Tag Archives: Xbox Live

Reaching for a Good Pun to Use as a Title

Well it certainly has been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately I don’t have any great excuse for why I haven’t posted in the last 2+ months but honestly writing for this blog is probably one of the lesser of responsibilities I’ve shirked recently. Perhaps one possible explanation is that I haven’t done a lot of gaming during this time, and indeed I’ve done (relatively) little, yet all together I’ve certainly done more than enough to report on:

“Enjoy General Knoxx’s millions and millions of miles of less than scenic highway!”

I worked my way through both The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx expansion packs for Borderlands via local co-op. Other than not realizing I had to manually select to go back to “playthrough 1” which resulted in us having to replay the first 10 minutes of the single player campaign, and then have our brains instantly devoured by living dead who horribly out-leveled us, Zombie Island was pretty fun. Perhaps a bit monotonous, but no more so than the rest of the Borderlands tends to be to me. General Knoxx was a little more fun, or at least it would have been if it weren’t for the obnoxious driving requirements in lieu of the absence of fast travel. I appreciate them wanting to put more emphasis on vehicles for that expansion but since I generally consider the vehicles in Borderlands to be godawful, the effort seems to have been a bit of a waste. I’d wager that even if you somehow enjoyed the vehicle sections of the game the lengthy back and forth travel required for many of the quests combined with many long, road centric areas and annoying, respawning enemies probably at least grated on you a little. We never got around to going after Crawmerax (our characters are still relatively low level) but we’ve still got a Robot Revolution to possibly investigate sooner or later. Despite all my seemingly negative comments I’d say that if you’re any sort of a Borderlands fan you should probably own all of these, period.

“No stupid caption, just Jun looking like a badass.”

What else? I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again way too heavily which has included me finally getting my “main” to level 80, making several new “alts” (including one who I’ve been leveling exclusively via the Random Dungeon Finder) and even making it into the Cataclysm closed beta for some so, so sweet early access to these hotly anticipated new changes and additions. More on WoW later in some separate updates but hopefully I won’t burn myself out again before I get too far into the proper release of Catacylsm next month.

Finally, and most importantly for this update, Halo: Reach has fallen from the heavens into our unworthy hands. Being a Halo fan since playing the first game on my brother’s newly purchased Xbox back in 2001, and continuing to enjoy the latest additions to the franchise in the form of Halo 3 and ODST, I was definitely anticipating Reach. Of course it was also an insanely safe purchase to make both because of Bungie’s great track record and the Halo franchise’s long, long legs on Xbox Live.

“Us owning some Covenant in the campaign.”

It has been such a long time now since it was released that my analysis of the game is going to be a bit more muted than it might have been if I had actually posted about it in a bit more of a timely fashion. I’ll sum up the single player pretty quickly though: continuing Bungie’s high level of production value and polish combined with improvements made from lessons learned in all previous Halo iterations, including ODST, yet never straying all too far from the conventions of the series, Halo Reach is almost certainly the best of the Halo single player campaigns so far. It may not be my personal favorite campaign (Halo: Combat Evolved holds a lot of fond memories for me and I’m idiotically nostalgic after all) and I might have been a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t get the Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon, or SWAT style squad based, tactical experience that my imagination ran wild with when we got our first glimpses of Reach early on, I do concede that it might be the best Halo yet. The action, story, variety and the pacing, etc. – it’s all awesome. That’s not to say it is perfect – we had some pretty funky AI issues with the other Noble Team members in particular when playing the game via co-op, and some other bizarre occurrences, but I chalk most of those up to Halo charm rather than any sort of real annoyance.

“Jet pack melee kills are one of my favorite additions!”

The aforementioned Xbox Live goodies are amazing too with Bungie continuing to raise the bar on console multiplayer experiences. The changes, as subtle as many of them probably seem to casual fans of the franchise, make a huge difference. The changes to Halo 3’s equipment being the most notable, particularly with the addition of the ever popular jet pack. Once you start to master the use of some of the new items you’ll probably wonder how you ever stood playing Halo 3 and who doesn’t love jet pack stomping on someone’s face? Bungie also took some nice cues from Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 (amongst others, of course) with their persistent stat tracking and career advancement and, while it isn’t as over the top as it is in those games, it is definitely an improvement. The new Forge (and Forge World) is incredible as well – I personally spent a few hours in it recreating a very sad approximation of one of my favorite old Doom deathmatch maps (available here!) I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth with the multiplayer alone and I’ve barely played any of the new Invasion mode and haven’t even tried the new Firefight yet. Awesome!

An interesting facet of the release of the game that has almost nothing to do with the game itself is that fans of the series are now left to wonder about both the future of the Halo franchise now that Bungie is doing new things, and exactly what new things Bungie will be getting up to. Rumors of MMOs and perhaps returns to older franchises (Myth, mainly) abound, but in any case it is definitely going to be a fascinating few years while we watch both situations unwrap.

Helicopter Hunting and Universe Saving

I finished up Battlefield: Bad Company last week. When I said the game felt easy I wasn’t being entirely accurate – while it is, no doubt, easy to overcome just about anything thanks to the overly generous healing and respawning systems the difficulty definitely ramps up as the game goes on and it can be extremely frustrating respawning and quickly dying over and over again. There were a few sections towards the end of the game where I really felt like I was being put through a meat grinder.

The last boss fight involved taking down a helicopter. I had seen multiple people claim that this fight was an easy opportunity to get the achievement for shooting a helicopter with a laser designator – those people are now my enemies. 😉

“Blah. One of the only online shots of Bad Company I could find and there’s an unprecedented lack of exploding going on in it.”

To explain the situation a little better, the laser designator requires you to hold a view on a target for a certain amount of time in order to lock the target. Once this is done you receive a satellite view of a missile dropping towards your target which you can then clumsily guide to where you want it. It works well enough for taking down, say, a tank that hasn’t spotted you yet. Taking down a helicopter that is constantly moving and launching barrages of rockets at you? Not so much. 🙂

I must have tried hitting this damn helicopter for thirty minutes or more, constantly switching between the designator and my trusty healing syringe to recover from near rocket hits, before finally getting the timing perfect enough that I could nail the chopper in one of the brief moments that it was hovering in place. Once this was done I threw down the designator and picked up a nearby rocket launcher so I could finish the job the way the game intended. Unfortunately this actually proved more difficult than I had originally imagined and I quickly used up all my ammo without taking it down. I was highly annoyed as I went back to the designator to attempt to score another one of these impossible shots to finished the deed. Luckily during the process I discovered an ammo box and was able to refill the rocket launcher and finally take down the chopper. Argh.

The ending, while setting up the potential for a sequel, was pretty enjoyable. The last shot of The Legionnaire looks freakily similar to Niko Belic. Well, Niko did say he did some bad stuff during the war, right? 🙂

I hopped into multiplayer briefly just to check it out since it has such a great reputation. The action was somehow even more chaotic than the single player game with an ever-present deadly crossfire of missiles, shells, and small arms. The environments followed suit thanks to the almost nonstop sound of booming explosions and errie visuals of the smoke plume filled sky and the rubble strewn ground. I only played about four matches and they were all of the Bad Company standard “Gold Rush” attack and defense variety. The teamwork was possibly slightly less together than what you might see in a PC Battlefield game yet I was surprised to see little if any fighting over vehicle spawns or other smacktard behavior. It seemed fun – very chaotic, but fun.

All in all Bad Company seems like a solid product – far from perfect but very solid. It was good enough to make me bump the upcoming Battlefield 1943 downloadable game up to being a definite purchase when it comes out later this year.

“Wake Island in the Frostbite engine? Sign me up!”

Next up in my back log will be the infamous Ninja Gaiden 2. We’ve talked about this game and other related games quite a bit on the Untitled Games Podcast which has been making me really want to dive into it. At the same time I’m a little bit wary of its legendary difficulty. While beating the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden was one of my more satisfying achivements in recent gaming history I still sometimes wake in cold sweats with visions of infiltrating the imperial city looping through my brain. Seriously, I literally completely put that game down 4 or 5 times but I loved it so much up until the different points where I got stuck that I kept coming back (sometimes months later) until I eventually made a concentrated effort to beat it. I feel kind of like I’m about to go to an amusement park and I’m really looking forward to it yet at the same time I know that the rides will scare the shit of of me.

Moving on, I also finally managed to beat Marvel: Ultimate Alliance cooperatively. It wasn’t bad although, honestly, the whole time I was wondering why they haven’t released a current generation version of the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games and wishing I was playing that instead. That being said the ending was actually surprisingly rewarding.

“Jeez, not another union mandated super hero coffee break. At least Dr. Doom gets things done!”

Each mission has an optional quest. Often times these felt like normal parts of the mission and we didn’t have any difficulty casually completing them along the way though there were a few that definitely felt a bit more optional or are were harder to complete. Many of these missions felt just barely related to the mission objective enough to remove any question of their purpose though I suppose this experience could be unique to people like myself who have played way too many RPGs, particularly of the MMO variety, in which completely banal side quests are dolled out constantly with little or no consequence. Regardless I didn’t suspect that there were actually major consequences for completing or failing each of these side missions, detailed at the end.

There was one instance in which we failed a mission and didn’t think we’d be able to beat it without a ton of effort. There didn’t seem to be any consequence to failing it though so we warily let it slide. We found out at the end of the game that this ultimately resulted in the West Coast being wiped off the map. Oops! Sorry, fellas!

Additionally an answer to a subplot that you might have forgotten about by the end is revealed and there are some hilarious voice overs during the credits. That’s the least I can say about the ending.

My favorite thing about the game though has got to be how humorously absurd it is as it constantly attempts to bluntly explain the origins and powers of different Marvel Universe characters and how their stories relate to each other. Now, I’m not a huge fan but I grew up around comic books and am definitely more familiar with the characters and storylines than the average Joe yet I somehow never realized how goddamn dumb most of these back stories were, especially when connected, until I played Ultimate Alliance. Good times! 😛

Oh, and how can I forget? I’ve also been playing the XBLA version of Peggle. Yeah, it’s pretty rad…

Quick update

Here’s a quick update about what I’ve been up to lately… and a bunch of Warhammer Online screenshots because… why not?

First, starting with Warhammer Online since it is probably pretty apparent that I’ve been doing a lot of that.

I finally got to my main character to tier 4 despite being distracted by several new alts. All of the various tier 4 zones I’ve visited lately have been relatively awesome – Eataine with its super bright blue skies, lush green fields and orchards, and beautiful Elven towers, Praag with it’s massive city sprawl, Reikland with its centerpiece, Reik River Observatory, keeps, and walled towns galore, and Kadrin Valley with it’s scenic snowy mountains, valleys, and epic Dwarven structures.

“Checking out a cool tower in Dragonwake.”

I quickly made the most of my limited schedule and put my nose back to the PVE grind stone questing in the relatively boring Elf lands once again. After gauging how much experience I was gaining and the levels of the mobs in the adjacent zones I decided I’d break away from my original plan of sticking only to my racial lands for solo PVE and ended up completing (including grinding out chapter influence!) the first zones in Empire and Dwarven lands as well long with the beginning chapters and first 3 side zones of the next set of zones. I just finished wrapping up the second chapter of Dragonwake back over in the Elven lands and am currently sitting just another short sit-down away from dinging 40 – the end is almost here and still absolutely tons of potential PVE content to go through! Perhaps the most exciting part of my character advancement, until I get to 40 at least, has been qualifying to use all of the great gear that I’ve slowly been gathering from off the auction house. That doesn’t sound that great but I’ve already maxed out my chosen mastery and don’t see any major benefit in using the leftover points in other trees and I’ve also got my tactics pretty much locked in until I get my forth slot at level 40.

I did do my first couple of Tier 4 scenarios as well, though so far which was interesting to say the least. I, of course, played the current flavor of the month scenario in tier 4, Serpent’s Passage, which is thought was pretty bizarre. It seems to be one of those scenarios where it is either absolute chaos or an utter beat down and seldom anywhere in between. I also played Thunder Valley a few times which I enjoyed. The I think my policy of waiting until I was further along in the various tiers to PVP much has been a sound one. 🙂

“My Swordmaster alt posing in Nordenwatch.”

With the recent releases of World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and Lord of The Rings Online expansions and Warhammer Online rapidly losing its “oooh, new, shiny game!” appeal for a lot of players we’re really seeing a lot of population drop off. Our server hasn’t suffered that badly, nor has my guild, but some have been utterly decimated. Still, my guild has it’s own problems – we’ve suffered plenty of membership attrition for a variety of reasons. With a mature focused guild like ours though they tends to be more because of various real life issues than game hopping or silly drama. This is all further hampered by the raging case of “altitus” everyone seems to have which included the establishment of a Destruction guild on a second server which has generated far more interested than I think any of us anticipated. I’m one of the few hold outs but it is pretty disappointing logging on to see no or few other guildmates online and no fun at all listening to my former allies talk smack about Order while cheerleading for Destruction on our voice server. We’ve taken some steps to help the situation out including having a serious discussing about the issue one night recently and looking seriously at joining an in-game guild alliance. Still, I sadly fear that my time in this guild may be nearing an end if things continue down their current course.

“A convoy of Imperial Steam Tanks escorted by Knights of The Blazing Sun.”

Speaking of those new expansions I’ve been resisting picking of Wrath of The Lich King as I don’t really feel like it offers me too much. I’m sure the 70-80 PVE content is great (if not more of the same) but the new class and other additions don’t do much for me. I’d definitely still like to check out EQ2 and return to LoTRO at some point though but neither idea seems feasible until I’m over WAR. Sadly one game that I had talked about here not too long ago including plans to return to it some day, Tabula Rasa, has announced that they’ll be closing their doors early next year. I’m pretty bummed by the news as the game had tons of potential and the development team seemed to be putting an outrageous amount of effort into updating the game post release. Respect to those on the TR live dev team and I hope they’re all able to find great jobs somewhere else if they aren’t reassigned to other NCSoft projects.

I finally managed to play my first couple of online matches of Warhammer: Battle March (Xbox 360) with my brother. They mostly consisted of me showing him how to do various things and some experimentation but it was fun none the less. I’ve instructed him to have a 15,000 point army of his choice ready to do battle for next time. I hope to get into the final chapter of the single player campaign which features Orcs and Dark Elves soon and finally get this game out of my 360 so I can move onto the next thing in my backlog. 🙂

“Sightseeing in Dwarf lands.”

Speaking of the 360 the new “NXE” dashboard update was released last week. Personally, I’m pretty happy with it. First of all, although I didn’t get to see how/if it effects matchmaking, the new party system seems like a simple, logical evolution of the old chat features. The avatars are neat – we definitely need some more customization options, especially with clothes, but I was able to make my avatar look quite a bit like me according to a couple of people who have checked it out. They don’t really add much to the experience but I’m not necessarily bothered by them either. The new friends list, which shows each of your friend’s avatars in a room, or their party in a room, and what they’re doing is pretty neat but much less useable than the old one. Of course you can still access your friends list the old way via the guild button which I assume most people would be doing while gaming anyway.

“My Xbox Live facsimile. Yes, I really do have stupid sideburns.”

The dashboard itself is much more responsive and feels a lot less cluttered – I know some people have complained about the adds, but personally I feel having a few Xbox 360 related adds within each menu is much more tasteful and much less intrusive than having little blinking ads scattered all around the screen, blocking your wallpaper as with the old dashboard blades. Netflix streaming is great and we’ve already scoped out several shows and a movie on it since we’ve had it. The rollout itself seemed to be pretty trouble free. You always hear horror stories of freeze ups or entirely bricked systems during these things but, for the most part, it seemed to go extremely smooth. The update downloaded and installed very quickly and the whole process was quite painless for me.

“About to cook some smores in Isle of The Dead.”

Lastly, after the release of a couple of new game that interest me, the Castlevania and the DS version of Chrono Trigger, for instance, I’ve finally decided its time I upgrade from a GBA to a DS. Hopefully this’ll end up being a Christmas present – I’m actually pretty stoked about it. 🙂