Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Slaying Giant Bugs

It seems like it has been forever since my last game log so I guess I’ll go ahead and spout off a little about my current ventures. Other than playing a healthy amount of Oblivion with Garn, of which you should be hearing about fairly soon, the main thing I did was finally start Ninja Gaiden 2.

Ninja Gaiden 2 started off great. Despite the numerous changes since the first Xbox Ninja Gaiden game it looked and felt pretty much the same. it even seemed just as polished which was surprising given some of the reviews and impressions I had read. On the second level I ran into a horribly annoying bug, however. I received an minor achievement only to be greeted with a blade message stating that the device my user profile was stored on had been disconnected and asking me to reconnect it if I wished to have my achievements recorded. What the hell? I doubled checked my connections, eventually chalking it up as a fluke and continuing on. A short time later it came up again. Again, I ignored it and all was well. It popped up again, and again, and again. It continued popping up randomly every few seconds to every few minutes.

My (admittedly relatively brief) research into the subject lead me to believe that this was actually a fairly widespread problem which started cropping up after the first Ninja Gaiden 2 update was released. Not only did the pop up interrupt people but apparently their achievements weren’t being updated either, regardless of the status of their connection to Xbox Live. I read many theories but one of the most prevalent ones suggested that the problem was caused by particular bugged achievements and that the only fix, which didn’t sound 100% reliable, was to recover your gamertag. The only other options I had were to either either play offline or clear my 360’s cache and refuse the update (which would, in turn, also force me to play offline.)

“How to get a head in life… and maybe an arm and a leg too.”

I wasn’t fond of any of these solutions. I wanted my achievements and I wanted to be online, in contact with friends. Instead I gritted my teeth and faced the level 2 boss, who wasn’t too easy in the first place, while being barraged by constant pop ups. Argh! I was pretty pissed about the entire situation. How could such a major bug in such a big title go unfixed for so long? How could this affect earning achievements in other games? I even considered scrapping the whole game but scrapping Ninja Gaiden isn’t easy for me – god knows I tried to give up the first one plenty of times out of frustration before finally beating it.

I didn’t get a chance to play the game again for quite a few days and luckily, so far, I’ve yet to encounter the bug again. My theory is that they had “sort of” fixed the issue in subsequent title updates. When I originally encountered the message I didn’t have any problems with having my achievements updating. The only oddity I noted with them was one of my recent achievements lacking the date it was awarded to me on but I still had it and my gamerscore was still correct. The fact that the problem seems to have gone away after clearing my cache and/or cycling the console suggests to me that the nature of the problem, as it originally appeared, has changed. Here’s hoping it doesn’t reappear!

At the time of this writing I’ve made it about half way through level 5 and suddenly difficulty has ramped up drastically. I’m encountering these exceedingly tough scorpion monsters and my save points, at least where I’m at now, are starting to thin out a bit. I should also mention that for some reason (the extra 100 achievement points and minor bragging rights, maybe?) I’m playing on the harder “Warrior” difficulty instead of the default one. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be a massive, frustrating mistake.

Damn, it’s nigh impossible to find actual screenshots of this game online. I pray the next generation of consoles include a screenshot feature in their standard UIs.

The Adventures of Tea Lad and Coffee Boy

The current game on my Xbox 360 backlog hit list is Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and Damned expansion. Wow, something semi-current?! Yep. I’m only about half way through with it at the moment so don’t expect a full review here but I’m really enjoying it so far. It’s definitely a much more interesting piece of content than I thought we’d end up with way back when I first found out that the 360 would be getting some extra GTA 4 content and it’s definitely worth the 20 bucks if you’re a fan of the series.

“Not at all conspicuous.”

As I’m sure almost everyone who is still reading by this second paragraph already knows TLAD is essentially a whole new game – a new cast of characters, a new story, a slight change in focus from GTA 4, and there are even some features of GTA 4 that have been removed from TLAD for various reasons. One of my favorite things about this new side story is that it isn’t very long. While some people might take issue with that for me it means the game’s story should resolve itself fairly quickly and hopefully by that time the repetition of playing the same typical GTA missions over and over again won’t have reached the point of tediousness yet as it occasionally had in past GTA games.

A small change but one well worth praising is that missions tend to have more check points. It’s now much more likely that if you’re doing a long, multipart mission and fail you won’t have to start over from the very beginning. This makes failing much less aggravating – something I complained about in past comments about GTA 4. In contrast I was doing some side missions (the optional missions Stubbs offers, for the record) which didn’t have this feature, in fact they didn’t even have the usual text message retry feature at all and failing those, even a few times, annoyed the hell out of me. These check points should be in every mission, even the ones that don’t feature any real story such as the collection and gang war missions. The number of times I’ve gotten smoked in a gang war is ridiculous (I’m a bit rusty at GTA 4’s combat system, I admit) and the ability to retry one, starting over just after collecting my gang members, would make them so much less painful.

Back to the important stuff though. I’m really enjoying the story and the new characters so far. The whole biker gang angle is something fairly new to GTA and feels pretty fresh. Johnny is probably a more fascinating character than a lot of people give Rockstar credit for – I’ve read a lot of comments accusing him of being a violent, bullying scum and all around low life but, while that might not be completely off base, it is clear from the power struggle between Johnny and Billy, amongst other things, that Johnny is in no way that one dimensional of a character. The same goes for some of the other Lost members as well.

“Riding off into the sunset…”

I also dig the bikes. I thought the motorcycles in GTA 4 were more fun and less of a liability than those in past GTA games and would often have Niko nab one for quick runs through the city. Sure, they still hurt like hell when you wipe out on one but it is generally easier to avoid collisions thanks to their small footprint and high degree of maneuverability. I’ve got to comment about the apparently improved physics of the bikes in TLAD though – I don’t see it. They feel more or less the same to me as they did in GTA 4 proper and there are still some physics oddities, maybe even more. While every single time it happens I find it damn hilarious when my bike hits a tiny bump and is suddenly catapulted 50 feet straight up in the air my amusement quickly turns to concern as I realize I’m probably going to take some significant damage as well as be knocked off my bike when I land. If this happens in the middle of a difficult mission you’ll be ready to throw your controller through your TV. Thankfully it doesn’t happen too frequently but it still occurs enough to mention.

On a final note I did make it to the infamous penis scene. I talked about it quite a bit on last week’s podcast. To clarify my level of interest and excitement about the subject I’m not any kind of cock enthusiast, rather I felt like it was somewhat of a milestone in gaming. Male full frontal nudity displayed in such a way in a mainstream game? I think some sort of new barrier has been broken.

Screenshots lifted from somewhere else since I can’t easily take HD console screenshots.

Overdone

I was able to finish up Overlord last weekend, thank goodness. Though I liked the game it felt a little too long to me and I was more than ready to move on.

A few notes about the last bit of the game:

First, whoever cast the voice actors for both the Jewel and Kahn characters needs to be smacked. Acting ability aside the voices don’t match either character to the point of ridiculousness.

I’ve also got to say that having the checkpoint right before the final boss fight require a few minutes of travel, combat, and other dicking around was a little annoying even if I did only die a few times in the attempt. Admittedly this might have been my fault for not taking better advantage of the save system, I’m not positive, but in any case a checkpoint upon entering the final boss battle might have been nice.

“Take their women and children first!”

The plot twist at the end threw me a bit of a curve ball – I didn’t really see it coming (even forgetting having it spoiled when the game was first released) and was pleasantly surprised by it. The issue of the heroes you go after not being all that “good” that I mentioned in my earlier entry about Overlord actually ended up being explained in the end though I can’t say much more than that without spoiling it.

I didn’t really go after the achievements after beating the game. I was going to go for a few but after finding out the hard way that I couldn’t get my 100% corruption achievement after beating the last boss the wind was a little knocked out of my sails. This was especially disappointing since the only reason for doing some of the more dickish things I did was to get that achievement and the one task I lacked was relatively minor and not even related to the story. Ah well…

I am much more curious about Overlord II now though. Will it be a continuation of the same story? They certainly left the door open at the end of the first game. Will the controls be refined? I could definitely use some tweaking when it comes to more precision arrangement of my minions. How about the adventure and RPG elements? Comparisons to Fable 2 are inevitable. We’ll have to see.

Well, that’s one more game in my Xbox 360 backlog crossed off the list. Next up I’m actually playing a relatively recent release. Who would have thought?

Screenshot lifted from somewhere else since I can’t easily take HD console screenshots.