Leveling Down

Meet John Marston. He’s much cooler than Niko ever was

I wasn’t too impressed with Grand Theft Auto IV and didn’t really understand all the wild praises it was getting (including on this site!). When Red Dead Redemption came out earlier this year, I immediately said “pass. Not interested in Grand Theft Seabiscuit”. RDR received even MORE praise than GTA IV, and NatureB4E insisted that I give the game a try, so I decided to take it for a ride. Overrated like GTA IV, or a true gem? Hit the jump to find out.

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Who would you rather play as in a video game?

The fall TV season is upon us, which leads to this equation: New TV Shows + Old TV Shows + Starcraft II + Halo: Reach + Fallout: New Vegas in 3 weeks = Mrs. cmfl3x is not a happy camper. One day, when I figure out how to maintain a better balance, I will write an article about that. Today is not that day.

Instead, what with all the rectangular screens I’m staring at these days, I started wondering what TV shows would work well as a video game. Really, there is only ONE game that I’d really want to see, but I added a few more for good measure. Check it out!

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My fond memories of Dragon Age: Origins have been dulled by the number of extra DLC that “expand” the game.

Last Friday I posted about how I felt that EA’s Project $10 initiative is working, and I’m a supporter of it. Hey, I’m all for supporting developers and publishers to make money off their own products and if it came down to it, I wouldn’t mind if the used market disappeared altogether. EA has been coming back into the spotlight in a positive way with gamers these days, while Activision has gone the other way. But there’s one thing that EA is now more guilty of than others at this point that I am annoyed with: DLC for single player games. Read on for my thoughts why.

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If you want to tackle all of the missions in Burnout Paradise, you will have to drive to them.

I’m still in the middle of BioShock 2, so I’m going to kick this week’s gaming entries off with a gaming topic that I’ve been wrestling with for a while now: “open-world” sandbox gameplay design. It seems like it’s getting more and more popular these days, and while I may be in the minority for this, I don’t think I am a fan. Grand Theft Auto III made sandbox gameplay popular, and ever since then, we’ve seen several games in the last few years implement this “feature’ from Burnout to Halo. The addition of basically being forced to travel everywhere to actually start a mission certainly makes a game longer, but does it make a game more enjoyable?

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Bayonetta is my hardcore action gaming “comfort food.”

After completing Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned, I had some gaming time before Bioshock 2 would be delivered to my door. I didn’t want to get into anything too lengthy, so I figured diving right into The Ballad of Gay Tony would be an optimal choice since it would allow me to close the book completely on the GTAIV universe and move on. Unfortunately, after playing the first couple of missions, I realized that I needed a break from the GTAIV world. I needed a game with just better gameplay in general.

As I recently lay in bed one morning, I came to the realization that I had to go back to Bayonetta since it was the game that defined what good gameplay is in this generation. Those of you that have read my review of Bayonetta know how much I enjoyed the game. It’s most likely the best action-adventure game I may have ever played within the last several years. So when I was growing tired of the lack of enjoyable gameplay in the GTAIV universe, who did I come crawling back to so that I could remember how much fun playing games could be? Bayonetta of course. And Bayonetta greeted me with open arms.
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Unlike Niko, Johnny has a gang that he rolls with throughout his missions in The Lost and the Damned

Several of you are aware of my chagrin about having to play The Lost and the Damned during a time when Mass Effect 2 is out, but I made it through the expansion this past weekend and am ready to share my slightly subjective review on it. While this expansion was released on the 360 about a year ago, it was just recently announced that it would be released on the PS3 and the PC in the coming months so perhaps this is a good time to review it now that I’ve noticed that we are getting more PS3 owners (welcome!) here at Leveling Down.

NOTE: I am playing The Lost and the Damned off the retail disc, Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City, which does not require the original GTAIV disc to play. I will be getting through The Ballad of Gay Tony and reviewing that hopefully in the near future.
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Settling for playing GTA IV: The Lost and the Damned instead of Mass Effect 2 is just not good enough.

For the earlier part of this month I had been spending my time with Bayonetta, a newly released title that I truly enjoyed. But after I completed that and DJ Hero this past Tuesday, I discovered that night that it was apparently the Mass Effect 2 launch date. I had already made a conscious decision to skip buying Mass Effect 2 at launch, just because I had already gone through Bioware’s more RPG-oriented epic, Dragon Age: Origins, last month and my pre-ordered copy of BioShock 2 is releasing just around the corner. Plus, with the number of games I have sitting in my backlog, I realized that my gaming time might be better spent clearing through a backlogged title or two before BioShock 2′s release rolls around.

But why is this so difficult?
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GTA: Chinatown Wars marks the first (and possibly the last) time the mature franchise hits the family-friendly DS market.

Fresh off the great success of GTAIV, Rockstar released another Grand Theft Auto game this past March. GTA: Chinatown Wars was the first GTA offering ever to hit Nintendo’s family friendly DS, and analysts predicted that people would buy it in droves. Unfortunately for Nintendo and Rockstar, the analysts were wrong, though the game has received high praise, the fact of the matter is, nobody is buying it (only a little over 100,000 copies have sold in 2 months which is way below expectations).

I wasn’t planning on picking up a copy, but a friend of mine lent me his. I’ve put a few hours in the game so figured I’d write up a quick retail impressions.

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In Broken Sword, as in Penny Arcade Adventures, mimes = evil. Remember that.

We really are in the gaming doldrums right now. But hopefully with E3 coming up, we’ll start having some games to look forward to! Anyway, I’ve been playing a lot of this and that - I’m probably TOO diversified in my gaming right now. But hey, I’m having a blast! Apologies in advance for the crazy tone…I’m just in one of those moods.

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Some of the best games are also the simplest

Mirror’s Edge – Almost finished with this game, although the things I have left to do are the most challenging. I failed a speed run (an entire level under a certain amount of time) by being slow by 2.1 seconds. I then ran it back, and managed to pass by shaving 3.3 seconds off my time. 10:58.8 seconds was enough FTW! Anyway, if you are masochistic and enjoy punishing yourself by trying to shave milliseconds off of your times, you should really play Mirror’s Edge!

Peggle – To take a break from the intensity of Mirror’s Edge I downloaded Peggle on XBLA. I’ve heard a lot about this game but didn’t know too much about it, but figured at $10 I could afford to take the plunge. It’s tough to explain how the game works, but it’s easy to explain that it’s a lot of fun. It’s particularly rewarding every time you clear a stage. I kind of wish I got this for DS, because it’d probably be nicer to play on the go, but it’s a good game to relax with between intense sessions of bigger games.

Chinatown Wars (DS) – I’ve been playing about one mission per night. It’s not as engaging as I thought it would be, but it’s not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll probably save the majority of this game for my upcoming trip on Memorial Day.