Reaching

The title of this blog is "Shouts from the Couch," but I've not been particularly angry lately.  In fact, if anything, the title now feels like it comes from a lazy couch potato who requires immediate assistance in reaching the bowl of onion dip that lies just out of arm's reach.

Speaking of reach, I finished the Halo Reach campaign on Friday, and have now officially dipped my toes into the sordid world of multiplayer.  And as much as it hurts me to admit, I must say:  I am enjoying the mulitplayer immensely.  I've even won a few matches!  (Only a few.)  I'm never going to be very good at Halo; indeed, most of the time I'm just barely competent.  But they've got so much to do in there that it borders on the absurd.  Most importantly, their matchmaking search criteria is fantastic this time around; I've only played 12 matches thus far, but I've yet to run into any racist assholes, and for the most part I've never felt like I was playing with people a million times better than me - which is to say that I've got noone to blame for my failure besides myself.  Which is just the way I like it.  And the new Points system is a fantastic incentive to keep playing, which is odd, considering that the only thing you can do with your accumulated points is to buy purely cosmetic changes to your armor, which you can't even see.

I think my problem with the Halo franchise is that because I've never been interested in the multiplayer, I've really only been able to base my opinion on each product on the strength of its campaign, and let's face it - their campaigns are all pretty stupid.  Reach is certainly paced well enough, and the enemy A.I. is quite devious at times and there are lots of memorable set pieces, but by and large the story is forgettable, the characters are interchangeable and hard to root for, and I frequently lost track of why I was going from point A to point B.  There's almost no backtracking in Reach, at least, so chalk that one up as a small victory. 

And it definitely looks good.  Great, even.  Definitely the best-looking Halo game yet.  But it's definitely not the best-looking game on the 360, not by a long shot.  It's not necessarily a knock - it doesn't look bad - but there's a reason why everyone licenses the Unreal engine, and why nobody licenses the Halo engine.

It's almost a shame that Civ V comes out tomorrow; I'd really like to keep playing Halo.  And that's something I'd never think I'd ever say.

pardon the cobwebs

I would say that there's no excuse for the absence of posting here over the last month, but that's not entirely true - there are several valid excuses I could come up with, and I'm sure I could make up a bunch as well. 

But here's the deal:  the last entry here talks about my failure at Starcraft 2.  Since then, here's what I've played:

• Madden 11.  I've always been one of those long-embittered 2KSports football fans who hated Madden and EA and everything it stood for.  But Madden won, of course, and if you have a serious jones for videogame football, it's Madden or bust.  And, as it happened, I started getting inexplicably excited for football season to start, and this year's Madden got good reviews, and I had some credit on Amazon that was burning a hole in my virtual wallet, and so there it is.  I've played about 10 or 11 games in my Franchise, which is set on Rookie difficulty, mostly so that I could get all the Achievements I cared to get as quickly as possible.  FUN FACT:  It is almost impossible to get the "Return 2 kicks for TDs with the same guy" Achievement on Rookie difficulty, because the opposing team is so terrible that they almost always go 4 and out, and you're lucky if you get to return just one kick - the one that leads off a half.
   
• Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light.  It's pretty good for what it is, and I imagine it would be a ton of fun if the online co-op ever got turned on.  Unfortunately, I think I've played all I'm ever going to play of this one, because now that Halo Reach is out I'm not sure that anyone will care enough to go back to this. 
  
• Mafia 2.  I actually did prepare a blog post for this; I had taken a sick day right after it arrived from Gamefly and accidentally/inadvertently finished the whole game in about 10 hours.  Here's what I can salvage:

Sometimes you can tell, just from the first 5 minutes of play, if a game was cared about in development.  After all, in today's ADD world, where developers have the balls to charge you to participate in a "beta", 5 minutes might just be all you get, and so it's probably a good idea to put your best foot forward (while still keeping the big guns for later in the experience).  Sometimes it's painfully obvious - the frame rate might be shitty, or the controls might be clunky and unresponsive.  Or, perhaps, it's just that certain areas of the game received more attention than others - sure, things explode pretty good, but the dialog and the voice acting both feel like first drafts; or, the driving model is responsive, but the combat sucks.

Mafia 2 was cared about.

But that doesn't make it a great game.

I was out sick yesterday, and I convalesced by playing the entirety of Mafia 2 (and, also, something else that I am not at liberty to discuss, wink wink nudge nudge).  And when I was going to sleep, I started thinking about how I would write about it, and I had this really well-written opening paragraph all set out, which was going to reference both this Joystiq article about how venerable games industry analyst Michael Pachter thought that Mafia 2 would probably be unprofitable, and this very well-written Rock Paper Shotgun review, which (among other things) made the salient observation that comparing Mafia 2 to GTA4 totally misses the point, and how Mafia 2 really needs to be compared to Mafia 1.

•  Anyway, yeah, there wasn't much to talk about after I finished Mafia 2.  It is a bland experience in an otherwise beautiful world.
  
• Professor Layton & the Unwound Future.  This just arrived in the mail on Monday, and... it really bums me out that I don't like these games anymore.  And the reason why I don't like these games anymore is because the puzzles, i.e. the reason why this game exists in the first place, have a tendency to be poorly written.  They can be unfairly difficult.  Or, most egregiously, they can only be solved with a walkthrough, and even then, the explanation for a puzzle's solution is obtuse or unclear.  The story is interesting, though, at least.
   
• Mass Effect 2: Shadow Broker DLC.  This is kind of a big deal, if you're a Mass Effect nerd.  The nuts and bolts of the DLC are pretty much just more combat, with a cool little vehicular chase scene (with the requisite shitty controls); so in that regard it's nothing special.  But from a story perspective... wow.  The ending of the DLC seems to be a pretty big deal, in terms of the ME universe, and yet the fact that a lot of ME2 fans might not see it would indicate that it won't really have that big an impact on ME3, which is kind of a bummer.  Anyway - if you're an ME2 fan, it's highly recommended.
  
• Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I got excited for the sequel and decided to give this another playthrough.  And it's still as good as it was the first time.

And that brings us to yesterday, when my copy of Halo Reach arrived.

I'll have more to say on Halo as I get further into it, but basically:  it's Halo.  And, also:  I don't know if I like first-person shooters anymore.  Or, rather, that the third-person action genre has gotten so good that first-person shooters kinda feel a little antiquated.  As in:  how come I can't use cover?