Leveling Down

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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After another furious round of voting, the Elite 8 is set! There were some pretty interesting Sweet 16 matchups, and a lot of the polls were closer than in the first round. At this point, 75% of the field has been eliminated, and we are 3 rounds away from finding out who is the winner of Leveling Down’s Video Game March Madness 2010! Hit the jump for a full recap, and feel free to express your utter outrage at the results in the comments!

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Voting for Round 2 is now open.

The polls will close on Monday March 29th, 2010 at 6PM EST. cmfl3x will announce the 8 winners moving into Round 3. Hit the jump to cast your votes!

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After 3 days of voting, the first round of Leveling Down’s Video Game March Madness 2010 is over! There were some close matchups, some blowouts, and of course, some surprises. As a reminder for those of you who may feel that some of these games were unfairly seeded, we seeded all the games based on Metacritic scores. It’s all their fault!

Anyway, thanks to everyone for voting! The first 32 have now been cut down to the Sweet 16. After the jump, check out who I voted for, my thoughts on the results, and a preliminary look at the Sweet 16 matchups.

Tiebreaker note: I decided that casting a tiebreaking vote was too arbitrary and I felt uncomfortable with the power! So for tie polls, I tallied up the registered commenters who voted as the tiebreaker. It seemed like the fairest thing to do, so make sure you’re logged in to make your vote count the most!

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Leveling Down’s 2010 Videogame Tourney Has Officially Started! The rounds will take place over the next couple of weeks, and will be heavily decided by you, our Leveling Down readers.

Voting for Round 1, which consists of all 32 games in the tourney, will close on Wednesday March 24, 2010 at 6PM EST. On Thursday, cmfl3x will announce the 16 games that will move onto Round 2 and we will open Round 2 voting Friday morning and end it Monday at 6PM EST.  Hit the jump to read more about our first tourney and to cast your votes!

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This sure beats the Etch-a-Sketch I got when I was six…but not by much

Although it is likely this information is only interesting to me, I’m so excited about all the video game related stuff I’ve gotten that I just have to write about it. As you can see, I got a lot of stuff, some as gifts, some borrowed, and some as gifts from me…to me. Here’s the rundown of what I got and my expectations for each, in order of my current level of excitement.

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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!

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Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.

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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.