Xbox withdrawal :(
Ok so I'm back at Uni now and it's really fucking bad not having my xbox to burn some time away on. I've got plenty of spare time, even dodging between hangovers and lectures and yet in a mis-guided effort to up my grades I've neglected to bring it back with me. I'd been smashing through a ton of great holiday period releases, Mafia 2 was a lot of fun if disappointing in parts but defiantly worth a play through and I felt very happy to have finished it. I only got up to about level 4 or 5 of Black Ops, I'd just started the one in the arctic circle I think? Played a fair few games online, love the wager matches, Gun Game is a massive highlight, playing that with friends is hilarious, going for gratuitous knifings when you know you're friends in the lead and hearing their frustrated yell down the headset is very satisfying, although I still struggle when we hit the sniper phase. Only got about 5 hours into Fable 3 so not much to say there, FIFA 11 is great, go figure, not too much different, like the newish career mode and the inclusion of Ultimate Team is excellent but until they can really deal with rage quitters online then I'm still going to find it hard to devote enough time to the online. The amount of times you wrestle for control of the match and then to finally slam in two in quick succession or comeback from a goal down only to have your elation greeted with a 'connection with your opponent lost' message is soul crushing. Halo: Reach is still awesome, no need to elaborate there. The undoubted highlight for me however was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. When this game was announced I was so disappointed, I absolutely loved AC2 and was devastated to hear they were wasting time and resources on a multiplayer of a game that didn't need it and a small single player. Shows how stupid my first thoughts were though. The multiplayer is fun; although I'm pretty poor at it and still don't need it as part of the product to be honest. The single player though is fantastic and well worth the money, I especially warmed to the recruiting and training of assassins and will find it hard to play without if it’s not in AC3. The story was alright and had a much bigger final impact that I'd anticipated (I'd previously thought you'd be able to go from 2 to 3 without playing brotherhood and still make sense story-wise, spoiler: you can't! ). Although for the most part it could be argued that it lacked story content in the middle of the game and was flooded with side-missions (or at least seemed to be with my play-style) but I loved every minute of it and although it wasn't quite enough to drive me to get all 1000 points as AC2 did I absolutely adored Rome and was very much aggrieved to leave it behind. On the plus side though I've got Civ V and Starcraft 2 to tide me over for the semester. However the only platform I have for those is my very unsuitable laptop so both are confined to the lowest graphical settings and Civ tends to slow down shockingly in the mid-late game period. Civ's ok, but it's not hooked me like IV did, and I can't seem to get on with any of the other nations at all. It seems almost all paths lead to war, but maybe I'm playing it wrong? Starcraft however is a very different beast. I've never played a Starcraft or Warcraft game before but was well aware of the pedigree the original is held in and the long development time the sequel has been granted, so I decided to have a crack. I decided the best place to start would be the campaign, so I buckled up with Jim Raynor and did my best to learn the ins and outs of the Terran units as they were introduced to me. I found the missions to be excellently varied and intriguing, the in-ship economy system was pretty simplistic but nice nonetheless although having put 60+ hours into ME2 this year the limited crew dialogue seemed poor and very wooden. I felt the story of the campaign was pretty terrible and very predictable but it's an RTS game so I'm not going to hold it to account for that because the gameplay, which is what matters here, was so fantastic. I've played a bunch of comp-stomps and been watching cast's of the top tier games but until I'm somewhere with a better internet connection my own venture (and inevitable humiliating losses) online will have to wait. I shouldn't leave so long between posts next time, this is a mess but there it is... P.S. I never even had enough time to even open Vanquish which is still sitting in it's plastic so expect that to get a treatment over Easter. |
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