I <3 Deadpool.

He’s such a crackup! Click the pic for a larger image.

Coming back around.

Staying on top of this social networking thing is becoming more and more difficult. My resolution for the year wasn’t to spend less time on Facecrack, although it should have been. Work has been keeping me pretty busy with the new year, and by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer. I finally caught up on all my webcomics yesterday. My RSS reader is still full of feeds left to read, though. However, despite my lack of free time, for all you interwebers out there I’m back with 4 quick reviews. I have been gaming a little too much, lately. Of course, being furloughed for a week and having a week holiday (tallying to two weeks off) during the cold winter season didn’t help. :) I’ve Gamefly’d my way through 3 titles, plus, I bought ODST the next day after my last post.

I had to try out G.I. Joe. I was a fan of the cartoon as a kid and loved the new movie. Unfortunately, the game was designed more for kids. It was fun, but not my usual bag. I do have one thing to say about it: there should be requirements for games if they’re going to start them out at $60. I mean, G.I. Joe should have sold for a LOT less as its opening price. There were no efforts put in to make the characters look humanly realistic. The landscape was expansive, but there were limits to where you could roam. The play control was sluggish as well. All of this I would expect from a game targeted at kids, but not worth $60. Gears of War is well worth the $60 price tag.

I’ve been slowly getting back into our Wii. My GF got it from her parent’s last Christmas mainly for the Wii Fit. Turns out, she’s more hard core about her workout, so the Fit wasn’t enough for her. That just means more Xbox time for me. :D At least, until she found out about Super Mario Wii… So Gamefly shipped me London Rush Hour Taxi. Not a bad game. Getting used to driving with the Wii controller was a bit difficult to start with, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun. However, my desire for a challenge and difficult puzzles goes beyond a driving game these days. I can’t even get into the Project Gotham and Forza series any longer than one evening. Taxi went back the next day.

Red Faction Guerilla. Here’s another “meh” I ran across. The graphics are well done and the landscape is massive! However, after a couple hours of gameplay and knocking out the first section, I was bored to tears. The monotony of the demolitions and guerilla-type “missions” you undertake gets old, fast. It’s worth a rent if you have some time. However, I wouldn’t recommend buying it until Gamestop drops the price to $20 on the “Previously Owned” list.

OK. Here’s one that’s been going around and around on the net. What is your take on Halo: ODST? To be honest, I love the Halo story. So to me, getting ODST was like buying the next in a series of books. Now, as far as the difficulty, I was quite disappointed. You start out the game as the “Rookie” (isn’t that typical). You’ve been passed out in your drop ship for the last 8 hours and wake up to Mombasa in shambles in the late evening. If you haven’t played yet, I’m not sploitzing here; this is all shown in the promo videos. You’re wandering around the city trying to catch up with your other ODST buddies (i.e., the rest of your 5 man and one bitchy ranking officer woman squad). As the Rook finds the remains from where his other teammates were, you run through their story as them. I found this to be a quite intuitive method for telling the story. But, like I said, the difficulty of the game is not like playing Legendary in Halo 2 or 3. I finished ODST on Hard the first go ‘round fairly easily. Normally, it takes me quite a while to tackle Hard without help. I even managed to rack up a good bit of the achievements along the way. Of course, the ODST's are human. They can’t take the beating that cyborg Master Chief can. You get shot in the head once, you’re dead. The ending is not something I have come to expect from the crew at Bungie. It was quite weak and more like one of those sappy “Hollywood endings.” This is probably why the game has gotten so much flack. My guess is Microsoft (or whichever execs are signing Bungie’s checks) forced them into a quick release for the series. That always equals some sort of bad result. Sadly, I haven’t had the calling to pick ODST back up and try out Firefight mode. I don’t play online that often, and most of my “Friends” are not Halo aficionados. I’ve been mesmerized by Soul Calibur IV lately, for some reason. And I’m not that big into fighting games (although I do own a few).

Oh, I almost forgot. I got Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for Christmas. I got stuck in one spot, so I quit playing. I’ll probably end up starting over. Quickly, I have likes and dislikes over the first (Marvel Ultimate Alliance), but I’ll tell you more about them later. If you’re a Marvel comic fan like I am, you’ll like it either way.

I had a good rant thought up about how gaming has changed (even with me) since Microsoft introduced the Gamer Achievement system, but I’ll save that for another time since this is already too long. BTW, according to Sakusen, “…2010 is not the start of a new decade…”. “It’s the end of the decade.” Just saying. :)

 

l8rz