After having pretty much sold off most of the mediocre games in my backlog, I proceeded to replay BioShock. Having beaten that, I honestly didn’t know where to turn to next. Part of me was thinking, maybe I can replay Oblivion, since I just picked up the Game of the Year edition with the extra content that I never got to see when I played the original release. I got a bit nervous though about really getting into that timesink, so I decided to tear off the shrinkwrap on Pure and give that a spin. It’s a decent game, but whether it has enough for me to beat the entire game I’m not sure.
At the same time, I started playing the Survival modes in my recently reacquired copy of Left 4 Dead on the 360, and have had a great time there and want to keep continuing it until I can get the Gold time on all the levels. In contrast to my enthusiasm for Survival, the Versus mode is just terrible. While there’s new maps to play Versus on, I tried playing with a buddy and the lack of any sort of matchmaking or stat tracking really drags it down.
The amount of time it takes to even join a Versus game with your friend(s) can be like 15 minutes, as each of you frantically tries to join a game in the lobby and invite the other before the room fills up and you both can be on the same team. And if you’re playing with randoms, it’s definitely not fair at all when you get paired with split screen teammates that don’t even use mics. If it’s one thing that I wish for in the sequel this fall, it’s a Halo/Call of Duty like matchmaking and stat-tracking system that allows you to play on the same teams as your friends and also level up so that when you play in random public games, the teams are more balanced. There isn’t even functionality to start a Public Versus game so you can invite your friends right away before the room fills up – instead it’s all on the server side whether you are forced to create a new game or join an existing one.
On a brighter note though, I tried out the Battlefield 1943 demo and liked it so much that I ended up buying it. I guess I’ll be playing that for my adversarial online gaming and stick with just Survival in Left 4 Dead. And finally, of course there’s BlazBlue, the game that I thought I would devote the next couple of months to getting competitive at before Left 4 Dead’s Survival mode and Battlefield 1943 started crowding my gaming time. But after the drought for the past couple of months, I guess this is only a good thing…
