As it stands, I am one match away from 30 online badges, the Kingpin achievement, and a 1000 in a game that took me over 150 hours. Unfortunately, that match has to take place on Talk Like a Pirate day, which is in over 6 months from now.
I've already given my thoughts on Saint's Row 2. It's everything GTAIV should've been. Obsessive attention to everything in physics was sacrificed for letting you do whatever you want ever.
This video pretty much sums it up:
I still stand by my statement that if Saint's Row 2 were given the same amount of polishing and attention to detail that GTAIV was given, but not the annoyingly accurate physics and graphics, it would indisputably be one of the greatest games of all time.
Currently, I'm working on Transformers, which falls under the category of "Got for points, but couldn't finish the godawful POS." My initial impression was that the game was horribly made in every facet, and probably substitutable for sleep deprivation as a means of torture in Guantanamo Bay. But as I'm getting into it, the game's not THAT bad. It's still a shitty game that I would rather have never played in the first place, but it's at least tolerable.
I ahould be done with it in a few days.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
It's been one week.
Not just a week since I've posted here, a week since I've even earned an achievement. I decided that once I get to the 10th rank, I'm going to boost out the other medals (giving me 29/30 badges), and just shelve SR2 until Talk Like a Pirate Day rolls around for a 30th badge with zero effort on my part. There's no point in spending 40 hours ranking up when there's other games I can be working on.
Hopefully, I'll have that done in time for week 2 of GSL, when I'll be playing. The fact I'm in a competition should be enough motivation for me to plug away at the easier games I have left.
WORKING ON:
Saint's Row 2 - $403,000/776,250
Hopefully, I'll have that done in time for week 2 of GSL, when I'll be playing. The fact I'm in a competition should be enough motivation for me to plug away at the easier games I have left.
WORKING ON:
Saint's Row 2 - $403,000/776,250
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
I'm coming for you, Stallion
No, not with total gamerscore. That would be stupid. What I'm talking about is 360voice's genre leaderboards, most specifically the Sandbox one, which Stallion is currently #1 on. I love sandbox games, and I noticed the other day that I own pretty much all of them. So my long-term goal is to 1000 every single sandbox game out there.
Games Fshguy currently tracks as sandbox:
ASSASSIN'S CREED
Done.
BULLY
I own this, and it isn't too hard, so I hear.
CRACKDOWN
Done.
DEAD RISING
I own this. It shouldn't be too hard, just a little time consuming. 14 hours straight would be totally doable on a day off of work.
GTA IV
I own this, and have a 900 on it. I have to play through the story mode entirely to get Chain Reaction, as it glitched on me and I decided to just clear out my saves and restart. The other achievements are all online. I think it's best if I wait for the online to die out, as even the last time I played it, it was alive enough to make AWP boosting a bitch.5.
JUST CAUSE
I own this, and it's easy.
MERCENARIES 2
The glitchy achievements scare me a little, but I heard it's only a little on the time-consuming side and actually a pretty fun game.
SAINT'S ROW
Done.
SAINT'S ROW 2
Currently working on. All I have left is Kingpin. I should be halfway through the ranks by the end of the night.
SPIDERMAN 3
I took this game off my card with the nXe glitch, and I'm a little afraid to put it back on. This would definitely be the make-or-break one, as I'd have to practice the hell out of it before I felt comfortable putting it on my account.
SUPERMAN RETURNS
Done.
THE GODFATHER
I don't know too much about this game, only that it seems to have a fairly high rate of completion on TrueAchievements.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
A superhero movie game? How hard can it be? (disregard what I just said about Spiderman 3)
Other games:
OBLIVION
You never have to level-grind in this game, and one of the biggest features of RPGs are gone. I'd consider this a sandbox hack+slash more than I would an RPG. It's done.
TONY HAWK'S AMERICAN WASTELAND
I mean, come on. The entire play area is one big unbroken map. It's done.
TONY HAWK'S PROJECT 8
Not only is it the same deal as above, but there's no story to it. Sandbox if I ever saw one. I only have 500-odd on it, but I definitely think I could do it if given time.
TONY HAWK'S PROVING GROUNDS
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH.... no. Never. I'm not even going to consider this unless it appears on the 360v genre list.
TRANSFORMERS
I haven't played it too much, but from what I saw it looked sandboxy. I own it and it's on my card at like a 15 or something.
SNEAK KING
Arcades really do belong in their own genre, but I consider the fact I have a 200 in this as an added bonus.
Consider any other games sandbox? Leave a comment.
Games Fshguy currently tracks as sandbox:
ASSASSIN'S CREED
Done.
BULLY
I own this, and it isn't too hard, so I hear.
CRACKDOWN
Done.
DEAD RISING
I own this. It shouldn't be too hard, just a little time consuming. 14 hours straight would be totally doable on a day off of work.
GTA IV
I own this, and have a 900 on it. I have to play through the story mode entirely to get Chain Reaction, as it glitched on me and I decided to just clear out my saves and restart. The other achievements are all online. I think it's best if I wait for the online to die out, as even the last time I played it, it was alive enough to make AWP boosting a bitch.5.
JUST CAUSE
I own this, and it's easy.
MERCENARIES 2
The glitchy achievements scare me a little, but I heard it's only a little on the time-consuming side and actually a pretty fun game.
SAINT'S ROW
Done.
SAINT'S ROW 2
Currently working on. All I have left is Kingpin. I should be halfway through the ranks by the end of the night.
SPIDERMAN 3
I took this game off my card with the nXe glitch, and I'm a little afraid to put it back on. This would definitely be the make-or-break one, as I'd have to practice the hell out of it before I felt comfortable putting it on my account.
SUPERMAN RETURNS
Done.
THE GODFATHER
I don't know too much about this game, only that it seems to have a fairly high rate of completion on TrueAchievements.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
A superhero movie game? How hard can it be? (disregard what I just said about Spiderman 3)
Other games:
OBLIVION
You never have to level-grind in this game, and one of the biggest features of RPGs are gone. I'd consider this a sandbox hack+slash more than I would an RPG. It's done.
TONY HAWK'S AMERICAN WASTELAND
I mean, come on. The entire play area is one big unbroken map. It's done.
TONY HAWK'S PROJECT 8
Not only is it the same deal as above, but there's no story to it. Sandbox if I ever saw one. I only have 500-odd on it, but I definitely think I could do it if given time.
TONY HAWK'S PROVING GROUNDS
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH.... no. Never. I'm not even going to consider this unless it appears on the 360v genre list.
TRANSFORMERS
I haven't played it too much, but from what I saw it looked sandboxy. I own it and it's on my card at like a 15 or something.
SNEAK KING
Arcades really do belong in their own genre, but I consider the fact I have a 200 in this as an added bonus.
Consider any other games sandbox? Leave a comment.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Aliens! And they're flying through airplane hangars!
So, I've returned to Saint's Row 2, which has since been patched and is even more of the best sandbox game this generation. It's numerous one-ups to GTA are really evident when it comes to the collections. There are less of everything. 50 tag locations, 50 Audio CDs, 80 stunt jumps, and 35 flying stunts. What's even better is that the stunt jumps unlock the second you hit them, rather than GTA, which insists you have to land everything perfectly. The flying stunts, while in theory next to impossbile, are infinitely easier with the Gamestop pre-order codes. Dial #728237 to get a UFO, which handles perfectly. The only times I ever crashed on it were due to carelessness. The only singleplayer achievement I have left is Blue Collar, and I'll have that done the second my cousin and I are on Live together.
Moving on to the multiplayer. Strong Arm is genuine fun. Basically, everyone's put in a sizeable (about 1 square mile) playing field. On this playing field, there are four tag locations. Having control over them will give your team powerups, anything from having CPU cops shoot at your opponents to increased ammo. At this point, it's a multiplayer I would be happy with, but there's more.
The activities from the singleplayer return again, 4 per match. Your team earns $10,000 for winning each one, in addition to whatever they get during the activity. These activities range from killing random pedestrians to having a plain old-fashioned race around the map.
So, basically, imagine throwing yourself in front of civilian cars, with the intent of ragdolling on them to get increased money for the Insurance fraud activity you're playing. Suddenly, an enemy appears, and he's advancing on you threateningly with a giant foam hand that kills in one hit. You try to shoot at him, but your view is obscured by a big pillar of smoke, activated by another enemy that just sprayed that tag. At the last moment, a CPU-controlled car comes by and smacks him at 90 mph, killing him instantly.
That's pretty much what happens over the course of the game. You get money for doing anything related to the activity at hand, as well as killing opponents. First team to $100,000 wins. The rest of the achievements will take me around 100 hours to complete, but it'll be nonstop fun.
Moving on to the multiplayer. Strong Arm is genuine fun. Basically, everyone's put in a sizeable (about 1 square mile) playing field. On this playing field, there are four tag locations. Having control over them will give your team powerups, anything from having CPU cops shoot at your opponents to increased ammo. At this point, it's a multiplayer I would be happy with, but there's more.
The activities from the singleplayer return again, 4 per match. Your team earns $10,000 for winning each one, in addition to whatever they get during the activity. These activities range from killing random pedestrians to having a plain old-fashioned race around the map.
So, basically, imagine throwing yourself in front of civilian cars, with the intent of ragdolling on them to get increased money for the Insurance fraud activity you're playing. Suddenly, an enemy appears, and he's advancing on you threateningly with a giant foam hand that kills in one hit. You try to shoot at him, but your view is obscured by a big pillar of smoke, activated by another enemy that just sprayed that tag. At the last moment, a CPU-controlled car comes by and smacks him at 90 mph, killing him instantly.
That's pretty much what happens over the course of the game. You get money for doing anything related to the activity at hand, as well as killing opponents. First team to $100,000 wins. The rest of the achievements will take me around 100 hours to complete, but it'll be nonstop fun.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
My review of Prey
Imagine you're playing a run-of-the-mill FPS. Now imagine you just did a good dose of LSD. Add in some portals, gravity puzzles, aliens, spirits, and a stellar storyline, and you have the basics of Prey, easily one of the five best FPS games on the 360.
You play Tommy, a twentysomething Cherokee who resents his life. You can't bring yourself to confess your love for your girlfriend Jenny, and you barely care about your Cherokee roots. The game starts with you staring into the bathroom mirror in Jenny's bar, insulting yourself, and one of my biggest pet peeves in video games shows itself right away. Despite the fact you can clearly see your feet in the reflection, you can't see them when looking down. But since Halo and Mirror's Edge are the only two first-person games I've played that let you see your feet, I'd be a jackass to hate the game for it.
You leave the bathroom, and you're confronted by your grandfather, who talks to you for a good 3-5 minutes before you can pass him. Once you pass him, you dick around in the bar for a while, probably earning 3 achievements by playing respective games in the arcade area. By this point, it's about 30 minutes after you first put the game in, and nothing of note has happened. It's a very slow start, one that would turn a casual gamer off of the game entirely.
However, the monotony breaks when you club two drunks to death for advancing on your girlfriend too vigorously, and then randomly get abducted by aliens. You get separated from your girlfriend and grandfather, and the game begins. All you have is a wrench you picked up at the bar, and you use this to kill various aliens, and pick up their guns. You're also introduced to several gravity mechanics, like a switch that reverses gravity when you shoot it, and a pathway that bends gravity so you can walk on it upside-down and not fall off.
None of this is explained to you, and while this feels like a cop-out on the developers' part, it actually helps to create a very organic experience. You feel exactly like you would if you just got abducted - lost in a strange place, forced to experiment with whatever you find to attempt to make sense of your situation.
Eventually, you find your grandfather, as he's trapped in a huge vice. Seconds later, he gets crushed to death. You continue onwards to try to find Jenny, and soon, your grandfather's spirit comes down to guide you. He brings you to Cherokee heaven, where he teaches you the power of spirit walking. Basically, you can bring your spirit out of your body and use it to go through force fields and operate switches.
While this is a very interesting set up to what becomes a theme to puzzles and the like, about 50% of the time you'll have to use spirit walk for the following scenario: You come across a force field. Spirit walk. Walk through the force field, hit a switch that's right there to shut it off, return to your body, continue on with the game. It gets tiring, but it has to be done to keep the mechanic in your mind. Otherwise, you'd come across a fantastic puzzle once every two chapters, and spirit walking wouldn't be an obvious solution.
Shortly after, you'll find the second power your grandfather helped you with. Every time you die, your soul gets transported to a spirit world, where the spirits of your slain enemies fly around you, and you're tasked with shooting them to revive your health. After a while, you get transported into your revived body, exactly where it was, but with more health. Since there's no penalty for dying, you get careless and do it a lot, which makes the game drag because you're forced to shoot birds for 30 seconds every time. While the obvious solution is to not die, it's just a bad idea to make the game less fun if the player sucks.
As you play on, the scope of the game gets bigger, employing spaceships and miles-long areas for each puzzle. While it serves to build the game very well, after a while, you start to grow a little tired of it. At this point, playing any other game, you would stop wanting to play. But Prey's storyline makes you want to suffer through the puzzles, find Jenny, and get home. Again, it stays very true-to-life, you feel exactly what you would feel if you were Tommy. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the plot and gameplay alternate their roles beautifully throughout the game. The game keeps you hooked in using one or the other throughout the duration.
Prey looks like a game that came out on the original Xbox, but I've never let graphics bother me. Also, I just can't shake the feeling that 3D Realms lucked out massively. The complete lack of direction in the game could've just been bad developing, and the fact I was always able to find my way through the puzzles could've been a mixture of lucky design and me making the right choices on the first go. Regardless, this is a game I thorougly enjoyed playing. It's an easy 1000, and a used copy only cost me 8 bucks. Anyone who hasn't played this 3-year-old game should. Immediately.
You play Tommy, a twentysomething Cherokee who resents his life. You can't bring yourself to confess your love for your girlfriend Jenny, and you barely care about your Cherokee roots. The game starts with you staring into the bathroom mirror in Jenny's bar, insulting yourself, and one of my biggest pet peeves in video games shows itself right away. Despite the fact you can clearly see your feet in the reflection, you can't see them when looking down. But since Halo and Mirror's Edge are the only two first-person games I've played that let you see your feet, I'd be a jackass to hate the game for it.
You leave the bathroom, and you're confronted by your grandfather, who talks to you for a good 3-5 minutes before you can pass him. Once you pass him, you dick around in the bar for a while, probably earning 3 achievements by playing respective games in the arcade area. By this point, it's about 30 minutes after you first put the game in, and nothing of note has happened. It's a very slow start, one that would turn a casual gamer off of the game entirely.
However, the monotony breaks when you club two drunks to death for advancing on your girlfriend too vigorously, and then randomly get abducted by aliens. You get separated from your girlfriend and grandfather, and the game begins. All you have is a wrench you picked up at the bar, and you use this to kill various aliens, and pick up their guns. You're also introduced to several gravity mechanics, like a switch that reverses gravity when you shoot it, and a pathway that bends gravity so you can walk on it upside-down and not fall off.
None of this is explained to you, and while this feels like a cop-out on the developers' part, it actually helps to create a very organic experience. You feel exactly like you would if you just got abducted - lost in a strange place, forced to experiment with whatever you find to attempt to make sense of your situation.
Eventually, you find your grandfather, as he's trapped in a huge vice. Seconds later, he gets crushed to death. You continue onwards to try to find Jenny, and soon, your grandfather's spirit comes down to guide you. He brings you to Cherokee heaven, where he teaches you the power of spirit walking. Basically, you can bring your spirit out of your body and use it to go through force fields and operate switches.
While this is a very interesting set up to what becomes a theme to puzzles and the like, about 50% of the time you'll have to use spirit walk for the following scenario: You come across a force field. Spirit walk. Walk through the force field, hit a switch that's right there to shut it off, return to your body, continue on with the game. It gets tiring, but it has to be done to keep the mechanic in your mind. Otherwise, you'd come across a fantastic puzzle once every two chapters, and spirit walking wouldn't be an obvious solution.
Shortly after, you'll find the second power your grandfather helped you with. Every time you die, your soul gets transported to a spirit world, where the spirits of your slain enemies fly around you, and you're tasked with shooting them to revive your health. After a while, you get transported into your revived body, exactly where it was, but with more health. Since there's no penalty for dying, you get careless and do it a lot, which makes the game drag because you're forced to shoot birds for 30 seconds every time. While the obvious solution is to not die, it's just a bad idea to make the game less fun if the player sucks.
As you play on, the scope of the game gets bigger, employing spaceships and miles-long areas for each puzzle. While it serves to build the game very well, after a while, you start to grow a little tired of it. At this point, playing any other game, you would stop wanting to play. But Prey's storyline makes you want to suffer through the puzzles, find Jenny, and get home. Again, it stays very true-to-life, you feel exactly what you would feel if you were Tommy. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the plot and gameplay alternate their roles beautifully throughout the game. The game keeps you hooked in using one or the other throughout the duration.
Prey looks like a game that came out on the original Xbox, but I've never let graphics bother me. Also, I just can't shake the feeling that 3D Realms lucked out massively. The complete lack of direction in the game could've just been bad developing, and the fact I was always able to find my way through the puzzles could've been a mixture of lucky design and me making the right choices on the first go. Regardless, this is a game I thorougly enjoyed playing. It's an easy 1000, and a used copy only cost me 8 bucks. Anyone who hasn't played this 3-year-old game should. Immediately.
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