Category Archives: Game Logs

Girls and Zombies

I had been looking for something new to play co-op with my girlfriend and it doesn’t seem like there are many good, local co-op games for the Xbox 360 that aren’t some sort of totally uber manly shooter games. Sure, I’ve got Rainbow 6: Vegas 1 and 2, along with both GRAWs, Halo 3, and Gears of Wars but she just doesn’t seem to be feeling those. To be honest I haven’t tried to get her to play them yet because I know they’re not her taste thematically never mind that she hasn’t really played many FPS or TPS games.

She’s actually usually a very quick study when it comes to games and tends to be a bit better than me at most of them. Perhaps that’s another good reason not to introduce her to one of my favorite genres – it’d really hurt my ego to get smashed by my noob girlfriend at a tactical FPS. 😛 Then again, it’s fun to daydream about us going online and working as a deadly duo. It could open up a whole new world of possibilities! She could finally play something other than World of Warcraft or The Sims 2 on her PC and I could have a permanent partner in crime. Probably just a pipe dream though…

“Come on, you know you wanted a screenshot of a bag vendor!”

We’d dabbled with a lot of different games in the past but the only ones that had ever really hooked up were World of Warcraft, Rock Band 1 and 2, and Carcassonne. The latter two we still play on a fairly regular basis. We could probably still be playing WoW if I didn’t start playing it with her well after having a main to max level and multiple alts scattered around at various level ranges. In other words I feel like I had exhausted most of the pre-expansion content and, in general, was pretty burnt out on WoW. We both felt a brief resurgence in interest after The Burning Crusade came out and ended up rolling some new Draenei characters which I was enjoying quite a bit at first but, again, burnout hit me.

I’ve been seriously considering going back, especially since Blizzard has bumped up lower end experience gain a few different times since we last played. The most frustrating thing is that I’m absolutely sure we could play and enjoy other MMOs together, ones I’d be slow to become exhausted of – hell, it would have been cool to have her along the ride with the rest of my guild in Warhammer Online. The main problem there is that her PC is somewhat outdated and she can’t really afford to stay in the hardware race at the moment. Maybe in a few more years!

I ended up dusting off my copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I actually got it for free, bundled with my Xbox 360 alongside Forza 2. Neither of them are games I was particularly interested in but both are pretty well respected and reviewed and nothing I necessarily object to owning either. We had played Ultimate Alliance a little bit when I first got my 360 but tired of it quickly and, for no particular reason, never picked it back up. Our save was literally a year old!

“Mission accomplished: We’ve looted Valhalla’s entire supply of beer.”

I quickly remembered why the game didn’t grab me. The graphics are decent, the game is pretty polished, generally, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. My top two complaints are probably that I find the combat to be far too button mashy and chaotic and the RPGish elements (character advancement and customization, for example) to be less than intuitive. I actually remembered having similar complaints when we rented a copy of one of the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games years ago. Regardless, for the time being it is getting the job done without my having to step foot or cloven hoof back into Azeroth.

Speaking of co-op games I had mentioned in a previous entry that I was annoyed about trying to grab the Xbox 360 Left 4 Dead demo as I thought it was something my girlfriend and I could potentially play split screen. It would have actually probably been a great introduction FPS game for her – pure co-op, fairly simple, and in a theme she could probably better appreciate. I also mentioned that a lot of friends had been trying to talk me into buying the PC version but I figured time zones would be a major issue so I resisted temptation. Well, that has changed.

“Da plaaaane!”

Some of the guys from The Untitled Games Podcast and I grabbed the game during a 50% off Steam sale on it. We definitely don’t have the time zone issue as we’re all local and as an added bonus it gives us something common to talk about on the show. We haven’t played together much yet but so far it’s definitely worth 25 bucks! Now I’m wondering if a second copy might not be worth it as it would surely run on her old gaming rig. Maybe I should rent the 360 version for us?

Marvel Ultimate Alliance screenshot lifted from somewhere else since I can’t easily take HD console screenshots.

A quick return to the Battlefield

I’m not really sure what inspired it but I decided to install a couple of old favorites I hadn’t played in a while, you know, just to have them around. One of those games was Battlefield 2. Being a big fan of Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942 I decided to try a few total conversion mods out after screwing around in single player for a while. There weren’t many mods out when I last played Battlefield 2 with any level of seriousness although there were several in production that seemed likely to end up as vaporware. Wow, does BF2 have a great modding scene! There must be a dozen or so high quality, major mods out there nowadays. I only grabbed a few for starters: Project Reality, which I didn’t try because of not having a single player patch for yet and, given how hardcore it sounds, I didn’t want to jump right into online play. Point of Existence 2, the sequel to an old BF1942 mod, Allied Intent Xtreme, a total conversion seemingly focused on single player, and Forgotten Hope 2, another BF1942 mod sequel.

I can’t really say I put a ton of time into any of the mods. Forgotten Hope seemed too hardcore to jump right into and seemed to be designed to work a lot better online than with bots but it definitely oozes quality. Of PoE2 and AIX I think I enjoyed PoE2’s less “out there” approach a bit more but I definitely had fun with AIX and will revisit it a lot more in the future. In any case I’m highly impressed and intend to grab even more of these suckers. If only they weren’t so huge. Now, if only I had a copy of Battlefield 2142 so I should try out this awesome looking Star Wars mod, First Strike! I’m honestly thinking of picking it up just to play that one!

One thing I did notice was that the bots seemed to behave a lot more intelligently in these mods than they do in the normal Battlefield single player – using their vehicles better, making better runs for objectives, etc. I have only a vague idea of what is involved in adding bots to maps in Battlefield 2 so I don’t know the exact reason for this but regardless this seems like the way to play Battlefield 2 offline.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve posted many good screenshots here’s several from a quick single player game of Point of Existence 2. Enjoy!

“Trying to get him before he gets me!”

“Locked on!”

“Off with their heads!”

“Rolling down the highway of death.”

“A teammate’s handy work but still cool.”

“This doesn’t look good.”

“Tank engagement.”

“On his tail.”

Some 360 Stuff.

I managed to finish Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (which I will mercifully refer to as “GRAW2” from here on out) over the weekend.

The game does indeed get more difficult but doesn’t quite reach the levels of frustration that I occasionally reached with the first game. I’d still have to say I enjoyed it more than the first GRAW in any case. That’s not to say I didn’t still have some complaints – indeed I did! One minor issue I had was that, while the 3rd person view looked great and even felt fine most of the time I often found myself thinking “cool, now to switch back to first person view!” Perhaps I should chalk that up to mere force of habit though. I did find myself often struggling to reload my weapon at the right times, that is, I either should have auto-reloaded and for some reason didn’t or I’d try to reload manually and wouldn’t, particularly when attached to cover. Similarly I also found using scopes when attached to cover pretty annoying as it often took several button presses to back out of scope mode back into your normal view where you could once again make sure you were in and/or attached to cover. This made using your scope more of a liability than probably intended. These issues are all most likely caused by unintentionally clunky features rather than actual bugs but either way they annoyed me often enough to note.

“In a startling turn of events our protagonist manages to lose his helmet! Ooooh… Ahhh!”

The ending wasn’t amazing but wasn’t too bad either. It definitely wasn’t the let down that the first GRAW ending was – after leading my group through a vicious firefight I ended up facing down a group of dozens of enemy fighters spread out along various distant walls and other cover. It seemed like a pretty tense situation as my squad mates bugged out and ended up taking cover nowhere near the fight with the exception of one particular mouth breather who was standing in the open dodging shot after shot instead of getting the fuck behind something. Jeesh. Anyway, as I tried to peer above the tiny broken wall that was somehow protecting me from the hundreds of rounds of automatic rifle fire raining down upon me I finally spot the my target – the boss if you will. I took a few potshots at him but it was far, far too dangerous considering the volume of fire I was receiving and how damn lethal shots are in the game in the first place. My target also seemed to sighted me as well and was aiming an RPG of some sort in my general direction. Not good! I hurl myself against the wall, cling to it for everything I’m worth, and… What’s this? I beat the game! It seems the dumbass terrorist leader didn’t have RPG training on his resume and accidentally shot the wall he was standing in front of. Ooops! Kind of anti-climatic don’t you think? 😀

I decided not to play through the campaign a second time on hard mode as I originally speculated I might. I didn’t whiz through the campaign quite as fast as I thought I might and my gaming time is far too precious to spend on a back to back second playthrough when my backlog is so large. I did go ahead and grab all of the single mission achievements as well as head online and install all of the free DLC content. There was a lot of that to go around too, most notably two large map packs containing mostly remakes of maps from older games. There are also two excellent sounding co-op map packs but those ones weren’t free. Not that it matters as I’ve never played a console Ghost Recon game online for various reasons. For those that feel compelled, however, this game looks like a great multiplayer value. I admit I wouldn’t mind trying it out myself, the co-op in particular, but I don’t have too many friends interested in the console Ghost Recons and I’d definitely want to avoid pick-up games on XBL with this title.

I also checked out two Xbox 360 demos this weekend as well: Tom Clancy’s HAWX and Halo Wars.

First, since I was just writing about another Tom Clancy game let’s talk about HAWX. First of all “H.A.W.X.” (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) is a fucking stupid acronym. It’s in the same genre as games like Ace Combat. I’m not really sure what you’d call that genre though – definitely not any kind of simulator. Perhaps it is a “flight action game”? Who knows. It is basically an arcadey take on a flight simulator. I’m not knocking the genre though – I’ve certainly played my Rogue Squadrons in my day. Like Ace Combat 6 before it though HAWX failed to grab me. It looked great, I love flying jets around and locking onto poor helpless bastards on the ground, but neither game was a compelling enough of an experience for me to warrant a purchase. Like Ace Combat 6 I’ll reserve HAWX for a distant bargain bin pick up, if I get around to getting it at all.

Feedback on the net on the game seems to be pretty interesting and, as far as I can tell, mostly negative. I think a lot of people were expecting this game to be a more realistic (as implied by the Tom Clancy brand, perhaps) Ace Combat. What a lot of people got, however, was a strange near future plot with warring PMC’s that sounds like something out of the Ace Combat series (accurately it brings Strike Commander to mind for me and now I’ll lose sleep tonight for making that horrible comparison) possibly even less realistic planes, and some bizarre features (“assistance” and “ERS”) that make the game possibly even more unrealistic than it might otherwise. The majority of (vocal) people seem to hate it. I found the no-assistance mode to be utter trash – it’s only benefit being that it breaks up the gameplay a bit when used. ERS mode, however, I thought was pretty nifty. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that in a flight game before thought most posters seemed to hate the hand holding aspect of it. Overall I actually enjoyed the demo, just, again, not enough to make me want to run out and buy the thing.

“Finishing off a Covenant base.”

Onto Halo Wars! What can I say? It’s a not-so-special RTS. It’s Halo. It’s pretty good. I’m not surprised it’s good, nor that it is such a cookie-cutter RTS given the developer which has a history of helping shape the genre. From what I saw of the demo (I played both campaign missions and a couple of skirmishes) it’s nothing too exciting. I will say that was pretty pleased with this attempt to map RTS controls to a console controller. My only issue with them was how hard it was to group units. After playing Warhammer: Battle March recently in which I was able to assign specific units to specific groups and cycle through them it felt like a little bit of a dumbing down in the strategy department. Maybe you can do it and I just didn’t run into it, however.

People will inevitably ask whether this is a good game for Halo fans that aren’t RTS players. I’d have to say yes. The game definitely oozes with Halo flavor. All of the troops and vehicles are there and, thanks to the tech trees, even have some yet unseen (to my knowledge) variations. The game’s single player campaign also seems to have a lot of story and plenty of decent cutscenes. So sure, if you’re a big Halo fan I say grab it. If you absolutely hate RTSes, however, I can’t imagine this one will change your opinion on the genre in even the slightest bit. I for one may grab it if even just to satisfy the Halo fanboy inside of me. I don’t play a lot of RTSes, especially on console, so this may be a rare purchase for me though I’ve also been eyeing Tom Clancy’s EndWar lately as well.

Err… Wow. Apparently me and Tom Clancy have a thing going on. 😉

Again, apologies for the crappy photos instead of decent screenshots. It’s the best I can do at the moment for Xbox 360 games.