I just recently purchased Halo 3 and The Orange Box for the 360 and those two juggernaut games have kept me thoroughly entertained. I picked up Jetset Refuelled on XBL arcade, too. You would think that would merit a step back so that I can simply enjoy those games til next year. However, one look at the release roster for the 360 this year begs to differ. There are old games and new ones that I still have to get a taste of:
After XBLM recovered from the onslaught of the Bioshock demo, I proceeded to download the Bioshock demo. I have to tell you, its really good.
The demo starts out with you in the water, having survived a plane crash. The water effects are gorgeous, as are the fire effects from the burning wreckage of the plane that has landed you in this predicament. One of the coolest things to watch is the tail of the plane slowly sinking into the water. Its a “so this is what it felt like to watch the Titanic sink” feeling. Better yet, you get to see this during gameplay so you can watch it while in the water or after you get out of the water and are on the nearby structure leading the the underwater world of Rapture.
As you walk through the doors of the structure, it shuts behind you leaving you in total darkness. Music plays. The mood is set. Palms are sweaty. Then the lights come on and you see the beautiful graphics of this game. The artistic style is like something out of the 40’s. Interesting logos reminiscent of The Rocketeer and a general design that oozes polish are immediately evident.
The other thing that the game does really well is creating a solid feeling experience. The thing I hate about games like “The Darkness” and “Prey” is how they are FPS but the world you view seems distorted. The walls are angled funny and when you look around, its like you are looking through a distorting glass with the edges all funny-looking. I can’t put what I’m trying to say into words here!
Anyway, Halo and Bioshock seem to understand how to make FPS games look normal and not like you are looking through a camera or something. It makes the world more solid.
The last thing to comment on is that Bioshock has great controls. The spells on the left trigger and the weapons on the right. Its like dual weilding in Halo but your left hand is reserved for “plasmid” actions. Pretty cool.
Going down into the water and experiencing the entire adventure is gonna rox. And to think, I wasn’t really big on this game til I played the demo . . . (I hardly ever play demos but ones that crash XBLM demand taking a look at don’t they?)
Just rented this from Blockbuster the other night. I have a gift card I haven’t used for about a year now so I figure I might as well rent a game with it. It was either this game, Prey or Transformers: the game. I went with this one.
So far, its a good game. Not great, but good. Its a tad better than Quake 4 which I had trouble really getting into.
I like the way the game starts with you in a car being driven by an NPC and another NPC in the passenger side. Its a nice intro to the game and nicely displays the games graphics - one of its strong points.
Once the gameplay starts, a few problems are easily noticeable for those that have played more polished FPS like Halo (the daddy of them all).
#1 - Objectives are somewhat difficult to quickly ascertain. Its like you’re acting a movie without the script. Of course, most of what you want to do ends up being what they want you to do (e.g. helpthe driver after he crashes the car). As the game goes on, you start to understand it and it gets less difficult to figure out where and what to do next. Given that I felt this the first time I played Mario 64 and even Halo, I guess its not a big deal. At leat to me. This chap would disagree:
#2 - Limited ammo and weak weapons. This is definitely not your run and gun shooter. I end up using the Darkness powers more than anything else. Its fun though, and I get achievements so I cant complain. This early on, the Darklings haven’t been as much of a help as I would hope. All I can do is point and click in the general direction where I want him to go and hope he deos something useful. Context sensitive orders (open gate, throw car, annihilate enemy) would’ve been better.
The game has great graphics, a good storyline and sets the mood well.
I don’t particularly like FPS games that are too much of an RPG (run and gun is more fun) but this has the right mix so far. Plus, I’m racking up some sweet acheivements .
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing through the Spider-Man 3 game on the Xbox 360 while on vacation. My final verdict is that the game is kinda lukewarm. To be fair, the devolopers got some things right but then there are some issues that keep the game from being great.
First, the good news.
The swinging on a webline is damn near perfect. You can zip in between skyscrapers in a beautifully rendered re imagining of New York City. The controls are intuitive for this aspect - at least when pulling off simple webswinging. When you start more complicated maneuvers like catching people in midair (yes, you catch falling people in the game) it can be a little trickier.
The graphics are good. Not mind blowing in detail but not pathetic either. They work just fine. The animation for swinging, wallcrawling and even the fighting is really good. The voice overs by the respective actors/actresses playing each role is decent too. So, props for the presentation. I love scaling skyscrapers and then doing a super jump with the A button to move up even faster. The animations for this are purty cool.
I’ve found that the longer I stick with the game and the more I play it, the more I enjoy it. I guess thats the problem with most reviews today. They simply tell you what the first impression of a game will be. The great games are polished and shine from the onset. The good games like Lost Planet or Spiderman-3 grow on you. They are like the songs you listen to on an album after you’ve exhausted the radio singles.
The bad news.
The camera really sucks at times. Especially when you are climbing walls. Imagine this: you jump up to grab the ceiling so you can crawl on it. The camera does a 180 so that up is down and down is up. This is highly disorienting. To make matters worse, you can’t freely move the camera from this point on. Such an easy mistake to fix but the way it is makes the game unplayable when you stick to ceilings. Its more forgiving if you are just scaling up the side of a skyscraper but hanging on to the ceiling is best avoided.
The other bad thing is the overuse of interactive sequences. Its like at every cutscene you are pushing A or B or X or Y to make things happen. This is okay (Tomb Raider Legends used this VERY well) but in spidey, sometimes you use it just to pry open a door. And its annoying when you have to mash buttons for this. Every time you have to lift something, you are mashing X and B. Some of it is fun (like disarming bombs) and some of the cut scenes where you use the context sensitive button pushing are cool. It’s frustrating though when you beat a boss and then screw up the button presses and have to fight the boss all over again to attempt the same scene and attempt pushing the right buttons.
So . . .
That being said, the game is tolerable - and after a while, enjoyable. It could’ve been better if the annoying aspects had been removed. Playtesting for polish would’ve done this. But then, the game had to come out to cash in on the movie tie in and so you have a broken camera, overuse of interactive sequences and long loading times with each time you fail (which will be multiple since the game has random sequences that take multiple viewing to see what button needs to be pressed in what manner). Last but not least, the achievments (a.k.a gamers crack) keeps you going. God bless microsoft for that idea.
Videos
I like this video cuz it actually just shows you what you get when you boot up the game. The sound quality ain’t the best tho (too loud).
This next video is IGN’s review of the game.
I don’t really notice any framerate issues like they talk about but I have to agree that combat is not that interesting. All these sandbox games have pretty boring combat. Its all about button mashing. Half the time, you dont even know what you are doing! I tend to jump in the air, pull enemies close with B (web sling them) then pound with X or Y while in the air. Sometimes, I can do this to multiple enemies without ever touching the ground. When I fill up my combo meter, I push RB and X to do the special move that hits multiple enemies at a time. So far, I’ve only beat one boss so I cant complain about the boss fights. . . yet.
So, I agree with the review. The game is okay. It’s not great. It’s just good.
After XBLM recovered from the 
Just rented 
.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing through the Spider-Man 3 game on the Xbox 360 while on vacation. My final verdict is that the game is kinda lukewarm. To be fair, the devolopers got some things right but then there are some issues that keep the game from being great.
