Friday, January 21, 2011

Heading Into Another Weekend! Punctuation!

My Resolution feature for Call Of Podcast has been going well.  Last week I began Starcraft: Brood War, and this week I've been playing Metro 2033.  I have a feeling a lot of these games are going to fall by the wayside, but some will grab me and/or be short enough to finish, and I think Metro will be one of those.  Brood War, on the other hand... well, it'll be a while.

Metro 2033's closest analogue in my mind is probably Half-Life, but Call of Duty is a good comparison, too; it's just that the set pieces aren't so bombastic as your typical CoD.  I suspect Metro has a ton in common with Half-Life 2, but I haven't played that game yet! Get your Resolution votes in today!  The visuals in Metro are damned good, even set to low so that it'll run at a decent framerate in 1080p (bumped down from my usual 2048x1152, also to help the framerate) on my 4850 512mb.  I'm going to need to upgrade the GPU in my PC before anything, it seems.  I like the game well enough, but it's not really blowing me away.  The atmosphere is there, and pretty unique, but the combat could use some work.  Humans take way too many shots to go down, and the mutants all behave like Doom pinky demons--they charge you, and that's about it.  There are other nits to pick with Metro (the UI is bad, enemies need more dialogue barks), but I like the game for what it's trying to be, and where it does succeed.

Brood War is very good, and very hard.  It's Starcraft for veterans, which I guess I qualify as, but only just barely!  The game is rock-solid.  Rock-solid as in rocks to break yourself on like an ocean wave.  Over and over and over, until, particle by particle, you can erode bits and pieces of the cliff face away, and over eons make progress inland.

I can't seem to play Assassin's Creed 2 in anything other than 4 hour chunks.  There is just so much to do in this game!   I'm in the middle of the fifth DNA sequence of like 16 or something--I keep getting sidetracked doing optional missions of 100 stripes.  I have already fully upgraded the Villa as far as renovations go, I just need to collect all of the art and weapons and feathers and stuff like that.  The feathers, at least, will probably never happen, but the rest may.  This is a very playable game.

4 comments:

Greg said...

Grats on finishing Metro 2033. Looking forward to hear your thoughts on that one.

I continue to buy far more games than I could ever play. I recently picked up Yakuza 3 during that Amazon special. I was surprised to see it includes vids so newcomers can get the story elements in Yakuza 1 and 2.

Count Elmdor said...

That's pretty nice, yeah. The second one also had a recap of the first.

The Yakuza games are pretty cool, but you won't be missing a ton by starting with 3, especially with that recap for story. Playwise, 2 was almost identical to 1 aside from some new areas.

The only con is that people say 3 is the weakest in terms of story, but I have to play it so no comment. 4 might be a better series entry, since it introduces a lot of new characters and it seems they're looking for ways to branch out past just Kiryu Kazuma.

Greg said...

Dude, my condolences on your xbox. I've lost at least 4 to rrod as you might recall. I'm pretty sure I bitched to you about it before.

Count Elmdor said...

lol, thanks. To make lemonade out of lemons, though, at least I had already started buying more PS3 versions of games and I'm not going to be wasting any gold membership time w/o a box!

My main concern is recovering my game saves from the old HDD. The games and DLC are license transferable. I'm not in a huge hurry to replace the system; I want to consider my options and probably wait for a hot 360 exclusive, first.