October 2, 2007 – 12:26 am
Having played Halo 3 for about a week now I can honestly say ‘meh’ to the whole series. I have no idea why it is so popular or why it gets such great praise. It is a well made game for what it is (a pointless shooter), but the story is boring, and the gameplay is the same thing over and over again. Sure it’s fun for a bit, but not really for me in the long run.
This is my first experience with the Halo franchise so bare with me. I’ve never been much for online gaming so I dug into the campaign mode first. Sure I’m coming into the story at the final act so maybe I was a little confused, but for the most part the story was lame. I was much more intrigued with the narrative in Gears of War than this snore fest—even though it was fairly sparse.
Now that I’ve finished the fight and collected all the skulls, I’ve dipped into matchmaking and online play. I’m not good at shooters, never could get into all that twitch control—run and shot stuff the 12 year olds have down pat. Played a few ranked matches, got my ass handed to me, and now I’m about done with playing this. Maybe when some of my friends cave in and purchase the game we can do some co-op I’ll find some enjoyment in this game. Otherwise after getting a couple more achievements I’m going to shelf this game.
I will say that the community features built in are quite impressive. It records the last 25 games you play and allows you to watch them from every angle, share with friends, create screenshots, and so much more. More games need to follow with this feature set, it’s great.
September 4, 2007 – 2:34 pm
I have a few minor gripes with BioShock for the Xbox 360. First off, the story seemed too short—I polished it off in about 3-three hour sessions. To be fair I did play it on easy during my first pass so that could explain why I breezed through it never knowing what happened when you died. Big Daddy’s pretty much went down by laying two proximity mines on the ground and causing them to rush into them. Something tells me on medium or hard it takes a lot more ammo to kill these bad boys. =P
While more of a frustration than a game design problem…the achievements. I nabbed 800 points playing the game to completion on easy mode. I should have gotten 950 points but I missed one frickin’ diary in the Kashmir Bar, which you can’t go back to after you leave that area! That and apparently if you kill Sander’s after completing his masterpiece you can’t get into his secret room later in the game. A room you’d need access to if you want to fully upgrade all your weapons for another achievement. I also forgot to photograph him so I didn’t get that achievement either (went back to where I thought I killed him to photograph the body but couldn’t find it).
Other than these minor nit picks, this game has been fantastic. I am by no means a fan of first person shooters, but I’ve really gotten into it. Probably has something to do with the amazing art direction, story, and sound design…and all the fun ways you can come up with killing enemies. If they make a sequel to BioShock that takes place in the Rapture universe, I’m buying it!
The game just gets better with each play through. Last night I started a game on medium, in hopes of grabbing the remaining achievements (minus the one for beating it on hard). Originally I was going to attempt hard mode but after getting frustrated with the constant dying I gave up. I can live without a perfect 1,000 gamerscore on this game.
Oh and what’s up with the game creating individual save files each time I go to a different locale in Rapture? I don’t mind the autosave feature but couldn’t it just keep it confined to one save? I had to manually delete saves because it filled up my Memory Unit and would refuse to save my progress. Eventually I gave up and just saved to the harddrive, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. Lame.
August 13, 2007 – 7:37 pm
I’ve been hearing about BioShock for a long time and frankly I didn’t give a damn. FPS (first person shooters ie: Halo, blah blah blah) aren’t my thing and that’s exactly how this game has been described by the press. I think labeling it a FPS has done the game a disservice because to me it seems more like a first person action adventure with more to offer than just fragging doods. Condemned: Criminal Origins pulled me in with it’s eerie story, great sense of environment, and overall creep factor—BioShock is doing the same for me.
After downloading the demo and completing it you really get an idea of what the game is all about. The world of Rapture looks amazing, sounds amazing, is amazing! The best part about this game is that enemy AI feels real, which makes the gameplay dynamic and fresh. Not to mention it’s probably going to scare the crap out of me because you never quite know what the other characters are up to. Going to pick this game up for sure when it’s released for the Xbox 360 in a few weeks.
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August 12, 2007 – 9:31 pm
So glad I didn’t buy this one for $59.99 when it was released. I liked the movie and I almost fell for the promise of being able play as my favorite Transformer and tearing it up. For the most part the game delivers on that but it’s awful controls, painful game mechanics, and nonsensical plot really hurt this one. I know I know… it’s a videogame based on a movie and they always suck. Well not always—I’ve played one or two that were above average.
So what does this game do right? For starters Peter Cullen and Frank Wesker retain their voice roles as Optimus Prime and Megatron from the original cartoon series. Peter was awesome in the new film and he doesn’t disappoint in the videogame. Frank on the other hand sorta sounds like the Megatron of old, if he had been smoking hardcore for the past 20 years and was ready to hack up a lung. It doesn’t distract from the game but you definitely hear why Michael Bay went with Hugo Weaving’s voice in the movie.
You can play a campaign as either the Autobots or Decepticons where you have access to all the characters from the movie. For the most part the graphics look “next gen” enough and the frame-rate was decent on the Xbox 360 version. The opening cinematic is done really well and looks pretty close to the CGI effects in the movie.
The problem with this game are the controls and mission structure. Almost every chapter is some lame race mission where you have to speed down streets trying to get to checkpoints in an allocated time. When you get there you mash on ‘X’ a few times to kill a few drones then drive to the next check point. Half the time you get stuck on curbs or in the trees because the camera is horrible and fail the mission causing you to restart. Frustrating!
For variety you can pick up trees, cars, and debris to throw at your enemy. This is pointless unless you’re fighting a boss and have to stun them from afar. Not to mention a pain to do because half the time you don’t pick up anything because the object moves on you. Your guns do almost no damage to anything because drones and Transformers always have their shields up which make them just as useless as throwing junk. Lame. A combo system or being able to upgrade your moves would have been nice.
Then there are the boss battles. Talk about even more lameness. They feel rushed and boring. If you’ve played the Transformers game Atari put out for the Playstation 2 a few years back, you will be seriously disappointed. Those battles were epic and hard—these sure as hell aren’t!
The story isn’t bad but it’s not great either. Pretty much get the same plot as the movie with a few things changed for no good reason. If you’re looking for an expansion on what happened in the movie you can forget it. Other than some brief exposition as to how the certain bots picked their alt forms and a brief appearance by Shockwave nothing new is shown.
Rent this one if you’re a TF junkie or want some easy achievement points in a few days. Otherwise pass.
It’s been a few months since I awoke to my Wii’s blue glowing disc tray, so I was surprised to see it lit up this morning. Figuring it was just a silly message from one of my friend’s I fired up my Wii while I brushed my teeth thinking nothing of it. Turns out it was a message from Nintendo informing me that there was a system update ready to download.
It wouldn’t be adding support for Wii Ware games, the new Mii sharing channel hinted at E3, or anything terribly special. Instead it added some functionality to the Weather and News Channels, which could now display scrolling news stories on the Home Menu. This allows you to quickly glance at whats going on in the world from the menu instead of clicking on the News Channel directly.
Never really used either of these channels much or any of the other channels for that matter. The information is delayed since the Wii doesn’t fetch it continously—so what’s the point? Who wants to read old news or get the weather that was accurate an hour ago? Plus it takes forever to open these channels and then return back to the Home Menu. Why does the Wii have to reboot itself when you quit out of them? If you could access these channels at any time while playing games, similar to the Xbox 360’s guide or even Apple’s Dashboard widgets then these channels might be useful.
Looks like Nintendo added a digital clock to the menu as well. Man does it look ugly and really clutter the interface up. Couldn’t they have integrated it with the date if they wanted to display the time so badly?
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