It has been a while since I’ve come across a game that I truly enjoy as much as Red Faction Guerrilla. When they released the single player and multiplayer demos on Xbox Live I had a good time with them but normally a demo just gives you a feel for the best part of a game. When you actually play the full release there end up being little annoyances that you do not find in the demo because it is so short. However, with Red Faction Guerrilla that has not been the case for me. I’m not saying the same is perfect or anything but that I’ve yet to find any major things that bother me about it. The destructible environments are not just a gimmick, but a core part of the game that fit well with the story and the setting. Every structure, building, and bridge in the game can be destroyed. Some easily with just a few swings of your sledgehammer and others only with large amounts of explosives. The destructible environment is what makes the game so fun. Deciding if you want to just run in and hit a few key pillars, drive a truck through, or use some rockets to level a building never gets old.

Starting off with the single player I really love that the game opens up the world of Mars and lets you choose how you want to play. There are some missions that are required to advance the main story line but you can do those whenever you want. In addition to the main missions there are dozens of different side missions you can complete for moral and money. These side missions can also be completed at any time and vary from escort and driving missions to defending and area or destroying a certain amount of property. Later in the game these side missions would be tedious if you had to do them all, but you don’t. You can play the ones that are fun to you and ignore all the rest. For me, that means playing all the missions where I blow stuff up and skipping all the escort and driving bits. The main story missions are also really fun to play. They vary quite a bit in length and structure, but it seemed to me that the later in the game you are the more fun the main story missions were. Once you complete the main story arc of the game it does not just end. You are back on mars with all of the side missions available for you to complete if you want. The overall world is quite large and there are tons of hidden things to find. Some which will get you achievements, like radio tags, and others that are just funny, like NASA’s Mars Rover. Overall, I really enjoyed the story of the game as well as the openness of how the world is laid out.

The multiplayer is a little different than the campaign because there are no vehicles but there are a lot of different packs you can use. Effectively combining the packs with a complimentary weapon and then getting a team of friends who are doing the same is great fun. The different packs really lend well to good team working winning matches. For example, one person on your team might grab a sniper and a jet pack and head up high to provide covering fire while someone with a fleetfoot pack goes in full speed to try and capture the enemies flag. The game has the normal deathmatch and capture the flag modes which are fun, but the modes specific to destroying stuff are some of the most fun I’ve had in multiplayer in years. Siege mode is possibly my favorite game mode. In it one team defends a building or set of buildings while the other attacking team tries to knock them down. Then, after a set amount of time the teams switch. It requires good teamwork and communication to win as Siege because you need to figure out where enemies are attacking from. If anyone already repairing a building or should you stop trying to kill enemies and repair it. Or, does one of the buildings have a structural weakness you can exploit. There are a ton of maps to play through and even more customization options that keep things fresh and interesting even if you play the same map all night long.

In addition to the single player and multiplayer there is also a pass the controller verse mode called Wrecking Crew. In Wrecking Crew you play against up to three friends and try to destroy a level with a set amount of time or ammo. Then, the level resets and your friends try to beat your score. It really is a fun mode that I think gamers might overlook because you have to play it locally and not over Xbox Live. However, it is well worth having a couple friends over to play because the face paced destruction focused game play is fun over and over again.

As you can tell by now I love Red Faction Guerrilla and I would highly recommend people try the demos if they are even remotely interested in it. Once you see the real physics based destruction you will be hooked.

Not long after I got my Wii I picked up Boom Blox and really had a pretty good time playing it with my wife. So, when Boom Blox Bash Party released I decided to grab it to add to the small set of games that I can get my wife to play. Bash Party has a lot of the same game modes that the original has, but they also added a bunch of new modes including slingshots, paint balls, cannons, and virus balls. The game mechanics are pretty much the same with a lot of throwing balls block towers, blowing up bombs to get the most points, and variations of Jenga towers to take apart carefully.

The new modes are fun for the most part and seem like a natural extension of Boom Blox. The mode with the pant balls was probably the most different because it was much more puzzle and strategy heavy than the other modes are. The ability to create your won levels is still there as well as the co-op and verses play, which my wife and I have been enjoying. Bash Party has less levels than I remember from the original, but they have added a quick button to each game mode section to download more user created levels. I really like this option because for the game modes that I like I can quickly go out and grab more of them from the Most Downloaded and Highest Rated lists they provide.

If you enjoyed Boom Blox you will like Bash Party as well since it is more of the same with some improvements. If you have not tried Boom Blox yet I’d recommend going strait for Bash Party since it has all the original game modes and the new ones plus the option to download more levels for free.

I was planning on playing Red Faction: Guerrilla all weekend and while I did play it some I got side tracked playing the 1 vs 100 Beta on the Xbox 360 Primetime Channel a lot. I play first during the 2 hour play on Friday night by myself. Well, my wife was sitting there with me but she was not as much help as I had hoped (don’t tell her I said that). I really had a lot of fun trying to get into the Mob or to be the One. I spent the whole night in the Crowd but it still was really fun to try and get a high score and keep a streak of correct answers going. The pace of the game was ok, but it could be a little bit faster. Still, with almost 100,000 people playing at the same time over Xbox Live in the beta it ran remarkable smooth.

After that I joined an Xbox Live party with a couple friends and played in the E3 Questions Extended Play. In the Extended Play there is no One or Crowd. Everyone is in the Mob trying to get high scores. The Extended Play was a lot of fun trying to keep my score higher than my friends. Also, it is much faster paced since there is no One to wait on. In 30 minutes of Extended Play there were 37 questions that got progressively harder. I also liked that if you get a streak going in Extended Play you can earn the ability to skip a question you don’t know to keep your streak going. I also played in the General Questions Extended Play Sunday afternoon with a party of 6 to 8 friends over Live. It was a blast playing with a group of friends who where helping each other but also trying to throw in a few false answers to mess up each other.

I’m not sure that I’ll be playing this every time it is on or anything but when the full game launches I’m sure I will play it at least occasionally with some friends. The lure of prizes is to strong and the game is too fun. The only thing keeping me from playing it regularly will be when they have the shows scheduled. Since you only win prizes in Live shows it will depend on my schedule if I can play frequently or not.

A demo for Overlord II went up on Xbox Live this morning. It has been almost 2 years since Overlord released and it still ranks up there as one of the funniest games I’ve played. The demo seems to be the first level of the game. Because of this you are not very strong yet and you only have brown minions. But, it is still really funny and dark. I had a blast running my minions around beating down people and furry little animals. They have added mounts for the minions to ride which are really fun because they let them move around quicker and jump across gaps. They brown minions get wolves to ride. The graphics look better than in the first game. There was just the one level in the demo so I don’t know about the full game but that level looked really nice. The first Overlord you were “evil” but ended up helping people. It seems like this time around they are going to let you be really evil. No accidentally helping people in the demo. Just a lot of slaughtering. The controls are pretty similar to the first Overlord so I had to get use to them again, but by the end I was running my minions all over like a pro. I would really recommend people check out the Overlord II demo because it is really dark and humorous.

Download the Demo to your Xbox 360 download queue here.

I watched Underworld: Rise of the Lycans the other night and I was really disappointed. I like the first Underworld because of the cool gun fights, but since Underworld 3 is set in as time period before guns they only have swords and crossbows. The crossbows did hold 3 bolts at a time but really it is not the same. The sword fights were mostly just a couple people hacking Lycans apart, but there were a couple decent sword fights. Really thought it is just not that great of a movie. The story was not that good and there was not enough good action scenes to make up for it. I would not recommend even renting it. Just watch the first Underworld again. It is a much better movie.

The more I see about Project Natal the more I’m excited to see some of the great developers who make Xbox 360 games get their hands on it and make some games.

If you’re not familiar with Project Natal there is a recap here and below are some trailers.

I finally got around to reading Mass Effect: Revelation last week. With all the potential Mass Effect 2 news coming this week with E3 I decided I should be ready. The book is a prequel to the game and I’m actually glad I read it after completing Mass Effect. There are not any huge spoilers in the book but there is a lot of foreshadowing that would have made the big reveals in the game less fun for me. Overall, I enjoyed the book but it could have used a little more action in it. Still, it has me pumped for reading Mass Effect: Ascension and playing Mass Effect 2.

Today was my catch up day for all the interesting looking Xbox Live Arcade and Community Games that I’ve been downloading for the last two weeks. So far I’ve checked out Gel, Yosumin Live, Blazing Birds, SQONG, Pellmell, and Hexy Trench. I’ve started posting ratings for them on XBLA & XNA Ratings and I’ll be posting more throughout the afternoon as I have time to write them up. In between playing more Dock’em and Yosumin! LIVE. I need to spend more time with Hexy Trench too because the tutorial is so long I did not get through it all before the demo ended.

You can find my ratings for them here.

When XNA games were announced originally it was marketed as the “Youtube of games” because anyone can make a game and post it on Xbox Live Community Games. Much like Youtube there is a lot of stuff that you’re probably not interested in up there but mixed are a few great gems that are worth telling your friends about. Stuff like Miner Dig Deep, CarneyVale: Showtime, and Classicard are games that are well worth playing. On the other hand there are tons of games that I do not even bother downloading the trial for. And this is coming from someone who is a big fan of Xbox Live Arcade and Community Games.

I guess I should not find it surprising that, again, like Youtube there are lot of people copying each others ideas and trying to one up each other. It seems that for Community Games the place to try and best each other is with massage “games” that vibrate the controller. First there was Rumble Massage that allowed 1 player to have their controllers vibrate at the speed of their choosing. The graphics are not great, but for this type of thing does it really matter? About a month later Remote Masseuse release and expanded to include vibrating your friend’s controllers over Xbox Live. While I still think both of these are kind of lame I can see where there is some advancement here. However, today A Perfect Massage released, and it does pretty much the same thing as Rumble Massage but with possibly better graphics. However, it does not include support for controlling over Xbox Live. It seems to me that it was released simply to cash in as both of the previous massage titles popularity as they have regularly been in the top 10 Xbox Live Community Games each week. I’m fine with our people trying to make money but if you’re going to release an obvious clone of an existing product at least improve on the original’s features. On Youtube it is stuff like this that keeps me from browsing videos randomly. The only Youtube videos I watch are the ones my friends send me links to, and it is junk like this that keeps me from downloading the demo for all of the released XBLCGs.

It has been a while since I had something to really rant about but the prevalence of stupid and lame titles on Community Games is increasingly annoying. Microsoft does not allow a Community Game to be rejected because it is a clone or even if because it is bad game, but if they did I think the service would be a much. Out of all the Community Games games released less than 30% have a rating of over 6 on XNA Ratings. That does not seem that good to me so I started doing some more digging. Over on XBLCG.info they have an option to specify if oyu would recommend a game or not. Less 20% of all Community Games are recommended by over half of the people who tried the title. That means somewhere between 70 and 80% of the Community Games are not being very well recieved by gamers.

I realize I’m not offering much of a solution here, but I’m hoping there is one. Xbox Live Community Games has so much potential and I’d hate to see the service ignored by the average gamer because they don’t want to deal with all the junk on there.

I’ve been playing a lot of Space Invaders Extreme since it released. It is the first Xbox Live Arcade game I purchased for quite a while. I’m really enjoying what all they’ve added to one of the few classic arcade games I’d still throw my quarters in. The graphics in Extreme look great. They have the feel of the original but in nicely done HD. I really like the bonus levels you can unlock as well as the weapon power ups. If you use them right, and remeber to conserve the power ups by hitting the Right Bumper, you can take out entire waves of enemies in seconds with a couple shots. I also like that you can earn power ups any time just by killing four enemies of the same color in a row. Follow that up by four of another color and you get a “Break” bonus level that you can then get the even better Fever power up unlocked. The levels get more and more challenging, but never to the point where I felt like it was impossible. The levels are short enough too that you can play for ten or twenty minutes and have a blast. Between the various power ups, bonus levels, and bosses the game never slows down and never gives you a break. It is all non-stop action from start to finish. I would recommend it to any fans of vertical shooters because it is well made and lots of fun.