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.