Leveling Down

Last week cmfl3x and I presented you with a list of games that we felt were good value from a standpoint of being enjoyable for pretty much every type of gamer. This week we’ll share more “niche” titles – games that you can enjoy – provided you’re into the genre. Again, we want to look at games that are good value – ones that either have a lengthy/replayable single player campaign or plenty of multiplayer hours to keep you coming back while at the same time being enjoyable while being inexpensive.

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Street Fighter IV online with my brother was how I spent the majority of my gaming this week.

Street Fighter IV – Finally convinced my brother to pick up the game, and we’ve been spending a good amount of time this past week playing it online. Even though he had barely played it prior to picking it up, he proceeded to destroy me right after we started playing. I was only able to win one of the 8-9 matches we played and I was using Sagat! But still, ever since then he’s started using Abel and that’s all we play. I’ve been learning a lot though from playing with him and while he’s clearly better, playing with him is actually making me better too so I’m happy about that.

Infinite Undiscovery – When will this game end?! Going on 60 hours or so now and have just beat the game on the hardest difficulty. Now all that remains is that final optional (ridiculously tough) end-game dungeon and I’ll be able to move on. Too bad I’ll need about another 10-15 hours in this dungeon before I can walk away victorious.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – cmfl3x and I beat the campaign early this past week so he could move on to Halo Wars. Some of those missions make me wonder if it’s even possible to beat with an AI partner on Hard difficulty. Maybe I’ll try it out sometime since we’ll be putting out a review for it next week.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts – Picked it up since it was on sale at Amazon for $20 this week. I wasn’t too impressed with the demo, but it seems like people that play it say it’s awesome: the equivalent of playing with Legos but in a video game. So I guess I’ll just have to see for myself. Add another game to the backlog…

Crysis & Crysis Warhead – Both were on sale for $10 each at Best Buy this week so I picked those up too. At first I wasn’t planning on Crysis Warhead due to the intrusive Securom DRM, but apparently EA has released patches on Crysis Warhead, Spore, and Red Alert 3 (on the PC) that allows you to deauthorize the game on your PC so you don’t run out of installs. My PC gaming backlog is almost up to double digits now…

Resident Evil 5 – Comes out next Friday but the sad news is: it’s a 7 hour game. What a massive disappointment. Resident Evil 4 was a 20 hour game and this is about the same length as Call of Duty 4 or Gears of War but without any sort of multiplayer. It’s practically Army of Two and even Army of Two had multiplayer! Grr.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is half the price of retail today as Amazon’s gaming deal of the day. It’s been getting relatively mixed reviews – those that were fans of the original Banjo-Kazooie games were not fond of this one since it takes such a huge departure from the original Mario 64 style gameplay. But for others playing it for the first time, they’re enjoying it as it has unique vehicle assembly gameplay where you use parts and gadgets to construct your own customized vehicle to take on challenges throughout the world. Some claim this is like playing a video game version of Legos.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts $19.98 [Amazon]