Unfettered Blather

A simple reality of my hobby is that every year we have a summer drought of titles. Gamers complain every year and yet it continues to happen. At a certain point you start to get a little desperate, like the lonely guy who showed up alone to the prom and suddenly the awkward girl in the corner doesn’t look so bad. Suddenly you catch yourself rationalizing and the next thing you know thoughts like “Maybe I do want to try Battlestations: Midway” start to surface. So the drought isn’t officially over but it did indeed drive me to try new games and so I have my post Summer glut which is just one of those times of year I start to stock up because as my birthday and Christmas approach it becomes important to get some games now before my wife-mandated moratorium on new purchases kicks-in sometime mid-October.

GAME OF THE MONTH Boom Blox
I covered this earlier this month, but Boom Blox isn’t just game of the month, it’s now the leader for the year. I kept thinking I’d get tired of the game, but so far it continues to enthrall me every time I pop in the disc. When we’re bored and it’s late then we usually finish off our evenings with a few rounds amongst the family. It is too rare that a game is the total package, fun, replayable, enjoyable to play with others, and different. This will be a tough one to top.

BEST OF THE MONTH
	#1 Boom Blox (Wii) Reverse Jenga with explosions would be the easiest way to describe Boom Blox, and one of the few games where the Wii controls actually work well. Easily the best game I’ve played all year.
	#2 Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (360) An excellent game that suffers from poor design decisions and odd glitches. Still inferior to Crackdown, which remains the best Sandbox game I’ve played on the 360 so far, but still fun to play. Unfortunately, the original was a much better thought out game and this follow up adds more but doesn’t address some issues left outstanding from the original. On the other hand, co-op play is a blast, literally.
	#3 Forza 2: Motorsports (360) Forza 2 had a terrible demo that led me to believe that anything that caused your tires to squeal in the slightest would send your car spinning wildly out of control. I avoided this game like the plague and figured it was just another “realistic” racer that would feel more like work than fun. I picked up the Platinum Hits version, which comes with all Downloadable Content, and have been enjoying the game immensely. This is everything I wanted Gran-Turismo 3 to be. Also, I think Forza 2 proves that you do not need an open world racer even in today’s market. While this might be an older X-Box 360 title I think it remains the premier racing title for the platform.
	#4 Frontlines: Fuel of War (360) Holy Crap! This is exactly the game I wanted way back when I bought Battlefield: Modern Combat for the X-Box! A very nice, tight shooter with lousy vehicle controls but very satisfying combat. I wouldn’t have minded a little more open and dynamic battlefield but I still like the system they put in place and that they give players some control over how they achieve objectives rather than putting them on rails.
	#5 Duke Nukem 3D (360) Nostalgia tends to make us remember games more fondly than we should. Some games age worse in reality than they do in our mind. Sometimes when we pick up a game ten years later we realize that the games we’ve played since then far outshine anything some of these older games could possibly achieve. Duke Nukem 3D is not such a game. While the technology does seem primitive by today’s standards, what makes the game standout is the sheer personality of it. In the modern age we tend to focus on technical aspects. Photorealism, weather effects, open worlds, audio presentation, and less on the actual character of the game. Duke Nukem 3D wasn’t really a great technological leap from it’s predecessor, Doom, but it was huge in terms of making the main character more than a little digital puppet controlled by the player. A lesson that has not been learned by game developers since.
	#6 Soldier of Fortune: Payback (360) Here is a game that reviewed so poorly that the impression you might walk away with is that playing this game will leave you with some crippling disease, as if chronic nerddom is not enough of a social put off. In truth, the game is not as bad as the reviews may have you believe but it is not a great game either. This is one of the few games that gives you the option of fully choosing your starting loadout, including what sights to put on your weapon, silencer, grenade launcher, and fuzzy dice. (Disclaimer: I’m lying, there are no fuzzy dice or hippy daisy attachments). This is a feature that I don’t see in much better shooters, so to see it in this game is rather surprising. Still, SOF Payback is a bit of a throwback and really is not a major improvement in the franchise. I enjoyed it but would never have payed full price for it either.
	#7 Gun (360) A sandbox open world game set in the Old West sounds great on paper, until you remember that the Old West was characterized by lots and lots of nothing. Gun certainly captures both the spirit of old classic gritty spaghetti westerns while acknowledging the reality that this was a time and place that had a lot of growing up to do. The story is fairly stock and the game plays well enough but sometimes it can really drag. A decent game and certainly something different but it could have used more work.
	#8 Tron (360) Curse you cable television! Downloaded from X-Box Live shortly after rewatching the movie on TV. I was expecting the movie to be laughably bad considering it was made in the 80’s, but it has stood the test of time remarkably well. So has the game, surprisingly enough.
	#9 Time Pilot (360) I had just enough points to get this game as well so I decided I might as well. This has aged remarkably well though it also stands as a stark example of how far videogames have come. I still enjoy it as a basic shooter though it’s amusing to hit the “future” time period of 2001!
	#10 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (360) Make a game cheap enough and I may eventually try it. I like realistic shooters that allow me to chose my battlefield and loadout, but GRAW is not as flexible as it might have you believe. A very early cover system that has some serious flaws, terrible allied AI, and frustrating gameplay combine to make this a shooter that likely only saw popularity because it was Ghost Recon, a series I’ve never quite understood the appeal of, and a serious lack of competition.

BEST SO FAR

1. Boom Blox (Wii)
2. Portal (X360)
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (X360)
4. Guitar Hero II (X360)
5. Mass Effect (X360)
6. Soul Calibur (X360)
7. Crackdown (X360)
8. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (X360)
9. Endless Ocean (Wii)
10. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)

WORST SO FAR

1. Call of Duty 3 (Wii)
2. Road Trip: Arcade Edition (GCN)
3. Carnival Games (Wii)
4. Yaris (X360)
5. Virtual On Marz (PS2)
6. Hexic HD (X360)
7. Pac-Man: Championship Edition (X360)
8. Bankshot Billiards 2 (X360)
9. Fable II Pub Games (X360)
10. Small Arms (X360)

YOU’RE OUT OF THE RUNNING
And now we bid farewell to those games that won’t make either list.

• Duke Nukem 3D (X360)
  Duke Nukem 3D will always be remembered fondly by me, but the limitations of its technology and the sometimes frustrating gameplay means that it has indeed been surpassed many times over since its release. On the other hand, this is probably one of the best purchases you can make on X-Box Live Arcade.
• Forza 2 Motorsports (X360)
  Had I purchased this earlier in the year, well I would have spent a fortune on downloads. Ok, it would have debuted better, but at this point in the year there is simply too much competition. Without a doubt, the best racer I’ve played in 2008, but not enough to make the list.
• Frontlines: Fuel of War (X360)
  While an excellent shooter it falls short of better games that have come before. The clumsy attempt at a story means it falls well short of Call of Duty 4 in terms of plot while the actual gameplay is enjoyable but can lose focus quickly when it asks you to control drones or vehicles. The enemy AI is actually not bad but your fellow squadmates have no real personality. I like this game but I don’t regret waiting until I could get it on the cheap.
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (X360)
  This is a game that should have been so good that it would never get bumped off the top ten list. I am very concerned that Neversoft is going to slowly errode the franchise until it is nothing more than a memory of how good these games used to be.
• Gun (X360)
  So, yes, I’m a sucker for sandbox games but Gun fails to deliver on many fronts. They had some nice ideas but I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better as a straight-up shooter rather than attempting Grand Theft Horse: Dodge City.
• Halo 3 (X360)
  Look, Halo 3 is certainly a good shooter, but it is also overhyped. I like the game, I enjoy the mythos, and the multiplayer is robust and certainly better than most games. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Bungie is just resting on its laurels at this point by making minor improvements. I thought Halo was, alright. Halo 2 certainly addressed Halo’s problems and had some pretty significant features, but Halo 3 feels like a next-gen version of Halo 2 with some minor improvements to make some attempt to justify it’s long development time and need for next-gen release. I think this is a fine capstone to the series but it reinforces how badly Bungie needs to move on to something else now.
• Pirates of the Carribean (XBX)
  This game just inexplicably started working this month. I guess it’s ok but it’s not exactly Bethesda’s best offering. I appreciate that they didn’t let themselves get too bogged down with the Disney licensing, but the game starts out way too slow and blasts the player with way too much information, making it difficult to get into due to the density of the game. Ironic because the game itself is rather shallow and I gave up on it before I got to anything “good”. Here’s the problem, if I wanted to take an hour or more just to get to where I was doing what I want to do I would start playing MMORPG’s again.
• Soldier of Fortune: Payback (X360)
  A middling shooter with some neat features but doesn’t bring anything exciting to the table. Great for fans of 80’s action movies but hardly a Call of Duty 4 contender.
• Time Pilot (X360)
  The game ends in 2001! That’s the last stage! That should give you some idea of how anachronistic this game has become!
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (X360)
  The best part of GRAW is seeing how lessons learned from it has applied to other Tom Clancy games. While not without its flaws the action is decent but a bit frustrating at times. Unfortunately it commits some cardinals sins that many “realistic” shooters do, like why am I taking on the entire Mexican Army with four infantrymen. I would think the US could do a little better than that.
• Tron (X360)
  4 stages that just get harder every time you beat them. I love the faithful arcade adaptation and it certainly is easy to sit down and play like a casual game but there isn’t an awesome game here.

AUGUST STATISTICS -
Average Cost: $19.30
Wii - 1 Titles (10%)
X-Box 360 - 9 Titles (90%)
10 Titles

STATISTICS SO FAR -
Average Cost: $16.87 per game
Gamecube - 5 Titles (5%)
PC - 2 Titles (2%)
Playstation 2 - 10 Titles (9.9%)
Wii - 14 Titles (13.9%)
X-Box - 16 Titles (15.8%)
X-Box 360 - 54 Titles (53.5%)
101 Titles

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