Just a heads up that I’ve moved my blog to http://legendofwayne.blogspot.com/.  I’m switching to Blogger to take advantage of the Google AdSense account I got when I became a Youtube Partner.  This blog will remain open, but won’t be updated. All new blog posts will appear at the new site.  Thanks for reading and/or watching.

Wayne

Bioshock Xbox 360 Review

Liked:

1. Great graphic design, and fantastic environment/atmosphere.

2. Good shooting and combat mechanics.

3. Good voice acting.

4. Lots of interesting plasmids to play with. (almost too many to be honest)

Disliked:

1. Boring “hunt and fetch it” quests.

2. Endings didn’t feel worth the effort of beating the game.

3. Failed to keep me interested.  I had the game for an entire year before I finally got through it.

FINAL BS RATING: +1ALRIGHT

Closing Statement: Next to Portal and Mario Galaxy, Bioshock has to be the most over-hyped game of 2007.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s well made and a quality game, but in my opinion doesn’t deserve quite as much “worship” as it has received.  Lesser rated and less popular shooters like The Darkness earned a spot closer to my heart than Bioshock.

More good news today, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune now has trophy support!  Gives me a reason to finally play through this game again.  I haven’t touched it since beating it right after it came out last year.

I hope a lot more PS3 games get trophy support.

Finally Conquest mode for Battlefield Bad Company is coming out this Thursday, August 7.  Great!  Can’t wait to give this a try.  Gold Rush had gotten so stale,  it seemed to be creating lots of intentional Blue on Blue incidents.  You had a lot of bored and agitated players team-killing simply because they didn’t like the way you were playing the game. God help you if you were playing Recon with some of those people….

Hopefully the new mode will help cut back on some of the bullshit.   At the very least, it will inject some fresh life into the game.

The Dark Knight Movie Review

Liked:

1. Great supporting characters such as the Joker, Harvey Dent, Alfred, and Gordon.

2. Best Batman movie I’ve personally seen.

3. Heath Ledger as the Joker lives up to the hype. Best Joker ever.

4. The Joker plots some interesting events during the movie, but they tend to be predictable. Still very entertaining though.

Didn’t Like:

1. Batman himself was very boring to me.  He was very much upstaged by the other characters in my opinion.  Bruce Wayne was only slightly more interesting.

2. Like all Batman movies I’ve seen, the fight sequences tend to be too dark and sometimes hard to tell what’s going on.

3. Didn’t care for the “love interest”.

YAY: Heath Ledger as the Joker totally makes this movie.  Without him, I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked the movie very much. +1

Final BS Rating: +2 PRETTY GOOD

Wed. July 30, 2008

Playing:

1. Civ Revolution PS3

2. Battlefield Bad Company Xbox 360

3. Crackdown 360

Watching:

1. Penn and Teller’s Bullshit!

2. Ice Road Truckers

3. Generation Kill

Civilization Revolution Single-Player PS3 Review

Only the single-player game was reviewed. The idea of playing Civilization with a complete stranger simply didn’t appeal to me enough to try multiplayer.

I’ve been playing the Civilization series on the PC since the very beginning, so I will freely admit  that I do have bias towards the more detailed PC Civilization games.

Liked:

1.   It’s Civ.  Still has that classic Civilization “one more turn” addictiveness.

2.   Different ways to win.  You can win by killing every other Civ, or win through other peaceful methods.  Gives you a reason to play the game in different ways.

3.  Researching techs, building units, wonders and buildings, and running an empire is lots of fun.

4. Less micro-management than previous PC Civilizations.

5. Best turn-based strategy game currently available for consoles.  Wish they’d make more of those.

Disliked:

1. The “Simlish” type gibberish the animated characters are always spouting.  English or shut the fuck up.

2.  I can’t find a difficulty level that suits me the best.  Chieftain and Warlord tend to be too easy, but I can play the game any way I feel like.  On King I can win using certain strategies that feel almost “gimmicky”. (but I don’t think I could EVER win o Domination victory on King or higher)   I haven’t tried anything higher than King since I’m not winning too often on that difficulty level.

3. Every game I’ve played, no matter what difficulty I played on, I’ve ended up at war with EVERY SINGLE other Civ at the same time. Whether I wanted to or not.  The Ai would only attack my Civ 99% of the time. I’ve only seen the Ai capture another Ai’s city TWICE in MANY games… Seems like the Ai is programmed to target the player.

4. Several minor nitpicks… This may be a perception thing, but it seems like the Ai can churn out an extraordinary amount of units in a short time.  More noticeable at the “King” difficulty level.  I couldn’t seem to replicate the apparent speed of the Ai production.

How is it I was able to get “Advanced Flight” tech before researching “Flight” first? That would have been like the Wright Brothers building a B-2 Stealth bomber before their “Wright Flyer” flew…

They dumbed down some of the management things, but made combat harder.   Before I realized that creating armies was the name of the game for combat, I was getting frustrated by not being able to capture cities.

No hot-seat games.    So you can’t have a friendly game with your girlfriend/wife/buddy on the same console.

Game of the Week is disappointing.

No trophy support.

5. Diplomacy has been neutered.  It all comes down to peace, war, trade, or bribe.  No alliances or open borders, or any of the more advanced things found on the PC games.  So that means no co-op play either.

Yay: Finally a Civ game worth playing on a console!  +1

Gay: Absolutely NO customizable game types. You can’t even choose the size of the map or how many civs you want to play against.  GAAAAY!  -1

Final BS Rating for Players Who Are Used to Civ on the PC : 0 MEH

Estimated Final BS Rating For Console Users Who Have Never Played Civ: +2 PRETTY GOOD

Closing Statement:

Fans of Civ on the PC will find about an equal amount of things to like, and dislike with Civ Revolution.  It’s definitely worth a try, but you’ll probably end up going back to Civ 4 after a few plays.   It is a bit dumbed-down,  but not always in necessarily a bad way.  Seems to be designed with online multiplayer console play in mind.

Console players who haven’t yet tried out Civilization will most likely find a great strategy game if they don’t mind the turn-based gameplay.

Army of Two Split-Screen Co-Op Review

ONLY the offline split-screen Co-Op portion of the game is being reviewed here…

Liked:

1. Overall fun co-op third person shooter action. If you’re into split-screen co-op with a buddy, this game is definitely worth buying.

2. I liked buying and customizing guns, and some guns look REALLY badass when they are pimped.

3. Achievements like “Kill 250 enemies with Assault Rifles”, etc, are good incentives to play through using all the different types of weapons.

4. Good length for the campaign, especially since you’ll probably want to play through on each difficulty level.

5. The interactions between Salem and Rios can be pretty fun.

Disliked:

1. The enemy AI is simply superhuman when it comes to accuracy, even on the lowest difficulty.  An enemy blind-firing from behind cover, half the map away will nail you literally the instant you pop your head orbody out of cover.  Luckily you can take a shitload of hits before you die. Superhuman accuracy tends to be a trend in shooters these days.

2. Sometimes you end up fighting with the controls more than the enemy.  Maybe the most frustrating thing can be when you’re fighting in close-quarters. Get too close to an enemy, and you’ll often find you won’t be able to shoot at him.  It can get to the point where you want to hurl your controller sometimes.

3. Probably all of the co-op specific mechanics feel too contrived.  Co-op sniping always has certain situations where the enemy is unaware of you with their backs turned.  There are enemies which you basically can’t kill unless your team-mate fills his aggro meter and you sneak around to shoot the baddie in the ass.  Some doors require you each to push a button on either side of the door. Who’s ever seen a door in real life like that?  What it comes down to, is that it never really feels like you’re working together, it feels more like you are jumping through hoops the programmers laid out to show off their “Co-Op stuff”.   The best uses of Co-Op are probably the dragging and healing, and the step jumps.

Yay: The fact that you can play split-screen offline co-op in the age of internet only fragfests is a definite bonus. It’s even better that it’s mostly pretty fun.  +1

Final BS Rating: +3 HARDCORE

Closing Statement:

If you like Co-Op shooters,  Army of Two is pretty much a must have.   Since there’s not a whole lot of offline co-op shooters out there,  Army of Two is a no-brainer.  Buy it or rent it, and have fun. Just remember to leave your brain behind before you get into the campaign’s story.

Medal of Honor Airborne Xbox 360 SinglePlayer Review

Liked:

1. Generally entertaining WW2 FPS gameplay.

2. Upgradeable weapons. Not so much for the upgrades themselves, but it gives you a reason to run around the levels using every weapon in the game, rather than just one or two.

3. Graphics are generally good, but not exceptional.

Disliked:

1. Hit detection or accuracy sometimes feels “wonky”.

2. Overly cliche.  Tries to be “Band of Brothers” without the story. The music wants to be emotionally evocative, despite not having any characters to be emotionally attached to. Every mission except one begins the same way, your C-47 takes a shitload of flak damage and everyone rushes to get out of the plane.

3. Some of the enemy soldiers are insanely gay.  And I don’t mean homo.  The Nazi elite soldiers later in the game are what I’m talking about.  The panzerschreck guys are the worst.  I literally got blasted in the face at point blank range with a panzerschreck, and I died, yet the German guy took the blast like nothing happened. Also the elite soldiers take an insane amount of hits to kill, despite not wearing body armor.  They’re very unrealistic, and seem to be there just because EA felt like the game should have some kind of “Nazi Super Soldier” in it.

4. Some historical inaccuracies stick out. The one that stuck in my mind the most was in the very last scene of the game, after you finish the last mission, you see P-40s flying over Germany in their “Flying Tigers” shark mouth paint scheme.   By 1945, all of the squadrons in the European theatre who had been flying P-40s had switched to P-47s or P-51s.  Which means there’s no way P-40s would be flying over Germany at that point in the game.  And they most definitely would not have been painted with the shark mouths.

Final BS Rating: -1Not So Good

Closing Statement:

MOH Airborne is a decent WW2 FPS. I enjoyed playing through the game except during a few very frustrating parts of certain levels.  I picked it up at a pawn shop for about $20, and for $20 bucks it was worth the money.  I never bothered trying the multiplayer, because honestly after playing Bad Company and COD4, it didn’t really feel like a game I would enjoy online.

If you’re bored and want some easy achievements, and you find this in a bargain bin, by all means buy it and play through it a couple of times. Just don’t expect greatness.   Airborne seems to be pretty representative of the kinds of games EA has been publishing over the last 10 years or so.  They make functional, mostly competent games, which never quite achieve the fantastic.

Hancock Movie Review

Liked:

1. Great concept, drunken asshole superhero, awesome.

2. Got some good laughs during the first hour of the movie.

3. Will Smith is the perfect choice for Hancock, and the rest of the main cast also does a good job.

Didn’t Like:

1. Movie falls apart during the last 30-45 minutes. Right after the big twist, the movie goes down the shitter.

GAY: The big CGI fight sequence right after the “big twist”. WTF? The whole “twist” itself is pretty gay as well. -1

Final BS Rating: +1 ALRIGHT