This entry is a bit on the stream of consciousness side. I have a couple technical topics lined up but all of them are still in draft form and need tweaking.

Gaming Roundup I

So I've been playing a couple different games lately, and I wanted to make some comments on them.

The first one is Dead or Alive 4. This game is brilliantly well done. It's beautiful to watch, and multiplayer is great fun. I absolutely recommend buying it. That said, whoever wrote the AI in it is an idiot. The AI sucks, badly. And I don't mean that it loses a lot. Just the opposite, in fact -- it regularly tears me to shreds. The thing is that it doesn't seem to have any difficulty scaling. As far as I can tell, the AI operates in two basic modes: PlayPerfectly, or DontDoJackShit. The difficulty level merely controls how much time the AI is in one mode or the other. When the AI is playing perfectly, you can't do anything, so there's really no point bothering. The way to win, then, is to make the most of the period when the AI has decided to stand around and do nothing for a while. Personally, I don't find this at all fun and I'm really quite baffled by the whole thing. I also suspect that Team Ninja, who made this game, didn't get anyone to test who hadn't already played the game and its predecessors forever. If they had, maybe they would've noticed the ridiculous brick wall of a difficulty curve.

Second is Gears of War. This game is good, not great. The difficulty is quite staggering, where I'm regularly being beaten on while playing the casual difficulty. Maybe it's different for people who've been playing shooters on consoles for a while, but I have a lot of trouble competing. I'm making progress, mind you. I'm just amazed at how often I'm killed off at what is supposed to be the easy difficulty. The ammo starvation in areas is not appreciated either. Visually, the game is suitably impressive. The biggest thing I noticed is that the cover element really dominates the game, almost unreasonably so. Any time you see cover, you can be assured that you are about to be in trouble within the next 5 seconds. (Of course, since you're being shot at pretty much all the time anyway, it doesn't matter that much.) I'll give Epic major props for actually coming up with a solid new mechanic for shooters, but really I feel like they could've been just a touch less aggressive about it.

Third, Halo 2. Not 3, I'm playing that after I finish 2. I'm told that 2 is a fairly short game. Thank god. Halo 1 was a very good game, maybe even a great game. Halo 2, however, is junk. I'm consistently lost, and since areas of the game are unreasonably dark, I'm usually lost because I missed some random corridor that I couldn't see without shoving my face into walls in the first place. The difficulty wanders up and down between "fairly easy" and "you die now". The last two hours I played were basically spent running like hell because I got tired of shooting the god damn Flood, whose population has apparently ballooned to even more absurd levels than before. They also have more random spawn points than ever before. Oh, and those freaking sentinels are doing the exact same thing. I've probably shot a hundred since I started playing. The plot is basically there, it's just that it doesn't show up all that often because I spend most of my time wandering around in dark areas being ambushed by Flood. My understanding is that most people were angry because the game ends rather suddenly.

The fourth game is PGR3. What's to say? It's very good looking, but as far as I can tell it's just another completely uninspired racing game, same as Forza and Gran Turismo. That's probably great for driving purists, but I'm not interested. I enjoyed Need for Speed: Most Wanted because it had a back story, along with hilarious cutscenes, and because the police chases were amazing. NFS: Carbon took away the chases, and I lost interest there, too. I'm wondering how the next Burnout game will be. I liked the previous Burnouts but felt that they tended to drag on a little bit, since it was basically minor tweaks on the same five minutes or so of gameplay.

There's a couple misc. games in here too. I played the demo of Crackdown, and didn't come to a final verdict. I'm going to get the full thing and try again, and then I'll decide about actually buying it. As far as I can tell from the Katamari demo, it's the same exact game it's always been. I'm mainly waiting to see if they've bothered to put in a real multiplayer mode this time. The Simpsons game demo basically sucked, which is unfortunate, because it's visually very true to that look. Viva Pinata seemed cool, but I'm concerned that it's like Harvest Moon, where I will get bored about 8 hours in and never play it again. That's another one where I'll play the full thing for a while before I decide about buying. Viva Pinata: Party Animals is looking to be great, and I'm hoping that the final release does not disappoint.

Lastly, the Arcade titles. Hexic HD is great. Cloning Clyde is great. Geometry Wars is great. Zuma is great. Worms is very good. Aegis Wing is okay, but I prefer the original version which my Live Arcade intern friends were working at when we were at MS as far as visuals go. Yaris is painfully bad. Bomberman is apparently just the same old Bomberman, as far as I can tell from the demo. Marble Blast is a great concept, but I haven't decided whether to get it, and what platform I would get it for. Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo II HD Remix is great, although I have to wonder if I would buy it or simply install a MAME emulator if that option was available. Tetris sucks. Seriously. I didn't think anyone could screw up Tetris so badly.