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.