SpaceRodent

I finished Shadow Complex last night. For those of you who don’t know Shadow Complex is a 2D Platformer in 3D that uses the Unreal Engine. It’s for the Xbox 360 and available via Xbox Live Arcade. It took me about 10 hours to finish it over three days on normal level.

This is the only game I can remember in a long time that as soon as I finished it I wanted to play it again! Luckily the game rewards this. When you start another game you continue at the level you finished at.

For my second play through I am playing on hardcore level. I am also striving for 100% completion. I had 68% completion on my first play through.

The game costs 1200 points which is about $15. The download size is 800MB. I guess the original 200MB limit is no more.

So if you have a Xbox 360 do yourself a favor and play this game!

So the other night I was playing Fallout 3 and the graphics started getting weird. There were red vertical bands where shading would be and when I went into VATS mode the highlighted body parts looked like TV static. I thought I would power cycle my XBOX and hopefully that would clear the problem – wrong!

Came back up with an error E74.

So I bought a new one last night and will ship the broken one off to Microsoft to get repaired.

Once I get it back I will sell it on craigslist.

So over the weekend I got Duels of the Planeswalkers for the XBOX 360. I played Magic the Gathering a lot when it first came out. When I started playing “The Dark” expansion had just been released so I consider myself an old school player. I am rusty though and have been getting my butt kicked all weekend on Live. Tonight finally I am about to win my first ranked match and am feeling good when the host drops. Nice. Instead of loosing a match fair and square and affecting their rank they drop. I don’t know if this breed of jerk has a name so I am going to call them “live droppers”. I think they deserve their own level in hell right below traitors.

By the way the game is excellent! If you like Magic The Gathering or card games in general its worth picking up for 800 points.

So I have been playing Infamous for the last two weeks and have a love/hate relationship. There are some things that really piss me off but I am still playing so it must be a good game. I picked up Prototype and Red Faction recently so I am going to compare and contrast the three games as they are very similar.

First the similarities

1. Open world
2. You’re a lone hero/villian against the government
3. You have special powers (or in the case of red faction weapons)
4. You can blow shit up
5. Game play gets repetitive

Now the differences

Infamous PS3

• Good/Bad system
• Climb everything

Prototype XBOX 360

• Very diverse powers including stealth
• Climb everything
• Extreme gore

Red Faction Guerrilla XBOX 360

• Fully destructible environments
• Vehicles
• No climbing

All three games have a cheesy story but its passable. Of the three I like Red Faction the least. Something about having superhuman powers, being able to scale everything is just too much fun, Red Faction feels not as fun by comparison but its still a good game.

One of the things that bothers about Infamous and Prototype is you have this super human power, you can fall off of a sky scraper but bullets hurt you; both are kinetic impacts why does one type hurt you but the other doesn’t?

In Red Faction you can blow up just about everything except blue barrels and rocks it doesn’t make any sense.

Of the three games I think Prototype has the best crowd system. The crowd reacts like I think they should: they run in terror. In Infamous they either boo you or give you the “you’re the man” sign. In Red Faction folks just wander about not really caring what you do and they tend to clump up in front of buildings so you have to bully your way in.

In Infamous you can ride the rails and electric wires so you can get around quick. In Prototype you have super speed and in Red Faction you have vehicles. Now Prototype also has vehicles but they are tanks and stuff and not meant to get you around. All three makes it easy to get to the main and side missions.

Of the three I think Red Faction and Infamous have the best side missions but that isn’t saying much. Prototype’s side missions are time trials. I hate time trials. I want to play the game at my own pace. Any way I want in depth side missions like in Oblivion or Fallout 3 not shallow “kill X things” and “run X maze”.

All three have an upgrade system so you can get more powers or better weapons. I like the Protoype system the best then Infamous and finally Red Faction in dead last. Red Faction makes you collect scrap metal like Rachet & Clank. So stupid.

I am still going through the single player missions so I haven’t played multiplayer yet.

Finally above and beyond everything I said above all three are great games and if you can only afford one you won’t be disappointed with any of them.

Well it has been almost a month since I got my PS3 and I thought I would give my second impressions. I still love it. In fact I have to say that I prefer gaming on it to the XBOX 360 because of the noise issue alone. The PS3 is so quiet, it is a refreshing change.

I recently finished Drakes Uncharted Fortune and I had a lot fun playing it. The gun combat was really hard though.

I am in the middle of Resistance Fall of Man and am enjoying it as well.

Aside from the noise issue I mentioned above I cannot tell a difference between the PS3 or XBOX 360 in graphics, sound or performance.

If I had to go back in time and could only buy one system I think I would still choose the XBOX 360 how ever. The online gaming is so much better.

I recently got a PS3 and having been a XBOX 360 user for the past two years I thought I would give my first impressions. Note that I am not a “fanboy” or a “hater” just pragmatic. Up until now I haven’t really had extra money to spend on one.

Okay first the good:

1. It is Quiet. I cannot believe how silent it is. The XBOX 360 sounds like a plane landing so I was expecting *some* noise but there isn’t any.

2. It is an excellent DVD player. So good I unhooked my dedicated one. It has a really good upscaling feature.

3. I really like the hardware design. It has a slot loading disc drive and touch buttons so there are no moving parts on the outside. It doesn’t have a huge power brick like the XBOX 360. It uses a standard, easily replaceable hard drive.

Now the bad:

1. Sealed rechargeable controllers
2. Didn’t come with high definition cables (component or HDMI)

Games:

Looks good. Not better or worse than the XBOX 360.

Conclusion:

I like it!

This is the second time I have said good-bye to gametap on this blog. Gametap has decided to ditch the fat, rich, desktop client with a web one and in the process went from a service that I loved to one I can’t stand anymore. I spent the better part of this morning trying to play a game and finally had to use google to end up in a obscure gametap forum to find the the solution; after that I was done.

Why would any company take a working, well received, product and shit all over it? I am not entirely sure. My guess is they didn’t want to pay developers anymore. The site is now also covered in ads – even if you have a gold subscription! They are also now competing with Direct2Drive and the other johnny-come-lately game download services.

Good-bye Gametap – it was a good run while it lasted.

So I have had Left 4 Dead for my XBOX 360 since it came out but I really didn’t get into it. I decided to get it on Steam and have been playing it a lot more. I really didn’t realize how much I missed the keyboard + mouse combination for first person shooters. I was actually pretty good at the game. I got a nice headset and started playing online. All the folks I have played with so far have been great! (which was the exact opposite online)

The whole Steam setup is really nice. I like all the integrated tools – makes it almost like XBOX Live. Newer games, like Left 4 Dead, also have achievements.

I just picked up the new Riddick game today:

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

First off the short version: I like it!

Now the long version: Its too similar to their previous game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay which was one of my favorite games on the original Xbox. In fact I was really upset it wouldn’t run under the Xbox emulation on the Xbox 360. Imagine my surprise when my local Game Crazy rep. told me that it was also included with Dark Athena!

Seeing them both, side-by-side, really shows how similar they are. They both are stealth shooters with bouts of face paced FPS goodness. Dark Athena takes place right after the events of Butcher Bay so if you haven’t played the original it would be best if you did.

My one complaint is you can’t play both at the same time as they both use the same “last checkpoint” slot so if you want to switch between them you will have to start at the last Chapter start even if your in the middle of it.

So anyhoo the games are basically the same in function and look and feel. Dark Athena does have some new weapons but other than that they are identical. Even the story is similar: “Fight the man, do side missions, escape” Dark Athena does have a multiplayer element but I haven’t played it yet.

That is okay though! The game is awesome and I don’t mind it one bit. For those of you looking for something different – look elsewhere.

For me the fact that Butcher Bay is included was worth the price even if I never played Dark Athena.

My favorite RPG games of all time are Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts Covenant. Both were 50+ hour games and the stories were great. I preferred the combat in Shadow Hearts though. They had a ring with a clock hand that spun around and you had to hit a button when the hand was on a certain portion of the ring. There were many different ring configurations. In my opinion this added a bit of ‘twitch factor’ to an otherwise turn based game. I felt the story in Final Fantasy X was a little better and the graphics were of higher quality.

Now that I have a Xbox 360 again I was looking into what sort of RPGs are available. Since I already completed Oblivion prior to giving up my 360 that wasn’t in the running. I know that a Japanese RPG is a lot different than Oblivion (which I guess is an American RPG?) but lets pretend they are both in the same category (I think they are). So I was looking at Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey.

Okay Blue Dragon was just too cute for me and it starred kids. I really don’t like playing kids (yes I know the star of Final Fantasy X was a kid – well a teenager more like it). It also got very luke warm reviews. With regard to Eternal Sonata – I just wasn’t interested in the story what-so-ever. Finally I came to Lost Odyssey – which also had luke warm reviews but it had something…special?

The team behind Shadow Hearts Covenant and the writer of Final Fantasy were the ones who put Lost Odyssey together. For me, a match made in heaven. So I dug into the reviews – what were people saying? Well for the most part they didn’t like the random battles and folks felt it didn’t break new ground. More of the same – of my favorite games – sign me up! I did like the random battles of Shadow Hearts so that was no big deal. Okay what about the story?

A world where there was an industrial+magic revolution results in steampunk technology. Two countries go to war and have a massive battle that is interrupted by a meteor strike! Everyone is killed except our hero who has lost his memory – this is where the story starts. The introduction movie is really nice and you get introduced to combat right away.

My only complaint about the game is the dynamic texture system is little wonky. Sometime the characters are really blurred and the high resolution textures don’t load unless you zoom in using the left trigger.

All in all I recommend the game.