Red Dead Redemption has been out long enough now that I don’t think a full review is needed. Everyone should have heard by now that RDR is a great game.  I’ve never played a GTA game so I’m not use to Rockstar’s open world game play but I am generally familiar with them given their general popularity. That said the sheer size and scope of RDR caught me be surprised.  There are literally dozens of things to do and see in the game. I think my saved game by the time I was done was around 35 hours. That is RPG length for a game where you don’t do much leveling or upgrades.  Yes, there are a few things you level up like your dead eye (aka. bullet time) and some better weapons to buy, but mostly you can do everything after you make it through the the beginning tutorial missions. I really liked this format because I was never punished for going to areas of the world that the main story mission had not gotten to yet.

The main story was a lot of fun to play through even though the character did not always make the exact same choices I would have in the things that were said and done, but given the situation the main character was in nothing actually felt out of place.  I liked how the main story progressed and the overall length of it.  However, it is the side missions that can suck your time. I would start off heading towards a main story mission and get side tracked by hunting doing side missions.  In some games there kinds of distractions would have been frustrating but I always enjoyed my time playing RDR.  Even when I was just riding around hunting or goofing off. The single player has been an absolute blast and I look forward to any single player DLC (or a sequel).

I have not played much multiplayer in RDR but I have played through the co-op missions with some friends and had a blast with them. We finished all 6 of them in one sitting on the normal difficulty and then wrapped up advanced mode the next time we played. So, not a lot of length in them but they were a fun few hours.

Overall I would recommend playing RDR. I had a lot of fun with and I don’t know anyone who has played it that did not like it.  Just be prepared for a lengthy single player campaign.

I’m not a die hard Green Day fan, but I like their songs for the most part and I like Rock Band. So, I decided to check out the game.  It is what you expect with over 40 Green Day songs to play Rock Band style.  About half way through the songs I realized a couple things. First, Green Day songs all have a similar feel that made things a bit easier once I got it down. Second, I know more Green Day songs than I thought I did. None of their songs are especially hard, at least on Expert Bass, and I was able to play through them all without failing.  Harmonix has done a good job making the game overall. There are a lot of Green Day clips to unlock for fans of the band and an export option to play the songs in Rock Band 2, or Rock Band 3 when it releases, once you’ve finished the campaign. Personally, I’ve enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to playing more Rock Band when RB3 releases in October.

While I’ve been enjoying Green Day: Rock Band for the most part but I am a little frustrated by some of the achievements. They have a lot of them tied to singing vocals and playing with a fulll band which is just not going to happen for me.  They also include some that require playing a song on every instrument.  Also not going to happen.  I get that they want to encourage people to play as a band but I tried playing on Xbox Live a couple times and never found more than 1 other person to form a band with. So, this is going to be a game where I don’t get the majority of the achievements.

Thinking specifically about the new stuff taking off from a air craft carrier was pretty fun.  Nothing especially hard about it, but it was fun.  Refueling in light was not nearly as fun.  It is was a 5 minute process to get lined up to refuel and if you are not fast enough then you fail and have to retry. It was really a pain in the butt. Getting behind the fuel plane was not to hard but because of the camera angle the last few meters is a real pain to accurately judge. Hopefully the full game has more air craft carrier type stuff and not a lot of refueling.

I think HAWX 2 is one of those games where if you like the first then you’ll probably enjoy the second as well, but if you were not then there is not enough new stuff to make HAWX 2 worth it.

After seeing the line up for this year’s Summer of Arcade I fully expected Hydro Thunder Hurricane (HTH) to be my favorite of the five titles releasing.  Especially after trying it at E3 this year. I had seen the trailers and screens for Monday Night Combat (MNC) and thought it looked pretty fun, but the nostalgia of HTH had my attention. I am enjoying HTH (see my previous post) but within 24 hours after the release on MNC I was hooked.  The co-op Blitz mode is challenging but a lot of fun and it scales the enemies to the number of people playing so you still have to work together when you get 4 people in a room.

While Blitz is fun I love the Crossfire 6v6 multiplayer mode.  Even though it is an objective based game type there is a strong focus on killing enemies first. It supports playing in a private room and still lets you earn experience and achievements which may games cut out of private rooms. We had 12 of us playing together last night and it was great fun. It would be nice if there was a little more control over setting the teams and the start of the match but as it is the games are still a lot of fun. Once you unlock a couple custom classes you can really start to tweak things to fit your play style which comes in really handy.

I wrote up a lengthy review on XBLA Ratings so I’ll not rehash all of it.  You can read it here.  I would highly recommend checking out the trial and doing so with some friends.

So I stumbled across Jolicloud last week and after spending a few days playing with the Live CD I went ahead and installed it on my laptop. Technically Jolicloud is an OS designed for netbooks, but I’ve not had any trouble with it running on my Dell Latitude D630. A couple of features caught my eye quickly and were the reason I decided to check it out. First, Jolicloud does not need its own partition (although it can be setup that way). You can just run the Jolicloud install in Windows and it automatically sets it up as a dual boot system with a dedicated amount of space on a drive of your choosing.  If I get tired of it or don’t like it I can just uninstall and everything goes back to normal. The other thing that I like is the simple, clean interface. You setup the apps you user regularly for things like web surfing, social media and checking email and then you’re set.

For basic web browsing I see myself using Jolicloud fairly often on my laptop. Then if I need to do something work related or more involved I can just boot Windows instead. There are over 700 apps currently available and more getting added weekly.  So far though I’ve not ran into anything I wish I could do that was missing.  VLC, Firefox, Google Docs and Twitter cover my main items. Another feature I like but don’t really use yet is that your settings and apps are saved to your Jolicloud account.  Then, if you log in on another system that has Jolicloud it will set everything just how you left it on the first system.  This cross system syncing will come in hand when I do get a new laptop or netbook.  It also allows for my wife to setup her own layout without effecting my stuff by creating her own account.

Oh, did I mention it is free, it boots fast and the apps install almost instantly with just one click?  All very nice features. Jolicloud hasn’t replaced my Windows 7 install, and I doubt that it ever will, but for day to day normal usage I’m starting to really like it.

So I played through the Army of Two: The 40th Day campaign this last week.  It was not especially long. I think there were only like 7 levels/missions.  Each one was over an hour but still not that long of a game.  The game play itself was fun.  I liked being able to tell my partner to move forward, stay in place or come to me and then using his position to flank or snipe enemies. The aggro system from the first Army of Two still works well with the teammate who is doing the most shooting getting the attention of the enemies.  Upgrading weapons with the money I earned was pretty strait forward. I found the couple guns I like and then upgraded them to be the best they could be.

The only thing I found annoying was the “morality” choices that you had to make throughout the missions.  You would get to set spots in the story and it would make you decide help someone or not.  Only most of the time helping the person resulted in some really bad thing happening down the line.  I’ll not spoil it completely but the ending of the game was like this as well.  I made my choice and the outcome sucked.  So I replayed the last level and tried it again picking the other option.  The outcome still stunk.  To me this is annoying.  Don’t have me make “moral” choices and them make the resulting outcome be bad either way.

While the game play itself was alright the story line was really frustrating.  It is probably worth a rental if you want to play co-op with someone. You can probably finish the whole thing in a weekend if you wanted to.

So I signed up for the first free year of OnLive because I was curious if it would work without lag and other delay based issues. I always intended to play through Trine after trying the demo a while back and when I got a free game for signing up with OnLive I decided to finally do just that. Trine has been out long enough now that I think most people are at least familiar with it. You play as three characters are magically merged together that you can switch between at will.  There is a wizard, thief and knight.  The wizard can create boxes, floating triangles and flat panels. The thief has a bow and the ability to use a grappling hook. The knight has a sword & shield as well as a massive war hammer and the ability to pick up and throw items. The game itself is a platformer where you have to use the three characters abilities to traverse the levels and puzzles. The game is a lot of fun and while a few of the jumping based puzzles were a bit frustrating (for me) at times there are plenty of checkpoints that you don’t have to redo major portions of levels very often. If you have not played Trine I would recommend checking it out. It is really fun even and nicely made.

One of the main reason I chose to play Trine via OnLive is because it supports using the Xbox 360 controller.  Actually, I believe that every game on OnLive supports using the controller.  I play a lot more console games so I’m far more comfortable gaming with a controller than with mouse and keyboard. I probably could have made it through without the controller because I played the demo that way, but once I started using the controller there was no going back.  Trine 2 has been announced already and if it is not on Xbox Live Arcade I’ll probably not play it until I get confirmation that the PC version supports a controller.

The OnLive interface it pretty nicely made.  The main screen that loads has quick links to the main categories. It is quick and responsive to navigate once it starts up but the actual start-up takes a few seconds. For the most part I did not notice any input lag in playing Trine.  I need to play the demo for something like BFBC2 to see if there is input lag there but for the single player games I’ve tried there has been no issue.  However, there have been multiple times where the graphics get all blocky because of a “network issue”.  90% of the time the graphics look great but occasionally, and seemingly randomly, a little network warning would appear in the lower right corner and the graphics would get all choppy.  Sometimes even without the warning the game would suddenly pause for a second and then restart with my character moved a few steps to the side. Those were mostly minor annoyances, but twice I could not even get the game to start because of network issues. Every time I immediately did a network test and it was always fine so I’m assuming the network issues and errors were on there end. Hopefully those types of things will get sorted out in the coming months.

OnLive’s list of games is not very big yet but the titles they do have are pretty big ones.  I assume they have more games lined up that they will be adding.  The main issue is not really the small game list as much as the pricing.  With Steam regularly having 50 to 75% off sales it is hard to see how OnLive can compete without having similar sales.

One feature I find interesting in OnLive is their Arena. Basically anyone playing a game via OnLive you can go into the Arena and see their game live as the play it.  You can spectate and watch them play and give them a thumbs up/down.  More than once people joined my Trine game to watch for a while.  Frankly, I don’t see why people would watch someone they don’t know play a game other than to see if the game looks fun or interesting. However, for people interested in that the Arena did work smoothly when I tried it.

So, while OnLive has been out only a short time I can see it doing pretty well if they can continue to improve their infrastructure, put games on sale and add to their catalog. I don’t see it replacing Steam or consoles for me but it is a nice additional way to game since I like using a controller.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane releases on Xbox Live Arcade tomorrow. I got the chance to play Hydro Thunder Hurricane for the last week and it has been a blast. I’m most of the way through the single player campaign and really looking forward to trying the multiplayer.  I love playing Hydro Thunder in the arcade any time I happen to be in one.  This remake/sequel is very true to the original but with great new graphics and dynamic water.

I’ve got my full review up on XBLA Ratings (here) but if liked Hydro Thunder on the console or arcade before this version will feel quite familiar.

If you are new to Hydro Thunder check out the trailer below and if it looks fun, which it is, I’ve got some tips for beginners (here).

I really enjoy open world games, for the most part, and Crackdown 2 is no exception.  I can see why some people are complaining that is just like Crackdown and not enough changed, but I don’t care about that.  Yes, it is pretty much just like the original with a few additions and new enemies, but the game is fun and that is what matters.  The four player co-op is  riot.

The story line in Crackdown 2 picks up years after the first game with the city overrun with Freaks (aka zombies) and the Cell violently opposing the Agency. Your job, as always, is to clean up the city.  The story is a little vague but if you listen to the audio drops throughout the city you get a little bit of an idea of the back story of the game. Really though, the story does not matter too much.  The point of Crackdown 2 is to run around the city killing enemies and having fun. The game looks a lot like the original Crackdown graphically but I don’t mind that really. Sure, there are better looking games out there but it does not look bad or anything.

Frankly, Crackdown 2 is a great summer co-op game.  Running around with your friends causing the biggest explosions and jumps in the world is a blast.  Plus, orb hunting now is co-op since there are orbs that require two people pick up.  Is it a prefect game? No.  Is it a lot of fun with some friends? Yes.  I could talk more about it properly I’m going to go look for the last few orbs instead.

There have been quite a few fun Xbox Live Indie Games released in the last two weeks.  I find myself continuing to go back to Radiangames Crossfire.  I’m stuck on level 49 for the last couple days.  If I was just more patient I could probably get past it, but so far no luck.  I have a lot of fun playing it with Shorty since he can just hold the trigger down and then move around.  I also am working my way through Lumi and Jurassic.  Both are really fun games.  I’ve got a breakdown of all three in a little more detail here.   Also, if you’re into vertical shooters I’ve got a post on EvilAvatar about some fun one on the Xbox Live Indie Game channel here.