Keeping myself honest

This is a post I’ve been sitting on for a while (Boxing Day) but now have some more insight to finish it.

– Start Original Post –

So my angry rant today will be on video games because its a subject that is near and dear to my heart and sometime utterly infuriating. I was playing Gears of War today and got annoyed at the totally asinine game play decisions just a few hours in.

First off the cover mechanic while interesting and at the time new seems slow and annoying most of the time as you get hit with a spray of bullets every time you jump up and have to re-aim at the enemy. I liked the realism the cover system brought to GTA4 but this seems more like a gimmick than anything, although I guess I shouldn’t be commenting on men with 5 foot wide shoulders moving slowly.

The melee combat is frustrating to say the least and I’ve already run into 2 situations with one hit kill monsters that you need to do some special attack to or you just have to run away from. These types of enemies have always been frustrating to deal with going back to the original Nintendo plat formers so why are they in an Xbox 360 game that is supposed to be a game of the year? Seriously I’m not at an arcade and you don’t need to suck me dry of quarters game designers, you can stop with the pull out your hair boss battles.

The last complaint (so far) on gears is even though I do like having an AI teammate to run around with make him less of a tool. I don’t mind if he isn’t as good at supporting me as a human but at the very least he shouldn’t keep randomly dying to the one hit kill monsters; and if I am doing something wrong so he will get killed by my actions he should mention it to me so I know what I’m doing wrong.

At first I thought my problem was that I was getting old and have less time to devote to gaming so I’m just not a good as I used to be but then I remembered that I’ve beaten Mass Effect, GTA 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.  all since I’ve started work. So this means it’s not me that is lacking but the game design.

I’ve had similar experience with Halo 3, Devil May Cry 4 and to a lesser extent Assassins Creed and I don’t really get why. Are my expectations higher? Probably, but with the budgets the games have now that should be the case. It seems like some games are trying to be a lot more than they should be, Halo 3’s attempt to make a more emotional experience was laughable at best and detracted from the fun of being a super bad ass 7 foot tall marine.

– End Original Post –

After finishing gears my feelings mellowed a little but but the game overall was still a frustrating experience that seemed liked it was a lot of release hype. Gears 2 on the other hand so far is living up to what I assumed from the hype was and while not the greatest game ever made is the bad ass shooter I was looking for.

Fable 2 was a little anti climatic for an ending but I got enough out of just wondering around in the game for it not to detract too much.

Thinking about updating the look of the blog and some functionality on the site this weekend, and maybe I’m just used to being out of  school but 2000 pages of reading for my MCTS seems like a lot when I have to actually work a real job during the week.

Will try to update this more and talk about the battlestar episode as well because it was pretty awesome.

Scotty B Gaming

I haven’t blogged in a while as I’ve been busy this last week getting back into work and well doing some gaming on my last week of vacation which kept me busy, and I was on vacation and well this blog isn’t work the posts always seem to take a lot more time then I think they’re going too.

Now that its had some time to sink in I feel like I have more to offer to the discussion of 1UP.com being bought other than my initial reaction which was ‘SCREW THIS’. For a quick refresher 1UP.com is a gaming site and is one of the few know for having integrity and honesty in a field where being a sell out is not only rewarded but sometimes the only way you can play the game. There content was original and insightful and always entertaining and over the last couple of years I had grown found of the site and many of its personalities.

So this week when I got word that they had just been bought from the ill managed and just out of bankruptcy Ziff Davis company I was happy that they would have money to expand content and keep things alive. Then I found out that all of the podcasts, the 1UP show (Great weekly video show) and at least 30 people had been cut I was more than a little outraged as many other fans were. The old CGW podcast (97.1 the Brodeo) was the first podcast I every listened too and not only got me interested in other podcasts (I think I listen to 15 a week now) but also into the enthusiast press.

There have been a lot of good blog postings and comments on the events, most of which are far more relevant and better written than anything I could hope to come up with here (here and here as a couple of examples). All I can add to the conversation is that at the behest of many of the departed I will try to continue to support the site although the things that made me care about the site and its personalities are no longer there. The podcasts while they made no money got me hooked and invested with the people writing the articles on the site and gave me a thirst to see what they were up to next, which made me go to the site quite often which should add to advertising.

Well good luck to all, I have you all on twitter and will continue to follow your exploits here:
eat-sleep-game.com
geekbox.net
talkingorange.com

At some point I will post my angry gaming rant (that I started writing on Christmas day) on the state of certain games and why I don’t think Gears of War is anything other than a decent game which would get some fanboy rage except no one reads this blog anyway, with the apparent exception of my little sister which means I can no longer curse all the time (Damn it). O and if there is any deity listening can you stop this bus strike? Because apparently no on down here is willing to try.

Also I never meant to to call you out Cara on if you liked my present or not I just had a better idea for a DVD that I thought you would already be getting and stay tuned for a new video show that I’ll be colaborating on with my good friend Colin when we both have some free time to get it rolling.

Scotty B Gaming