Advent Rising (2005)

I picked up this ($6) along with HL2 Orange Box that I got on sale from gogamer. While I could easily feel Advent Rising's console roots I still had fun with it for most of the game. Its basically a sci-fi 3rd person jump/run/gun game. I did enjoy that there were multiple alien races, both good and bad, with traitors in between.


For what I played there was lots of different areas. From the human space station, to a brown planet, to running through a city as it falls apart and then to alien space stations and other planets. Besides on foot, it had some speed buggy action that was OK. Not great but not bad as it was mainly used to run down the enemy and jump a few gullies (if you failed there was a nearby checkpoint to respawn at). The gun and jedi-like powers were fun (I had too much fun blasting them off ledges or through glass tunnels to their doom! mwahhhaaaahhhaaaa!!)


One thing to watch though was if you hit a savepoint (where you would start at game restart) or a respawn (where you would start at respawn during the same game). During the same game progress wasn't hard as respawns were close, but respawn areas (checkpoints) did not equal savepoints (where the game starts on reload) so sometimes you had to replay some sections if you were starting the game the next day vs reloading during same play session.


I made it to the end of Chapter 6 but couldn't get to the Epilogue even with cheats. I was unable to defeat the giant monkey thing that reminds me of the scene in 'Return of the Jedi' with the Rancor. While the monkey could not beat me (godmode!) I was unable to beat him. I could not 'focus' on the rock to throw it back on him more than 1 lucky time. It really seemed like an odd boss fight too as the big monkey isn't anywhere in the game up until that point (A previous bounty hunter boss at least made sense). I had fun up until then, though I did start resorting to cheats during boss fights (I hate boss difficulty jumps). I got my $6 from this game, but I'm glad I didn't pay full price. I guess I could youtube or fully read the walkthroughs to see how it ends.


Glad I tried it, but I just don't have the will to finish it. After a few reloads I'd switch to God mode for most boss levels. But the monkey boss required a special kill (lift and drop the rock he is about to throw) which I only did once after running around forever. Its giving me to many Donkey Kong 1 flashbacks for me to continue (the rock looks just like one of DK's barrels to me....the trauma!).


So I can no longer continue to try and finish this game, which is sad considering God mode normally allows this, but even with that I still couldn't defeat the monkey. Maybe its a message...That we are still monkeys and unable to move past that stage of evolution. We are not as evolved as we thought we were. Of course thats stupid..but I think I'll go have another banana and toss some barrels around.


But then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to - to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, they knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me...