Goodbye old friend

This evening I had some potatos in the oven, I was boiling some water to put corn in, and I turned on My XBox 360 (which has become my defacto DVD player) to queue up disk 2 of Entourage Season 6 which just arrived from Netflix today. Only instead of Vinny, Ari and the boys, I am greeted with this unpleasantness. (Not the cord dissaster geniuses, I plugged the 360 back in after I unhooked everything for the picture) I'm referring to the E73 error message. That's as far as my XBox would go. You can't see it from this picture but the top left quarter circle of the power LED is red and blinking. I looked up this error and it means the ethernet port on the xbox 360 is bad. I unhooked the ethernet cable, but it made no difference. I called Microsoft, knowing that I would have to pay to get it fixed. The customer service rep had me go through a couple of steps, nothing fixed it, so she informed me that I would have to send in my XBox to have it fixed for $120. Say what? $120? I thanked her and told her I would think about it. I then turned down the heat on my potatoes, turned off the boiling water, and went to Best Buy.

Last month, Microsoft announced the XBox 360 slim model, which replaced the original, effective immediately, and had the effect of causing retailers to knock $50 off the price of the system. I went to Best Buy and bought an Arcade unit for $150. No tax on Oregon purchases. So instead of paying $120 that I may have had to pay tax on, and wait 2-3 weeks to get my Xbox back repaired, I just bought a new one and connected my old hard drive to it. The new one comes with a wireless controller (bringing me up to 3 now) and 2 games: Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and Viva Pinata, neither game I have ever owned.




The new Xbox has the newest motherboard style: The Jasper, which is supposed to have the fewest instances of red rings (though my problem wasn't a red ring so who cares?) One nice surprise was the power brick on the new one is noticably smaller than the obese original.

Best Buy didn't have any slim Arcades for me to consider. I'm not sure if I'd pay $50 more for the slim. On the plus side it has a built in wireless adapter and it has a direct port for Natal, which even though at this time I have no plans to get, never say never. On the other hand, it's $50, I don't really want to play my games via wireless adapter if I can avoid i t, and it's way too soon to know what new hardware problems this first run of slim consoles will have. I have some time to think about it, 30 days to return the new system, but at the moment I am happy with the Arcade unit.



It's kind of a sad moment, we've been through a lot together. It died 2 days after I finished Bionic Commando, making it the last game I played, and one day after I watched Scrubs season 4 on DVD, making it the last DVD I watched. I won't be able to access my downloaded content unless I'm online with the new system, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Bionic Commando

Date Acquired: 7.17.2010

Date Completed: 7.25.2010

Thoughts: I have to admit, I'm shocked that I finished this game. I tend to be bad at finishing games over all, so when I do finish one, it tends to be a AAA title, or close to it. Bionic Commando had all the potential to be that AAA title upon it's release last year, but reviews refuted that promise, and so I passed it by until last weekend when I saw Gamestop sellign it used for $8.99 AND during a buy 2 get one free sale. Can't get much cheaper than that for a barely year old game. I bought it because of the price. I knew the reviews were bad, so I wasn't expecting to play it much. It has an average review score of 73 on gamerankings. Not the kind of game I usually buy, I figured I'd throw it in for a little while, pick up some cheap achievement points and move on. But then I started really liking it. I guess if you go in with no expectations, it helps you enjoy a game. I might have felt differently about this game if I bought it on day 1 last year for $60. I played it for a few hours last Saturday, then switched to a different game, but thought about it at work on Sunday, so played it more, and so on.

Pros: The Swing Mechanic. In the begining this can be frustrating. There's a point early to midway in the game where you have to swing over some floating mines over water, and you have to go from one to the next for quite a while, if you drop in the water you die (which, while I hate that in games, I have to admit, falling into the water with a giant metal arm strapped to your body that extends for 50 feet probably would be hard to swim with). Anyway this section of the game was really really hard. It probably took me more than 20 tries to get it and I was frustrated. But that was the last time I had any issue with the swing. After I crossed that hurdle, I knew how to use it, I knew how it worked, and the few times they'd sprinkle those in again gave me no trouble at all. The Graphics are decent, not spectacular, but fine. There was a really creative section of the game where you're riding on top of an army jet, you have to rip the metal covering off of it, then use your arm to hack into it, you take over the plane and fly it to another plane and jump to it, and repeat. I liked creative little touches like this throughout the game. The gun combat was easy enough, standard 3rd person controls here, get shot too much, go hide while you heal automatically. Another thing this game has going for it is it felt like a blockbuster title. Like the money was clearly put into it, the cut scenes are good, the dialog is good, it just feels pretty polished for the most part, it's hard to describe. It didn't feel like when I was playing TMNT and I could tell they were just half-assing it. Some real effort was put into it, and while it may not have translated in review scores, I appreciated it.

Cons: There were definitely some issues with this game. Chief among them for me anyway was the radiation. There's Radiation all over the city, if you go off the path you're supposed to go, the radiation kills you. The problem is, well there's a lot of problems with this. For one, it's not always obvious you're swinging into radiation. It's one thing if I go way off the map, I know I'm risking it, but sometimes you're just heading for the next waypoint, and while that waypoint *IS* due west of you, you can't actually go West, you have to go North first, then west, and you can pick up some serious speed swinging through the game getting shot at, and you propel yourself into the middle of a radiation patch while following the map and die. But worse than that is why the radiation is there in the first place. Obviously it's being used to make the game linear, force you to go one the path Capcom wants you to, but that's a giant cop-out. The crux of the game is you have this bionic arm that lets you go up and around all over the place, places you can't go in other games. The game even hides collectibles (that coolly look just like the original NES power ups) So you're supposed to explore to find the collectibles, but not TOO much or you'll die? What kind of logic is that? The game should be as much about figuring out cool ways to get where you want as about the combat, and adding the radiation really detracts from that. The game's hard too. They give you some really difficult enemies that your gun does nothing against. You get some power ups, but they are very few and far between, mainly saved for the boss fights. It's the game's way of forcing you to use your arm attacks to defeat the enemies, which is fine, but it sometimes feels like you're under-armed (no pun intended) and you ought to have at least a few cars laying around to throw at the enemy or something. Another really annoying con to this game is level jumping. When you load up a game you have the option to continue your game, make a new game, or level jump. Level jumping sounds like a great idea. Use this to go back and find the collectibles and achievements you missed, right? No. The game tells you specifically you can't get either of these things if you use the level jump. So uh, what's the point of it? I already played the level, why would I want to go back if nothing I'll do has any impact on the rest of my game? The game auto saves, and I only have one save, stuck on the last fight of the game, so I can't go back that way either .Basically unless I want to replay the game again, I can't increase my achievement score. I could care less about the collectibles, I wasn't going to get all of those any way. I just don't see why even have that level jump option if you can't do anything with it.

To do: Nothing. I'm not playing through it again, and have no interest in the multiplayer. Since I can't get any achievements without putting another 3-5 hours into the game, I'm just going to move on.

Shopping Spree

Gamestop's buy 2 get 1 free sale is a periodic event that has proven to be an achiles heel of mine. I just can't say no. Today, my day off, was the last day of their latest such sale. I rode my bike to the closest Gamestop to me, looked around, bought nothing, came home. Thought about what I saw, looked some games up via game rankings, and went back to a different gamestop (because for some stupid reason, the gamestop near me is the ONLY gamestop of the 6 in Vancouver that closes at 8, the rest close at 9, and it was literally 8:01 when I stopped by. I was at this next Gamestop for quite a while, until 9:00 when it closed actually. Here's what I came out with:

Battlefield: Bad Company - 1 of the 2 primary games I went into Gamestop to get. The 2nd game has received a ton of good word of mouth, but the first game got very solid review scores as well. Given the good time I've had with the Call of Duties, this reasonably-priced prequal seemed like a must-buy. This is also one of only 2 games that I played tonight after I got home. Liked what I saw so far. Good humor, good graphics and gameplay. Solid title.

Fallout 3 - I can't believe I didn't own this already. It even came out in the relatively mediocre gaming year that was 2008. But I was in a relationship, and that caused me to miss out on the 2 biggest games of that year (this and Metal Gear Solid 4, among other games) I have wanted to get to this for literally years now, but the scope of it, the size of this RPG is intimidating. I just don't know where I'll find the time to play it. But I need to try. It has a sequal coming out this year, and while I have no plans to buy the sequal this year, it does add urgency to my need to finally get to this game. I got somewhat lucky with this as well, the copy I tried to purchase had no boxart or manual. But when they pulled it out of the drawer they keep used games in, they had tons of copies of this game, complete with box art. It's the little things.

Bionic Commando: Here is a game that didn't review well at all. I was initially looking forward to it last year, but the reviews were so bad I didn't even consider purchasing it when it eventually came out. But it was $8.99. That's hard to pass up. I looked up it's review score, and it's not as bad as I thought. About a 73 on game rankings. Which isn't awful. So I bought it. This is the other of the 2 games I played tonight, and I played this the longest. I am 26% of the way through the game, and to be honest, I really like it. Maybe I haven't gotten to the really frustrating parts yet, I see what some of the reviews are saying about the play control, but it hasn't been that big of an issue for me at this point. This game has been a really nice surprise.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 - This is the other of the 2 games that I went into Gamestop to buy. I've been jonesing for a new Tony Hawk game since forever, but they stopped being worthwhile a while ago. This is the highest rated game in the series on the 360, getting about an 82 on gamerankings, and doing even better on the big sites like 1up (gave it a 9) This was the 2nd Tony Hawk game to appear on 360, but the first built for it (the first 360 game was an Xbox/PS2 port. Not impressive from the reviews that I've read.

Halo 3 - I actually used to own this, and already beat it. But I knew I'd have to buy it again some day, as this is a prime candidate for a game my friends and I can pick up and play through the campaign together with. What finally pushed me over the top and got me to buy it this time was: It was $15. I've never seen this game this cheap, and I just decided to get it.

Ninety-Nine Nights - This was the one placeholder title. I needed another $10 game to satisfy the 2nd buy 2 get one free deal. I considered Tomb Raider Underground ($8.99, but I have a couple TR games I haven't played already, I'll never get to it), Motor Storm on PS3 (Good racing game, but no achievements) and others, but I went with this on the strength of a demo I remember enjoying years ago. This had by far the worst reviews of any game I bought, and when I looked up the achievement points, I found it unlikely that I will get any of them, which basically made the decision to return this game an easy one. Gamestop is having a half off sale on many older titles starting tomorrow (right after the Buy 2 get one free sale ended) but since I have a receipt, I will be able to exchange this game tomorrow, and I can get one of the discounted games that wasn't available today at that price. The leading candidates so far are: Lost Odysee: $12, Soul Calibur 4: $10 and Heavenly Sword: $15. I will likely update this list to reflect what I chose.

The grand total for these 6 games? $52. Less than the cost of one new game. Tough to beat that.

EDIT: I returned Ninety-Nine Nights the next day. These are the two titles I acquired instead:

Soul Calibur 4 - A game that's been on my list to get for a long time, yet when I looked at it yesterday it was a full $19.99 used which seems high for an older title. So I waited on it, and then saw it in the Gamestop sale for half off, finally it fell to the price point that I was willing to pay. I loved SC2, didn't really play 3, so hopefully I'll be able to get into and enjoy the 4th game. If Jon ever gets it, we can play online!

Lost Odyssey - Microsoft had a string of Square and Sakaguchi titles that didn't live up the hype. Blue Dragon, Infinite Undiscovery, etc etc, just didn't turn out well. But Lost Odyssey did. This Sakaguchi title reviewed very well, and consequently hasn't seen it's price drop as quickly as I'd have liked. It was still $24.99 yesterday, but half off today, so I made it an impulse buy.

Assassin's Creed

Date Acquired: 11.25.2008

Date Completed: 7.6.2010

Thoughts: I initially had trouble getting into this game. My initial impression was the controls were clunky and imprecise. I played through the tutorial and a few minutes of the mission but just didn't get hooked, and moved on quickly. That could have been it for me and Assassin's Creed, but the stellar reviews the sequal received made it clear to me that I would eventually need to revisit the first game. Also I really like Ubisoft's Prince of Persia games, to which I perceived this being of similar ilk. The end result was a game I found to be alternatingly very satisfying and very frustrating.

Pros: There is a lot this game does well. The assassinations are a lot of fun. I enjoyed the simplicity and effectiveness of the throwing knives (they replaced the crossbow that was originally supposed to be in the game and even exists in some early trailers) Finding high perches and climbing to their summits to synchronize your map, and discover new missions was a highlight. It allowed the game to show off it's visual beauty, which even now 3 years later I felt held up very well. The little graphical flourishes were a nice touch, there were a lot of different ways to kill someone in a fight, from cutting his head in 2, to stabbing him in the leg so he drops and then impaling him. But my favorite part was the story. I was engrossed in the events as they transpired. I WANTED to talk to Lucy after every trip in the Animus, to find out more about my mysterious captors and her role in all of this. I needed to know where it was all leading.

Cons: As good as the game is in places, it is a frustrating, buggy mess in others. My initial assessment of the clunkyness of the controls was spot on. Many times fights would not go my way even though I was performing precisely the correct block and counter moves I'd performed so many times before. The game just chose not to register that I had done anything and allowed me to be hacked to pieces. Once the game froze so badly on me after an assasination, I was trapped inside a building's wall and couldn't get out. I had to restart my game and redo the assasination. Water may be the most frustrating thing about the game. I can take on 50 enemies at once, but if I fall in the water, my game is over. And the game makes it VERY easy to fall in the water. One assasination in particular has you traveling to a pier and fight an enemy on a ship. You have to hop along several small platforms and the game won't auto correct when it realizes you were aiming for a peer. It will let you sail 3 inches past it into your death so you can reload and backtrack to that spot and try it again. The most common flaw with the game I've heard cited against it is it's repetitiveness. And there's no arguing this point. The games extremely repetitive. You will be doing the same missions over and over and over again in the game. There is one optional side mission: Save the pesant from harm' and this is always 5 guys attackin a peasant and you always have to fight them off. As far as story missions go, there are stealth assasinations, interogations, pickpockets, and eavesdropping. Oh and once I went to do one of the missions and was asked to go pick up 20 flags he's spread all around that area of the city in 4 minutes. I would have stealth assasinated him if I could but I settled for defying him and doing a different mission. Fortunately, the game doesn't require you to do every mission, you can pick and choose, you only need to do about 3 of the 6 or so available for every assasination target. Good news since they're all the same. You can do your favorite if you want (eavesdropping is the easiest, you just sit on a bench, press y, now go make a sandwich or something, the mission is over) The repetiveness reminded me of some other sandbox games like Spiderman 2 and Crackdown, it's just a fact of life in some games, but it's made tolerable if the bulk of the gameplay is enjoyable, which is the case for Spiderman 2 and Crackdown, and it's the case in Assasin's Creed.

Undecided: The ending. Wow, how do I feel about the ending? Well if I finished the game when this originally came out, the ending definately goes in the cons section. Basically this is because the game, well DOESN'T end. I'm not joking. I got the achievement for completing the game over 30 minutes before I actually stopped playing. I even got another 50 point story achievement after that point. And even at this point it wasn't obvious the game was over. The game never takes you to a 'to be continued' screen, even though it's obvious the story isn't close to being over. The game just leaves you in your little room, free to use the animus to your heart's content, but never again to advance the plot. I had to go online to confirm that I wasn't missing something. The game just.... ended but... didn't end, because I could still be playing right now if I hadn't eventually just turned the power off. The cliff-hanger ending caught me be surprise, I really expected the story to be resolved. Fortunately I already own Assassin's Creed 2, so I immediately put it in, even though I've already s tarted the game and gone a ways through it, I started again from the begining so that this time the plot would make sense. And it made a lot more sense.

Overall: Would I recommend this game to someone else? It might depend on the person, but overall, yes I would. Partially with the expectation that the excellent 2nd game will vindicate the flaws of the original. I am very interested to see how the game improves, as nearly every critic agrees that it does in a big way.

BioShock 2

Date Acquired: 2.14.2010

Date Completed: 5.3.2010

Thoughts: The Date completed is not a typo. I finished this game 2 months ago. So why has it taken me so long to write up thoughts when I've written up reflections on 3 other games since then? I was finding it difficult to put my experiences with the game into words. As a high profile followup to a superb game, I was having trouble reconciling my impressions into words. Much has been made that very little has been changed from the original game. And this is all true. But that's true for nearly all sequals. For some reason this is a cardinal sin against this game. I suspect the reason for that hypocrisy lies with the fact that the developer of the original game: 2K Boston chose not to make the sequal and the responsibility was instead given to 2k Marin. This put Marin in an impossible spot. By changing nothing, they offend people who claim that Bioshock's innovative nature is sullied by giving the sequal no innovation. On the otherhand, they could impliment innovative changes to the sequal and then they'd deal with allegations that they ruined the game by changing it too much. In all, I think sticking to the original blueprint was the right move.

That's not to say I agree with every choice the developers made. The game has it's flaws. For starters, I don't agree with the way the big sister was handeled. The big sisters are a wave of enemies, you will fight several times throughout the game. I think it would have been preferable if there had been only one little sister, a survivor from the original game, that you fight throughout. It would have seperated them from every other enemy you fight. Also the gatherings became tedious. I performed every one to stock up on Adam, but I always dreaded it. Also I don't understand what the point of playing as the big daddy was since I had no greater powers or abilities than the regular human I played in the original.

These complaints however, are essentially the only complaints I have from a game that I found otherwise to be fantastic. I was pulled into the game, it's story, it's mood, even more than I was the original. Once I started playing it, I couldn't not finish it. A rarity for me. I found the mood and the little details to be the equal of the original game.

One last thing, I must address that box art. I mean look at it. I just can't see anything else when I look at it.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Date Acquired: 2006 sometime

Date Completed: 6.30.2010

Thoughts: Well that was close. It's been my goal to Complete at least one game every month. Yes, I finished 3 in May, but that doesn't carry over into June. Finishing 3 games in May left me with a lot of games to start, not to finish. I did play several games in June, but as the month drew to a close it was becoming clear that I wasn't going to be finished with any of them by the end of the month. So the night of the 29th, I began combing through my games looking for something I could finish by the end of the following day. I considered Mad World, one of a large number in my collection of partially finished games. And then I found Phoenix Wright. I remembered leaving off on the fifth and final case. It's portable nature would allow me to work on it while at work. It was perfect.

I can't remember why I stopped playing Phoenix Wright. But I stop playing most of the games I start so that's to be expected. I can say it's not because I was stuck in the game. I wasn't even at the investigation phase of the game, I was in the court room, which really is where this game shines. The investigating and looking for evidence can be somewhat tedious. But in the courtroom you get to see the personalities of the crazy characters flourish. There's a lot of hilarious moments and antics.

It likely comes as no surprise that the game takes liberties with the legal system and it's procedures. As in, it outright ignores them. What we would call purgery, the game considers to be case exposition. Characters lie under oath with impunity. Cops plant evidence or destroy it, and nobody gets in trouble unless they kill somebody. But plenty of people do die, and it's your job to figure out whodoneit by listening to testomonies, catching contradictions and figuring out what pieces of evidence you hold can prove it. It's simple at first, Officer Marshall will tell you he never set foot in that room, and then you'll look in your evidence pile and see something called 'Marshall's handprint' smeared in blood in that very room. But it doesn't stay that simple, and if you get the wrong answer too many times, the judge ends your game and you have to start over at your last save point. It can be trial and error at times, when the answer isn't obvious, with this type of game that really can't be helped without the game being too simple.

The great thing about this game is it's uniqueness. It's nothing like any other game you've played before. Unless you've played any of the 5 DS games released in the US alone, more of which are available in Japan. All of which play exactly the same. I'm not sure it's a gametype that can really sustain multiple identical sequals like other franchises. It's a good experience, a fun game, but I can't say that I plan to seek out the sequal. Maybe in a year or so if I see one of the titles suitably cheap, I will pick it up on an impulse. But Upon finishing it, I don't feel the need to play another game like it anytime soon.

To Do: Nothing with this game. It has no replay value to speak of. I suppose the next step would be one of the sequals some day down the road. Maybe.