So, after playing Command & Conquer 3 for so long I was looking for something a little simpler. So, as I was looking over GameFly’s available games I remembered that I had enjoyed the demos of Overlord and Surf’s Up. So, I put both in my queue the day I sent back C&C3. I received Surf’s Up in the mail this last Friday. Yesterday afternoon I completed the game. According to LiveEye I spent 3 hours playing it, but I think it was closer to 4 or 5 hours. So, it is really short, but since it is a kid’s game I expect it to be short. Also, I did not play any multiplayer which would have extended its length. Frankly, I’m not at all upset about the length. It was a a fun, relaxing game to play this weekend. I did not have to think to much, and I could just have some fun surfing as a penguin (or chicken). The game has a simple control scheme, but yet still allows for some pretty cool, and very unrealistic, tricks. In addition of the air tricks you can do off a wave there are also a lot of really long “grinds” you can do. So, it is not even remotely realistic, but it is a video game so I don’t care. For the fellow Achievement Whores out there this was the fastest 950 points I’ve ever gotten. I could have gotten the last 50 points, but I did not feel like grinding out the last achievement since I would have had to go back through every level looking for surf idols. It would not have been to hard, but it would have taken at least an hour and would have spoiled the relaxing weekend I was having. This is a great game for kids or adults who want to relax (or get some easy achievement points). Just plan on renting it since you’ll have it beaten withing a couple days.

I checked out the demo for The Bigs this afternoon and it was pretty fun. I stink at it, but not as bad as I did with the MLB 2k7 demo. It has a similar play style to the old Blitz games where players are making impossible catches, but without all the direct violence. If you’re into baseball games but find them pretty difficult give this one a try. I think The Bigs could be a lot of fun to play with a friend. I can’t say that I’ll be getting it, but if I was over at a friend’s house and he had it I would not be opposed to playing him.

The Blue Dragon demo has two levels available that you can play for an hour each. I was able to beat the first level of the demo with a couple minutes to spare, and I made it a good way into the second level before I got mad and had to stop. While I do like RPGs I prefer ones along the lines of Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, or the to-be-released Mass Effect. Japanese style RPGs are not ones I find myself interested in, but with all the hype over Blue Dragon I decided to check out the demo. The graphics remind me a lot of Dragon Ball Z, but then I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full episode. So if you’re a fan of Dragon Ball Z don’t judge me to harshly on the comparison. While the graphics are not a style I prefer they still look really nice. After playing the demo for Eternal Sonata recently it took a few minutes to get use to the full featured RPG system with items, skills, spells, and classes. Once I got use to it and remembered how a real RPG is played I was able to breeze through the first level pretty easily.

There are some unique elements to the game which I really liked. First, when you’re wondering around the world you can pause at any time and pull up a Field view that shows you all of the enemies in range of you to attack (if there are any). This gives you the opportunity to attack one or all of the enemies in range. At first I was ignoring this option, but once I got use to it fighting got a lot easier. The other unique feature that helped get through the demo quicker was the Field Barrier. When activated you don’t have to fight any weaker enemies that you have defeated before. So, once you beat a specific type of enemy you never have to fight them again if you don’t want to. Other than the boss fights I was able to take out whole parties of enemies in one turn for the most part. During the boss fights the tension meter is the key to winning. Basically, the more damage done, both by you and to you, increases the tension meter and once it is maxed out you can do really powerful attacks that can pretty much defeat anybody.

The regular combat system took a little getting use to, but once I figure it out I was slaughtering guys. Any attack can be powered up, but the more you power them up the longer you have to wait before the attack occurs. Since combat is turn based you want to try and get the most power out of your attack while still getting the attack in before the enemy gets another turn. It took me about half of the first level to start getting the hang of the turn based power up attacking style, but now that I have it figured out I really like it.

There were a couple things besides the graphical style I did not really like. First, some of the powerful attacks have their own animations and for some reason it would not let me skip some of them. The weird thing was that other animations could be skipped. The same thing would happen with some of the cut scenes. I could skip some of them, but not all of them. Since the demo is only 60 minutes I wanted to skip these after I saw them the first time since the same attack has the same cut scene every time. The other complaint I have is that the music during battles seemed like it was always the same. After a while it gets old. The music itself is pretty good, but after hearing it over and over again for almost 2 hours I was getting pretty tied of it. Hopefully the full game has more music that it switches between.

I never made it past the Gorgon Hydrattler in the second level. I had all of the other areas cleared out, but every time I’d fight the Gorgon Hydrattler it would turn all (or most) of my team to stone with its first attack so I could never get an attack in. If anyone knows how to keep from getting turned to stone please let me know. I’d like to finish the second level, but I can’t get past this part.

If you’re into RPGs I’d absolutely recommend giving this one a try. Despites is cartoon appearance it has a lot of depth to it. After playing it for a couple hours I was still finding great new spells, skills, and items that I did not know about. Before playing this demo I had written this game off, but now I’m thinking I’ll have to play the full version.

A demo for Stuntman: Ignition was released on the Marketplace today and while I stink at racing games I figured I’d give it a try anyway. While it looks pretty good, I found it to be very difficult. Even when I set it to the easy mode I had trouble beating any of the three levels. The premise of the game is that you are stuntman and you need to do the stunts as the directory calls them out. The more you string together the better you score. Even with the director telling me what to do next and where to go I had a lot of trouble with it. A lot of the driving requires you to be precise while driving over exact spots or between specific places without loosing speed. I can’t drive in video games when it is on a nice wide track let alone between two other cars. I found it frustrating because they clearly want you to replay the levels over and over until you get it perfect, but I prefer games where you don’t have to memorize every twist and turn in a level to finish it perfectly. If you’re into driving games this one is probably worth checking out, but keep in mind that your driving skills have to be pretty dang good to score well. I know I should probably give up on driving games, but the idea of driving through explosions was to tempting to pass up.

Golden Axe and Sonic the Hedgehog were both released today on Xbox Live Arcade for $5 each. I’m not really excited about either one. I’ve never been a Sonic fan and while I do remember enjoying Golden Axe I think retro titles like this are like movies and tv shows I liked in the 80’s. They are better off staying in my memory because in reality they were not that good. The one thing I like about both of there games from Sega is that you can assign all of the buttons however you want. In Golden Axe they also provide an option to turn on/off rapid fire. Sonic looks about how I remember it, but Golden Axe looks really bad by today’s standards. I wish they had at least taken the time to make enhanced graphics for it like many other retro titles are doing. Because neither of these games are really that good I’m not going to bother withl reviews on them since there are demos of current games I’d rather spend my time with.

A demo for the Campaign Mode of Ace Combat 6 was released this morning corresponding with E3. I was playing it at lunch today and I was really impressed with the graphics. Everything looks more realistic than I expected. The HUD has a lot of info on it, but I quickly found the few pieces of information that were critical and was able to ignore the rest. One of my favorite things, once I found it, was the option to keep holding down the button for launching missiles and the camera fallows the missile. It is a really cool to see the opposing aircraft explode up close. Just remember that you’re plane is still flying so don’t hold the launch button so long you crash. Although, the crash animation was pretty cool. When you die you get a cool replay camera option that lets you see your spectacular death over again. This same replay is offered at the end of the mission which is helpful for seeing how close you really came to getting shot down. Maybe you’ll be better at flying than I am so you will not need it, but for me it was helpful to see how enemy planes were getting shots on me.

I’m not really use to this type of flying game. The last time I played all the way through a flying game was Crimson Skies. I tried Blazing Angels but I just could not get into it. That said, the controls seemed very smooth, but I had trouble getting use to using the shoulder buttons for the yaw. Maybe it will be a little easier to control using the optional Flight Stick they are going to offer bundled with Ace Combat 6. I don’t see myself buying it since the bundle will cost $150, but if you’re into flying games then the flight stick might be the way to go. Once I got use to the actual flying portions of the control the demo was pretty easy. I used my special homing missiles for pretty much all of my kills. I never was able to get any kills with the machine gun or the regular missiles. Fortunately, there were plenty of the homing missiles. The one thing I do have an issue with on the controls is that you have to use the back button to switch between regular and homing missiles. I don’t like games using the back button for anything other than bringing up an in-game menu because it is not in a place that is easy to reach. I would rather have the missile switching done by hitting right/left on the D-Pad since that is not currently used. However, once I switched to the homing missiles I never switched back so I guess I was not really using it that often.

If you’re into flying games be sure to check out this demo and start saving for the $150 flight stick bundle. If flight games are not really your thing I’s still recommend checking out this demo because it looks beautiful. Just be ready for a bit of a learning curve with the controls.

I checked out the demo for NCAA Football 08 last night and it is pretty much exactly how I remember NCAA Football 07. The graphics don’t really look any better. The plays are all still the same. The only difference I can see is they changed the audible and coverage options that are available before the play snaps. The demo lets you play as USC vs Michigan. I really don’t have a lot to say about it. If you’ve played NCAA Football 07 then you know what to expect. Essentially you’ve got a scaled down version of Madden, but with more teams available to play with. Hopefully this is not the final build of the game because when you leave the huddle the game hiccups and pauses for a second. I did not notice it at first, but once I did I realized it was happening every single time. Hopefully that gets sorted out before the game is released.

I would prefer to just keep NCAA Football 07 and buy an update for the game with all the new rosters. I’d even pay $20 for it. I don’t expect EA to do that, but it would be a nice option. If they are not going to have any major updates to the series why release another game?

The last few months Official Xbox Magazine Demo Discs have been lacking, but this month they have an exclusive demo of Eternal Sonata. Initially I was not that interested in Eternal Sonata, but since I can’t turn down trying a demo I gave it a shot. Eternal Sonata is about the final hours of the composer Chopin’s life. In an unusual twist Chopin travels through his own dream world. The game is an RPG, but it is not to heavy on the stat upgrades. The stats automatically level up as you gain experience. It does have the usual RPG style item collection, but a lot of the times are music related since it is based around Chompin.

Graphically the demo looked really good. It has a anime type of feel, but not as much as Japanese import games. Since it is a dream world it is very bright and colorful with tons of great art. There were some points where the game would hiccup as some of the large areas loaded, but I’m not sure if that was the demo or the OXM disc. Either way I assume that will be worked out in the final game.

Throughout the demo there seemed like a lot of enemies to fight to get to the boss at the end, but not a lot of NPCs. I’m not sure if the game is like that the whole time or just the demo so you can get a feel for the fighting on the game. The one thing I found a little frustrating was that a lot of the map sections are pretty small. You’d walk on the screen fight one group of bad guys and then walk off the screen to the next section. There were some larger areas on the own, but outside the town the sections seemed really small and linear.

The fighting is simple, but has some skill and strategy. You have a party of three people who fight as a group. The combat is turned based where your players all get a turn and then all of the enemies get a turn. During the enemies’ turns you can still block, but you can’t move or attack. Each character’s turn is timed. The timer starts as soon as you start moving or attacking. Before you do anything the timer is paused so you can work out your strategy for the fight. Each character on you team has a normal attack and a power attack. The more normal attacks you get in before the power attack the more damage it does. Each character you control has two assigned power attacks. One they can use in light and one they use in the dark. There are additional power attacks in your inventory, but each character can just have the two assigned at one time. The battle areas play into this well by providing sunny and shady areas. Additionally, some enemies are stronger or weaker in sun or dark, and are therefor effected differently by the light verses dark power attack types. This makes for some great strategies as you use a couple of your team members to attack from the light and then have the other team member use is dark power attack to finish the enemy off.

Overall, I’m more impressed with Eternal Sonata that I expected to be. I’m not really into this style of RPG, but it was fun to play through the demo so I may end up having to check out the full version. It is a one player only RPG so I’ll probably rent it, but if you’re into RPGs this one has some very unique features that make it worth checking out.

I finally had tome today to finish the GDI campaign. I finished the NOD campaign last week. I realize I did them out of order, but that Defend Your Base level in GDI was really hard (which everyone told me it would be) so I took a break from it and went to NOD. All of the other levels were pretty strait forward and not to hard to do on Medium difficulty and still get all the bonus objectives. For that Defend the Base level I had to do it on Easy to beat it, but I did get all the bonus objective for it on Easy. The one thing I’m a little frustrated with is that when I finished the GDI campaign it did not give me the achievement for doing all of the bonus objectives even thought I did gt them all. I even want back through and checked. Oh well, I’m not playing through them again to try and get it. On to the Scrin campaign.

It is nice that they released the Black Pack for free, but it still is a tad annoying they messed up the first time and charged $10 for it. Now I have to wait 8 to 10 weeks to get my refund. It is also nice they dropped price of the Red Pack to be free now as well, but since I already had it that doesn’t benefit me. Still, I’m not really that upset about it. $10 for 5 maps was a bit steep since the Red Pack was $10 for 5 maps and 2 game modes, but I would still have bought them since Rainbow Six: Vegas is the game that I play most consistently.

The Black Pack contains 5 maps. Three are completely brand new, one is a remake from Rainbow Six 3, and one is a remake of Streets that was originally included with Rainbow Six: Vegas. I really like most of these maps, but my one issue with all of them, other than Streets, is that the spawn points for Team Sharpshooter are really close together. I also played Retrieval on all of the new maps and the spawns were better for the most part. It just seems odd that they would put the spawns so close on a couple of these maps when they are so large.

Streets Redux
I’ll start with a preface before I get into details on this map…I don’t really like the original one. The redo of Streets is pretty much the exact same map, but now it is night time and very dark (see the screenshot for an idea how just how dark it really is). Because of this I found that it plays pretty much the same way as the original streets, but you can’t see as well. Night vision does help some but after playing it a while I found I prefer to play it with the Night Vision off.

Presidio
Presidio was originally released with Rainbow Six 3. I never played it so it was a new map for me. The entire map consists of a two story building with a little bit of ground outside of it. It is probably the smallest map available for Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it was still a lot of fun. I’d recommend playing it with grenades off through because one team spawns on the second floor and the other team spawns on the ground floor. Because of this, if the team on the ground floor is not familiar with the map they walk right under the opposing team and get hit with grenades within the first seconds of the game. As long as everyone knows the map or grenades are off it is a lot of fun.

Wartown
This is a large map, but on Team Sharpshooter only about 2/3 of the map gets used because they spawn points are on the same half of the map. In the other game modes the whole map is used so it is a bit odd that in Team Sharpshooter it is not. The map is fairly dimly lit, but not as bad as the Streets Redux. The map has a large portion that is broken buildings with holes in the walls to sneak through and then the rest is outdoors. This great mix of areas has something for everyone. There are areas to snipe and then other areas to sit in ambush around a corner with a shotgun. In reminds a little of Marshling Yard in that respect.

Red Lotus
Like Wartow, the spawn points are oddly close together for a map of this size. It is not as large as Wartown, but still with three stories it is fairly large. There are numerous rooms and hallways to use for flanking. It just seems odd that they would have the teams spawn on the same floor of the building in Team Sharpshooter. In other game modes the spawns are further apart. In Retrieval specifically the package is on the ground floor while teams start on the top floor. It makes for a great fight trying to get to the package. Even with the odd spawn points this map is a lot of fun. There are very few places where you can get pinned down because of all of the hallways and rooms which leads to some great offensive attacks. Just watch where you run because it is easy to get lost in the maze of rooms and hallways that all look alike.

Neon Graveyard
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite maps. The spawn points are still close together with one team starting outside and another starting on the second floor. This makes for some cheap grenade kills from the second story windows at the very first of the match, but if teams are familiar with the map and move quickly it is not an issue. The map consists of a few warehouse building, each with two stories and a basement, and some outdoor areas. One of the things I love about this map is that there are windows everywhere. Most of them can be climbed through. This makes the map seem a but smaller than it actual size because you can get across it so many ways so quickly.

I would recommend everyone spend some time with these maps because they are a lot of fun. Just be ready to hide right away on Team Sharpshooter since the spawn points are all so close.