Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Zombie Overlord

I somehow hadn’t mentioned this yet but the next game I decided to tackle in my Xbox 360 backlog was Overlord. Overlord came out near the launch of the 360 and had caught my eye early. The whole “evil” angle that sort of parodies other fantasy worlds seemed pretty humorous and, of course, the whole concept of ordering minions around seemed pretty awesome.

The minions are indeed cool. As a Games Workshop fan they remind me a lot of Snotlings or Nurglings. I love “sweeping” my giant horde of minions over to an enemy to have them envelop it entirely, hitting it from every direction, hanging on to its back, etc. It’s actually kind of brutal now that I think about it. You also can’t overlook the whole pillaging angle of it – when you sweep your minions over of an area with containers they all smash and grab items, bringing anything you’d want back to you, while equipping any armor and weapons they can use while gleefully shouting “for me!” Very cool.

One thing I didn’t expect was some of the more RPGish aspects – the ability to customize your character a tiny bit, along with your tower. There are some other interesting things you can do in your tower as well. I feel like if all of these things were fleshed out a lot more in the recently announced Overlord II it could make the game appeal more to other audiences.

“Decidedly less awesome than I look.”

The setting is pretty enjoyable with it’s whole fantasy world flipped on its head kind of thing though the story itself isn’t anything too amazing thus far. You play the generic fantasy bad guy (who looks an awful like Sauron) trying to rebuild his evil empire all while subjugating the locals and smashing all of those pesky “heroes” that roam the land. An odd thing about it is up to the point I’ve played I haven’t really been put into many situations where I’m doing inherently evil deeds – most of the quests in the storyline are actually somewhat good, or at least neutral, and the heroes and other enemies you kill are usually portrayed as being corrupt or not having been so good in the first place. I’m especially amused by the portrayel of the evil Halflings in the first area – what’s not to love about the idea of roaming packs of Hobbits going around raiding villages, taking slaves, and generally being anti-social shits when they’re not busy at their massive feasts and smoking their pipeweed?

I suppose the main idea is that you can be sort of a benevolent dictator – ruling the land with a population that for the most part actually appreciates you on some level. If you’re so inclined you can however purposely be a bit of a dick, doing overtly evil things on the side, eventually resulting in a more vicious, fear based reign. For instance, early on in the game I found some stolen food that some villagers asked me to return to them. I could have returned it to them but instead I decided to keep it all for myself. Of course another thing the local peasants don’t seem to like is when you casually slaughter them. *whistles* Another time while hanging out with some Elfy types I decided to burn down their “sacred grove” just for the hell of it. *shrug*

I almost never play the “evil” side in games that give you such choices but this time I figured “what the hell!” This is a game built around playing a bad guy so I might as well go all out instead of trying to be a goody two shoes like I usually am.

More on Overlord when I finally beat it.

“Get back outside!”

I’ve played a lot more Left 4 Dead since we first picked it up a couple of weeks ago. Playing it co-op with friends totally reminds me of how much I love playing games cooperatively period. I love all of the cool, unique stories we always end up with after a L4D session. Making memories and such.

The second time I played it I was joined by only NetworkShadow and we ended up making it all of the way to the end of the first act. Of course I was viciously knocked off of the side of the building by the last tank which was a pretty crappy way to die. At least when no one is there to notice and point and laugh. Then I got to watch NetworkShadow frantically try to survive the rest of the onslaught by himself which was actually pretty damn entertaining. I thought he was going to make it, honestly. For the record, I was bitterly rooting against him… 😉

“Standing victoriously over a tank.”

The next time we played all four of us got together. We got to the end of the second act and, hilariously, when the ship finally showed up to rescue us I immediately ran my ass off towards the dock, missing almost the entire last zombie push but accidentally leaving all my teammates to be slaughtered. Hobotix ended up making it to the boat, barely, but Radium and NetworkShadow ended up biting the dust… Oops!

Another time with all four of us we made it to the end of act 3 but NetworkShadow died before we made it onto the plane. It was quite an epic battle with all of us almost dieing multiple times. So fun!

“Up close and personal.”

I’ve said it before (on the podcast, in particular) but Left 4 Dead is one of those games that dieing and/or doing bad in is actually fun. Maybe simply because it’s a shared experience but perhaps also because the game sort of pits you as the loan survivors struggling against the odds to make it out of alive so it’s not entirely unexpected when you don’t. Either way I’m not complaining…

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

Drum Damage

I was planning on having the Untitled Games Podcast crew over to my place to record and to potentially play some Rock Band a few weekends back. I struggle to justify exactly why but I hadn’t really played Rock Band in quite sometime so I pulled out my drums to practice a bit so I didn’t embarrass myself too badly in front of everybody.

“Odd depression?”

That’s when I noticed there was an odd depression in my yellow drum head and also a much less pronounced one on the blue drum. The yellow one also felt strange when I pressed in the center, almost like a button. It was as if somehow the rubber layer over the drum head had thinned out so now I was pressing directly on the censor. My friend mentioned to me that they had noticed some time before that it looked weird too. Odd. Still, I set them up and played six or so songs and they worked just fine. Hmph, weird!

The next night we recorded a two man down episode 3 and, afterwards, engaged in some Rock Band shenanigans. I was thrilled to discover that my yellow pad was now completely and utterly fucked – it’d only register 1 in 10 or so notes! Doh. Luckily we were using Rock Band 2’s “no fail mode” so it didn’t totally ruin the night.

The next day one of my compatriots called to tell me they had ventured to Circuit City during it’s going out of business sale and seen several sets of Xbox 360 Rock Band 2 wireless drums for 40% off. I had kind of been looking for a good excuse to upgrade to the Rock Band 2 drums – the removal of the cable wasn’t a big deal but I thought the add-on cymbals looks neat and the quieter, more bouncy pads sounded like a good upgrade.

“Cracks on the underside of the head after dismantling.”

After disassembling my old drums I discovered that the problem was that my two center pads were massively, massively cracked. I figured I could possibly fix it myself but nothing short of some sort of epoxy (which I didn’t have) would keep it from rebreaking the next time I smacked it a little bit too hard and I’m still not even sure the broken head was the only problem. I decided to simply opt for the new drums and headed off to Circuit City.

“Yup, it’s broke…”

When I arrived they only had 3 boxes of the wireless drums left and all of them seemed to have been curiously taped shut as if they were returns. I decided to take the gamble and grab one of them anyway. When I got home and unboxed it I was pleased to see that everything was in order – it didn’t appear that anything was missing or had otherwise been tampered with after all. Once I got the drums setup, however, they absolutely refused to connect to my 360. I absolutely can’t stand buying something and having it dead on arrival and thanks to the terms of Circuit City’s liquidation I couldn’t return the drums, not even for an exchange. Doh!

After browsing various forums and trying every suggestion under the sun it appeared that my only option was to RMA the drums.

I went through EA’s RMA process which I found to be way more painful than it should have been. The website didn’t work right in anything besides Internet Explorer (…and who the hell uses that? 😉 ) and even then it was poorly worded and not very easy to use. I actually found myself calling EA (and of course their number wasn’t easy to find) to make sure they had my correct RMA information because the process and it’s corresponding confirmation e-mail were so damn unclear.

Once all that was done with I had to get them a copy of my receipt with a date of purchase to prove that the unit was still under manufacturer’s warranty. On the bright side, once I was able to do that I received a UPS tracking number in about 20 minutes.

“New drums: Success! (5 stars, 99%, 344 note streak on expert.)”

A few days later and UPS showed up with my new drums. Other than trying to figure out how to put my old ones back in the damn box I had zero trouble with the new replacement drums. They connected right away as my previous ones should have and they performed well during another Untitled Games Podcast rocking out session, this time after the recording of TUGP episode 5.

All in all, while I was extremely disappointed about the original “dead on arrival” drums the RMA process was easy enough, very quick, and I’m satisfied. Now I just need to scrounge up some money for those cymbals and, of course, even more songs to play! 😀

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.