Tag Archives: Xbox Live Arcade

It’s 2010!

I haven’t updated in a while but I’m still playing through The Ballad of Gay Tony on my 360 and plan on another Oblivion session real soon.

Christmas and New Years have come and gone (happy holidays!) and, naturally, I’ve acquired some new stuff. First and foremost my I got me a generous gift certificate which I more or less had to spend on video games. I’ve already used it to grab Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 for the 360. Assassin’s Creed 2 is probably the one game I’m most anticipating playing right now and I can’t wait to hop into Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I was planning on grabbing Borderlands as well as I thought it would be fun to play co-op but they were sold out of it everywhere I went for some peculiar reason. I’ll either try to be patient or grab Arkham Asylum instead. I win either way, right?

I also had a friend gift me Trine on Steam, a game that I’ve had my eye on for quite some time now. I was hoping it would eventually make it to Xbox Live Arcade but since that doesn’t look like that is going to happen I’m stoked to play it.

I received a points card for Xbox Live which I’ve used to buy two games that were on sale at the time – The Secret of Money Island: Special Edition and Shadow Complex. Both excellent games and since I plan on reviewing Monkey Island soon owning the SE will be quite useful as well as entertaining. I’ve still got some points left to spend but I’m not sure what I’ll spend them on yet. There are tons of Arcade games I want to play but relatively very few that I’ve actually purchased.

Speaking of Xbox Live Arcade titles I’m finally at the point where I’m seriously considering upgrading my 360’s hard drive. At this stage my Premium’s drive is totally undersized for the large collection of Rock Band tracks I have combined with some of the bigger Arcade games and expansion packs and patches I have. It is getting to the point where I almost don’t have a choice in the matter – having to delete content every time I want to download something new is a chore and in some cases entirely unreasonable. My only hang up is that as a long time PC guy the price of the 60 or 120 gigabyte drives strikes me as totally ludicrous.

“Sailing the starry seas.”

Finally, on an entirely unrelated note I am amazingly hyped for yet another MMORPG: Star Trek Online. Ugh, I’m so sure this game is going to bomb (at least to some degree, although with World of Warcraft out there that is true for every MMO) but the previews and beta leaks look great so I just had to drop the dime on the preorder.

I’ve always been a little bit of a Trekkie thanks mostly to my brother, who is a much bigger one than I and raised me on all of the movies and series up through Voyager. I’m currently experiencing a major reinvigoration of my Star Trek fanaticism not unlike what so many others I know went through as a result of the 2009 reboot movie. I’m pining to see the old movies again and I’d even love to re-watch The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager despite that being a lot more cost prohibitive to do.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the idea of a Star Trek MMO was a brilliant one and even when the game was having massive troubles under a different developer and the naysayers were out in full force I was quietly looking forward to seeing how the game turned out. The idea of being able to create and customize my captain, my crew, and my ship and go exploring where no man has gone before is quite appealing. At the very least you’ll see me write a lot more about it here in the next month or so when I make it into the “open” beta (what’s up with all of these closed open betas lately, anyway?) and finally the retail launch.

1943: Dawn of the cataclysmic half prey

Whew, I can’t believe it has been almost a month since I last updated this.

First thing first, I beat Prey. I don’t have much more to say about it than I did last time. I’ve since read that a lot of people were annoyed by the “flying” parts but they didn’t really annoy me, personally. They were definitely a little bizarre though I felt like that was probably intentional, going right along side the gravity walkways, gravity changing buttons, and the portals.

“Holding the line…”

I would like to expand a tiny bit more on the death mechanic I mentioned briefly last time. Basically, when you die you’re transported to a level where you can shoot at passing spirits in an almost Duck Hunt like manner. One type gives you additional health when you respawn, while the other gives you additional spirit. This sequence ends after a short time and you’re soon respawned where you left off. Your only punishment for dying, really, is that you had to waste 30 seconds of your life playing this mini-game. The repetitive nature of the mini-game annoyed some people but whenever I encountered it for the 3rd or 4th time in a row I realized that I’d rather be doing that than starting over from a check point or even loading a manual save. Neat.

I bought Battlefield 1943 on XBLA. Excellent game. There’s not a lot to say about it that hasn’t already been said by everyone else when it was the flavor of the month. It’s a near perfect game for when you need to kill 30 minutes or so and don’t want to invest in anything too meaningful. I’ve got to say that I’m pretty damn depressed at how much I suck at it compared to the original Battlefield 1942 though – I used to rock at Coral Sea (AKA Air Superiority) damn it! 🙁 It’s also amazing how much Frostbite’s destructible buildings change the infantry part of the game – you might as well be playing totally different maps when in one version every structure is essentially bulletproof and in the other strictly temporary. I don’t intend to play this one much as I rarely play online on my Xbox 360 but it was worth the 15 bucks in my mind.

“All out attack against The Avatar.”

Next up? I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to play more XBLA games but since I haven’t bought many of the ones I want yet and I’m broke it seems a bit silly to pass up on all of the games I already own and haven’t played yet. Speaking of spending money, I suppose Halo: ODST will end up being the next thing I play.

Changing platforms, I finally decided to finish up Dawn of War 2’s campaign. I felt like I could probably keep playing it forever. If only their were more maps to play in the random side missions – it just got way too repetitive. 🙁 Great game and they just announced the first expansion pack. Just my luck it’ll be continuing the campaign of the original game, raising the level cap, and adding a bunch of new stuff. Bought!

“Peekaboo!”

Hmmmm, what else? The news of World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion got me all hot and bothered to return to Azeroth so I dusted off my newbie Draeni character to try some of patch 3.2’s additions, most notable probably being earlier access to mounts, and to check out the old world one more time before the Cataclysm hits. We’ve not been playing too hardcore but advancement was fairly steady until we fell off the wagon again a couple of weeks ago. I also finally got around to getting Wrath of the Lich King although I haven’t touched any of the post 70 content yet on my main as I’m considering transferring servers and possibly even changing sides so that I can play with my friend’s main. If only it weren’t so damn expensive.

I definitely love the idea of them revamping Azeroth’s 1-60 content. I’ll be sad to see some of the zones totally changed forever but it is probably a needed change. I remember many a conversation about flying mounts in Azeroth once The Burning Crusade was released but the problem was obvious to anyone who had explored the world even a little. Except for travelable boarders and flight paths most of the zones were patch worked together with harsh seams. Many of them even featured areas that you can’t and aren’t meant to be able to traveled or even seen.

“Ravenholm, anyone?”

Finally, I started playing through Half-Life 2. Wow, old school right? It’s for a good cause! I’ll be playing along with Rebel FM’s Game Club and since I haven’t played through Episode 1 or Episode 2 yet it’ll give me a good opportunity to refresh myself on 2 before playing them. This will be my first actual participation with Game Club or it’s predecessor 1UP FM’s Backlog which I’m pretty stoked about. Ugh, I had forgotten how long some of these levels were…

News stuff

There’s always lots of gaming news but I don’t make much of an effort to talk much about it unless it particularly interests me. Hell, E3 came and went a few weeks ago unnoticed by this blog for that matter. Lately though there’s been a stack of stories that I’ve wanted to comment on all hitting the gaming news aggregation sites at around the same time.

It turns out that EA’s merging Bioware’s Old Republic and Mythic’s Warhammer Online (and, I’m assuming other) teams. Mark Jacobs of Mythic has also stepped down though it isn’t clear under what circumstances. It’s understandable that EA might want Mythic to lend its considerable MMO experience to the Bioware since this will be Bioware’s first MMO but given Jacob’s departure the opposite scenario could be true as well – perhaps EA wants Bioware to help save Warhammer Online?

Mark leaving is also a bit surprising to me as he’s been the voice of Warhammer Online and Mythic as a whole to some degree for a while now and, while I admit I haven’t been keeping up on Warhammer Online news after unsubscribing, he didn’t seem to be receiving too much credit for any of the game’s shortcomings. Perhaps EA feels differently about it though. For what it’s worth I liked Warhammer Online quite a lot and will probably check it out again someday. I can only imagine the recent changes such as the addition of the Land of The Dead are only improvements. As a bit of a Bioware fan I also hope that Old Republic turns out to be the World of Warcraft killer that so many people think it might be.

Two games I was interested in, ArmA II and Battlefield 1943 have both been released. ArmA II is, unsurprisingly, apparently chalk full of bugs. The first ArmA game was much the same way though in my experience much was fixed in post release patches. I’ve got it on order but don’t plan on jumping into it too soon. The XBLA and PS3 Battlefield 1943, however, is quite good according to most reports I’ve read. It has been having major server problems since launch, however. I definitely plan on checking that one out quite soon. Battlefield Heroes is also officially live now and I don’t know how I’ve not yet tried it.

Seemingly out of nowhere Piranha Games officially confirmed that it is working on MechWarrior 5. Battletech/MechWarrior lovers rejoice! Fans of the series have been pining for a sequel to simulation heavy MechWarrior PC series for quite sometime now and the closest they’ve gotten recently were the two MechAssault games on the original Xbox… which is to say not very close. Sadly I predict that MechWarrior fans will freak out even more than Fallout fans did over Fallout 3 when this is finally released and isn’t exactly what they wanted it to be down to the last detail. Check out this trailer.

Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax has bought Id software. I guess Bethesda wasn’t screwing around about wanting to get more into publishing games. John Carmack has done a few interviews and whatnot and seems generally quite pleased with the deal though as an oldschool Wolfenstein 3D and Doom fan it still stings a little. Still, this makes the total gaming geek in me wonder about the possibility of the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout game running in an Id engine or even a Doom open world RPG. 😛

Finally, and these ones are a bit older than the rest but well worth the wait. First of all LucasArts is releasing a remake of the original Secret of Monkey Island on PC and XBLA in a special edition format with remade graphics and voice acting. Soooo bought. Telltale Games, responsible for the Sam and Max episodic games, has also announced it’s working on an episodic Monkey Island series called Tales of Monkey Island. Again, bought… Well, eventually. It’s only coming to WiiWare and PC at first so I might hold off for a XBLA release.

Finally, LucasArts announced that it’ll be releasing some of its back catalog on Steam. The first round isn’t amazing exciting though it features some games I’d definitely consider classics such as The Dig and the Indian Jones adventure games. I’m sure they’ll be more than this released down the line and there’s a high possibility that I’ll be buying it all. I wish LucasArts would release these old games in a retail format as well, just for safe keeping, but Steam is better than nothing!

Sheesh. All of these announcements are making me think that the original The Secret of Monkey Island may be the next game I review.