Tag Archives: Xbox 360

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.

Oh, to kill again!

Normally when I post my impressions of a game I do it at least a couple of times throughout the time that I’m playing it but for some reason, possibly because I was plodding through it at such a slow pace, I never even mentioned that I’d even been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 (Xbox 360) on here. Well, I have been, and I FINALLY fucking beat it! I got 1000/1000 achievements and, more or less, “one hundred percented” the game too, just a I did with its predecessor. The verdict? I loved it.

“The entire city is yours… to murder.”

Foremost on my mind as I started playing the game, other than how nice their engine is holding up, was that despite the differences between it and the first Assassin’s Creed, they were still very, very similar. I was a little surprised at just how similar they were since so many reviewers and the like said that even if you disliked Assassin’s Creed you should give Assassin’s Creed 2 a shot – I can only agree with this opinion to a point. Let me go into some details before I break this conclusion of mine down though.

First, and this is a big one for players who hated the first game, free running/parkour, despite minor improvements, is almost identical to what we had in the first game, which, in my mind is sublimely smooth most of the time. Like in the first game, however, you can occasional hit moments where your character will seemingly inexplicably (I say seemingly because it is probably my own fault most of the time) jump the wrong direction, grab the wrong thing, or otherwise not behave how you expect him to. This can really break up this otherwise enjoyable part of the game and kill the immersion a bit – one minute you’re a badass assassin effortlessly bounding the rooftops in search of your next mark, and the next instead of gracefully running across a line tied between buildings, you just decide to hop off the side and plummet 75 feet to your death. Wow. This felt the most silly the couple of times it happened when doing “leaps of faith” and instead of jumping cleanly into a bale of hay I instead dove head first for the cobblestone road below. Well, so much for faith… 😉

“I’ve slaughtered so many of these poor roof top guards that I actually kind of feel sorry for them now.”

One thing definitely worth mentioning relating to the free running, given that it is such a big part of the game, is that it is used in more creative ways this time around. As you progress in the environments you run into structures that require more creative climbing. This is expanded on much, much more in the various “Assassin Tombs” and “Templar Lairs” in the game which transform your character’s city traversing parkour into a Prince of Persia series like puzzle/platforming experience. Most of the time, except for when you run into some of the above mentioned rough points, this works quite well and is a great change of pace for the series, even if it did make me use my brain a bit more than I was expecting to going into this game.

AC2’s combat system feels like a good analogy for the whole game, really. It is almost exactly the same as the first game’s, only with some subtle improvements and the addition of some new options at the player’s disposal. A lot of the time these improvements and additions don’t feel truly needed but they at least succeed in giving players a tiny bit more choice and variety and apparently a lot of people needed those things. As someone who liked the first game already, more is usually better, and they didn’t overdo it or otherwise ruin a good thing here. It does indeed feel like improvement and refinement.

“Who is my friend? Oh, it’s only Leonardo FUCKING Da Vinci!”
Alright men, gather 'round him and watch as he kills us all one by one!

“Alright men, gather ’round him and watch as he kills us all one by one!”

I could ramble on a lot more about the game and in a lot more detail but I’ll cut myself off. Back to the conclusion I referred to before. Like I said, I loved it, but I also loved the first one despite its flaws. Still, it is hard for me to recommend Assassin’s Creed 2 to someone who absolutely hated the first Assassin’s Creed – again, it is largely the same game with some improvements, some needed more than others, and a new setting with all kinds of awesome Italian accents. If you were simply turned off by minor issues in the first game then certainly check it out, otherwise you might as well wait until we see what Assassin’s Creed 3 brings to the table. Of course by then it is possible that you won’t have ANY FUCKING CLUE what is going on in this batshit crazy conspiracy story. 😉

I have no idea what Assassin’s Creed 3 will be. It could literally take place anywhere, at any time, and they could change the gameplay in any number of ways. So far I like where they’re headed though. I’m a little puzzled (and maybe put off) by the announcement of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood but I can’t imagine not playing it at this point unless it just gets awful reviews. I would like to request that if they keep adding in requirements to complete things in stealthy means they add some more traditional stealth mechanics to our assassin’s repertoire of abilities though.

One more note: I played the game with the 2 “additional” DLC chapters intact and feel like I would have definitely missed not having them there, at least story wise, so I’d recommend picking them up if you care about that sort of thing and/or consider yourself a fan of the series. They were a tiny bit buggy, with sound dropping out on me a few different times during cut scenes, which I had heard others mention as well. Still, worth it.

As usual with Xbox 360 games I stole all of my screenshots from other people. It was really hard to find decent, non-PR released bullshots for this game. Most, if not all of these are from the PC version.

Gay Tony and Me

Well, I finally completed The Ballad of Gay Tony last weekend. I can’t say I’m quite as positive about it as I was about my The Lost and Damned playthrough though. I don’t know precisely what my main issue was. Perhaps I’m just experiencing some general GTA 4 burnout? Maybe this playthrough was a bit too soon after TLaD? I’m not entirely sure. While I’ll dish out some positives later let me continue this train of thought and bring up some of my specific negative issues first:

While the missions were generally more “over the top” and varied than those in the previous two installments of GTA 4, the disparity wasn’t quite as large as I was under the impression it might be after hearing so many other people laud the game for them. It still felt very much like Grand Theft Auto IV territory the entire time. The only real new thing was the parachuting/base jumping mechanic which would have been right at home in San Andreas or Saints Row.

“Our protagonists.”

Next, the characters weren’t quite as enjoyable to me as those in the previous two titles. Gay Tony himself wasn’t the easiest character to fall in love with thanks to his drug problems and the often stupid, reckless decisions he makes that drive the story. While the lead character, Luis Lopez, seemed quite interesting at first, I felt like his character actually devolved as the game came to an end. I went from intrigued about his history with prison, his relationship with his family, particularly his father, and of course his friendship with Gay Tony, to completely bored of him and his frequent comments about how he’s “a total psychopath, bro!” and “likes killing people for money, bro!” As a lot of people took issue with Niko’s various anti-social crimes and violent acts seeming to be at odds with his character in the main campaign of GTA 4, I found there to be something a bit disingenuous about the pairing of Luis’s character as it is presented to us with his apparent fondness for murder.

I still have some gripes about the checkpoint system. In my original rambling post about GTA 4 I had a few complaints about the system but only specifically touched on the number and placement of checkpoints being an issue. In my playthrough of TBoGT, however, I was completely annoyed by an entirely different aspect of the system: When I die during a mission (which is typically why I fail missions) I hate, absolutely HATE, having to wait to load up at the hospital, wait to get and reply to my “retry?” text message, and wait yet again to load back up at the mission checkpoint. I realize that Rockstar probably does it this way to give the player more options before retrying and ultimately help instill a further sense of persistence in the GTA 4 gameworld, but I’d so rather prefer a simple “retry?” prompt to pop up on the screen the second I fail a mission. Honestly, I can normally really respect the persistent world aspect to these kinds of game design decisions but in this case I feel like the fun factor should have weighed a bit heavier into the equation. The funny thing is that I didn’t even fail that many times in TBoGT, certainly not as much as I did in GTA 4 proper, so I’m not quite sure why it annoyed me so much this time.

“This is for all of those food poisoning victims!”

Finally, after the much more streamlined narrative of The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony’s story didn’t feel quite as fetching nor as well told. There’s really no need to go into specifics about this point, it’s just my general take-away after playing both DLCs fairly close together.

Anyway, enough bitching! Is it good? Yes, it is good. I can safely say that if you’re a GTA fan and you enjoyed GTA 4 you should probably go out of your way to own both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. In fact, save yourself some hard drive space and buy the Episodes from Liberty City disk. Plus you get to rock out to Vice City FM and the awesome RamJam FM.

Both times now when I’ve come back to Liberty City I’ve been blown away by what an amazing job Rockstar did on the city itself. Sure it doesn’t always look amazing (some of the textures, particularly) but the amount of detail is astounding! I always felt that much of that detail was squandered since there are so many locations you don’t really spend any time in or only see in a blur as you fly down the highway. Still, occasionally I end up on foot in a strange new place thinking “wow, this place is pretty neat for somewhere you never go in any missions or anything.” To that end I’m sure the guys who did the bulk of the development work on the city were quite happy to see it brought back in The Lost and Damned and again in The Ballad of Gay Tony.

“Yes, there is finally a tank. Upgrade!”

I also still think the character and story crossovers are totally genius. Niko, Johnny, and Luis all influence each others stories, sometimes directly and sometimes more subtly, but it is there and it is often presented in such a way that you have to wonder if Rockstar didn’t have these different stories, and maybe others we’ll never get to experience, penned down from the get go. Again, totally brilliant!

Well, I’ve already written a lot more on this than I had planned too. Again, if you’re a big GTA 4 then you need this. I personally think The Lost and Damned was a better, more cohesive game but TBoGT is well worth your time as well. I have to wonder if we’ll see more, non Xbox 360 exclusive episodes in the future. I wouldn’t doubt if they’ve considered it but I’m sure all the guys at Rockstar are probably ready to move on by now.

As usual my Xbox 360 screenshots were swiped from far more reputable sources.