Leveling Down

How many rockets does it even take to destroy a tank?!

I haven’t even started the single player to Call of Duty: World at War yet and have already dove into the multiplayer with a few of friends. Having played the three levels in the beta/demo, I kind of knew what to expect. Unlike some of my other friends who I notice get on to play it pretty often, for some reason the game is just not clicking for me like Call of Duty 4 was. It wasn’t clicking much for me in the beta, and the addition of the new maps in the retail has not really changed that feeling. My biggest gripes seem to be the addition of tanks and the changing of unlocking a sight from 25 kills to 75 kills. The game in general just seems really imbalanced from a multiplayer standpoint.

This is all coming from someone who did decently in Call of Duty 4. I had a k/d ratio of about 1.5, a max kill streak of 20 or 21, was able to use every weapon in the game, and did the F.N.G. time in a little over 16 seconds.  I’m not just some guy who sucks at these types of games. They’re practically my bread and butter.

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I ended up splitting up my gaming time this week between Fable II and Call of Duty: World at War. It’s funny too because even though it seemed like no one was too into the beta, it ends up several of my friends got World at War – four of them, in fact. So now whenever there’s three or four of us on, we hit up Call of Duty: World at War, otherwise I’m playing Fable II. I just completed Fable II last night, so I’m making good progress on my game queue. I’ll probably dive into the single player campaign of Call of Duty: World at War next, since I’m already playing the multiplayer and that will allow me to put out a review on it. My buddy chullyQ is telling me though that going through the game on Veteran is even more aggravating than it was on Call of Duty 4, so I’m not exactly looking too forward to it.

I was saying earlier that I wouldn’t buy any more games unless I made significant progress through my current game queue, but I couldn’t resist. I ended up buying Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, and Left 4 Dead as sort of a Christmas present for myself. These were the only titles I was interested in of the big holiday releases, so now that I have them I can rest easy and feel content knowing that I’m caught up on buying all of the video games I wanted this holiday season. Getting through them all of course will be another matter. For that reason I’m pushing Fallout 3 a little further back in the queue, even though that’s the game I want to start playing most. I figure I’ll beat the shorter ones first and clear ‘em out of the queue through baby steps.

I’m pretty excited that I am now holding the top three multiplayer games of the holiday season though: Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, and Call of Duty: World at War. Unfortunately, all my friends seemed to jump onto the Call of Duty: World at War train so that’s what I’ll be sticking with for now. But I do hope either some of them pick up Gears 2 and Left 4 Dead, or I meet some more mature and skilled people that want to play Gears 2 or Left 4 Dead online. I’m quite interested in playing the Horde mode in Gears of War 2. Taking on wave after wave of enemies with four other buddies sounds like a romping good time. I don’t care too much for the adversarial stuff in the Gears game since I’m not the biggest fan of the game mechanics, although with matchmaking now implemented I’ll probably try all the modes out to see how they play.

I tried out Guitar Hero World Tour as well and didn’t care for it. The game just felt a lot clunkier to navigate through compared to Rock Band 2, and it actually gave me a similar feeling that I had when I bought a PS3. I felt conflicted between the 360 and the PS3 when both were next to each other since they were similar yet different. There was really only room for one of them in my life so the PS3 went back. I felt the same way about Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2. The two seemed similar and even with a decent amount of the songs are different, it felt superfluous to own GHWT when I was still enjoying (and will continue to enjoy) Rock Band 2. I think the Guitar Hero franchise may be dead for me. Long live Rock Band!