Minus World

In my rush to abbreviate my last post as much as possible, I completely forgot to mention this week's XBLA goods. Well, good, anyway.

n+
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 130 gs, 4 online for 70 gs)

Given that I've been playing video games since I was four or five, there are times when describing a game in terms of its derivations occurs. While it's not my favorite style of reviewing, it certainly fits this game, because everything that is derivative is well-executed.

n+ pits you as a stick figure ninja up against peculiar environments, explosives, and a lot of turrety things in what could best be described as Super Mario Brothers 3: TECHNO REMIX OONCE OONCE OONCE OONCE. Between the boucy blocks that I couldn't help but picture bearing music notes, the greatly increased jumping power from running inertia, collecting coins left and right, and a dash of wall-jumping from Batman for the NES, this game was like a fusion of some of the best platformers of my youth.

The best part is, I'm not even a big fan of platformers. Paid for it after the first tutorial level, and I'm terribly curious as to what this online Survival Mode happens to be. Get it.

I think I'm lifting the impromptu hiatus I took from the other games I had floating around today, too. Since I'm going to Vegas next weekend, I figure I'll just play what I've got until then and send everything back, save for Bioshock if it doesn't get finished and whatever they send me to replace Avatar.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

I don't even care about Avatar, so this review will be quick.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth: The Most Pointlessly Long Title Ever
Achievements: 5 (all offline for 1000 gs)

Game inserted at 2:32 PM.
50 hits registered, all unchievements unlocked for 1000 points at 2:35 PM.

This game is kind of ugly, the voice acting weak, and there are no mouth animations. THQ still sucks.

You can choose Iga or Koga.

I'm a few days late on this, but Assassin's Creed is here and is trés sweet.

Assassin's Creed
Achievements: 44 (all offline for 1000 gs)

I was mildly worried about this after hearing only tidbits about the puppetteering controls, thinking it was some overblown, confusing system to get specific results out of your action. Glad to see I was pleasantly surprised. I recall a lot of people showing disdain for the sci-fi sidestory running through things, but I'm digging it, and already starting to wonder where they could be going with things.

There's not much to say that hasn't been said by someone else already, so I'll just say play it. Sure, there's a lot of sidequesting and optional stuff, but this is definitely a world worth getting as much experience with as possible.

Since I've been busy and it's just those last two achievements, Bioshock's getting a time rule exemption since I figure I can finish it by Thursday, even though I should technically be dropping it in the mail today. I'd probably be farther along if I were sticking more religiously to the SAVE EVERYWHERE thing. The game still sucks me in the second time around, and I blew a good twenty minutes of progress last time thanks to a stupid death. Rrg.

CoD 2 is also on hold, but because the disc is messed up and keeps locking up my system. Not cool.

Another milestone strikes soon, too. Once Avatar gets here, I will have played all the retail games out to date beginning with the letter A! Finally, something that feels like progress.

Getting carded.

Hefty update today. Call Of Duty 2 came in yesterday, plus XBLA goodies, plus I picked up Culdcept SAGA because it's a low-rent title and everyone's freaking out about it being hard to get, at least that I know. The copy I got was actually the last one they had at GameStop when I went to pick up Wipeout Pulse, so I guess they may be right about the scarcity.

Call Of Duty 2
Achievements: 13 (all offline, 1000 gs)
Online play: I'm pretty sure anyone who'd be playing this online has and is rocking out in CoD4 by now. Since none of the achievements require you to go online, I'm not going to bother checking.

I'll be honest, I've been a hard person to impress with military games. It's hard to care all that much about WWII now that it's been beaten to death nine ways from Sunday, nevermind how removed most gamers are from the events of the 1940s due to age alone. As impossible as it may sound, you can only kill so many Nazis before it gets boring, and I'm pretty sure I met my quota back in the days of Wolfenstein 3D*.

That being said, two missions in and I already really like this game. Infinity Ward stepped right up to the challenge of building games in hi def, because even for a first-run game on a new console generation, CoD still looks and sounds great. The control layout is stripped down to the bare minimum for a first person shooter, which does a lot for enhancing the feel of being in an actual war.

The achievements are all related to story mode completion, and the game's another potential 1000 in one run fest, if you're feeling daring and leap right into the hardest difficulty setting. Personally, outside of the occasional lucky/drunk murder streak in Halo, I'm terribly average when it comes to FPSes, so I'm running Easy to get a feel for things, then diving right into Fuck City to see what I can get before sending this back.

If you never got around to playing this, it won't harm you to do so. If nothing else, it's a nice reflection of how solid this series really is.

Commanders: Attack Of The Genos
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 195 gs, 1 online for 5 gs)

It's Advance Wars with a few cooler unit designs and much shittier character portraits. Not much else to say about it. I dug it well enough to buy it, but you're probably better off grabbing Days Of Ruin if you've got a DS.

Bitches really need to stop phoning it in on the online front with "win an online match" as their only online achievement. If you're going to implement multiplayer, you might as well give more incentive to play it, especially if your game's mediocre, right?

One other little nitpick I have is that, unlike a lot of games that'll tell you you unlocked something and ask you to get the full version to enable achievements, you have to replay the Tutorial level after buying the full game to get the Tutorial clear achievement despite getting an "unlock full version" prompt. Weak! Sure, it's easy, but it still feels like a waste of time.

Someone please tell me who Sierra Online's been blowing to be the only crew dropping games onto XBLA, too. They're okay games and all, but wtf, there've got to be other devo crews out there dying to get some exposure.

Discs Of Tron
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 155 gs, 2 online for 45 gs)

Classic arcade game = I suck at it, but I suck less at this one than the original Tron game. Simple dealie where you're throwing your disc at Sark and he's throwing his at you and you can bounce it off walls and move around to try and avoid getting hit.

Achievements are mostly for various sorts of style points moves, like winning without moving, winning without deflecting, going x amount of time without doing anything but dodging, and so forth.

Simple fun, but probably more worth it to fans of the arcade version than anyone else. The end.

Culdcept SAGA
Achievements: 50 (38 offline for 785 gs, 12 online for 215 gs)

This is a franchise I've been meaning to get into for a while, since I had friends pushing me to play the PS2 version(s?) back in the day. Now that there's online play and several people I know on Live that have the game, I'm so in.

The quickest way to describe the concept is Magic: The Gathering meets Monopoly. You take tiles of different elements by summoning creatures to them, and if an opponent lands on one of your tiles, they have to pay a toll unless they defeat the creature holding the place for you. Meanwhile you're trying to complete laps of the board and improve your standing to accumulate a given number of points before the opponent to win the match, and of course there are instant spells that can effect your player or the opponent, or bolster your creatures in a fight.

Character designs and graphics are neat, but the character voices and cop-out, mouth-flap speech animations aren't. It's pretty enough in general, and the soundtrack's okay, but I get the feeling I'm going to be hooking up my iPod for some relief from the generic RPG tunes soon enough.

One big caveat, though it could be because I'm new to this, is that long matches are loooong. It took me half an hour just to win on a 20-space square board in the introductory match. Be ready to sit down for a while if you're going to pick this up.

As for the achievement list, it looks like it's about 1/4 story, 1/4 style points for different sorts of match completion (one-color decks, specific related cards all out at once), 1/4 catch 'em all (cards, outfits for your dude, and objectives), and the online stuff (mostly match counts). A nice spread if I do say so myself, with appeal for all sorts of approaches while still sponsoring exploration of the entire game.

Coming soon: Gamefly actually sends me a game I'm looking forward to! Assassin's Creed is supposedly in the mail!



* - Defeating Master-D in Bionic Commando is the exception to the So Many Nazis rule. That never gets old.

BILLY... (Daddy, no!)

Another blast from the past rolled in today. Not much I can say about it that hasn't been said, though.

BioShock
Achievements: 51 (all offline, 1100 gs)

This game's pretty much just amazing, and everyone should play it. While not quite all it was hyped up to be, it's still a solid experience, and something I recommend everyone play even if not for achievements. In summary, you end up in this underwater city after a plane crash and try to figure out why, with questions of morality and a few games of Pipe Dream along the way. I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilage, if that's even possible at this point.

In all honesty, you can get every achievement in one playthrough, so long as you play on hard and turn off vita-chambers (read: autosave). Just remember that the wrench rules, and you should enhance your abilities to make it rule even more when you can. Save like you would in a PC game, which is to say every five steps, or at least after any event or victory that seems remotely important. And if you want to make life easy, you can crank the brightness so you can see better, but that seriously kills a lot of the experience.

Personally, all I have left to do is to beat it on Hard and without vita-chambers, so I'm boosting the brightness to save me the hassle, but I already beat it once before, so nyah.

I was about to rescind some of the negativity I spewed re: Call Of Juarez in the last post, because the shooting stuff with Reverend Ray is fun, but then there were more platforming issues. Bugger that. Slightly more playable than my first impression but still annoying.

Got a day or two left to decide if I'm keeping Blue Dragon or not, since I've gotten a whole lot of nowhere in this first month but I do so like it. I probably will, given that the Rock Band guitar I was expecting to shell out for got pushed back to April. We'll see.

Poker in the rear.

I would be a liar if I said this project wasn't starting to get to me. That double hit of fucking Cabela's was a blow, to say the least. But I will soldier on, and I think halting queue additions for a bit might get some better games to show up at my door. I think I have up through the letter E queued up so far, so I'll leave it at that until things clean themselves up a bit.

Anyway, Arcade freshness and another retail game in. Let's get down to business.

Poker Smash
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 185 gs, 1 online for 15 gs)

Shit's fun. Panel-de-Pon-style puzzler where you clear blocks by matching up three of a kind at the basest level, but since the pieces are playing cards, you can make full poker hands and get bigger and higher-scoring clears. Simple concept, solid execution, more fun than you might expect.

The achievement list mostly has to do with getting all the possible hands and different numbers of chains; the only offline thing is winning a match online. Simple enough, I imagine.

My big love in this game is the control scheme. Rather than having it so you swap cards between two positions with a button, you move the cursor with the left stick and the card selected with the right stick. A lot more intuitive, and it speeds up gameplay something fierce. Granted, I'm still confused as to why they disallowed vertical moves, but that does kind of add to the challenge, so I'm down with it all in all.

I bought this right off the bat, and between the fun gameplay, excellent setup (leaderboard ticker right at the bottom when you start whuuuut), and decent soundtrack, you might as well drop 800 points if you're into puzzlers.

Retail-wise, I recieved Call Of Juarez, which was either release-run or close to being just as old. That or I'm confusing it with Gun, since there was a surge of western-themed crap around the time of Oddworld: Stranger and whatnot.

Call Of Juarez
Achievements: 36 (26 for 745 gs, 10 for 255 gs)

You're a gundude looking for gold in the old west or something. I dunno. Seems simple enough. The thing is, none of the achievements sound like things you'd come across through normal gameplay, at least not offline.

Sure, I can see killing five dudes without reloading in multiplayer being entirely plausible, and not getting detected on a stealth mission? Kind of obvious. But shooting off hats in one chapter? Sure, I'll recant if someone says I need to be non-fatal or shoot hats in said chapter when I get to it, but really, that makes no sense. I think achievements are more fun if you have some you can get without checking the list first, because then people who aren't complete whores like me will play the game for the game's sake, before going back for more gamerscore.

I'll be honest, the gameplay's pretty frustrating. The first-person view is all HUD, with very seemingly out-of-scale representations of your weaponry when you're holding something, and just trying to flee town is already proving annoying, trying to swing gaps with just a whip. Thanks, Tron 2.0, for ruining the whole THOU SHALT NOT PUT STUPID PLATFORMING BULLSHIT IN AN FPS thing. Second swing in is already a crap shoot, and I'm wondering if I'll ever get to later chapters at this rate.

The dialogue, admittedly, isn't too bad, and graphically it's fine aside from the half-assed, two-frame ledge-climbing "animation," but you're not even going to hear the former unless you crank the volume, and even then, it's peppered with some unnecessary profanity that kind of kills the mood. If anything, I'd like it better if it were hokier.

Argh. If I can move on with the game, I might actually get some decent gs out of it, but I'm not holding my breath. Not a recommend to even play, to be honest.

ANTHRAX IN THE FACE

Congratulations, Cabela's Alaskan Adventures - YOU ARE THE FIRST GAME I AM SENDING BACK EARLY IN A FIT OF RAGE. Seriously, this game is godawful. I'm like two feet from the end of a sled race and I break the sled? Even though I've been on the trail the whole time? Eat a fat cock! Go to butt! I do not have time to waste with your fickle triflings.

On the flipside, African Safari or whatever? Not so bad, even though I totally forgot how to change weapons and whatnot for a couple days. I'm down with this. I am good at shooting stupid animals when buying a fucking tent is not an issue.

Gamefly also got Burnout Revenge back today but I dunno what they sent me next. Whatevs. Watch it be another Cabela's.