Friday, June 5, 2009

E3 2009 and Oblivion

Not much in the way of a play report this week, just a little Peggle, TF2, and Phoenix Wright, aside from jumping back into Oblivion and doing a bunch of the Dark Brotherhood stuff.  That's where my focus has been, mainly.  It has been a series of pretty interesting quests so far, probably some of the most inventive I've seen in the game, and I've already been through the main story, the fighters', mages', and theives' guilds plus the whole vampirism and finding a cure thing and a whole bunch of other random quests.  There was one where I was locked in a house with 5 treasure hunters and had to off them all one by one without anyone suspecting it was me, and there was a big WTF moment when I had to go kill X group of people.  Oblivion is an awesome game.

I have been so tempted to rush out and pick up Red Faction: Guerilla.  That demo on XBL (the single-player one) is insane fun.  I am definitely going to buy this game at some point.  I hope I can find a good deal on it somewhere soon.  I did pick up the Freedom Force games in the Steam sale last week, based solely on recommendations and Irrational's (later) pedigree, including BioShock.  I only messed around with the demo for Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich before buying, but it seemed cool (and complicated at first), and both games were only $6.74 together.  I absolutely love Steam.

This past week was probably the biggest news week for gaming that will happen all year.  Certainly, it was.  It was E3, and not the lame E3 from the past couple of years, but a full-on assault of megaton announcements.  Some of what I'm most looking forward to, in no particular order:

Metroid: Other M
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
Crackdown 2
Left 4 Dead 2
Final Fantasy XIV
PSP Go (price drop lol)
Metal Gear Solid: Rising
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

So much new stuff came to light that I'm probably forgetting stuff, and there are a few things I think are cool that I'm not even going to bother to mention.  I'm skepical of Microsoft's "Project Natal" motion stuff, and I think Peter Molyneaux's Milo thing is outright bullshit.  Nintendo's fingertip pulse thing is a giant WTF and Sony's motion stuff actually looks the most interesting.
It's a great time to be a gamer.

4 comments:

Greg said...

I still need to dig into Oblivion. I started and then picked up Fable II and have been working my way through that. I guess I went the path of least resistance.

After hearing of your excitement for the new Red Faction, I thought I would check out some footage. Maybe I'm losing interest in shooters or something, but that game just looks so bland to me. I should at least give the demo a try before writing it off entirely.

Speaking of shooters, I was expecting you to be playing Killzone 2 by now since you seemed very interested after playing the original. Have you messed around with the demo on PSN? I tried it once and never felt the desire to go back to it.

Count Elmdor said...

Yeah, give the Red Faction demo a try! I just ordered it off of Amazon for about $45, found a good deal.

I do still want to play Killzone 2, but I'm working on Far Cry 2 and Oblivion, both first-person (and both open world) types at the moment. Then I've got Crysis and the Half-Life 2 series (and Resistance 1) to play through as well... and I'll be getting Halo ODST day one, and maybe Bioshock 2 sometime, though that one can probably wait until after KZ2.

It's definitely still on my radar, but I'm trying not to buy stuff anymore unless I'm ready to play it then and there. Soon as Red Faction gets here, I'm jumping in!

Greg said...

Ok, so I tried the RF2 demo and it's actually kinda cool. I enjoyed it but not enough to spend $60 on it. This is one I might buy when the price drops.

I do have to say in defense of the game that it looks better in motion than the still pictures would lead you to believe. I like the Sci-Fi setting on Mars but the destroy anything gameplay seems like a gimmick. So what if I can destroy anything? Most of the time it is utterly pointless to destroy things in the game.

I picked up Infamous for $50 from Newegg so I am looking forward to giving that a go in about a week's time.

Count Elmdor said...

I'll be interested to hear what you think of Infamous. It's on my list of games to check out eventually.