I’ll be writing up a Madden 10 review soon, so keep posted!

The Good

The game is fun. It has all the classic elements of Battlefield combat: land, sea, and air vehicles mashed in with a large ground-based capture the flag maps. Another huge plus is that the game is only $15. I think that this is a great step in the right direction. I hope it sends a message to game publishers that you can publish a game that might not look the best or be game of the year but if it’s fun and cheap people will buy it.

They are also doing a challenge where the community unlocks new content by getting a large number of global kills. At 43,000,000 kills the respective system (Xbox360 or PS3) unlocked the Coral Bay map (which is an air-combat only map). This REALLY incentivized people to get on as much as possible and keep the fight going 24/7. Editors Note: Both systems have unlocked Coral Bay, although the Xbox 360 was the first to do so.

The Bad

This game is slow. While I enjoy playing it, I never get really passionate about it like I do COD4 or TF2. You have no sense of teamwork, or team goals, which is a problem in a game centered around team and squad based objectives. You basically run around capping points, trying to kill the enemy. When the game is over you are never really surprised about who won, because you have no clue what is going on elsewhere in the match.

The game in general seems very non-immersive. When I shoot my gun or run around I don’t FEEL like a soldier on a battlefield. I almost feel like I’m playing a rail shooter in an arcade.

When I hopped back into COD4 after playing this game for a couple reasons, I realized why COD4 is SO GOOD. When you run the camera moves around like I’m running, when I shoot my gun the camera makes me feel like I’m actually shooting a rifle, Battlefield 1943 just doesn’t do that.

The Down-Low

This game is fun and cheap, plain and simple. As you can tell, it wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played by any stretch of the imagination but it keeps me entertained and got me to pry open my wallet instead of GameFly’ing it like I do most games.

Boonie

Growing up we all loved the movie The Goonies. It was always a feel good movie that our school would let us watch when the teachers didn’t feel like teaching. Our love for this movie continued throughout our adulthood eventually peaking mid 2009 when we so lovingly coined the phrase “Boonie it up!” I was at home when I received a call from my Fragfest buddies who were at the store buying some beer for the night’s festivities. “What  your favorite snow cone flavor?” Not really thinking that the question had any real relevance I answered “blue” and hung up the phone. Ten minutes later my friends arrived carrying some particularly nasty looking is Blue Hawaiian Boone’s Farm. Now if you’ve ever drank much Boone’s Farm you know one thing: YOU WILL HAVE A HANGOVER. We were very all very aware of this fact and didn’t really want to drink the Blue Hawaiian, but our manly competitive spirit prevented any of us from actually ADMITTING that we didn’t want it. This left us with a dilemma, how do we decide who has to Boonie (the phrase used to signal to another man that he needs to take a healthy swig of Boone’s Farm, usually followed by all of us yelling “BOONIES NEVER SAY DIE!”) in a manly and equitable manner.

Games for Boonies

After much deliberation we decided that the best way to dispense drinks was through video games. But what video game to use? It can’t be a game with a high learning curve and it needed have a high turnover (from player-to-player). We found just the perfect game: Geometry Wars 2. The pacifism game mode is perfect a competition such as this. We would have “rounds” which consisted of each of us getting one life on the pacifism game mode. He with the lowest score would have to Boonie.

The Result

The result was one hell of a good time! This was competitive gaming at it’s best! This was the first competitive gaming I’ve done with real world consequences. If you lost you had to drink the death wine (Boone’s) and wake up with a splitting headache. As the night progressed we REALLY didn’t want to lose, but in the end it was all in good fun. We eventually expanded the Boonie game to other games (such as the new Scene It: Box Office Smash) and it holds true that it is super fun and gives you great motivation to win.

Give the Boonie game a shot and let me know how you all fare!!!

The New Xbox Experience is clean, smooth, and very Web 2.0. I love how they retained the blade system in the new guide and the Netflix streaming is easy, beautiful, and works flawlessly. The ability to install games is nice, not great or earth shattering, but nice. Now I can play games without having to hear my loud-ass 360 disk spin up. The avatars are more hip and fun than Mii’s, and definitely less Japanese (which is a good thing). I haven’t tried parties yet (I don’t personally play many games that use parties), but it looks fun and very polished.

The Bad

Netflix WHY CAN I ONLY WATCH THINGS IN MY INSTANT QUEUE?!?! WHY CANT I BROWSE FOR THINGS TO WATCH?!? This is a big hang up for me. Before this came out, I used a plugin for Windows Media Center to watch “Watch It Now” movies on our tv. This was handy because we would often just browse for an old movie we haven’t seen in a long time and watch it. Now on the 360 we have to have everything we want to watch in our Instant Queue. This works great for TV shows, becasue you can just go to each one quickly and see the episodes you’ve watched and watch the next one, but if you are in the mood for something unexpeceted the system leaves you somewhat helpless.

Installing games is nice for the disk noise, but other than that the feature is totally worthless. I was hoping I would be able to install a game and then play it without the disk. This would be handy for games like Madden 09 where I’m always playing it, but the wife might have a movie in the disk drive or I’m playing another game from Gamefly. No such luck, the 360 requires you have the game disk IN THE DRIVE when you play it from the hard drive. This would be okay if installing to the HD had any tangible benefit (such as loading faster, etc) but it doesn’t. Load times are identical to when you are playing from the disk. I hope in the future they will allow you to install to the HD and only require you put the disk in once a week so there is a healthy mix of security/anti-piracy and convenience to consumers.

While the avatars have more clothes customization than the Mii’s, the faces of avatars have about 1/5 the customization ability of Mii’s. My avatar has a bear that covers half of his mouth, but I cant’ move his mouth down to fix it.

The Ugly

Avatars are a stupid Mii rip off and completely unneccessary. While they have pros and cons compared to Mii’s, they are still dumb in my opinion.

The new slide system is just annoying. I have a hard time finding things and sometimes will be completely over to the right on a slide line and have no idea where i was originially. They tried to mimic thier UI for Windows Media Center and I think it is a flawed model.

So what do you folks think of the NXE?

My thoughts: VERSUS MODE IS FUN AS HELL. Nothing beats being an infected setting up an ambush on the survivors. I personally like being a Boomer and vomiting all over the survivors (calling in the always fun horde), but it’s also very satisfying to be a hunter and pin someone down tearing at their flesh!!

I do feel, though, that people’s worry about L4D’s lack of content and multiplayer staying power is warrented, but hopefully Valve will keep us in downloadable content so that this game will be fresh and fun for quite some time.

If I can get a crew of people together I’ll be sure to play as much of the game as possible and give the entire game a full feldged review soon.

Bullet-Tooth Tony and I have a habit of sitting around my apartment, drinking, playing classic Nintendo games on my Wii while we proceed to get drunk (fun, eh?). So last weekend we thought this would be a great throw-back game for our classic gaming ritual but after playing for something like 2 hours we had only beaten two robots (I also again must confess, both of the defeated foes were the work of Tony).

I’ll confess I bought this off of WiiWare. While I usually evangelize the Xbox360 as the console to beat, I hate hate hate hate the D-pad on the 360 controller. A d-pad needs up, down, left and right and when you are playing classic games on a d-pad with diagnals (like Bionic Commando: Rearmed) it just screws things up.

So pick this game up from your favorite game dispenser and give Capcom the money they deserve for giving us new content in a familiar format!!!

*Now, disclaimer time, I routinely was behind the times as a child. While I did have a Nintendo Entertainment System, I rarely got new games and when I did they were gifts from family members who had no clue what the “hip” and “happening” games were, so I played Mega Man first in my late teens via an emulator.

The biggest complaints I have about the game is that the graphics are pretty terrible and the commentary gets repetitive. . . . . . VERY QUICKLY. The graphics are a pretty moot point, though, being the focus of the game is the content and not the visuals. The game’s narrative is pretty generic and quickly gets very repetative. After awhile you want to punch the narrator right in the face.

My only other gripe is that the big button controllers are infrared, which means you need to have the controller pointed at the included IR reciever for them to work. I understand that this was probably done to lower the cost of the controllers, but for someone like me it’s infuriating at first. When I play anything on the 360 I relax and kick back, so imagine my surprise each time I go to answer a question and my answer isn’t registered because the controller is in my hand behind the couch. After that happened a few times I learned my lesson, though.

Overall I like this game, it’s a nice and quick way for the girlfriend and I to have some fun together and being that it’s now 60 bucks it’s pretty reasonably priced. If they ever do release some downloadable content for this puppy it will be well worth every penny.

metacritic

Amazon