I got to play the Crackdown 2 demo at E3 2010 for a little bit and now the same demo is available on Xbox Live Marketplace. If you played the first Crackdown then you have a pretty good idea of what Crackdown 2 is like.  It is a lot of the same gameplay but with new weapons, enemies and 4 player co-op. Plus you can unlock 10 of the achievements on the Crackdown 2 demo that will then unlock right away in the full retail game.  The demo is limited to 30 minutes and a blast. I can’t wait for this to release now.

I did not have a lot of hope for Transformers: War for Cybertron when I heard about it since it is a licensed title, but then we started seeing trailers that looked pretty good.  So, when the multiplayer demo hit Xbox Live last week I was curious to try it. After spending some time with the demo I’m pleasantly surprised.  The multiplayer is fairly deep and fun, and it has me excited for trying the 3 player co-op campaign.

My Longer Impressions of the Transformers: War for Cybertron Multiplayer Demo

I talked about Blur before when the beta was running and now that the full game is out I’m loving it.  The single player is a lot of fun with a mix of objective based races and normal races.  The destruction races in the single player might be my favorite because all you do is follow other cars and try to shoot them off the road.  Each section of the single player is broken down by race types and finishing with a one-on-one race. I really like this format because each section gets me to focus on a few aspects of the game. This leads to me playing better in the multiplayer races.

The multiplayer is still a riot. The World Tour section is quickly becoming my favorite as it is a mix of all the other game modes randomly sorted.  This keeps things interesting and fresh.  The number of cars and tracks is quite substantial. There are literally dozens of cars and the tracks feature a much wider range of layouts than the beta showcased.  You can have a lot of fun just racing and using power-ups whenever but if you put a little strategy into it you can really dominate a race.  I’ve put together a few tips to get beginners started.

Overall, I love Blur.  It is not a perfect racing game but it is a great car combat game that features races.

Has it been a few weeks already since I did the first Indie Garage post over on Evil Avatar?  Time seems to be passing quickly this spring.  Anyway, my second Indie Garage post went up today. This time taking a look at some of the best tower defense titles on Xbox Live Indie Games.

Evil Avatar’s Indie Garage – Tower Defense

A demo for N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights hit Xbox Live (download link) today. It has been a while since I played the original Ninety-Nine Nights, but I remember enjoying it.  Ninety-Nine Nights II continues the focus on the first with lots of enemies for you to slice to pieces, but it adds some special attacks that I don’t recall being there in Ninety-Nine Nights.  Even through these specials make the controls a little more complicated they overall are still pretty simple. X is your main quick attack and Y is your heavy attack.  Get use to pressing both of these a lot.  Considering the first mission in the demo I had over 600 kills there are plenty of enemies to clear.  As you do you fill up your special attacks which can take out large groups of enemies all at once.  Most of the enemies you face are mindless grunts but there are a few large enemies who will require specific attention.  If you played Ninety-Nine Nights then Ninety-Nine Nights II should seem pretty familiar with some new options.  The camera still does not zoom out as far as I’d like but you can control the angle of the camera somewhat which helps.  Visually it looks good and the game play is fun for what it is.  Like Ninety-Nine Nights before it I plan to play though Ninety-Nine Nights II when I’m in the mood for a mostly mindless hack and slash type of game.

A demo for Green Day: Rock Band hit Xbox Live today (download link). Green Day is not my favorite band or anything but I do enjoy most of their stuff and I’m a Rock Band fan in general so I figured I’d check it out.  The demo only has two songs in it, Welcome to Paradise and Boulevard of Broken Dreams.  Both were pretty fun to play on guitar on Expert.  Not overly hard but not so easy I was bored either.  Visually, the graphical style is very similar to Rock Band 2 while you are playing the songs and the menus have a Green Day theme that fits well.

My only frustration with the demo is that it literally took me longer to get it calibrated than it did to play the two songs. I tried the automated calibration and that failed to work on the video portion. So I switched to manually calibration but the sound portion did not play in sound for me to use to calibrate to.  I eventually just threw on Rock Band 2 and checked my calibration settings and then went back to the demo and set it the same.  Which still was off a little since the manually setting the values goes in increments of 5. I then had to go hunt down the over-scan option so that the video filled the screen instead of having a black bar around it on all sides.  It is a little annoying.  It would be really nice if when future Rock Band games, Green Day: Rock Band included, first are loaded up they look for previously played Rock Band titles and give you the option to copy over the setup settings automatically.

Other than the calibration annoyance the demo was fun. I’m not going to be getting Green Day: Rock Band the day it releases or anything but I’ll pick it up at some point. Seems like it will be pretty fun.

Lost Planet 2 might be the game that I have the most mixed feeling about this year. It has a lot of little things that really bug me.  Like that as you earn points in the game to unlock new weapons and abilities you can’t actually pick which ones you want to unlock. Instead you “spend” your points on a slot machine that randomly gives you whatever it wants.  There are literally dozens of weapons in the game that I’ve not even tried yet because I have not unlocked them.  It is not that I could not finish the game without them, because I did, but just that I don’t have the option.  Even if you had to use the points to progress up a weapon tree would be better if it gave me some control over which weapon types I unlocked. Additionally the series of loading and confirmation screens to get a game started is ridiculous. I don’t need confirm my save game location twice and then confirm I want to load the co-op invite I just accepted and then finally confirm that I am joining the room.  Just automatically do all that stuff.  The other thing I find lame is that with the full campaign being 4 player co-op you still can’t drop in/out whenever you want.  You can only do it between missions.

Once you get through the menu and actually get your game going things take a drastic change for the better.  The campaign is an absolute blast to play co-op.  Going it solo is doable but much more difficult as your teammate AI guys tend to just follow you around and shoot at whatever you are.  When you have 4 players working the mission objectives together you can split up and take them on from multiple sides.  On some missions you don’t even get a choice in this because the story line splits putting each pair of teammates in different areas from the start.  The missions tend to follow a predictable arc of kill a few minor enemies and then face a massive boss. I thoroughly enjoyed this pacing because I always knew that there was something bigger and badder to fight coming up soon.

I also enjoyed how the campaign is broken into 6 episodes like a tv mini-series.  Each episode focuses on the story from a different group’s perspective with the final episode tying all of the stories together.  Some of the story sections were a lot more humorous than others with some funny character interactions while others were somber and tragic.  The story itself takes place 12 years after the events in Lost Planet.  The core elements of fighting Akri, using VS suits and trying to get T-Gen remain but the world itself has changed a lot.  There are still some sections of ice and snow but there are also jungle, desert and even space based missions.  The variety of mission locations was a nice change from the original.

Don’t expect to get a lot of achievements as they are few and far between.  It is a completion’s nightmare as it will take about 14 times playing through the game to unlock a few of the achievements.  But, if you’re looking for a fun game to play with some Lost Planet 2 well worth trying. The boss fights are challenging but fun, and the story’s plot is a nice change from most shooters that spend the whole game with one main character.

Well, once again I’ve found a way to distract myself from actually blogging here but I’ve started writing a bi-weekly post for Evil Avatar titled “Indie Garage”.  It will be a look at some of the best Xbox Live Indie Games.  The first one just went up with a quick look at three platformers.

Link: Evil Avatar’s Indie Garage – Platformers

Let me know what you think and if there is a specific Indie Game I should be sure to mention.

I’ve been playing a lot more Xbox Live Indie Games this last week while I am waiting for Lost Planet 2 to release.  I’ve come across some really fun ones (in addition to Retrofit:Overload) so I out together a brief rundown of three of my favorites, and AC was kind enough to publish it:

Top New Retro Xbox Live Indie Games

Retrofit:Overload hit Xbox Live Indie Games last week and I love it.  I posted a review over on XBLA Ratings (link). I would highly recommend checking it out because it is really well made and it just will set you back $1.