May gaming summary.

There is a small chance of me posting more before the end of the month, but let's be realistic, this is the only post for May.

Gamefly sent me Call of Duty 4 for the 360. I did well enough on the tutorial mission for the game to recommend "Hardened" difficulty, but I went with "Normal" instead. Very glad I did that, since there were loads of sections on Normal that took me long enough to get past that I was almost ready to give up. I hear that was a common complaint about the game. I did start it back up on Veteran difficulty (looking for more Achievements), but that drove home the game's weaknesses: the AI scripting that is so typical of the Call of Duty series was driven home, the varying difficulty just meant that the AI shot faster, and took more bullets to die, while I took less. The game took some serious risks with the story, and I thought they paid out extremely well. So many of the moments in the game will go down as high points in recent year's gaming experiences, or at least some of the disturbing moments. The first mission involves killing sailors in their sleep for god's sake! The game was excellent, and anyone willing to be faced with a seriously adult game (no sex, but damn was it 'real' violence) should rent it without question. I don't think it is worth buying, but it is absolutely must-play.

Props for Gamefly on turnaround. I put CoD4 in the mail on a Tuesday, and got the replacement disc (Raving Rabbids 2) on Saturday. Not much time invested in RR2, but from what I've seen so far it feels like a bit of a turn-key game, lacking some of the joy of the first one, but all of the games are better tuned, and the "story" mode is put together in a much, much better way.

This month saw the release of Mario Kart Wii. I got it day one, of course. Reviews have been brutal towards it, and I'm getting pretty fed up with the bullshit bias. Two days after MKWii came out, was GTA4: probably the most hyped release in a year, and that includes Halo 3. There are arguments against Mario Kart, some design decision that I disagree with, and the usual Wii complaints, but it is a solid entry in the Mario Kart family. The frustrating part for me is the types of complaints people are spewing, especially considering the GTA4 reviews. Fawning over GTA's evolution, building upon previous versions, fixing some of the flaws of the older games, but maintaining the same base game play. Then Mario Kart deals with reviews that savage the game's adherence to the old formulas, compaints of only adding online play and motorcycles to the game. I don't understand people sometimes. The game is fun, they update the number of racers from 8 to 12, they put in motorcycles, they added air tricks, they removed snaking, they put in the best on-line on a Nintendo system so far. Nothing major, right? Oh, the game is very similar to the DS version of Mario Kart, like the biggest change is bikes and no snaking. Bikes are a significant change in game play. I'm not much of a fan so far, but they are cool. There is no more double dash action, which sucks. In a perfect world, I'd like to see bikes, karts and two-rider karts. The on-line works to a nearly XBox 360 level, without the voice. They even put in an ability to get the game-specific friend codes just through the Wii friend code interface. Big step in the right direction, Nintendo, keep it up.

In Burnout Paradise, I completed my final license, the Elite! Very satisfying, but it started to get tough at the end. I needed half a million points on three different Stunt Runs, which in theory is easy, since I nailed a 2.5 million stunt run. No way! it took me ages to pull those off. Good times, though, now I just hope to complete two sections of online challenges to get the last car unlocked, and hope to do it before they release the new set of challenges. Online for this game is going to explode with the new patch: Stunt Run, Marked Man, Road Rage and timed challenges.... I'm so psyched! I love that game.

I grabbed a bunch of Rock Band songs over the course of the month, missed the one McDonald's promotional song I wanted, but barely played Rock Band at all. When I finally booted it up, the number of songs I had that I had never played was crazy! I still have tons of fun playing that game, but it can be hard to pull out all of the fake plastic toys to rock out when it has such a high wake-the-family score.

I hope to either add more to this post, or toss in another one to close out the month, maybe with some Bioshock chit-chat. Anyway, see ya.

Stack Pop

Psychonauts is complete. The "last boss" was just a precursor. I had some kind of odd bug which prevented me from being able to beat him in my first try. I actually had to die 5 times to get the continue, so I could load the game without this one board protecting the glass brain case on the giant tank. I thought this boss was too easy, and the game more than made up for it. The final level of the game is just sick sick sick. Time limits, impossible jumps, another pseudo-boss-fight, and a new type of play for the final boss with some new magical powerup in order to beat him. At least the ending cinematic was pretty good, even though the weak sales of this great game preclude it getting the sequel so hinted at. All in all, a really solid experience, and until the last level, I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested.

My 360 should be back by next Monday, but by then Lars will probably have bought Burnout Paradise, and I intend to get some progress on Overlord this weekend. I have a hard choice to make when I get the 360 back: Bioshock or Overlord. I really want to get Bioshock done so I don't have to worry about spoilers, but Overlord is ready to be played right now. I think I'll do what I can in Overlord this weekend, and evaluate the Bioshock dilemma when I get the 360 back. I miss Rock Band!

March failure

I almost made my goal of beating Psychonauts in March. I probably would have done it, but with the 360 out of commission, I was missing the social aspect of gaming, so I jumped on one month of WoW. Just in time for the 2.4 patch, which raised the experience given from quests, so I was able to go from 51 to 53 in two days. Granted, 51-52 was based mostly on Kevin helping me out with his level 56 Hunter. We were able to blast through 5 quests in no time. I was able to do level 53 all by myself, just by cleaning up a few straggler quests and getting some Alterac Valley quests. That obviously means I got to try AV. I sort of hated Warsong Gulch, as a Priest, but I loved Araethi Basin. Even AB pales in comparison to AV. The massive, massive battles, tons of players clashing over snowy fields. Even though I am the bottom of the rung at this bracket, and unable to wear any armor heavier than cloth, I get to participate, sometimes just by following some level 60 Warrior and keeping them healthy (until the Alliance punks realize that you always kill the healers). I hold out some small hope that I will hit 60 with some help from Kevin and his group of players before the month is up, but in the meantime, AV is a lot of fun, and well worth 15 bucks if I get some more play time on it.

This past weekend I focused on getting Psychonauts finished up. I didn't quite make it, but I did make good progress. I was in the insane asylum, and had figured out the three people I had to help to get to the top of it. The thing is, I wasn't expecting each of these three characters to be a full-blown level on their own. With that in my way, I only managed to finish one of them on Sunday, then the other two Monday night. Late Monday night. Then I stayed up later trying to get to the real end, and that was another 25 minutes, just to get to the final boss. So Psychonauts remains uncompleted for March, but I figure as long as I have it done before this weekend, I can call this a triumph. Huge success.

First online race win!

I decided to get some Burnout Paradise in last night, and I am so glad that I did. I risked the freezing 360 for some on-line races after grabbing a few Time Road Rules. I have the usual crap, host leaves, can't connect to everyone, then I get into a game with a bunch of players. We start up a race on the curvy mountain roads, and right off the bat I miss a chance to Takedown one racer. I try for a jump, and miss that. Now, back in 4th place I start driving better; and it is showing. I pass the cluster of three cars and take first, and see that the finish line is less than a half a mile away. The minimap shows all three arrows right behind me, so I chance a look in the rear-view mirror, see that they are RIGHT behind me... and promptly crash. The Amazing Race effect took hold, though and all three cars were so closely following the guy in first place that they all hit the rock too! I was using a Stunt car, so I could use my Boost right out of the gate, and was able to clinch the win pretty easily after that part. Such a nice feeling. Of course the 360 froze before the next race could start, but it was fun while it lasted. Where is the new 360!?

Binge

Well, despite having "finished" Halo 3, and still having both Psychonauts and Bioshock looming large on the stack, I've been mostly engrossed in Burnout Paradise and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I suppose I would feel worse about it if I wasn't having so much fun. McGuire assigned himself unlock duty, apparently, since he pretty much scored almost all of the unlockable characters in Brawl by going through the Subspace Emissary mode. I've been jumping in to co-op mode with him when I get the chance, but between his greater stock of free time and my gaming ADD, he's a lot farther in the game than I am. It's quite fun either way, so I don't mind.

I got even more Halo 3 time in this past week, first when getting some Skulls with Lars' friend Steve, then again later with Jen and Lars along. Jen is still missing a couple of chapters on the Legendary difficulty, but she soloed the missing missions on Heroic, so she is well on her way. It's pretty funny, the first night all four of us played she was by far the weakest link, but after just one night on Legendary, she is back to the ass-kicking gamer that I am more familiar with. The less WoW the better.

Burnout Paradise: what can I say? I get so much enjoyment out of this game it is just sick. I've been gaining cars as fast as I can manage, and right now I am on a quest to finish EVERY burning route for each of my cars. I started this self-made quest before I had my B License, and it's been going great. A few of these routes are really, really hard, but I've had a few that I finished with 30 seconds to spare, too. I still can't get anything going on-line, the system freezes too fast to accomplish much. Such is life. On the "good" news front, I got Microsoft to agree that my system is defective, and I already have a coffin on the way. I will miss the 360, it's become quite the fixture in my gaming life already, but it will be so nice to have a working one, and be able to really play Burnout with other humans.

Mega Gaming Weekend

This past week I wound up knocking Halo 3 off of my stack. It wasn't really intentional, but the pieces just fell into place and I knocked it off with three friends on the hardest difficulty. We grabbed 8/13 Skulls in our journeys, they add a nice level of challenge, so I can see myself going back for the other 5 later. Halo 3 is one of those games that I'm not really done with, I just finished the campaign, so I don't have to worry about spoilers or missing out on part of the story. I do still want to get back to it with McGuire, he and I did the first 5 levels already and it was fun playing with him, as always.

Sunday was the big "Super Smash Brothers Brawl" release day, I've been looking forward to playing that game for ages. I had decided to pick up Burnout Paradise while I was there (hooray for performance sharing bonuses!), so I came home from Best Buy on Sunday with two shiny new games; neither one of them a stack candidate. With Super Smash Brothers Melee, I played the crap out of it, until I had unlocked every character, every stage and everything else unlockable, then I considered it "done". It still got plenty of love, the good 4 player mode caused it to be brought out quite often, I can't see Brawl being all that different in that regard. First things first: I must get R.O.B. as a playable character.

Ironically, I think I spent slightly more time with Burnout than Smash Brothers Sunday. It makes the 360 freeze up, as I expected, but I get a chance to usually finish at least one event per freeze. It's just a matter of time before the 360 RRODs.

GameStack.pop()

Finally!
I beat Metroid Prime 2 yesterday. It's pretty funny, how much I came around on the stuff that I don't generally like when finishing this game. I guess it's been a while, so I should start with the key hunt. Just like Metroid Prime, at the end you have to track down a set of items to gain access to the final area. In the first game, I think it was 8 artifacts, 3 of which I had stumbled upon in my travels. The last five I had to figure out the location of by reading the scan log book and guessing where the clue referenced. A key word was bolded in each section, so it didn't take that long, but it was a chore. When I got the key hunt task in Echoes, I was really dreading it. I had found 4 of the 9 needed keys ahead of time, and had scanned all of the keybearers at one point, so I knew it was a matter of going to the locations that I had been to in the past, and getting a key from the Dark planet. What I didn't realize until much, much later was that the logbook was arranged in such a way to make the key hunt almost trivially easy. Once I figured out that it was broken down by area, and still numbered when you got to the actual Key Entry in the log, it was really fast to get the last of the keys. Kudos to the developers for making the worst part of the end-game of Prime into something that really works in Prime 2, even if a stubborn fool like me took a while to see it.

Thankfully, the section after the key entry is simple: save station, wall jump, boss fight(s). Like, seemingly, every other game these days, this was a multi-stage boss fight, with the requisite Metroid countdown after the first boss. In this game, the 'final' boss battle was the Emperor Ing, with 5 scannable sections, and a 4 part battle. It basically took me one life to get the hang of the first mode, and another to get the hang of the second. The third stage was really easy, but it took me 4 tries to get past the final part. Once you get past all of that, the countdown begins. It's a short trip out of the area, so 8 minutes is a really long time, until you get intercepted by Dark Samus' final 2 modes. The first mode went by pretty easily. The second mode was tough. After dealing with Archer turning off the game (making me re-do Emperor Ing) and just plain losing twice, I got the hang of it, and beat the game. 80% Completion, 23 hours. It was quite satisfying, and now I'm on to play Psychonauts.