Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Dropping on to the Lost Planet

Oh shit, it’s game log time and I actually played some things this time!

As predicted my next 360 foray was Halo 3: ODST. ODST has pretty much been talked about to death lately on all of the gaming forums, blogs, podcasts, and the like so I won’t go into it too much. I played through it co-op via splitscreen on Heroic difficulty and enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s nice and short but well paced and a lot of fun. If you’re a Halo (particularly Halo 3) fan then this is a must buy despite the lack of the iconic Master Chief. I plan on going back and getting more of the achievements, including going after all of the audio logs, in a subsequent playthrough sometime soon. I also dabbled in the new Firefight mode a couple of times with some friends and, as predicted, enjoyed the hell out of it. There’s just something to be said for working together with friends in just about any game and the Gears of War 2 “Horde” mode template that everyone has been shamelessly copying lately really seems to nail a certain pure aspect of that.

“Silenced pistols are the new black.”

Next up I decided to play Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on my 360. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it was the ever increasing nip in the air around here as we move into the fall that made me want to jump head first into Lost Planet’s abundant virtual snow banks… or maybe I just dig mechs? Who knows. I remember thinking the game looked cool since well before it was released but until the relatively recent announcement of its upcoming sequel I feel like it has been overshadowed by newer games. I’ve got a couple of friends who really dig the game though and one of them, NetworkShadow, even demoed it for a few of us at his place one day not too long ago. I really got into the idea of trudging through the beautiful snowy environments. The graphics might be fairly dated nowadays but people were blown away by them at launch and they’re just stylized enough to remain easy to appreciate even now.

“E.D.N. III has some pest control troubles…”

I managed to beat the game in just a few sittings and although there were some tricky sections (including lots of old school set piece boss battles) I found the game to be fairly easy. In fact a lot of my difficulty came about from trying to collect the achievements for all of the “target mark” collectibles for which I had to replay a few sections, even a few entire levels to complete. The character’s movement and control felt slightly off to me (though admittedly I play relatively few 3rd person action games) but once I got used to the controls it all felt quite smooth and I was generally quite happy with it. I was a little disappointed by the last boss fight which hit on a pet peeve of mine – throwing entirely new game mechanics at you in the last level. I didn’t feel like Lost Planet’s case was as gross as a lot of other game’s and I once I got a good feel for it I could more or less tell what they were going for. Still, it was fairly annoying and I ended up having to replay it like 15 times before I finally managed to beat it.

Lost Planet is also one of those newer Capcom games that seems to heap on a large amount of Western influence for some mysterious reason I don’t suppose I care enough to speculate too much about – something about increased international sales or a bold new direction or something, I don’t know. Indeed the game reminds me a lot, the setting, graphics, control, and the core gameplay, of a lot of Western 3rd person shooters, however there is an unmistakable Japanese feel to the entire game. I’m not just talking about the often silly extended cutscenes but the game itself often feels like somewhat of a 3D take on an oldschool side scrolling shooter like Contra or something. It’s hard to explain but I’m sure some of you who have played it know where I’m coming from. Regarding those cutscenes though, I’ve got to say that not playing many Japanese games, particularly the cutscene heavy JRPG genre, I do find an occasional dip into the cesspools of insane Japanese cutscenes to be pretty refreshing.

“What’s better than mowing down aliens with a minigun? Mowing down aliens with two miniguns!”

Next up for the 360 is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. An interesting note, and one I remember mentioning once or twice on the old podcast, is that I’ve had Call of Duty 4 since right around the time it was first released. I had the PC version and only really bought it to play multiplayer with friends however. As a result I never even started up the single player campaign and somewhere in the back of my mind I had always figured I’d probably enjoy it more on the Xbox 360 and that the achievements wouldn’t hurt either. So, here I am, nearing the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I’ve finally tracked down a decently priced used copy of the game for 360. I can’t wait! I’ve heard so much about the campaign and, who knows, I might even give multiplayer on Xbox Live a try while I’m at it since it’s such a blast.

On a non-console related note I also continue to play Half-life 2 from time to time – I’m about to start Episode 2 and wrap the game up. I’ll talk more about Half-life 2 in a separate post when I finally get around to finishing it.

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…

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…