Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

The Good
Note: 2nd update. Maybe a game I've played more than a week needs a little better review than just 100% trashing it cough

The sacrifices I made just to fulfill the tech requirements of this game (sigh). Anyway...

Oooh, another Vampire: The Masquerade game...boy have I been waiting a long time for this one. Got quite upset with the previous version due to bugs and hardware conflicts, hoping this one would make it up...

Wow, nice graphics...very nice...takes forever to load, but very nice. Oooh, it's an RPG too, from screenshots I dreaded it was just an adventure game, thankfully for RPG diehards like myself it had the very unique "clan" character creation. Too bad I never played the actual board game.

Graphics
Yeah, baby. Graphics were to my opinion, "ahead of its time" or at least very much appeasing. I must again note the great use of color in this game. I hate horror games with gloomy colors...this isn't one of them. Although still in dark blend atmosphere, Bloodlines has no problem in using bright colors to brighten up the mood...especially the color red.

Story
Though I didn't play the game long enough to actually experience all the story (due to technical conflicts)... I do recall the "sick and twisted" plot of the "underground" of urban cities. Especially at downtown Hollywood I thinks. Most of the missions are essentially one cult or horror movie after another. The effort put in the story is extremely well received at my end anyway.

Music
I must admit, I've never been exposed to Gothic music before. And after playing this game, I was hooked with one of the music tracks you can hear at a local club. Probably also the only RPG in existence where your hero can dance...and really good too! (Final Fantasy X-2, for a dancing-mood-plot game you should be ashamed!) Even the NPC (Non-player-characters) can dance equally as good. I literally, usually just let my hero dance at the club and watch for minutes and minutes...(sad to think that he can dance better than me...oh well)

Combat
Combat was pretty much straight forward. The controlling system was alright, not the best that I've experienced for these types of games (the best is still Fable), but still enjoyable...though shooting was somewhat tricky.

I do remember something else very well (excuse the ladies). This is the first game I know that has woman's breasts bouncing up and down (again, 'scuse the ladies). At the beach there's this Maldovian? vampire, during the dialog I couldn't take my eyes of those things going boing, boing, boing. Egad, I thought I was old and experienced enough to get past these stupid teenage ideas. But nooo, the only dialogs I got from her was boing, boing, boing. Some wrong with my brain man, something seriously wrong....:p

The Bad
Sigh. I don't think I've ever personally badmouthed a whole developer group. But Troika really has gone to far. I'm still pissed about the truck load of bugs they did with Arcanum...and that was still AFTER I downloaded 2 freakin patches.

But before I get ahead of myself, I was seriously disappointed with the previous Vampire the Masquerade game, since the game went way slow and buggy in several scenes. I thought they would gain wisdom from past mistakes....only to find out they also developed Temple of Elemental Evil, which by the way, the demo was better than the game.

Sorry, back to the main issue. Loading game....still loading game...egad it's still loading? Don't remember the last time a game took this long to load? Oh, wait, there NEVER WAS a game that took this long to load. What the hell are they doing with the programming, trying to get a World Record on pissing gamers by long loading hours? Considering installing the game was long enough....sheeesh.

The one major thing that totally wrecked my gaming experience was, guess what? Loading....(again). Can you imagine that E V E R Y single time you go to a different room it takes nearly 5 yes 5 minutes to load. You go to a small store just to see the inventory and it takes 5 minutues to load. I got the minimum spec requirements, probably not the recommended, but hey, does anyone really HAVE to upgrade their PC everytime some idiot developer thinks they should be innovative with the latest tech equipment. The developers of DOOM had the decency of warning players. I think I've wasted more time waiting for the dang game to load than actually playing the dang game.

And there's this final bug that was quite amusing. Everytime I went to the beach (yes, the vampire girl...I'm hooked), suddenly the game gets into "slow motion". The graphics turn in "matrix coding" and you move 1 frame every several minutes. Probably because the dang game hasn't finished L O A D I N G the last time and was still trying to make up for it during gameplay...

The Bottom Line
I don't know about you but none of the people I knew actually finished the game due to several bug or technical related issues that seriously lead to major anger issues.

Another possibly great game ruined by Troika. Way to go fella's! Won't be playing any future games from you guys!

To think, some of these dudes actually were from the Fallout team....sigh.

(Oooh, Troika recently shutdown! Hope it was because of my review! Hah!)