Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Gay Tony and Me

Well, I finally completed The Ballad of Gay Tony last weekend. I can’t say I’m quite as positive about it as I was about my The Lost and Damned playthrough though. I don’t know precisely what my main issue was. Perhaps I’m just experiencing some general GTA 4 burnout? Maybe this playthrough was a bit too soon after TLaD? I’m not entirely sure. While I’ll dish out some positives later let me continue this train of thought and bring up some of my specific negative issues first:

While the missions were generally more “over the top” and varied than those in the previous two installments of GTA 4, the disparity wasn’t quite as large as I was under the impression it might be after hearing so many other people laud the game for them. It still felt very much like Grand Theft Auto IV territory the entire time. The only real new thing was the parachuting/base jumping mechanic which would have been right at home in San Andreas or Saints Row.

“Our protagonists.”

Next, the characters weren’t quite as enjoyable to me as those in the previous two titles. Gay Tony himself wasn’t the easiest character to fall in love with thanks to his drug problems and the often stupid, reckless decisions he makes that drive the story. While the lead character, Luis Lopez, seemed quite interesting at first, I felt like his character actually devolved as the game came to an end. I went from intrigued about his history with prison, his relationship with his family, particularly his father, and of course his friendship with Gay Tony, to completely bored of him and his frequent comments about how he’s “a total psychopath, bro!” and “likes killing people for money, bro!” As a lot of people took issue with Niko’s various anti-social crimes and violent acts seeming to be at odds with his character in the main campaign of GTA 4, I found there to be something a bit disingenuous about the pairing of Luis’s character as it is presented to us with his apparent fondness for murder.

I still have some gripes about the checkpoint system. In my original rambling post about GTA 4 I had a few complaints about the system but only specifically touched on the number and placement of checkpoints being an issue. In my playthrough of TBoGT, however, I was completely annoyed by an entirely different aspect of the system: When I die during a mission (which is typically why I fail missions) I hate, absolutely HATE, having to wait to load up at the hospital, wait to get and reply to my “retry?” text message, and wait yet again to load back up at the mission checkpoint. I realize that Rockstar probably does it this way to give the player more options before retrying and ultimately help instill a further sense of persistence in the GTA 4 gameworld, but I’d so rather prefer a simple “retry?” prompt to pop up on the screen the second I fail a mission. Honestly, I can normally really respect the persistent world aspect to these kinds of game design decisions but in this case I feel like the fun factor should have weighed a bit heavier into the equation. The funny thing is that I didn’t even fail that many times in TBoGT, certainly not as much as I did in GTA 4 proper, so I’m not quite sure why it annoyed me so much this time.

“This is for all of those food poisoning victims!”

Finally, after the much more streamlined narrative of The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony’s story didn’t feel quite as fetching nor as well told. There’s really no need to go into specifics about this point, it’s just my general take-away after playing both DLCs fairly close together.

Anyway, enough bitching! Is it good? Yes, it is good. I can safely say that if you’re a GTA fan and you enjoyed GTA 4 you should probably go out of your way to own both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. In fact, save yourself some hard drive space and buy the Episodes from Liberty City disk. Plus you get to rock out to Vice City FM and the awesome RamJam FM.

Both times now when I’ve come back to Liberty City I’ve been blown away by what an amazing job Rockstar did on the city itself. Sure it doesn’t always look amazing (some of the textures, particularly) but the amount of detail is astounding! I always felt that much of that detail was squandered since there are so many locations you don’t really spend any time in or only see in a blur as you fly down the highway. Still, occasionally I end up on foot in a strange new place thinking “wow, this place is pretty neat for somewhere you never go in any missions or anything.” To that end I’m sure the guys who did the bulk of the development work on the city were quite happy to see it brought back in The Lost and Damned and again in The Ballad of Gay Tony.

“Yes, there is finally a tank. Upgrade!”

I also still think the character and story crossovers are totally genius. Niko, Johnny, and Luis all influence each others stories, sometimes directly and sometimes more subtly, but it is there and it is often presented in such a way that you have to wonder if Rockstar didn’t have these different stories, and maybe others we’ll never get to experience, penned down from the get go. Again, totally brilliant!

Well, I’ve already written a lot more on this than I had planned too. Again, if you’re a big GTA 4 then you need this. I personally think The Lost and Damned was a better, more cohesive game but TBoGT is well worth your time as well. I have to wonder if we’ll see more, non Xbox 360 exclusive episodes in the future. I wouldn’t doubt if they’ve considered it but I’m sure all the guys at Rockstar are probably ready to move on by now.

As usual my Xbox 360 screenshots were swiped from far more reputable sources.

Dropping on to the Lost Planet

Oh shit, it’s game log time and I actually played some things this time!

As predicted my next 360 foray was Halo 3: ODST. ODST has pretty much been talked about to death lately on all of the gaming forums, blogs, podcasts, and the like so I won’t go into it too much. I played through it co-op via splitscreen on Heroic difficulty and enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s nice and short but well paced and a lot of fun. If you’re a Halo (particularly Halo 3) fan then this is a must buy despite the lack of the iconic Master Chief. I plan on going back and getting more of the achievements, including going after all of the audio logs, in a subsequent playthrough sometime soon. I also dabbled in the new Firefight mode a couple of times with some friends and, as predicted, enjoyed the hell out of it. There’s just something to be said for working together with friends in just about any game and the Gears of War 2 “Horde” mode template that everyone has been shamelessly copying lately really seems to nail a certain pure aspect of that.

“Silenced pistols are the new black.”

Next up I decided to play Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on my 360. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it was the ever increasing nip in the air around here as we move into the fall that made me want to jump head first into Lost Planet’s abundant virtual snow banks… or maybe I just dig mechs? Who knows. I remember thinking the game looked cool since well before it was released but until the relatively recent announcement of its upcoming sequel I feel like it has been overshadowed by newer games. I’ve got a couple of friends who really dig the game though and one of them, NetworkShadow, even demoed it for a few of us at his place one day not too long ago. I really got into the idea of trudging through the beautiful snowy environments. The graphics might be fairly dated nowadays but people were blown away by them at launch and they’re just stylized enough to remain easy to appreciate even now.

“E.D.N. III has some pest control troubles…”

I managed to beat the game in just a few sittings and although there were some tricky sections (including lots of old school set piece boss battles) I found the game to be fairly easy. In fact a lot of my difficulty came about from trying to collect the achievements for all of the “target mark” collectibles for which I had to replay a few sections, even a few entire levels to complete. The character’s movement and control felt slightly off to me (though admittedly I play relatively few 3rd person action games) but once I got used to the controls it all felt quite smooth and I was generally quite happy with it. I was a little disappointed by the last boss fight which hit on a pet peeve of mine – throwing entirely new game mechanics at you in the last level. I didn’t feel like Lost Planet’s case was as gross as a lot of other game’s and I once I got a good feel for it I could more or less tell what they were going for. Still, it was fairly annoying and I ended up having to replay it like 15 times before I finally managed to beat it.

Lost Planet is also one of those newer Capcom games that seems to heap on a large amount of Western influence for some mysterious reason I don’t suppose I care enough to speculate too much about – something about increased international sales or a bold new direction or something, I don’t know. Indeed the game reminds me a lot, the setting, graphics, control, and the core gameplay, of a lot of Western 3rd person shooters, however there is an unmistakable Japanese feel to the entire game. I’m not just talking about the often silly extended cutscenes but the game itself often feels like somewhat of a 3D take on an oldschool side scrolling shooter like Contra or something. It’s hard to explain but I’m sure some of you who have played it know where I’m coming from. Regarding those cutscenes though, I’ve got to say that not playing many Japanese games, particularly the cutscene heavy JRPG genre, I do find an occasional dip into the cesspools of insane Japanese cutscenes to be pretty refreshing.

“What’s better than mowing down aliens with a minigun? Mowing down aliens with two miniguns!”

Next up for the 360 is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. An interesting note, and one I remember mentioning once or twice on the old podcast, is that I’ve had Call of Duty 4 since right around the time it was first released. I had the PC version and only really bought it to play multiplayer with friends however. As a result I never even started up the single player campaign and somewhere in the back of my mind I had always figured I’d probably enjoy it more on the Xbox 360 and that the achievements wouldn’t hurt either. So, here I am, nearing the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I’ve finally tracked down a decently priced used copy of the game for 360. I can’t wait! I’ve heard so much about the campaign and, who knows, I might even give multiplayer on Xbox Live a try while I’m at it since it’s such a blast.

On a non-console related note I also continue to play Half-life 2 from time to time – I’m about to start Episode 2 and wrap the game up. I’ll talk more about Half-life 2 in a separate post when I finally get around to finishing it.

1943: Dawn of the cataclysmic half prey

Whew, I can’t believe it has been almost a month since I last updated this.

First thing first, I beat Prey. I don’t have much more to say about it than I did last time. I’ve since read that a lot of people were annoyed by the “flying” parts but they didn’t really annoy me, personally. They were definitely a little bizarre though I felt like that was probably intentional, going right along side the gravity walkways, gravity changing buttons, and the portals.

“Holding the line…”

I would like to expand a tiny bit more on the death mechanic I mentioned briefly last time. Basically, when you die you’re transported to a level where you can shoot at passing spirits in an almost Duck Hunt like manner. One type gives you additional health when you respawn, while the other gives you additional spirit. This sequence ends after a short time and you’re soon respawned where you left off. Your only punishment for dying, really, is that you had to waste 30 seconds of your life playing this mini-game. The repetitive nature of the mini-game annoyed some people but whenever I encountered it for the 3rd or 4th time in a row I realized that I’d rather be doing that than starting over from a check point or even loading a manual save. Neat.

I bought Battlefield 1943 on XBLA. Excellent game. There’s not a lot to say about it that hasn’t already been said by everyone else when it was the flavor of the month. It’s a near perfect game for when you need to kill 30 minutes or so and don’t want to invest in anything too meaningful. I’ve got to say that I’m pretty damn depressed at how much I suck at it compared to the original Battlefield 1942 though – I used to rock at Coral Sea (AKA Air Superiority) damn it! 🙁 It’s also amazing how much Frostbite’s destructible buildings change the infantry part of the game – you might as well be playing totally different maps when in one version every structure is essentially bulletproof and in the other strictly temporary. I don’t intend to play this one much as I rarely play online on my Xbox 360 but it was worth the 15 bucks in my mind.

“All out attack against The Avatar.”

Next up? I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to play more XBLA games but since I haven’t bought many of the ones I want yet and I’m broke it seems a bit silly to pass up on all of the games I already own and haven’t played yet. Speaking of spending money, I suppose Halo: ODST will end up being the next thing I play.

Changing platforms, I finally decided to finish up Dawn of War 2’s campaign. I felt like I could probably keep playing it forever. If only their were more maps to play in the random side missions – it just got way too repetitive. 🙁 Great game and they just announced the first expansion pack. Just my luck it’ll be continuing the campaign of the original game, raising the level cap, and adding a bunch of new stuff. Bought!

“Peekaboo!”

Hmmmm, what else? The news of World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion got me all hot and bothered to return to Azeroth so I dusted off my newbie Draeni character to try some of patch 3.2’s additions, most notable probably being earlier access to mounts, and to check out the old world one more time before the Cataclysm hits. We’ve not been playing too hardcore but advancement was fairly steady until we fell off the wagon again a couple of weeks ago. I also finally got around to getting Wrath of the Lich King although I haven’t touched any of the post 70 content yet on my main as I’m considering transferring servers and possibly even changing sides so that I can play with my friend’s main. If only it weren’t so damn expensive.

I definitely love the idea of them revamping Azeroth’s 1-60 content. I’ll be sad to see some of the zones totally changed forever but it is probably a needed change. I remember many a conversation about flying mounts in Azeroth once The Burning Crusade was released but the problem was obvious to anyone who had explored the world even a little. Except for travelable boarders and flight paths most of the zones were patch worked together with harsh seams. Many of them even featured areas that you can’t and aren’t meant to be able to traveled or even seen.

“Ravenholm, anyone?”

Finally, I started playing through Half-Life 2. Wow, old school right? It’s for a good cause! I’ll be playing along with Rebel FM’s Game Club and since I haven’t played through Episode 1 or Episode 2 yet it’ll give me a good opportunity to refresh myself on 2 before playing them. This will be my first actual participation with Game Club or it’s predecessor 1UP FM’s Backlog which I’m pretty stoked about. Ugh, I had forgotten how long some of these levels were…