Halo: Reach drops in two weeks. Are you ready to join Noble Team?
I can’t stop playing Starcraft 2. It’s an addiction. There were all these games for Xbox that I wanted to try out, but I haven’t turned my Xbox on for almost a month. Limbo is still in limbo, Death Spank has no life, and Final Fantasy is a fantasy. There’s only one game that has a chance to get me away from my mouse and keyboard, and that’s Halo: Reach, so I figured I’d take a look at why.
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?
Mass Effect 2 – an RPG with a shooter soul, or the other way around?
We live in an interesting time for games. In the not too distant past, gaming genres were clearly delineated: you’d play Doom to get your first-person shooting on, Starcraft to focus on real-time strategy, platformers like Super Mario Brothers 3 for throw your controller out the window experiences, and the turn based Final Fantasy role playing series for some heavy stories and to prove that “video games can make grown men cry”. But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century…
One of the highlights of Halo 3: ODST was the ability to unlock free gear for your Avatar
Although 2009 wasn’t as awesome as 2008, it was still a great year for gamers. Looking back, I’ve enjoyed all the titles I’ve gotten to play and am really looking forward to next year. There were some new things we saw this year that I hope will continue in 2010. Hit the jump to find out what!
In Part 4 of the Awards/Shopping Guide, Leveling Down will be tackling some of the more controversial categories: Best Story, Best Value, and Most Overrated. Admittedly, these categories are VERY subjective and are only our opinions, and on some counts even espion4ge and I don’t see *exactly* eye to eye. Nonetheless, controversy is a lot of fun, so might as well give it a shot!
One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.
I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!
It’s that time of the year again…as 2009 draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, cmfl3x and I decided that we wanted to do our own “Leveling Down” gaming awards for 2009 where we choose winners in several categories for Xbox 360 games that have been released in 2009. At the same time, we also wanted to preserve the holiday shopping guide that Leveling Down produced last year but felt that the awards and the shopping guide were too similar.
Instead of separate 2009 awards and holiday shopping guide posts, we’ve decided to combine them this year into one. Every game we’ve nominated within our awards are games worth considering for the holidays, but at the same time, we’re also declaring the winner. Consider the awards as, if you can only buy one game from the nominees of the category, buy the winner. But if you are further interested in other games from the category, you should definitely pick them up as well as they have aspects that all make them worth considering. Game boxes have been provided for all nominees, and all of them link to Amazon, our gaming retailer of the year due to not only their ridiculous gaming deals, but their constant vigilance in price matching practically all competitors.
Our 2009 awards/shopping guide will span all week, with cmfl3x and me alternating posts and writing about a few categories each day. This will culminate on Friday when we both share our own nominations for Game of the Year, and our picks for Game of the Year. I will kick things off today with three categories: 2009′s Best Fighting Game, Best Role Playing Game, and Best First Person Shooter for the Xbox 360.
Firefight may seem daunting at first - especially the achievements that require you to get 200,000 points on every map. The first time I played Firefight with some friends, we ended up with only 60,000 points and 200K seemed impossible. Yet two weeks later, I realize that getting 200K on each map can be relatively straightforward, provided you go in with a gameplan and follow some basic strategies. I decided to put together a short guide, first with general strategies and then map specific tips. I’ve also included a strategy for getting the Vidmaster: Endure achievement. These tips are by no means exhaustive, but should give you a head start on conquering Firefight! Since this is a relatively long post for our blog, you can find everything after the jump.
I love achievements. Even though my wife says the greatest achievement I have ever unlocked is “most hours spent in front of glowing screens” (that was for Vidmaster: Endure in Halo 3: ODST), I still really enjoy trying to “achieve” these meaningless rewards. It makes me wonder though, have achievements changed how I play games, or was it me who changed?
An example: in Left 4 Dead, once I finished the Expert campaigns, the game began to be less fun. It was okay to run through a campaign, but with no sound effect at the end of the tunnel, I found it less exciting. Same with ODST and the Firefight maps: will I ever go back and play them after I’ve unlocked the achievements? Firefight is a mode I could potentially have seen myself playing endlessly, but I know that thanks to the achievements, I’m not really gonna want to go back after I finish the 200Ks. If those achievements didn’t exist though, I might just keep playing to keep trying to beat my top score. But since achievements arbitrarily define these “top scores” in a lot of games, it takes away my inner desire to beat myself because I know what mark I have to get to to prove to the world my skill.
When I was a younger gamer, I just use to play games over and over because I loved them. I must have beaten Super Mario Bros. 3 like 6 or 7 times, and gotten to the last stage a bunch of other times as well. I used to race against the computer in Mario Kart 64 just for fun (though some of the shenaningans the computer pulled in 150cc drove me nuts), and I even played through the original Halo multiple times just for fun. Nowadays I can’t see myself doing that anymore. It’s partly because I don’t have the time, but it’s also because once I get all the achievements I want, I don’t have the motivation to play anymore. The only exception is multiplayer games I love: Halo 3 and Modern Warfare took up hours and hours of my life and I never really wanted to stop.
I guess in a way achievements made it easier to fit my gaming habits into my changing life habits. Now that I have goals in games to strive for, I can budget out the amount of time I’ll need to play, and that way I can balance my time better. It’s not as “pure” as when I was a kid, but let’s face it: I’m not a kid anymore, and I have responsibilities that are much more important than beating games 50 times. Instead, I can just focus on the achievement for beating a game twice and then go to bed! 
I’ve spent most of my time on the 360 the last couple of weeks playing Halo 3: ODST, but what I’m starting to notice is that unlike on the Halo 3: ODST release day when practically everyone online on my friends list was playing it, like no one is playing it now.
The game sold very well, but does it have legs? It’s looking like perhaps not. Almost none of my friends are playing Halo 3 multiplayer either – even with ODST containing all the multiplayer maps. It just goes to show you, maybe people are just playing through the campaign and that’s it. If you were interested in Halo 3 multiplayer, you were already playing it – seems like ODST is not going to be the catalyst.
I tried getting back into Halo 3 after playing through ODST, but it just feels different after playing ODST. Several thoughts popped through my head as I played Halo 3 online: “Battle rifle? Where’s my magnum?” “Why am I jumping so high?” “Why do my grenades have a terrible throwing arc?” “Why can I only hold 2 of each grenade type?” And finally, “Why does this guy keep tea-bagging me?” Those were all the questions I asked myself as I played Halo 3 online, and decided, it’s not worth getting back into. I’d rather get back into Call of Duty 4 to prepare for Modern Warfare 2.
I think Halo 3: ODST would really have legs if there was matchmaking for it or even simple rooms that people hosted and others could join. It’s ridiculous how we have to go through friends lists and custom gaming groups just to find players that not only want to play Firefight, but are looking to play the same Firefight maps we do. Now there’s a bunch of people on these “Firefight” friends lists I have that may want to play Firefight, but are instead playing other games because they don’t want to sit at the Halo 3 ODST menu and wait for invites all day. It’s truly annoying that I have to deal with messaging them in other games to see if they want to switch to play Firefight.
Stat tracking for Firefight matches is awesome on bungie.net, but Bungie, why did you put all this effort into stats and totally botch the multiplayer implementation of Firefight? One player drops and the match is over? I played on a level for over 3 hours and was about to get the Endure Achievement before one player dropped and it all was for nothing. And why not allow for friends to join a Firefight match that’s already started because there’s already a limited number of lives? And of course, the biggest question to boggle my mind is that even without matchmaking, why not at least provide us a way to play online by creating rooms so the public can join?! Was it that difficult to add Firefight as a selectable matchmaking mode in Halo 3′s multiplayer, but only joinable for owners of ODST? These types of questions really irked me and make me wonder how a company like Bungie can do such an awesome job with the multiplayer of Halo 3 but do such a terrible one with ODST. And maybe because of it, that’s why the game just doesn’t have legs.
