I'm back! Funny thing is, I wrote 6 blog posts over the past 3 months, yet never published them.
Over the course of my 12-year gaming career, I have acquired something like a hundred games on consoles ranging from Atari to PS3. Only one of these games is based on the Indiana Jones series. And so, enter Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. I've had this for probably the past decade, but this blog enables me to pour out my (somewhat shriveled) heart. And so I shall attempt to review... this... game.
Alright, first things first: The game was released in 2003 to fairly positive reviews, except for the PS2 version (which was hastily ported from the Xbox), which is glitchier and less polished than its counterparts on Xbox and PC.
It takes place in 1935, just before the events of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom(which, as we all know, is terrible).
Next thing: This game is hard as hell. I know I'm overusing the hard games (2 in a row), but it's true. Your attacks generally do very little damage, yet guns are a 3-hit kill. I guess they're trying to be "realistic", but come on. I want to be grabbing idols and swinging across chasms, not slowly whittling down the health of a single enemy.
The boss fights, however, are something of a joke - you beat a 50-foot long crocodile by simply luring it to your position and trapping it behind a gate. You also beat a 10-foot tall man fueled by whatever steroid the Nazis are pumping into him by simply throwing beakers of an (apparently highly potent) acid. So on and so forth, for 8 worlds.
Fortunately, the levels are quite impressive. Sri Lanka, Prague, Istanbul, and China are all locations in which the game takes place, and are rendered quite nicely for 2003. The levels have a decent bit of variety, with chasms that require up to 3 or 4 whip-swings to cross, walls that require explosives to clear, and often-confusing puzzles.
Finally, I just thought I should mention this: I still haven't beaten it. It probably has something to do with my procedure for playing hard games. What is this procedure, you may or may not be asking? Here it is in instructional form.
1: Play game for two hours.
2: Get stuck.
3: Try to pass section with ancient, beaten-up strategy guide.
4: Somehow fail. Miserably.
5: Turn off PS2.
6: Wait for a year.
7: Rinse and repeat.
...Yeah. By the way, I'll be in Germany for the next three weeks, meaning I'll make even less progress on these than I normally do.
