Leveling Down

Another year is almost over. Time sure flies these days! Over the course of this past year, I feel like I’ve leveled down the most since the blog started in 2008. By the end of 2011, my gaming library has dwindled down to only a fraction of the games I owned at the beginning of the year (I only own 2 PS3 games now!), I’ve actually skipped the purchase of several notable titles I would have usually bought (Dead Island, Catherine, Dark Souls, etc.), and generally feel like I may not even be buying more than a handful of games going forward (perhaps only Diablo III and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm next year).

For our last entries of 2011, cmfl3x and I decided on providing our thoughts on our game of the year for 2011 as well as any other reflections on the year. As you can see from above, my thinking is that I’ve leveled down a lot over this past year. But, I did enjoy some games this past year as well! Hit the jump for my favorite games of 2011.

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This will be me in a few weeks. Until then: UAV online!

Unfortunately, I haven’t played enough new content for a new post, but I’ve been playing enough games to do a thoughts post. The simple fact of the matter is, I’m addicted to Modern Warfare 3 (50 hours and counting). The real question is, can anything change that?

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Fall 2011 – is this the best you have to offer?

I’ve been super busy with work and life recently. I don’t think I’ve played a video game for five days straight or something! In the interim, I’ve been thinking about what games I’m anticipating for the fall season. Shockingly, I’m coming up zeroes! For every game I think of, I think of a bunch of reasons why I’m not excited. What’s wrong with me!?

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Happy New Year! It’s now 2011 so we’re going to kick off this year with our top most anticipated games for 2011. Of course, there is a slight possibility that one or more of these games may not make it in 2011, as well as a possibility that they may not turn out so well. My most anticipated titles for 2010 under-delivered, but I think this year I have a lot more to be excited about. (Plus, I’m going a little less risky with my picks!) We have big sequels like Gears of War 3, Uncharted 3, Dead Space 2, etc. so 2011 is already shaping up to be a better year than 2010 (at least, in my humble opinion). Yet, it appears that my most anticipated games are all “sequels” that have not been churned out in a long time. Hit the jump to see all of these major franchises that are returning in 2011 that I can’t wait to play.

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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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Before my mind gets completely sucked into the gaming onslaught of the 2009 holiday season and I forget about my recent experience the Oblivion Expansions, I wanted to share my impressions since I completed them this past weekend. I decided to go through The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition last week since it’s been sitting on my shelf and I told myself I wouldn’t play the Fallout 3 GotY edition until I got some enjoyment out of the Oblivion GotY edition, which contains the original Oblivion game with the two DLC packs: Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles.

Knights of the Nine was the first of the two major expansions released for Oblivion, and because it was released perhaps too early in the 360′s life cycle, Bethesda Softworks didn’t put any extra Achievements into this particular DLC. This expansion retails for 800 MS points ($10) online, and provides about 10 hours of extra gameplay through a major quest line that has you journeying around Oblivion’s world and assisting the knights with their quests. It’s not a bad expansion, but it pales in comparison to Shivering Isles due to the fact that it’s not only somewhat short, but it still takes place in the regular edition’s world.

Of the two expansion packs, I dove into the Shivering Isles expansion first, which may have been a slight mistake since I ultimately found Knights of the Nine to be less satisfying in comparison. Shivering Isles was the second of the two major expansions released for Oblivion, clocking in at 1600 MS Points ($20) online, with 250 extra Achievement points, and about a 20 hour major questline (along with several hours of minor subquests) in a different world as you step through what is basically a warpgate to the Shivering Isles. I enjoyed Shivering Isles a great deal because it was a living breathing world with new towns, characters, dungeons, and all sorts of landmarks. While the main questline was only 20 hours long, for completionists that are dead set on exploring everything the Shivering Isles have to offer, you’ll be clocking dozens more hours.

The two expansions come on a second disc included with the Oblivion GotY edition, so it’s actually possible to simply install the expansions onto your 360 hard drive and never need the disc again. (I believe the Fallout 3 GotY Edition second disc with the 5 expansions functions in a similar manner.) Also of note – you are able to access the expansions pretty much right away in the game. I created a new character for both the Shivering Isles expansion and the Knights of the Nine expansion.

 So what can I say about these expansions? Certainly don’t buy them for $30 online today since the full game itself with the expansion retails for $30 in stores. And how can one really judge whether it’s worth spending more money for 20-30 more hours of questline content when the original game can last you dozens, or even hundreds of hours? In a way, I do like that the expansions provide you with a major questline to follow, as playing the regular Oblivion game and only following the major quest lines would have you finishing the game in about 50-60 hours. So the pricing is right. Definitely recommended, especially those of you that never got into Oblivion, but enjoyed Fallout 3. Oblivion holds up amazingly well today, and will continue to hold up as the highest rated RPG on the 360.