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The first game I purchased for my Xbox 360 was Call of Duty 2, and since then I’ve been in love with the franchise.  Infinity Ward knows first person shooters and they are master craftsmen of the genre.  Call of Duty 4 has been no exception, and I tore through the single player campaign as quickly as I could. Usually I end it right there, but having heard about the unique leveling system of multiplayer, talking to friends who were engrossed in the COD4 multiplayer game, and having still an unquenched thirst for more Call of Duty goodness, I decided to give multiplayer a try.I have no false expectations on my skills at first person shooters.  I don’t have the twitch and dexterity to be really good at them, nor do I have the time to practice to push my own skills higher.  Still, I’ve really enjoyed a good multiplayer coop from time to time, so the idea of playing with other people sounded reasonable, so I took the plunge. I’d heard it before on podcasts and forums, but the Xbox Live experience is just plain broken for multiplayer gaming.   I’d assumed there would be trashtalking online, but I wasn’t prepared for the racist slurs and complete idiocy of a select few players in each match.  I thought I might run into it once or twice, but it’s pretty pervasive to the point that I clearly needed to quit or change something because it just wasn’t fun for me to here someone’s drunken diatribe online.   Having 2 kids still too young for real gaming, there is no way I’d let them play online. The one saving grace for me was a little known setting in xbox live to turn off voice communications for everyone but friends (To access it: go to your gamertag, edit gamer profile, privacy settings, voice and text) which silences everyone but your friends.  Now I’m in blissful ignorance, enjoying the game albeit I wonder how much more fun it would be if there were friendly people there working together as a team to play the game as the developers intended. Microsoft really needs to revamp the system to make it a better community if they hope to grow their userbase for this kind of gameplay.  There are ways to report people who are obnoxious but it takes too long to do, and isn’t very effective.  A better system would be something akin to linkedin.com where you can let friends of friends in your voice chat or even friends of friends of friends to at least comb out the bad apples as a first pass and then ban the rest manually.  

Tags: Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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I’ll admit it: I own four copies of Half Life 2 and bought my original copy many years ago, but it wasn’t until now that I really played it. With the Orange Box and it’s terrific value, I don’t feel I payed too much for the experience.

The first copy I bought on a whim when the game originally came out, having loved the original Half Life to death. My PC wasn’t really up to the task at that point, and neither was I with all the work and family matters I need to attend to, so it sat in my office collecting dust. When I did find the time to start gaming again, I bought an my Xbox 360 and decided that I should really get the Half Life 2 XBox version and finally give it a go, but soon heard rumblings that Valve was going to create a new version so I decided to wait for a native 360 version. That version, the Orange Box, finally came out, and while it took years to start playing, I was hooked and couldn’t stop playing it once the wrapper came off the box.

Let me get my only gripe with the series out of the way right now because it’s just a minor thing but permeates all the products included in the bundle: the loading screens. The loading screens smacks of old technology with the way they freeze the game up for 5-10 seconds at a time with no warning. Even in Episode 2, you’ll be walking through a tunnel and the game will freeze for a moment until the a loading screen pops up for 5-10 seconds to load the next level. It’s a forgivable sin, but I hope they fix it for Episode 3 and beyond.

By not playing Half Life 2 until now, I got a truly great gaming experience from start to finish. Half Life 2, which starts out slow with it’s long water level, is an awesome game and holds up well despite the fact that it’s a couple of years old. Episode 1 extends that goodness and gives you more of the same. Episode 2 seems to have taken all the good bits from the original and Episode 1, and combined them to make a roller coaster ride of goodness. Portal I blogged about before, which is also stellar. At the end of the day, it was a marathon gaming experience but well worth the time it took and I never got tired of the experience.

At this point, I can’t wait for Episode 3 and I hope Valve does a similar experience next time bundling potentially Episode 3, Portal 2 (the two stories could potentially connect at some point), and a remake of Half Life 1 to make the graphics HD quality. That would be a truly awesome deal.

If you’re keeping track at home, that’s three copies. The fourth was another Orange Box for the PC which I’m going to use the Team Fortress 2 code and give the rest to my brother in law. 4 copies seems like a lot, but it seems like a great deal to me.

Tags: Shooters, Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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I picked up Picross this weekend, and given the number of hours I’ve played it since then, I’m fairly concerned that I’ve got a serious addiction problem on my hands and I believe Picross should be sold behind the counter by prescription only. If you enjoy Sudoku, which I consider the gateway drug of puzzle games, you’ll love Picross.

The idea is pretty simple. Each puzzle is a simple grid where each square can be turned on or off that you decipher based on a simple rule set. At the end of the puzzle, if you look hard enough, it forms a picture. There is a time limit to each game of 60 minutes but if you guess wrong, you’ll get penalyzed minutes which can be annoying if, like me, you don’t have full control of your stylus and accidently hit a square you weren’t intending.

The rules are simply a set of numbers for each row and column representing runs of dots. For instance, the grid size starts out 10 x10 and one row might have 7,2 next to it which means there will be 7 squares in a row on and 2 squares in a row on. With that knowledge, you would draw the first seven squares on, the next off, and then the last two on (i.e. 10 total squares). Just like Sudoku, you’ll need to be cognizant of the vertical and horizontal axis of each square to fully determine which run of dots goes where.

The game takes 5 minutes to learn with a decent tutorial to start you off (albeit I couldn’t figure out how to skip it and at points, it becomes a bit pendantic) and then you are off and running. The puzzles get harder and harder over time, as you’d expect, with the clues more difficult to figure out and the grid sizes getting bigger.

If you have plenty of time to waste, I can’t recommend this game enough.

Tags: DS, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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Before Orange Box came out, no one had really heard much about Portal and assumed it was being thrown in simply as a technology demo.  Now that people have it in their hands, it’s been getting a lot of buzz as a great game.  After spending the last couple nights playing it to completion, it’s become one of my favorite games of the year.

While I waited to read articles that included any spoilers,  what I did read gave me the impression that the game was a series of puzzle and included some witty voice acting.  That is al true, but what really surprised me was the genuinely good narrative and the way the game lead you through that storytelling without the heavy handed approach of cut scenes.  Instead, you find little bits of the story as you go along.

I think Portal benefited from the fact that the game is short and focused on the single game-play mechanic of the Portal gun.  Another developer might have tried to make Portal into a full retail package and be faced with some bad design choices to extend the play out another few hours.  One way might have been to add other gameplay elements such as the use of different weapons, a vehicle level, or the now in vogue, quick time events ala God of War.  Another way, from the school of Mario, is to increase the difficulty as each level progresses making you having to become better skilled at the controls.  While Portal does get more difficult as the game progresses, the answers lie in using more sophisticated uses of the Portal gun as opposed to having to become more dexterous with the controls.  At the end of the day, Portal is all meat and no filler, and as a result, is a satisifying gaming experience.

Spoiler Related Links Below

•  Gamers With Jobs Thoughtful Analysis of the game.
• Sexy Videogameland’s Portal Love
• WikiQuote Portal Quotes

Tags: Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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I bumped into title while visiting a local game stop.  It’s really good; I’m surprised more people haven’t heard about it.

Tags: Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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I put this in the category of “Games I was really looking forward to that totally disappointed me”.   I really tried hard to like this game, but it let me down big time.  The game controls absolutely suck.  It’s a beautiful game with a great concept, and I really do feel bad for the developers that spent years of their life developing it, but at some level of management, the team was let down by some really bad game design decisions.

I’ve heard the Lair developers defending their six axis control scheme as being for the casual gamer, but I just think there was a bit of groupthink that prevented the team from taking an objective look at the controls.  As a longtime software developer, I’ve seen similiar things like this happen.  To a much smaller extent, design decisions like this get raised all the time, and people become passionate about the subject.  At some point, the issue gets escalated and at some level, managment wrestles with it and a direction is selected.  It’s at that point, that things can go off the rail.

An old motto that is common in development is “Disagree and Commit” and for the most part, it works out well.  When your life is so focused on a single project, it’s easy to get myopic and escalate issues needlessly to the point where people become passionate of the color of a font or the name of a button.  In that case, there is no ‘right’ answer and making a decision and moving on makes perfect sense.  For the detractors of a decision, it may not make the best sense, but it keeps the project moving and at the end of the day, it may be sub-optimal but still good enough.

The problem with “Disagree and Commit” comes after that point when new information becomes available that may reverse the decision.  No one wants to re-visit a sensitive topic and managers are usually wise to avoid it.  Once committed, decisions like that are hard to reverse.   It’s much easier to ignore the information than to open up a sore wound, and it takes a strong manager to reverse course.  I have no idea if this happened in Lair but having seen previews that commented on the faulty control scheme, I wouldn’t be surprised that something like this happened.   It seems inconceivable that no one ever raised the alarm that the controls sucked or that the team didn’t read any of the previews raised around this issue.

Some people like seeing games getting reviewed poorly, but having been around the software industry so long, I really feel bad for the team that developed the product.  It takes a long time and energy to develop software and it’s clear from the product that people worked passionately on this product.  I would much prefer to see Lair be fantastic and lauded, but sometimes decisions have an enormous impact, and whoever made the call on the controls, let the team down.

Tags: development, PS3, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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10 years ago, I would have agreed with others around the internet that Heavenly Sword, also known by some as the PS3 Goddess of War, was good but too short. Others have said that compared to the Ninja Gaiden series, Heavenly Sword doesn’t reward you for mastering the controls and can be beat by button mashing. I think these observations are basically correct, but as an older gamer than can’t find more than a couple hours a night to game, I just don’t have the commitment to finish a longer game or master complex controls ala Ninja Gaiden which constantly belittle me by asking, “Do you want to give up the way of the Ninja?” Having said that and having lost gamer-cred, I must say that Heavenly Sword rocks.

Heavenly Sword is a showpiece for the PS3 with some of the most amazing graphics I’ve seen. Albeit predictable, it has a good narrative driven by pretty amazing cut-scenes and voice acting. The game play has some learning curve to it and you do improve as you master the controls, but it’s not anywhere as difficult to master or as penalizing as Ninja Gaiden, and if you wanted, you could probably survive most of the game mashing the buttons over and over again. I also found the six-axis controls to be really fun once I got the hang of it.

It took me about 6 hours to fully complete the game, and for me, it was about the right length for the experience that it delivered. In some ways, I wish it would have been longer but not at the expense of the pacing or by having to backtrack through levels. At the end of many games, the last 25% for me are a slog for me to finish feeling compelled to do it only to say that I’ve completed the game. I loved every minute of Heavenly Sword from the opening sequence all the way to the end credits, and at the end of the day, that’s what makes a good video game for me.

Tags: PS3, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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Bioshock may not be “The game of the year”, but for me, I can’t imagine any other game being better in my eyes.  From the moment you enter Rapture, you become engrossed in the game.  It has a fantastic atmosphere, a good storyline (albeit the freedom to choose between playing as a bad guy and a good guy is over-rated), and strong game play mechanics.  Some people complain it is too easy, but I found it to be tough enough to be entertaining but not too tough such that I got frustrated so that I couldn’t continue moving the story forward.  In a word, it’s awesome!

Tags: Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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While Resistance has been out for a while, it still is worth buying for new PS3 owners.  I had a great time with this title and while it took a bit of time for me to warm up to it, it turned out to be one of my favorite first person shooters.  Part of the problem is that it takes some time before you get infected and get to take advantage of the game’s unique health system, and until that point, the game seemed less forgiving, but it is worth slogging through the beginning and becoming accustomed to the controls.

Tags: PS3, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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Gears of War is a “must have” if you own an Xbox 360 and an HDTV if for no other reason but to show off how impressive the the graphics can be on the Xbox 360. As far as shooters go, the game is pretty fun using a cool new cover system to hide from the bad guys, and it’s been many years all the back to Doom that I was so excited about wielding a chainsaw; the blood splattering graphics are pretty intense.

There are three negatives most reviewer have complained about in Gears of War with some validity. The single player game is pretty short, and as far as the narrative, it’s pretty weak. The last technical problem is the controls which have the A button fairly overloaded, making it a hassle when you start button mashing to get out of the way and end up crouching behind a crate because it thought you wanted to run for cover. It takes a bit to get used to and the controls could have been layed out a bit better (Rainbow Six Vegas cover system is far superior), but you end up feeling like a pro after a little time in the game.

As far as the short single player campaign, I actually thought that was a benefit for me personally. With so little time that I can devote to gaming, it was nice to be able to finish the storyline in a few nights of feverish gameplay. I like shorter games because I can feel like I can play through the game multiple times if I like it enough, but I don’t have to devote months of gaming in the process.

All in all, if you own a XBox 360 and like shooters, Gears of War should be something you own.

Links
GameRankings for Gears of War
GameFaqs for Gears of War

Tags: Shooters, Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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