PC is finally here!

That's right, it finally arrived.  My long overdue entry into PC gaming is manifest.  To celebrate, the first thing I did after all the preliminary setup was to go and download Steam, and promptly pick up the Half-Life series, specifically the Source engine remake of the original, and The Orange Box, which of course has the sequel and all of it's....quasi-sequels.

Interestingly enough, on the PC the box comes with a couple of things not in the console versions: Lost Coast, another add-on to HL2, and Peggle Extreme, a Valve-themed version of the popular Pop Cap game.  And so the first game I played on my new machine was Peggle.  The second was Portal; I just played through the whole thing again (for the fourth time, if I remember right) before writing this.  I figured it was a good "training session" to get me re-acclimated to the first-person mouse & keyboard scheme.

I can never get enough Oblivion, so I picked up the full box version, featuring both expansions, as well.  And this is just the beginning.  I've got a lot of catching up to do!

Before the arrival of my new machine, and in the post-Killzone interim, I want back to GTA IV.  I'm somewhere in the middle of the game, and apparently doing things backwards, somewhat.  Most accounts I've heard of people playing the game, they've gotten to the point where they have to choose to kill either Playboy X or Dwayne and then later gone on to do the big bank robbery straight-out-of-the-movie-Heat mission.  Either way, I've past both of those now and have finally opened up the last island.

When I first started playing these games, with GTA III, I used to ignore the missions and such for hours and just go blow stuff up and see how long I could survive with a full wanted level.  That's not where GTA IV shines, though.  If I want to do that I'll go play Crackdown.  I find GTA IV is best when I'm moving swiftly from mission to mission, and not just the main plotline ones, but including the side activities like helping the random people around the city or stealing rare cars for Brucie, or just doing the social activities with Niko's friends and girlfriends (though these get tiresome).

Lastly, Necovia/Lonesteban and I finished up Gears of War on Hardcore last night, getting the A Dish Best Served Cold achivement to unlock RAAM in Gears 2.  That was a lot of fun, and I think it's really telling that the parts we had the most trouble with in the game were the parts where we were forced to go separate ways and couldn't watch each other's back so well.  Still a great game, though.  Gears 2 Horde Mode soon!

Holding Pattern

This week has been much the same as the last.  Highlights being finally finishing Metroid Fusion and playing Gears of War co-op through acts 2 and 3 on Saturday night.

It was nice in Metroid to finally accrue all of Samus' lost power-ups and be able to face down the SA-X for once.  Most of the game you're avoiding or running in terror from it.  I almost had to call foul on the game, though, for pulling the old Metroid escape sequence but spiking it with a final boss battle.  I almost didn't make it through in terms of either life or time.  I'm done with this one.  It was cool to see where the overarching plot went, but by all reports Metroid: Zero Mission is the better GBA outing in the series, and I've got that in the queue waiting for a likely time.

I played some more Burnout Paradise this week, too.  That's a great game.  It's got a bunch of those qualities that keep you coming back to a game, like short, attainable goals, a sense of progression from unlocking more cars and beating more events, and a great online mode.  The sense of speed in the game is also excellent.  I crash a lot.

I put maybe 4 hours into Killzone this week, too.  I'm up to the beginning of the 8th mission, of 11.  I have a few gripes forming: a) checkpoints in this game are few and far between,  b) enemy grenades seem way too unfairly deadly, c) the Helghast are beyond stupid AI-wise (and need more lines of spoken dialogue, or at least the frequency with which they spout their limited lexicon dialed back a bit).  Otherwise, it's cool.  The level design is kind of sparse, but I'd chalk that up to it being a hardware limitation, since the art-direction is pretty spot-on.  Also, some of the dialogue is a bit overwrought--it's standard action-flick fare.  Again, the limitations of the PS2 are the albatross around this game's neck.  I'm excited to see how the sequel turns out when it's released in a month or so.  The weapons and sense of being there and atmosphere are already pretty great.

I had a few minutes to kill tonight and so I played some Hexic.  My brain just does not work the way that game wants it to.  I got my best score to date, nonetheless.  I think I made two of the star-flower things.  If I understood the victory conditions correctly, I would need at least 18, arranged in the proper manner, to make 3 black pearls, and then get those arranged together, to win.  I hope Puzzle Quest Galactrix is released soon...

Progress Report 01/19/2009

I got some good time in with an assortment of games this past week. Variety is always nice. I've been jumping into Metroid Fusion for 30 minutes to an hour at a time every couple of days. It's good, but not totally engaging me the way Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night have in the past. That's probably no fault of the game's, though; in an era of gigantic open world, open-ended gaming, it just seems kind of quaint. I do enjoy it, just in a more connoisseur-ial fashion. I appreciate it.

Finishing Gears of War 2 left me wanting more, and coincidentally there's a Gears 1 achievement I want to unlock so that I can unlock the final playable character model in Gears 2 multiplayer, so I popped the first game into my system this week and started off a playthrough on Hardcore difficulty. I finished Act 1 so far, and hopefully someone will jump in with me for some buddy action!

I've been extremely impressed by the post-release DLC support (entirely free to this point) that Burnout Paradise has received over the last year, and all the raving (and my desire for something new to play before/after watching a DVD without having to toss a disc in) finally convinced me to pick it up from the PSN store. I've never played another Burnout before, but it sorta reminds me of a mix of Ridge Racer and GTA's driving engine. It's a free-roaming city street racing game, but you have no goals you have to meet, or anything you really have to do in order to progress, except just have fun.

What's really cool is the (almost) seamless online integration. I can just hit right on the d-pad a couple of times and all of the sudden I'm online and there are a bunch of other players around the city doing things, cooperatively or competitively. I'm in the same city, on the same street as before, only now there are real people driving (a few) of the other cars on the road. I got into a game the other night where a couple of the 8 people had headsets (I don't, on PSN), and they were able to give directions and coordinate with the rest of us to meet up in certain areas and do things to complete some multiplayer challenges. It's good, mindless fun, not something with a million cars and parts you really have to worry over or races you have to practice a whole lot at, like a lot of other racing games.

When I was logging onto the PSN store to get that, I noticed a new PSOne Castlevania up on the store that I'd never played before, and it was only $6, so I impulse bought Castlevania: Chronicles. Turns out this is a port of an old Japanese PC adaptation of the original NES Castlevania. I knew about the game since it came out in 2001, but I'd thought it was just a PSX update of the NES Castlevania. The difference, essentially, is a bunch of extra levels and some tunes that weren't in the NES game. Win-win. Tough game--luckily you can save at the beginning of each level. The graphical fidelity is somewhere between 8- and 16- bit--adequate.

Lastly, I played through missions 2 and 3 in Killzone last night, since Netflix streaming on the 360 was being difficult. As I've said before, it's a classic example of a developer trying to outdo their platform. It's like how Crytek future-proofed Crysis by making it for 2010 machines in 2007. Except Killzone's case is a little dumb when you consider the fact that PS2's aren't upgradeable. Apart from the frame rate, and brain-dead enemies, I think it's a pretty good game. The graphics are pretty impressive at times for a PS2 game, and the weapons are cool. I also like how you can choose to control any of the people in your squad. I played for a bit as the assassin woman, and I just added a new guy with a minigun. More will be written about this one later.

My 2008 GOTY

Every site/podcast out there chooses theirs, so I thought I should, too. I'm going to limit this to 2008 games that I actually played in 2008, as opposed to older games I played in 2008 or 2008 games I haven't played yet. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I don't think I ever named a game for 2007, though, so here's that one first: BioShock. Honorable Mention goes to Halo 3.

Without further ado, my game of the year 2008 is: Metal Gear Solid 4. It was completely awesome, and as good a cap to the series and wish fulfillment as could be hoped for. Who could forget Metal Gear on Metal Gear battle, or Snake's agonizing crawl through that microwave tunnel? Unbelievable, I loved it. Pretty good control scheme, even!

Honorable Mention goes to Gears of War 2.

I didn't actually play that many 2008 games in 2008...

Gears Of War, Fuck Yeah! Comin' Again To Save The Motherfuckin' Day, Yeah!

I just finished the campaign in Gears of War 2 (fuck yeah!). Holy fucking crap! That was awesome. At no point in the game (and I played through a good bit of it twice) did I ever get tired of what I was doing and want to quit. I only ever put the game down because I didn't have time to plow through it all in one sitting. I'd say it's a non-stop thrill ride, but that might imply that that'd be the only summer movie cliche that applies, and that is simply just not the case; it's also the most fun you'll have all summer, the feel-good hit of the season, and the fun for the whole family. But I ask of you, what kind of fucked up family plays Gears of War together? This is hardcore gaming shit, ain't no Wii goddamn bowling. You'll give grandma nightmares.

I got all the way to the end of Gears 1 solo, and then for the life of me I couldn't kill the last guy. I didn't even know he was the last guy, either. I thought he was just some jackass holding me up until my friend Dustin, aka DeeZee, jumped in to play it co-op with me and said, "Damn, you're all the way at the end." We killed him first try, then. No such difficulties (or ambivalence) about Gears 2, though--though the end section not especially difficult, it was absolutely EPIC, and I knew it was the end this time because there's no way they could top that section without 2 more years of dev time and another sequel.

Oh yeah, I played some WoW and Diablo this week, also. I'm getting closer to the end of Lord of Destruction, with my now level 33 Assassin, and I've got my WoW character up to level 26 now. It's definitely way, way more casual of an MMO than FFXI, at least on the way up to endgame. I've only had to group up for a few quests so far, all dungeon instances, and of course those have all been 100% optional. I like to do and see as much as I can, though, and I scored some nice loot that you can't get anywhere else. Not that it matters; I'm sure it'll all be obsoleted twenty times over by the time I get to level 80. Want to see my WoW character? Check this out.

Pretty cool, huh? FFXI never had that. WoW's got achievements, too, which are always fun.

I'm going out of town, to Germany, for the holidays, but I'm taking my MacBook and DS with me, so I should be able to do a little gaming in the downtime and while traveling. Maybe I can finish Metroid Fusion.

For The Horde!

I can recognize the signs of MMO addiction setting in, having been through this once before. There's something about making those numbers go up and making those bars fill, especially in the midst of a huge world with a rich lore. It's a would-be, all-encompassing obsession, an undertow overcome only by clinging to the floating debris of limited free time. As long as the most I can ever devote is a few hours at a time, I should be able to keep my head above the water line. I'm almost to level 16, woot!

Last weekend I plowed through all of the Thieves' guild quest line in Oblivion, leaving only The Dark Brotherhood line that I plan to do sometime later. If you add up all the time on each of my characters, I probably have 130 hours into that game, but oddly, it doesn't feel like I've played it that much. Maybe because that's been over a year and a half or so, but by the time I had 100 hours into FFXII and DQVIII, I felt it. Again, it's amazing how well the world of Cyrodiil is put together. There have been some really cool moments in the quests in the main guild series. I'm expecting great things from Fallout 3 when I get around to that game.

I've been playing Gears of War 2 this week, as well, and I've been blown away. I've made it through the first two of five acts, and I've been continually impressed by the variety of environments I've been through, the set-piece scenarios, and the awesome firefights. There are some caves you are dropped into at the beginning of act two that look absolutely amazing, they're possibly the most gorgeous graphics I've ever seen in a game--it's unreal. Your AI-controlled squadmates seem much more reliable this time around, and maybe it's just my imagination, but even the signature Gears cover mechanic seems improved and not so cumbersome as it was for me before.

It's been a long time since I played the original Gears (I sold my copy a while back), but that game never quite won me over entirely. I sort of went through the whole thing with one eyebrow raised. I can't put my finger on any one thing that they've improved for Gears 2 that has wiped away my skepticism, but there you have it. I can even give myself over to the cheesy '80s action movie dialogue and mid-battle banter, immortal exchanges like this one between rookie gear Carmine and grizzled main character Marcus Fenix:

"Sarge, I heard there are a shitload of locust there."

"More like ten shitloads, rook."

Maybe Gears 2 just hit me at the right time, rubbed me the right way, and I just wasn't as receptive to the original. Now, strangely OCD as I am, I feel like I have to go back and give that game another chance sometime. I'd like get someone to jump into a game of Gears 2 with me (or vice versa) and play the campaign co-op, and I also need to check out the multiplayer some, especially the new Horde mode. So far I only played one of the tutorial matches with bots, which was cool. I had never played anything with bots before.