I’ve always enjoyed the campaigns in the Halo series as well as the Halo novels, but the multiplayer is not really my style. Because of this Halo ODST was a rental for me. The story was fun to play through and Firefight was a blast, but I’m just not into the jumpy multiplayer of Halo 3/ODST. My plan for Halo: Reach was to rent it and play through the campaign like with ODST. Bungie has not said if there will be Firefight in Reach and they have not said much about the multiplayer components. However, they have released a couple videos that have me really excited to play the campaign. The return of Elites in the campaign is going to be great. You can check out the trailer and a vidoc they released below. They are reworking the engine and graphics from the ground up which should make for a really beautiful game.
Is it too early to start nominating games for the 2010 Game of the Year? If not then Mass Effect 2 would be one of the top nominations. It is one of the best games I’ve played in a very long time and I’m already looking forward to completing the trilogy with Mass Effect 3. For now I’ll have to be content with playing through it again on Insane.
I spent some time catching up on recent Xbox Live Indie Game releases this weekend and found two really fun games, Rotor’scope and Your Doodles Are Bugged. Rotor’scope is a puzzle game where you have to match 3 of the same color blocks, but instead of the usual block moving mechanic you rotate or flip the entire game board and gravity does the moving.Your Doodles Are Bugged is also a puzzle game, but on the opposite end of the gaming spectrum. In it you have to drawl a path for the bugs on the level to escape with limited ink to get them to the goal. I’d recommend checking out both of them because they are both well made and a lot of fun to play. I’ve got a longer review of each available:
Aliens vs Predator was not really a game I had any interest in but a few of my friends were raving about the demo on the Xbox 360 so I decided to give it a try. I found it pretty frustrating for a couple matches but once I got a hang for all of the differences between the classes it is really pretty fun.
It has been a while since an Xbox Live Arcade game released that I was really interested in. There have been a ton of generic shooters and puzzle games, but with the release of Chime there is finally something worth buying and sinking some time into. Plus, since the proceeds from the game go to charity playing a video game actually is helping someone else.
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'm an tech fan and avid gamer. Looking to have some fun and try new gadgets.