Let me start by saying: I know, it’s been a while.  One post per month doesn’t cut it and although I have been putting in my two cents on Julie’s fine work, I have to get back in to writing my own stuff. The goal is to have Julie and I each writing a post a week. She’s been holding up her end of the deal but really, we haven’t been playing a lot of games lately. So take this as another apology for ignoring you, the community. Sorry. Now on to the business at hand…

I purchased a PSP a few months back for a couple of reasons.  One of the big reasons was to get a chance to catch up on some games I had missed for the system.  Aside from the GTA “Stories” games, I wanted to play the first handheld in the God of War series, Chains of Olympus.  Also, the red, Kratos-etched PSP looked pretty kick-ass (although the subsequent Madden blue edition also looks pretty hot).

Chains of Olympus tell the story of Kratos, man-slave of the Greek gods, fighting the underworld to return the sun to the sky.  This is the first game in the God of War series that I have played and, to be honest, I was a little underwhelmed with the story.  I didn’t find it was well explained and considering the breadth of stories to pull from Greek mythology, the plot should have been much more entertaining.  Instead it was just another ho-hum excuse to hack and slash some baddies.  Perhaps it was my inexperience with the series that caused my confusion as to why Kratos was doing what he was doing.  If that is the case, then the game’s developers needed to think a little more about those of us who were making our first trip to ancient Greece.  It’s all too bad since I understood that the stories were a big reason why the console versions of God of War became so popular.

Story aside, the gameplay holds itself together fairly decently.  It’s a pretty standard, button-based combo system that again trickles in from the console versions of the games in the series.  Occasionally I would put the game down for a week and forget some of the combos or how to beat specific enemies but that can more easily be explained by my general alcohol intake as opposed to a gameplay deficiency.  There were some combos that involved the use of the PSP’s analogue stick that felt unnecessarily difficult because of the design of the nub.  It’s more a critique of the PSP than the game but since this is the first game I’ve played for the system, it’s an unfortunate bystander in my hardware drive-by.

Another consequence of the PSP hardware and its lack of a second analogue stick is that the view is from a fixed, cinematic type camera.  It generally kept up with where I wanted it to be, although it does take a little getting used to since camera control is basically ubiquitous in gaming nowadays.

The game does throw the occasional challenging puzzle at the player and I was able to figure out most of them with little difficult.  There were two times, however, that I found myself stuck in room not knowing what to do next.  I would run back as far as I could and try everything over again with no success.  Both times it turned out that there were climbable walls that I had missed.  Maybe it was my vision going bad, a lack of resolution on the PSP, or not enough gentle persuasion in the level design, but being stuck for thirty minutes trying to solve a puzzle that doesn’t exist is probably the most frustrating and enraging half hour of a man’s life.  Maybe not.

All in all, God of War: Chains of Olympus is an able compendium to the series but I suspect most people would prefer the story depth available from the console games…or perhaps people just want to whip some Greek ass.

Since I didn’t actually play this game, or even look at it for five seconds, you might be wondering where I get off having an opinion on this review.  I just want to say that our *cough*chris’s*cough* lack of posts isn’t necessarily because we haven’t been playing games, but because we haven’t been playing any NEW games.  We’re still slogging our way through Pinata, and even though we’re enjoying every second of it, it’s been keeping us from really digging in to any other titles.  Alas, tis the bane of any completionist.  Rest assured, though, I’ve scheduled a Pinata break so that we can run through Dead Space, and I would have to use some pretty severe force to keep Chris away from Rock Band 2.