And now I’ve finished the last of my 360 launch titles, after wrapping up Condemned yesterday afternoon. In the sense of finishing the game, that is, not actually unlocking every little thing. (Though I find myself surprisingly tempted, as it implies the unlocking of substantially more main character backstory.) In any case, assume the prettiness of the thing, as I have pretty much concluded that all HD games will be extra-pretty for the near future, and it’s only worth commenting upon if it’s unusually bad. Poor Bill Gates, how quickly I have acclimated to your 720 or 1080 line utopia. (I should point out that sometimes the people were a little blocky. Not that this is bad; I guess I’m just used to video game people being slender rather than built like wrestlers, so it was noteworthy.)

So, the game then. Really, really cool. The play was nervewracking, because sometimes the homeless people were hard to beat up, and just shooting them in the face was limited by a lack of guns laying around in the abandoned train tunnels and the abandoned department stores and the abandoned schools and the abandoned apple orchards. So, yeah, lots of the urban dystopia motif, but it fits when the purpose of the game is hunting down serial killers. They tend to hide, when they’re the ones from TV rather than the ones in real life. Plus, all the crazy homeless people would be harder to explain in a regular shopping mall. Next good thing about the game: the further in it got, the more surreal it got, and I’m all about the surreal horror. Sure, Resident Evil coasted on zombies for a good long while, but RE4 (which I’ve never finished, and don’t think that isn’t a nearish-future concern) and the Silent Hill games have that little extra oomph over just shooting at bad guys, because you really want to know what’s truly going on, just that much more.

Unfortunately for that class of game, the big reveal at the end can fall short of expectations, as it did here. Nowhere near enough to make the game look bad as a result, but I was really hoping for something more. (Particularly egregious: the decision that closed out the game had no actual bearing on the ending, it just unlocked two different ending point scenarios and bonus cinematics and such. Lame.) That said, the investigative CSI part of the game was pretty cool, and I’d probably play another such game, as long as it was more dead birds and crazy homeless people and less actual like the TV show CSI as the backdrop for all the investigatin’.

I have now finished the Doom 3 expansion. There’s not a lot to say here that I didn’t already say about Doom 3, as the technology and the game design are virtually identical. Sure, the storyline has differences (it’s 2 years from now instead of Doom 3’s now, and, um… oh, the industry wanks are less of a hindrance to your Marine mission than in the original), but the part where you wander through seemingly free, open spaces that are actually carefully laid out rat mazes is the same. The monsters are sporadically different from anything you’ve seen before, but they look more or less identical, give or take a spine ridge or differently colored energy ball of death. Despite consistently updated video drivers, the red sparkles have not ever gone away for the long haul. The only real innovation, the unimaginatively named Grabber, was apparently stolen wholesale from Half-Life 2.

So, was it good? If you liked the last one (which I did), it was definitely good enough. People always complain about games being too short. These are people who haven’t yet progressed beyond college age, I maintain, because a game that lasts only a dozen or so hours feels just right to me, these days. Also, I’m pretty sure this marks the end of Doom 3 as a franchise. At least, it would seem to be impossible to progress from where this one ended without a storyline reboot (not unlike the shift from Doom 2 to Doom 3, so there’s certainly precedent). As for me, though, I’ll keep mostly looking forward to a real HL2 expansion. Or another Farcry, or maybe Halo 3, or that F.E.A.R. game I’ve heard so much about.

The thing is, I got most of the way through the game and then took a vacation, and I was in danger of forgetting where I was. So I took a few moments to collect myself, and then powered through my illness in order to complete my second 360 launch title, the one by Rare, called Kameo and Her Elemental Buddies. Or something like that. It is the story of a scantily clad elf girl with a skirt that is entirely too short for flittering around using her faerie wings, as she is wont to do. Luckily for the censors, she spends most of her time transformed into her various elemental buddies, who can do things like roll up steep hills, shoot out sprays of environment-threatening oil, or climb up walls using shards of ice pulled out of their backs.

Why should Kameo do this, you ask? Her jealous older sister has enlisted the assistance of the evil (you can tell because they neither flit around hotly on faerie wings nor throw strawberries at you) trolls to win back her birthright. Did I forget to mention that in addition to all the elemental buddies, Kameo and the evil sister (okay, elf, but you can tell she’s evil because she wears a low-cut, form-fitting midnight blue evening gown) are the princeses of the Elven kingdom? Like you didn’t already assume that. Please.

Gameplay is fairly fluid despite that you have only 3 slots to transform into 10 different buddies; I never quite intuited the controls, though, wherein the main buttons are for transforming and the triggers are for enacting all of the carnage. As with any given ‘siddy game to date, it is of course completely gorgeous. Some of the puzzles are harder than others, and it becomes all too easy to ask for assistance from the wizard trapped in the book you carry around with you, so the game goes by quickly. But I really don’t mind that kind of thing anymore, with what little time I tend to have for games. The last boss fight was pretty easy, but there were really tricky ones before that to make up for it, and at least two extremely loose ends for a sequel that I would feel perfectly happy playing. Hooray for Rare, in that regard.

I noticed (apparently a while after the fact) that the Half-Life 2 expansion, Lost Coast, was finally available through Steam. So then I downloaded it and played it. Some brief web-searching indicates that if I’d spent another $1000 or so on my PC in the past year, it would look like the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen on my desktop’s monitor. I have not, which only leaves the gameplay.

Now, here’s the thing. I was expecting it to be a full expansion going in, like the two that followed the original Half-Life. So, when it took approximately as long to play through the single level as it did to download and tweak the settings to my taste in the first place, well… not what I’d call a satisfactory experience. That said, it was definitely Half-Lifey goodness, and as a result I’ve snagged the first of what will probably be a few third-party level packs to play at, whereas before I’d never have thought to look. So, a win? Sure, why not.

In amidst all the extra-long book reading and multiple movies-watching I’ve been up to lately, I managed to squeeze in time to finish the first of my three launch titles for the XBox 360. (Yay, I found one!) Call of Duty 2 tells yet another version of that same half-decade story of tragedies and triumph that is World War II. And really, this is the beauty of the WWII video games; there are an infinite number of stories to tell, so everyone can cash in as early and often as they’d like, so long as the story and the game are good.

In this case: success. I mean, it’s easy to care about beating Nazis, but they do a good job of making you care about the soldiers around you as well, which I haven’t seen very often yet. You might call it a mistake to get the AI unintelligent enough to run in front of another soldier lining up a shot, but I call that realistic. These were kids, after all, and probably they took more than their own fair share of actual friendly fire. But I appear to digress. Anyway, you’ve got a standard sequence of Russians, British, and Americans fighting it out against the German war machine, mostly in Europe, and let us never forget a fateful D-Day landing thrown in for deadly measure.

Really, deadliness was the one problem with the game. It was far, far too easy to survive on the normal setting. That’s okay, as it has replayability in spades, and I actually expect to for a change, at least once. The worst part was the multiplayer. … … Okay, now that you’ve settled down, let me explain. I haven’t gotten onto Live and found a big battle to jump into with a couple of friends. But I had a friend around to do one on one in the console, and… man, it stank. It’s possible that the options let it tweak down to usable levels, but all we had was a series of one-kill, reset to beginning of level, and on a level that was a little large for two people and without any ammo to collect to change up the flow. Very boring. So, I’ll reserve judgment there, and really hope that the online play and some tweaks make it as fun as I’d expect it to be, instead of as miserable as it was.

And did I mention how very, very pretty it is?