3 Hour Review: Halo 3 ODST

I have to admit that I was expecting another plain old Halo game with ODST. I hadn't read much about it but I knew a couple of key gameplay details: you're not Master Chief, you can die faster, and you play as different Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. That is so little of the game and only partially true.

You play as one character trying to find his other squad mates after they had a bad drop from space down to earth. You, as the Rookie, stalk around at night looking for their drop ships. Every time you find one, you get to play as them after they drop and wake up. The flashing back and forth give the game an entirely different feel than just running and gunning around as Master Chief. The night scenes are calm and quiet with a few gun fights here and there as the city's A.I. takes control of street signs and traffic road blocks to guide you where you need to go (and of course there is a map). Then when you flash back to your other squad mates, it's daytime right after they dropped and your smack in the middle of the Covenant grunts, jackals, brutes and hunters. Each member of the team has specific achievements tied to their level, which really makes you play each flashback differently. You can also go back at anytime and replay their levels to keep trying for the achievements (they reset every time you leave or finish) and it's really like playing a bunch of mini-Halo games. I enjoy that change of pace from the long drawn out stories from this game's predecessors.

I don't really think that not having regenerative health makes a big difference in the game play. You'll still die just as often as you would any other Halo game. The fact is that if your getting creamed with weapons fire, you shouldn't have gotten yourself stuck in that situation to begin with. Needless to say, I still die often and enjoy it every time.

I really like the Rookie gameplay at night. It's dark and fun and lonely. You really feel like your in a post-apocalyptic city that's crawling with bad guys and you feel desperate to find your squad mates. The daytime sections of the game are filled with teammate chatter (from a few of Firefly cast members and Six from Battlestar Galactica to boot!). Nathan Fillion's character even looks like him.

And we easily slid back into the Halo gameplay controls. The sniperific pistol is back. Flanking enemies in huge areas works really well in co-op. And for the first time, two people can really go along way away from each other to search out ammo and weapons without being sucked back to each other at a checkpoint.

We made it through three or so different levels last night playing co-op and we still have to check out the Firefight mode and play some regular online matches with the new maps. I really did want to stay up all night and play it, but, as the title of the website does decree, pesky work gets in the way once again.

I love this game. It's quite a change from the old Halo games. It's a great addition to my collection as well as a new chapter in the Halo series.

Microsoft Thinks We're Made of Money

...because with the new Xbox Live update, you can buy your cartoon avatar a Star Wars lightsaber to play with for 400 MS points. $6 damn dollars!

Trials: Addictive Motorcycle Web Game on Xbox Live

There are an internet-ton of these games out on the web; controlling a little man on a motorcycle to get through an obstacle course with a couple of keys on the keyboard is quite a lot of fun.

But now it's coming to Xbox Live for $10 and it looks gorgeous.

Facebook and Twitter come to Xbox Live

So Microsoft unveiled some new services coming the console this year that I believe are ridiculous. I'm not saying that they aren't going to do well because I believe people will not only eventually try anything once, but also do things wrong.

Facebook and Twitter are the two services hitting the Xbox this year. These are super huge web apps that practically everyone and, literally, their mom use. We all log on to our computers at least once a day and check to see what kind of princess each other are. We are very busy people. But why would I want to turn on my tv, receiver and Xbox to check all that stuff? Not including having to login to your Xbox Live account (if you have more than one person on your Xbox). The same with Twitter. You couldn't possibly make it any harder to check your accounts when you could just as easily hit a bookmark link on your computer.

But I'm sure that social gamers and heavy Facebook/Twitter users will find a happy marriage here. And just like the recent ads for Conan O'Brian say...

"I'm here to tell you about an exciting new technology called television. Television allows you to watch things just as you would on your computer or cell phone, except while seated in a more comfortable chair."

Gamers already know this chair. A little too well.

And just to be a green geek, doesn't it have to involve a lot more electricity to check Facebook on a home entertainment system than, say, a laptop? Or do a lot of gamers have both up and running?

4 Left 4 Dead Friends

Games take on a whole new experience when you play them online with your friends. I'm not just talking about getting in a random group with people that maybe you've even met before playing other games, I'm talking about your buds from high school that you don't see very often in person anymore. Those guys that always had your back in the real world, now getting your back virtually against hoards of zombies, having a great time, laughing it up, reliving the old years.

Tonight, one of those buds was my wife, sitting in the same room with me split screen with my friends. Probably one of the best nights online together we've ever had.

Video games have truly transcended they're socially inept colorings and gone way, way outside the lines.

Digital is More Expensive?

Since the Xbox 360 started offering the ability to download older games from the original Xbox library of games online and store them on your hard drive, the Wii, PS3 and PSP have also taken to the idea and started doing it as well. I think it's a great service to have digital games instead of cds and cartridges (though I am a bit enamored with my own collection of stuff).

But I don't understand what's going on here. Instead of the idea of a digital service saving money by not using physical media, companies have started to offer the service at a premium, charging way too much money for games that are 5-20 years old.

It's hard to say for the PS3, since I can't seem to find any prices on their Playstation Network website, but the Xbox and Wii offer titles to download from their older consoles at about 200-400% markup on prices based off of eBay offerings ($15 from Live vs $6 average from StillLivesAtHome128 on eBay). Of course, the used games behemoth Gamestop is still selling Halo, a game from 2001, for $20, but only idiots shop there.

*crickets chirping*

Nintendo isn't doing much better. Nintendo offered the first three Mario games for download on the Wii for $5 each. You can find it on eBay for under a $1 if you can get an auction that doesn't charge $8 for shipping. That's almost a 500% markup on a game that they fully admit on their store website is 25 years old. In fact, it's the oldest commercial Nintendo game ever that they gave away with the console. I'm not even sure you could buy it because they made it available to everyone that had the NES.

And what's worse is that your paying for a transaction back into your childhood. Most people played these games when they were kids. I'd even bet that the majority of the buyers of games like Super Mario Brothers are in the 20+ age bracket and realize after buying the game that, like most childhood memories, some things are best left in the past. Games that old evoke other memories from times of yesteryear but not the ones that help you compare your new HD-loving, 1080p, BluRay watching eyes to the 8-bit bleeps and bloops that you fondly remember sitting cross-legged on the living room floor drinking a Tab.

Sure you have to manage a new set of resources when your dealing with digital distribution. Instead of trucks delivering games, your paying for bandwidth. Instead of paying retailers profit margins, your paying for server hard drives and routers. And instead of packaging, your paying for programmers to retrofit code to new consoles. But per game, I'd have to imagine that it's still cheaper to sell games digitally that it is to keep shipping out disks. Especially if sales are stagnate in brick-and-mortar stores.

So here's an offical plea to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony: Stop trying to make money on games that are older than our kids. Here's some logic to follow: If (ParentAge-ChildAge/2) < GameAge Then GamePrice = 0. I think that's a pretty fair rule to follow.

Wii Store: http://www.nintendo.com/wii/virtualconsole/games
Xbox Live Store: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/catalog.aspx?d=5

PSN Store: http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Store

And The Cheaters Ruin It: Left 4 Dead Update

It wasn't even 24 hours before cheaters started taking all the top spots in the new mode for Left 4 Dead. The eagerly anticpated Survivor horde mode by a few of us is now a cheater haven.

The Valve team was reportedly unable to break the 10 minute mark, surviving onslaughts of zombie masses at the dead end light house, but now cheaters have been glitching and finding unnatural places to hide in the maps, ticking over a hundred minutes and maxing out the timer.

The one thing we don't quite see enough of, but at least we do see it, is Xbox Live swooping in and banning gamertags and sweeping clean leader boards.

There will always be cheaters; I myself have partaken in at least leveling up my Call of Duty 4 character with boosting so I'm hardly pointing fingers. I'm upset with the fact that they figured it out so fast and made what for us was a super hard video game mearly a child's play thing and broken it schoolyard bully fashion.

Achievements Bite Back

I just spent 25 minutes in Call of Duty 4 getting the Your Show Sucks achievement.

Again.

The End of Xbox Live Subscriptions is Near

I subscribe to a lot of shopping/tech/gaming rss feeds and one in particular, TechBargains.com, is updated so often, I read it like a commercial pricing index.

One thing I've noticed lately is that Xbox Live 12+1 Month subscription cards have been steadily coming down in price over the last 4-6 months. They started at $50 a year for 12 months and now they're $30 for 13 months.

The Playstation online service, PSN has been free from the start. Nintendo, while it's extremely limited in capability is also free. How much long with Microsoft keep up the pricing scheme. If it's not on it's way out the door to charge people for their admittedly awesome service, why is Microsoft letting companies like BestBuy and sell the subscriptions so deeply discounted?

I give Microsoft till the end of 2010 to dump the pricing all together. Maybe it's just a dream, but hopefully it will be a reality soon.

1 Day, 705 Gamerscore Points

Well, Brian just left the house for the night after an all day gaming session of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and his harddrive full of Live Arcade games. I wasn't expecting to walk away with 705 points after the full day of gaming, but I did, and I also got my personal goal of 10,000 Gamerscore while in ownership of an Xbox 360.

Along with GH: Aerosmith, I got to pick up some achievements in the classic Track and Field, Robotron and Dig Dug.

As a side note, when are developers going to start making achievements more unachievable to believed as an achievement. In Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, I got 6 achievements for playing my very first song: playing at a venue (you can't NOT get this), playing as a girl character, getting 100 notes in a row, getting all the star-power note phrases and, finally, not using star-power during a song. One song, 6 achievements and 85 gamerscore. Rediculous.

Surving on the Past

Having quite an extensive array of systems and games in my game room, I knew losing my Xbox 360 (for a third time) to hardware failures wouldn't be hard to get by. I've got a nice backlog of games to button up on my other systems and there's always the nice nostalgic stroll down memory lane with the real old stuff (the games the don't have endings). My friend came down to work on my lighting and electrical work in the basement and after a hard day in the dark and a nice dinner at the Wood Fired Oven, we came back to the house to take such a stroll.

So many memories of our pre-driver's license days were tied to video games. Playing games like RC Pro-Am and Ivan Stewart's Off Road immediately had us sitting in front of our family room tvs ignoring parents and homework. Moving to James Bond: GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the N64 transported us together with friends in dirty high school bedroom eating pizza and drinking soda and sucker punching each other in the arms for cheap shots and dirty tricks.

I think as well as most people can attribute songs to be the soundtracks of their lives, video games are the like that too. But video games offer nostalgia on so many levels: the music, the palette of sounds, the evolving gameplay, the cheap stories, the friends we played them with. The walk down memory lane easily becomes the dive into the deep pool of our pasts. Video games will always be the preferred form of entertainment for me and my friends. Luckily technology has been able to keep us all connected even though we live much farther away from each other than before.

So, Microsoft, there's no real hurry to get my Xbox fixed and back to me. I have a huge library of memories that I really don't mind flipping through and relaxing with. Old games can be really fun because they come with so much more than just jagged graphics and 8-bit music, they come with years of memories and loads of good times.

Finished: Call of Duty 4

I'm pretty happy to wrap this game up. It gave me just enough of a taste of maddening challenge to feel relieved that it's over. I'm not left wondering what all the fuss is about, nor am I so exhausted that I have nothing to say about the game. I beat the game on the hardest mode, veteran, and with the exception of one ridiculous level, and I think that it was the perfect challenge for me.

I'll keep playing the game online until I max out my profile. I don't quite understand what people are getting out of this "prestige" mode. It doesn't serve any purpose online other than to get you a different unattainable rank. But the price, resetting just about all your unlocked items and challenges, is too heavy for me. As little time as I do play the game, I need something to remind me of all the time I put into it.

It's like why I enjoy games that have a running clock of how many hours you put into beating it. Gamers really don't have anything to show for their hard work to the real world outside our game rooms, so any tangible, programmed measurement is welcome. If it were a total of pink bunnies in a flower basket, I'd be sure to tell you I had gotten all 55 of those furry bastards and even that I'd named the last one Willie, the name of that kid who I got into a butter fight with in elementary school.

I got him now.

Review: Call of Duty 4

When the CoD4 online multi-player servers find a shred of cohesiveness and manage to get every player in the room into a match, it's like unlocking the wardrobe door to Narnia. There's a bit of euphoric bliss and amazement, followed by a lot of war and death.

For the past two weeks now, since Christmas, Xbox Live has been broken. There have been so many people trying to play online with bad code, that your lucky if you get in three rounds of play in an hour. And people are trying. Because this game is awesome.

Online aside, the single player campaign is probably the most visceral 1st-person war shooter game to date. Everything in the game screams realism. Especially in an AC-130 shooting through night vision. And things that normally hamper a single player campaign aren't evident in CoD4. No annoying computer A.I. that get in the way or don't do their job. Stupid enemy A.I. that run out of cover just to be shot. Repetitive levels with no design. It really shows the work that Infinity Ward put into their game.

flashbackSo far my favorite levels are the AC-130 leve, Death from Above and the sniper mission, All Ghillied Up (the videos don't do this game justice for realism). But every level, really, makes you feel tense and eagle eyed, because this is one of the few games that really makes you realize that if you shot someone with a real gun, it really doesn't take much to hurt them. I don't own a gun for that very reason. And for the same reason, I found myself discarding my usual tactics of head first, shoot fast and adopting a much more self preservative style, often letting my A.I. teammates breach the next corridor and allowing me to come in and clean up.

I think the reason that the online game gets me so riled up is the fact that I like sneaky, hiding games. It reminds me of hide and seek as a kid and that I always preferred hiding as opposed to the seeking. There's a bit of ingenuity, patience, and voyeurism involved. I always wanted to wait for the seeker to walk by, unassumingly, and then jump out my hiding place and scare their pants off. So many times, I think I'm backing into a corner on a street and end up getting shot. If it weren't for the KillCam showing me where I was shot from, I'd swear someone was cheating by glitching their gun through a wall. And half the time it's a guess-grenade being chucked from a block away that just happens to land right next to me, primed and ready to blow.

Sadly, every time I try to play it online, because I finished the campaign, the room closes by itself or the connection drops because of all the server problems. I hope this game gets cleaned up over the next month. I'm still plenty busy with all the games in The Orange Box and Mass Effect. If it weren't for server problems, I don't even know how much I'd be playing these offline games. So maybe it's a blessing.