The Lamer Gamer

Actually getting up ass early and running 4 miles helps too.  Not sure how I pulled that off after the night of dodging firework debris and downing High Life and Coors Banquet Beer.  On that note, if you should ever have the opportunity to sit 30 feet away from where a series of firework mortars and such are being set off, it’s a good time.  Have bits of gunpowder smelling wrappers fall on you, some of which still enflamed, is a trip.   Use your best judgement as to whether the persons controlling said display are licensed and skilled enough to have you sitting so close.

Anyway, LHP is okay.  I’m just watching someone else play right now.  I was never really into the books or movies so it’s not as much of a draw for me as Lego Star Wars or Indiana Jones were.  Still, the TT guys came up with some new mechanics like the set of spells your character can use.  Not a vast change from the last few incarnations.  I feel as though it’s just too easy for them to just pump out Lego remakes at this point, and frankly, they don’t feel altogether fresh.  Lego Rock Band in particular.

To recap.  4 miles run, good.  Hangover, bad.  Participatory fireworks, good.  LHP, so-so, so far anyway.

Made a slight mistake in grabbing Alpha Protocol.  It’s not that it sucked bad in general, but it did suck bad at being an RPG.  About the only thing that they get right is the abundant talking.  Other than that, it tries to be a Mass Effect-ish action RPG and it’s just not well executed.  The inventory customization bit fails as the weapons just don’t feel very different when customized and aside from the Endurance/Damage Reduction bonuses on armor, nothing else feels like it has a huge effect (e.g. hacking bonus).

On to another pet peeve I have.  Without reloading saves at critical points 3+ play throughs are necessary to get all of the achievements.  I know I’m just achievement whoring at this point, as enjoyed my one play through but am now fast forwarding through all the dialog and  at the same time trying to pay enough attention to it to sway one NPC or another into doing what I need for the achievement.

On the plus side, since this game isn’t so awesome and I already sent back Red Dead, I’ve been getting a little more exercise.  about 10+ miles this week.  Nothing ridiculous, but still good for me.

Lego Harry Potter on its way.  Gotta get something family friendly once in a while.

I can’t really put my finger on why, but I never got into Grand Theft Auto.  I like mob movies, love sandbox games, tried most of the GTA games in the last 5-10 years and they just never grabbed me. 

So for me, Red Dead Redemption was a bit of a risk.  I might play it a bit and the lose interest just like with all the rest of its more modern ilk.  Yet after a few hours I was legitimately hooked.  The game is beautiful, vast, the characters deep, and gunfights abound.  The combat system is great, though I still don’t have Expert targeting down just yet.  There’s so much to do in Red Dead that it’s hard to get bored.  Skin some bears, hunt some boars, fight a few duels, haul in a few bounties, all in a day’s work.  Single player took to around 1.75-2 days play time.  Not bad.

Multiplayer is better than I thought it would be, though worse in some ways too.  Playing coop through gang hideouts is plenty fun, and the Outlaws to the End hasn’t even been released yet (plus it’s free DLC, gotta love that).  On the down side, it’s a little too easy to get bullied by higher ranked players who just feel like constantly shooting you in the dome.  Since the weapons get significantly better as you rank up, as opposed to MW2 where in general there’s a lot of parity, you can be held at the mercy of a guy that just lives to give you a hard time as he’s harder to kill with your cattleman’s revolver than you are with his high power pistol.  I’ve blown a few hours being harassed in that way already.  They can follow you if you go to a different Free Roam session too, so that kind of adds to it.  The PvP modes don’t appeal to me much.  Played some Gold Rush, thought it was okay.  Maybe the experience there is better with a bigger crowd of friends.

All in all it’s a great experience.  Well worth the current rental, likely to a buy in the not so distant future.  Before Red Dead becomes too much of a time sink, I need to get into Alpha Protocol.

I’m kind of surprised to see a bunch of mediocre reviews of Alan Wake.  83 isn’t a bad score on Metacritic, but I find it hard to believe that people were really that dissapointed.  Claims like “There aren’t any memorable moments” were clearly made by people who dislike hair-metal, rock shows with pyrotechnics and zombies consumed by darkness or simply hadn’t actually played the game.

I’m speaking of course (spolier) about the showdown at farm when you face waves of the Taken while Barry works the light show.  The game had been up until that point been fairly serious, and this was a great break in the otherwise darkdarkdark atmosphere.  I had some much fun playing this part I restarted my checkpoint when it was cleared I’d nearly reached the next.

I can see some gripes about the nightmare difficulty not being all that nightmarish which also goes against how this was billed a bit as survival horror, it’s really not.  Also another pet peeve of mine, why do I have to unlock nightmare mode?  You’re wasting my time.  The enemies are rather unvaried.  But the story!  It’s good.  It has a solid novel quality twist near the end, I continually wanted to know more.  Visually it’s well done, but the facial animation sucks major ass. I’d already mentioned that the atmosphere was great, it’s scary and dark though not nearly as scary as Dead Space.  Speaking of which, Dead Space 2 coming up!

After waiting way too long for the Halo: Reach beta to download, I got into a handful of matches last night.  It plays pretty well, better than I expected.  Controls are going to take a little getting used to though.  Green Thumb is generally how I like it, click the thumbstick to melee. http://gruntsrus.com/2010/04/halo-reach-control-scheme/

Really, the strength of Reach at this point is the variety of game types and the addition of some new ones.  Slayer gets kind of old.  Not that people, myself included, don’t play every game like it’s slayer anyway, but I love objective matches.

The Modern Warfare type exp system is unremarkable, but being able to buy customizations with those credits is at least kind of amusing.

For some reason I felt the need to rent Supreme Commander again.  I guess I wanted to run through it before renting Supreme Commander 2.

NEWS FLASH, it still crashes.  All the time, though typically only when saving.

Nice for me is that it crashed about 3 minutes before the Senators scored in triple overtime, so I actually got a chance to see it.

Just so I could curse at my TV one last time playing Halo 2 on Xbox LIVE, I fired it up tonight and threw in the disc.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t tooled as badly as I’d thought I’d be.  What I hadn’t expected was that during the match loading screens Bungie had thrown in a bunch of more-random-than-usual blurbs in the “Did You Know?” box.

Finished up Mirror’s Edge this weekend, which felt rather challenging, though it might be that I suck that bad.  Mostly it was the Speed Runs that got on my nerves.  Very similar in feel to completing the campaigns in AvP on nightmare difficulty, where in either case, one little screw-up has you restarting the level.  I’m really impressed with Mirror’s Edge in a lot of ways, it’s innovative in terms of gameplay and controls + it’s a game that doesn’t center around guns.  Lord knows I’ve got enough FPS style games around.

Inspired by MI, I’ve run around 10 miles in the last week.  No, not really.  I did run 10 or so, but because I’m already registered for races that I’m going to get murdalized in if I don’t train up hard in the next week or so. 

I see that Supreme Commander 2 is out for 360, and while I was so dissapointed with the first one, I’m going to give it another shot.  so MI is heading back and we’re gonna see about renting SC again.  Maybe there’s a patch for the lockups…  Maybe…

I ocassionally hunt Nuke Boosters in MW2, but never really thought to catalog them.  Followed a guy around for a few games this evening.  I wasn’t the only one apparently.  Now that is amusing.  Piss off enough people that there’s a posse following you to your next game.

Here goes.  Booster in Bold, helper in Italic

1. ledbulletsniper
2. CPTxKluTCHx

Maybe the least fun portion of the game for me.  Speed Runs in Mirror’s Edge are unlike what I find in a lot of games, an actual achievement.  Your ability to hit every jump or trick on the course is so hit-or-miss that it can become crazy infuriating when you make it to the end of the course and then fall off a building or get shot only to then be short on time.

Finished a few of them in the last day or so, but then gave up, only to switch to Time Trials which are still as hit-or-miss, but generally so much shorter than the Speed Runs that it isn’t an issue for me.   Made it through a ton of them with 2 stars, a couple of 3 star runs.  Very fun.

Working my way through the story on hard.  This is yet another game that requires you to unlock the top difficulty with a playthrough on a lower difficulty.  That is rapidly climbing my pet peeve list.