eh chainsaws grubs and doesn't afraid of anything.

I finally had some free time this weekend to get some good ol' fashioned gaming done, and my game of choice was Gears of War.  I originally played and completed the entire game sometime back around spring 2007 with my friend on co-op.  This of course, was not on my Xbox 360, seeing as how I did not own one back then.  Gears of War was pretty much the first "next-generation" game I played for more than a brief moment and it absolutely blew me away then, and it still blew me away now.  Of course, it probably felt a little less significant this time around since I had already beaten the game before, but it was still an extremely epic and memorable experience the second time through, after having not played it for 2 years.  I played it by myself this time, however, and this led me to discover a few annoyances about the game I was not previously aware of, and they were actually more prominent seeing as how I briefly tried out Gears of War 2 when I first got my 360.

I would probably say my biggest complaint with Gears of War is the fact that your allies do NOT revive one another, and this pissed me off to no end.  There were times where one of my squadmates would go down on the complete other side of the area that I'm in, and despite the fact that one of my other squadmates is HIDING BEHIND THE SAME COVER as him, NOPE, he will not revive him and I have to travel across the entire level just to go get him.  Epic did off-set this by making it so that if you clear an area of all the current enemies your downed allies will revive automatically, but it's still annoying because once they go down all the focus from enemy fire shifts towards you.  This also leads me to another thing... the friendly AI in Gears of War is well... kind of dumb.  I never really noticed it the first time I played because I was playing co-op with my friend.  This time however, since I was playing by myself I noticed that often times your squadmates don't actually do a whole lot.  That's not to say they are completely useless, since they do a pretty good job of distracting the enemy... but they aren't really so great at actually killing them.  Sometimes I noticed my allies would just kind of stand around in really bad spots while getting shot and then just go down, and that was pretty annoying too.  Generally these problems weren't really game breaking in any way whatsoever, they were just things that stood out to me as making the single player feel a little more frustrating than the co-op.  Another thing that kind of bugged me a little bit, but is understandable is that when you get shot down you have to reload at a checkpoint.  Naturally this makes sense, but in co-op you can be revived by a buddy, it just makes me think that if you allies are alive they should be given the chance to bring you back.  The same applies in Gears of War 2 though, so I can't really complain.  I kind of wish they made it so your allies could bring you back though because it's really annoying when you're at the VERY END of an area and some random enemy comes out of nowhere with a shotgun and is just like SUP BRO EAT SOME SHOTGUN SHELLS and you have to repeat the whole area from the beginning.

Another thing I noticed which may have just been to my own chainsaw incompetence, but sure as hell didn't feel that way, was that sometimes the chainsaw just felt really unresponsive.  I know that when you get shot/hit/whatever while reving the chainsaw you have to rev it again... but there were numerous instances where I'd be right beside a guy and the chainsaw just REFUSED to work.  I don't know if anyone else has ever experienced this with this game, but there were too many occasionas where I'd try to chainsaw a guy and I'd just wind up dying because the chainsaw decided it didn't want to do anything even though I was holding the button down, and even tried re-reving the chainsaw, but nope it just wouldn't work and I'd die and have to repeat the whole area all over again.

Anyway, don't take any of this as me bashing the game though, I'm merely just venting about a few frustrations I experienced throughout my absolutely spectacular playthrough of Gears of War.

In other news, I started playing Gears of War 2 not too long after I finished Gears 1, because after I finished Gears 1 I sat on my computer for about 30 minutes and then just got this feeling like I needed more Gears of War.  Needless to say, I've played it pretty much all the way up until what I believe is probably the final area of Act II, and all I have to say is that Benjamin Carmine is awesome.  Poor guy definitely got the short end of the stick though :/

P.S. Fuck you, General RAAM.