Leveling Down

Resident Evil 5 is definitely more action than adventure this time around

Being underwhelmed with the game at first, I’ve finally come around to accept that it’s still a good game. While not as phenomenal as Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5 has enough that it is still worth a look for not only fans of the series, but action/adventure gamers in general. I’ve beaten the game on all difficulties with the AI partner, and have spent some time with The Mercenaries mode. Read on for my thoughts based on that.

Good
- similar gameplay feel to Resident Evil 4
- lots of extras and unlockables that increase replayability
- online & splitscreen co-op

Bad
- less adventure and more action than previous Resident Evil games
- pacing and level design not as strong as Resident Evil 4
- forced to play with an AI partner for co-op

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“NO I WILL NOT MAKE OUT WITH YOU!” Joking aside – Resident Evil 5 turned out to be a pretty good game.

I had a “productive week” in gaming this past week, as I was able to complete all of the Achievements in Resident Evil 5 and all of the offline Achievements in Halo Wars. This means it’s almost time for me to pick my next game to get into, which is always fun. What will I choose to take out of the plastic wrap next?!

Resident Evil 5 – While I had negative impressions of the game early on, after putting about 30 hours into it to get all of the Achievements (had to go through the game several times), I have to say that it turned out better than I initially thought. Sure it’s not as good as Resident Evil 4, but it’s still quite playable although playing with the AI on Professional difficulty is an exercise in patience. Expect a review on it some time soon.

Halo Wars – I completed the campaign and all of the associated sidequests that came with them, like finishing under part time, finding hidden boxes, skulls, and all that and even got a chance to try out the multiplayer some this past week. I’m not the biggest fan of the skirmish Achievements though where I’m supposed to win on every map and all that. Still, like a sheep I went through and beat the AI on easy within 5 minutes of each map. While I think the game is actually a pretty enjoyable RTS on the console, it does seem to lack a bit in terms of depth for multiplayer. I’ll put some more time in and maybe I’ll change my mind by the time we get a review out.

World of Goo – Started playing it this week on my PC and it’s pretty enjoyable. The premise is interesting since it’s sort of like Lemmings where you’re trying to get units to an exit point, but in this game, the pieces of goo form nodes that are used to allow the goo to travel further along. What shakes things up though is when the environment presents all sorts of variables, like a rotating wheel or pillars to lean on so that you really see the physics at work behind the goo structure you build. Build too heavy on one side and the structure will keel over. I’m happy I bought it for $5 on Steam back then and will definitely buy some more indie games on Steam if they go on sale.

The UNSC campaign in Halo Wars was quite enjoyable – but where is the Covenant one?

Halo Wars – Spent this week taking the time to crank through the campaign on Legendary and grabbed all the skulls and black boxes too. While the game is definitely more simple than I’m used to for a traditional RPG, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. The main issue I have is that there’s no Covenant campaign. I don’t know what that’s attributed to but it seems to be the trend nowadays since the new Starcraft II will also only have the Terran campaign. I’m going to be diving into the multiplayer soon, and without any experience with Covenant my predisposition is definitely more towards the UNSC. But, maybe a few scrimmage games playing as the Covenant will change that.

Resident Evil 5 – Also plowing through the game this week now that it’s become my main single player game with Halo Wars beaten. I’m on the last leg of the game now, and while it’s introducing a few new things, the game still feels poorly paced. I don’t want to go into spoilers with regards to enemy types, but again, let’s just say I was disappointed when I have to fight half a dozen of them at a time when in games past it was really only 1 or 2. The game is just all out action now rather than adventure, and while that clicks a bit for me as a hardcore gamer, it still bothers a little bit of my Resident Evil fanboism. I could talk more about it, but I’d rather not spoil anything!

Street Fighter IV – My beatdown continues. This week I played online and dropped to 800 BP before fiercely fighting my way back up to 1000 BP and calling it a day. Competition is still quite fierce – probably because everyone else is improving but me. Nowadays I seem to be seeing a lot more Blanka players, and Chun Li players too. My friend Jason is coming over this weekend, so hopefully I can talk to him about strategy and maybe learn something more to see if I can get myself at least back up to 1500 BP.

Guitar Hero World Tour – After getting the Rock Band 2 Wireless Drumset last week, I ended up ordering Guitar Hero World Tour from Newegg since they were selling it for $35.99. Thought it was cheap enough to get a few new songs to try out with my new drumkit. While I’ve spent a little bit of time with it before and came away unimpressed, part of me is starting to get a little bit bored of the Rock Band 2 Tour mode since I feel like I keep playing the same Rock Band 2 songs over and over! It’ll be nice to finally jam to something new like Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, for example. The other thing that also had me deciding to purchase it is Stan Bush’s “The Touch” from the Transformers Movie is going to be free DLC for GHWT. Now if only GHWT or Rock Band had “Dare” and Karate Kid’s “You’re the Best Around” I’d be all set.

Are scripted car chase shooting scenes what Resident Evil has become?

I picked this game up on launch day, but unfortunately, I also picked up Halo Wars that same day and have been trying to balance my time between those two games, as well as Street Fighter IV, ever since. For the most part, Halo Wars and Street Fighter IV have been winning – Resident Evil 5 is just not an excellent game. I guess I sort of already knew that from playing the demo, but still decided to take the plunge anyway. Here are my initial impressions on the retail game, after getting through about half of it already (I’m just starting Act 4 now).

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Henry Hatsworth is an innovative and charming platform/puzzle game that should appeal to all types of gamers.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS) – I know someone that worked on this game, and he’s been pretty excited about its release this week. He’s so excited that he’s been visiting various Gamestops and retail stores the last couple of days to see how many copies are coming in and who is buying them. Thus, you can understand his dismay when he discovers that most Gamestop employees never heard of it, and instead ask him if he’s interested in buying GTA: Chinatown Wars instead. Of the Gamestops that did get the game in, they only get 1-2 copies. (I guess there’s always Amazon.) It’s unfortunate that it may get lost in the flood of big name titles this month on the DS, but I’ve played through it and it’s a solid game. It’s basically Mega Man + Tetris Attack, but my only real issue with it is that the difficulty *really* ramps up in the latter half of the game. If this is your cup of tea – start looking for it! With a tiny number of copies hitting retail stores around the country, it may prove difficult to find once word gets out. For more on it check out the IGN review, which gave it a 9.0, and how much hardcore gamers are loving it over at NeoGAF.

Street Fighter IV – So begins my downward spiral. I hit 2000 Battle Points last week and was pretty happy with it, but when I tried playing some this week, I must have lost nearly all of my 20 or so matches I played, dropping me all the way back down to 1200 or so. The competition this week has been ridiculously tougher than before, and I’m seeing far less of the “Ken players” that I saw when the game first released. It’s almost like the people that weren’t that good with the game have already moved on, so now it’s only hardcore players left. I’m playing against all sorts of characters I have no idea how to fight against since I didn’t see them before, and I’m also seeing more 4000+ BP players who are just nuts. I fought one Cammy player who would just rush at me and constantly spam light attacks as well as a light jump into the air and Cannon Striking me over and over. Before I knew it, it was already over. “What just happened?!” I asked myself.

Resident Evil 5 – I grabbed this over the weekend at Toys R’ Us since it came with the free $20 gift card, but I honestly can’t figure out how to spend it. Last week they had the “any 2 $20 games for $30″, but the selection was terrible at the Times Square Toys R Us, and now this week they have “$20 off any 2 $40+ titles”. But what the heck is left for me to get considering my huge backlog? There’s some games I kind of want, but not for $10 off their $60 retail price. So yeah, that’s my conundrum over the $20 gift card. They didn’t have 1600 point cards either, but hopefully they stock them at some point since I decided I’d end up just doing that if it came down to it.

Oh as for the game itself? Decent so far. It honestly has gameplay mechanics similar to Resident Evil 4, but for some reason I’m just not that into it. I see that half of my friends list is playing the game, but for some reason I’m just not that excited to play it after having beaten the first few levels. It’s not seeming as short as I thought, but it’s not giving me an “awesome vibe” like I had when playing Resident Evil 4. Consequently, I’ve been spending more of this week playing Halo Wars and Street Fighter IV instead. Expect some impressions on the game from me next week though.

Halo Wars – Picked this up this past weekend and I’m actually enjoying it more than I thought. While it’s simpler than Red Alert 3, I’ve actually grown pretty used to the controls and it’s quite doable with the d-pad jumping between my armies and bases, hitting the R trigger to switch between unit types in my groups, etc. I think I’m at mission 9 or so, and for the most part, Legendary difficulty hasn’t been too tough although I had to restart a few times in missions 6 and 7. I haven’t had a chance to play online yet, but I’ll probably try to get some games in if I can finish up the single player campaign this weekend.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Ended up picking the PC version of this game at Best Buy this past weekend since it was $10. Ironically, it was pretty much right after I traded in the 360 version of the game across the street at Gamestop for like $15. I figured the game was pretty enjoyable and patches keep coming out for the PC version so maybe I’ll see what it’s like – plus, it has the new expansion with Ric Flair. I was shocked though to discover how zoomed in the PC version of the game was. I tried to zoom out as much as I could but it’s still probably zoomed in at least twice as much as the 360 version. Crazy stuff.

Over 80 hours into this game already. But I’m excited because that means a new game to play is around the corner…

Infinite Undiscovery – A few more Achievements left in the game to get and I will be totally done. I’m hoping to get them this weekend, when I beat the optional end-game boss on the hardest difficulty for that 1 Achievement point. By beating her, I should also hopefully unlock the other most difficult Achievement in the game – one that relies on me having collected every one of the unique 880 items in the game. If I don’t get that Achievement, I’m done anyway – not going through it again and trying to collect every single item.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Finally got the 1000 in the game! cmfl3x and I played a few online matches this week and it wasn’t bad, but without matchmaking, it’s time for me to part ways with the game. It seems like no one really plays 2v2 online though, as it took me maybe 20 minutes before being able to find three other players to start a game.

Street Fighter IV – Still playing this, especially whenever my brother has time to play. We’ll just hop in a room and play for hours. Surprisingly, my Sagat is giving his Abel a little more trouble than we both expected, so either I seem to be catching up to him in fighting game ability or I’m learning how to use the imbalance of my character against him. I prefer to think it’s just the former, but I’m sure it’s a mixture of both. I hit my current goal of breaking 2000 Battle Points this week, and I’m definitely starting to see higher level players. Played against a 4500 player once, and when I lost, I only lost 1 point and he only gained 1. Wha?!

Peggle – Been playing this on my DS. I’m sort of addicted to the game. I never played it much before, but with it coming out for the DS I figured I’d try it out and now I’m playing it on my subway commute home from work every night. I can definitely see why the Japanese are addicted to Pachinko – Peggle seems to take that addictiveness of watching a ball bounce around different pegs but also adds more pinball-like gameplay enhancements that are now making my subway trip home far too short each night.

Resident Evil 5 – Still struggling for a long time trying to decide if I should go pick up the game today since Toys R Us is giving out a $20 gift card with it. The thing is, I don’t know what to put the $20 gift card towards. I think it expires at the end of the April, so it’s kind of forcing me to have to use it sooner rather than later. Maybe I’ll just get at 1600 point card or something.

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.

Is Left 4 Dead a $60 game? Or is it really only worth half that?

Recently, news hit the gaming industry that Valve’s Left 4 Dead half price sale ($24.99) on the PC was met with remarkable success. Gabe Newell, one of the co-founders at Valve, remarked that it was an experiment that surprised them: when Left 4 Dead went on sale for half price, it actually made more money for Valve than the initial launch window of the game when it sold for its full price. This is pretty unprecedented, because when you think about it, who ended up buying it for $24.99? Didn’t we all already buy it back in November? I’ve never taken an economics class, but I’ve heard people state that according to economics theory, if a game is selling ridiculously higher with a reduced price then perhaps the original price is too high.

Today’s discussion topic between cmfl3x and me revolve around the pricing of games and what we feel they are worth.

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Is two always better than one? Not necessarily if the second is AI-controlled…

The Resident Evil 5 demo was released to the Japanese Marketplace on Friday morning 12/5/08. American fans were not to be denied, as they began creating Japanese accounts to download the demo to their console. This was working for a while until Microsoft decided to institute a hardlock IP ban on downloads outside of Japan. Fortunately, gamers discovered a workaround in that you could actually download the demo to your PC, burn it onto a CD/DVD, and play the demo right off the disc on your 360 with no problems. Read on for my impressions of the demo.

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