Yesterday, while on my way to my girlfriend’s house, I passed by another Blockbuster. Having pillaged every Blockbuster in my city, I decided to check out the Blockbuster close to her house to see if I can find some gems in their clearance bin. While their selection had no shortage of old sports games, generic shooters and crappy movie-based games, I did pick up some stuff and there were other games worth noting.
Hit the break to see what I found.
Soul Calibur IV
I’ve never taken 3D fighting games all that seriously. I’ve always been a Street Fighter purist. However, during a period when I was starved for good games on my Gamecube, I picked up Soul Calibur II on clearance at Costco and had a lot of fun with it. It does have a lot of depth for those looking for that type of experience, but for me, it was a game that looked great with a fairly low barrier of entry. Unlike something like Street Fighter, I was able to essentially mash buttons and still feel like I was accomplishing something.
I picked this up for $10. It’s something that my brother and I can play whenever the mood strikes, and Soul Calibur games generally have good and more fleshed-out single player experiences, which should make getting my money’s worth fairly easy.
Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights
Like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, I picked this game up because I was entitled to a free $4.99 game with my purchase of Soul Calibur IV, and this was the lesser of evils available at that price. I’ve played the demo before to know that this it’s not terrible, but it doesn’t stand out either, except for the fact that the game title sounds like the title of a porno movie. The other options at $4.99 to me were three year-old sports games and Blacksite: Area 51, which is another generic first-person shooter. Having filled up my capacity for crappy first-person shooters thanks to Turning Point, I decided to mix things up and grab Juiced 2 instead.
Listed below are a few games I thought were worth mentioning that I found in the bargain bin:
Devil May Cry 4 – $9.99
This was the highly-anticipated sequel from the series that spawned the likes of God of War, Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno. The reason I didn’t pick this up is that, I don’t care for this genre at all. I have dabbled in both DMC and Bayonetta in the past and neither of them did anything for me.
Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures – $9.99
For a minute, I actually considered picking this one up. The character-based action adventure Lego games have been fairly good for what they are since Lego Star Wars, but I’ve never gotten into these, either. Ultimately, there wasn’t enough to motivate me to play this game, even at $10.
Avatar: The Burning Earth – $9.99
This game put me in a very weird space. I have no interest in Avatar: The Last Airbender. I also know that this game sucks. However, at the cost of $10, I could get 1,000 achievement points in essentially two minutes using the most famous achievement loophole ever. In the last three months, I’ve been able to boost my gamerscore by over 6,000 points, and I would be welcome to earning more. The problem is, by buying a crappy game just for achievements, I set a precedent and possibly open the floodgates that could lead me to spending countless hours playing crappy games for easy achievement points. If this was a $4.99 game and I was able to get it for free with Soul Calibur, maybe then I wouldn’t feel bad about picking it up. However, spending money on a crappy game just for achievements seems like it could be a very slippery slope to me. Did I do the right thing by passing on this?
In Third Person 