Hey everyone,

It's been over a month since I started playing Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and I am finally reaching the last chapters. I'm clocked in at about 18 hours of total playing time and during this time I've formed some strong opinions about the game.

First I'd like to talk about the Loading Time. I installed the game to the harddrive which takes a little over 3 GBs and it's suppose to shorten the Load times. I haven't played the game without installing the game, but from what I've read about it in forums, the Install shortens beginning chapter loading times, but not in-game load times. One of the annoying things about Ninja Gaiden Sigma is that when you're traveling around you'll come across loading zones. No matter how long you stay in that zone, every time you walk across it the game pauses and takes about 2-3 seconds to load. This sounds like it's not so bad, but considering this is next-gen and very frequent, it's quite disappointing. Some people wrote that if you don't have the game installed, it plays better during in-game; however, chapter load times are longer. Considering how many times you die in Ninja Gaiden, I'm not sure which is the lesser of two evils.

The second thing worth mentioning are the graphics. Many people in the forums agree that the in-game graphics are nice, but Techmo not redoing the Xbox CGI cut-scenes is really disgusting. These scenes are especially distorted. As for frames per seconds, many report that the game is less smooth when installed. After I beat the game, I'm going to uninstall the file and test several save files to see if the game is any less choppy.

And lastly the third thing I'd like to say is that Ninja Gaiden Sigma is an awesome game with some flaws. The combat in Sigma is superb; however, the camera angles can be cumbersome. Often there is just too much action going on that it's hard to find time to control the camera. Along the same lines, the acrobatics in Sigma are so precise that the tiniest mistake will cause a lot of frustration because you will spending a lot of time jumping, wall climbing, and bird flipping over and over again to progress to the next location. The game is also ridiculously difficult in the beginning. Black Spider Ninjas kicked my butt, but later become nothing since as you progress, you get noticeably stronger and eventually die less.

That being said, because Ninja Gaiden Sigma is such a challenging game, it certainly is very satisfying as well. I plan on finishing it up this week and will start playing Persona 3 whenever it's back in stock at GameFly.

I'm also looking forward to playing Wild Arms 5 when it's released at the end of the month. I've been a big fan of the Wild Arms series, playing it all the way back in 1997 on the PS1. The only Wild Arms I didn't beat was 3, and I wasn't too impressed with Alter Code: F. However, I did enjoy WA4 and welcome the new Hexagon battle system so WA5 should be really good. That's all for today, later all!