Welcome to NLU "WheneverIfeellikewriting" #82... okay, this is actually NLU Weekly #82 and I have a few things to discuss with you today. Until last week (week of Oct 11) there really a lack of anything new to write about, but now we are fully in the holiday rush of games, with at least one game worth buying every week until nearly December. So on the agenda today are two of those releases so far: Brutal Legend and Borderlands. We'll end with Closing Out as usual and discuss the remaining schedule of wallet / bank balance breaking proportions. Go!

Impressions: Brutal Legend
I don't really have much to say about Brutal Legend... I really wanted to give Tim Schafer's newest game a shot, I didn't like Psychonauts' gameplay, but I did enjoy the story, dialog and world/characters... it really is the same here, Tim Schafer should write/direct animated cartoons... I'm serious I'd be a HUGE Tim Schafer fan if I didn't have to play his games to enjoy the stories/worlds he creates. He's a funny guy with a great sense of humor, but when I have to play a mishmash of mediocrity to enjoy that, well, it blows.

Brutal Legend is a big fat tease, a big fat mean tease... you think you are going to play a 3rd-Person hack and slash action adventure game and then slowly it starts changing... squad commands... then before you know it holy **** it's a ****ing RTS!!! I hate RTS and turn based strategy games, it's probably the only genre I don't really like playing and when I found out it was part of Brutal Legend (as simplified as the RTS element is) I was turned off instantly. I haven't really played it since October 13 when it was released. Sorry Tim, I respect your efforts, but you gotta start making animated films... for reals. RTS is NOT metal.

Impressions: Borderlands
Now here is a mixed genre game that is completely legit. Borderlands takes the precision twitch skill based shooting from Call of Duty and combines it with RPG-like questing, loot collecting and skill trees to make something quite excellent. I am almost 30 hours in and am still collecting all kinds of crazy guns, fighting tons of bandits and solving many quests... it is super addicting and holy crap Borderlands contains the some of the most exciting treasure chests in gaming you can't help but be riveted as they fold open revealing your next haul of loot.

I'm going to save my full thoughts for when I complete the game and maybe try the co-op and some different characters, but from what I played the outlook for long term play is great.

Closing Out
I've got a lot of games on tap for the next few weeks, I don't think I can handle them all really but I'll give it a shot. Next week (Oct 27) Forza Motorsport 3 is out; Nov 3 is Dragon Age Origins and finally Nov 10 is Modern Warfare 2. That's a lot of stuff; all of which have large potentials to be time sucking... It took over 50 hours to finish Forza 2, I can't imagine Dragon Age being anything less than a 40 hour game and the original Modern Warfare sucked up over 16 days (384 hours) of play time over 2 years, add in Borderlands and my life is over... lock me in a vault and I will see you some time in 2010. I'll do my best to write timely impressions on each of these titles as they are released. Talk to you later. Loading Complete!

Welcome to NLU Weekly #81, it has been two weeks since my last blog entry and for that you can blame my laziness and you blame ultimately Twitter. I am finding instead of writing epic blogs for three hours, I just quickly note down my thoughts on Twitter... I really should start doing a weekly Twitter dump or something... if you haven't done so yet you should probably follow me on twitter, that way you can read my thoughts on the latest games without waiting for me to suck it up and write one of these damn things. For this one I am going to just do another one of those quick thoughts blogs, no more than a paragraph for each topic... here we go.

Games Thoughts Quick
- I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum a week or two a go and it was a really great game. The stealth sections where actually really fun and I loved how with each guy you took out in a room the other thugs would more and more frightened. Solving the Riddler's riddles was a little easy but they kind of gave the game a Metroid like feel where you couldn't get every riddle until you go the right upgrade. I highly recommend Batman.

- The Beatles: Rock Band came out and I got that as a birthday gift (it came out the same day) and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The art style is unmatched in music games and it's even pretty fun to watch especially during the trippy "dreamscapes" in the later songs. The only real problem is the game is really short and easy (in three hours you can finish all 46 songs) and it is quite possible that your favorite Beatles song is not on the disc... even if it isn't a personal special favorite, many of their #1 hits such as "Help!," "We Can Work It Out," "Elenor Rigby," "Hey Jude," and my personal faves, "Yesterday" and "Penny Lane" are not in this game. Three Beatles albums are slated for release this fall, so I'm sure we'll eventually get these songs. DLC for the WIN and the LOSS.

- Mid-September mean it's time for NHL Preseason and the Pair of new NHL videogames. This year is a little shaky, I'm not so sure about either of the games this year... NHL 2K10 has some of the most advanced AI in hockey videogame history, but the AI of the goalies is beyond stupid and it frankly ruins the game. As for NHL 10, EA didn't spend much time on AI and it shows... it unbelievably broken, it gets stuck in loops, doesn't make quick decisions (something very important in hockey) and it is OBSESSED with taking shots from the blue-line... I have to play each more but it's not looking good for either game this year.

- I played a bit of Midnight Club: Los Angeles and I got pretty tired of it after about 5 hours... it's a really tough game, it is incredibly hard, even in the first few races you will have trouble winning. The race types are pretty repetitive and I fucking HATE the characters in this game; your character is a douche-bag who is cocky as all hell... and you will get tired of the lame school yard trash-talk delivered in various LA slang. At the starting line: Competitor: "This is the last time you're gonna see me, son!" Your Character retorts: "No it ain't I got a rear-view mirror!" OH SNAAAAAAP!

- Forza 3 and Brutal Legend demos where released this week and they are both pretty fun. Forza 3 demo features one track and 5 cars, it isn't something that will hold your interest until Forza 3 arrives in October (27) but it will give you a good idea of how the cars will handle. Brutal Legend demo is about 25 minutes long, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough to get an idea of all the gameplay, but the demo is funny and it looks to be better than Psychonauts.

Closing Out
That about covers what I have been doing the last couple of weeks... things are sure to heat up soon, so I will hopefully manage to do some detailed thought instead of just tweeting all the time. Heard on the streets of LA: "I'll be the first to laugh when you wrap that thing around a telephone pole!" Loading Complete!

Welcome to my latest attempt at keeping this blog afloat until I have plenty to write about. Actually I have been pretty busy in the world of games, so I should have written a week or so a go, but better late than never. Today: Metroid Prime Trilogy, Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum, My Anticpated Games of 2009 and Closing Out. It's gonna be another one of those 3,000 word epics so sit back, grab your fave beverage and read on!

Metroid Prime: Trilogy
When I first heard about Metroid Prime Trilogy I was pretty stoked, I loved the first game, really enjoyed the second game and even though I owned the 3rd game never really got very far into it. But the idea of all three Prime games on one disc was enough to put it on my radar even though I own all three individually. It then fell off said radar until it was basically released... I then was reminded that they revamped the first two games with the supposedly amazing Wii Pointer controls from the 3rd game. My enthusiasm dropped quite a bit, but I hadn't played the first two games in nearly 5 years and discovered it came in one of those great SteelBook cases, so I bit. Suprisingly, things worked out great...

Metroid Prime is still the best in the trilogy no doubt, that's because it is one of the best games ever designed. Retro captured what it was like to be behind the visor of Samus Aran; steam fogs it up, water rolls down the front when you get out of deep water, rain drops land on it, high electrical fields disrupt it causing static and eventually for the HUD it self to crap out for a moment, bug spit and splat on it, you feel like you are in the world and the 10+ hours it'll take to finish it will fly by. Improvements/changes in the trilogy version are mostly from the Japanese and Europe versions, but these changes are for better and worse depending on what you want out of Prime 1. A lot of the changes in JP and EU versions were to prevent speed running and sequence breaking, so if like that this version is not for you. As for the Wii Controls I'll talk about those a bit later.

Prime 2: Echoes (aka Dark Echoes in Japan) is a decent sequel and it tried something different. The light world / dark world thing had been done before but not really in 3-D, there are a lot of cases in Prime 2 where you must jump back and forth from light to dark just get past obstacles. Prime 2 only really has 2 major problems setting it back... the first is the dark world: when you first arrive it drains your health at 5HP/sec and you only recover 1HP/sec when in the light bubbles, the pacing is messed up because of this you gotta get out of that dark world as fast as you can, no time to explore. Later you get the Dark Suit which lowers dark world damage to 1HP/Sec, but until you get the light suit in the last few hours of the game you'll be constantly under pressure, especially when fighting bosses as if your health was a ticking time-bomb. Secondly, it seems the further in to the series the games got the more Retro really wanted to prevent people from sequence breaking their game, so instead of embracing it they removed it by making gates that could only be unlocked if you progressed the correct amount. Prime 3 took this a step further, which is where I think Retro missed the point of Metroid, if I have the skills and will I should be able to do almost anything.

Prime 3 is a weird game, instead of one big planet there are many different ones, but with smaller areas to explore. Your mission is to clear each one in order making them almost like levels. There is also *shudder* voice acting *shudder* in this game, that should be enough said... but I have yet to finish this game so I'll have to save my final thoughts for later.

As for those Wii Controls they work great, I hated them when I played Prime 3 the first time, but I wasn't using them the right way. You've gotta set the sensitivity to Advanced and hold the Wii Remote against your lap that keeps it balanced so that you have great control and don't get tired. I thought because Prime 1 and Prime 2 relied on the lock on for hitting specific spots the free aim controls would not work but they make the game smoother to control. One of the best additions to Prime 1 and 2 is the spring ball jump by shaking the remote when in morph-ball mode. You can use this as long as you have bombs and it allows you to jump in morph-ball form without planting and waiting for a bomb, it makes the game much quicker and the battle with spiderball guardian in Prime 2 way easier.

Metroid Prime: Trilogy is worth every cent, for the price of one Wii game you get three games each lasting 10 or more hours, the first two games are even presented in wide-screen which is great, it is a compilation you should not miss if you have Wii.

Shadow Complex
It's been a few weeks since Shadow Complex arrived on the 360 and I really meant to talk about nearer its release date, but I fail at timing. It is a game that is clearly inspired by Metroid and the newer Castlevania games, but takes place in a story created by Orson Scott Card, I don't know much about the book Empire, but it is really inconsequential to the game. That is probably SC's biggest flaw, it really doesn't do much with its story which seems compelling, but since the gameplay goes into old school mode it just kind of forgets it. As for the gameplay, I found it too annoying on Normal, one mistake can leave you screwed for the next room, I just wanted to explore and find all 100% of the items, not deal with Metal Gear Solid type stealth. Casual is WAY too easy though, you'll never die, there are some instant kills, but normally you will not even come close. Really there isn't too much to say about the game, it's basically like any Metroid or Castlevania that you have played... except here you are climbing through caves and lots of 4 foot air ducts instead of alien planets or a possessed castle. It's well made and a great game, but don't let anyone fool you in to thinking that it trumps something like Super Metroid or Castlevaina: SotN with their hyperbole. It is one of the best games you can get for $15 though, so I do recommend it.

Batman: Arkham Asylum
I picked this game up last week, but I have only gotten in one single session thanks to Prime Trilogy, but my quick thoughts are as follows: it's a fun game, seems to capture the feel of Batman and plays a lot like Metroid. I'll play this more soon and I will have a lot more to say.

My Anticipated Games of 2009
With the big wave of new release hitting starting in September I figured I'd share the games that I am look most forward to in the next few months.

September 2009
The Beatles: Rock Band (09.09.2009) - I love Rock Band and while I can't claim to be some kind of Beatles super-fan, I enjoy their songs a lot. Plus, I think my Dad and myself can have some playing this one, at least he will know the songs.

NHL 10 / NHL 2K10 (09.15.2009) - The NHL games are my Madden, no matter how they turn out I always get both. Honestly, I don't want to get both, but ever since I played NHL 2K3 I have been more of a 2K fan, but EA has really stepped it up since 07, while 2K hockey has just become a mess of game. I'm hoping 2K10 will impress me more than 2K9 and I like the changes that EA has made to NHL 10, which I will probably play Be-A-Pro for another year.

October 2009
Alpha Protocol (10.06.2009) - I enjoyed Mass Effect in 2007, it was a great game but it has so many problems that I don't think it really holds up. Alpha Protocol I think will be a nice stop-gap while waiting for 2010's Mass Effect 2, even the skill point board looks EXACTLY like the one from Mass Effect 1. It's really is just Mass Effect with spies.

Borderlands (10.20.2009) - I love First Person Shooters, I love collecting loot (I even continued playing Too Human and Sacred 2 because of it), I love RPGs, put them all together and holy ****, you have a game that I am damn excited to play. Besides the prospect of millions of random guns just blows my mind. This is probably my most anticipated game right now, yes, even more so than Modern Warfare 2.

Forza Motorsport 3 (10.27.2009) - Back in 2007, I played the crap out of Forza 2, pretty much the entire month of June 2007 was devoted to playing Forza 2. Forza 3 is bigger and better and that is all I really need to enjoy it. I look forward to designing new liveries for my favorite cars and trying all the new tracks in the game.

November 2009
(Call of Duty) Modern Warfare 2 (11.10.2009) - It's Modern Warfare 2... that's all I need to say.

Closing Out
Wow, finally almost done, before I go, I should mention the announcement of Okami for the DS... all I can say is Capcom had better release this here. I think that about covers everything I wanted to say, I'm going to go play Batman or something, so I will talk to you soon, probably about The Beatles Rock Band or something. Later. Loading Complete!

I'm back after a few weeks of nothing with some stuff that amounts to a little bit more than nothing, but at least that, is something I guess (damn, I have been playing too much Oblivion: Shivering Isles). Alright enough insane drivel and more inane rambling for this edition of Now Loading Update. There is actually a bit to cover so I probably get right to the point, so the agenda then: Fallout 3 DLC: Mothership Zeta Final Thoughts, Oblivion: My Strange Obsession, Stuck In a Loop (of Games) and Closing Out. We have intercepted a strange radio signal, follow your map markers to...

Fallout 3 DLC: Mothership Zeta
I love Fallout 3, I've played it for probably over 200 hours across my few characters, my main character has over 115 hours and most of that was spent playing even though I was stuck at the level 20 cap and the other 20+ hours stuck at the level 30 cap... but I just keep playing because they just keep releasing new things to do. First it was Operation: Anchorage with it's focus on combat, then it was The Pitt which brought back the moral choices (and one of the toughest at that), thirdly we got Broken Steel which brought us out of the purgatory which was the level 20 cap with a new set of missions and a level 30 cap, fourthly came Point Lookout which gave us a new explorable area and a double-barreled shotgun... And now we have the apparent final DLC: Mothership Zeta which actually makes use of the downed Alien craft that has been crashed there the whole time in Fallout 3.

One of the coolest things about Fallout 3 is the realization of the concept of the 1950's future utopia but with the dark tones of a post apocalyptic catastrophe marring it, so a storyline where you are captured by 1950's style space aliens and brought aboard their 1950's styled spaceship should be the coolest thing ever... IT'S NOT. This is cookie-cutter shit right here, the aliens are generic, the ship looks kind of tacky and there is almost no storyline other than the 25 recordings of captured victims and get off the ship alive. You don't get any information on where these aliens come from, what they are really called; it mostly boils down to that they are just the typical human experimenting / want Earth for resources kind of green spacemen. There is even an interesting hint at something the aliens are doing with the robotic horse toys from all the in game posters, but it never delves past self speculation as to what the connection is. That is the first problem of Mothership Zeta it doesn't follow through with a great concept or any of its plotlines.

The second problem is that it is too combat focused, which is the main reason the story is killed, all you do is have shootouts with aliens and sometimes their robot drones. The little buggers have shields and can take a crap-ton of punishment... to the point of tedium; they also have impeccable aim they just stand still and blast you repeatedly with their ray-guns while you are trying to reload. It got to the point where I moved the games difficulty down to Very Easy (from Normal) just to get through all the boring ass tedious combat, it sure as hell wasn't because it was difficult.

The other thing I did not like is this DLC is kind of willy-nilly with the loot, it's all good stuff (which we will get to in a moment), but it just seems placed randomly. I didn't find the best alien rifle the "Distablizer" until my third time through the DLC and it was just sitting on a shelf just like any other gun. I also never found the fabled "cryo-grenades" and I searched every room of that ship three times. Did you also know that you could get a perk for being better at using alien weapons if you mess around in an alien shooting range? Don't get me wrong I like discovering secrets, it's why I play Fallout 3 (and games like it), but the biggest kicker here is... you don't get a second chance at this stuff. If you complete Mothership Zeta, while you can still come back to ship and there is a section that isn't sealed off where you can fight aliens for more ammo (and the super useful Alien Epoxy), all the other rooms of the ship are off limits. So if you don't find all 25 voice recordings, all the weapons and gear the first time through you are going to have to play through it again. Not to mention that there are three OPTIONAL sections of the ship and each of those contain cool stuff and a few of those recordings that you want to find (for completeness/achievement purposes). I had to play through it 2 full times before I finally found all off the stuff worth pinching from that ship.

I also encountered a game-breaking bug... on my second attempt at completing the quest. One of first major missions is to destroy three power generators (you'll be doing this a lot throughout the DLC), then talk to the little girl Sally and then go on a spacewalk (the coolest part of the DLC). I discovered that if you fail to do it in that order and neglect to talk to Sally and still take the spacewalk you get to a point where you are supposed to activate a teleporter for them to get to your level, except it is already active and they won't beam up... you can't go back to where you came from and you can't progress because you need the little girl to open the door, so you are screwed... if you hadn't made a hard save before that point or saved over a recent save much anger would ensue, so BE CAREFUL.

As for the gear, it's a tad disappointing, but there is a alien rifle that does almost 200 damage (with the alien gun perk and 100 in energy weapons, I guess), there is cool 1930's comic book style spacesuit, a samurai costume (complete with sword), a new plasma pistol (that does 90 damage at maxed stats) and the gun you never thought you came for, Paulson's Revolver... this .44 Magnum revolver (without a stupid scope, for once) can dispatch Giant Radscorpions in 2 shots and Albino Radscorpions in 5, I tested this quite a bit (on various higher difficulties), but it seems that nearly every shot triggers a critical hit making it better than every single gun in the game, IMO. Though it is terrible at long range, which is it's downside. The only strange thing is to get the revolver (and the samurai gear) you're going to have to kill the survivors if they didn't end up getting killed by themselves. Finally, the other cool item is the Alien Epoxy this item repairs your currently equipped weapon by 25%, where normally you would have to have a pair of related guns to do the repair... handy indeed, especially for those guns that don't have compatible pairs, like the Gauss Rifle and the Tesla Cannon. Though, I haven't yet confirmed if it works on your currently equipped armor.

If you are a hardcore fan of Fallout 3, you probably already have this, but if you are a more casual fan, this isn't the pack you want. Get Broken Steel, The Pitt and Point Lookout or just wait for the GotY edition. It could have been great, but just like I said waaay back in my Op:Anc review, this does not play to Fallout 3's strengths which are story and moral choice.

Oblivion: My Strange Obsession
I have spent almost 100 hours with my latest Oblivion character that I started a few weeks ago and I got sucked back in to Oblivion. The reason that I call it my strange obsession is that I don't really like how Oblivion does things. Auto-Leveling enemies mean that you never get more powerful making leveling pointless for the most part. Tons of useless skills, like Speechcraft and Mercantile which end up being point less, you can just bribe everyone making speechcraft pointless and you have sell over 25000 items to get your mercantile skill to Master, by that time you'll have probably a million gold. Not to mention the character building system is pointless, sure you can play ANY character you want, but you won't be able to complete the game with them... making powerful melee characters the only really viable character unless you read a guide to how to play as a pure mage. Trying to play as a 50/50 character leads you to either not having enough strength (mostly to carry things) or not having enough magicka points. But for what ever reason... I can't stop playing, sure I have to turn down the difficulty slider to simulate gaining more power after leveling up and sure bunny-hopping all across Cyrodiil to get your acrobatics skill up is the most ridiculous looking thing... but the adventure, the exploration and getting lots and lots of sneak attacks keep me coming back.

Stuck In A Loop (of Games)
I haven't been making much progress in my backlog, why? It's because I can't stop playing a few specific games, they include Call of Duty 4 (which I have been avoiding the best I can recently), Oblivion, Fallout 3, NHL 09 and Rockband 2. I have lots of games I want to complete but I am stuck in a comfortable zone with these five games and I have been having a hard time breaking out of it. Oh, well, I'm sure it will change soon enough, but I just wanted to get that off my chest and it is mainly the reason that I haven't really wrote much in the blog.

Closing Out
That's about it for now, we're into August now that means we are only about a month away from seeing the first of the fall line up hitting shelves, so I hope that will speed things up. Though I have really failed to capture the quality that this blog used to have, I have been slacking on the impressions and stuff like that a lot. Anyway, I am out of here for now, hopefully it won't be another three weeks before I write again. Loading Complete!