I couldn't tell you why it's taken so long, but I'm just now realizing that BioWare is probably my favorite video game developer. The game worlds that they've created, and the game mechanics that they've pioneered/refined, have kept me coming back to their games again and again over the years. It's pretty incredible looking back on all of the great experiences BioWare has been able to deliver me.
Note: I'm sorry for any typos that may be present. I'm a bit tired and am choosing not to proof-read this super throughly.
This isn't a review (I do plan to write one), but more like a stream of consciousness type deal where I'm going to talk about how I feel about Rock Band 3. I have quite a few things to talk about, so this may get rambly. Fair warning.
Rock Band 3 is easily one of the most anticipated games of the year for me personally. I've been into rhythm games since playing Guitar Hero 2 at a friends house back in the day. Since then, I've been deep deep into a variety of rhythm games. No other games have grabbed me quite like the Rock Band franchise though. I liked the style of Rock Band over Guitar Hero. The fact that they evolved the genre by introducing vocals and drums didn't hurt either. I played countless hours of RB1 and 2. I beat the endless setlists for each, multiple times. When I say multiple times, I mean a minimum of three times each. Needless to say, I was primed and ready for the launch of Rock Band 3. I showed up to my local Gamestop on Monday night, about 11:30 for the midnight launch. I stood in line with a bunch of other people (mostly there for Fable), and I finally made it to the counter and paid an unreasonable amount of money for a single video game. After getting it home and playing for almost exactly a week now, that amount of money I spent still feels unreasonable, but I don't regret it one bit. With that, I'm just going to jump into a bunch of random thoughts. Starting with:
The Keyboard and Pro-Keys
The new keyboard peripheral is what ended up costing me so much money, but I'm glad I got it. Pro-Keys are probably the biggest change from RB2 to Rock Band 3. (It could probably be argued that Pro-guitar is bigger, but I can't comment on that as of now as I don't own a pro-guitar.) The first thing I did when I popped the game in was jump strait into Pro-Keys. I didn't want the watered-down experience of regular keys, I wanted to jump head first into this new and magical world of Rock Band Pro-Keys. I think I made the right decision, as learning my way around the keyboard, and advancing from easy onto medium (and in some cases hard), has been the most rewarding Rock Band experience I've had since I first played the drums in RB1. Harmonix has effectively translated keyboard play to Rock Band, and it's actually fun. I can't say that I have any piano training or anything, but playing Pro-Keys honestly feels like I'm playing a real instrument (probably because I basically am). The songs Harmonix has chosen to fill out the on-disc setlist are, in general, fantastic choices for playing Pro-Keys. There are actually a handful of on-disc that aren't keyboard compatible, which is weird, but most are. Not to mention the three free Doors tracks that were up on the marketplace; Light My Fire is one of the best keyboard songs currently in my library. I guess what it comes down to, is that the keyboard is a great addition. It's challenging as hell, but as someone that's deep into Rock Band, that's exactly what I want.
A dude gettin' down on keys I want to mention the hardware itself a bit. the keyboard is about two feet long counting the little handle that the overdrive button and touch strip rest on. Speaking of the touch strip, it's kinda crazy. I was never a fan of Guitar Hero's guitar touch strip, but this one is at least out of the way. It works as you'd expect; just drag your finger across and it will gain you bonus overdrive or whatever. It's really sensitive though, as I just rest my hand over it a bit and I can hear it accidentally altering my notes as I play. There are 25 keys which are marked off in sections with the standard red, blue, yellow, etc. I can't really talk a lot about octaves or notes or whatever as I have very little knowledge of keyboards in general. It all feels nice and sturdy though. For what it's worth, there's a full sized keyboard in my house that I was messing around with yesterday. I'll just say that the keys on my RB3 keyboard feel nicer than the keys on that full-sized, semi-expensive keyboard.
The keyboard's a great addition that adds tons of fun and breathes some much needed fresh air into the series. I recommend picking up the bundle, or if you have a PS3 or Wii, pick up the keyboard separately.
Pro-Drums
This is what you'll see in Pro-Drums If I had to pick one instrument and call it my favorite, it would definitely be the drums. I even wrote a damn blog about my insane ION drums at one point. It's OK though, I didn't pay full price, I bought them used off of a friend. :) I also recently carved a pumpkin in the design of the Rock Band drum logo. As you can see, I'm a fan of drums, and I was really excited to dive into pro-drums as well. So I started playing pro-drums and I quickly realized that, "wait a second, I was kind of already playing pro-drums before...". I've had three cymbals set up for quite some time now, and I've been using them. Sure, I wasn't 100% loyal to the song in terms of always using cymbals when there's cymbal sounds and drums when there's drum sounds, but I was pretty close a lot of the time. Maybe I should take a step back and mention that the big feature in pro-drums is that it charts cymbals and drum pads separately now. That means if you hear a hi-hat, you'd better get that lazy arm up to the hi-hat cymbal. No unauthentic play is allowed in pro-drums. So as I mentioned, I'd already been doing this a bit whenever I could distinguish which pad or cymbal I was supposed to hit (at times it can be hard). The biggest challenge has been breaking the mental block of always going for a pad or a cymbal on certain songs. Since in RB2, you could hit either, and either would count just the same, I'd become used to playing certain songs in certain (incorrect) ways just out of convenience. Pro-mode says "Fuck You" to convenience and has tripped me up a couple of times, as I have had to readjust on the fly. I know this isn't the most common situation for most people to be in. I'd imagine most people are starting their cymbal-using career right now, and are probably struggling at least a bit. The best tip I can give in that situation is to set up your cymbals to exactly how you like them, and then just play some simple beats. Getting used to the placement of the cymbals was the hardest thing for me to do. I was constantly swinging and hitting air the first time I tried. That's embarrassing, but true. :P
There's not a whole lot more I can say about pro-drums. They're a great minor step up from what already existed. The thing is, the abstraction of playing drums was already extremely minimal, especially compared to playing the guitar. With Pro-Drums, abstraction has been basically eliminated completely and you're now playing honest to god drum parts. Even hi-hat rolls have been recharted to the hi-hat cymbal instead of being unrealistically charted to what is otherwise the snare pad. Pro-Drums are great. Pro-Drums are realistic. Pro-Drums are fun as hell. Moving along.
UI and gameplay changes
This is kind of a wide spanning topic. I'll start with the in-song UI and gameplay. This is basically what you know and (hopefully) love. You earn stars that build in the corner as you earn points. You have a meter on the left that shows everyone's instruments, and how close the players of said instruments are to being yelled at for failing. The note tracks still scroll, and you still get little colored rectangles flying towards your face (often much to fast). There are some little tweaks here and there though, that in my opinion, aren't necessarily for the best. Exhibit A: Solo indication. It's probably a case of me not being "used to it" yet, but I often have no idea that I've transitioned into a solo while on guitar for example. The percentage counter has been removed (yet is still there for keys for some reason) and the blue color that the makeshift fretboard turned is now reserved for when you're in 4x multiplier mode. Therefore a new light blue highlight is the new solo indicator and it's really too subtle. You might think it' no big deal to not know exactly when you go into a solo, but I use the solo buttons on my guitar, and it's a big problem when it's not obvious as to when I can or can't finger tap sections of songs. This isn't a huge giant deal, as most of the time I can easily tell when I'm heading into a solo, but it's annoying when it catches me off guard.
Full Band Craziness There's a new prompt while playing guitar and drums to look out for as well. For example, when there's a super fast drum roll, instead of being forced to be super accurate and hit every note perfectly (no more, no less), it gives you a darkened section and you just need to hit the roll as fast or faster than what is charted. It's an interesting change that also applies to guitar on those fast sections where you're hammering-on/pulling-off yellow and blue really fast, for example. Sorry that I don't know all the "proper" terms, but that's why I play Rock Band and not a real guitar. :P I like this system, although I'd really prefer if pro-mode forced you to play the exact part, RB2 style. Hitting rolls too fast is definitely easier than nailing it, but that's not what I want from the mode that's supposed to push me as far as possible.
Pro-Keys note track. Notice the arrows signaling a track shift. I mentioned earlier that cymbals are charted on pro-drums now. This is simply indicated by circular "gems" coming down the lane for cymbals, and the standard rectangles coming down the lane for pads. The guitar's notes are unchanged. Smaller gems still indicate hammer-ons/pull-offs. The keyboard is what is interesting/frustrating in this department. On standard keys, you get the five lanes and it's basically just like playing guitar. Pro-Keys, though, charts every last key on the keyboard. This shows up as colored sections with multiple black and white keys within any given section. I used the word 'frustrating' earlier because learning where to put your hands with this UI is pretty tough. Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but it's really tough. I can't think of a better way for Harmonix to chart pro-keys though, so I guess it'll just be a long learning process.
I'll also just throw it out here that unison bonuses when playing alone are stupid. The point of a unison bonus is to reward the band when multiple players all nail a section. It's less exciting when you know that all your A.I. band mates will never mess up. Minor point.
This is getting long, so I'll end this section with the general "out of song" UI. The song selection screen is something thats needed an overhaul for quite some time, and it got it. I was really excited for this, but it has issues. First of all, it lets you sort your likely enormous library by almost any method you see fit. Want to see every song in your collection that supports keys, was made in 1980, and that you've scored 5 stars on? That's doable. You can even save setlists locally now for replay later. A feature I really like is being able to take those saved setlists and share them with friends and create challenges out of them. Harmonix has already started created setlist challenges that auto-populate into the saved selist menu; pretty slick. The options are all there, and once you get the hang of quickly jumping through a couple menus, it's a nice and powerful sorting too. As for the issues though, I've ran into a couple while using keys specifically. The Music Library allows you to choose which instruments previous scores are displayed on the selection screen. I decided to use the keyboard to play a guitar part, but after I was dumped back to the selection screen, the game thought my keyboard was a guitar and wouldn't let me display keyboard scores anymore. I had to play another full song on pro-keys in order for it to recognize that i was using a keyboard again. Also, the selection screen will display which friends you're close to, score wise, but it takes forever to switch to that display after selecting the song. That should have been a toggle option. Again, more nit-picky stuff, but they just seem like easy mistakes that should have been fixed.
This is what the minimal menu screen looks like The main menu of the game is... interesting. It's not the strait-forward menu that you've come to expect out of Rock Band games. Instead it's a shell in which up to four players can jump in or out at will (including mid-song). Pressing start brings up the options for each player. That leaves things like "Get More Songs", "Play Now", and "Career" left on the menu. Career isn't actually where you go to play through what is the games makeshift story mode, though. To do that, you select Play Now and then select Road Challenges. At that point you're into something more recognizable as Rock Band career mode. This is all pretty confusing and I'm sure I'm explaining it poorly, but It's the early morning and I didn't sleep much. :P Suffice it to say, the menu system works, but it takes a bit of poking around to learn where everything is located. I really like the "shell" system that allows jumping in and out. One of the best improvements of the game in my opinion. It's so useful when trying to get a band set up and rocking.
Rocker Customization
My bro Customizing your Rocker had been changed up a bit, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. You can still do basically the same things as RB2, and in some cases you can do a lot more. I've posted my own Rock Star to the forums. I encourage you to post yours, too! But anyways, the facial customization has been blown out, allowing full tweak-a-tude of your avatar's nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, etc. You can randomize and come up with some pretty ugly mugs. The part I'm not sure about, though, is the decision to get rid of the concept of money within Rock Band. It definitely streamlines things a bit, but you're now forced to earn specific items of clothes by completing challenges. Now if I want to buy a certain jacket and tie *cough* on my guy, I have to complete some crazy set of challenges instead of just clicking A and spending 500 Rock Band bucks. I like the idea that it gets you to play more challenges and whatnot, but it can be annoying.
I don't know if this really counts as customization, but assigning stand-ins for your band could have been done better. Instead of just selecting a few characters to stand in, they could have allowed you to pick which instruments they'd stand in for. I want the guy I created to be my lead singer, to always be my lead singer, but I haven't found a way to make sure that happens.
Training
All the same training options are in there from RB2, but now with Pro instrument training as well. I'm just going to say it right now: Pro-Keys training is an absolute bitch. I've completed the easy and medium trainers so far, but the hard lessons are bat-shit bananas. That's not even getting into the expert trainers. It's pretty impressive the kind of depth that the trainers go into at times, but it's baffling other times when it seems like they just expect you to know certain things. The difficulty curve is not nice. Hand position on Pro-Keys is probably the biggest issue here. It's been brought up by lots of people and for good reason. It just seems counter-intuitive to be asking you to play these complex patterns without showing you how to properly attempt it. It will probably come with time, but including some diagrams, or better yet video, would have gone a long way in helping me learn the most efficient hand positions. In the case of Pro-Keys though, there are 17 different exercises that each have multiple parts. That's a ton of stuff to learn and once you can get it all down, you could probably take that right over to a real keyboard or piano. It's an awesome idea that I just wish was executed slightly better. I'm still looking forward to the day I can complete all of the Pro-Keys trainers. For now though, it seems insurmountable.
Training mode will walk you through the steps if you'd like Also new to the practice modes is the "Learn A Song" mode. This take you step by step through a real song (as opposed to the little training beats) until you can theoretically memorize the parts and go play them for real. This is a pro-mode only feature, and in fact I think it's just for keys and guitar. Pretty cool though to think that you're learning a real song by repetition through a mode in Rock Band.
All other training stuff is kinda as you'd expect. Freestyle drum mode is in there, as is regular practice mode.
Setlist
A lot of people still put a lot of stock into the quality of the on-disc setlist. That's understandable, but the way I see it, Rock Band is more of a "platform" than ever before. I currently have 533 songs, completely independent of the ones that came on the Rock Band 3 disc. That's kind of insane, yes, but it almost makes the RB3 on-disc setlist irrelevant at this point. It's a good thing though regardless, that the Rock Band 3 setlist is probably the best of the series yet. A lot of it was built around the Keyboard, but that doesn't detract any from the fun you can have on other instruments. Songs, from the intro video jam, "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" by The Doors, to "Space Oddity" by David Bowie are featured. "Roundabout" by Yes, "Imagine" by John Lennon, "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Crosstown Traffic" by Jimmy Hendix, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen are some of my personal favorites. Really almost every single song on there is fun to play though. Sure there's a handful of songs that I would have left out (I'm lookin' at you, "Du Hast"), but everyone has different music preferences and I know someone at Harmonix had to fight hard for that one, as with the rest of the tracks selected. I honestly couldn't be much happier with the setlist. It's incredibly fun getting some people together and playing "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis & the News. Good times. :)
So I've been carving video game pumpkins for at least a couple years strait now. Last years pumpkin was based on portal. I only have a shitty picture of it, but here's that one from a year ago:
Portal's a game. Just FYI. It was roughly carved, but I thought it turned out fairly well.
This year I decided to continue the theme and think up something else video game related. Since I've been playing a lot of Rock Band 3 lately, it seemed obvious that I should do something with that. I'm not the greatest pumpkin carver in the world, so I tried to come up with something relatively simple. I came up with this:
Drums! The symbol is practically begging to be carved into a giant orange vegetable. So that translated into this:
Pre-darkness Which, when lit up, looks like this:
Darkness (I throw dark) As you may have noticed, I was unable to keep the white sections on top of the drums (as seen in the outline image) because they weren't connected to anything. I could have pulled some kind of trickery to get them on there, but with my limited skills, I'd bet it would have looked awful. I like how it turned out though. I'm no pumpkin master by any means, but I work with what I've got.
So that's been my brief expedition into video game pumpkin carving. I plan to continue it next year, but I probably will follow tradition and not come up with an idea until the day of Halloween, again. If any of you carved a video game pumpkin this year, then don't be shy! Post pictures!
OK, yes I do. I expected to get strait-up murdered in Duke 3D yesterday on TNT. Turns out I'm way better than I expected. I won two strait matches rather convincingly. I come with proof:
Y'all got owned
Y'all got owned: The College Years I know I probably look like a douche for this blog, but I'm proud of myself. To everyone in the matches: Good game. It was really fun.
As a few of you may remember, I once upon a time created a crazy story in picture form based on one of Dave's tweets involving him ordering a pizza. Well, I guess I'm a crazy stalker because I decided to do it again. This one is done in a record time of 1 hour post-tweet. Gotta be on top of this breaking news, people.
This is based on real events that occurred at around 9 PM on Tuesday, September 28th.
I got to play PlayStation Move today, yay! My brother bought it, so it isn't really my own. I did play around with Sports Champions a good while though. I don't even know what to call the controller. The wand? The Move stick? The Ice Cream Cone? I think it's called the Move Controller, but that's no fun.
Squishy orb is squishy Picking up the Ice Cream Cone for the first time felt pretty good. It feels nice in the hand, and the glowing light from the ball is kinda cool (surprisingly bright). At first I had a hard time keeping strait where the classic face buttons were located, but I got used to it. One thing I didn't expect was the glowing orb is squishy, not hard. Probably a design choice to prevent injury when you inevitably smack yourself in the face. But anyways, I like the trigger. It feels more like the 360 controller trigger than the Dual Shock 3's trigger. Then there's a large Move button that basically takes the place of the large A button on the Wiimote. I had no idea that was there for some reason. I guess I didn't watch enough Move videos from E3. The precision of the Ice Cream Cone is pretty impressive though. Table Tennis specifically shows how accurate the controls can be when you are trying to perfectly angle your paddle and put a good amount of spin on the ball. Overall I'm impressed with the hardware. Maybe not so much with the camera as the picture quality seemed poor, but it seemed to work well enough. We were playing in both low and high light situations and it picked up all the movements. I should say though that I was only using one Ice Cream Cone as opposed to two. Some games seem like they'd me more fun with two, but others were just fine.
This is totally the best game I haven't actually read Jeff's review of Sports Champions yet, but I remember him saying at one point that Table Tennis was easily the best game of the bunch. It is a good game, but I actually had more fun with the Volleyball game. Volleyball was definitely one of the games that would benefit from two Ice Cream Cones, but it was still the most fun of the bunch with only one. You can choose to serve either underhand (which seems like the safe option), or overhand for more power. Depending on how you move the "Cone", you can bump, set, spike, block, and even dive for stray balls. The motions are simple, but I think that helps the game feel responsive; you're not going to be swinging wildly trying to make contact. The way the people move around the sand is also kinda hilarious. They move their legs like crabs at times, which is pretty entertaining.
The only games I'd say need two "Cones" to be fun are archery, and the Gladiator Duel game. Those both just feel like super dumbed down versions (Which they kind of are) of what the games are meant to be. The Gladiator game specifically just feels very cheesable (at least on the lower difficulties). It's entirely possible to just slash at the opponents legs until they're dead. Disc Golf is fun, but a bit dull.
My overall impression after playing though was that "this works". I had a few doubts about the camera's ability to keep up with the Ice Cream Cone--especially in poor lighting or bad angles--but it seems to keep up really well. Sure, you have to calibrate before every game, but if it's necessary to work well, then it's not a problem. I look forward to seeing what kinds of games come out of this tech in the future. The potential seems great.
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The NBA 2K11 demo has been released on XBL to my surprise. This game has absolutely snuck up on me this year. It's one of my favorite sports game series of all time though, and I may go as far to say it's one of my favorite video game series' in general. Needless to say I was excited to try out this years product, so here's some points that struck me having played through the single-quarter demo probably a dozen times now.
Animations
LaMarcus' new inside game (fingers crossed) will be unstoppable. The animation of the players this year is a step up. If I had to choose one word to describe it, it would probably be "flowing". Every little detail like a guy planting his foot to pivot or change direction, closing out on shooters, crossovers, spin moves, passes, etc. all just seem to flow seemlessly into each other. It gives the game a really natural feel and it looks a lot like watching a real game on TV. The individual jumpshot mocap that 2K has been doing for several years now continues to impress. Kobe's J looks more like Kobe's J than ever. It's not just one animation though either. Depending on what situation Kobe's in, he'll throw up a variety of different mocapped shots that when witnessed, make you think "Wow, he'd totally do that exact move in real life". Throughout the years, the signature moves haven't just been limited to star players either, and I expect even more accurate shots from lesser known players as well. Sadly the demo only lets you play as the Lakers vs. the Celtics, so I can't see how deep they've gone with the signature stuff.
I guess I'll lump the ISO-Motion stuff in here as well, considering it's animation based. So ISO-Motion is the dribbling system in the game and it's received another overhaul. It's honestly hard to wrap my head around every year due to the constant evolution, but this year it seems pretty smart. The left trigger seems to activate kind of a signature move toggle, which when held, makes it really easy to pull off some sweet stuff with Kobe. Spinning the analog stick makes the player spin. Moving the stick from one side of the player to the other makes them changes hands. It's all very intuative and feels, again, natural. Moving on.
A.I.
I'm gonna be honest, the AI in 2K games has never been super great. Sports game AI in general though has never been great, so I guess it's forgivable. It seems like AI has been improved a good amount here, but not necessarily anything to write home about. The Players seem more aware on both offense and defense, which leads to more exciting action. For example, if you're throwing long passes up court a bunch, the AI is going to start picking off those passes. Also, they will take advantage of defensive lapses rather quickly. In past games, it was always a drag to sag off of a guy and just see him stand there dribbling for a few seconds before he decided to just drive or shoot the WIDE open shot. A bit more decisiveness is nice. Seems like good steps, but can still be improved upon.
Physics
Physics in sports games are pretty hard to nail perfectly. It's tough to make two players collide in believable way for example. From what I've seen, 2K11 does a pretty good job of at least being able to seem physicsy. A lot of players crashing into each other are canned animations, but it's done in a way that seems pretty realistic. Player collisions specifically can be pretty brutal this year. If you are standing between Kobe and the rim, don't expect Kobe to just magically slip by and dunk the ball every time like last games. What I've seen more is Kobe either getting agressively swatted, or both players end up in a nasty collision that looks very injury-inducing. New to the collision dynamic is shot collisions. If you're pulling up for a jumper and someone jumps into you, that will often be reflected in a variety of different (sometimes specific) shot adjustment animations. On one shot I took with none other than Kobe himself, he got bumped in midair, landed awkwardly, fell to the ground, and still hit the shot. No foul was called so the game kept rolling and Kobe had to quickly pick himself up and run back on defense. Very realistic looking, and very cool.
Presentation
From what I remember, the 2K11 team actually went out to hire a professional broadcaster to help give the presentation of the game a bump up in quality. They seem to have been successful to an extent. Starting a game looks very much broadcast TV style, and is neat to watch. Having no audio commentary in the demo, it's tough to tell if that was a much improved aspect, but last years game went above and beyond in this aspect. I expect more progression on the commentary front this year. I'm sad that they've chosen to still not include proper player introductions, but that's a minor issue. I'm going to lump graphics related things into this topic because I'm the writer of this thread and I can do that. From what I can tell, the graphics engine remains the same again this year. I look forward to the year that 2K builds new graphics from the ground up, but there's really no reason to complain about what's here. Player faces have been further refined, although Ray Allen still looks like a turtle. Jerseys look great, as do the heavily animated crowds and life-like arenas. All this just comes together and makes the game look incredibly real. If there was an option to turn off the player indicator below their feet, I'm convinced that upon seeing the game play at a slight distance, many people would easily find themselves in a panic to figure out why they didn't know their favorite basketball team was playing that night.
Other Stuff?
Oh, yeah. Jordan's in there too. The menu music sounds good. I have no idea who sings any of the tracks that play in the demo, but they're good. Dunking! the dunking deserves a section all it's own, but alas. Dunking seems really life-like this year though. Different directions on the Right Stick still throw down different types of dunks, except it actually feels responsive this time. In past games, you never felt like you had a lot of control of which dunks you'd throw down. On top of that, they felt floaty the past few games. This time, every dunk really feels powerful and like something the player could actually do. It's a great feeling to dunk this year, and I can't even wait to try out the big gun leapers in the full game.
There's probably heaps of things I'm forgetting, but I want to go play some more. Can anyone else not wait to see how godly the Blazers will be in the full game?? :P
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It's tradition on gaming sites to tell others "Watcha been playin". I almost never do this, just because I think it can easily become boring. Whatever though, I got a bunch of random stuff to say. Feel free to disregard this entire blog.
Editors note: This blog did not end up very simple or traditional at all. Oh well.
First thing's first: Deadly Premonition
After beating the game for the first time on normal a few months back, I haven't touched it since. That is until a few days ago when I decided to pick it back up. I decided I was going to S-rank the game... just because. Well the achievements are not stackable. In order to get all of the difficulty achievements, it's required to beat the game 3 times, so I decided to play through on hard this time. I had it in my head going in that I would have to be a lot more careful, and that this may actually be tough. Well, I was wrong. The game's not tough, even on "hard". The enemies seem to take a few more bullets to kill, and do damage to York a bit quicker while you're frantically trying to shake them off, but no big deal. If you are playing even the slightest bit carefully, you should have WAY more than enough health kits to get you through any situation in the game. So my hard playthrough was basically just an exercise in perseverance. Don't get me wrong, this game is really interesting in many ways as I'm sure everyone knows, but after having experienced the entire story already, the game loses quite a bit of charm.
It gets worse though. After having beaten both normal and hard, I now am going back through on easy. This time though, I not only have to beat the game on easy, but collect all the cards in the process. I actually haven't started this process quite yet because I'm having some trouble figuring out the most efficient way to go about it. Apparently it's best to do as many side missions before you beat the game--as opposed to replaying chapters--because it ends up faster that way. Anyways, I'll be doing that some time very soon. Damn you Deadly Premonition and your compelling 200 point achievements.
Halo! Or should I say Failo! Ha! It's funny... because, it's punny. :(
You can always expect the poorest of poor jokes in my blogs. But anyways, I've been playing more Halo 3 recently. I couldn't really tell ya why other than: I felt like it. As always Halo continues to be a really fun game. Smokin' dudes online is always a good time, as long as you aren't interacting with the dudes you're smokin'. In fact your own team probably isn't good to be interacting with either as can be witnessed by my previous blog. Even being as old as Halo 3 is though, it's still really solid. I honestly don't get all the hate on Halo. OK I think this is about to turn into a blog about why Halo isn't the worst game franchise. You've been warned.
I was having a bit of a conversation with a secret user of the Giant Bomb forums. This secret user claimed that they hated Halo. I asked why, and this person responded with things that had nothing to do with the game, such as: kids that play it, and the fact that old 360s had failure problems. This person also brought up the point that the plot is "OK...when it works" and that you'd have to read up on the novels to get the full effect. Well, I don't know about anyone else, but that doesn't sound like a game worth any hate at all. The point about the plot--despite being debatable--is really the only valid one. But really, video game plots are never very good. Even the best video game plots are crappy when compared to the best movie plots, or novel plots. It's the game its self that really matters though, and I think a lot of people are quick to write off Halo and take it for granted. The gameplay systems in place are fantastic and very well balanced. The maps Bungie crafts are always amazing too. I'm not going to stand here and say that Halo is the greatest game ever made or anything like that. I just think that it catches a bad rap for seemingly no good reason. I'm already tired of writing about Halo, so I'll just leave it at that. I was thinking of writing a more detailed Halo related blog about the issues I was just talking about. Maybe I'll still do that.
Picross 3D! (In 2D!)
Yep, I've been playing Picross 3D. There's not much to say about it, other than it's awesome. If you aren't sure what the game's about, than here, check it.
Hype Machine! (Tables!)
This is where I list the games I'm hyped for
This is where I tell you why I'm so hyped for them
Rock Band 3!
I'm a big big big big big fan of the Rock Band series. I've been into rhythm games since I played GH2 on the X360. Since then I still haven't gotten my fill even after countless DLC downloads, and a myriad of fake instrument purchases. I even bought the damn ION drums off of my friend. I'm freakin' ready for pro drums. But oh noes, I'll have to buy a pro guitar! It'll happan. Pumped for keyboards. Pumped for the setlist. Bohemian Rhapsody anyone?
Halo: Reach
I can't say I'm nearly excited about this as I am about RB3, but I do really want to play it. Reach seems like the culmination of everything Halo + a bunch more awesome. That sounds good to me. Halo has been discussed, so yeah.
Metroid: Other M
Yes it's already out, but I haven't played it yet! From what I've seen in the quick look, it seems to have turned out a lot better than I had assumed it would. I'm going to try to rent it I think. I hope I can beat it quickly.
NBA 2K11
I enjoy the hell outta basketball games. I've played the past few NBA 2K games probably more than any other game. The latest emergence of the Team Up mode has only fueled my need to play as well. From What I've heard, 2K is revamping their servers to hopefully not be complete garbage this time around. Oh and Michael Jordan is on the cover and will have a mode dedicated to reliving his greatest moments. Can this get any better?
Spider Man: SD
I was a huge fan of the Spider man movie video games (specifically the first and second ones), and I think this game may bring that awesomeness back to the Spider Man series. Looks awesome with the 4 distinct universes and whatnot. Noir Spidey looks badass.
I can't think of any more, so I'll leave it at that for now.
Giant Bomb! (And Giant Bomb related mischief!)
I know most of you haven't heard of it, but Giant Bomb's a website... about video games. Just watch this video, I can't explain it:
I'm glad that was so clearly explained for me. But anyways, I shall now list my current Giant Bomb activities for you in easy to read list form!
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