Category: weekend recap

>Weekend Recap: here comes the hyperbole

>Are you ready for some outlandish statements? Good, because I’m really tired after watching the Lost finale last night and work is slow today and I can’t stop thinking about Red Dead Redemption, so here goes:

1. Red Dead Redemption might just be my favorite Rockstar game ever.

Let me qualify that a bit.

RDR is not the groundbreaking, industry-shifting watershed moment that GTA3 was. But there’s a difference between being groundbreaking and being a truly great game. My affection for GTA3 – more specifically, for the times I personally spent in GTA3 – helps me overlook a lot of that game’s glaring problems, of which there are many.

As with each subsequent Rockstar open-world game, RDR, then, is simply the latest refinement of the ever-evolving open-world platform. In this particular case, it most clearly resembles GTA4. But it’s where it differs that gets me all hot and bothered.

GTA4 was a staggering achievement; it managed to create the most immersive city ever seen in a game, while also creating a truly fascinating narrative around a singularly unique protagonist. But GTA4 still suffered from old ideas; the game’s gunplay was still a bit tricky, even in spite of being retooled, and the punishment for mission failure was still brutal.

RDR fixes almost all of what was bothersome in GTA4, and I would expect/hope that GTA5 will borrow almost everything that RDR gets right. The snap-to targeting might make the game a little too easy, but frankly, I’d rather have fun with the story than struggle with the controls. If you fail a mission, you can continue from the most recent mid-mission checkpoint, which is fantastic. There’s regenerating health and fast-traveling, which is crucial. You can save anywhere, at any time, which is essential.

And the world – oh, the glorious world – is a sight to behold. It’s easily the prettiest game Rockstar has ever made, and utterly convincing at every turn. I do wish that the game would let you take screenshots – and I’d buy the PC version if only so that I could. I’ve had to call my wife in from the other room just to have her look at something – like standing on a cliffside watching the sun rise over the valley below.

But it’s not just the graphics – it’s everything. The wildlife; the random people in trouble; the “ambient challenges” – there is always something to do. I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but I’ll make it again anyway – it reminds me an awful lot of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, because getting from Point A to Point B usually meant that you’d get sidetracked about a dozen times doing other things, which were always just as much fun as the actual missions.

According to Rockstar’s excellent Social Club, I am just under 19 hours in and just over 42% complete. I don’t know that I’ll be able to finish the game before I leave for Jamaica next week; as much as I want to be done with the campaign before I go, so that I don’t have to miss it, I kinda don’t want the campaign to be over with, either.

2. The new Prince of Persia game isn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe.

Let me qualify that one, too – it’s certainly not bad, and indeed it’s the best-looking game in the series, and it easily has the best combat system. The problem is that it’s arguably the least essential. There’s nothing inherently special about it. It’s not magical. The story feels slight and flimsy. Too much work went into the game to call it a mere cash-in for the movie, but I finished it in 6 hours or so and haven’t thought about it since, other than to write this paragraph. It’s certainly worth a rental, if you’re a fan of the series and you’re not already sidetracked with RDR or Super Mario.

3. I really want to like Alan Wake, but the opening chapter didn’t grab me nearly as hard as I’d hoped, and RDR has pretty much overshadowed it for the foreseeable future.

That wasn’t really all that hyperbolic; it’s just the way the weekend went.

>Weekend Recap: preparing for ME2

>Not much to report this weekend, but here’s what’s what:

1. Finally finished my 3rd playthrough of Mass Effect 1, and picked up the Achievement for hitting Level 60. That’s all I wanted to accomplish – hit level 60, and make sure that I could import my character into ME2 with all the stuff I wanted to be in place. (Which is somewhat ridiculous – my first playthrough was all light-side, my second playthrough was deliberately dark-side, which meant that my bases should have been covered. But I guess I wanted whatever perk there may be in hitting Level 60 with a light-side run.) I’m very glad I did so; I feel very much caught up on the story, which is as excellent as I remembered, and now my anticipation level for ME2 is off the friggin’ charts; you don’t need to hear about it. Very tempted to take some sick days in the immediate future.

2. Dabbled a tiny bit in Dark Void, which is, for lack of a better word, janky as all hell. It doles out Achievements like crazy, though, perhaps as an incentive to continue slogging through it. That being said, I will probably just send it back to Gamefly tomorrow morning; ME2 will take up all my available time anyway, and I don’t feel like I need the Achievements that badly. (I hit 50K; that’s enough.)

And so what did you play this weekend?

>Weekend Recap: RE5 and 50 Cent, together at last

>Ordinarily you wouldn’t put Resident Evil 5 and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in the same sentence, but we’re edgy risk-takers here at SFTC, and so: that just happened. I finished both of these games over the weekend, and I was a little surprised at how much they have in common; certainly it was a little disorientating when switching between the two.

Consider:

  • 3rd person shooter
  • crazy-ass story that doesn’t make a lot of sense
  • many enemies take lots of bullets before going down
  • crate smashing galore
  • hidden targets that yield bonus items
  • campaign can be played co-op, which I didn’t try but it would definitely enhance both experiences

Of course, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand lets you move while shooting, and if you want to destroy a crate, you just have to hit “B”, instead of “LB + RT”. Most importantly, your AI partner in 50C:BotS can handle his own inventory, thank you very much, and is much more vocal in giving encouragement and pointing out objects of interest. Advantage: 50 Cent.

I kid, of course. 50C:BotS has been compared to Gears of War quite a lot, mostly because they both have cover systems, but the last level is a blatant and bizarre “homage” to both Halo 1 and Halo 3, and it completely rips off has quite a bit more in common with Bizarre Creations’ conceptually interesting but underwhelming arcade shooter The Club, where you fulfill disbarred attorney Jack Thompson’s wildest fantasies by literally getting points for killing people, plus bonus points for killing people in quick succession, and where there also are hidden targets to shoot.*

50C:BotS is better than I expected it to be; indeed, it’s better than it has any right to be. But that’s not to say that it’s a great game, or that I would recommend that you purchase it. Quite frankly, the biggest thing going for it is that it might be the most unintentionally hilarious game I’ve ever played. When I wrote earlier that 50’s AI partner is very encouraging, I’m not screwing around – every 10-15 seconds, your fellow G-Unit possemember is saying shit like “Hey 50 – over here, man!” or “Yo 50 – here they come!” or, my personal favorite during the obligatory driving level, “Yo 50 – hit that ramp!” The game is utterly ridiculous; the story makes absolutely no sense; when a character warns you in the game’s first chapter to “trust no one”, it goes without saying that everybody you’re going to meet in this game will double-cross you, but it’s not especially clear why they would be helping you in the first place. There are more than a few cutscenes that appear to have been edited for some reason so that they now function as nothing more than non-sequiturs, featuring evil people that you’ve not yet met conspiring to do things that have nothing to do with you – or, rather, finishing up their conspiring and walking away as the image fades to black. It’s very strange stuff indeed. I will concede that the unintentional hilarity was my primary motivation in finishing the game; I got all the Points I cared to get out of it and promptly sent it back to GameFly.

As for Resident Evil 5, it is much better than Blood on the Sand. I am obviously uncertain as to where it would stack up in my 2009 GOTY voting, but I think I can safely put it in the top 10; and if I were to play 10 new games that were demonstrably better than RE5 before the end of the year, I think it’s safe to say that we are all in for a real treat.

The controls in the RE5 demo frustrated me to no end, and I was fully prepared to hate RE5 to death. They do indeed remain archaic and strange in the full game (as does the inventory management, which gets its own paragraph) but they somehow work in the game’s context. If you were able to move and shoot at the same time, with your aim being the center of the screen, the suspension of disbelief would be utterly shattered; you’d have more than enough time, then, to actually see how ridiculous it all is. There’d be no tension, there’d be no cathartic release; the game succeeds because of its control scheme. You hit the left trigger to aim and your focus instantly narrows, and each infected thing you kill becomes its own tiny individual battle; you are forced to look at what is attacking you and, then, you are forced to look at what you have done to it. And just when you’ve seen enough of the same type of enemy, another one comes along with slightly different tactics or weapons or, eventually, it becomes something entirely different that you have to kill again. I’m not sure if that qualifies as genius, but it becomes pretty compelling and it’s only at the very end of the game where it stops being, well, fun.

The inventory management is a little wonky and clunky, and while it adheres to standard RE conventions while giving it its own twist, it could probably be done a little better. I read something last week – maybe it was in Zero Punctuation? – that decried the utter lunacy that a bazooka took up the same amount of inventory space as a first-aid kit, and that first-aid kits don’t stack. Again, I didn’t find it much of a problem until near the end of the game, when ammo management becomes both essential and ridiculous. The nice part about the game’s design is that you maintain your inventory and money at all times, so if you die, you can at least get a free, untimed re-organization and contemplation and you can buy whatever supplies you may need.

That’s really my favorite part about RE5 – it’s not necessarily the single-player campaign, but the entire package that arrives on the disc. The game is clearly designed to be played more than once, and there is a tremendous incentive for doing so; there’s a lot of cool stuff to unlock, for one thing, and as I said before the game lets you carry over your inventory so that you can replay chapters with new and advanced weaponry. You can also upgrade your weapons, which is its own meta-game; do you continue to put money into upgrading your basic weaponry, or do you start from scratch with a potentially better weapon that will be less powerful when you acquire it than the one you upgraded?** In addition to goofy costumes and graphics filters (which I haven’t really messed with yet), beating the campaign unlocks the Mercenaries mode, which is a fun diversion (and which I’m not very good at yet).

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: while I was playing RE5, my mind kept coming back to Metal Gear Solid 4. They are both set up as the conclusions to their respective mega-franchises, although Kojima hinted at future MGS games at last week’s GDC, and Capcom has already said that RE5 is a conclusion of the current storyline and that RE6 will be a dramatic reinvention. They are both graphical show-stoppers; I might even say that RE5 is better-looking than MGS4 if only because there’s a wider color palette. They’re both very quirky and are somewhat insular, even as they’re accessible for people unfamiliar with the larger story. They both take themselves very seriously, even though they’re also high in camp. And they are both ultimately love letters to their adoring fanbases; they are absolutely loaded with special treats that long-time fans of the series will no doubt enjoy. I was not a die-hard fan of either franchise, and I wound up really enjoying both of these titles, even through their faults. I’m not sure I’m going to run out and play any of the earlier MGS titles, but you’d better believe I’m going to dust off the Wii this week and see if I can’t finally get into Resident Evil 4.

* The hidden targets might even be the same color, now that I think about it. I would insert screenshots to back up my point, but Google isn’t being helpful and I don’t have the time.

** I think I read somewhere that when you fully upgrade a weapon, you then have the ability to have unlimited ammo for that particular weapon; fully upgrading a weapon is very expensive, however, and in the meantime you could be messing around with other things to buy.

>Weekend Recap: Reality Sinks In edition

>I’d thought I’d handled my 360’s recent death rather calmly, all things considered; it happened the night before The Lost & Damned came out, so I already knew I wouldn’t be playing it – I imagine I’d have been a lot more pissed off if I’d bought the DLC and then found out my 360 was fucked. And, really, this was a perfect time to try out the PS3 as my main console, and if nothing else this gave me a lot more opportunity to spend with FF7.

Problem is, I was expecting Microsoft to send me a shipping box for my 360 when I did my online support request, and as it turned out, I had accidentally selected the “No, thanks, I’ll send it myself” option, which I didn’t actually find out until Saturday night, after the local UPS store closed. So I basically wasted a week of repair time that I didn’t even know I had. And now, well, I’m really missing my 360.

I certainly had stuff to play for the PS3 this weekend – I downloaded Noby Noby Boy, already this year’s front-runner for the coveted “What The Hell Is This Thing?” award, and my rental copies of Valkyria Chronicles and Street Fighter 4 had arrived.

I can’t really talk about Noby Noby Boy, because I have no idea what it is. I was certainly excited to check it out, as my love of all things Katamari runs deep, but NNB is just plain weird. I’m not even sure it’s a game, to be honest, nor am I sure what exactly it is you’re supposed to do. Then again, the game’s creator doesn’t really know what it is, either, so I guess you get what you pay for.

Valkyria Chronicles is a sort-of strategy RPG, and while I can appreciate that it’s doing something new, I really don’t like strategy RPGs, and after finishing the first mission I already knew I wasn’t going to like it. So there’s that.

Then there’s Street Fighter 4. I feel terrible for not really liking it. I feel pretty confident in calling it the 2nd best fighting game ever made (next to Soul Calibur), and it certainly brought me back to my childhood years in which I’d routinely beat the hell out of my younger brother on the Sega Genesis version of SF2. But the truth is that I think I’m kinda done with fighting games; I have neither the skill with which to be even marginally successful in online play, nor the patience to learn. I tried Arcade mode on Very Easy with 3 or 4 different characters and I couldn’t even make it past Round 3 with any of them. I tried the Trial mode, which ostensibly teaches you all the moves, but it’s done pretty badly and the nomenclature they use to describe moves went way over my head.

I can totally respect why other people are going apeshit for it, and I really wish I felt the same way. I suppose if my wife were interested in mashing buttons with me, I’d probably put in a bit more effort into getting better at it, but she is most definitely not interested, and so it’ll be going back later this week. I kinda want to give it one more go online before I send it back, though, if only to see if I can get my headset to work (in advance of Killzone 2‘s eventual release).

>Weekend Recap: Superbowl edition

>I apologize for the lack of posts lately; the post-holiday doldrums have settled in, apparently, and I haven’t found that much blog-worthy news of late.

I’ve polished off the Anchorage DLC in Fallout 3, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to play any more Fallout until the level cap patch hits; I hit level 20 even before I started the DLC and the way I figure, I might as well get rewarded for killing things. It’s odd – for the entire course of the game, I was always struggling with money, but now I’m suddenly rolling in cash.

Finished The Maw; it’s a cute, fun, better-than-expected XBLA title, but I’m not sure I’m ever going to touch it again. I think I mentioned this the other day – I like my XBLA titles to be the sorts of things that I can continually play over and over again, be it something arcade-y like Geometry Wars or something puzzle-y like Puzzle Quest or Bejeweled 2.

Speaking of which, there’s a Bejeweled mini-app on Facebook that I’d been getting obsessed with during my less-busy hours at work, and so I fired up my XBLA version over the weekend. Is there any other game in the 360’s library with tougher Achievements? My God.

Finally, I had a friend over yesterday before the Superbowl who’d never played Left 4 Dead before, so we sat down and did the airport level from top to bottom. I think I’m still buzzing from the experience; it was absolutely thrilling and we could not stop high-fiving each other for the rest of the day. I keep forgetting how absolutely incredible that game is; I need to be playing it more often, especially in this dry release period. Maybe we’ll put a SFTC L4D night together or something.

>Weekend Recap: Fallout 3, The Maw, RE5 demo

>So I accidentally finished Fallout 3 over the weekend. That’s a problem, of course, because when you finish the last quest, the game is over; the credits roll, and that’s it, and I still had a bunch of stuff I never finished doing, as well as a bunch of other stuff I never saw. I (fortunately) had a save point right before the last mission, and so I’ve taken advantage of this rip in the space-time continuum in order to keep playing and exploring. This also means that I can start messing around with the DLC and still be super-powered.

Fallout 3 is a very impressive game, on many levels, but it’s also problematic. After all the hours I’ve put into it, the combat still hasn’t ever really felt totally satisfying – come to think of it, I had the same problem with Mass Effect. My favorite thing in the game, ultimately, is simply exploring and finding new points on the map, and yet this is also a little bit of a bummer because everything kinda looks the same. Still – the amount of content and the level of detail is absolutely staggering, and Bethesda did a really great job revitalizing this franchise. I’m going to be keeping this game in my rotation for quite some time to come; I’ve got a few more Achievements to score, of course, but really there’s just so much more in the world that I’ve yet to see.

Played a bit of The Maw, which is one of the better XBLA titles to hit in some time. It’s pretty simple but very enjoyable, although I’m not sure there’s a lot of replay value. (I tend to prefer my XBLA games – as well as my handhelds – to be either puzzles or just straight-up arcade titles, as they don’t get too repetitive.)

Speaking of which, I actually fired up my PSP this weekend and tried to play the latest Star Ocean title. Unfortunately, I stopped giving a shit about 10 minutes in; endless, unskippable cutscenes plagued the pacing and I’m a little tired of cookie-cutter JRPGs. I would regret buying a PSP more if I remembered I still had it. I came very close to trading it (and all my games for it) towards Wii Fit this weekend, except (of course) Wii Fit was sold out everywhere.

Finally, I fired up the Resident Evil 5 demo this morning before I left for work. Not ideal circumstances for trying highly anticipated titles, but whatever. I saw what I needed to see, and what I saw is that it’s basically a hi-def RE4 with slightly less clumsy controls. I’m hoping to try it tonight via online co-op; maybe that’ll make the experience less disappointing.

>Weekend Recap: Getting Reacquainted

>The current economic downturn affects us all in different ways. As Gred wrote last week (in SFTC’s 100th post, no less), 1up got bought up by UGO and killed EGM in the process. It’s hit me as well; I’m definitely more aware than ever of what I’m spending my money on. If there’s any good to be had out of this situation, then, it’s that this is a wonderful opportunity to re-explore all the stuff I’d already bought and never finished. I bought a lot of music last year, but I still haven’t listened to all of it; similarly, I’ve got a stack of books next to my bed that I am going to force myself to finish instead of buying anything new. And, certainly, I’ve got a few games in my library that I never finished, and now is as good a time as any to get my money’s worth.

It is true that there are some big titles coming in February (Street Fighter 4, Killzone 2), but there’s also some notable DLC coming as well – Fable 2 arrives this week, GTA4 arrives soon after and the Fallout 3 stuff looks so interesting that I’m going to pause my progression until it comes out. (Not sure if the Burnout Paradise car pack qualifies as must-have DLC – the car models are cool, yes, but it’s not like it dramatically changes the experience).

Anyway, I spent some time this weekend getting reacquainted with some of these games; I found a super kick-ass sword in Fable 2 which will hopefully come in handy, I did some achievement hunting in GTA4 (finally finishing Jacob’s deliveries and the LCPD most wanted missions), and did a tiny little bit of screwing around in Fallout. But mostly, all that GTA4 action reminded me that I really ought to get back into Saints Row 2, which happened to sort-of win Zero Punctuation’s GOTY.

[Ed: I just went back through the STFC archive because I know I’ve written about SR2 before and this next paragraph was starting to sound familiar, and sure enough, I’ve already written pretty much the same stuff twice (1, 2). But I’ll say it again, because it’s still true.]

Goddamn, that game is fun. It’s also a little broken; I’m currently bogged down in a mission where the shit gets so crazy that the frame rate pretty much just gives up. But the point is: the shit really and truly gets crazy, and I salute it for being so committed and going so completely balls-out in that direction. GTA4 is the superior game, there’s no doubt about that, but what I love about SR2 is that even though it’s gleefully insane, it’s also oddly powerful.

One particular cutscene that I came across last night took me very much by surprise – and without giving away too much, it makes me wonder just how many reviewers even watched it because as far as I know, nobody talked about it at all and yet they all made a pretty huge deal out of a notable, similarly-themed cutscene in Gears of War 2 (i.e., the scene with Dom). Granted, Gears is a somewhat higher-profile title than SR2, and so it was big news that Gears even bothered to put a story in the game at all, but still – this same kind of moment is in SR2, and it works, even though (or maybe especially because) the game surrounding it is totally bananas. SR2 is in many ways the anti-GTA4 because of how purposefully ridiculous the story and the characters are, and yet it still manages to have some heavy shit tucked away where you least expect it.

I need to try some SR2 online co-op; this is definitely the sort of sandbox – even moreso than GTA4 – where you would be saying “HOLY SHIT DID YOU JUST SEE THAT” over and over again.

>Weekend Recap: pre-Xmas 2008 edition

>Kudos to me for not buying Spore this weekend. I was clearly concerned that my lack of willpower would result in a drunk download and I just don’t have the time or the money (but especially the time) (and also the money) to get into something like Spore, which ended up not being the greatest game ever made.

My weekend was actually pretty busy, gaming-wise; made a brief bit of progress in Fallout 3, played more Rock Band 2 with the wife (who has gotten quite good at guitar and is even doing ok on the drums), got a bit further in Chrono Trigger, went back and rounded up some hidden objects in Little Big Planet, and started to get seriously sucked into Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Where do I begin with Banjo? I was curious about it until I tried the demo, where I found myself in way over my head. But then Amazon lowered the already-low price by another $10 or so, and I felt compelled to give it another go.

Having the full game is quite a different experience than what the demo offers; all I remember about the demo was that the game was certainly gorgeous, but I didn’t know how to build anything and didn’t have the patience to learn. What’s nice about the full game, then, is that you don’t actually have to build anything, at least not right away; if you fully explore the environments that you have available to you, not only can you procure a number of parts on your own but you can scrounge up enough coin to buy blueprints and parts, thus giving you an advantage in the early competitions. And what’s nice about this – especially for someone like me, who was never mechanically inclined and who never strayed from the cover photos on Lego boxes – is that eventually you will hit a wall and will have to start building, but at least you can start from an already well-designed vehicle and then make tweaks as you see fit.

Case in point: this one particular event is basically a giant ski jump, and I have to get my vechicle to fly/glide to a certain distance in order to get a Jiggy. The catch is that I can’t just use a plane; once I launch from the jump, my engines cut out. At this point in the game I’ve either found or bought around 40 different blueprints, but none of them get me anywhere close to the Jiggy threshold. [Jiggy Threshold – great band name?] And so now I have to start experimenting. Putting wings on a heavy vehicle seems like an obvious solution, except the wings cause my vehicle to start sailing well before the end of the ramp and I end up having zero momentum by the time I really need it. Ultimately I end up putting 5 balloons on a moderately heavy pre-made vehicle and manually inflating them shortly before the jump to create lift, and I’m able to glide into the Jiggy Zone, although I’m still well below Trophy Level. Still, though, I learned several concepts about vehicle design, and I was able to invent a working solution, which felt very satisfying.

I have a feeling, though, that I won’t be smart enough to beat the game at higher levels of difficulty. But that’s why they invented YouTube, so I can look at other people’s blueprints.

>Weekend Recap: pre-Thanksgiving 2008 edition

>Last Tuesday I noted that, among other things, I was hoping to increase my Gamerscore by 10,000 points over my total at the end of 2007:

I started the year at 28788; I am currently at 37403. There’s still 6 weeks left in the year, so I still have time to make it to an even 10,000 point swing.

I certainly made up a lot of ground over the last few days; by my calculation, I’ve gained 1075 Points in less than a week, which means I’ve only got 310 more to go.

At least 600 points came from Scene It: BOS, which doles out the points like they’re going out of style. (My wife likes playing the Scene It games, which means I buy them as soon as they come out.) I like this new game a lot; it uses Avatars, which make them seem a little less pointless, everything’s gotten a nice graphical make-over, and they seem to have a healthy obsession with Simon Pegg, which is OK with me. The only real problem with the game are the announcers, who are even more horrible than they were in the last game; I mean, they’re FUCKING HORRIBLE. Thank God there’s an option to mute them.

A few more achievements came from Fallout 3, but that game should not be played for points AT ALL. I was all set to name GTA4 as my Game of the Year, but I have to say that every hour I spend with Fallout 3 makes that decision a little less concrete. I’m about halfway to level 10, and I’m probably going to stay away from the main quest for a little while longer and work on some side stuff. There is so much to see in this game, and the level of detail is simply staggering. Perfect example: I was doing one of the very first sidequests in the game, which required me to go to this bombed out town and pick up some mines; while I was there, I decided to break into some houses and see what there was to loot. And each house that I broke into featured this little unspoken short story of each family’s last moments – one house in particular had a pair of skeletons lying in bed holding each other, and it actually made me stop for a second and think about what I was actually seeing. What I love about Fallout 3 is this deeper notion of history; everything you’re looting is stuff that belonged to a different time and place – and, well, it belonged to a human being who died. Not many games are able to convey that sense of a lived-in world very well – even Bioshock struggled with it at times.

What else, what else… oh, well, yeah. I caved and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld, mostly because Gamefly kept pushing it back and when I checked Sunday morning, it was slated to ship this coming Tuesday, which is bullshit. My initial reaction is pretty much par for the course: it’s Legend with a gorgeous new coat of paint and a really shitty camera. I’m in the Mexico level (which is, I think, the third level if you don’t count the prologue), and it’s got a wierd non-linear progression which is actually a little annoying, to be honest – Tomb Raider games shouldn’t be sandbox-y. I’m also missing the Croft Manor exploration level that’s been a favorite feature of mine in the last 2 games, although considering that the very first thing you see in the game is the Manor exploding, it probably makes sense that it’s missing. (Maybe it’s unlocked after you finish the game?)

Played a tiny little bit of Left 4 Dead; that game is awesome and I need to give it another go.

Oh yeah, also played a bit of A Kingdom For Keflings, which I think I really only downloaded to be eligible for some stupid contest. It’s basically a super-lite strategy game, with Avatar support; it’s actually a decent time-suck, although I’m not sure how much time I’m going to spend with it. I’ll probably finish one game and then go back to Civ Rev for my strategy needs.

>6/9 Weekend Recap

>Got a lot done this weekend:

  • Lego Indiana Jones. Finished all 3 movies, got a heap o’ Points – basically, did the bare minimum. It has some annoying camera problems, and there are a few puzzles that got me a bit stuck, but overall I thought it was a hell of a lot of fun, and I definitely liked it more than the Star Wars games. There’s a tremendous amount of replay value to be had, of course, and I will be going back eventually.
  • Ninja Gaiden 2. I rented this from Gamefly. Got a few levels in – actually, no. Finished Level 1 and made it to the Level 2 boss and realized that I didn’t really care anymore. The camera is dreadful and the combat gets very repetitive.
  • GRID. Also a Gamefly rental; haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to keep it or not. I adored DIRT but maybe I just like the off-road stuff better for this series – this franchise is rooted in off-road racing and this game kinda feels a bit forced, like it was a corporate decision to expand brand awareness by putting this (still beautiful) racing engine into big cities. Will need to spend some more time with it.
  • Hot Shots: Open Tee 2 (PSP). Bought this straight away from Gamefly; it’s great. I miss the advanced swing option that I’ve been getting used to on the PS3, and it’s still maybe a little too Japanese (or, maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the franchise to get what everything means), but it’s addictive and certainly this is the most time I’ve spent with my PSP since I bought it.
  • Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus (PS1, played on PS3). I really just wanted to see if it actually worked on my PS3, and I ended up getting sucked back into it; I’m pretty impressed with how many of the secrets I remembered. It definitely could use an HD makeover, but you can see how sumptuous it would have appeared 10 years ago. The cutscene humor hasn’t aged very well – indeed, the writing in general is pretty juvenile, and what I was able to ignore 10 years ago seems pretty grating now – but the actual game itself is still very charming. And brutally difficult – I totally forgot how hard these games are. I’m glad I opted for this one, instead of the first one – the Quicksave ability is an absolute necessity.

My Gamefly queue should now be open enough for me to get a copy of MGS4; I’m even kinda getting excited, which is patently ridiculous.