With only a few games left in the running, cmfl3x and I have decided to combine the results discussion from Round 3 along with the starting the polling for Round 4.
Round 4 polls will close Monday, April 5th, at 6pm EST. cmfl3x will announce the two games moving into the Finals and open the voting on Tuesday. Hit the jump to see some commentary on the results and to vote for the Final Four…
Voting for Round 3 is now open.
Polls will close this Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 6PM EST, so you will only have today and tomorrow to vote. I will post the winners for each of the four regions on Friday. These winners will move onto the Final Four next week as we get closer to the 2010 Finals. Hit the jump to cast your votes!
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!
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!
For the next few weeks, my Xbox is going to take a backseat to my favorite sporting event of the year: March Madness. What little time I have left for video games will probably be spent playing Dragon Age: Origins, and since we’ve covered that on the site, I figured I’d try something new: a video game bracket!
I’ve chosen 28 of my favorite games across 4 different categories (“regions”), and as the NCAA tournament plays itself out, so too will you get to watch this video game bracket play itself out. Why am I doing this? Well, I love brackets, first of all. Secondly, it’s a chance for me to take a trip down memory lane and narrow down some of my favorite games of all time. I recognize that a lot of times comparing games is like comparing apples to oranges, which is why I separated the games by genres (loosely).
Anyway, I’ve left the 8 seed open in all four regions, so I need YOU, the Leveling Down reader, to suggest games to finish out the bracket. Hit the jump to see the selection committee’s (aka, cmfl3x’s) criteria and some other notes about this totally awesome tournament.
We’ve finally reached the last day of our 2009 Xbox 360 Awards & Holiday Shopping Guide, culminating in our Game of the Year. For those following the awards throughout the week, you may have a good guess as to what game will be our game of the year. Is it the same as your pick?
In any case, please remember that while we’ve chosen only one winner from each category, all games nominated within each category are all worth considering, depending on how much you enjoy that category. This week’s feature has doubled as a shopping guide as well as an awards “ceremony”. With that, let’s draw back the curtains for the finale…
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.
My brother was in the NYC Chinatown arcade this past weekend, and noticed that the Street Fighter IV cabinets were practically empty while players were crowded around the Tekken 6 and BlazBlue cabinets. I’m a little surprised to hear that myself, but if BlazBlue is popular in the arcades, then it obviously has something going for it. This game is basically the sequel to Guilty Gear, with interesting character design, great presentation, memorable rock music, and a deep fighting engine. It’s a great fighting game if you’re willing to take the time learn it.
Before buying the game, I was reading impressions from different buyers of the games and everyone practically loves it. Even casual players were gushing compliments about the game and I found the character designs interesting so I jumped in. I told my brother I picked it up and the first thing he said was, “Wow – you know that it’s a pretty difficult game right?” After playing it for hours now, I have to agree. It’s more difficult than Street Fighter IV. I’m guessing this may be due to us playing Street Fighter games for over a decade now, making Street Fighter IV quite intuitive. But BlazBlue is something else. It’s safe to say that this is NOT a good game for fighting game newbies to pick up, as cool as it may seem. I’d even go so far as to recommend Street Fighter IV for fighting game newbies over this one. BlazBlue is very offensive oriented, with lengthy combos, air juggles, and traps and penalties for blocking too much. It’s almost like a cross between Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs Capcom 2, blending some of the simpleness of the former with the craziness of the latter.
The selection of 12 characters in the game seems meager, but each one plays very uniquely so it’s not like half of them are shoto characters. Sadly, I’d go so far as to say that some of the characters are a bit overpowered, and it’s probably why they’re used so often online. There are four attack buttons: a light, mid, and strong attack and a Drive attack button. The Drive button is what completely differentiates each character, as it functions quite differently depending on the character’s unique trait or weapon. For example, one character uses the Drive button to control his mech that accompanies him, similar to a helper in the Marvel vs Capcom games. Another character uses the D button to control wind, altering the direction that the players move on screen. A third character uses that D button for special attacks that allow him to steal life from the opponent. The list goes on. All in all, very drastic differences in how each character plays based on their Drive ability.
BlazBlue’s online is better and worse than Street Fighter IV’s online. On the better side, it allows for 6 player rooms for Player matches, allowing groups of buddies to “quarter match” it up, something drastically missing in Street Fighter IV. In the ”meh” side, you have a ranking level based on experience tied to both Player Matches and Ranked Matches. So even if you were to just play Player Matches, you would still level up. There’s a “Trueskill ranking” as well, and perhaps that is what is used for Ranked Matches but I’m not sure. I’m not a fan of any sort of “rank progression” based on unranked games, as it defeats the purpose, but it’s not a deal-breaker. What kind of sucks is when you play someone in a ranked game, both player’s stats for both ranked and unranked matches are displayed, which again, annoy me since unranked should just be that: unranked and not counted in any way. And on the bad side, it seems to take quite a long time to find ranked games, especially so if you’re just looking for a match in the low ranks. It looks like now that the game has been out for over a month, not many low level players are left in the game but that seems to be the case with many hardcore fighting games. I do miss Street Fighter IV’s auto-matchmaking mode where you could play while waiting to get matched up.
While I believe BlazBlue to be a great fighting game, the only issue I have is that the game is perhaps too tough for me. However, my brother is starting to dig it as he’s been devoting time to understanding the nuances of the game and he’s been helping me get better too. I’m lacking in so many fighting game fundamentals that it helps considerably when he is able to go over my character’s moveset and tell me what’s good for poking, what should be my bread and butter attacks, etc. I’ve never been able to figure that stuff out on my own but I’m thankful that he’s around so I’m catching onto the game. If I were just playing this by myself, it would probably already be thrown back onto the shelf by now! So I guess I can conclude my impressions of the game as this: if you’re willing to devote your time to learning this game, you won’t be sorry as it has practically everything a serious fighting game fan could want: interesting characters, top-notch presentation, and a functional and lag-free online mode.
