50K!

That didn't take very long at all, actually. I hit 50K late last night in Assassin's Creed 2, after finishing a particularly flashy bit of killing.

AC2, by the way, is amazing. My initial concerns were probably just me trying to keep my expectations in check; I'm now at least 5-6 hours in and I'm totally in love all over again. In fact, I think the only reason why I'm awake so early on a Sunday (especially since I was playing until around 1:30 in the morning) is because I'm so anxious to jump back in.

My only real complaint is that sometimes the controls get fucked up. For the most part, the game tries to keep thing as simple as possible and so it'll more or less guess what you're trying to do and just let you do it without a series of convoluted button presses, but sometimes it guesses wrong and sends you careening backwards off a ledge instead of up the side of a wall.

OK - Venice, here I come!

Progress

The quest for 50K is going much better than I'd originally anticipated; I've got 6 weeks to get 327 points. I'm pretty sure I can get that relatively quickly from Assassin's Creed 2, with an assist from Left 4 Dead 2. So, hooray for that.

This past weekend was a little weird, gaming wise, but when I think about it it actually worked out to my advantage. The weekend's primary goal was working on music, but every once in a while I needed a break, and so I'd dive in to something on the 360; and since I'd finished Modern Warfare 2's campaign already, I didn't feel pressured to pick one thing and finish it.

I keep grinding away in Forza 3; I kinda messed up and bought the wrong car for an upcoming race in the Season Play mode, and so now I'm just going through tournaments in an effort to make that money back. I can't remember if I made the analogy here or in an email, but here goes anyway: Forza reminds me a lot of the Tiger Woods games, in that there's an absolute ton of stuff to do, a lot of which I've already done in previous versions in the franchise. On the flip side, Forza 3 does not in any feel like it's treading water, the way the Tiger games have for the last few years.

I'm also still running around in GTA4: BOGT, which is making me love the original GTA4 a little less. The game just feels dated; not in its story or setting, but in its actual gameplay mechanics. Combat feels incredibly clumsy, and the game is just brutally punishing if I fail a mission - I lose cash, armor (if I had it) and ammo (which doesn't get replenished), plus time keeps moving forward so if I had something I wanted to do at a certain time, I probably don't get to do it if I have to keep doing a mission over and over again. Saints Row will never be confused with GTA in terms of story and emotional resonance, but in terms of having fun and not being endlessly frustrating, it's not even really all that close anymore. The Houser brothers are starting to make a little bit of noise about GTA5; I know there's tons to think about in terms of making a great GTA game (story, setting, dialogue), but I would suggest that they also add some refinements, if not a complete overhaul, of the way the game is actually played. Let us recharge our health; let us have mid-mission checkpoints; let us not be punished so harshly for failure.

I'm starting to get really excited about 2010 Q1; specifically, Mass Effect 2. And it occurred to me that I never finished my 3rd playthrough of ME1, so I decided to give that a bit of a whirl. As it happens, I'd stopped playing near the end of the last DLC they released; said DLC was more or less a glorified combat tutorial, which is arguably the least successful aspect of the original game. But whatever - I turned down the difficulty and plowed through the last few missions and got 100 Achievements for my efforts, and then I saw where I actually was in the story, and then I decided to call it a day. (If you're familiar with the first game, I'd just gotten off the Citadel and hadn't yet started those first 3 long missions you get in order to advance the story; in other words, I'd have a looooooooong way to go.)

And then, in a bit of idle panic, I downloaded the Torchlight demo from Steam, just because I'd heard it was good and I was curious to see if my aging PC could run it. The short answer is yes, it can, and shortly thereafter I'd purchased the full version and now I'm totally hooked.

This week: Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and the God of War Collection for PS3.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to Pandemic Studios, who very well might be getting shut down today. Mercenaries was one of my favorite games on the original Xbox, and Star Wars Battlefront was a lot of fun, and even Destroy All Humans! was worth a few chuckles. I'm hopeful that Saboteur will at least be a fine farewell from one of the more ambitious developers out there.

The Quest for 50K, or, the world's saddest violin playing just for me

Today is November 3, 2009, and my Achievement total is currently sitting at 48,723. That gives me 2 months to get just under 1300 Points. Hitting 50,000 wasn't necessarily a stated, determined goal of mine, but I hit 40K on my birthday last year, and getting 10,000 points in a year seems like something worth pursuing. However, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be able to cross the 50K threshold in time, and maybe there's a tiny part of me that's a little bummed out about it.

Yes, I'm going to be busy with other stuff over the next 2 months; we all are; the holidays are nearly upon us and we all have stuff to do. But I'm also just not entirely sure that the games are going to be there.

There are 5 major Xbox360 games left in the calendar year, as far as I'm personally concerned: Dragon Age: Origins (currently shrinkwrapped, sitting in my messenger bag), Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Saboteur. I'm also still heavily invested in Borderlands and Forza 3.

So that's 7 games, not including Brutal Legend which I don't know that I'll ever finish (and certainly won't get any multiplayer achievements for), and not including the 500 points for both episodes for GTA4, which I'll be lucky if I get half of.

I can rule out getting more than 300-400 in both MW2 and L4D2; I don't really play multiplayer all that much, and in the case of MW2 I'm sure I'll only do the campaign on Normal difficulty. I'm sure I can rack up 400-500 in Assassin's Creed; I have no idea how much time I'm going to put into Saboteur, and if it gets shitty reviews I might just hold back from renting it altogether. So it's really about finishing Borderlands (which supposedly isn't all that difficult), getting as much as I can out of Forza, and doing my darnedest with Dragon Age, which is anywhere from 40-100 hours that I probably don't even have.

It's going to be close. It would certainly be nice if the 360 did something cool to mark the event; I'd even settle for a "I got 50K gamerscore and all I got was this stupid t-shirt for my avatar" thing. Most likely, though, I'll cross 50K and nobody will know but me; I'll pour myself a glass of single-malt scotch, pat myself on the back, and then blog about it here, for an audience of none.

The Calm Before The Ridiculousness

It's 9/8/09, which means that in a little over 24 hours I'm going to be in some sort of Beatles-induced catatonic stupor, and then the wheels totally fly off shortly after that in terms of the fall release calendar. This is probably a good place, then, for me to check in before I check out.

So, then, first things first - please accept my humble apologies for the lack of regular updating. Blame it on the crappy summer release schedule, which coincided perfectly with an absurd uptick in my own personal music-related endeavors.

The last few weeks, though, have yielded both some free time and some really, really good games to be played. Here's some quick impressions:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum

Without question, a Game of the Year candidate - notwithstanding the fact that 2009 has been a pretty shitty year in terms of quality. But the real question is why. There's a number of things to appreciate about developer Rocksteady's latest effort; they took the hottest comic book/movie license out there and avoided the easy cash-in opportunity. They used the animated series - which is better source material for an interactive experience, anyway - and crafted a remarkable playground in which to explore. I always felt that Sam Fisher would kick the shit out of Solid Snake - and without endless cutscenes to muck it up - but I'm pretty sure that Batman could kick the shit out of both of them, at the same time. The game features fantastic combat mechanics, but doesn't rely on combat to pad the game's length, to the game's tremendous credit. The Riddler's puzzles offer tremendous incentive to explore every nook and cranny of Arkham Island, and the 40 Achievement Points I got for solving every riddle and finding every hidden message were among the most satisfying I've ever accumulated.

• Shadow Complex

I spent my free time this weekend on my 2nd playthrough, with the objective of finding every hidden item. There were only 2 or 3 that really tried my patience; I'm still not entirely sure how I was able to nab them. (They involved breaking blue boxes, in case you're already familiar with the game and what that means.) I found myself comparing Shadow Complex with Batman:AA more than once; it's true that I played them more or less at the same time, but the two games complement each other in pretty interesting ways, I think - mostly in terms of encouraging exploration and offering incentives for backtracking. I'll put it up there in GOTY territory as well; certainly it's the XBLA's best offering this year.

• Trials HD

I love Trials HD; I just wish I was better at it. I've managed to finish all the hard levels, but I'll never get beyond a bronze medal in any of them, and my ineptitude at the ultra-hard levels is discouraging. Difficulty aside, though, the game is an absolute blast; it's beautiful, accessible and addictive, which is really all you could ask for in a downloadable title. The game features some of the best leaderboard integration I've ever seen, in any game; it also features the quickest restart of any game I've ever played, which is a big deal since failure is constant in the higher difficulties.

• Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

I was a big fan of the first Layton game and very much looked forward to this latest iteration. I'm a bit torn on it, though, to be quite honest, and it's puzzling (ha!) to figure out why. The game's puzzles are much more varied than in the first game; the puzzles even have a bit of context, which makes them feel important (unlike the first game); there's a wonderfully-integrated scratch pad which lets you scribble notes, trace paths and quickly add up sums. So, really, the game ought to be a better experience; and yet, for some reason, I quickly found myself racing through it - sometimes using a walkthrough, which totally defeats the purpose - and the game's ending was utterly preposterous. I'm curious as to why I had such an unfortunate experience with it, but I will say this - as quick as Trials HD is when it comes to restarting a level, Layton 2 is tediously slow when it comes to retrying a puzzle, so much so that I probably resorted to a walkthrough because I didn't feel like waiting 10 seconds if I got something wrong. If nothing else, though, the game did offer up my favorite game-related quote in quite some time:

"As a gentleman, I feel that it is my duty to take one of these balloons."

• Wolfenstein

I'd forgotten this was on my Gamefly queue. And, well, what do you know - here we are a few weeks later and I'd nearly forgotten I played it for about an hour.

------------

Here's my to-do list for the rest of 2009.

*All titles 360 unless otherwise noted*

MUST PLAY:
Beatles Rock Band
Dirt 2
Scribblenauts (DS)
Mario & Luigi 2 (DS)
Brutal Legend
Uncharted 2 (PS3)
Borderlands
Modern Warfare 2
Dragon Age
L4D2

INTERESTED IN:
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Katamari Forever (PS3)
Dead Space Extraction (Wii)
Alpha Protocol
Ratchet & Clank (PS3)
Forza 3
Blur
Assassin's Creed 2
Saboteur

DO NOT CARE
Halo ODST

Weekend Recap: Superbowl edition

I apologize for the lack of posts lately; the post-holiday doldrums have settled in, apparently, and I haven't found that much blog-worthy news of late.

I've polished off the Anchorage DLC in Fallout 3, and I've decided that I'm not going to play any more Fallout until the level cap patch hits; I hit level 20 even before I started the DLC and the way I figure, I might as well get rewarded for killing things. It's odd - for the entire course of the game, I was always struggling with money, but now I'm suddenly rolling in cash.

Finished The Maw; it's a cute, fun, better-than-expected XBLA title, but I'm not sure I'm ever going to touch it again. I think I mentioned this the other day - I like my XBLA titles to be the sorts of things that I can continually play over and over again, be it something arcade-y like Geometry Wars or something puzzle-y like Puzzle Quest or Bejeweled 2.

Speaking of which, there's a Bejeweled mini-app on Facebook that I'd been getting obsessed with during my less-busy hours at work, and so I fired up my XBLA version over the weekend. Is there any other game in the 360's library with tougher Achievements? My God.

Finally, I had a friend over yesterday before the Superbowl who'd never played Left 4 Dead before, so we sat down and did the airport level from top to bottom. I think I'm still buzzing from the experience; it was absolutely thrilling and we could not stop high-fiving each other for the rest of the day. I keep forgetting how absolutely incredible that game is; I need to be playing it more often, especially in this dry release period. Maybe we'll put a SFTC L4D night together or something.

The Best Achievement, 2009 Edition

Until yesterday, my 2 favorite Achievements were getting all 500 Agility Orbs in Crackdown and getting the Wax Off Achievement in Geometry Wars 2. But it will be difficult for anything to top my first Achievement for 2009; I have never exerted so much mental and physical energy to get 20 Points as when my wife and I played Rock Band 2 for literally 10 hours in a row yesterday, doing The Endless Setlist. I was playing drums on Hard, but my wife was playing guitar on Medium and so that's all we got credit for; that said, she saved my ass repeatedly during the last 3 or 4 songs and so I wouldn't have been able to finish it without her.

(We got five stars on pretty much everything right up until those last 4 songs, and then we just got killed left and right. I think it kinda sucks that you spend so much time playing all sorts of cool songs only to finish with a bunch of speed-metal sludge; I understand why it's there but I'd much rather finish with something a little more musical.)

My arms and legs are totally sore now, and I think I'm going to take an extended break from playing drums. But it was totally worth it; my wife and I climbed a mountain together, and that's a pretty awesome way to start a new year.

Prince of Persia sort-of review

I can't help it; I'm still giddy about crossing 40,000. Wouldn't it be nice if the 360 gave your avatar a little balloon/confetti party every time you crossed a significant number?

For the record: I officially crossed 40,000 by getting the "Flawless Fretwork" Achievement in Rock Band 2. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should also acknowledge that I was playing The Police's "Roxanne", which is not very hard at all on Expert. Indeed, I'd accidentally gotten 100% the previous day, but my guitar wasn't signed in as JervoNYC (alas, it was the drums) and I spent the next 20 minutes playing Roxanne over and over and over again and always spazzing out at the very end.

Anyway. I'm here to talk about Prince of Persia, which I finished in about 10 hours, pretty much all in one sitting.

My initial impressions ended up being pretty much spot-on; the game is beautiful and the art direction is truly impressive, and there are some vistas that are truly jaw-dropping. And, also, the controls never felt quite as tight as I wanted them to feel; the Prince doesn't immediately go into a full run, which messed up my timing a bit, and there are certain things in the game that never stopped being "new" - a perfect example being that when you jump to a surface below a ledge, you don't have to press "A" to jump again because you automatically jump up to the ledge; if you hit A during the tiny window between animations, you will inevitably jump to your doom - er, get reset to the last checkpoint. It took me almost 3/4 of the game to stop doing this.

Much has been made of the fact that you can't die in PoP; all this means is that if you miss a jump - and you will, and not always because it's your fault - you are "rescued" by Princess Elika, and you're taken back to the last place you were on solid ground. You're still dying, it's just that the game never stops moving forward. It's actually a nice addition and it ensures that you always have a sense of momentum; it's very hard to put down.

It is a shame, though, that much of your not-dying is because of issues with the controls, which is maybe my biggest problem with PoP, and is certainly the biggest issue with any game that requires precision. The thing that not-killed me the most in this game was whenever I'd jump to a pillar/column. Generally speaking, if you jump to a pillar, you'll automatically swing around to the back so that you can keep moving in the same direction. Sometimes, though, you don't want to move in the same direction, because (a) there are multiple paths to follow or (b) you want to move up instead of forward. In this case, you will swing your body around to the direction you want to face. The problem I had in these cases was that the animation for moving your body around takes a little bit of time and isn't always responsive, and the camera would occaisonally move in the opposite direction. Which is to say - I'd jump to a column, turn left and jump, but the game would interpret that to mean I'd jump to a column, turn right and jump into the abyss.

Other times, there's a jump you have to make that requires a double-jump. The game generally does a good job letting you know when these double-jumps are coming - the visual cue is that the screen starts turning black/white - but sometimes it doesn't, or the window you get is half as long as it normally is, and that just kinda sucks.

The first game in the last-gen series was almost perfect, and the thing that held it back was its combat, which just sucked. The 2nd game was apparently designed to maximize the shitty combat, and the 3rd game kinda refined it a bit but it was still shitty. The combat in this new iteration is generally much better, because you only fight one enemy at a time, and you don't fight very often. That said, it's not without some significant annoyances; you fight each of the 4 bosses multiple times, and with each successive encounter the fighting is broken up with QTE events, which break up the flow and, incredibly, do no actual harm. All that happens if you pass a QTE event is that you go back into combat. Furthermore, near the end of the game, each fight is basically 80% QTE, so your actual window to deal damage becomes progressively narrower until it's a wonder you're doing any damage at all. Even worse is that should you fail a QTE and the princess rescues you, the boss gets healed as well, and this never stopped being annoying.

I should probably back up a bit here and talk about the main point of my initial impression, which was that this new Prince was a bit of a douchebag. Ubisoft has had a real bitch of a time trying to find the right tone with the PoP series, which is odd because they totally got it right in Sands of Time. The 2nd game was all goth and naked chicks and being super intense and hardcore, as if that's what market research said that the franchise really needed, and the 3rd game... you know, I don't even really remember the 3rd game other than it was better than the 2nd one, which I stopped playing less than halfway through because I hated it so much.

Anyway. I think it's fair to say that this year's Prince never truly stops being a douchebag, although certainly there are moments near the end of the game where he lets up just a bit. The game's story is somewhat generic but interesting; there's a few twists but you can see them coming, and here I think there was a pleasant and unintended consequence as a result. (I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can, but you may want to skip to the next paragraph just in case.) The Prince, in this game, is a bit thick; he spends an inordinate amount of time talking about chicks and gold and tomb raiding, and when he's asked about himself he keeps things relatively vague, and while I suppose the game designers thought that would keep him mysterious, it really just makes him appear dense and stupid. I am neither dense nor stupid, however, and as I said above I saw where the story was going long before the Prince did. But what made this interesting is that this lent the rest of the game this accidental air of tragic inevitability that I'm not sure it would have had if the Prince knew what I knew. Two of the biggest themes in the PoP series have been the notion of fate and the illusion of time, both of which also come into play in this game, and I must say I was actually somewhat moved by the game's ending, partially because the Prince stops being such a douchebag, but also because by the time he figured out what I already knew, he did something that I did not expect. The game is set up for at least one sequel (surprise!) but the ending is still very satisfying, and that's not something one sees very often.

(Spoilers over).

The short version is that the game has a decent story but a terrible script. I don't want my Prince to be all "cool" and modern and talking about girls and shit; there's absolutely no sense of time or place in this game, which I suppose would be more frustrating if the game lived or died by its story, which it does not. In any event, the Prince should not sound like he's on a TV show.

I think this review (or whatever this is) comes off as maybe a bit negative, which maybe isn't fair. Or accurate. I really was having fun for a significant portion of my time with it, and that's ultimately the most important thing. But it will not be in my Top 10 of 2008, and I think that's why I guess I'm a little disappointed with it.

Big announcement to come later today, possibly right after I finish posting this. It deserves its own post.

33, 40K

I am 33 years old today, and I broke the 40,000 Achievement Points threshold earlier this morning. I AM KING OF THE WORLD.

Prince of Persia "review" and GOTY posts are forthcoming, as well as a big announcement. For now, though, I am going to enjoy my cup of coffee and wait for my brain to get started; I had a Rock Band birthday party here yesterday and I'm still not fully coherent.

Good Times All Around

Last night was epic.

Last night was the sort of night that makes me seriously reconsider my pick for GOTY. As said previously, I'm refraining from doing the big GOTY post until after Prince of Persia arrives - I'm a huge fan of the series, and with all the positive reviews it's been getting, it could very well have an impact.* But as I've also said previously, I entered the 2008 stretch run still feeling confident in my GOTY choice.

I'm having some serious questions now.

Last night was a night spent with Rock Band 2 and Left 4 Dead.

Let me start with Rock Band 2. My wife and I have a band together: "Lilo and Two Poots", named after our two dogs and their farts. In this band, I play drums (on hard) and she plays guitar (on easy). We'd been hitting a wall in our tour progression, though - Medium is too hard for her on guitar, and there were a bunch of competitions that had Medium difficulty as the lowest available option. And so, as she was out of the house, I took it upon myself to pick up the guitar and plow through the stuff she couldn't do.

And, as a result, I ended up beating the game (I think). There was a 5-song set that we needed in order to open up some new venues, and then there was an 8-song set in Shanghai that would get us on the cover of Rolling Stone. After the RS show, I opened up every other venue in the world, and so obviously there's still a tremendous amount left to do, but the credits rolled anyway. Having only really played RB2 on the drums, it took me a little while to get used to playing guitar again, but I quickly got the hang of it, and I had a friggin' blast. There's so many great songs in that game, and all of the guitar parts are sensible. My biggest problem with Guitar Hero 3 was that the difficulty level often had nothing to do with the actual music that was being played; playing a song on Medium was often times harder than actually playing the actual song on an actual guitar. RB2 does not make that mistake at all - I did my guitar parts on both Hard and Expert last night and the difficulty was absolutely fair; if I screwed up, I knew it was my fault, and if I was able to get 4 or 5 stars at the end, I felt like I'd earned it.

And in the middle of this RB2 insanity, I played some Left 4 Dead with some good friends. We managed to get through an entire story (I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but it's the one that ends with the last stand at the boathouse). L4D might not be the most complete game package out there right now; it really just does one specific thing, though, and it does it exceedingly well. We were constantly keeping tabs on each other, racing in to fend off a Hunter on a downed teammate, calling out Boomers, making sure we all had our flashlights turned off if we heard a Witch, setting up gas can traps for oncoming horde assaults... and all the while, the excellent AI-controlled 4th member of our party was watching our 6, healing us when necessary, and never, ever getting in the way. The game is remarkable in its pacing, but also in terms of communication; the three of us were constantly talking to each other, but then (also) our in-game characters would chime in with situationally-appropriate comments which often cracked us up. Not to mention, we all scored a number of Achievements as we progressed, most of which were pretty cool and not really things we were consciously aiming for.

This is a long way of saying that RB2 and L4D are now firmly entrenched in my top 5 of 2008, which is getting more and more crowded with every passing day.



*According to Amazon, I won't be getting my grubby little mitts on PoP until Friday, the 5th.

Decembering

Some quick hits as we enter December:

• Maybe getting up to 40K by the end of the year isn't totally far-fetched. I've got less than 900 points to go, and plenty of Fallout 3 and the forthcoming Prince of Persia to go through, as well as giving Dead Space another, proper go; I suppose I could always try to finish up what's left in Tomb Raider Underworld, if things got really out of hand...

• Speaking of reaching the end of the year, I'm really just waiting for Prince of Persia to come out before I make my big GOTY post; I don't necessarily think PoP will impact my top 10 one way or the other, but you never know. And I'd love to be wrong about PoP.

• I finished Tomb Raider over the weekend; as I'd guessed, I wasn't that far off from the end, although I was a bit surprised at how abrupt the end actually turned out. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high, but I was pretty disappointed; the game has certain high points but for the most part it feels lazy and uninspired. Supposedly there is 360-exclusive DLC coming up, so I guess I will hold on to my copy for the time being; I would imagine it'll be a bonus level or two (possibly even the Croft Manor puzzle level that's been a favorite of mine in the last two installments).
  

• I've only played the first 10 minutes of Chrono Trigger for the DS, which is probably why I'm failing to see this as the greatest RPG of all time.

• My brother got me the Wii Classic Controller as an early birthday/holiday present. I mention this because having the Classic Controller has finally gotten me excited about owning a Wii again - I'm going to go download Ocarina of Time and Donkey Kong Country. And I think that pretty much says it all, in terms of the state of the Wii this year.

• I was at a Best Buy on Black Friday - in the afternoon - and the scene was decidedly non-hysterical; indeed, you'd almost never know what day it was if not for various sale-related posters. Anyway, my inability to find a Blackberry Storm very nearly resulted in me getting an iPhone, but cooler heads prevailed, and I was actually able to find and buy a Storm last night in NYC. So far I'm relatively pleased with it; it does the things I want it to do, at any rate. That said:

1. The contact list is ugly and could use a re-design.
   
2. The interface in general is sluggish, although this is supposedly being addressed in an upcoming software update.
3. There isn't a tremendous amount of apps to use, nor is there a store (that I can find, at any rate) to buy games. It's not a dealbreaker, but having solitaire or sudoku on the go is always handy.

Stay tuned for the forthcoming GOTY post, which will be a doozy.

Remembrance of Things that Almost Were

I feel like I have about a million things I want to talk about today; I'm not sure how many are actually post-worthy, and I'm definitely not sure how much time I have to write, so we'll see how it goes.

But first things first - I'm now only 15 measly Points away from my goal of amassing 10,000 Points in a year. It's probably too difficult to try to get to 40,000 before the end of the year unless I go on a Points-whoring binge, and to be honest I'd much rather actually enjoy the games I'm playing right now; then again, I'm only 1227 Points away...

And here are some quick recaps before we get to the meat:

• I think I'm almost done with Tomb Raider: Underworld, in every sense of the word. I'm pretty sure I'm in the last level, and unless I feel the need to chase after some (minor) Points, I'm probably not going to play it again. I think they dropped the ball with this title, big time; Legend and Anniversary had generated a lot of goodwill towards a franchise that had been plummeting into oblivion, and Underworld was a fantastic opportunity to really blow us all away, and instead the game feels a bit under-developed. Even something little like cutting out the Croft Manor minigame is a bummer.
  

• I played another 30 minutes of Left 4 Dead with some friends last night - for some reason I got booted off of Xbox Live after we all wiped in the middle of a stage and I couldn't log back in. That game is friggin' awesome. The computer AI is absolutely fantastic - you almost can't tell the difference if one of your friends is handing the reins over to the computer - and the overall pacing is absolutely incredible.

...

This is where I was going to talk about the recent discussion of the reviews of Mirror's Edge that have been circulating around the 'tubes, as well as answering a question from the MTV blog about waiting for DLC, and I was also hoping to put up the synopsis of a conversation I'm having with a friend of mine who is somewhat anti-gaming. But as the fates would have it, I've gotten super-busy at work and so those things will have to wait. Have a great holiday, everyone.

Weekend Recap: pre-Thanksgiving 2008 edition

Last Tuesday I noted that, among other things, I was hoping to increase my Gamerscore by 10,000 points over my total at the end of 2007:

I started the year at 28788; I am currently at 37403. There's still 6 weeks left in the year, so I still have time to make it to an even 10,000 point swing.

I certainly made up a lot of ground over the last few days; by my calculation, I've gained 1075 Points in less than a week, which means I've only got 310 more to go.

At least 600 points came from Scene It: BOS, which doles out the points like they're going out of style. (My wife likes playing the Scene It games, which means I buy them as soon as they come out.) I like this new game a lot; it uses Avatars, which make them seem a little less pointless, everything's gotten a nice graphical make-over, and they seem to have a healthy obsession with Simon Pegg, which is OK with me. The only real problem with the game are the announcers, who are even more horrible than they were in the last game; I mean, they're FUCKING HORRIBLE. Thank God there's an option to mute them.

A few more achievements came from Fallout 3, but that game should not be played for points AT ALL. I was all set to name GTA4 as my Game of the Year, but I have to say that every hour I spend with Fallout 3 makes that decision a little less concrete. I'm about halfway to level 10, and I'm probably going to stay away from the main quest for a little while longer and work on some side stuff. There is so much to see in this game, and the level of detail is simply staggering. Perfect example: I was doing one of the very first sidequests in the game, which required me to go to this bombed out town and pick up some mines; while I was there, I decided to break into some houses and see what there was to loot. And each house that I broke into featured this little unspoken short story of each family's last moments - one house in particular had a pair of skeletons lying in bed holding each other, and it actually made me stop for a second and think about what I was actually seeing. What I love about Fallout 3 is this deeper notion of history; everything you're looting is stuff that belonged to a different time and place - and, well, it belonged to a human being who died. Not many games are able to convey that sense of a lived-in world very well - even Bioshock struggled with it at times.

What else, what else... oh, well, yeah. I caved and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld, mostly because Gamefly kept pushing it back and when I checked Sunday morning, it was slated to ship this coming Tuesday, which is bullshit. My initial reaction is pretty much par for the course: it's Legend with a gorgeous new coat of paint and a really shitty camera. I'm in the Mexico level (which is, I think, the third level if you don't count the prologue), and it's got a wierd non-linear progression which is actually a little annoying, to be honest - Tomb Raider games shouldn't be sandbox-y. I'm also missing the Croft Manor exploration level that's been a favorite feature of mine in the last 2 games, although considering that the very first thing you see in the game is the Manor exploding, it probably makes sense that it's missing. (Maybe it's unlocked after you finish the game?)

Played a tiny little bit of Left 4 Dead; that game is awesome and I need to give it another go.

Oh yeah, also played a bit of A Kingdom For Keflings, which I think I really only downloaded to be eligible for some stupid contest. It's basically a super-lite strategy game, with Avatar support; it's actually a decent time-suck, although I'm not sure how much time I'm going to spend with it. I'll probably finish one game and then go back to Civ Rev for my strategy needs.

The Best Achievement / Release Calendar

Up until last night, the Achievement I was most proud of was finding the last of 500 Agility Orbs in Crackdown; last night, however, I got the Wax Off Achievement in Geometry Wars 2, and even though it's a substantially less Point increase, it was a HUGE monkey off my back. I like GeoWars2 a lot, even though I'm near the bottom of almost every leaderboard in the game, and Pacifism is my favorite of the game modes. The problem was, I was so obsessed with getting the Wax Off achievement that I wasn't actually playing the mode - I was simply trying to get the achievement, and that led to lots and lots of frustration, and I often wondered how I would ever get back to the sheer joy of the actual mode without getting the Achievement. After another 10-15 tries, somehow everything lined up and I was able to unlock it, and now (1) I don't have to worry about it anymore, and (2) I can go back to playing the mode the way it was meant to be played. That said, Wax Off - and a lot of the other Achievements in GeoWars2, for that matter - does a great job of teaching you how to avoid the enemies and how to strategically steer through gates.

The Olympics are killing my CivRev buzz; my wife keeps wanting to watch the Olympics on our HDTV. Good thing, then, that the upcoming release calendar is somewhat bland and uninspired; I'll probably still have a lot of open hours with it before the Next Big Thing hits.

I was going to do a Release Calendar, but there's really no need; there's no week-to-week insanity like there was last year. Some big titles are coming out, to be sure, though...

MUST HAVE / ALREADY PRE-ORDERED

• Mercenaries 2
• Star Wars: Force Unleashed
• Little Big Planet
• Fable 2
• Fallout 3
• Saints Row 2
• Gears of War 2
• Resistance 2

not a lot of original IP in there.

RENTING / MILD-to-VERY CURIOUS

• Too Human
• Tales of Vesperia
• Infinite Undiscovery
• Viva Pinata
• Harvest Moon (DS)
  
• Harvest Moon (Wii)
• Rise of the Argonauts
  
• Silent Hill: Homecoming
• Far Cry 2
• Midnight Club: LA
• Dead Space
• Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
• Mirror's Edge
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
• Left 4 Dead
• Prince of Persia
• Tomb Raider Underworld
• Last Remnant

STILL HOPEFUL IT WILL BE RELEASED IN 2008

• Brutal Legend
  

33333

Someone pointed out to me that my current Gamerscore is a pretty nifty 33333. Hadn't even noticed, to be honest - I've not really turned on my 360 recently.

Finished Uncharted - I liked it and look forward to a sequel where the enemies aren't so (a) bulletproof and (b) plentiful.

Traded in GRiD - it just wasn't doing anything for me, the way DiRT did. DiRT sucked me in from the moment I got started, whereas GRiD remained inaccessible and a little too unfocused. Also, the driving just wasn't as much fun - it's as if the game couldn't tell whether it wanted to be Burnout, PGR or DiRT on asphalt. DiRT, on the other hand, had an incredibly clear focus and you immediately knew what you wanted to do. Also also - and this is inexplicable - the instant replays, which were arguably the best feature in DiRT, had no option for slo-mo!

Also traded in MLB08, but not because it's a bad game - indeed, it's probably the best baseball game I've ever seen. It's just that, well, I totally suck at it. Even on the lowest difficulty, and with the pitch speed set to the minimum, I almost never made contact with the ball, and I never scored a single run.

Finally: some big news. There is supposedly a podcast in the works - I don't know if it'll be here, or somewhere else, but we're trying to get our shit together and as soon as we get our technology in place we're going to start pumping out a weekly show. If you have Skype, you are more than welcome to be a guest (once we figure out how to get you recorded).

Lego Indiana Jones and the Quest for Attainable Achievements

Funny thing happened yesterday. My copy of Lego Indiana Jones arrived via Gamefly, and even though I had a million things to do, I felt compelled to pop it in and check it out. About 30 minutes later, I'd unlocked 2 or 3 Achievements, and I suddenly realized it had been at least a week since I'd heard that sound or remembered what that felt like.

See, ever since I finished the story in GTA4, I'd sorta been half-heartedly trying to get to 100%, but it's a time-consuming process even if you are giving it your all, and I've got a long ways to go on pretty much everything I need to do. So aside from finally figuring out what I was doing wrong on the "Fly the helicopter under the bridges" Achievement, and somehow beating the CUBED high score, it had been many, many hours since I'd unlocked any Achievements. Add to that my time spent on my PS3 - Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds is pretty addictive, and I also decided to download Crash Bandicoot 2, just because - and you can see why getting a little over 100 points in just over an hour in LIJ would feel like a shock to the system.

As for LIJ itself: I gotta say, I'm really enjoying it so far, maybe even more than the Star Wars games. Maybe it's because I've always secretly liked the IJ movies more than the SW movies; maybe it's because I think the puzzles are better, and are a more natural fit with the source material; maybe it's because watching Lego Indiana drop kick a "Nazi" is always endearing and awesome. The humor is just as spot-on as it's ever been in this series, but they also do a pretty great job with the platforming (such as it is) - there are moments where this kinda feels like a Tomb Raider game, which is great considering what Tomb Raider games are emulating in the first place.

My rented copies of Ninja Gaiden 2 and GRID should be arriving any day now, and I must admit I'm not really looking forward to either of them. The previous Ninja Gaiden game utterly broke my spirit, and everyone's saying that the camera in NG2 is even worse than the first one. And the word about GRID - about how the 360 version suffers from freezing - is very disappointing, as I am a huge fan of DIRT and was really looking forward to this (although, of course, since I haven't actually played it yet, I have no idea how bad the problem is, or if it even exists at all).

And then MGS4 arrives next week. I've set up my Gamefly queue so there's no reason why I shouldn't get a copy immediately; and yet I kinda don't give a shit. I'm playing it because as a PS3 owner I feel obligated to play it, and so that I'll be adequately prepared when the first wave of discussion hits the 'tubes, but... as soon as I hit a cutscene that goes past 10 minutes and I lose track of whatever the fuck is supposed to be going on, I'm gonna sink back into my couch and wonder why I let myself get talked into something I knew I wasn't going to enjoy.