Tag Archives: Xbox Live Arcade

Halloween Spirit

You know, like a lot of kids when I was young Halloween was easily one of my favorite times of year. Insane amounts of delicious, horrible candy, cool macabre decorations everywhere, and of course the costumes… oh the costumes! As an adult I still enjoy all of these things, plus we get the addition of drunken Halloween bashes and the seemingly ubiquitous “sexy” adult costumes to boot. Upgrade!

Still, for me Halloween as an adult has been largely a bust. This year wasn’t going any different so I decided to try to head it off at the pass a little bit and get back in the spirit of the holiday – watch a couple of horror movies and, hey, why not play something Halloween themed too? I could have gone with one of the numerous horror or zombie themed games out there these days but instead If decided to cross Double Fine’s Costume Quest off of my XBLA backlog. I’ve been wanting to play it since the first reviews of it rolled in and what a better time than the week of Halloween itself?

“Serious business…”

Costume Quest isn’t a horror game. It isn’t even a scary game. It is, on the other hand, Halloween… as… fuck! It’s about a pair of siblings going out trick or treating when one of them gets kidnapped by a group of monsters that seem to be in the process of a massive candy heist. The theme of Halloween night and the childhood tradition of getting really hyped about getting dressed up and scoring mountains of candy is pulled off incredibly well. Even better perhaps is the relationship your character has with their sibling – the sometimes apathetic, sometimes love/hate relationship they have with each other really adds an authenticity to the experience. After all, if you had siblings you were sharing your holidays with them, for better or for worse. The writing is great and while I suppose it is kid friendly, this is clearly a game written by adults, for adults, and it’s hilarious.

“Spying on some grubbin scum.”

The game itself is a sort of simplified take on the classic JRPG. Your party roams around in a top down “overworld” perspective talking to NPCs, collecting and searching for candy, trick or treating (of course) and doing various, simple quests along the way, all with a fun, highly stylized and cartoony presentation. The combat is fittingly styled after traditional turn based party battles, with different costumes (which are collected throughout the course of the game) granting different powers and abilities. When the fight mode kicks in the graphics amusingly shift into a more realistic, gritty style giving the player a glimpse of what the world apparently looks like in the imaginations of our protagonists. Excellent!

Costume Quest has an overall high quality, nicely polished feel to it, which is what I’d expect from Double Fine. Maybe my only complaint here would be the lack of any voiced dialog but honestly I think I’d rather read text than have these snarky kids represented poorly by horrible adult attempts at child voice acting. It’s also a nice, short game clocking in at maybe 8 hours tops which I appreciate as the JRPG mechanics would probably overstay their welcome with me otherwise. There is an expansion, Grubbins on Ice, but it didn’t really sound like it offered enough to justify extending the experience any further so I opted to skip it for now.

“You bet your ass I used the Macross inspired robot costume!”

With what little I’ve written here I hope you can pretty clearly see the appeal of the game. Literally every one of my friends that I’ve described it to since I started playing thought it sounded awesome and I definitely enjoyed my romp through it. Perhaps some of the best praise I can give it is that it succeeded in helping remind me of what I loved so much about Halloween as a kid and rekindle a little of that Halloween spirit. Of course, all of this delicious candy I’m stuffing my face with doesn’t hurt either…

As usual, these console screenshots were stolen from elsewhere…

Flashpoint Defense

I’ve been absolutely pining to play ArmA again lately – perhaps finally dedicating myself to an organized team with regular play schedules, even. For now I’ve been sticking to watching a ton of ArmA 2 related videos on YouTube. I’ve found them to be a great source of background noise and entertainment while at work, especially some of the better channels like Dslyecxi’s fantastic ShackTac stuff.

Additionally, I’ve decided to scratch the itch by replaying the original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and Resistance campaigns (using the PC re-release version, ArmA: Cold War Assault.) This is actually the first time I’ve played through the whole game on PC – most of my quality time with the original OFP was actually done with the Xbox “Elite” version, which was pretty much identical apart from some (barely) improved sound work, models, and textures and some enhanced graphical effects here and there. It even had a more or else intact editor and the same rad online co-op action as the PC version.

“Ahh, we were so innocent in those early missions…”

The PC version has aged pretty badly in some respects – barren looking landscapes thanks to a lack of ground-cover, the annoying, choppy radio chatter (A staple of the engine, which seems god awful when you first hear it but after getting used to it and even starting to rely on its information, is rather useful) and the ridiculous soldier models and animations. Regardless, the landscapes are still massive, the vehicle models are still quite serviceable, and the immersion of the soldier simulator-inspired action is still hard to beat in “Tactical FPS” circles once it clicks with you. I’m actually enjoying myself though I really don’t remember some of these missions be so brutally fucking difficult. Ugh!

Oh, and coincidentally, I also came across this excellent OFP retrospective after I started replaying it. Fun read.

“M60 versus T80. Seems fair…”

Will I get around to dedicating myself to ArmA 2? That’s hard to say. I plan on playing through ArmA and ArmA 2’s various official campaigns first and then… well, by then ArmA 3 should be officially released. That’ll be perfect timing to hop on that bandwagon, although I might need to build an entirely new gaming rig to play it smoothly. 🙁

On the console front I just wrapped up playing through Defense Grid: The Awakening’s main single player campaign on XBLA. If you’ve never heard of it, Defense Grid is a fantastic sci-fi tower defense game. You probably have though – the PC version was quite popular years ago on Steam. Regardless of which version you go with I’d say it’s a “must play” if you’re a fan of the genre – it’s excellently executed on all fronts. Good graphics and sound, challenging and varied maps, and absolutely refined, classic tower defense gameplay. I’ve said it before, but I love a well-done tower defense game and I had a hard time putting this one down for long. I’ve still got plenty more of them on my backlog but I’m pretty sure I’ll be returning to Defense Grid to play the Portal themed “You Monster” DLC campaign at some point in the future.

“The more towers the merrier!”

Next on the 360 will be yet more exploration of my backlog. I’ve been feeling like a World War II shooter lately so I think it’s finally time to give Call of Duty: World at War’s campaign a spin, despite how much I’ve grown to hate Call of Duty’s single player gameplay in recent years. Wish me luck with making it through that one without pulling out my fucking hair…

Braid Your Pitts

I haven’t posted in nearly 4 months. Shameful, I know. I have been gaming a bit though, for sure. In fact one of the main reasons for my lack of updates in the last 6 or 7 months was climbing back onto the vile World of Warcraft bandwagon. I haven’t mentioned it much on here because I’ve been about ready to quit again, once I completed the last of several goals I’d been working on. After that I planned on writing an entry all about my return and what I had accomplished with my time. Unfortunately that last goal has turned out to be a total pain in my ass – expect that post if I finally do meet my goal but I’ve all but stopped again as it is so that seems unlikely.

“Braid is goddamn pretty.”

I got around to playing Braid on XBLA. I actually played through the demo at around the time of its launch and honestly most of my critical analysis of the awesome, creative puzzle mechanics is probably back there somewhere since I was pretty blown away by them originally. Even blasting past that topic, I loved the art style and absolutely adored the music. Despite how mind-bendingly difficult some of the puzzles might seem to some players (personally, most came to me easily, though I did definitely struggle hard with a few of them) it’s still very worth checking out. Notice how I skipped talking about the narrative? 😉 Seriously though, I actually enjoyed it at first and like what they’re were going for though the end came out of nowhere and didn’t really do much for me. In the end though, it didn’t seem crucial to the experience – how much did the story in any of the Super Mario games (and the comparison here is appropriate given all of the obviously influence and callbacks) ever matter?

I finally finished my run through of Fallout 3 + all of the DLC. I got pretty much all of the achievements I could get in one play through and had a blast. My insanely sporadic playtimes made me come to some odd conclusions about my gaming habits as of late: I’m getting too old for this shit. Seriously, I seem to only want to jump into most games (basically anything I’m either not insanely addicted to, or anything that isn’t extremely “pick up and play” friendly) when I have a couple of hours or more free in one sitting, and even then I have to be “in the mood” which I’m often not after a long day at work or whatever. If it is going to take me a year to finish a decent sized RPG for now on I suppose I’m going to have to stop spending as much time and money on this hobby as right now it’s just a little out of whack.

“We’re going vault hopping tonight, baby!”

Back to the game though. Obviously I loved Fallout 3 – I mentioned that in my last update about it. How could I not? I loved the original Fallout games and I love the Elder Scrolls series so… yeah? I’m not going to get into a big, detailed review of it or anything but I did want to mention one unexpected surprise: The Pitt DLC campaign. Whaaa? Although I know it often gets praise as being one of the better DLC add-ons for Fallout 3 I don’t remember hearing anything about the whole moral dilemma you’re faced with in it. Hell, maybe I did and simply forgot all about it since then, but in any case… spoilers in the next two paragraphs!

So, the basic setup for The Pitt (I’ll try to keep it fairly general) is that you’re contacted by a runaway slave who wants you to infiltrate the city which is overrun by an oppressive, ruthless group of slavers who force their slaves into working in their factories while they reap the benefits. They also all have some horrible radiation sickness and the leader of the slavers is apparently hording the cure for his very own. Seems straight forward enough and when you arrive as sure enough, sick slaves everywhere and the people in power are stacking the bad karma deck without question. Once you finally infiltrate the slavers and confront the leader, however, you learn that all isn’t as it appeared – the cure is actually a baby and the ex-slave who talked you into the whole thing in the first place is actually an ex-slaver who was forced out after a failed coup attempt looking for revenge. Seems like the situation is getting greyer. Still, why would I want to leave the baby in the hands of these assholes? Plus, who cares if the other guy is an ex-slaver himself, he clearly wasn’t lying about this place being packed with slaves and this sickness killing everyone. I stole the baby and vaporized the leader of the slavers, and most of the rest of them while I was at it.

“Fireworks are always better when they’re made out of your enemies.”

The plot thickens. Audiotapes reveal that the leader of the slavers was an Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel who got stranded there after cleansing the ruins of the city long ago. Hm, well that still doesn’t mean he wasn’t an asshole, I suppose. Left there alone, he built up his gang and the settlement himself including bringing the factories back online. He regretted the slave labor but viewed it as a necessary evil and even planned to eventually set them all free. Hmm. He was also the father of the baby in question and, it’s revealed, seemed to genuinely care for the kid. He also viewed his research into the cure in a philanthropic way – he didn’t seem to be hording the cure at all, it simply wasn’t finished. *gulp* I might have made a bad decision but… well, at least the slaves are free, right? So then I get back to the people I was working for to discover the guy acting like a total fascist asshole himself and implying that the baby was now in much worse hands. It also only took me about 2 seconds to notice that the slave labor still appeared to be in full effect around the settlement – maybe the people in the chains had changed, but still… what exactly have I done here?!

This is one of the most interesting moral dilemmas I’ve run into in a game in recent memory. Most fascinating was probably the fact that I really wasn’t ever asked to make any clear cut, black and white choice on the matter. Sure, I was forced to pick a side but it was before I had all of the intel. Even after all of the cards were on the table it was still a pretty nebulous situation with no obvious right choice… and the fact of the matter is, not unlike after the big reveal in Bioshock, I felt totally played after it was over. Nice!

“These guys, yet again…”

What else? Oh yes, I bought and played Halo 4. I’ve talked about the Halo series on here a lot in the past so I’ll skip the background and the in-depth analysis and just say that 343 Studios did a fine job. It still feels very much like a proper Halo game yet makes necessarily measured steps into new directions. I enjoyed the new multiplayer advancement (for example) though so far I prefer Firefight over Spartan Ops. Most of all, I just enjoyed returning to a universe that I’ve always really enjoyed. As far as that goes though, I might have enjoyed watching Forward Unto Dawn more than playing the actual Halo 4 campaign. *shrug*

Next up is a play through of the original Saints Row, if I can manage to slog through the grind. Oh, and I also started a new blog which I’ve been filling full of random non game related stuff – mostly related to music and just general expressive bullshit. I’ll link to it eventually when I have more content. Hell, maybe I’ll even merge it into this one and make it a little less gaming focused. Stay tuned!