... and since I've basically been mainlining Xbox 360 games lately, I think that now is a fine time to look back and reflect. Meditate, even. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm pretty lucky in that I have very giving friends (and even friends of friends of friends) that have been steadily unloading games for me to play like a Darma supply crate (or is that too soon?). It means that I've only actually paid for two games outside of the pack-ins that came with the machine; and I haven't even come close to touching those.
What have I touched? Perhaps more importantly, what has touched me? Lovingly? Well, shit, let's do some short reviews. It's my List Issue...
Halo ODST:
Again being the first Halo game that I've even considered playing, a lot of people are telling me that I started at the bottom of the quality totem pole and should have just started with Halo 1 and moved chronologically. After playing ODST, though, I'll say that I still really don't give much of a shit, but that doesn't mean that I didn't have a good time. The combat was fun and the first mission in the 'sploded city was pretty neat. However, it didn't really do anything that touched my soul like the many, many other Xbox people out there. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not fair for me to judge the series based on this one, seemingly weak game, especially since I just said that I liked it. But the setting and story just didn't really do it for me.
Plus, I'm too far removed to start playing these games competitively online. For one, it looks like a lot of work for me right now to really learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics for competitive play, and since I barely play first-person shooters at all to begin with means that I'd be almost starting from scratch. Thanks for the memories, Halo, but you may be on the way to the resale shop this weekend.
Mass Effect:
Being nearly the sole reason for me to buy a 360 that I didn't really need, it's time for me to suck it up and say that I was a little bit let down with its brilliance. Is that a sentence your noggin can't reconcile? Ok, then. I really, really dug ME, but it wasn't half as great as I made it out to be in my head. I think after hearing all of the good press that ME 2 has been getting and all of the Dragon Age that I've played since November pretty much made Mass 1 into a rock star that I met in real life that just didn't stack up to my idol worship. The lunar tank thing was a total drag to drive around, even stressful at times. The graphics were really good for a lot of it, but the backgrounds got pretty bland, pretty fast. And on that note, a whole lot of locations were recycled throughout the game that made me wonder how many original areas there really were. This game also had the misfortune (like Persona 3 and Final Fantasy XIII) of being one in which when the main character gets killed off its game over, even though your comrades get popped constantly and get up after the fight is over and they're totally fine. I get why, but still. Stupid.
Though there really wasn't that much to make me want to run through the game again (although I still probably will at some point), I did like the skill building system enough that I'd be interested to see how I'd use more weapons than just the assault rifles. The morality system of the game was fine but very binary. The good vs. bad choices were really easy to spot, and I climbed to number one on the Paragon charts (as well as number one in your hearts) steadily without much trouble. I didn't really use a lot of special skills and powers during my trip through the game since I found it easy enough to just rely on blasting people, but the few times that I used them made for some diversity from pointing, shooting, and hoping the craps game of RPG shooting landed in my favor. So to sum up, another play through as an evil female space wizard that packs pistol heat seems to be in my future. Yeah, that sounds about right.
On the absolute plus side is the stellar voice acting. I know that many prefer the female Commander Shepherd voice over the male, but he did a pretty good job if you ask me. The characters weren't as memorable to me as the Dragon Age ones, but they were still a bunch of cool people. I was surprised how pro-Christian some of the tone (and one specific character) of the game was, almost refreshingly so. Not that I think that a video game should be pushing a specific religion to the player, but since the topic of God is something either danced around (Xenosaga) in gaming or completely against (see Final Fantasy IX, X, and to a lesser extent, XII and XIII). Sure, Ashley turned out to be kind of a bitch by the end of the game, but I appreciated that faith was a defining character trait.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
The biggest video game release of all time. Ok I've gotten the requisite finger pointing out of the way. It was pretty fun for the same reasons that I liked Halo, but I honestly didn't have any idea what was happening half of the time. At least with Halo I was pretty good about keeping a level head, but if Modern Warfare 2 is any indication, I would be the worst infantryman in the history of armed forces: comrades would be shot on sight, running would happen in complete opposite ends of where objectives would be, and gunfire-induced panic would usually overtake me during the first 45 seconds of any mission until I died once or twice and got my head straight. Still, I can see why people like this game and it's brethren. The game certainly looks pretty and the online modes that I actually tried out where pretty fun, albeit overwhelming bloodbaths (I was never against anyone lower than level 43).
Ok, Modern Warfare. I get it. You're just not for me.
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition:
Though I'm man enough to admit that I was more hungover than I usually am at 8am on a Saturday and that that may have played a part of it, I really didn't like the beginning of this game. After all of my friends gushed over how deep the customization was and how vast and varied the world was and blah blah blah, getting out of Vault 101 and getting my ass constantly kicked by monsters from the blue lagoon and Thunderdome rejects because I was better with a lead pipe than the fucking hand gun my stats said I would be fine with made the Fallout 3 feel more like work and less like fun. I like fun, and I sure as shit don't like work. Persevere, they all said. So I did.
Fallout 3 turned out to be one of the better games I've played since, well, Dragon Age. Though I didn't really think the story was as great as it could have been (though that ain't Liam Neeson's fault. He's a cool guy), turning my lowly vault-dwelling jive turkey into a walking death machine is one of my favorite things about RPGs, and by the time I was done with Fallout 3 I felt empowered with every single shotgun blast that killed my enemies. But maybe that just makes me weird. I'll probably go back and play the game again someday, especially since I only finished half of the packed-in DLC for the GOTY edition.
I also finished the game one night, and spent nearly eight straight hours the next day collecting all of the missed bobble heads if that tells you anything. Fallout 3 was really, really, really good.
Brutal Legend:
With my limited exposure to Tim Schafer games, I'm starting to think that he's a better writer than he is a full on designer. That isn't to say that BL isn't an alright game, but that's just what it is: alright. The single action goes out the window almost right away (one of the things I thought was stronger than the rest of the game) in favor of really jank RTS trappings that make it feel like a bastardized Overlord than a bastardized Starcraft. That's not a compliment.
On the flip side, the dialogue is really hilarious. Jack Black stood right at the edge of the annoyance cliff, but didn't take the plunge with a somewhat restrained performance, and the metal icon guest stars like Halford and Ozzy were surprisingly good actors. Sure, they were kind of just playing themselves (well, not really Halford, but still), but Ozzy in particular delivered his lines perfectly. I find that I can't really play this game more than maybe an hour at a time because I get stupid bored, but I finished it because of the characters, not the gameplay.
On Deck and in No Particular Order:
Bioshock 1 and 2
Gears of War 1 and 2
Mass Effect 2
Shadow Complex
Alan Wake
Blur
MagnaCarta 2
Forza Motorsport 3
So if you've been paying attention, that's two 360 exclusives and three multiplatform games. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to playing those multi- titles if the goodwill of some folks hadn't led them to loan them to me, and for that I'm pretty grateful. The BioShock games fall into that category. Not that I've ever been opposed to playing them in the past, they just happen to fall in my lap right now, so I'll be giving them a shot sooner than later.
Mass Effect 2, being on of the two games that I've actually purchased, is something I'm excited to play. Since I own it, though, I feel a little guilty about playing that instead of the shitload of stuff people have thrown my way. Same goes with Shadow Complex. I played a demo of it last night and was very happy with it.
I am morbidly curious about MagnaCarta 2. Reports from across the internet mix from "worst RPG of the last decade" to "most underrated game of last year." It's usually that kind of wadded up spaghetti press that attracts me to niche games in the first place. I own the last one for PS2 and even though it sure wasn't all that great, it still wasn't too shabby, so I'll probably grab this one.
Probably see you in a month. Go Comments!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Hello and Hello
Cats and kittens, ladies and germs, you and you and you and you...
Sorry that I've been away. I rarely get a ton of time to do bloggy writing these days now that I've taken up the Senior Editor gig at Twin Galaxies. Life, as it happens, tends to keep me pretty busy, too. So here's a quick rundown of what you missed in the last 9 or 10 months:
For the purposes of this video game blog (which is what I think this has just finally become), let's concern ourselves with numbers five and six. While it isn't exactly unheard of for me to buy video game consoles, a couple of questions come to mind in regard to the 360: why did I buy it, and maybe more interestingly, why did I buy it now?
Well the answer to that first question is just as easy as you think it is. I play a lot of video games, and I kinda wanted one. There. Other than that, I do write about video games on the regular, so having one of everything (I already own a PS3 and a Wii) kind of helps in that regard. Sure, I have access to a 360 for game reviews and other journalistic ventures when absolutely necessary, but I've never had one laying around for personal amusement, so I finally get to catch up on stuff that I've been missing over the last few years.
But what took so long? The machine's been out for five years now, so what gives?
For some reason I feel ashamed to admit this, but part of it was do to brand loyalty. I've never been the kind of person to hold to particular console manufacturer for very long. When I was a young'n and had my NES, the prospect of a newer, swankier machine appealed to me very early on, so I didn't wait for the SNES and went right ahead to the Genesis (a decision that I do not, under any circumstance, regret). After that my options were pretty wide open. Being an early adopter at an early age, I wasn't about to sit on my hands and watch until a one machine came out on top the other, and at the time, the choices were the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn with the Nintendo 64 still a ways off. I mowed a shit load of lawns that year and shoveled a metric fuck ton of snow, but the deciding factor finally boiled down to the fact that my brother worked at a Camelot Music (remember those?) in a mall and that he got a discount, and they just happened to have a Playstation and not a Saturn. From here on, we can call this game/set/match for Sony.
It had a slow start, but I was very happy with my PSOne until I basically ran the thing into the ground. Like many of my nerd peers, I had to play with the console upside down due to heating issues in its waning years. I call that a badge of honor. But it wasn't to last; there will always be evolutions to video game consoles and I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Playstation die of old age and over abundance of Tekken 3. But the choice was clear for me: I would be buying a Playstation 2, and this was without question. Sure, I got starry-eyed like Davey Jones on The Monkees when I first played Soulcalibur on the Saturn, but I knew that all of those pretty graphics and steering wheel- like controllers won't hold my interest as much as whatever Sony's got cooking in their mad laboratory. History has shown that I was correct, but if not for one small, though significant, factor I would probably be writing either requiem for the Dreamcast right now, or perhaps nothing at all (the PS2 had quite an effect on me).
I speak, of course, of backward compatibility. Amen, I say to you, the prospect of building a video game library only to sell it off has always been the catch-22 of video game collecting at a young age: you may want to play these older games again, but you need the capital to buy stuff for that new console. I'll remind the world that emulation was still in something of an infancy, so the idea of playing all of those old PSOne games that scrimped and saved for in high school was almost kablammo if not for a new machine that played old games, and it was practically a god send.
Fast forward to the current console generation. While I had a bit more disposable income than I did in my poverty-stricken college and immediate post-college days, I tried to be a bit more discerning about my future purchases. Having gotten over a previous prejudice against Microsoft (you can thank Fable and Ninja Gaiden for that), I was more than willing to give them a chance very early in the 360s life cycle, but once word came down from the Sony mountain that the Playstation 3 would not only be backward compatible with PS2 and PSOne games my fate was sealed. Plus they it was going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII as exclusives, so it wasn't that hard of a call to make.
Now just try to imagine my fury when, scant months before finally buying one, Sony decides to cut backward compatibility for their machine. Multiply this rage when I hear, a few months after tracking down a BC PS3, that Final Fantasy XIII was also coming to the 360. The five stages of grief set in hard for me, and the worst of it was acceptance where I found that I was a mope for months after deciding that I probably backed the wrong horse.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with my Playstation 3. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and the Uncharted games are some of the best I've played in this generation, and most of the stuff I would have played on 360 ended up being multi-platform anyway, so I eventually got over it. But the larger player-base (aside from their negative reputation for being childish assholes), strong exclusives (I'm looking at you, Fable II), and feature-rich online components were something I knew I was going to miss. Though, like the tenth person for caller nine of a radio station contest, I got over it.
Know this: the best and worst shopping decisions you make are while you're inebriated. Those Britney Spears disks of my wife's, that SportsNight boxed set, the wooden sign above my microwave that reads "cooking is love:" all made after beer number 4. I stand by them, even if I have to piece together why I did it in the first place. Then again, these are purchases that are under $250, but whatever. Walking through a Target about week and a half ago after an early dinner and having your wife tell you that I should buy an Xbox? That, friends, is what love is.
But what can we take from the concept of "brand loyalty?" Personally, I felt cheated that Sony would remove a feature of their high-powered super computer that many people see as important. With a tradition and promise of backward compatibility, you send a message to your user base that you thank them for their continued support and welcome them into your plans for the future with open arms; almost transitioning the user from one generation to the next. In the PS3's case, it made the outrageously high price of the machine a bit more palatable: you could sell your old PS2 to help curb the cost and get the same service. To maintain that high price and disarm the machine of that feature was like dropping trou and pissing in my face after punching me in the stomach. It sent a message to me that cutting costs of the system to lower overhead was far more important than keeping your return customers satisfied, and forced me to give my money to the used market instead to the company. At that point I was completely fine with that, though.
The bottom line is that I had exclusives to look forward to and older games that I still wanted to play, and it seemed to me then (and still does now) that Sony did their best to bungle both of the reasons I wanted a PS3. It almost came to the point of sending an irate letter to them explaining my concerns (their continued high price and botched lock downs of exclusives was slowly killing them), but they didn't need me to tell them that they were fucking up; the sales alone were letting them know. But it doesn't mask the fact that I bought a Playstation 3 anyway, and I did it because I was loyal, though with definite feelings of dissent. Does this make me an idiot? Maybe, I guess, but I've definitely learned to love my monstrous, though sleek, black machine. My past few years with it have been far from awful, but like turning down a job or not calling someone back, you sometimes wonder how things could have been. In this case, though, I actually get to find out.
So it's been almost two weeks. I bet you're wondering how that Xbox thing's going, right?
Ok, forget a bunch of that bullshit that I told you up there, because I wanted to get a 360 for Mass Effect and that's pretty much long and short of it. I'll tell you all about my experience with it when I'm finished (I hope), but I'm happy with my decision with less buyer's guilt than I thought I'd have. So far, I'm finding that paying for an Xbox LIVE Gold account a bitter pill to swallow after years of not shelling out for online gaming. And since I've been playing Mass Effect almost exclusively thus far, I'm not even using it so I feel kind of guilty.
But to say that I feel "complete" still seems weirdly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that I'm wishing that there more systems for me to buy or that I now need to go trick out my PC to effectively play Crysis or something. No, I have come across a surprising feeling of emptiness now that almost all of gaminghood is open to me on a personal level. There's no more hoping that a game that looks good on x system will show up on the y system that I own. There's no more feeling of superiority when the exclusive game for one console rakes in the GOTY awards, or that great downloadable content is available only for that one machine. Having all three of the current generation of home machines simply means that when something comes up that sounds good, I go get it, and that's that. I never thought I would lament what I used to think of as a limitation. I feel like I've exhausted my possibilities when all of them have just opened up to me.
You know, just something to ponder.
Sorry that I've been away. I rarely get a ton of time to do bloggy writing these days now that I've taken up the Senior Editor gig at Twin Galaxies. Life, as it happens, tends to keep me pretty busy, too. So here's a quick rundown of what you missed in the last 9 or 10 months:
- I write a lot for TGI, but you knew that already. I've been keeping busy with writing reviews and news. The Straight Dope is my baby (as well as the ones from my Lothario travels throughout the world. One day I'll unite them and appoint them code names and THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY), so go read it.
- I think I've put some weight on, but am assured that much of it is muscle. Now my biceps are nearly as big as my ego!
- The above sentence aside, I still hate exclamation points. Just sayin'.
- I got hitched in September. Boom.
- I bought an Xbox 360 two weeks ago. Refer to number 4 and know that it was her idea.
- I've played a lot of video games over the past year. Many of them have sucked.
- I turned 30. And into a werewolf. So I'm no longer a teen wolf.
For the purposes of this video game blog (which is what I think this has just finally become), let's concern ourselves with numbers five and six. While it isn't exactly unheard of for me to buy video game consoles, a couple of questions come to mind in regard to the 360: why did I buy it, and maybe more interestingly, why did I buy it now?
Well the answer to that first question is just as easy as you think it is. I play a lot of video games, and I kinda wanted one. There. Other than that, I do write about video games on the regular, so having one of everything (I already own a PS3 and a Wii) kind of helps in that regard. Sure, I have access to a 360 for game reviews and other journalistic ventures when absolutely necessary, but I've never had one laying around for personal amusement, so I finally get to catch up on stuff that I've been missing over the last few years.
But what took so long? The machine's been out for five years now, so what gives?
For some reason I feel ashamed to admit this, but part of it was do to brand loyalty. I've never been the kind of person to hold to particular console manufacturer for very long. When I was a young'n and had my NES, the prospect of a newer, swankier machine appealed to me very early on, so I didn't wait for the SNES and went right ahead to the Genesis (a decision that I do not, under any circumstance, regret). After that my options were pretty wide open. Being an early adopter at an early age, I wasn't about to sit on my hands and watch until a one machine came out on top the other, and at the time, the choices were the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn with the Nintendo 64 still a ways off. I mowed a shit load of lawns that year and shoveled a metric fuck ton of snow, but the deciding factor finally boiled down to the fact that my brother worked at a Camelot Music (remember those?) in a mall and that he got a discount, and they just happened to have a Playstation and not a Saturn. From here on, we can call this game/set/match for Sony.
It had a slow start, but I was very happy with my PSOne until I basically ran the thing into the ground. Like many of my nerd peers, I had to play with the console upside down due to heating issues in its waning years. I call that a badge of honor. But it wasn't to last; there will always be evolutions to video game consoles and I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Playstation die of old age and over abundance of Tekken 3. But the choice was clear for me: I would be buying a Playstation 2, and this was without question. Sure, I got starry-eyed like Davey Jones on The Monkees when I first played Soulcalibur on the Saturn, but I knew that all of those pretty graphics and steering wheel- like controllers won't hold my interest as much as whatever Sony's got cooking in their mad laboratory. History has shown that I was correct, but if not for one small, though significant, factor I would probably be writing either requiem for the Dreamcast right now, or perhaps nothing at all (the PS2 had quite an effect on me).
I speak, of course, of backward compatibility. Amen, I say to you, the prospect of building a video game library only to sell it off has always been the catch-22 of video game collecting at a young age: you may want to play these older games again, but you need the capital to buy stuff for that new console. I'll remind the world that emulation was still in something of an infancy, so the idea of playing all of those old PSOne games that scrimped and saved for in high school was almost kablammo if not for a new machine that played old games, and it was practically a god send.
Fast forward to the current console generation. While I had a bit more disposable income than I did in my poverty-stricken college and immediate post-college days, I tried to be a bit more discerning about my future purchases. Having gotten over a previous prejudice against Microsoft (you can thank Fable and Ninja Gaiden for that), I was more than willing to give them a chance very early in the 360s life cycle, but once word came down from the Sony mountain that the Playstation 3 would not only be backward compatible with PS2 and PSOne games my fate was sealed. Plus they it was going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII as exclusives, so it wasn't that hard of a call to make.
Now just try to imagine my fury when, scant months before finally buying one, Sony decides to cut backward compatibility for their machine. Multiply this rage when I hear, a few months after tracking down a BC PS3, that Final Fantasy XIII was also coming to the 360. The five stages of grief set in hard for me, and the worst of it was acceptance where I found that I was a mope for months after deciding that I probably backed the wrong horse.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with my Playstation 3. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and the Uncharted games are some of the best I've played in this generation, and most of the stuff I would have played on 360 ended up being multi-platform anyway, so I eventually got over it. But the larger player-base (aside from their negative reputation for being childish assholes), strong exclusives (I'm looking at you, Fable II), and feature-rich online components were something I knew I was going to miss. Though, like the tenth person for caller nine of a radio station contest, I got over it.
Know this: the best and worst shopping decisions you make are while you're inebriated. Those Britney Spears disks of my wife's, that SportsNight boxed set, the wooden sign above my microwave that reads "cooking is love:" all made after beer number 4. I stand by them, even if I have to piece together why I did it in the first place. Then again, these are purchases that are under $250, but whatever. Walking through a Target about week and a half ago after an early dinner and having your wife tell you that I should buy an Xbox? That, friends, is what love is.
But what can we take from the concept of "brand loyalty?" Personally, I felt cheated that Sony would remove a feature of their high-powered super computer that many people see as important. With a tradition and promise of backward compatibility, you send a message to your user base that you thank them for their continued support and welcome them into your plans for the future with open arms; almost transitioning the user from one generation to the next. In the PS3's case, it made the outrageously high price of the machine a bit more palatable: you could sell your old PS2 to help curb the cost and get the same service. To maintain that high price and disarm the machine of that feature was like dropping trou and pissing in my face after punching me in the stomach. It sent a message to me that cutting costs of the system to lower overhead was far more important than keeping your return customers satisfied, and forced me to give my money to the used market instead to the company. At that point I was completely fine with that, though.
The bottom line is that I had exclusives to look forward to and older games that I still wanted to play, and it seemed to me then (and still does now) that Sony did their best to bungle both of the reasons I wanted a PS3. It almost came to the point of sending an irate letter to them explaining my concerns (their continued high price and botched lock downs of exclusives was slowly killing them), but they didn't need me to tell them that they were fucking up; the sales alone were letting them know. But it doesn't mask the fact that I bought a Playstation 3 anyway, and I did it because I was loyal, though with definite feelings of dissent. Does this make me an idiot? Maybe, I guess, but I've definitely learned to love my monstrous, though sleek, black machine. My past few years with it have been far from awful, but like turning down a job or not calling someone back, you sometimes wonder how things could have been. In this case, though, I actually get to find out.
So it's been almost two weeks. I bet you're wondering how that Xbox thing's going, right?
Ok, forget a bunch of that bullshit that I told you up there, because I wanted to get a 360 for Mass Effect and that's pretty much long and short of it. I'll tell you all about my experience with it when I'm finished (I hope), but I'm happy with my decision with less buyer's guilt than I thought I'd have. So far, I'm finding that paying for an Xbox LIVE Gold account a bitter pill to swallow after years of not shelling out for online gaming. And since I've been playing Mass Effect almost exclusively thus far, I'm not even using it so I feel kind of guilty.
But to say that I feel "complete" still seems weirdly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that I'm wishing that there more systems for me to buy or that I now need to go trick out my PC to effectively play Crysis or something. No, I have come across a surprising feeling of emptiness now that almost all of gaminghood is open to me on a personal level. There's no more hoping that a game that looks good on x system will show up on the y system that I own. There's no more feeling of superiority when the exclusive game for one console rakes in the GOTY awards, or that great downloadable content is available only for that one machine. Having all three of the current generation of home machines simply means that when something comes up that sounds good, I go get it, and that's that. I never thought I would lament what I used to think of as a limitation. I feel like I've exhausted my possibilities when all of them have just opened up to me.
You know, just something to ponder.
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