrop. And fast travel is just going through a bunch of cubes to get to where you need to go. really it's so bad. there is no SOD for this game. 4/10 and I debated giving it a three. I wish I could get a refund. but I gave it a chance. I can honestly say I gave it a fair shake and it failed.

3 years after release, it is clear that CD project has spent the time to fix this game and make it great. Three years! That's a long time. I did a complete playthrough of 60 plus hours and it was a blast. a totally immersive enjoyable experience. on the series x this time.

Crashes constantly and full of bugs. I'll wait for a few months.,...........

The 10-star reviews are from **** who did not complete the game, they spent a few minutes or a couple hours looking at it and it reminded them of the old days and they immediately reviewed the game. Because you CANNOT finish this game. The load times become exponentially higher with every minute of gameplay. I call **** on anyone who claims to have finished the final act of this game. It is fraud. It is ****. It is unplayable.

I rarely give out 5-star or 10-point (100%) ratings on movies and games since there's always something wrong with even the most masterful work of art. But in the case of Skyrim, I can't bring myself to take off any points for any flaws in the game. I first played it in 2012 on the Xbox 360, with the expansions, and it absorbed all of my free time for several months. Easily 150 hours into it. Then I bought the PC Legendary edition and did the same thing again in 2014 (and another 100 hours)! You'd think I would have had enough by now, and I thought I had enjoyed this game as much as I needed to. Yet, I found myself buying Skyrim for Xbox One, despite getting the Special Edition upgrade for free in my Steam account. (I'm a **** for console games). Played it all the way through again, with all expacs, and loved every minute of it. I can only hope Bethesda puts as much TLC into TES 6. No, I'm not a fanboy, I'm a fanman.

This game has the worst stealth of the entire series--that is to say, there really is none, even though it's hyped in skills and items. Useless. Stealth does not exist, it is only icing to make the player feel as if it's happening. Guards will spot you through walls, around corners. When one guard spots you, 100 guards come running to the scene. I have personally watched guards materialize into thin air, Star Trek style, to rush my character. That's complete **** The parkour is the most improved of the entire series to this date. I bought this game late after all the early complaints had been addressed, so my rating is based on the "fixed" version of Unity. The missions are absolutely stupid. I rated only one of the pointless side quests 5 stars; all the rest, including all of the main missions, got a 1 or 2. Mainly, because stealth does not work. For instance, a mission to assassinate someone inside a building crawling with guards. So I'm on a window ledge waiting to kill a guard inside. He walks up, spots me, 100 more guards show up, shooting at me through the wall (apparently the window is 10 feet wide). I crawl a few feet away, be still for a few minutes, and all goes back to normal. Translation: Suspense of disbelief blown. Here I am, an assassin, infiltrating a royal house, clearly up to no good, and the guards just give up after 2 minutes and walk away. I realize the game can't accommodate them actually searching the grounds, but give me a #*@*%^&# break. There's no way to attract a guard to come toward your hiding spot. He might just wander by but usually does not. So what can you do? You have to basically complete the missions exactly as the designer intended because there's no way to misdirect a guard to sneak by or kill him silently. It's all just bollocked up and not fun. While completing sequence 9, I became so agitated my blood pressure went up, and I just began screaming at the game. Not because I screwed up. This late in the game, I know what the #*@# I'm doing. Because the game does something unbelievably stupid that causes me to restart at the last checkpoint. In other words, I didn't do it EXACTLY the one way it must be done. So much for open world. That's **** There is no open world here, it's a big city scape full of useless treasure chests if you want to waste 50 hours opening up fkg chests. Which gets old after about 1 hour. This is yet another example of an Ubisoft game that had so much extraordinary potential--like Splinter Cell Blacklist--but the stealth is completely broken so it's just NOT FUN. Although I quit Blacklist after the first few missions out of utter frustration, I stuck with it in Unity because the story was interesting. The gameplay is the usual horrible Ubisoft **** but the story is enjoyable so I suffered through stupid **** missions created by incompetent designers and playtested by fans rather than real QA people. A real QA team could not have tested this game. I will absolutely never touch this game again after having finished it. Never again! Black Flag, though, was enormously fun and replayable. The Ezio series was fun, though it too had enormously frustrating problems with parkour. So there's the rub: Unity fixed most of the serious flaws in parkour, but STILL manages to anger the player into near controller-smashing rage. I don't have anger issues. This game brings out rage in me in the same way that a bad driver on the freeway does. It's a justified rage because my best effort has no impact on the situation. So, yeah, that's the best analogy I can think of: Playing a typical AC game is like commuting to work with idiots on the road. At least in AC my life isn't in danger every day, but the emotions are the same.

The "10" reviewers are ignorant arcade players. Period. Where did all the tech go? Customizing cars is what Forza excelled at. Now there's no wrenching involved. You can upgrade various parts to "Street" or "Race", and it doesn't even tell you what the stock parts are. Is that a 5.0, 4.6, 1.8TT? No idea! Because it doesn't tell you. Just a generic speed rating. I got fed up and quit playing for a long while. Then I gave Forza 6 another try, and found a drivatar setting that turns off aggressiveness. I run it at above avg or one step higher and usually get into 1st place within the first lap, so that's a good sign. But, any AI level higher fakes the cars rather than increasing actual driving skill which ruins the experience. The AI cars still crash stupidly around every corner. Such terrible AI. But at least they don't actively go after you with that setting turned off. They still accelerate without regard for the car's actual capabilities. Fake challenge. Drivatar AI is so stupid it's almost unplayable solo in career mode. Out of 23 cars, the bottom 12 will just try to ram you off the track while the top 12 will speed up or slow down %-wise regardless of the cars' capabilities (such as top speed, which is ignored). This is supposed to be semi-pro/pro racing, and half the cars ram right into the player!? And Turn 10 thought that was a good idea? AS if that's how pro racing works? What is this, Daytona USA, circa 1995? At higher difficulty setting, the top 2 cars will accelerate like Star Wars pod racers regardless of the car, and then if you manage to pass them, they suddenly seem to have engine trouble because they fall WAY behind quickly. Another thing that irritates me is you get a ton of money and free cars and really don't even have to work for them. I get that Turn 10 wants players to experience a lot of cars but there used to be a challenge to it. I also miss seeing ACTUAL component names and performance data. Now it's dumbed down to the point it's not fun at all for a gearhead. Since when did Ford make a 5.7L V8? Or a V12? That ruins the fun for me further beyond the driving problems. Previous Forza games used actual hardware from real companies for upgrades, like Roush and Saleen equipment to upgrade Mustangs, and real Ford engines for engine swaps. Instead, it looks like every category has the same generic 5.7L engine upgrade: Ford, Chevy, and Dodge. Unless I missed something. That ****. For the Fords, you should see the 5.0L (GT/Boss 302), the 5.2L GT350, the 5.8L GT500, etc engines. Such a shame. So much potential. And where is the Boss 302 Laguna Seca? Where are the REAL cars? After the 12th Lambo I have lose interest in supercars and want a real-world driving experience pitting real American cars against other real American cars--or maybe an exotic from time to time. No luck, the cars are too limited. Forza 4 was far superior to this game in the most important aspects that matter to a racing fan. From the car upgrades to the car SELECTION to the AI, this is a downgrade. Besides larger scale tracks with dust and night and rain, the graphics aren't far enough beyond 4 to accept the dumbing-down of the game to this low level.

This totally underrated game was the most fun I've had with the Xbox 360 since Halo 3 launched. The upgradable weapons added an extremely fun gameplay element. The boss bad guys were fun to take down. The story might not have been unique or new but it moved the game along nicely and I enjoyed myself. Haven't found a game quite as good as this in the shooter genre until the new Tomb Raider (for similar reasons!). p.s. I don't hand out 10-star reviews often.

This game got ripped a new one by whiny "day 1" players who pitched hissy fits when it was launched with bugs. Granted, that's a big no-no, but it's the norm today with all the crooked game publishers using customers for final beta. I enjoyed Ghosts, but only played solo campaign, not multiplayer. Apparently 95% of players only play online so I'm the minority here, but I enjoyed the Riley missions and the graphics and the story was pretty good.

90 miles an hour in the buggie, hit a tiny crack on the side of the road, stopped dead--with no impact or collision of any sort. That threw me completely out of my SoD. I do disbelieve it and this game ****. The shooting isn't interesting, either. Bad guys will just stand in one spot and dodge back and forth predictably. I was expecting humor since the story is such a joke, but there really isn't any, it's just a poor man's Fallout 3. I lost interest after 3-4 hours and quit.

Launched myself off the Coliseum and missed the the hay. Remember the scene in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray's character experiments with suicide? Been there, done that. Correction: Ezio has been there, done that, while possessed by me. I have a real love/hate relationship with this game. It's like playing an 18-hole golf on the most epic course in the world, and getting rained on at hole 15, unable to finish the game. I so wanted to quit from about the halfway point onward but had committed too many hours into it and wanted to see it to the end. The controls are erratic and extremely frustrating, when Ezio just WILL. NOT. FREAKING. GO. WHERE. YOU. WANT. I had to be very, very patient in order to not rip the disc out and frisbie it across the room and then take a mallet and break it into a million little pieces and then melt them down in the fire, after the umpteenth time Ezio jumped into the middle **** of guards instead of up to the next ledge as I'd wanted him to. I controlled my frustration, became Zen with the game, recruited my brotherhood, and went on a killing spree throughout Rome. The endgame is extremely rewarding, but it was a parting gift at best after all the violent arguments we'd had. But, it was best that we separate then and there.

I'm a fan of retro games, even though I'm not very good at them. I enjoy it because I played these games in the arcade as a kid. But, this collection is CLUNKY. It's just not well done, feels thrown together without much thought put into it. The XBL games have achievements which is very cool, and the rest of the classic emulated games ran fine. But, loading times throughout are unacceptably slow. These ancient games are only about 256kb roms at most, so it's not like they have to stream content off the disc, they should come up immediately. I'm not impatient but by the time you wait for every game to load it's not easy to just jump in for a quick romp through a few old games--a-la popping in a quarter, like it should be. Why is it so slow? When I'm in the mood to play these games, I don't want it to be a small ordeal to get to playing. It's not convenient or pleasant, in other words. It's maybe a trite complaint but multiply it by 30 games and you have a frustration-inducing arcade experience--quite the opposite of what you want to feel when firing up ancient games for a little nostalgic fun. I was a little disappointed in the sluggishness of the emulated games, as well as the menus. There's obvious screen tearing in several games which hints at poor emulation running on the 360. The loading time for the menus and the disc startup is unacceptably slow. There is no title screen, just a menu to go to the XBL editions or the classic emulated versions. That's all there is for a title screen, so why does it take so long to load? I wouldn't think more than 2-3 seconds is needed. Also, after an XBLA game is finished, you're dumped back into your Games list, not Namco Museum, so you have to RUN IT ALL OVER AGAIN! I also had trouble getting the games to work well with my Street Fighter IV fightstick (which emulates the D-pad). Most games worked with it but responded poorly to the D-pad, as if the games are given priority control with the LS instead? I won't speculate, just disappointed that D-pad control is not very good. Dig Dug, for instance, is almost impossible to play with the stick, despite the fact that this and the other games were originally designed for exactly that kind of input. I won't fault the product for that, since it does not claim to support it, but basically that means D-pad input doesn't work very well. Why? I can guess that the delays in emulation have something to do with it, poor framerate, sluggish input. A casual player might not ever notice, but try playing with just the D-pad instead of LS. Since I'm so unhappy with it, I'm returning the game. I'll go back to Midway. If you enjoy just the Live Arcade remakes, then it's probably worth the purchase but the disc has to be inserted to play them! Live Arcade Games (with achievements): Dig Dug Galaga Ms. Pac-Man New Rally-X Pac-Man Xevious Emulated Classics: Baraduke Bosconian Dig Dug II Dig Dug Arrangement Dragon Buster Dragon Spirit Galaga '88 Galaga Arrangement Galaxian Grobda King & Balloon Mappy Metro-Cross Pac & Pal Pac-Man Arrangement Pac-Mania Pole Position Pole Position II Rally-X Rolling Thunder Sky Kid Sky Kid Deluxe Super Pac-Man The Tower of Druaga

Unplayable due to numerous bugs (even a year after release). I waited a year before buying this game after hearing all the rumors about bugs. They were not fixed and the game is still unplayable, and all of the people who posted 3-star or higher reviews either did not play the game on an Xbox 360 for more than 10 minutes or they didn't even run it, and just like the artwork on the box, or the youtube videos. Whatever the reason, they could not have played this huge disaster ****. It hard locked my Xbox twice within two hours. Had to unplug the power cord to reset the Xbox. That's a big no-no. You don't wreck the core system like that with a crash, people. If the game had been even REMOTELY tested by QA people, this would have been a known issue. Secondly, the character keeps getting stuck in the environment, like in a wall, or in the level-up ring in the Hero's Guild. There, after leveling up my abilities, my character stood frozen, unable to rotate or move. So, naturally, I loaded a recent save just outside the Guild. My character was naked and the game was seriously glitched at like 1 FPS, totally unplayable. I killed the game, re-ran it, and decided to give it one more try. I got as far as fighting the Hobbes on that farm. When I didn't beat the girl's score, the game wanted me to reload an old save to try again. Except, it hadn't bothered to DO a save before that began, so I was back to about 20 minutes in the past, running through the forest again to get to the farm. Searched for workarounds. Cleared the HD cache on my 360. Let it sit on the title screen for a while as suggested. And you know what? After that, after the hard crashes and getting stuck in the game level, I'd had enough. Deleted off my HD.

I had such high hopes for this game and was utterly stunned by how bad it was. Not just that it's a flawed or bad game, or has some bugs--it's completely unplayable! I spent a good 8 hours on the 360 trying to get through the story mode but it's like the developers didn't want me to enjoy it or even finish the game, like they went out of their way to make it as bad as possible--like spite against a publisher that didn't pay their contract or something. This absolutely deserves a 0/10 rating and I'm an old gamer/software developer, not just a whiner.