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.

First off….

Dead Space (PC)

This game pretty much takes survival horror and re blends it.  It feels like it takes pieces from Resident Evil 4 and Bioshock and mixes it with some RPG elements.  This game uses the over the shoulder 3rd person view which seem to work better for immersion and the scary factor then the First person view.  This game kinda reminded me of what Doom 3 would have been if it was more than a flashlight simulator game.  Its dark in space but its overall dim lit and not completely black.  Doom seemed to get this wrong.  Immersion in a Horror game is all about the aura and the vibe that the maps give you.  And when you just plain old can’t see the map it kind of kills it and turns it into, “I’m scared because there is just shit jumping on me and I can’t see”  Don’t get me wrong Dead Space is full of cliche horror scenes like the typical monster comes out of the wall and attacks you.

The game rides on the pretty common theme of Alone in the Unknown.  The story line is pretty lame though, I’m not going to spoil it but its a bit predicable.  I did however like the weapons.  When I play a game i like to see some originality with the weapons.  Typically in many games there is the pistol, machine gun, and heavy weapon shtick.  Though this is how the weapon cast system is in Dead Space they seem to change it up with the Power node upgrades.  Its a system that allows you to modify and unlock attributes to your weapon with a series of branched out upgrades.   Another thing about this game that I haven’t seen in any other game is that you DON’T want to head shot, you want to take out the limbs.  This adds a fun element to the game.  And craftily flows over to some of the weapons.

As you may have seen from screen shots or videos, some of the weapons shoot out ammo in a line.   These are denoted by the 3 laser sights.  The fun thing is, is that you can choose on the fly how your gun is positioned  to shoot i.e. vertically or horizontally.  So if you want to shoot off an arm the best position is to have your gun shooting top to bottom.  And if you prefer to slow down the enemy you can adjust the weapon to shoot a line of ammo from left to right and take off a leg pretty easily.

The game had a good length to it as well.  It was just long enough to keep you from getting bored of the scenarios that it could throw at you.

Moving on..

Farcry 2

At first I thought I really liked this game.  I had the mind set that it would run just as shitty as Crysis which actually takes away from the overall game play experience.  When I launched this puppy, I found a gorgeous world that actually ran like butter.  Which was surprising, and a total bonus.  A few hours in I was even content with the story.  But after being let out on your own to do whatever (sandbox), it just got old.  My train of thought was lets get some good weapons going immediately.  Well to upgrade your weapons you have to talk to a dealer and he will give you a mission to unlock said cool weapons.  The missions given to you by the dealer are fucking identical every time.  Go to (X) on the map and take out convoy.  The convoy consists of a Truck and 2 Turret mounted hummers.  No difference, every single time.  Which leads me to my next grievance.  The roads are pretty repetitive too, it goes something like this.  1) take out map, 2) find location and drive, 3) drive past check point 4) get out and kill everyone, 5) continue till next check point and repeat.  Its kinda like GTA but the roads have nothing cool on them, its not like your driving down a street and have someone to run over or something to look at.

So at this point I am bored and go to get back on the main story line, which turns out there really isn’t a main story line.  Its pretty much run around and help out whatever faction or what ever friend you make.  I was pretty disappointed.  I tried to go back to the butcher to continue my quest but he wasn’t there.  I walked in and was getting shot at from all around.  And on my objectives all it said was get a mission from random person i.e. gun guy or faction, which I was bored out of my mind with. I need some drive to keep me from continuing.  Some story line to keep me involved.

I’ve had some time on my hands as of late so I have played an beaten most of the game I play.  I will have to talk about Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: WoW and even my aspect on Left 4 Dead.

Graphics

The graphics in this game are great. Stylistically he game is a giant cartoon with small video enhanced bits and it fits the game perfectly. I honestly think this is where the Wii is headed. It can’t compete wiht the PS3 or the Xbox 360 in video power, so they will work with things that are would look good on any system but many of the beefier systems have abandoned (such as a 2D platformer done in cartoons).

Controls

The controls in a Wii game make or break the game. Because it is the system’s big selling point, many developers focused on using the Wii’s motion controllers in as many ways as possible, which in many games is  complete overkill. Wario Land: Shake It! has the perfect control usage for the type of game it is. First, it uses the Wiimote in a horizontal fashion which for a simple 2d platformer is retro-heaven. Horizontally the Wiimote is nothing more than a slightly akward, wireless NES controller. The Wii’s 4 direction d-pad means that I never had trouble telling what direcion i was going in *coughBionicCommandoReArmedcough*.

The only time you use the motion in the game  is in fun little bits that remind you that you are on the Wii and are used in ways that make the game much more dynamic and fun. The basic motions are shaking the controller to spit out the treasure in a bag of gold (and with a title like “Shake It!” trust me, you will do a ridiculous amount of shaking) or moving the Wiimote down to do a ground slam, but they added some motion depth by using the tilt component in VERY fun little ways. My personal favorite was one world boss where you tilted to move a rolling cart back and forth which also changed the angle in which you used a giant punching glove on the front of your cart to shoot objects at the boss.

Sound

The music in this game is HORRIBLE. It sounds like Dentist Office/Elevator rejects. Maybe the developers were trying to make an inside joke here, but I just found it annoying. The other sounds in the game are great and very funny. Hearing Wario grunt while he climbs a ladder or a little bad guy scream like R2-D2 on fire is just priceless.

Overall

I loved this game, but then again I’m a huge sucker for a 2D scroller. It was cute while offering a challenge and not taking itself too seriously. I actually had a reason to fire up my Wii and not be completely disappointed and decide to sell it.

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.

Why was ctf_well so bad? Because was one LONG ass ctf map. I mean the travel time from intel point to intel point was massive. This caused two problems. The first is that when you have that long of a travel point you get used to your intel NOT being in your base. You just assume it’s either at large or dropped somewhere you don’t care about. The second problem is that the large size of the map got rid of the intensity of getting intel from one base to the other. On 2fort for example, if you have a well organized team an enemy trying to cross the bridge with your intel should have one hell of a fight waiting for them.

What Changed

What changed with the new version of well? The biggest alteration is the removal of the middle building and the subsequent removal of the middle water to that building and an overall shortening of the map. The removal of the middle building is great idea for this map. Now, there is a much sorter, straight shot between each of the spawn buildings, making a great zone of carnage in the middle (with, mind you, still a train rolling in and out at random intervals). The removal of the water path was also great, although now spies might lament because they no longer can get to the enemy intel completely with a minimum of enemy interactions. The removal of the middle train station also gave them the ability to shorten the entire map, which is so helpful. It creates a sense of urgancy and excitement when your intel is taken, because you know there are limited paths to take it back. You feel like you have the ability to hunt down the intel thief, and defend your intel long enough to return it to where it belongs: in your base!

Overall, I’m really pleased with this map’s update, but unfortunately i think its already poor reputation amongst players might keep people from realizing how much fun this map actually is.

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