Tag Archives: XBox 360

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Game of the Year Edition

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I know objectively that I finish a goodly chunk of games each year, and that I could even demonstrate this via the method of counting back on the tag. And that this does not even take into account the many games I play partially but consistently fail to finish with. Nonetheless, it’s always a bit surprising to me when I do finish one, even one that’s a solid year old by now. Which, okay, is misleading: Call of Duty 4 only took me a couple of dedicated afternoons, and I didn’t start until this past month. Plus, I’m still nominally in the middle of Grand Theft Auto IV[1], and I’m actively about a third of the way through Dead Space. I play stuff, honest!

Aside from spending the money, one of the things that held me back from CoD4 so long was the Modern Warfare tag. For whatever reason, I convinced myself that removing the game from World War II meant there would be a lot of cool new weaponry, sure, but no plot to hang it from. To the contrary, it was as affecting as many war movies I’ve seen, and far superior to anything the franchise has previously put out. Russian and Arabic terrorists with nuclear capabilities, if you’re wondering, but it’s a couple of the characters that really make it pop, plus one incredible scene in which you don’t use a single weapon.

The multiplayer looks like it would be really fun with a sufficient number of players, but at the reduced amount we can usually pull together on any given Monday night, Halo 3 remains the clear champion of that aspect.

[1] Where “the middle” doesn’t appear to have scratched the surface in reality, plus I’m reaching the point where, without a conscious pushing of myself, it will fall by the wayside. I blame this at least in part on the giant pile of new games I want to play: Gears of War 2. Far Cry 2.[2] Saints Row 2. Fallout 3. Left 4 Dead. Even Resident Evil 5, if it’s out early next year as I’ve heard. (And I really need to finish RE4 before that!)
[2] Why did they split it into two words for the sequel, I wonder?

BioShock

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It only took me, what, 8 months to finish BioShock? 10? And yet, that puts me well ahead of any number of games that I still intend to finish, much less the ones I’ve long given up on. At any rate, it was well worth it. On top of fantastically fluid gameplay that allows for practically any tactics you can imagine, the enemies vary from simplistic to extremely challenging but without the penalty of being unable to proceed because of constant death-resets. It may not be my favorite gameplay, but it’s easily in the top ten.

Where BioShock shines, though, is in the storyline. I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged (though I intend to retry someday), so I can’t tell you exactly how stood on their head Rand’s theories are, but I can certainly tell that she would be entitled to quite a lot of energy generated by her grave-spinning corpse, were she ever to see it in play. The premise is simple: while on a trans-Atlantic flight in 1959, your plane crashes near the entrance to an underwater city commissioned in the mid 1940s by suspiciously-initialed industrialist Andrew Ryan, who built Rapture to escape from the communists, governments, and religions that wanted to steal his money and ideas. The sole survivor of the crash, you naturally enter the city as it’s the only place to find shelter from the elements. Before you can draw a breath to admire the fantastic art deco architecture, you’re plunged into the middle of Rapture’s civil war between Ryan and newcomer Atlas, who seems to be a rallying point for the people but now only wants to escape with his wife and children. And everyone you meet is infected with plasmids that give them strange biological powers, such as the ability to shoot fire and lightning from their fingertips. (Plus, they’re infected with Randian libertarian philosophy, and half of them appear to be undead; hooray for Objectivist zombies!) And then, things start to get mysterious.

So, much as I loved Portal, this game here? Best game I’ve played not merely in 2007, but probably in most of the decade. I cannot realistically praise it enough. I know I’m late to the party here, but if you haven’t played it yet? It’s on the “must” list, I promise. It’s even forgiving to people who do not play first-person shooters.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Most of my video game time[1] lately has been spent perusing the Orange Box for A) a Half-Life 2 experience that doesn’t involve sparkles flying across my screen[2] and B) an improved gamer score. It has been quite good to me on both counts, and hooray for that. The task has been spread out over so many months, though, that when I finally finished the other new content on the disc, I forgot that completed games get reviews! That is a little bit embarrassing, and the moreso because this is coming a few days out of order. But so be it, I have no other choice at this late date!

So, right, in the summer of 2006 I downloaded the first incremental sequel to Half-Life 2 from Steam and played it, and other than whatever bizarre video driver conflict I was having, it was extremely fun! Episode Two took rather longer to come out than I had originally heard, and by the time it finally appeared, I needed a refresher. (And a higher gamer score.) So that explains the delay since I got access to this newest sequel. (Well, and Portal, which is its own kind of awesome excuse.) Anyway, I got refreshed and voila, time to play! Which I did.

Directly following the climactic destruction of City 17 at the end of the previous game, Gordon and Alyx are forced to continue their journey to deliver the stolen Combine data on foot. The trouble with this plan is that the bad guys have some pretty brutal new assets for making our heroes dead, and since they’re on the ropes right now, they seem willing to throw almost all of their effort into preventing the success of the resistance. Along the way, there’s a friendly garden gnome, ever more antlions, gut-wrenching drama, and a promise that Aperture Science[3] will feature heavily in Episode Three. These really are the best first-person shooters on the market for storyline; they blow Halo clean out of the water.

[1] Not all; there’s Halo on Thursdays, for example.
[2] Thanks, PC gaming!
[3] Also, whenever Episode 3 is released, I bet Portal will have a sequel at the same time. Which would be fantastic.

Portal

35979-portalI’m about halfway through Bioshock, and probably within an hour’s play of finishing Mass Effect. But I at least finished one of the three or five big awesome games that have come out this quarter, and I’ll take what I can get. Mind you, I’ll be playing most of the rest of the stuff in the Orange Box before too much longer, but many of those games have been previously reviewed, so I doubt I will again unless some kind of mood really strikes me. (On the other hand, at least there will be no stupid sparkles flaring all over my screen to distract me. Thanks, PC gaming!) The important part for now is that I have finished Portal.

At the risk of over-selling it, Portal is what a video-game would be if someone took pure awesome, distilled it into its Platonic form, and then burned it onto a game disc. Yeah, okay, that’s probably an oversell after all. Anyway, Portal is a game set in the Half-Life universe. You play as a volunteer at a Black Mesa rival company called Aperture Science, testing their Portal Device. The function of the so-called portal gun is to open transdimensional portals between two points in space, effectively joining them into a single point. Aside from this possible violation of the laws of physics, the portals otherwise adhere to natural laws, conserving momentum and gravity in ways that would make Escher smile like the Cheshire Cat. Utilizing the portal gun and the assistance of the Artificial Intelligence in charge of the testing chambers, you make your way through a series of tests designed to confront you with diverse challenges that can only be solved through ingenious use of these portals.

The game has three essential strengths: 1) The puzzle-solving aspect, although sometimes frustrating, is mostly a true delight. In a way that no FPS has ever done before, it lets you come up with novel solutions to otherwise insoluble problems. Every victory, however small, leaves you feeling like a giant among men. 2) As of Half-Life 2, Valve has really captured the urban decay chic, and despite that almost all of the game takes place in sterile white test chambers, there’s a real sense of the same kind of minimal but undeniable wrongness about things that marks their other recent efforts. 3) The dialogue is outstanding, even though there are only two characters with lines in the entire game. It swings between hilarious and chillingly disturbing with, at the risk of repetition, disturbing ease. (Also, the end credits contain a wonderful song to which I wish I had the mp3.) Oh, and 4), the three things I just listed combine to form a very tight and affecting plot.

I like Mass Effect quite a bit. I like Bioshock better than I’ve liked any game since Half-Life 2 came out. That said: if you find time to invest yourself in a game before the year ends, it should be Portal. You’ll thank me later. (Except you mostly won’t, because who hasn’t already played it? Nobody, that’s who! (Dear people who haven’t played it: no offense!))

Saints Row

I finished another video game, yay! And got something like 650 gamer points in the bargain, also yay! Now I should maybe get around to finding out why my wireless adapter no longer works so I can resume being online. Or I suppose I could always move the cable modem into the TV room and go ethernet, now that my desktop has been broken for six months with no signs of me caring enough to fix it. It’s possible none of that is really relevant, except insofar as I’m pretty much console or nothing these days. Anyway, the coolness here is that I played Saints Row to the end of the plot, and did almost every single part of the non-plot as well.

As far as the game itself, it’s pretty easy to explain. Big sandbox game where you can drive or run around and explore the world and listen to all the people talking and radio stations playing and interact with things in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Plus an attached plot about a gang war that your character is involved in, in which the leaders of your gang keep placing more and more trust in you as you prove yourself cool by performing their missions, wearing their colors, and otherwise interacting with the city in such a way that your face becomes more and more known by the general populace. And a pretty deep cast of actors whose voices you might recognize. Which is to say, it’s nearly exactly the same as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, at least on the surface. (Now, there’s a game I never finished. Alas.)

Below the surface, there are a lot of changes that make this one easier to swallow. No impossible to maneuver airplane and helicopter controls. (Well, mostly the airplanes were the hard bit.) Instead of having to wander around hoping to stumble upon the side missions, they are mostly in plain sight on the map, waiting for you to take them on at your leisure. But there are still a few collection items to discover as well, for people who like looking under every rock. And there are definitely other minor tweaks and differences around that are harder to explain in a blurb, like the cell phone. The long and short of it is that Saints Row felt like a polished, optimized version of the GTA games. As long as GTA 4 due out in a couple of months has taken note of even a portion of these refinements while managing to hold onto the spare, evocative storytelling of GTA 3 (not so much Vice City or San Andreas, though they had their own charms), it is going to be the game to beat this year.

Mind you, the storyline for Saints Row here was pretty cool. I did, after all, complete 95% of everything available in the game.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

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Back in the hazy, halcyon days of yore, when I had just gotten my ‘siddy, there were a fair number of launch titles I was interested in. And a few I wasn’t, mostly racing games and Perfect Dark Zero, which always seemed kind of terrible and whose demo left me cold. And there was King Kong, which seemed pretty awesome, but outside my then-jobless budget. And then as the months passed, it kept looking kind of old and worn compared to the new shiny games coming out at the same prices. (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising and Oblivion!)

But then, earlier this month, it was sitting lonelily on the shelf at Fry’s for $19.99. That is the exact perfect price to win me over. And as it happens, it’s a price I’m pretty happy with. It’s still a lot prettier than Wii Sports, but when I compare it to any of the last 6 months’ worth of HD games I’ve played, it lacks a certain indefinable something. I’m pretty sure that something is realistic water effects, and wow, behold the snobbery of me! Anyway, aside from that, it was a pretty good game. Maybe slightly short, and maybe slightly easy, but neither in such a way that I felt like I’d lost out on the deal.

As the title implies, it’s almost a straight port of the movie, though with a lot more fighting giant insects and man-sized dinosaurs, and a little more running from T. Rex-y ones. I took longer than I should have to figure out the right way to perform most of the combat. But since I was playing as a script writer turned adventure hero, I don’t mind so much. Also, I’m sure the game would have been a lot easier if I’d been willing to leave areas with any of my enemies unkilled. The play as Kong part suffered from some of the same failure of learning curve on my part, which is less excusable, since I kind of figure he knew how to fight all along. (Though if so, where did all the other giant monsters keep coming from? Shouldn’t they have been dead by now?) Still: perfectly fun game up until the last level, where it suddenly becomes a quagmire of misery and depression. In case you’re not familiar with the game or any of the three versions of the film: nevermind why.

Gears of War

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The day is coming when I’ll feel obliged to cross-reference some games with the movies section. The last couple of Zeldas fall into that evolving category, as does Halo 2. As, also, does Gears of War. On a class M somewhere out in the galaxy, humans are living out a reasonably Utopian existence. (Utopia looks like a sidewalk cafe in Paris in the springtime, apparently. If you remove the Parisians, then, fair enough.) The problem with Utopia, in this case, is all the humanoids and beasts living below the surface of the planet who decided one day to erupt onto the surface and smash human civilization. Now, some years or decades later, the military remnants continue their struggle against, um… the bad guys. No, seriously, I can’t remember. Ah, okay, it’s the Locust Horde. (I can only assume they call themselves something else.)

The actual in-game story is quite a bit more awesome than the, for now at least, cardboard premise. A squad of marines is tasked with penetrating Locust defenses to retrieve a potential doomsday weapon that has been lost behind enemy lines when the helicopter transporting it was shot down. Although only two are playable, all of the six or so characters has sufficient depth to be in a video game; that is, you care what happens to them and hope they don’t die. The story being about as grim and post-apocalyptic as it sounds, don’t count on that hope winning out, though.

As far as gameplay? It’s really pretty cool. I felt more present than I have in the majority of first-person shooters, despite it being a third-person. The maps being open enough for true flanking and the easy-to-use cover system make the repetitive parts of the game (where you repel this or that wave of enemy attackers before proceeding to the next such wave) not only tolerable but genuinely fun again, and the non-standard parts of the game where you’re dealing with the things that come out after dark, the unkillable aliens, or the ginormous spider all have sufficient tension and uniqueness of play to rival anything I’ve hooked a controller up to. Plus, yay, it’s a current-gen game, so you don’t have to hook up controllers anymore. And not a moment too soon.

Half-Life 2

I know it looks like I’ve been neglecting my duties here. Instead, I just randomly finished three different things in the same 18 hour stretch. I’m not really clear on how that kind of thing happens, and yet here I am.

This time out, Half-Life 2, the story of Gordon Freeman, the rogue physicist who can’t seem to catch a break. After going through the rift accidentally opened by his fellow scientists at the Black Mesa research facility to put a stop to the creatures coming through, Gordon wakes up years later to find that his efforts didn’t result in as safe a world as he’d expected.

Then, crowbar at his side, he finds himself swept along by events once again, this time not just in an attempt to survive but due to the efforts of a resistance movement that has long viewed him as the savior of humanity. As many dark turns as were taken in the original Half-Life, this story nevertheless has a more somber feel to it. The stakes are higher, the betrayals are more deeply felt (if less surprising), and the character interactions are more fully realized. All this despite the main character never uttering a word of dialogue.

As for the gameplay: Lots of loading screens. It breaks up the game, which didn’t bother me. I can easily imagining it bothering other people, but I typically enjoyed the pause to relax and reflect. Spectacular gameplay. Well, fine, anyhow. I think that the FPS control and interaction scheme has been finalized for quite a while. No real improvements, but it’s worked very well, and continues to here.

The graphics are breathtaking. I’m on record as having said that they were a solid increment above the Final Fantasy movie, and here I mean the in-game play, not the cutscenes (of which there are none). I’ve since considered that I may have overstated that. The character movements in Final Fantasy were more realistically human, but still images and especially facial expressions don’t really hold a candle to the ones in this game. The rest of the world is essentially photorealistic. If FPSes weren’t quite to twitchy, it would be very easy to entirely forget you were playing a game.

I look forward to Half-Life 3, although not to the years-long wait for it. I expect I look forward to whatever expansions that get thrown out too. However, I do wish the game wasn’t so tightly copy-controlled that you have to be online to play the game. I didn’t pay money for it, as it came free with my video card. That smokescreen aside, I feel very uncomfortable not owning a physical copy of a game I’ve paid for. Not even the CD so much (although that too), but the idea that if I unplug my ethernet cable, I suddenly no longer have the game. For one thing, companies do go out of business from time to time. Mostly, I mistrust the precedent. Today, I can’t control my own purchases, tomorrow, eyeless crabs are latching onto people’s heads while an unelected military organization enforces the whims of our unseen alien overlords.