Blur Review

This game is fun. I want to get that out there and make sure it is known from the start. It may sound like I am ripping this game up at times, but it truly is fun. I am also attempting to make my reviews a little more concise as my RDR review was very long winded, and doubtful anyone will read that much. I may try to do addendums to a review for some added thoughts, but I will try and keep the main review short and sweet.

The Good:

Driving Mechanics. The cars all feel pretty good. There is a racing system here, that is not just balls to the walls, crash to turn racer. There is a drift mechanic that also works to some extent. I personally never really bothered too much with it, but it is there, and the fastest cars are all labeled as “Drifty”. I steered clear of these. The cars all handle fairly well, and you feel in control of them.

Insanity: The game doles this out by the truckload, and it keeps the tension high in most races. If you play on medium difficulty or above, no race is safe. I put this game down to easy about 5 hours in as racing the same race for the 5^th time is not attractive to me. There a ton of weapons to cause havoc and destruction both to you and your enemies. Add to this the added goals of each race where you need to earn fans by doing cool shit, and then having a “fan run” of running through gates, all while getting shot and going as fast as possible, you ratchet up the insanity level. This does increase the frustration though as you can be stopped from getting other goals because of oh let’s say losing the race because you were trying to hit gates like a slalom skier, while assholes are shooting you.

The Bad

Graphics. While the graphics are not horrible, they are not good either for what he 360 is capable of and has been seen in other racers. This game feels like it was built with the same kind of engine as their last game some 2 or 3 years ago. The cars all look pretty good, but there tracks are rather bland, and the effects seem somewhat toned down from what you would hope when you blast a 3 foot glowing globe up another cars ass.

Mods. When you first load up your car, you see a screen that says mods on it. This gets my heart aflutter as I am hoping for money, and customization, and RPG kind of elements to leveling up my cars ala Forza. Alas this is not to be. This is merely a cock tease, as your mods are a simple one trick pony that is useful for only one type of power up, which you may or may not even get very often in a race. The best one I found was 3/4ths of the way into the game, and it made my nitro push cars away. Cool yes, but not what I had in mind about Mods.

The UGLY

Variety. If I were to tell you that a $60 game released with 5 tracks, would ask if this was an EA game and you were expected to become a VIP to get the rest, which were done they just didn’t give them to you yet. Unfortunately this is not even the case, you actually only get 5 tracks, with different variations of those same tracks, some longer some shorter. This leads to boredom as you are racing the same basic pieces of the same tracks over, and over, and over, and over. And OVER. It seems like Bizarre is flat out telling you, WAIT THERE WILL BE DLC!!!. This is fucking bullshit and give me a full game, then make the DLC EXTRA content please.

Social Interaction: This seemed to be Blur’s catchy back of the box bullet point, share your experiences with your friends while playing the game, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LEAVE. In reality all you get is annoying as hell posts that are canned you can send to facebook or twitter. I did this my first night to annoy and nothing else. I mean seriously Bizarre, do you think my friends give two fucking shits if I am looking at a 2050 Nissan P with a flashy spoiler? I hope to all that is holy they don’t give a shit, or I don’t need to be friends with them any longer. If you had spent this much time giving me more tracks I might have spent the last third of the game not just finishing it, but rather playing it.

Closing:

Overall this game WAS fun, it had a bunch of the pieces to make it challenging and make it fun at the same time. It was also missing some pieces that would have made it infinitely better. The game does so much right it is almost annoying at times when you are missing pieces that could have propelled the game to a whole different level. This will be billed as a streamlined racer, but I tend to think of it as a stripped out racer. I did not hate my time spent with it, but I also don’t find myself wanting to play it now that I have sent it back to Gamefly. I constantly think back to the strip that PA did though when thinking about this game because it is just so fitting, believe me the expletive they call a power up, is a phrase you will exclaim many times.

I would rate this $25 fun, or if you can find it cheaper.

Transformers WFC

I was reading the new article from PA, and they stated what I had realized was going to be a trend in my short play of only the first chapter of this game. That is, this is going to be fucking difficult. I very may well have to turn it to easy. My rule normally goes, that if i die more than once on the first level, then I had damn well better go to an easier level, or risk losing my mind, or some piece of electronics will lose its life in the process of me screaming at the cheating ass computer.

As a note, I died 4 times in the course of the first chapter. Now that I think about it more, I am changing the difficulty the very next time I play that shit, or if it is very mean spirited and doesnt allow a mid game change of difficulty, I will simply replay the first level. I don't have enough time in my life to replay the same portion of a game 50 times because the developers decided to make it impossible. I just don't get that sense of satisfaction from beating something that has punished me repeatedly. I instead want to sodomize it with a broom FOR punishing me.

I play games to enjoy them, not to climb Mt Everest and proclaim to the world I am the greatest for beating a game. I am glad I read this PA article or I may have trudged on longer than needed down the path of medium difficulty.

From Kotaku

Blur

Just finished the single player of Blur. In a vacuum and not comparing blur to anything else, it was quite fun. People seem to complain about the graphics but i think they are pretty good. The cars are fun to drive, the controls feel tight, and the racing is hectic. This single player has a few twists but nothing groundbreaking. I will try to write a review tomorrow or Tuesday.

Games I am Playing This Week

I am about 3 hours into Alpha Protocol. So far this game is pretty fun, not the best game I have ever played but so far it is quite fun. My only major gripe is the controls aren't as tight as you would hope for a game that spends most of its time as a shooter. But this is actually more of a RPG than it is a shooter.

Blur is loaned out to a friend, but that will get played later this week as well. I am enjoying its single player quite a bit. the multiplayer is hectic and fun, but it feels like i need friends to play with, racing solo against 19 other people isnt all that fun by myself.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Ugly

Here is where I think RDR falls short. I have two major gripes here that stand out. I separate out these two parts because they are the pieces that I think would have made this a truly great game. I know it has gotten great reviews and sold a ton of copies, but I personally don’t see how it is getting reviews as good as it is. I don’t find it a bad game, as I have said but these are pieces that could have made this an amazing game instead of a good game.

· Storytelling. This only becomes apparent when you reach the supposed culmination of the story that you have been presented with for nearly 20 hours. The makeup of the story feels wrong, and put together weakly. It feels as if they weren’t sure how to tell a story. Instead of the story feeling emotional and attaching you to characters, they throw you into a character they have constructed and assume you’re going to care about your family because Rockstar deems it so.

All this game needed was a rearranging of the pieces of the story and this could have felt totally different. The problem is that this leads you in with 20 hours to no climax, and then forces you into about 2 more hours to reach a final climax. This is an aborted story arc that feels unnatural, and feels poorly told. If you were a freshman in high school and wrote a short story in this method, you would be reprimanded for breaking a tried and true method of telling stories. I wish they would have taken a queue from great RPG’s (read Bioware) in their ability to tell a story.

· Multiplayer. I feel like the free roam was a great direction. What this game needed was to take this ball and roll with it. They needed ways to make this a sort of co op campaign. Instead they chose to try and include all the normal game types for multiplayer that you have played a hundred times. The problem is that this isn’t a shooter and doesn’t control like one. It needed to take its strong points and focus on that, instead of the mess of modes it attempts and doesn’t do very well at. The free roam is fun, but could have been fleshed out to be a standout, it feels like it was tacked on.

Score: FAT.

· Fun at times, problems distracting (FAT)—Rent, avoid buying unless you really dig what they dug.

My Scoring Scale.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Good

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Bad

Please make the game a fraction this cool Bioware

OMG Please be Awesome, please.

Fun Scale Scoring System.

A comment from a friend (my first yay) made me think about it, and I don’t want to just put a number score. A number rarely is indicitive of the true product, and how would one ever find gems if you only took others numbers into account. I may still place a number score in comparison to other reviews, but I am more interested if a game is fun or not, not only a pure number. The bottom line is that I don't have all day to play games, I don't like to waste my time, so the fun becomes paramount in the experience. This will be a scale of how fun I thought a game was.

A distrust of only a number system is compounded by my own suspicous conspiracy theory loving mind that scores from major sites are ONLY about money. AAA titles that spend a ton on marketing never seem to get reemed when they are deserving and fun games will get horrible scores for problems forgiven by AAA titles. This is partial to nostalgia in which the flashy parts of games were not all you had to go on, but gameplay and story had as much to do with graphics. I like to think that eye candy is not all I am interested in, there are times where I am wowed like anyone else, but I don’t get hung up on graphics.

Fun Scale, or Score for review. This is mostly subjective, but this is mostly about whether I had fun or not. There are plenty of games that get great number reviews that arent fun at all, and many more that swing to the opposite side of he pendulum.

· Fun, Atful or Innovative. (FAoI) –Must Play Game

· Fun, missing some parts, doesn’t get in the way. (FMSP) –Can’t go to far wrong here, find a way to play.

· Fun at times, problems distracting (FAT)—Rent, avoid buying unless you really dig what they dug.

· A Chore to play, Where’s the Fun? (CtP) - Don’t bother, you are not missing much here.

· No F******Fun At All pure work, don’t bother. (NFF) – Avoid at all costs, laugh at friends who buy this.

New sexy 360 Model

New XBOX 360 is sexy. Not sure I want to buy another 360 already, I just bought my Elite back in December of 09. Still for 299, getting a 250GB HD, built in WiFi, Built in optical audio, and NO BRICK, plus quieter operation... May be too much to pass up. Not having the removable HD is a bit of a bummer, but with the new ability to use a thumb drive, it is almost obsolete anyways. The only time i ever wanted it was when it was easier to take my spare 360 to someones house, but that didnt help much because you couldnt use the installed games on a different box, and my two boxes are different models, so they use the different power bricks too. Now I would need to move my profile and saves onto a thumb drive and go, instead of needing the whole HD. This is an advantage in my opinion, not a weakness. It is new, and not totally backwards compatible, but backwards compatibility rarely means better.

http://www.engadget.com/photos/new-xbox-360-press-shots/#3076568

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Bad

Second part of my Review of RDR will be the bad. Here will be the parts i was not so enamored with as it would appear the media is with this game. In most of the reviews I have read, there seems to be almost nothing negative to say about the game, which boggles the mind in my opinion. As i said in the good section, I did not think the game was bad

RDR Review Part 2 - The Bad.

1. The interface. The on screen HUD was functional and worked most of the time, it left something to be desired that there was no zoom level on the minimap, so you had no idea of how far you needed to go at times, and the minimap only had one zoom out option, I feel this needed to be able to zoomed out much farther for the vastness of the world.

The other glaring problem i had was the menu system you were forced to use that was not streamlined in any way. For some inexplicable reason, your back button pauses the game, and brings up your consumables and random items menu. From here is where you use medicine, access your campsites, etc. To see the mini map though you need to pause the game with the start button, then select the top option to see the map. The problem with this is that if you are tired of riding your horse, (I was after about a half hour) and want to fast travel you must: hit start, then hit a to see your map, find where you want to go and set the way-point on the map, then unpause, then hit the back button, then select your campsite, this then launches a mini cut scene, then hit A in your campsite, to travel, then finally hit A to travel to waypoint. I thought i needed to post the entire process here for you because I used this constantly, and went to the back menu first about a kajillion times.

This was a glaring oversight in my opinion. Why on earth didn't back default to the mini map like every other game, then all you needed was a bumper to switch to the other screens of your consumables. This would allow you to hit one button to see the map quickly, which i needed a lot, place your way-point and drop a campsite, in one screen with one pause. This was just not designed well in any way, it was as if the game assumed you would never need the map.

2. Controls. These were not horrible by any means, but along the streamline complaints some of the button controls seem strange. Not having the ability to map consumables to the d-pad, which almost seems like a standard anymore, was a major oversight. this again causes you to navigate menus to do something you need a lot of, and forces a pause to use a health kit.

I had hoped for a faster way to switch between some weapons as well. there was a switch between guns but not for your other weapons, such as your lasso. this caused you to shoot someone to incapacitate them, then use your LB + L Stick to rotate the menu to your lasso, all while hoping the guy doesn't get up and shoot you while holding your lasso. The cover system left something to be desired as well, with many times i was able to be shot while in cover, and not have any idea who was shooting me as one extreme, with the other not being able to enter cover on something and getting stuck in the open.

I also had a ton of frustration with the spacing needed to activate certain parts of actions. An example of this is putting a hog tied person on your horse. I had this nearly every time where i couldn't find the exact 3 inch space that i was required to be standing in on the flank of the horse to place the person on the horse, and god forbid you press the button before you need, or you set the person down on the ground to start again. Oh did i also mention the horse wont stay still, so i had to walk with a person on my shoulder trying to hit a moving target and holding my finger on the button so when i finally see the correct prompts i can hit the button at the right time. This must have been hilarious to watch a three stooges moment of me walking in circles around my damn horse praying to the gaming gods that it would just let me press X to put the person on my horse.

Overall the controls felt a little sloppy.

3. Pacing of the game. This game felt like a very long game, but was about 22 hours for me to complete. I did very few of the random encounters, played poker a bit, and went mission to mission for the story. I am not new to long games, I played over 60 hours on my first go round with Dragon Age Origins. RDR just seems to drag on, and leaves me not caring about what is happening any longer.

The problem I had was with the forcing me to do 8 side missions for someone, all so they can finally give me the sliver or information or help that will then send me to the next taskmaster to start the dance over again. This of course was only a dance where you think its going to be a slow dance, and as soon as you hit the dance floor, some ridiculous techno song plays, and you now are going to look ridiculous. This is the mission system of RDR, everyone is a scheming fruitcake, who needs you go on a mission to find the One Ring, so they can tell you that your princess is not in this castle, try another. You even know its coming, and just wish it wasn't going to be the case. For all the people you shoot in the face, Marston sure is a pushover to be at the beck and call of every whim, of each Tom, Dick, and Jane he meets. By the end you are a famous killer, and still everyone jerks you around.

In an RPG, these are called side quests, that are not mandatory. You get to choose if you want to be the guy who helps everyone, or tells them all to screw off. For this being a sandbox game, you are not given choices, more on that next.

4. characters. I put this in the good, but there is a bad to this as well. One of the main problems I had was that for all the dialog thrown about, you never get to know anyone, and almost no one you meet early on ever comes back up, so what you know about them becomes quickly irrelevant, and has no lasting appeal. The characters are at times interesting, but honestly if I was given an option upon meeting them of either, a. shooting them in the face to get my information, or b. listen to a wall of dialog and do 14 tasks to get that information, face shooting would prevail.

5. Things to do. I had a problem with the amount of extra things to do, but none really mattering except to do them. Money is largely irrelevant because you are given guns for free as you go through the story, and I only had to buy ammo a few times, and bought one gun before i realized this. I only wish that more time had been spent crafting a story than had been spent creating more mini games to play.

It feels as if the RDR is a mini game, hunting, herb gathering collection of mini games, with a story thrown in as something else to do, instead of the opposite.

I don't want to sound overly harsh in my criticisms but i feel that all of these combine to really bring down a fairly strong game from Rockstar. The last section of the review i will write tomorrow night, with an overall score as well.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Good

This will be my first review and it will be a game still fresh in my memory as i just finished it on Tue. Red Dead Redemption. I am going to try and do my own thing a bit on reviews, and do this in three separate parts, and I think I will theme this after the old western, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I am sure someone else does this and this will be similar to how Kotaku runs their reviews.

I will preface this review by saying that i believe that my age, or patience, or simply my sanity, have outstripped the game play provided by these Rockstar sandbox games. For reference I only made it through about 5 hours of GTAIV before I deemed it un-fun, and moved on. I left it on the shelf thinking i would someday take up this monumental endeavor again, which i tried about a month ago, to which was a failure on my second mission. But I digress, this is supposed to be about RDR, not previous games, I simply wanted to state that I am 100% non-objective to this game, though I will try my best to keep this game in perspective to other games.

Part 1 - The good.

1. The Graphics. The graphics of this game look pretty amazing. The sky looks believeable. the scenery and draw distance are great, and there is very little "pop-in" of textures. This is of course aided by the lack of details needed, but nonetheless it is pretty.

2. Fast Travel. Thank (Insert Deity of your choice). I swore that if i loaded this game up and they gave me no way to fast travel that i would instantly send this back to whence it came, Gamefly. They did get this part right, and allow you to, with an upgrade to an advanced campsite, fast travel to a way point on the map. This means gone are the days of needing to drive 15 mins just to get a mission, in which you again drive for 10 minutes. God forbid you were to die in previous games, as you would then need to re-drive all that time. Major Kudos for finally realizing that traveling is not what people pay $60 to do.

3. Characters. This will make an appearance in another portion as well, but the good side of characters. Rockstar inserts their normal sense of humor into the characters you meet, and there are constantly hidden gems in the dialog. This is of course if you keep yourself paying attention as there is a ton of dialog. But there are some amusing characters you will meet, among them a grave-robbing outcast into bestiality, a drug fiend intellectual, a lecherous freedom fighter, and many others.

4. Things to do. This is another topic that will be in more than one area. There is a ton of things to do that don't pertain to the story directly. I wont list them all here, but there are a lot, hunting horseshoes, poker, skinning, gathering, side quests, bounty collections, and the list goes on. If you like doing extraneous activities, or achievement hunting, there is ton to do here. Personally this is not my cup of tea, this felt like MMO quests in which they are time wasters, or grinding missions. In this I mean they don's further you into the story unfolding, they are just things to do.

5. Multi-Player Free Roam. Only the free roam in my opinion makes it here. the free roam gives you all the single player side items to do, minus the story, with the addition of other random players, or with your friends. this leads to unpredictable games, but were pretty fun. There is plenty to do here as well with levels MMO style, challenges and hunting etc.

6. Western Feel. The game does a pretty good job of setting the tone as a western and combined with the story doesnt feel unlike a western movie. The story is nothing revolutionary but does hold up well enough.

Games I am Playing

This week I wrapped up Red Dead Redemption, and am in the middle of Blur. Thanks to gamefly i have lost planet 2 waiting, and alpha protocol on the way as well. I plan on writing a review for RDR in the next couple of days hopefully. I thought it was a pretty good game, but i dont hold it in the high esteem that most sites seem to.

So i guess this is my attempt at blogging.

I am not a journalist and really dont have the desire to be, but i wanted some kind of outlet to drop my opinion in the sea of opinions which likely no one will see. That is OK with me, this can simply be a release for my thoughts.

The plan will mostly just be a place where I can write a review of the games I play, and my opinions on gaming from my perspective.

I am a tech professional, 29 years old , and spend most of my disposable time playing video games. What I have discovered over the years is that there are specific game types I like, and others i do not. More on this later and as time goes by. Mostly what I have discovered is that i don't like my time being wasted by games.

I have no idea how often I will update this, as my full time job and other activities dont warrant multiple updates per day, but I hope to post something almost every day, we will see how that work. Anyways, that is my intention, but as the saying goes, The best laid plans of mice and men...