McWilliams’ World

Okay, I admit it. I simply played King Kong to get the easy 1000 gamerscore points. One of my boy’s friend left his copy of King Kong here and since I had time this weekend, thought I’d plop it in and rack up the points. Took me a little over 5hrs to complete.

But I’ll admit, it was a pretty fun game. It wasn’t overly complicated or frustrating. You pretty much followed the plot of the movie so there wasn’t the need for looting, upgrading items, etc.. It was just simply play through the movie. Most of the puzzles involved finding handles to turn cranks that opened doors, clearing brush with fire to get at certain areas, and having Kong move obstacles out of doorway (man there are a lot of doors in the jungle!). Not too hard. Sometimes they changed some of the puzzles up by adding a waterfall that would extinguish your burning stick - so you had to find another way (usually by throwing it to the next section and running to get it). Occasionally you get to play as Kong and smash the crap out of stuff like villagers, T-Rexes, and other smaller dinos. And yes Kong still dies - so it’s very anticlimactic.

The game is dark (as in the amount of light), however that’s how I’d expect the jungle to be. It does add to the atmosphere. As for graphics, nothing to write home about but I did like the brontosauruses and the Kong fight sequences.

Overall a fun game but I’d have felt cheated out of $60 to complete it in about 5hrs with virtually no replay value. It’s been out long enough and if you have a friend that still has a copy - 1000 gamerscore points can be yours in short order.

I finally got COD4 last night from Amazon.com. Why it took so freekin’ long to get here is beyond me. I had it pre-ordered and everything. Grrr!

Anyways, just some quick observations from the first 2-3 missions;

• Where the hell are my legs? During the initial “ride with the terrorists” I looked down and noticed I HAVE NO LEGS! NO BODY! I’m just a floating head (if my head even exists - it must because some guy boots me in the head and I eventually get shot - point-blank). No legs? That’s so last-gen!
• Holy crap the pacing is fast. I can’t count the number of times I got lost because my squad ran off without me. Plus the overall pacing of the game is very quick.
• Speaking of fast - those terrorists drive like banshees through the streets. Narrow corridors, people running in and out of the road - LOOK OUT! But the car keeps speeding along what feels like 35mph. I don’t think he hit the breaks once.
• The game looks great. There were a few times I just took a moment to take it all in as rockets were racing into the evening sky, bullets were flying, and people screaming.

I didn’t have too much time last night to get too far into the game but from what I saw I liked. Just thought it was funny I had no legs.

Man, I just breezed through the first four tiers in GH3 on expert and all I can say “It’s teh suck - so far.” (yes, I meant to spell “the” that way).

Wow. Just wow. What a bunch of underwhelming, no-name, blah, mundane bunch of songs. I think I 5 stared Paranoid on the first try - I know I at least got two achievements (250 note streak, 250k+ score). I’d say 90% of the songs are power-chords and simple strumming. No cool guitar licks or grooves. That Sonic Youth song and Story of My Life; what the heck are those?! Wow, they blow.

I remember reluctantly selecting the next song in the list knowing that it’s the only way I can move forward. I don’t know what Activision, Neversoft and Red Octane were thinking when these songs were selected. There’s absolutely nothing exciting about them nor is there much of a challenge.

That being said, I’ll plod through, but there better be a more than a handful of fun songs to play otherwise the replay value, for me, will be slim. Even with multi-player - if the songs suck… that wouldn’t even be fun.

Man, I was really looking forward to this. But it’s no fun when you just want the song to end.

Let’s just say I’m seriously looking at picking up Rock Band.

Wow. I finally hunkered down and finished Ninety Nine Nights (N3). Main reason I did it was to get the extra 500 gamerscore points. Okay, it’s a fun game too.

A quick review of N3:

• The graphics are great (not Gears of War great, but good nonetheless)
• The save system bit me in-the-butt a few times by overwriting a certain character’s save spot with another’s, causing me to re-do the overwritten character’s missions again. Grrrr!
• On the surface the game appears to be a button-masher (which you can do with fairly good results), but it’s fun pulling off the better moves/combos when you know what you’re doing.
• There is some strategy involved in order to complete missions with an A or S rating (S being the best - don’t ask me why, it’s a Japanese game).
• There are plenty of guys to slaughter. Literally hundreds on the screen at once making for some killer action; very fun
• The dialog is very corny, don’t even try to follow the story line. Vik Vak (the troll) probably has the best story line and he only has two missions; very touching IMHO.
• Bosses are a bit cheap in that your blue spark (mega power) won’t even touch them and if it does, it’s a small amount. I’d expect it to do some damage. For crying out loud I just obliterated 400 guys and the boss just gets to stand and block?! I don’t think so. At least damage the boss a bit.
• Speaking of cheap (or just bad physics), during Tyruruu’s (can’t spell, she’s a sorceress) mission in the mountains, boulders are littered everywhere which you can push with a water blast. However, depending on which way the boulder’s are programmed to roll, if you are in front of the boulder and try to push it away from you, it’ll actually roll back toward you. Yikes! Can we say glitch? 
• Cut screens can sometimes be skipped. If there was one rule I’d impose on every game developer is that cut scenes should be always skip-able. I’m okay being forced to watch a 1min clip the first time but then let me skip it. I just want to get to the action after I’ve died for the umpteenth time.
• The achievement for leveling all of your characters to level 9 is a bit excessive and confusing. Since this game was an import from Japan, the wording for this achievement changed a bit. In the US, the requirement is to level all your characters to level 9 but in actuality you have to play through every character’s missions while at level 9. Ugh. That took close to 8hrs for me to complete.

I admit that I had to go to the Xbox.com forums and get some tips to complete some parts of the game. It wasn’t cheating as there are no cheats involved, but there are strategies which I desperately needed.

Overall, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I not only completed my first 360 game, but achieved all 1000 points from the title as well. Before I was okay with just finishing the game, but the achievement revolution that the Xbox 360 created makes me want to push farther and extend the life of the game. Will I push through every title I have like that? Maybe. Maybe not. Some titles may not be worth it.

I finally cracked the 5000 gamerscore

I was an achieving fool Saturday and Sunday. After completing N3, I cracked off achievements in Gears of War, G.R.A.W., and Lego Star Wars II. My Xbox even blogged about it. On to the next milestone. What is that? About 500 more points to net me a little prize for raising my gamerscore by 1500 by April 22.

I finally received my copy of Gears yesterday from Best Buy (about freekin’ time!) and was able to plop it in for about 20min or so; enough to get through about 2-3 sections.

After reading some other people’s impressions, it was suggested to start out on Hardcore mode instead of Casual just to prepare for multi-player action and to make the game a bit more challenging.

I will say this, Hardcore is challenging and it makes you think a bit more, but it still feels like I’m flying through the game. I don’t like the feeling that I’m blazing through a game so fast. I want the sense that this is a struggle and not just doing a level at a time. Granted, I’ve only played a few minutes so maybe that feeling with disappear.

I died several times, mostly after reaching the top of the stairs from the prison. The “grubs” were flanking me and I just couldn’t react fast enough. It’s frantic action, and I’m still getting used to the controls which is part of the problem. One dig here, and this “rule” will go on my “game developer’s commandments” post I’m thinking of writing, is “Let me skip the dang cut-scenes”. I’ve seen it once, don’t force me to endure it again every single stinkin’ time I die and reload my checkpoint! This is the next-gen people, I want control!

A couple of nice things I noticed:

1. Storage device selection was an option within the game settings. I don’t think I was bothered with the ”where do you want to save this game” every stinkin’ time I needed to save or reload. Bonus points there…Other game developers should follow suit.
2. I noticed a turn off extreme content option. Haven’t tried it out but it’d be cool if it does turn off the gore (extreme blood splatter) and removes the language. I’ll have to try that out - if anyone has seen what it does, let me know. I wouldn’t mind letting the kids play if that stuff could be turned off - but we’ll see about that.
3. Screen options were also present, such as “soft”, “vibrant”, etc… I flipped it to vibrant and noticed things were a bit brighter. Maybe they could have explained that a bit more (maybe it’s in the manual…didn’t check). Liked that option though.

Overall I liked what I saw and enjoyed what I played. The game looks and feels great and is by far one of the most spectacular looking games on the 360 or any other console for that matter. I wouldn’t mind doing some Xbox Live co-op at some point either as I think that’d really amp up the excitement. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time during vacation.

If you’re on-line and see me playing this coming week, shoot me an invite, I’ll be glad to jump in any game we have in common.

I just finished playing through Jade Empire - an original flavored Xbox title I’ve had in my possession for over a year and never played.  Why? I have too many other games to play!

General Info

I’m not going to go too in depth about the game as you can find many other, well written reviews other places, but just want to give my two bits.

Jade Empire is an original title by Bioware. The same guys that brought you the most excellent Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (I loved that game too, which reminds me, I have to play through KOTOR II one of these days). The setting is ancient China where everything is very fanciful, mysterious, and astounding. You start off choosing your character of varying combat classes (balanced, speed, strength, magic), male and female. I choose to play as the Sprit Monk (an extra character included with the special edition).

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I just received Dead Rising (free from yourFree360Games.com - yeah!) and I’ve played a it a bit - long enough to make it to 7pm - when the zombies get their freak on!

So far I’m having fun with it. However, due to the strict 72hr in-game time limit (it’s shorter than that in real-time - your character only has so much time to figure out what’s going on), situations become very tense and stressful. You have a feeling of urgency and although the desire is there to roam around, find little secrets, and splatter zombies with whatever I can pickup and use as a weapon, I know if I dilly-dally too much, I’ll miss out on some cool storylines and potential points. So it very much feels like hurry-up-and-go.

I have run into the infamous “save issue” that most reviews point to. You can only save in bathrooms and safe areas - which are few and far between in this huge mall. Oh yeah..you only have one save spot. So for save-hos, like myself, there’s no way to create a couple separate saves as backups to potential screw-ups. Stray too far or get lost (very easy to do) and get brain-munched by a zombie and it’s back to where you last saved. Sucks.

On the flip-side, you can restart the game (from scratch) with your character at the level you ended with. That’s OK I guess, but it won’t make up for having re-do certain things.

Apparently there’s also an “infinity mode” where there’s no time limit and you see how long you can survive. Sounds fun.

I’m not sure if I’m going to invest a ton of time into this game at this moment, since I’m currently playing through Jade Empire (finally) and will be getting a couple new games in the next few weeks.

Overall, Dead Rising looks pretty fun. I’m glad I got it. More whenever I beat it.

I just finished playing through Psychonauts (shortly after my son Jonah beat the game).

There are million reviews of this game so I’ll keep this post just to my thoughts.

The Game

Psychonauts is mainly an adventure-platformer. You’ll jump, double-jump, bash things to find goodies, flip switches to unlock other areas, etc… pretty standard stuff. However, a number of psychic abilities add some extra spice to this game. You gain powers such as psi-blast, levitation, telekinesis, clairvoyance, shield, invisibility, etc… You earn these powers over time and you’ll upgrade these powers as you collect arrowheads and psi-challenge markers and your character levels up.

The game takes on a very ugly (but cute) cartoonish look. Nothing is in proportion. Characters have bulging eyes, mis-shaped heads, just odd looking; but it works perfectly. The voice acting and storyline are top-notch.

Humor is riddled throughout and I found myself laughing out loud many times. At one point in the game I’m projected into a very ugly lake monster’s mind (to free it from someone’s evil grasp) and while in its mind, I’m a giant within a city with all these little lake monsters running around, screaming like I’m Godzilla; but they call me Gargalor. The comedy that ensues from actions I take like crushing buildings and such are priceless. Another time I have to defeat some wrestlers and after defeating them they’re found tending to a garden. Walking up to them and talking my character says (in a very polite tone); “I just want to say that the way you took that ass kicking I handed you really shows how how much you care.” (or something like that). Very funny stuff.

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