Games Of The Year

My personal GOTY's for 2008:

• Fallout 3: I was very skeptical at first, but after 1.5 playthroughs (and counting) I must say that this is the best Bethesda game yet. In my opinion, the Fallout world fits the "Bethesda school of game design" much better then the phantasy world of the Elder Scrolls. And gameplay-wise, Fallout is quite a bit more streamlined then Oblivion, keeping the player engaged without giving up too much freedom.
  
• Ninja Gaiden 2: Yeah, the game was rushed and there are some obvious flaws, but the combat in NG2 is simply spectacular. I must have played through the game eight or nine times, and I'm currently in the middle of my first Mentor run. I wish there would be hope for some sort of refined "NG2 Black", but with Itagaki's leave from Tecmo chances seem to be void :(
  
• Dead Space: This game came out of nowhere for me, and in fact, it's hard to describe, why the game is so great. Dead Space is basically "Doom3, done right", and that's all there needs to be said. It's an old-school corridor shooter with shiny graphics and rock-solid shooting mechanics. And I can't get over the fact that this is an EA game. EA!!!

Live Arcade GOTYs: Castle Crashers, RezHD, BC: Rearmed and Omega Five (hmm, more great games on XBLA then retail this year...).

Here's my XBLA wishlist for 2009: downloadable full games, and more price variety for downloadable games (in my opinion, a game like Mirror's Edge would be better if it wouldn't have to fill the shoes of a full-blown 60.- Euro game).

See ya'all in 2009 :)

Home (PSN)

I was just checking out Home, and to put it mildly, I was not impressed:

• I was trying for about 15 minutes to get past the start screen, getting all types of connection errors, then suddenly... one connection attempt worked, as a "casual user" I would have given up after the first four or five errors (which do have intuitive names like "C931").
  
• I tried for 10 minutes to create a character which doesn't look like shit and failed.
  
• Downloads and long loading times between sections totally kills the "experience".
• Everything basically looks and feels like it has been designed by yuppie marketeers stuck in the 90's.
  

I doubt I will ever return. Even if Home was "the cool shit", the long startup time kills every impulse to even launch that thing.

I don't know... I refuse to believe that Sony is driven by marketing peeps who thought that Second-Life is the next-big-thing during its short media-hype. I just don't "get" it. But who knows, I wasn't "getting" the Wii either, and look how that turned out (yeah, who am I kidding, it's more likely that Home will turn into a wasteland and Sony will let it die a quiet and slow death in a few months). Hmm... wasteland... time to return to Fallout3 :)

Month of Shooters

I'm currently playing through the Gears 2 single player campaign, and I don't know why exactly, but I'm not having very much fun. There are a few easy to identify points which I clearly don't like:

• Vehicle sequences: I don't know why FPS designers still torture us with vehicle sequences. The mini-tank in Gears 2 controls like shit (a bit like the Mass Effect Mako, but worse), and there's too much driving through boring tunnels with nothing else happening.
  
• Stupid story: So far I'm not seeing the better story that was promised. Instead I'm just seeing Dom bringing up his wife all the time (just found her yesterday). What is this emotional bullshit doing in my Gears... really. If you want to do an emotional story, do it right. The Gears main character are simply not built for stuff like this. It's like asking Schwarzenegger to play Shakespeare. Some things simply don't work, no matter how hard one tries.
  
• Dialog: alright, Marcus isn't exactly a second Cicero when it comes to conversational skills, but those stupid one-liners get old pretty fast.
• Too much brown: I know it's cliche, but Gears could just as well be played on an old black-and-white monitor and not a lot of information would be lost. I'm sick of monochromatic shooters.
  

Except from the vehicle sequences (which are inexcusable) I can live with the other points. I like my bad story and cheesy dialogs, if there's a good game at the core.

But somehow, the core gameplay isn't very satisfying to me in Gears2. I've been playing into the COD4 single-player-campaign again for comparison, and holy shit this an entirely different level, even the "quiet moments" in COD4 are packed with action.

Gears2 brings up unbelievable stuff like mile-long worms, giant fish and whole cities sinking into the ground, but it doesn't grab me. Maybe it is because the scale is too big, or maybe it is because the actual fire fights aren't very exciting. I think maybe the main reason why the game leaves me cold is that there are too long pauses between fire fights, and fights are too predictable. Coming into an area with a lot of conveniently placed barricades? Sure as hell a few seconds later a door will shut behind you and Locust will start attacking.

Good thing Dead Space came along, otherwise I might have lost my faith in shooters ;)

I'm very impressed with the new Xbox dashboard, especially with the fast and painless update process (took maybe 2 minutes through my 16Mbit DSL line at home). I was prepared for the worst (something like 2 weeks without Xbox Live like last Christmas), but apart from a few glitches on the Marketplace which were fixed the next day everything went perfect. I love how responsive, fast and colorful everything is now, and the hard drive installation is a god-send because it turns off the jet-engine noise from the DVD drive.

I even like the Avatar stuff more then I should. I've been trying to create a Ron Jeremy avatar, but that's where the avatar creator really comes to its limits. Here's my wishlist for the next update:

• the current fat setting needs to be a lot fatter, the current maximum isn't even enough to build a realistic Elvis in his later years
• more 70's porn star accessories and clothing please
• more real hair styles(!), there's plenty of 90's neo-hippie shit, but no hair which nearly does Ron Jeremy justice
• hair styles should include chest and armpit options

Since I didn't find the right hair and clothes, I went for a Ron Jeremy/Princess Leia hybrid:

CoreGamer

It feels like this is the most packed holiday season of all time. It is a shame that publishers don't spread their releases a bit more over the year. There was hardly a single good game coming out every quarter for the 360, and now suddenly since end of October it feels like there's a block buster released every day. Unfortunately, a lot of great games will be buried under the heavy weights like Gears or Fallout3, but well who am I to complain. It's a great time for hardcore gamers across all platforms, and that's all that counts :)

I think I'll have to work on the oncoming backlog until at least February next year, and careful scheduling is necessary to manage the avalanche of games indeed. Fortunately some of the games didn't turn out quite as good as pre-release-hype made me belief, so I can push a few games into next year. One of those is FarCry2. It's not a bad game by any means, I was prepared for the open-world-ness (which is the exact opposite of the original FarCry) and shitty to non-existent story (which is exactly in line with the original FarCry). But still I was disappointed. I must confess that I didn't give the game a real chance (only played for one evening, about 2 to 3 hours). Graphics are great, but game-play wise it is somewhere between Just Cause and Mercenaries2, and I already had my share of sandbox games this year I guess. However I will definitely come back to FC2 next year when the storm has settled a bit, but it looks like this will be the Assassin's Creed of 2008 (spectacular presentation, shallow gameplay).

Next up was Fable2. Great game (especially with the downloadable English audio track), but I just haven't the time to appreciate the game as a whole. The game requires a lot of time investment, but rewards the player for the time spent with a great sense of immersion. But at the moment I just don't have the attention span required for a game like this. One thing I found surprising was, that one of my old favorites, Overlord, in places looks better or at least very similar to Fable2 (not a surprise, since the Overlord designers definitely drew a lot of inspiration from the original Fable), but considering that Overlord is a 2007 title, Fable2 should have been a prettier game. I was about half way through Fable2, when along came my personal surprise hit of 2008 (so far at least):

Dead Space!

What a f*cking great game. It's a bit of Alien (the movie), a bit of System Shock, and a bit of Quake2, merged into a wonderfully old-school survival-horror-corridor-shooter. The really surprising bit is: this is an EA game! With the exception of Fight Night 3 and Skate, I wasn't interested in a single EA game for the entire life-time of the 360, and now all of the sudden, EA actually starts to produce great games in a row. This year alone I bought Battlefield BC, Mercenaries2 and Dead Space from EA, and will probably get Mirrors Edge soon. And considering that Bioware is now EA as well... oh dear. What has the world come to, EA making great games... The end must be near indeed hehe.

The PS2 is now at 77 Euro in Germany, just a tad more expensive then a typical 360 or PS3 game. That's the latest model: slim, with integrated power supply, one dualshock, composite cables, looking sexy as hell (no memory card though). Since my last PS2 went MIA, this was a very good reason to impulse-buy a new one. Better investment then my PS3 to be honest. Just playing a few minutes into MGS3 again was worth it.

Mercenaries 2

I'm currently having a lot more fun with Mercs 2 then I ever had with GTA4. Proves that blowing up shit is a lot more important then story in sandbox games. At least to me he. The game is a bit rough around the edges and has a number of minor bugs and glitches, but all the important stuff (controls, gun feedback, immersion, frequency of oh-shit moments) is much better then in GTA (IMHO of course). Battling a group of 3 or 4 heavy tanks in an army-occupied city only with RPGs and C4 is an absolutely exhausting experience, but so much fun with buildings crumbling left and right, tank shells and RPGs whizzing by and the distinctive sound of distant sniper fire over the general combat noise. Of course the player could opt to level the entire city with a few air strikes, but that would cost a lot of civilian lifes and wouldn't be well received by the Guerilla. And besides, air strikes are freaking expensive ;)

MGS4

*** WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD ***

Alright, first play-through done. Debriefing showed 20 hours playtime. Overall an amazing experience, even if it felt like only one third of it was actual game-play and the rest was watching cutscenes. The game starts really slow and in the first and second chapter I actually had to motivate myself to continue playing. Then with the ending cutscene of chapter 3, the story suddenly becomes interesting and the rest of the game is an amazing ride, only problem is, there are only 2 chapters left at this point.

The presentation of the game during cut-scenes is jaw-dropping. The quality of the characters models, facial animation, motion capture performances is almost unbelievable. The direction and story-telling of the cut-scenes provides better entertainment then most good action movies. Unfortunately, for every one scene of pure awesomeness (basically every scene with Old Snake AND Liquid Ocelot) there two scenes which are outright cheesy and a real pain to endure.

The story wraps up all the events of the previous MGS games and can be a bit hard to follow since from time to time, the story-telling switches into some sort of white-board-mode and floods the player with details (which provide interesting background information but would IMHO be better if told through codec conversations). The other problem is, that the back-story of EVERY F*CKING PERSON which EVER showed up in ANY MGS game is brought to its end, turning parts of the story into a gigantic soap-opera. I think 4 or 5 hours of the cutscenes could have been removed and I wouldn't have missed a thing.

In its core, MGS4 tells the story of 2 old men, Solid Snake (the hero from MGS1, and clone of Naked Snake from MGS3), who's suffering from accelerated aging programmed into his genes (as far as I understood that part of the story), and Liquid Ocelot, a chimera of Liquid Snake and Revolver Ocelot. Snake is portraied as a cynical, pragmatic asshole, which really makes him a likeable protagonist. But the real hero of the game (to me) is Ocelot, he's an old man, just as Snake, but has aged naturally, and he (or better his Liquid Snake part) has all the energy and vision left which Snake seems to have lost long ago. In the end it's all about handing the world over to the next generation (shame that thist next generation mainly consists of whiners and wimps).

On to game-play: This is the disappointing part IMHO, which is a real shame since MGS4 is still considered a game, not a movie. The core sneaking elements are the same as in MGS2 and MGS3, which is of course a good thing. You can still hide in lockers or under cardboard boxes, shake knocked-out or dead enemies to loot them, and the camouflage element from MGS3 is also there, but now in its science-fiction version as the octocamo suit (basically, adaptive optical and infrared camouflage).

The survival elements from MGS3 have been removed, and replaced with shooter gameplay, and that's where I still have my biggest problem with because a sneaking element has been removed in favour of an action-oriented gameplay element. I'm a big shooter fan so that wouldn't be much of a problem for me IF PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED. Problem is, the shooting stuff is only very basic and for a shooter, the controls feel extremely awkward. If gun handling would only be half as good as in good tactical shooters like Rainbow Six Vegas I would be sold, but unfortunetaly it's far from it. Especially cover and firing from cover have been evolved dramatically since the times of MGS2 and MGS3, but in MGS4, firing from cover is still as awkward as in these old games. Also, the big number of guns offered to the player is kinda useless. There's no real reason to choose a submachine gun over an assault rifle. A sniper rifle is just as easy to use close-range as any other gun. An assault rifle with an optical sight is just as good as a sniper rifle over long range, because the levels are relatively small anyway.

I wish the developers would have put all the work which has gone into the shooters aspects into new sneaking elements instead. Compared to the last Splinter Cell, the game-play of MGS has been falling behind. Look at all the Bond-gadgets Sam Fisher has at its disposal, or all the ways Fisher can approach a door to investigate what's behind it before sneaking into a room... (man, speaking of Splinter Cell - I think I need to re-play Double Agent soon...).

But even if I don't particularly like the direction MGS has taken, it's still truly exceptional entertainment and one of the best games of the current console generation. And I think it was the right decision to put Snake to rest and with him the MGS series, since at least I am ready for some fresh wind in the sneaking genre (although it seems there will be lots of trial-and-error ahead as the S.C.Conviction and Assassins Creed "debacles" show).

PSN hmm...

I have removed the PSN "Portable ID" on the left side. Seems like it's just a static display for my user name and avatar picture doh... And I can't believe that Sony doesn't let me download (buy even!) additional gamer pictures from PSN (or I simply didn't find them? even after the re-design it isn't exactly easy to find stuff on the PSN shop, even though there's not THAT much stuff there). I'd really love to have an MGS4 gamer pic. It's all those little "un-important" things which make me appreciate the online-integration of the 360 (on the other hand, if I had gone straight from the PS2 to the PS3 I probably wouldn't even care, but the 360 really has spoiled me). Sony really needs to get all this simple and obvious stuff fixed first instead of wasting their time and resources on Home IMHO.

Kept ya waiting huh?

Sooo I finally bought a PS3 yesterday. MGS4 did it (I basically bought a PS2 just for MGS3, so this was inevitable). My local GameStop was sold out completely (the guy there said he won't get any new PS3's until the new 80GB model comes out end of August). MediaMarkt still had one MGS4 bundle left so I took this one.

First impressions:

• OMG its huge! Ok, power supply is integrated, but the 360 looks tiny compared to this thing.
• I was actually planning to wait for the white PS3 (black entertainment devices are plain ugly IMHO) but it looks like it will never arrive in Europe.
• System and WLAN setup was fast and flawless.
• Surprisingly, picture quality is worse on my TV then my 360. I have an 2 year old 32" LCD Sony Bravia, and have the PS3 connected through HDMI. The 360 is connected through VGA. There's a lot of edge aliasing going on in the PS3 picture. I suspect that's because the VGA connection runs at the native display resolution (1280x768 or so), while the 720p HDMI connection has a non-native display resolution so that the TV's scaler kicks in. Basically looks the same like when I had connected the 360 through component. Still I would think that connecting one Sony device to another Sony device through a digital connection would generate a better picture.
• During a game, the TV signal is lost from time to time (maybe once per hour for about 2 seconds). WTF? I've read about this in forums but thought this would only happen with some obscure TV's. Again this is a Sony TV and a Sony console. This definitely didn't happen when I had my 360 running through HDMI.
  
• The XMB looks slick and feels much more responsive compared to the 360's dashboard.
• Way too many system settings... half of which don't interest me at all (mouse sensitivity???)
  
• The system didn't notify me that a software update is available. How is a typical user supposed to notice that he isn't uptodate?
  
• Not impressed by the web browser, feels terribly slow and unusuable without a mouse...
  
• Downloading the new firmware took FOREVER (20 minutes or so?), and displayed another progress bar for installation which took another couple of minutes. I don't remember waiting for more then 3 minutes for a system update on the 360...
• MGS4 starts: ugh more installation... this isn't funny.
  
• Start screen with all those little flowers looks REALLY messy on my TV...
  
• Ok, WTF is this David Hayter interview shit before starting a new game?
  
• Hmm, ingame graphics isn't quite as impressive as I remember from the trailers...
• Snake's character model looks really great though.
• Adaptive camo is nice.
  
• 2 hours later...
• MGS4 doesn't know whether it want's to be a shooter or a sneaker... definitely too much emphasis on guns and shooting, which would be fine with me if shooter controls wouldn't be horribly broken, getting out of that abandoned hotel with the hot chick's team was an extremely frustrating experience
• story didn't exactly grab me so far... cutscenes are cringe-worthy when they try to be funny

Guess MGS4 needs to grow on me. When I launched MGS3 I was immediately fascinated and couldn't stop playing. This didn't happen so far with MGS4. Will post more impressions when I finished the game.

Ninja Gaiden DS

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS is finally available in Germany (Dragon Sword - DS - gettit?). How the game is controlled using the stylus is astonishing, breathtaking, eye-opening, dare I say: revolutionary.

They nailed the controls, plain and simple. Just as the 2 Xbox games, the DS version is all about rythm, but instead of hitting button combos, playing NG DS is more like painting a picture with a brush. A few well-placed "brush strokes" here and there, a few taps over there, and another group of Spider Clan ninjas are history. Something complex like an Izuna Drop is simply done by a down-up-up-stroke over the enemy (the first down-stroke is a more-or-less normal sword attack, the first up-stroke launches the enemy into the air, and the second upstroke has Ryu jump into the air, grab the enemy and whirl it into the ground.

The graphics are beautiful for what the DS can do. The backgrounds are 2D bitmaps, but give a good 3D-ish illusion since the 3D characters can move into the screen with the correct perspective projection.

Best DS game in a while, shame that it got so little attention from the DS crowd.

10 Years After

Andreas, an old friend of mine, noticed that Urban Assault went Gold (or RTM - Release To Manufacture as it was called at Microsoft at that time) on July 13th 1998, almost exactly 10 years before Drakensang went Gold (which was at the 10th of July 2008). He even sent me the original anouncement mail I sent back to Germany. Andreas and I had been "stationed" over at Seattle at that time to apply the final fixes and polish to UA, since flying the programmers over to NA was probably more convenient in 1998 then FTP'ing complete daily game builds over ISDN.

Apart from the usual post-project cleanup stuff I can now start to work on new and exciting technology stuff again, improving our tool-chain, continue working on Nebula3, and dust off those Wii and 360 devkits which probably feel a bit neglected due to our focus on finishing Drakensang.

We're also a licensed PS3-developer now, a N3 port hasn't started yet but from looking through the SDK docs the programming environment doesn't seem to be too bad. The underlying philosophy or "style" is a bit different then the 360 SDK (just like for instance Win32 has a different style then Unix). But all in all the PS3 SDK looks complete and actually quite usable. It's also quite obvious from looking through the release note history that the PS3 SDK has improved a lot since the PS3 launch. I think it will be relatively easy to get "something" up and running on the PS3, squeezing the last bit of performance out of the bitch however will be something completely different I'm sure ;)

The Dead Rising port to the Wii might be the most interesting news I took out of E3. It made me play the 360 version again, and this is one of those game which get better and better over time.

I totally underestimated the importance of the books one can find in the different book stores. In the past I ignored them because they take up valuable inventory slots. But what they actually do is they make every single slot much more valuable. For instance there is a book which triples the time edged weapons can be used until they break, and another which triples the usage time of items from home-improvement-stores. And the effects actually stack. For instance the mini-chainsaws which are unlocked after killing the clown-psycho (pretty much the most powerful melee weapons in the game) fall under both categories!

The Wii port of Dead Rising makes immediate sense with all the special attacks or shaking off zombies for instance. These should translate very well to waggle. I'm concerned though about the number of zombies. It's just not Dead Rising without hundreds of zombies on screen. The first batch of Wii screens have a suspicious lack of zombies in them...

Status Update

We're currently in release candidate mode for Drakensang which basically means we're more or less on standby until QA hits the alarm button because they found a show-stopper bug. The good thing is that I can spend most of my time at work actually playing the game from start to finish. Obviously I'm biased, but a truly wonderful game it has become. Of the games I've been involved with in my life, Drakensang is probably the one I am most proud of.

After Drakensang has gone gold I think I can spend more time with Nebula3 and the blog again.

In stark contrast to Drakensang I've spent the last couple of evenings at home mainly with Ninja Gaiden 2. I did a normal play-through on Path Of The Warrior, one Dragon Sword weapon run on Acolyte (which really was too easy), and am currently half-way through a Lunar Staff weapon run on Warrior with many many play-throughs to follow.

Coming straight from Ninja Gaiden Black I had some trouble to adapt to the new style of the game. In the original, fights are against 3 or 4 enemies at once. In NG2 a typical fight is against 10..15 enemies at once. The combo and hit-recovery timing is a bit different in NG2, which made the control feel sluggish to me at the beginning. Also, the polishing grade couldn't be more different. NGB was probably one of the most polished games in history, while the lack of polish in NG2 is quite apparent unfortunately (yes, the camera does indeed have some issues, I had 2 freezes so far, and the game goes into some sort of slow-motion-mode in heavy fighting situations).

But despite these flaws NG2 still trumps any other fighting game I have played so far because the rest is so f*cking great. The core game mechanics are so extremely carefully tuned (and fine-tuned compared to NGB) that the laughable story and less-then-stellar boss-fights are simply not that important. NG2 shines where the player spends the most time with: fighting hordes of ninjas and monsters. The actual combat is so intense and incredibly satisfying that I want to start a new game immediately after finishing the last. There is one special moment in the game involving a staircase and maybe 100 or 200 ninjas which is simply jaw-dropping (and is probably my most favourite gaming moment of all time).

If there ever was a flawed diamond among games, it is Ninja Gaiden 2. Even with its flaws it is a really exceptional game, but if Itagaki and his team of ronin find a way to improve the game as they did with Ninja Gaiden Black the result would be ultimate perfection.

NG2 (YES!!!)

I finally got the game! I ordered the UK version because NG2 isn't available in Germany anyway. I just rushed quickly through the first 2 chapters yesterday evening and holy shit this game is epic. DMC4 was fun, but NG2 is simply on a whole different level in every aspect (yeah, I'm a biased Ninja Gaiden fanboi but anyway...).

One thing I noticed immediately is that the rythm of the game is a bit different then Ninja Gaiden Black. It was a bit harder for me to pull off an Inazuna Drop in the beginning. Ryu's control feels a bit heavier (or one could say, a little bit more realistic). And Jesus are the enemies aggressive right from the beginning. Hold a block for more then 2 seconds and the bastards will rip you apart :o) But due to the new partial life regeneration and plenty of save points, the game feels a bit easier in Way Of The Warrior compared to NGB on Normal difficulty (so far at least).

The gore is a bit too over the top for my taste. Nothing against some blood-spilling, but I felt a bit uneasy after I had reduced a group of 10..20 spider-clan ninjas into a bloody heap of arms, legs and torsos and some glibberish things which I don't want to inspect too closely. At least for the first time. Afterwards it becomes kind of a routine. This is basically the game version of Kill Bill (wow, how cool would that be: playing as a yellow-clad Uma Thurman through NG2...).

I love this game.

What Camera Issues?

OMG I can't believe reviewers still bitch about the camera in Ninja Gaiden 2. If it's the same as in NG1 (which they complained about as well when it came out) then it's just perfect. Just tap the right trigger and the camera snaps back behind Ryu. That's the secret to successful camera control in Ninja Gaiden ;)

GTAIV

Dammit I wish I had more time to play GTA... In the first hour or two, the game actually wasn't the jaw-dropper I had expected (other games on the 360 definitely look better, and the walking controls are just as shitty as in the old GTA's). But boy has the game grown on me after a little while... there's not one session where I don't discover some hilarious shit to do in the game... there's so much attention to detail in the tiniest, most forgotten and dark corners of Liberty City... And some of the missions I have encountered so far are simply epic (the gunwork has improved dramatically over GTA3:SA, although the new cover system could have used a bit more work). Some of the elements I liked in San Andreas have been removed unfortunately (like the character development stuff), but all the new features and improvements definitely compensate for the loss. R* have delivered again.

COD4 DLC woes...

Here's an interesting side-effect of the COD4 map pack: ever since I downloaded the map pack my K/D-ratio started to suffer terribly. Once I deleted the map pack from my HD the ratio immediately improved. Looks like the map-pack was mainly purchased by hardcore players, so that there are not enough noob players like me available for fair match-making. So the DLC actually made the game less enjoyable for me. Well, I didn't like Chinatown anyway ;)

In Oblivion

I can't believe I started playing Oblivion again. I finally want to finish the main quest, last time I played through nearly all guild quests and then didn't have enough motivation left to go on with the main story... I was immediately sucked into the game again. Dungeon crawling is where Oblivion really shines, even more then Morrowind (which I still consider the better overall game). I have created a new dark-elf nightblade which I'm playing as a stealthy magic-wielding, arrow-shooting bad-ass assassin :o)

I also started to play around a bit with SVG, since I was looking for a cheap way to render diagrams for the Nebula3 debugging and profiling subsystem. I'll go into more details in a later post, but let me just say that SVG kicks ass and is exactly what I was looking for. Fun-fact: the only browser that can't render SVG out of the box is IE7 (Firefox, Opera and Safari are fine).

Gaming Weekend

I'm not feeling very productive this weekend, might have to do with the shitty weather in Berlin...just the right weather to stay at home and play some games. I bought Bully for my 360 last week. I didn't play the original on the PS2, and although I read that the game "might freeze on some older consoles" I gave it a try. And guess what, it froze on me about 2 hours into the game, loosing at least 1 hour since the last save. I'm waiting now for the patch RockStar promised should come last week, since the game really looks like fun. Lousy certification job though, this bug shouldn't have slipped through.

Played through the first chapter of Rainbow Six Vegas again... and I must say the game hasn't aged very well. The graphics is a bit too dirty, it's very hard to make out enemies against the background at least in the Mexican setting in the beginning. There's still no better cover system in any other game though, but I had a hard time to adapt to the controls again (blew myself up several times because 'B' is 'throw grenade' instead of crouch). I think it was the right decision to make the graphics in Vegas 2 that much cleaner, even though I was turned off at first by the "cartoony" look of the screenshots.

After that mildly frustrating experience I played some more Ninja Gaiden Black on Hard difficulty. I finally want to kick Alma's ass. This game just gets better the more you play it. The structure of the game is very different on Hard difficulty. There are new enemies, items are distributed differently in the world, you get weapons and their upgrades only much later, and the boss fights are much more challenging because the bosses are now accompanied by minions. It is amazing how well balanced the rock-scissor-paper system in Ninja Gaiden is. A different weapon can make a subtle but very important difference for a specific enemy type. For instance, at first glance, the new cat-demons in hard difficulty just look like a more annoying version of the Black Spider Ninjas, but while the ninjas can be controlled very nicely with the Lunar staff, I feel much more comfortable fighting the cat-demons with the nunchuk (need to do some experimentation with the Vigorian Flail though). Hard difficulty also forces you to learn blocking, jumping and rolling much more efficiently to avoid attacks. I recently downloaded Ninja Gaiden as an Xbox Original title even though I also own the disc version. Not having to swap discs for a quick round of Ninja Gaiden fun is well worth the 1200 points IMHO :)

I also played an hour of Crackdown. This game is still so much fun... I was playing around with some of the more advanced stuff I didn't use during my earlier play-throughs. For instance, specifically aiming for body- or car-parts (head-shots with the sniper-rifle over insane distances, or causing havoc on the highways by blowing up the gas-tank or tires of passing vehicles). I read somewhere that GTA4 will use a similar targeting system, if true this would be great, I really started to appreciate the added targeting functionality in Crackdown, especially when playing a bit more tactical instead of blowing up the whole perimeter Terminator-style.

I finally ended the day with a few rounds of COD4 multi-player. I'm now on my second prestige-round. I guess I have finally finished my transition from a keyboard/mouse- to a gamepad-FPS player. I can pull off shit with the gamepad now which I deemed impossible one year ago :)

COD4 FTW!

Hmm, just noticed that COD4 is now my personal most-played game, replacing Oblivion which ruled at the top spot since I bought my 360 in 2006. The funny thing is that I remember Oblivion as that huge time-eater which I played the whole summer of 2006, while COD4 feels like I just barely started to really play it. Scary.

I also finally finished the final boss in Prince Of Persia (the XBLA remake)! The combat system is surprisingly complex, attacking and blocking requires very good timing, a bit like the sword fights in Assassins Creed. Oh and I started with Lost Odyssey. Don't know what to think of it yet. It didn't exactly grab me, I'm 3 hours in or so, and there's just nothing happening in this game! Everything is so stretched out, and I keep thinking "man I could play some COD4 instead of struggling through this borefest"... and that's what I usually do about 10 minutes later...

I'm also currently on my third DMC4 play-through in Son-Of-Sparda mode. Great great game. Nice distraction until the king returns in June ;)

COD4 Multiplayer

I have developed a serious addiction to COD4 multiplayer. Usually I'm not that big into competitive multiplayer, but I'm having my phases. Back in the old days, it was Counter Strike, a few years later I was excessively playing Battlefield2, and now for the last couple of weeks I'm totally hooked to COD4. On a console. With a game-pad. I tried the competitive multiplayer portions of Gears Of War, Rainbow Six Vegas and Halo3 before, and none of them really ticked with me in multiplayer like the old-school PC shooters. But COD4... one match did it. The reason - I think - is because COD4 is the love-child of CS and BF2, my two favorits of the past. Sessions feel very fast-paced, with an initial rush to the control-points, just like in CS. The class system and up-leveling is more like BF2, but it's more back-to-the-roots, especially the class system, which doesn't feature advanced classes like medics or engineers, instead, all classes are strictly offensive. Every single feature is extremely polished, and everything which would hinder the flow and speed of the game has been removed. And my personal killer-feature: you don't have to communicate a lot. Nothing breaks the immersion more then some jerks talking about some completely unrelated shit like their last GameStop-visit during a Team Deathmatch in some destroyed middle-eastern city. Fortunately the game plays just as well without headset. Big win.

Assassin's Creed Wrap Up

I finally reserved a few hours to finish up on Assassin's Creed. Yawn... all this cheap pseudo-science crap was really getting on my nerves towards the end. It seems that every stupid conspiracy theory ever invented has been stuffed into AC's "story".

The game itself was actually quite a chore during the last few hours, because nothing really unexpected or new happened (yes, the game tries to have some sort of a surprise ending, but one can see this coming from a mile away). For the little variety the game-play offers, the game just feels too long IMHO. Everything is just too stretched-out. Overall it's a pretty good game, but now that it's over I feel somewhat ... unsatisfied. The fact that the game doesn't seem to have a real ending doesn't help either. Yes, I discovered the credits ... but what the hell now?