I’ve been playing Lego Rock Band off and on for well over a month, but with my newly repaired guitar I’ve been spending a lot more time with it.  As a long time Rock Band/Rock Band 2 player I am to the point where I play most songs on Expert Guitar except for the hardest tier and those I tend to play on Expert Bass. Going into Lego Rock Band I was expecting a lot of easy songs because the game is labeled as Family Friendly. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice range of song difficulty in the included tracks.

The game’s family friendly aspect come in a couple other areas.  The first is in the song selection.  All of the songs have clean lyrics and would stay away from mature themes.  Yet, with songs from Blink-182, Sum 41, Kaiser Chiefs, and The All-American Rejects there are still a lot of familiar songs that are fun to play.  The other family friendly features are the Super Easy mode and the Auto Drum Bass. When you set it to Super Easy mode you just have to play along with the note’s rhythm but you can hit any color. The Auto Drum Bass cuts out arguably the hardest part of playing the drums by removing the need to use the foot pedal.

The developers have done a good job tying in a little story with the music.  Between sets you get some videos of your band’s adventures which are true to the humor of the previous Lego games.  You can still completely customize your band’s appearance as well as your Rock Den by spending the blocks you earned playing the songs.  Since you are a Lego character you can customize each piece of your character separately or complete swap him out for other themed characters you unlock.

I do have a couple small issues with the game.  The load times are pretty long.  Maybe it is because I have Rock Band 2 installed on my hard drive but not Lego Rock Band that is causing the load times to be so long, but it gets old.  Also, moving around to the different venue locations requires a small load when you switch to them.  I’m use to Rock band 2 where you can just jump from city to city without any loading.  The other annoyance is that most venues only have 2 or 3 songs from the game’s full set list and then the rest are Make Your Own and Mystery setlists.  Especially early in the game this leads to playing a lot of the same songs over and over as you work towards unlocking all of the game’s songs.

Overall, it is a really fun game with songs that play exactly like you would expect for a Rock Band game.  I like knowing that when I am playing a Mystery Set List I don’t have to worry that the songs it chooses will not be clean when my son is around.  Instead I can play and he can watch my Lego band rock. I also appreciate that the game uses Rock Band DLC but only the songs that are suitable for a game rated E10+. Right now my son is not quite old enough to play, even on Super Easy, but in a year or two I’m looking forward to playing Lego Rock Band with him. I think he will really enjoy starting our own band customizing his own rocker.

I’ve been wanting to get back to playing Rock Band 2 and start Lego Rock Band for a few months, but my trusty wireless Rock Band 2 guitar’s strum bar has gotten so loose that I just could not handle playing with my guitar. I generally play on Expert for songs up through the 4/5 difficulty ones.  When i get to the 5/5 difficulty I jump from guitar to bass to keep getting decent scores. I know I’m going to miss notes when I play but when I’m missing them because of the guitar’s faulty it is just too frustrating. Fortunately after some looking around the forums at ScoreHero.com I found some options for replacement strum bars. After reading some opinions I ordered a MaxAxxe RetroShhh replacement. The site looks a little flaky but the RetroShhh arrived when they said it would.

The actually installation was much easier than I was afraid it would be when I saw the two pages of instructions. Basically, you take the back off your guitar, remove the whole strum bar component, replace the strum bad and then put the new board on top.  Finally, screw it all back in and connect the wire.  Put the whole thing back together and you’re set.  It took all of maybe 15 minutes and that included the time to hunt down a suitable screwdriver.

After I was done, I fired up Rock Band 2 and played a couple songs I know I can gold start every time.  I was hitting every note and the timing was just as it use to be (before the old strum bar got all mushy and loose). The RetroShhh has a nice sold feel which is good because I tend to smack the strum bar when things get going fast.  I’ve been playing with it for a week and it still feels great. It makes a little more noise than I expected since the RetroShhh is suppose to be their quite one.  They also sell a RetroClick that has the feel of the Guitar Hero Xplorers. The noise is not a click like the Guitar Hero strum bars, but more just the noise from the component moving back and forth. I don’t really notice it when I’m playing buy my wife pointed it out. It is not overly annoying or anything. Just something to keep in mind if you are looking for a very quite peripheral.

Now that I’ve been playing with it for a while I’m really glad I picked up the RetroShhh.  I’m actually having fun playing Rock Band 2 again and I don’t have to worry about missing notes because of a faulty strum bar.

The Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC released a few weeks back but I’ve still not completed all of it yet. Mad Moxxi is this crazy chick who is looking for her fourth husband, but in the meantime decided to run this arena style tournament. The trailer below explains it nicely.  Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot consists of three small 5 round tournaments and three large 20 round tournaments.  So far I’ve completed the three small tournaments on both playthrough 1 and playthrough 2 and one of the large tournaments. The small tournaments take about 30 to 40 minutes each so completing all of them in a couple hours is doable. The larger tournament took just a hair over 4 hours to complete, and that was without having any rounds where we all died and get set back a round.

The way the tournaments are structures is the same for both the small and the large ones except that the large ones have 4 times the number of rounds. Each round consist of 5 waves of enemies. The first wave is a starter wave of fairly simple enemies.  The second wave is “Gun Wave” where all enemies have guns. The third wave is “Horde Wave” where the enemies have melee weapons and charge your position.  The fourth wave is the  ‘Badass Wave” where all of the enemies are extra strong, but there tends to be less of them.  The fifth and final wave is the “Boss Wave” where you have to face one of the bosses from the main story of the game and a few of his side kicks. The bosses have powerful weapons and a lot of health so it takes a lot to finish them off.  After each round Moxxi drops some loot in the center of the level for you to grab before the next round starts.  The loot on playthrough 1 was mostly worthless for a level 50 character, but when I did the playthrough 2 small tournaments the loot drops were much better.

As the first round Moxxi starts adding modifiers that rotate after each wave.  These modifiers vary widely and include things like making only a specific gun type work effectively, reducing gravity, increasing everyone’s movement speed, taking away shields, making enemies take less damage, or making guns less accurate.  These modifiers keep things interesting and challenging. She starts with just one modifier, but every five waves she increases the number of modifier so for rounds 15 through 20 you have 4 modifiers running all at once.  Those waves get really crazy.

You can’t truly die or lose in the Underdome. If you die Moxxi puts you in the Penalty Box for the rest of the wave. The Penalty Box is at the top of the map so you can still shoot at enemies from there.  However, if all of the members of your team die and are put into the box on the same wave then you get bumped back an entire Round. So if you are on Round 8 Wave 4 and all 4 of you die then you start back at Round 7 Wave 1. So, it is important to be careful to keep at least one person alive. using a well rounded team that has at least three if not all four of the character classes helps with this. Having everyone respec to builds that help out the team and using class mods that are team beneficial as well can further boost your chances of making it through without dying.

For completing the three small tournaments you’re rewarded with an extra skill point and an achievement. If you do both playthroughs you can get 2 extra skill points for your character.  For each of the large tournaments you get an achievement, and if you complete all three with the same character you get an achievement for that too. If your team can play a little conservatively to ensure that you don’t all get killed the same wave then the difficulty is not too bad.  The later waves are challenging, but doable. If you’re team does not work together and is always running off you’re going to be spending a lot of time redoing waves after you all died.

While I do love Borderlands and the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot extension of it I do have some complaints.  First, once you start a specific tournament there is no way to stop it and come back later.  For the small tourneys this is not a bid deal, but since the large ones are 4 plus ours a checkpoint of some sort would be nice. It is not very often I can play 4 or more hours without stopping. Even if it was just at the half way point that would make it so much nice than having to do all 20 rounds (100 eaves) in one sitting.  Another area I wish they had spent more time is on the variety of  bosses and enemies.  There are only like 5 bosses that it rotates between. So by round 20 you’ve seen them all a few times.  With the enemies there are just variations of Skags, Outlaws, and Lancers.  It would have been cool if they had included waves of some of the other animals as well.  Waves of Rak or Slugs would be nuts, but even cooler would be it the game recognized I have the Zombie Island of Dr Ned DLC and included waves of Zombies.

As it is the DLC is fun, challenging, and lengthy, but with more variety in the bosses and enemies it could go from being good to really great. Plus, with the length of the large tournaments it is going to be difficult for me to schedule a time to do the other larger tournaments with three friends. It is a solid addition to the game if you’re ok with playing in long sittings, but for games who only can play for an hour or two at a time it will be tough to get all of the new tournaments completed.

I finally got around to playing through the campaign for Modern Warfare 2 and some Spec Ops. I have no desire to play the multiplayer mode. It is just not my style of game play. Despite some truly fun moments most of the campaign was pretty frustrating and not that fun.Spec Ops is pretty fun when playing it co-op. The few I tried solo were very hard (maybe I should have try a setting lower than Veteran).

I’ve got a longer review detailed my complaints: Here

I figured after the last post with the top Xbox Live Arcade games I’d work on my top overall games of 2009.

The Most Fun Games of 2009

With 2010 in full swing I finally found a little time to put together a list of the best Xbox Live Arcade games of 2009.

You can check it out here.

As a kid I use to love playing  with Legos. As an adult I’ve enjoyed playing through the various Lego games that they have released (Batman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Rock Band). So, when I saw there was this trailer for Lego Universe that got released at CES I figured if would be more of the same.  However, after watching the trailer I’m really looking forward to playing it once it release. I have no other real details about the game other than it is an MMO but the video makes it look awesome! Generally I’m not really an MMO player but being able to build stuff and play in an all Lego world has the potential to be really fun.

Dark Void had a demo hit Xbox Live Marketplace yesterday so I took some time to check it out.  The think that sets Dark Void apart from other third person shooter is that you have a jet pack. The demo starts with a cut scene of how you get your jet pack. The graphics in the cut scene were remarkably nice looking.  Not the best ever or anything but I was impressed with how nice it looked.  After the cut scene ends you have your jet pack and you start off with a brief tutorial of how to fly around.  Switching from standing to flying the jet pack is a little disorienting at first, but by the end of the demo I had it figured out.  It just is odd at first how you go from a standing perspective to have the camera swivel around to a flying one. Combine this with the controls switched from normal to inverted when flying (which is how planes controls generally are) and the first time I about crashed strait into the ground.

After going through the basics of controlling the jet pack it then has you learn to use its weapons first on some static targets and then with some ships. The ships took me a little while to get shot down because they move quite quickly, but once I figured out their flight pattern it was pretty quick to actually down them.

From there you learn to hover and land.  Once you are back on foot you fight through a small building to destroy a control console and then fight back out to escape.  You start with a generic machine gun and then can pick up a few other weapons throughout the level.  The first one was a machine gun style shot but with plasma/energy bullets.  The second one I found shot slowly but had large plasma/energy balls that it fired.  That one was pretty fun to use. There is also a melee button that seemed to be context sensitive when enemies got close.  Sometimes if enemies were low to the ground it would kick and then other times it would hit with my gun.

After escaping the building there was another quick cut scene showing a very large boss like robotic enemy that I’m assuming you will have to take out in the full game.  The total demo length was not more than 15 minutes, but it did give a pretty good feel for the game.  It lets you see how you can combine flying and the use of cover which is a big part of Dark Void.  I’m planning to play Dark Void for sure now.  The demo was really nice looking graphically and the story seemed fairly unique.  Plus, I like how the cover system, flying, and vertical elements of the game combined. I doubt it will be game of the year or anything, but it does seem like a fun, polished shooter.

I don’t know what made me decide to try out 0 Day Attack on Earth, but I wish I had not. It is one of the worst Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve played in a long time.  I’ve got a full review up here if you want to read why it is so bad.

Having spent the last two weeks playing Torchlight exclusively I figured I should finally put a full review together. I covered a lot of the basics of the game in my initial impressions so I’m not going to go over all that again.  For my first playthrough I went as an Alchemist mostly focused on the Lore skill tree. That gives me a lot of minions who I can spawn to attack for me as well as strengthens my pet dog.  Here is a breakdown of my skills currently. The great thing about my Nether Imps and Golems is that they stay alive unless an enemy actually kills them. Unlike spells that summon Archers, Zombies, or Skeletons which will disappear after a time. In addition to my minions my primary attack was my Ember Bolt skill. I very seldom used my my staff or wands. I enjoyed playing through like this because I was on my laptop with a generic USB mouse.  So, I did not have to be as precise with my clicking since my minions find their own enemies and the Ember Bolt seeks enemies.  When I play through as a Destroyer I’ll be doing it on my PC with a larger monitor and better mouse.   I already started playing through a second time on my laptop as a Vanquisher and I’m glad to be back home to move over t the PC to finish up playing through as her because I need more accuracy for  her ranged attacks. My Alchemist is up to level 54 now because after completing the story I worked through about 12 levels of the Shadow Vault and a few add-on mod dungeons…more on those shortly.

I really enjoyed the main campaign o Torchlight and the story that keeps the loot grinding going. Torchlight is a loot lovers dream.  There is a ton of stuff being dropped all the time and you can add rings and amulets that add additional 2 or 4% bonus chance of getting better loot. The majority of the enemies are not to tough to deal with but there are lots of them.  Then you’ll run into a boss who takes a considerable more damage to take down.  They are always fun because you mind your health and manna while trying keep spells going and minions attacking.  All while getting in as many attacks as you can while dodging.  The final boss of the main story was the biggest example of this. No spoilers on who it is, but they have a ton of health. It was probably a 5 minute long battle. At one point I spent like 30 seconds just running in wide circles around the boss casting spells that call people to attack for me and then running more to keep from getting surrounded.  It was an epic fight.

After completing the main story I like that the game does not end but you unlock the Shadow Dungeon.  It is a never ending dungeon that just keeps going deep.  Each level is different and you can work through them to level up your character, complete more quests, and find more loot. Plus if you get tired of grinding you can always stop to fish for a while. The actual fishing mechanic is quite simple, wait until the rings overlap and click.  When you do you catch a fish that temporarily either turns your pet into another creature or gives it a bonus modifier. Fishing is a nice little distraction if you ever feel things getting repetitive.  After about 5 minutes you’ll have a ton of new fish to try out. It is really fun to turn your pet into other creatures of an hour and see how they respond.

Another great feature of Torchlight is that they developers openly support modding and released tools for their community to create mods for Torchlight.  They have not been out a long time but already there are a lot of really great mods.  I would highly recommend using Torchleech to find and apply the mods to your Torchlight install.  It is a mod manager that allows you to install mods directly with links back the the original posts and a compatibility check tool to make sure that there are no issues between the mods you install. Here are the mods I’m running (that I can remember off the top of me head). I found most of these by sorting TorchLeech to show the highest rated mods.

Aegis Maps – Volume 2
Aegis Maps – Volume 1
Forgotten Fortress of Rukom
Heron’s Sword Pack
Mine Booster Pack
Potions Stacksize Mod
Respec Mod
Starch the Monster Hunter
The Mysterious Man

The other nice bonus is that since I went with the Steam version of Torchlight I have 66 achievements to try and unlock. Since I was already mostly through the game when they added achievements I’ll have to play through it again to get most of them, but I have no issue with that.  Some of them I’ll probably never get, and Steam achievements don’t quite have the same satisfaction as their Xbox Live counterparts, but it is still a nice bonus.

With the number of hours I’ve already put into Torchlight I already feel like I got my moneys worth, and I’m only just scratching the surface of how much I could play. I’ve got two more playthroughs at least so I can try each of the other characters more thoroughly. Plus, a lot of additional mods are being created that I’m sure will be worth playing.  The additional stand alone dungeons like the Aegis Maps and Starch the Monster Hunter are really a lot of fun.  If you still have not tried Torchlight you really owe it to yourself to try the demo at least.  It is possibly the best $20 I’ve spent on a game.