Damn!

I have a lot of different games I'm working on at this point, it's difficult to work on so many great games at one time. Currently I am working on Dragon Age : Origins, Borderlands, and Modern Warfare 2.

While having so many games to play at once, it is also difficult to beat a game you've lost touch with or are lost in the story if I haven't played for a while. It's not just that, but I'm also working on games that I will only play in co-op. These games include Resident Evil 5, Saints Row 2, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2. When your co-op buddy is never available to play any of these games it is even more difficult.

Also being difficult, there are games in my library that I've been wanting to play for a long time. These include Bioshock, Farcry 2, Prey, Prototype, Battlefield : Bad Company, Bionic Commando, Dark Sector, and Little Big Planet. Some of those games have been sitting on my shelf for almost a year and I still haven't even put more than 45 minutes into most of them. One thing that may make this easier is having my current roommate ;) He is playing a lot of games on my systems, while this can and will take play time away from me, it will also create a better gamer to play co-op with if any of those games support split screen. Looking forward to those Matt!

Next year is going to make this very difficult with a plethura of amazing games being released. Two off the top of my head are Mass Effect 2 and God of War 3. That's not even counting the countless games that were pushed back for spring release of 2010!

To all my gamer buddies, good luck next year! It's going to be an expensive, time consuming one.

Quality difficulties

So, I recently picked up a game that wasn't Uncharted 2. For those of you that have actually played the game, you can understand this issue. I popped Dragon Age: Origins into my PS3 after playing well over 20 hours of Uncharted 2 and I can definitely notice the production value of Naughty Dog's finest game to date. Yes, both games are completely different but when you go from playing through a movie; back to playing a game it can be kinda weird. I found myself taking a couple of hours of the gameplay trying to forget about the amazing textures and water effects to decent textures and water not reacting when you walk through it =P
Though now I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins for about six hours now, I'm growing to like the game quite a bit. So far the characters have a lot of personality, this is something very important to me because I like to find some type of connection to a character. The battle system (to me anyway) seems to be pretty fresh for a console RPG, but honestly I haven't been playing too many RPGs for a while.
Something I find very nice about buying this game early is the fact that they are including downloadable content for people that actually go out and buy the game brand new, I believe this offer expires in April some time. But for the people that sit and wait for that very first copy of the game in the used section to save five bucks are losing out on over $15 in DLC. If these companies keep doing offers like this, I'll start buying more new games.... I like free stuff!!!

Honorable Mention

I thought I'd type something this morning for a game that I like to sit down and play whenever I get a chance. I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1



Just starting on my voyage into purchasing and playing Indie Games, I thought it would be a good start being that the game is only $1 on Xbox Live Arcade. I can tell you this is the best buck I have ever spent on a game. It's not the graphics, that's not important. But what Jamezila (the developer) did with the style in I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1 is top notch. While playing this masterpiece it is playing one single song in the background over and over. While that sounds boring, it's not, other visual stimulation destroys your retinas whilst playing. Being hard to explain the coolness of all this, I've also added a video you have to check out.

Video Games | I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 | Launch Gameplay

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

I feel this will be a game I visit very often as a single player. Though when I have friends join me, this game is even more amazing with four players. Some of the weapons kind of suck, like the shotgun, but there are plenty of great weapons that make up for the slow and underpowered. If you have an Xbox, you need this game for the small price of $1.

Get off your ass!!

Well It's been a while since I've done any updating. To tell you the truth, I'm just lazy ;) I've accepted this fact. But I will be trying to post more often on here, maybe not very detailed or long since I'm likely going to use a few different blogging tools.

But as of late it's kind of weird what I've been doing. Yes, Uncharted 2 has been abused pretty badly. But It seems I've been trying to find as many games as I can for as cheap as I can and am building up my collection. Since purchasing Uncharted 2 I've also added four new games to my library. (Dead Space, Prototype, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword) I've been keeping my collection updated on raptr.com which also tracks my Xbox play time and achievements.

Tomorrow I'm picking up Dragon Age: Origins created by BioWare so maybe I'll start blogging my trials through this one. Either way, I've updated my blog. Even with a new name with a different spin on my Xbox LIve Gamertag.

Too Much

So Saturday I spent 9 hours playing Too Human until I beat the game. I really enjoyed the tone the game was trying to set with the Norse mythology, but super futuristic stylings of the setting. Mainly playing the game strait through as a band-aid cover up, or just doing it as quickly as possible so it doesn't hurt so much to continue.

My main annoyance of this game was the camera, really all you could do to adjust this was to press a button so you could see what was directly in front of you. Most games allow you to use the right analog stick to change your view and let you take the reigns, and this is perfect. Not in the case of Too Human, the right analog stick is the button you use for your attacking. There are always tons of enemies on the screen and really all you need to do is hold the right analog stick in the direction of the enemy you want to attack and your character will 'slide' mostly where you are aiming. To add a little variety there are aerial juggling attacks once you knock an enemy into the air, but both of these melee attacks are awful boring after the first hour.

There's so much I want to say about Silicon Knight's mess of a game, but I feel my writing skills are a little to inept at the moment to portray my complaints properly without yammering on about nothing. Being a huge fan of their Legacy of Kain series, I just feel a little bit let down by their efforts. Mainly because they worked on this game forever and even tried throwing Epic under the bus saying crap about the Unreal Engine 3.

Being a planned trilogy I am hoping Too Human's sequels change the camera and battle system completely. I know I'm not the only one that has complained about these issues since it's release in August 2008.

The beginning

This is the first video game I played, on the first video game console my family owned. Not many people have heard of the Magnavox Odyssey 2. A little known fact, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game console ever released. I never have seen the first Odyssey, but I have watched videos of which were pretty funny. I recently hooked up an Odyssey 2 just to find that the system is fried and will not work, I was saddened by this since there was multiple games installed on-board the internal memory. Though I did find a video of the game we all enjoyed the most which was in a 3-in-1 ROM cartridge called Speedway!-Spin-Out!-Cryptologic! The game we played the most was Spin-Out, a simple, 2 car racing game. Some day I wouldn't mind finding an emulator for the Mac, or even the actual system to re-live some of those classic memories.

Helghan?

Yes, Helghan... the creative name for a planet of which the Helghast live in the world of Killzone 2 for the Playstation 3. I'll be the first one to admit I'm not the best at playing video games, but certain gameplay mechanics made this game very difficult for me. If you've read any other reviews of this game you know there is a slight delay when you are trying to aim, which did not annoy me too much since this was an actual feature designed into the game to make the weapons seem heavier for a little more realism. Also to add more detail to the game, the reload times take longer than the average FPS. Killzone 2 is loaded with detail, there were certain chapters of this game I just stayed in one location looking at the details of the ocean crashing on the shore with the lightning crashing down in the background. Playing this game in surround is mesmerizing, there are few games that can engulf you in their world just by fine tuning the sound effects, and Killzone 2 did this for me. I would recommend at least a rental for any PS3 owner.

Dead Samurai

I am one of the many subscribers of Xbox Live. I was very skeptical about this at first, paying for a service that everyone else doesn't charge access for. It wasn't until recently that I've been finding how much I actually enjoy this service, all I really want to talk about right now is the content I've recently purchased from Xbox Live Arcade. This game is called The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, which I've provided a video of below. The graphical style of this action platformer is very stylistic and engaging for the eyes. In between levels there are comic cells that move across the screen which I find to work pretty well, short and simple. The gameplay is simple, yet deep with the combos you can pull off (so far I suck and find the game pretty tough in certain parts). Two player is where it's at though, Ian and I played the arcade mode of the game and you get to battle together to clear waves of enemies. I would strongly urge you to pick this up if you have Xbox Live, for 800 MS points it's hard to pass up.

Back when "Rad" used to be cool to say

So this is another NES game I played this last weekend called Rad Racer. One of the things I find most interesting about this racing game is the fact that SquareSoft (now Square Enix) is the developer. They made an attempt at "3-D" in this game, when you push select, the screen starts flashing in blue and red. I remember using the supposed 3-D glasses that came with the game when it first came out, and it was horrible; so I tried to see if it was my young eyes ... it wasn't. This is the first game I can remember where you could actually select the music you wanted to listen to; I think there were three various songs you could select from. A few years later Square released Rad Racer II.

Legendary!

I'm going to start this off with something recent, yet so far away. Saturday, I relived one of my past video game experiences from the late '80s and watched Ian and Shane play together. A game I used to play frequently as a child was Legendary Wings for the NES. As you power up your character, I remember becoming nearly indestructible as the video shows below. I'd say it would be nice to have a remake of this game, but really there was nothing exciting about the characters (other than the fact they had actual wings and wore blue or pink spandex); in this type of game, they could have just as easily been just another spaceship.