Gaming Update #16: Revisiting Old Pastimes

By natetodamax July 12, 2010 7 Comments

In This Blog:

• Star Wars Battlefront 1
• Guitar Hero
• Gears Of War and the stupid COG Tags
• Cold Fear (yeah, that game!)
• Just Cause 2 and the stupid Freeroamer 2 achievement!

  
( Because I'm too lazy to make a banner this time ) 

Hello. I'm natetodamax and for the past few weeks I've been helping carry boxes out of our old house and into our new one. And let me tell you, it isn't entertaining in the slightest. It's strange that all this happened around the same time that Giant Bomb was putting stuff into boxes and moving on to the new office. Coincidences aside, I'm here to talk about games. Specifically of the interactive video kind. 
 

In the previous house we lived in, I did not have a television in my room. Because of this, I didn't touch my Playstation 2 for well over a year. In fact, I didn't play the thing for long periods of time since 2008. But now in our new house I have the TV back, and the first thing I did was hook up my dusty PS2 to see if it still works. After some anxious and annoying cable hunting, I managed to get the thing fired up. Oh, how I missed that awful noise it makes when I open the disc tray. For real, it sounds like a machine gun is going off when I open it. It's great. It still has the marks of the stickers that used to be on it (when I was a dumb little kid I put stickers all over it because I had nowhere else to put them, and I didn't want to throw them away because I was a dumb little kid that liked stickers, so shut up!). Out of all the great games I have for the system, the game I put in to mark the first PS2 game I've played in over a year was...... Cold Fear. For some reason, I had a strong urge to play a survival horror game, and that's the only one I have that fits the genre. (I've never played Resident Evil 4....). That game is...... confusing. The combat is mediocre but works fine enough. My biggest problem with the game is that most of the time I have no clue where to go. There are no waypoints or arrows pointing you in the right direction. Whenever I get a new objective, I find myself wandering aimlessly around the ship until I manage to complete it. For example, one or more of the objectives I found myself tasked with involved finding a card to open a door. The ship is pretty big, and every time you open a door the game has to load. Because I this, I roamed helplessly around the ship until I finally stumbled upon the darn card about 20 minutes later. By that point, I had had enough of the game. 
 

Following my adventures aboard that Russian whaling ship, I headed in a completely different direction by popping in Guitar Hero II. Mainly I just did this to see if my guitar controller is still functioning properly. I'm amazed that it still works perfectly, except for the whammy bar which no longer remains in the position it's supposed to remain in. But that's no big deal. I played Psychobilly Freakout, which is one of my favorite songs on the game. It's really fun on Extreme, but I can't seem to get more than 4 stars in the career mode on it :(. I have just about every song 5 starred on Expert except for a few in the last Tier or so. Once I had satisfied my Guitar Hero II hunger (that was a terribly cheesy sentence, but I'm leaving it) I threw in the first Guitar Hero. I noticed several songs in my Expert career that were 4 starred, and I somehow managed to five star nearly every song I tried. The guitar solos in that game are definitely a lot harder than all the others because the hammer ons/pull offs basically don't work. It's way to precise and you have to hold down the other buttons to do it which is a total pain. Because of this, I just strum through all the solos which works sometimes and other times ends pretty bad. Regardless, that game has some good songs, although the cover for No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age is downright atrocious. Sounds like an emo band covering it. That's not good. In fact, that's never good. Oh, and I played a little of Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80's. That game isn't very good. Oh well. 
 

Rounding out my PS2 marathon this weekend is Star Wars: Battlefront, a game that I value more than most of my Xbox 360 titles. I love this series to death. I have the second game which I tried to play first, but to my dismay it wouldn't work when I put it in the console :'(. I still had some fun with the first game though. I didn't do any of the Historical Campaign because I didn't feel like getting too deep into it. I did do some Instant Action though and a little Galactic Conquest. I've reached the conclusion that I enjoy playing in the........I totally forgot the names of the eras. It's the era where it's the Empire versus the Rebels. I like that better than than Republic versus CIS because I just hate the droids for some reason (both fighting them and playing as them). The game has a good Battlefield vibe to it, complete with vehicles, a Conquest-like mode, and many many dudes on the map shooting each other. The AI is noticeably weak, however. I often find 10 or so of my teammates all huddled together in a corner at one of our bases, just standing there not moving an inch. (A well placed grenade will convince them to get their butts in gear!) I've also happened upon enemies staring at a wall, completely oblivious to my presence. (A few blasts from my rifle knocks them out of their stupor!) Despite some flaws, I still love the series like it was my baby :) But man..... I wish Battlefront 2 was working. That game introduced several new features and improvements, including space battles and the ability to play as a Jedi. The Historical Campaign was much more fleshed out, and the Galactic Conquest mode was a TON of fun. The things I disliked was the fact that some awesome maps from the first game, like Bespin Platforms and Endor, weren't in the sequel (while other maps from the first game were, I believe) and they removed team commands. One of my favorite things to do in the first Battlefront is to issue the "Follow Me" command so I can flank the enemies with a squad of soldiers behind me. 
 
Oh, and I played a little God Of War but not enough for it to warrant a paragraph in this blog. That game is fun. Yeah. 
 
The two Xbox 360 games I played quite a bit since my last blog are Just Cause 2 and the first Gears Of War. I played a lot of the former in an attempt to get the Freeroamer 2 achievement, which requires you to get 100% completion in 100 different locations. This is one of those achievements that made me hate the game after I got it. I spent all my time parachuting around Panau collecting stupid resource boxes in villages and blowing up communication outposts, of which there are 75 (these are really easy to get 100% in). I don't think I'll be playing any Just Cause 2 for a long time. I went on another collectable spree in Gears Of War. I noticed that despite having the game for like, three years, I still didn't have the achievement for grabbing all of the COG Tags, of which there are 30 scattered throughout the game. I fired up the game and for some reason, all of my campaign progress was gone, meaning I was back at 0 COG tags collected. I think the fact that I haven't updated the game in a long time contributed to that. However, this made life easy, because all I had to do was play through the game beginning to end and collect the tags as I came across them (I used my Brady Games guide, or Prima Game guide, whichever it is). I actually had to replay the last train sequence to get the last COG tag several times because stupid things happened, like me dying halfway through the level and being reset to the beginning because I didn't get any checkpoints or missing the COG tag at the very end, resulting in me hitting the point of no return and having to restart the entire thing over. I did get it though, which makes me happy. 
 
This marks the end of Gaming Update #16. I hope you enjoyed this mammoth of a blog as much as I enjoyed typing it. As usual, here's a song you should listen to. I think I've gotten back into 80s metal (Poison, Motley Crue), which makes me very scared and concerned........crap..... In fact, the song I'm going to put here is going to be one from The Black Keys. The video has several pretty ladies in bikinis, as evident before you even hit the play button.
 
  

   
Until next time, children.

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