WOOT!!!!

I was on vacation, so I guess I'll put three reviews in one post. Kay now, all you inverse idiots, I was just on kongregate.com and Upgrade Complete was the number one game. Oh, come on, I could make a better game all by my factoring self! Furthermore, I did it in an hour. So, here it goes, UPGRADE COMPLETE REVIEW!

The basis of upgrade complete is that you have to buy everything as an upgrade. The shop hwere you buy upgrades, the music, the size of the logos, etc. etc. This was mildly amusing until I got to the title screen, in which case it got old and I stopped caring.

Then came the gameplay. It looks like another game trying to rip off Galaga at first, but it has an interesting catch: You can't die, you must simply prevent all the enemies from crossing the screen. The game starts out hard and gets easy as you buy upgrades, particularly missile launchers, the most overpowered upgrade in the game. You can basically just sit there and fire a bunch of times until the wave is over if you've got enough.

However, the game reminds why upgrades were put into video games in the first place. Replaying the last level a bunch of times to get all the upgrades may seem boring, but I actually did it for no other purpose than to get all the upgrades the game had to offer. It's not a good game, but it has some cool to offer.

On the other hand, I did lake the shooter Pixelvader. Borrowing design philosophies from Touhou, mass precision is required to fight of enemy waves without dying, until, of course, you get all the upgrades. Which is, by far, my biggest complaint with Pixelvader. Once you've got enough upgrades, everything but bosses ceases to be a challenge. Sure, you'll still have fun facing the bosses, but you spend more time fighting normal enemies than bosses. I wouldn't complain if the levels got gradually harder and the bosses, being at the end of the level, were the hardest, but that isn't the case; the difficulty of a level is stable until you fight the boss. If it was a matter of getting to the boss with as much health as you can, I wouldn't complain, but one of the upgrades allows you to regenerate health. If you ask me, removing the health regen upgrade would be the best way to improve the game, as it would solve most of the game's preoblems.

Just as a warning, the first level of Pixelvader is very boring. You may think it's unnecessary of me to mention this, but if I hadn't been exiled from my room by my dog, I probably wouldn't have continued after the first level since it's so boring.

And my last review: Robert Crosby's LAST BLOOD!!!!! My complaints with Mr. Crosby's other works were that, despite being a talented author, Crosby can't consolidate all of his talents into one webcomic. Last Blood feels a lot like a failed attempt to do just that. More time is spent developing characters and the plot doesn't feel like it's there just for lolz. But did it succeed? Unofrtunately, no.

The plot's pretty much Twilight if you replaced the suck with zombies. At least, I think so. Not having ever read Twilight, I guess I'm not an authority on such things. So anyways, the zombie apocalypse happens, and vampires try to protect the last remaining humans, as they are dependant on them for food, proving that they are smarter than us since we don't use the same logic in terms of the environment. Cough Cough factor you all. Then a vampire falls in love with a human and another human has sex with another vampire and then... Yeah. Stuff.

Now, despite his past successes, Last Blood isn't really written that well. I guess I'll blame the other Mr. Crosby since my brain can't accept the possibility of Robert being a zetta bad writer even some of the time. The comic could have really benefitted from being, say, twice as long, as a lot of parts (especially the ending) feel zetta rushed.

As for the characters, despite attempts at developing them, they all feel rather dry and stereotyped. Now, they could be much worse, but I guess I've come to expect more from Robert Crosby.