Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Row, Row Row…

At long last I’ve finally gotten around to playing through Volition’s Saints Row for Xbox 360. I’d been curious about this “GTA Clone” style open world game since before the launch of GTA IV (which I’ve talked about on here numerous times) given that it was one of the first games of this type released this generation. It was also one of the few semi-well received ones at the time – it seemed like Rockstar were the only developers capable of really pulling this formula off for a while there. Volition helped change that.

“Every muthafucka here knows!”

Saints Row really does feel like a GTA clone through and through though. Of course, pre-dating GTA IV and all of the other open world games from this generation, it looks and plays closer to Grand Theft Auto III and its follow-ups, Vice City and San Andreas, than anything else. It actually feels pretty odd to go back and play this now considering some of the innovations it (and later games) introduced into the genre that are now rather common place. For one, Saints Row gave us auto check points before missions and an easy retry option. It’s far from perfect however, as there are no check points for different stages of missions and some of those stages (such as driving to the place where mission ACTUALLY begins) are definitely tedious and highly skippable. Saints Row also introduces an aiming mechanic that feels more like a normal third person shooter than the janky, inaccurate, lock-on nonsense of the GTA games. Yep, gunplay in Saints Row is actually almost kind of fun! I also dug the ability to recruit followers to help gun for you – particular useful for drive-by shootings, of which I am want to participate in rather frequently.

While I’m being complimentary, one of my favorite things about Saints Row has to be the ability to completely customize your character. This has been a major component of the Saints Row series since this first game and in the sequels gets taken even further with picking the voice of your character and therefore voice actor and to a minor degree tone and script of the entire story. In this one, however, it mostly relates to designing your physical appearance and customizing your wardrobe. For comedic effect I made my character look about as close to President Obama as I could manage and later even made him run around wearing an appropriate shirt and tie ensemble. Nah, this wasn’t political commentary, I just find the image of President Obama doing drive-bys in the hood to be rather fucking hysterical. Yes, I’m a horrible person.

“RPGs… the real reason to own a convertible.”

As for the negatives, the entire game doesn’t quite manage to muster up anything really resembling Rockstar’s levels of wit and style. This reflects on everything, from the general humor in the world (which is often less on the clever and more on the offensive side) to the less immersive nature of the city of Stillwater. That’s not to say any of that stuff is dreadful but it’s a comparison that I feel has to be drawn. I mean, Freckle Bitches? Come on. The world they paint also tends to ride a rough line between extremely violent and almost comical – I was slightly disgusted the first time I automatically shot someone point blank when I jacked their car. Harsh. Likewise, one time I jacked some random driver and gave them a single, swift punch to the head… you know, to teach them some respect? Yeah, my purple-clad follower ran up to him and proceeded to brutally stab him over and over again with a huge fucking knife until his corpse lay crumpled on the street. Err, wow…

“About to fuck some shit up!”

Technically speaking, I fully expected Saints Row to be embarrassingly buggy and unpolished, especially after some of the hilarious glitch videos I’d seen on YouTube years ago. Not so much, really. I actually thought it did just fine other than occasional sometimes severe pop-in issues. I suppose this might have been a benefit of playing the game way, waaayyyy after release after it has been patched, probably multiple times, and we’re now able to load the disc image onto our 360’s hard drives for I/O gains, which I more or less always do these days. Hopefully the engine used in Saints Row 2 (which is definitely in my backlog!) is a little more capable of handling things.

My biggest complaint with Saints Row has got to be whole “respect” grinding system though. In order to start story missions you need to have your “respect” meter filled up which you can do by completing all sorts of random activities scattered around the city. The activities are quite varied and some of them are even quite a lot of fun (Insurance Fraud gets brought up a lot though the Drug Trafficking activities were favorites of mine) but still, the need to have to crank out a few of these between every mission really drew the game out and did awful things to the overall pace. I can kind of see what they were going for by making these things mandatory (forcing you to explore what would normally be optional content) and I bet the design looked great on paper, but in reality it’s all rather tedious. While I pushed through it without too much trouble several of my friends bailed out of the game early specifically because of this grind.

“Braaaaaaaaaap!”

Anyway, Saints Row was fun. The story interested me even less than I thought it would and the game overall didn’t QUITE scratch that GTA itch like I was hoping for but it was certainly worth a quick visit to. If I had played it back in 2006 before GTA IV and the plethora of other “Grand Theft Auto clones” I’m sure I would have enjoyed it even more. I’ll be visiting many of those other open world games in the near future, including Saints Row 2. I can’t wait!

As usual with Xbox 360 games, I totally jacked all of these pictures. 3rd Street represent!

On a Rail

There’s been all kinds of buzz lately around the release of Minecraft 360 Edition on Xbox Live Arcade. I first played the original all the way back in 2010 and I’ve revisited it plenty of times since and yet I still managed to get swept up by the hype. One boring evening I bought it with the intention of “just checking it out” for a couple of hours, max. That night ended up being the latest I’ve stay up gaming in a couple of years…

The game is largely identical to the PC version, save the crafting menu, the limited world size, and the Xbox Live integrated multiplayer. The biggest draw for me though was the achievements. I’m not exactly an “achievement whore” but I do sometimes go out of my way to go for those sweet, sweet points and, more importantly, some of the more creative ones inspire me to play games in different, interesting ways. While the PC version also has achievements these days I’ve pretty much ignored them. With Minecraft 360 Edition I set my sights on “one hundred percenting” them! The achievements in Minecraft are mostly tied to pretty basic things that you’re likely to get through normal play. Even some of the harder ones could be stumbled into, really. The most interesting ones to me were probably “Leader Of The Pack”, “When Pigs Fly”, “Into The Nether”, and “On A Rail”.

“Random picture of a sheep enjoying a hot soak. *shrug*”

I set off going for On A Rail almost immediately. The idea was simple: ride a mine cart 500m in one direction. 500m is, for the record, 500 blocks which is definitely nothing to scoff at. I believe the world size on Xbox 360 Edition is only 1024 x 1024 so it’s approximately half the width of the entire map. Damn!

So, I started by building a modest cabin and gathering the usual resources to kit it out nicely and start doing some real mining. I next built a massive 10 or 15 block wide one block stair step down from my home’s basement all the way to bedrock. This ended up being a pretty epic mine shaft and once I got to the bottom and started doing some strip mining out from there, then having to make a few exhaustive runs up and down for supplies, I decided would be a great place to build my new rail system. I’ve only dabbled with rails and carts in Minecraft and have barely scratched the surface on using Redstone but some experimenting and a bunch of gold and iron down the drain later and I had an awesome fast ride up and down the shaft. Nice!

“Come here and give me a hug, you loveable little scamp, you!”

I next continued to strip mine just above bedrock from there, mostly searching for iron to continue my railway but I also started a new tunnel straight out from where my old track stopped to try to hit the 500m mark the achievement called for. This took quite awhile as I ran into the two walls I always seem run into with Minecraft: iron and lava. That is, a lack of the former and an abundance of the latter. At first I didn’t run into any lava and I was quite pleased with myself but eventually it hit. I mined around it. I hit it again. I mined around it again. I hit it again. Soon my track went from being straight to being this funky zigzagging mess. I also couldn’t find iron to save my life. In fact, I found far more gold and diamond than iron oddly enough! Eventually after extended my tracks a tiny bit yet again and not getting the achievement I realized that I had unfortunately forgot about the requirement of the 500m being in one direction. All of my lava detours meant that I’d be using quite a bit more than 500m of track. Doh…

For the second phase of the project I took my now MASSIVE collection of cobblestone and started building a 3 block wide raised railway from one end of the map all the way to the other, up and down mountains, through and sometimes totally over forests, over lakes, over lava pools. It was quite a construction project – in fact I ended up having to build a series of smaller houses to stay the night in along the way since I was so far out. On the plus side I did gather quite a lot of wood and other resources. About 2/3s of the way to the end I spotted a giant pack of wolves. I had no idea wolves spawned in packs like that and figured it was the perfect opportunity to get Leader Of The Pack. It’s a simple one: tame 5 wolves.

“Woof.”

Now, I’ve never tamed a wolf in Minecraft so this was all new to me. It seemed simple enough – give them a bone and they become your pet and follow you around. Bone in hand I approached the pack. For a brief moment I thought to myself “I sure hope this doesn’t attack them…” and sure enough, hit the wrong button and was instantly mauled to death by a pack of 7 or 8 angry wolves. Okay, I’ve had some pretty funny deaths in Minecraft but this one was just fucking hilarious.

I eventually finished it and then dug up all my old track. Still not enough track to finish the entire railway nor enough for the achievement. Around this time I decided to explore a bit and poke around for some dungeons. Dungeons were also something I hadn’t really experienced yet and were required for the When Pigs Fly achievement. I figured the easiest way to find one would be to explore mountains and existing caves for signs of them. Shortly after starting I discovered a MASSIVE cave system and it was absolutely chalk full of iron to boot. My expedition to explore and mine these caverns became such an undertaking that I had to come and go to restock on food, torches, and picks multiple times. One of the times I was making a supply run I ran across another pack of wolves. This time I didn’t make the mistake of accidentally hitting with the bone instead of using it and tamed my 5 wolves. Achievement unlocked! I figured while I was taming 5 wolves I might as well use all my bones and ended up with a ridiculous number of wolves all following me into the caves. Unfortunately this actually became a huge nuisance for some of the riskier mining and climbing I had to do as the dumb bastards had a bad habit of blocking narrow paths and even nudging me off ledges. Eventually the problem resolved itself as they all dove into a huge, dark pit to attack some skeleton rangers and zombies never to be heard from again.

“No, I don’t have a life.”

By the time I was through with my crazy cave exploring expedition I had more than enough iron to finish my track. One long, glorious ride later and achievement unlocked! Now that was a long, hard, but fun achievement. The railway was useful too, and I ended up adding enough powered rail to make it 100% automated in either direction. One of my favorite Minecraft engineering projects ever.

“The chickens and moon alignment aren’t related to the achievement… just something I’m into. Don’t ask.”

Next I set out for building a Nether Portal for Into The Nether. Again, I’ve never built one. To make one you need to mine some obsidian. Obsidian is formed when water his calm patches of lava. Now, lava and water mixing isn’t super rare to find but in my experience it’s almost always running lava hitting calm waters, or two running streams coming together. These both produce boring cobblestone – nothing at all notable. Most of the lava I had encountered was in my mines under my house and wasn’t exactly safe to try to play with so I began looking for other alternatives. I first decided to try making an artificial lava pond by using buckets to fill small trenches I’d make and then pour water buckets on top. Unfortunately the lava produced by buckets this way is flowing and therefore not suitable for producing obsidian. Fortunately I realized the very source of lava I was using had a bunch of calm patches so I began dousing it with water. A little while later and I had stepped into the Nether for the first time. Achievement unlocked! Annoyingly my 360 locked up when I tried to leave the Nether (not uncommon from what I’ve read) and I lost my save though I ultimaltey looked at it as a good thing since I didn’t need a Nether Portal in my front yard and I preferred my little lava pond being filled with beautiful glowing lava and not blocks of half mined obsidian.

Finally all I had was the When Pigs Fly achievement. This one is the most bizarre of all of them. You have to find a saddle, which can only be found as random loot in a dungeon chest, put it on a pig, and then ride the pig off of a ledge tall enough for it to take falling damage. Alrighty then. Unfortunately I still hadn’t found a single dungeon anywhere in my world and continued to search for one. Eventually I decided to cop out and start a new world using one of the seeds that people had been passing around to get this achievement – one where you spawn right next to an exposed dungeon that always has a saddle in it. Nice!

“Do it, DO IT!”

This isn’t the end of the challenge however. When you mount a pig *insert dueling banjos here* they freak out and start moving erratically, not unlike a bucking bull, so you can’t really control them to force them off a ledge. I ended up having to try to block one in on the side of a cliff, saddle him, climb on him, and then wait until he got close enough to a ledge that I could hit him and cause him to jump off. It took a while to pin him in and it took almost as long to get him to wander close enough to a cliff but finally… achievement unlocked!

400/400 points.

Screenshots are actually recreations and general screwing around in creative mode on the PC version – not actually the Xbox 360 Edition and not my actual world, unfortunately.

Shadowvan Complexia

It’s been months since my last proper Game Log update and there’s good reason for that: I haven’t been gaming much!

I’ve continued to play some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 online here and there until relatively recently. I think I finally reached that “eh, I’m good enough at this now…” stage of burn out which I also reached before max level in the previous two Modern Warfare games. Interestingly though, my load outs are fairly different. In MW2 I had developed a mean hyper-aggressive, hip-firing shotgun build and would even occasionally whip out a pretty effective sniping build on certain maps. In the original MW I had several assault rifle builds but one of my favorites was a hip-firing, fast reloading, high rate of fire sub-machine gun build. Coming full circle back to MW3 I found myself most effective with a pretty similar sub-machine gun build again. Great game, for what it is. Expect me to talk more about it (and probably more negatively about it) sometime when the future when I get around to playing through the single player campaign.

Oh yeah, I also briefly revisited my Minecraft addiction as well when a friend of mine put up a server… still a ton of fun! I didn’t do much cooperative building but I did carve out a little niche of my own and do plenty of exploring.

“I built this seriously huge canal before remembering that they changed the way water physics worked online and I couldn’t actually flood it properly. :/”

Star Wars: The Old Republic quickly came and went from my roster as well. Great game! I’ve definitely never felt so attached to my character or so drawn into the story of an MMORPG before, yet at the end of the day it is still a fairly cookie-cutter MMORPG and despite really enjoying it I decided that, at least for now, I would get more (and cheaper) enjoyment out of sticking with single-player titles. I’ve got such a huge backlog and tons of planned reviews for this blog and whatnot as it is, and with me spending so little time gaming lately, it just doesn’t seem worthwhile to invest so much time into yet another MMORPG. I do expect to return to this and finish out my main character’s story eventually, but for now… cancelled!

“I actually modeled my Sith Inquisitor after my old UO character.”

Speaking of my backlog, I just finished Shadow Complex on XBLA. Yes, I know this came out in 2009 and I’m massively late to the party (as usual) but wow, what a game! It’s no wonder so many people were raving over it at the time. For the uninitiated, the game takes the classic “metrovania” formula (probably an understatement: it is very much a direct rip-off of Super Metroid’s gameplay) and throws it into a slick, modern setting with a nice 3D engine to back it up. Don’t let the mention of it being 3D scare you – it’s still very much a 2D side scrolling platformer like the aforementioned Metroid and Castlevania games, though Chair did at least have the sensibility to use the more modern engine for things like in-engine cut-scenes and 2.5D environments. Let me explain the 2.5D thing: it means enemies can be in the background rather than only on the same plane as your character which may sound confusing but it generally works pretty well even with the occasional targeting oddities. It’s used pretty effectively, allowing for a lot more enemies on screen without cluttering things up and just greatly enhancing the perception of depth in the environment in general.

“If you can’t explore it, shoot it.”

While the 3D graphics are nice and the polished presentation much appreciated, probably what impressed me most were all of the tiny little updates to the Super Metroid formula. Just little things, like using a flashlight to see what objects and doors were accessible/useable with what items, color coding those same doors on your mini-map for later reference, highlighting the route to your next objective, etc. Perhaps some of those intelligent tweaks aren’t new to the genre, as other than playing the DS Castlevania games I really haven’t played anything like this recently, but they’re all here and all work exceptionally well. Some of the item and weapon additions were quite cool as well and despite the game always highlighting your next goal there could be a lot of flexibility in what paths and methods you used to reach it if you want to explore and use your imagination a bit. I’m quite thankful for all of this as I was a little concerned before I got started that this would be one giant, tedious slog through backtracking hell… but no, it’s very easy to keep track of where you have and haven’t been, what secrets you have and haven’t unlocked, etc. and it only gets more and more fun to play as you progress.

“Judo chop!”

Highly recommended if you were a fan of Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or games of their ilk or, hell, even just a fan of 2D platformers in general. I definitely got my 15 bucks worth and I’ll probably play it again at some point in the future to go after more of the map secrets and challenges. Now if only they’d develop a new Metroid or Castlevania in this engine… *drool*