Playing the 360 at my parents on a computer monitor and using their Wii composite TV for the audio
I got a lot of gaming done last week during Christmas week when I was off. I was considering for the longest time whether or not to bring my 360 back with me to my parents’ house and finally ended up bringing it. I’m pretty thankful that I did too since I got a chance to put in maybe 20-30 more hours into Fallout 3, as well as various other 360 games. One thing I learned is that playing Fallout 3 on composite video is terrible. It’s so bad that I would even say it’s unplayable. Fortunately, I also brought my 360 VGA cable (I anticipated this issue), and was able to hook the video up to a spare computer monitor and have the audio play from the TV. Pretty silly setup with the small monitor on the ground and sound coming out of the TV, but the TV used for their Wii was all I had to work with at my parents’ house and how I ended up gaming during my Christmas week.
My brother was also home, so we got a chance to play some co-op splitscreen, something that I rarely do. Luckily, many of the big holiday blockbusters all had splitscreen support: Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, and Call of Duty World at War. While Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead can both be played split-screen online, Call of Duty World at War cannot. It sucks too since my brother and I were able to make it to Level 17 on the Zombie mode with just the two of us. Who knows how much further we could have gotten with another player or two! What sucks though is that even though we got to 17, it didn’t update it on the Online Leaderboards for my profile so I guess I can only play online if I want to increase that. It’s all still at random though how far you can get – if you can get those Rayguns, or even the magnum, you can get far but if you’re on like Wave 10 and both players still only have machine guns, it’s pretty much over.
I also tried out Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, the game I picked up on Amazon when it was $10 around Thanksgiving. It is hard to play, but I can see it being entertainingly intuitive if I put in more time to learn the playstyle. I can confirm now after recently playing Resident Evil 4 again that you cannot move while aiming – something I was disappointed about in the Resident Evil 5 demo. It was weird because you’d attach the nunchuk to the Wii-mote, and you’d use the analog to move while you’d move the Wii-mote to aim. The weird thing is when you go into gun aim mode, the nunchuk analog now adjusts where the camera points, so you’re basically aiming with both the left and right analog sticks at the same time to fire a shot: the left stick to figure out where you want to point the camera, and the right analog stick to point your gun in the plane that your camera is viewing. Needless to say, I was having a hard time simply shooting zombies in the leg like I used to do, but maybe with practice I could get used to the Wii controls for the game. It was rough but I will say that’s it’s pretty cool how if you simply swing the Wii-mote, Leon would automatically swing his knife and if you had the gun out and you swung the Wii-mote, he’d reload.
I asked my brother to bring his copy of de Blob home so I could try it out on the Wii. It’s actually pretty fun. It has a Beautiful Katamari-like vibe, but instead of rolling around and absorbing everything into a big ball, you’re going around and painting everything based on what colors you find. When my brother saw me playing it, he said it reminded him of Jet Grind Radio, and after thinking about it, I think he’s right. It has a funky musical beat like the game, and various colors and even painting buildings and stuff have the sort of graffiti tag element that Jet Grind Radio had. It’s a pretty simple yet entertaining game but one of the big drawbacks I felt was that the levels were like 45 minutes long and there was no saving during a level. Not sure why they did that but it forced me to only play it when I had hour-long chunks of time available where I knew I could finish a level.
And finally, I played a bit of Chrono Trigger on my DS when traveling to and from my parents’ house for the holidays. It’s funny because that was my favorite Japanese RPG of all time, but after playing it now I don’t know if it really aged as well as I hoped. While the game was still pretty entertaining, I found myself enjoying the Final Fantasy IV GBA version more when I played through that – maybe that game aged better. I guess there are just certain areas that were kind of bland in Chrono Trigger that I chose to forget in my happy childhood – I wasn’t too much a fan of the future world nor the prehistoric world, and apparently that’s where I ended up getting stuck so I stopped and switched over to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. The game is great but the reviewers weren’t kidding when they said the game was quite unforgiving. So far, boss encounters are like five minutes long and if you mess up at all, you have to start completely over from the last save. Something seems completely off when the boss is attacking me for four times the damage I do to him, and has four times my lifebar, but I guess maybe it appeals to old school NES gamers that grew up on Ninja Gaiden and Ghosts N Goblins.
