Guitar Hero 3

Played through easy to warm up on my rusty Guitar Hero abilities and quickly bumped it up to medium.

I don't quite understand the flak the game is getting from gamers on some sites I have seen. While I will never get that feeling of innovation I got from the first installment to the GH franchise I simply can't find too much to fault in the current incarnations game play. It is after all the same game with some minor additions and new songs.

The game has the standard career, co-op, and online modes as well as an area to purchase new song packs from Xbox Live. By the way anyone who has this game should download the two free packs provided. One is the songs for the boss battles which is one of the minor additions I was describing earlier, more on that to come, and the other is a Halo theme song remix which is pretty cool for a free download.

So Career mode is where I have spent most of my time so far and I have to say the minor additions do make the game more fun. Occasionally (3 times) through out the career of your band you come across a "boss battle" which plays out a little differently than the normal regiment of hit as many notes as possible. Instead of star power you get battle powers for hitting specific note combinations successfully. These powers are there for you to try and get the other player to fail the song and it can be a nice touch of strategy to a game that typically lacked any. Other than that its a pretty straight forward Guitar Hero game.

I have not yet tried multi player but later this week I will be trying out co-op with a buddy of mine and I may find some time to jump on Live to battle some people and see how I fair against them...I'm no Hendrix yet but I'm no slouch either.

One thing I have noticed on the 360 is that, at least on medium so far, when the camera is trying to focus on the guitarist and there's a lot of notes on screen the game seems to stutter a little bit, nothing that has affected my game play yet, but noticeable none the less. I have also heard rumors of guitar lag for the PS3, but as I don't have the game for this console these are just rumors as of yet.

More to come as info materializes from the ether.

Final Impression: Assassins Creed

So after two previous posts on the subject I now have my final impression of Assassins Creed. I stand by my previous assertions that this game is amazing in both concept and application. The only addition I have is that the ending was very fitting for the game and gives a sense of continuance that I was hoping for. Yes it does end on a cliff hangar and I can't wait for the sequel.

For those interested in achievements on the 360 make sure you go through the credits because you get a "Visions of the Future" Achievement unlock, and it gives you sometime to play around and find out a little bit about the story in the next installment. I really don't like to give out numerical scores on games because personally I don't think I am here to grade them, but more like give my opinion on what I thought about the game, but I do realize that people love to have numbers because they get all warm a fuzzy over them so if I had to give it a score I would give it a 9 out of 10. The reason it loses a point in my mind is due to the AI having some minor flaws and in the heat of the moment sometimes the controls don't do exactly what you would have liked. Well there you go guys either go buy, rent it, or miss out on a great game. More gaming once I get some new titles in.

The Onslaught Continues

Pouring more time into Assassins Creed, more that I realized as a matter of fact, has cemented this title as one of my favorites. It definitely has its flaws, which I will get into shortly, but the overall destructive force that is Altair is simply too much fun to pass up. The game plays out as a stealth game where the player, as the disgraced assassin Altair, must redeem himself for his failings by assassinating 9 prominent figures in the different cities of the holy land. Although as a twist there is a sci-fi element to the game which blends surprisingly well, and is something that I won't give away as it may be an enticement for a purchase or rental for you (you will thank me later). The idea behind this game's stealth is not one of hide in the shadows and stalk your prey, it follows the hide in plain sight school of thought, and the mechanics work for this type of game.

The hide in plain sight idea is that you, as an assassin, must make yourself so inconspicuous as to appear as just another face in a crowd. It also helps that your assassins outfit is very similar to a monks outfit and you will often find your self bowing your head in prayer in order to "blend" as the game puts it. With a number of tools and maneuvers at your disposal (ie: a hidden wrist blade, a sword, throwing knives, a short sword, and the ability to counter enemy attacks) you can pretty much kill anything with style in all situations; you aren't invincible mind you, but with the right amount of timing you can damn well appear to be so. The ability to use your stealthy removal of a guard in order to divert patrol attention away from something you are about to do is another great element to the game. Very quickly the player will find that the game is not always about staying hidden all the time, and with certain missions like save the citizen from the guards it is encouraged that you blow your cover and start piling up bodies. There is a system to lose the guards and it can lead to some fast paced high adrenaline chases until you can find a hiding spot and is another great aspect to the game.

As I stated before the pure fun that this game perpetuates vastly overshadows the flaws with the design, but there are flaws. For starters the stealth kill or at least one of them is an animation of you cupping the mouth of a guard and stabbing him in the neck with the hidden blade which is awesome and looks amazing. My problem with this is that it is fairly obvious that you are murdering this guy but despite this fact the guard less than two feet away will not react until after the body stumbles to the ground, at which point he comes and investigates his dead comrade and just can't for the life of him figure out what happened all the while I am able to get behind him and stealth assassinate him too.

Another problem is that for some reason all the guards in the country side are all suspicious of you from the start and if you don't walk around in either blend mode or stay out of their visual range they can definitely screw up exploration of the tiny villages you come across. The way I got around this was by eliminating every guard in the countryside that could blow my cover, and while it did take a little while to do this it made exploration a lot easier as I didn't have to slowly walk everywhere. The body count that I piled up also made the game more interesting as just running around looking for flags to collect and Templar to assassinate would have been very boring otherwise.

The final "flaw" with this game, while I understand where people are coming from, I don't necessarily agree with. A lot of critics are saying that the game is tedious and repetitive, and if you do all of the optional quests then I can see this as something that may be true to people of a certain mentality. I have been doing all of the investigative and free quests like scout the entire city from it's highest points or save the citizens and it may just be my ability to get into the storyline but I have to say that it adds to the character of the game. I mean you are in a huge city and are a highly skilled assassin so it stands to reason that you would want to get all intel possible on the target so the mission goes as fluid as possible. These side missions either net you that intel or do enough of the free missions and it adds to your life bar...it's like finding four heart pieces in Zelda.

As you can tell from my gamer tag I have gotten into the game, but not finished it yet. Even with that fact the game is only getting better for me, and I will post my final thoughts on the game once I get all the way through it.

Follow the Creed

Just picked up Assassins Creed, and I haven't finished it yet so this wont be a terribly long post. The only thing that I am going to write about this game right now is that this game is very very good. Pay no attention to those reviews that gave it a low to mediocre score. The game is actually fairly long if you play through it to get eveything done, and there are benefits to doing everything within each city. Pick it up and enjoy!

CoD4

Ok so I bought this a week ago and I have had some time to play through it. Let me start off by saying that for me this is not a single player title, I expressly bought it for the multiplayer component on the PS3. That having been said I did have a chance to spend sometime in the campaign and I am glad that I wasn't expecting too much from it because it didn't deliver. Don't get me wrong it was entertaining but there are so many fundamental flaws that it really took away from the actual game.

The problems are apparent as soon as you get into the first mission. The game trys to play like a squad based combat game, but fails to give you any control of your squad. What's worse is that for some reason the developers didn't give the player the ability to open doors and for that you have to rely on your team mates to go ahead of you and do the honors. Once you get the door open the team makes seem to stand there quite often and shoot any enemies that are around. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but because you can't run through your team mates you are stuck on the outside waiting for them to finish killing everything. Consequently this gave me the feeling that I was being escorted through the a lot of the missions. Top this off with the fact that enemy spawns are limitless until you pass point A can make for an aggravating experience. Some times it was impossible to hit that point because there were so many enemies and other times you can sprint through the enemy lines to point A and keep on going.

Where this game fails as a single player it more than makes up for them in Multiplayer. The system uses the same level/rank up style that Halo 3 uses except well these ranks actually mean something. Obtaining new ranks unlocks new gametypes, power ups, weapons, and new challenges. The custom class creation is simply innovative in a game like this and makes the game have more variety in battle situations. The xp system awards you for completing game type objectives, enemy kills, using the radar/air strike/chopper attack ability, and completing the challenges (ie: get 100 kills with this weapon or get 6 kills while squatting down).

If you looking for a great multiplayer game on the PS3 or the 360 this is definitely worth looking into.

CoX

Ok so the news it a little late but it appears that cryptic studios has sold the rights fully to the once City of Heroes/Villains partner NCSoft. What does this mean for it's subscribers? We for starters were going to so a tripling of the production staff and obviously a much larger budget. Those subscribers that currently only had one side of the game (either CoH or CoV stand alone) prior to Nov. 9th with get full access to the other side of the wall. Currently you can buy a combo pack with both titles for $20 in most retail stores. Those at NCSoft have stated that they are going to be more in touch with the player base as production continues on this awesome franchise.

I was a part of SWG and the debacle that lead to its miserable downfall. As such I was quite concerned when I learned of this transaction, but many may be happy to learn that pretty much the entire dev team for cryptic are being brought under the wing of NCSoft as this product is where their passion lies.

There really hasn't been a better time for people to subscribe for the first time or resubscribe with issue 11 on the horizon. I feel like we are going to continue to see good things from this dev team. way to go guys!

Horrible Retail

Let me start this off by saying that I am an avid penny arcade reader and as such a huge fan of what these guys do. So to kick off retail store bashing I will point you to this post http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/07 of theirs since they have most of the personal experiences I have encountered already written down.

I have also worked retail at Circuit City and let me tell you they are indeed the worst type of evil in this universe. They under pay employees, don't offer commission, make employees cram warranties down customer's throats, will pay two people doing the same job significantly different pay if they can get away with it, treat their computer repair crew, "Firedogs", like the lowest form of garbage, and the list can go on forever. It's for these reasons that you should shop at Best Buy or one of its other competitors instead.

One thing that I didn't know was what the guys at Penny Arcade were saying about EB Games, which is also Gamestop by the way. Apparently these retail locations will tell customers that they are all out of non-preorder copies even when they aren't if the game is going to be a big seller. In essence they are "punishing" people for not pre-ordering. This is the biggest crock of shit to the highest magnitude...obviously my money is worth less if I am not a pre-ordering customer. I am one of those people who has what's called a budget that I have to pay attention to, I can't afford to just buy every game and I wait for people who do have this luxury to play the game and tell me if it's worth buying. Sometimes this doesn't mesh well with the pre-ordering process. If they were truly out of copies then that would be one thing, but to try and chastise people for not following their corrupt marketing practices is absurd.

Well that's my rant for now... the key point here is that most retail places have evil intentions so buy at your own risk.

Bioshock Completed

Ok due to lagging on my part I took longer than I wanted to to finish Bioshock for the 360. The story twists were fantastic all up till the end, not giving out any spoilers but wow. The last boss was a cake walk though, maybe die to my vastly superior gaming prowess but I highly doubt it. Overall if you're looking to pick up a great single player title with a compelling and eerie story line then rush out now and get this one.

Now I just have to finish some of my other titles that I have been sorely neglecting recently...I'll keep em coming as I slowly lay waste to the titles.

Zombies!

Ok so Halloween came and went with little celebration, much to my dismay. This is largely in part because of the fires that have recently plagued San Diego County, because after all you can't throw a party if you house is gone or a wreck...but this is water under the bridge.

Bungie, the minds behind the Halo franchise, did something really cool for the night of ghouls and goblins by making their game type "infection" a ranked match making option which allowed many people to finally play large games of one to the most popular game types. There was however one small problem with the whole setup, if you had people in your party while trying to match make then it wouldn't find any games of zombie...on top of that if you had a party and playing a regular game type then it seems like the ranking system didn't allow people to gain ranks. It was really a bummer as I had people over at my house and we couldn't play zombie and since it was a "one day" type deal the chance has passed me by. No matter I am sure they will make it an official game type due to popularity.

On another Halo 3 note, I played numerous custom games with the guys over at Gamerswithjobs.com , and let me tell you they are some of the most fun games you will play. We played a game called "puma ball" and it consists of two teams with players near invincible playing a soccer type game with a warthog as the ball and player bases as the net. Each player has a gravity hammer and the rocket launcher and try to hurdle the warthog across the map. There was a pirate game where you have to stay on your ship if you want to have full shield as you stave off attackers on skiffs or try to prevent the other teams ship from boarding yours, let me tell you its an obscene amount of fun good work guys.

As has been stated I have been playing CoX lately primarily city of villains and have started a stalker which is akin to a rogue in WoW in the sense that it has invisibility and can do insane amounts of damage from stealth but once you get that initial strike done its very hard to deal consistent damage and stay alive. Updates will come as this character levels more.