Category Archives: Game Logs

Reaching for a Good Pun to Use as a Title

Well it certainly has been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately I don’t have any great excuse for why I haven’t posted in the last 2+ months but honestly writing for this blog is probably one of the lesser of responsibilities I’ve shirked recently. Perhaps one possible explanation is that I haven’t done a lot of gaming during this time, and indeed I’ve done (relatively) little, yet all together I’ve certainly done more than enough to report on:

Enjoy General Knoxx's millions and millions of miles of less than scenic highway!
“Enjoy General Knoxx’s millions and millions of miles of less than scenic highway!”

I worked my way through both The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx expansion packs for Borderlands via local co-op. Other than not realizing I had to manually select to go back to “playthrough 1” which resulted in us having to replay the first 10 minutes of the single player campaign, and then have our brains instantly devoured by living dead who horribly out-leveled us, Zombie Island was pretty fun. Perhaps a bit monotonous, but no more so than the rest of the Borderlands tends to be to me. General Knoxx was a little more fun, or at least it would have been if it weren’t for the obnoxious driving requirements in lieu of the absence of fast travel. I appreciate them wanting to put more emphasis on vehicles for that expansion but since I generally consider the vehicles in Borderlands to be godawful, the effort seems to have been a bit of a waste. I’d wager that even if you somehow enjoyed the vehicle sections of the game the lengthy back and forth travel required for many of the quests combined with many long, road centric areas and annoying, respawning enemies probably at least grated on you a little. We never got around to going after Crawmerax (our characters are still relatively low level) but we’ve still got a Robot Revolution to possibly investigate sooner or later. Despite all my seemingly negative comments I’d say that if you’re any sort of a Borderlands fan you should probably own all of these, period.

No stupid caption, just Jun looking like a badass.
“No stupid caption, just Jun looking like a badass.”

What else? I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again way too heavily which has included me finally getting my “main” to level 80, making several new “alts” (including one who I’ve been leveling exclusively via the Random Dungeon Finder) and even making it into the Cataclysm closed beta for some so, so sweet early access to these hotly anticipated new changes and additions. More on WoW later in some separate updates but hopefully I won’t burn myself out again before I get too far into the proper release of Catacylsm next month.

Finally, and most importantly for this update, Halo: Reach has fallen from the heavens into our unworthy hands. Being a Halo fan since playing the first game on my brother’s newly purchased Xbox back in 2001, and continuing to enjoy the latest additions to the franchise in the form of Halo 3 and ODST, I was definitely anticipating Reach. Of course it was also an insanely safe purchase to make both because of Bungie’s great track record and the Halo franchise’s long, long legs on Xbox Live.

Us owning some Covenant in the campaign.
“Us owning some Covenant in the campaign.”

It has been such a long time now since it was released that my analysis of the game is going to be a bit more muted than it might have been if I had actually posted about it in a bit more of a timely fashion. I’ll sum up the single player pretty quickly though: continuing Bungie’s high level of production value and polish combined with improvements made from lessons learned in all previous Halo iterations, including ODST, yet never straying all too far from the conventions of the series, Halo Reach is almost certainly the best of the Halo single player campaigns so far. It may not be my personal favorite campaign (Halo: Combat Evolved holds a lot of fond memories for me and I’m idiotically nostalgic after all) and I might have been a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t get the Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon, or SWAT style squad based, tactical experience that my imagination ran wild with when we got our first glimpses of Reach early on, I do concede that it might be the best Halo yet. The action, story, variety and the pacing, etc. – it’s all awesome. That’s not to say it is perfect – we had some pretty funky AI issues with the other Noble Team members in particular when playing the game via co-op, and some other bizarre occurrences, but I chalk most of those up to Halo charm rather than any sort of real annoyance.

Jet pack melee kills are one of my favorite additions!
“Jet pack melee kills are one of my favorite additions!”

The aforementioned Xbox Live goodies are amazing too with Bungie continuing to raise the bar on console multiplayer experiences. The changes, as subtle as many of them probably seem to casual fans of the franchise, make a huge difference. The changes to Halo 3’s equipment being the most notable, particularly with the addition of the ever popular jet pack. Once you start to master the use of some of the new items you’ll probably wonder how you ever stood playing Halo 3 and who doesn’t love jet pack stomping on someone’s face? Bungie also took some nice cues from Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 (amongst others, of course) with their persistent stat tracking and career advancement and, while it isn’t as over the top as it is in those games, it is definitely an improvement. The new Forge (and Forge World) is incredible as well – I personally spent a few hours in it recreating a very sad approximation of one of my favorite old Doom deathmatch maps (available here!) I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth with the multiplayer alone and I’ve barely played any of the new Invasion mode and haven’t even tried the new Firefight yet. Awesome!

An interesting facet of the release of the game that has almost nothing to do with the game itself is that fans of the series are now left to wonder about both the future of the Halo franchise now that Bungie is doing new things, and exactly what new things Bungie will be getting up to. Rumors of MMOs and perhaps returns to older franchises (Myth, mainly) abound, but in any case it is definitely going to be a fascinating few years while we watch both situations unwrap.

More posts soon!

I leave my life to ride the mindway!

Lately I’ve been playing more PC games than I had been thanks in part to finally getting my first Xbox 360 “red ring of death”. Luckily I (barely) made the warranty so I got a replacement free of charge. While that was being taken care of though I’d been focusing most of my precious gaming time on games that I could pick up and play quickly and in relatively short bursts such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer. I’ve also been playing a little bit of Defcon which I’ll probably talk more about in the next one of these. The game that has most captured my attention lately though is Audiosurf.

Can you forgive me? I never knew...
“Can you forgive me? I never knew…”

Audiosurf has actually been out for a while now (2 years now?) and I had heard only great things about it, mostly on gaming forums and the like. In fact based on those recommendations I’ve almost purchased it on several different occasions. I finally bought it as somewhat of an afterthought during the last big Steam sale and now I’m wondering what exactly my reservations could have possibly been. It’s a total mystery.

I absolutely love music. It has been a nearly constant companion of mine since I was a kid. It has helped me through so many of the bad times in my life and was usually involved in or at least present for the best ones as well. These days are no different and I’ve been digging out a lot of my personal classics for some much needed escape recently. Enter Audiosurf…

And I will advertise it.
“And I will advertise it.”

Audiosurf is like the display of a graphic equalizer or some other, equally effective form of music “visualization” that, while nimbly dancing through the rhythms of your favorite songs, tripped and fell into the nightmarish dark void of a sci-fi space epic effected by an unhealthy dose of psychedelics. That’s what Audiosurf is. Wait… what the fuck did I just write? Let me start over.

Audiosurf analyzes music and dynamically maps it fairly precisely to a represent a race track, using the tempo to dictate the turns, curves, and elevations of the track. The tempo will also control how fast you move during your trip. It uses other sonic blips, typically those caused by instruments of course, to add other elements to the track – rings you fly through, colors and shapes bursting through the space all around you. Most importantly though Audiosurf uses some of those audio queues to fill the track with little blocks which make up the core of the actual gameplay itself. You steer your small craft along this funky space highway (which as an aside brings back fond memories of SkyRoads) avoiding and gathering these tiny colored blocks to the rhythm of the music in an attempt to combine them into a unit which will then grant you point bonuses, not unlike block stacking in some puzzle games.

Stop crying for what you've done... it's only the past... it's only life.
“Stop crying for what you’ve done… it’s only the past… it’s only life.”

So yeah, it sounds like a neat toy right? Actually it is surprisingly compelling. I find myself wanting to play just a song or two and end up playing a 7 or 8. Why?

First of all, as I implied, the visualization is actually quite good, depending on the song of course. You really feel like you’re riding the rhythm, moving your ship to the beat to hit the blocks representing it – it is often extremely effective. I find myself playing it in full screen and getting lost in it quite easily. Crucially, not only can you use Audiosurf’s built in “radio” soundtrack but you can pick any song from your hard drive in a variety of formats. It even has direct iTunes and Last.fm support. Screw buying songs you already own as in Rock Band or Guitar Hero and while we’re at it screw being constrained by the music tastes of others! Play whatever you want! Finally, when you complete a track your score is uploaded to a central server where you can see what other people achieved on the same song. This adds a whole social element to the game which I find quite intriguing especially when it comes to the aspect of representing your musical tastes. I’m personally the “champion” of some pretty obscure stuff though I of course owe that in large part to a lack of competition. 😉

Dodge the bullet or carry the gun... the choice is yours!
“Dodge the bullet or carry the gun… the choice is yours!”

There are a few different game modes all based on that same theme. I prefer the “mono” variety as the easiest to really zone out in and focus on the music itself – you still have some potentially challenging twitch gameplay but you don’t need to focus quite as heavily on what is going on nor deploy any advanced tactics to score well. In fact I enjoy zoning out and getting into the music so much this way that I intend to play through all new albums I buy from now on.

Songs with drastic tempo changes tend to make for wilder rides, and as I said some songs are interpreted a bit better than others, but most people who give Audiosurf a try tend to come away impressed. You can usually find it for sale on Steam and its regular price is only 10 bucks. Check it out!

Once More Unto the Breach

I was digging through my screenshots folder the other day when I came across a bevy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 screens. It then occurred to me that I’d somehow neglected to ever even mention BC2 on here. What can I say? I suck at this. 😉

Despite trying the Xbox 360 demo and not feeling immediately compelled to run out and buy it I ended up grabbing Battlefield Bad Company 2 for PC strictly so that I could play its well reviewed multiplayer with several old PC gaming friends. There were also a few guys at work playing it on console so I figured it’d be fun to be able to talk about it with them from time to time. I was not disappointed. I’ve been a fan of the Battlefield series since Battlefield 1942 and, despite some major design changes over the years, I still consider myself one. In fact I mentioned playing through Bad Company’s single player campaign on here not too long ago.

While I haven’t invested the countless hours that many of you have I’ve certainly enjoyed my time with the multiplayer despite how much more difficult it seemed for me to get good at it. It seems so much more chaotic… or maybe I’m just getting too old? I did eventually find a niche that I could fill nicely and have since improved quite a bit. I’m not sure if I’ve decided how much of a good thing it is yet but I’m definitely intrigued by how much environmental destruction changes the gameplay.

Anyway, since it has been quite a while since I’ve actively played it (though I do intend on going back to it) I won’t ramble on with my usual observations. I will, however, post some of those aforementioned screenshots:

We both shoot but I close the deal.
“We both shoot but I close the deal.”

Sure, lean back, take a load off.
“Sure, lean back, take a load off.”

Beautiful capture of an explosion.
“Beautiful capture of an explosion.”

Medic!
“Medic!”

Feel good moment in 3... 2...
“Feel good moment in 3… 2…”

In my sights.
“In my sights.”

I cannot wait for the proper Battlefield 3.