Condemned: Criminal Origins - Xbox 360

Condemned: Criminal Origins was kind of a blast from the past for me. Condemned was the first Xbox 360 game I ever owned, and the first Xbox 360 game I ever beat.

My brother had just bought an Xbox 360 bundle with Kung Fu Panda and Lego Indiana Jones. Right after he bought it I house sat for him for a week. Neither of those games really appealed to me so I headed over to Game Stop to see if I could find something I wanted to play. At this point in time I didn't own an Xbox 360 so I didn't really want something very expensive, I was looking for something in the 10$ or so range. That's when I found Condemned, it looked fun, the premise sounded pretty awesome, and I love scary games, so I picked it up.

I am glad I did. Condemned is an awesome game. From pretty much start to finish I loved it. It was one of those games where I sat down and just played, and played, and played, losing track of time. I think I beat it about a day or two after buying it.

Condemned is in my top probably five scariest games I've played. The first time a crazy guy jumps out of the shadows behind you to beat your skull in with a pipe will scare the hell out of you. In most games they give you a flashlight that you can only leave on for a small amount of time before your batteries die and have to recharge... in Condemened your flashlight is always on. Constantly. And trust me, you'll be thankful for that. The atmosphere of the game is just creepy. It works incredibly well.

I wasn't too sure about an entire game based on melee combat (there's a few guns scattered around the game, but not many). Most FPS games have kind of horrible melee combat, but Condemned makes it work. I think this makes the game even more intense. When you see someone you can't just shoot him from a distance, you have to get pretty much right up next to him to get within range for your found weapons (pipes, 2x4, axes, etc.)

Overall, Condemned is a great game. There's a lot of things about this game that if they hadn't worked would have doomed the game, but everything seems to come together perfectly. For a launch title it was a surprisingly solid game. Really a must play if you like scary games and want something different from the FPS genre.

Squid.

Halo Reach - Xbox 360

We all know my feelings on the originalHalo. I've played Halo, Halo 2, and Halo ODST, and yet I've never been all that thrilled by the Halo series. None of them ever seemed all that exciting or good to me. They were all fun, but I never felt like they were truly great games. That all changed with Halo Reach.

Halo Reach is everything I wanted the first Halo to be. One thing I never felt in the first Halo was the pull to keep playing. I always would get to a point and think "Well, I guess I'll stop now." In Halo Reach it was more of a "Holy crap! It's two in the morning and I should really stop now... after I finish this level." There was a drive to keep playing, a wanting to know what was going to happen next. Halo Reach completely sucked me in.

The action was great, the story was great (though was somewhat confusing having never played a few of the games), and overall was just an incredibly fun game.

Here's the thing. Halo Reach was a good enough game that I'm seriously considering playing the series over again. Over the years I've played the games and haven't really been all that interested in them... but Halo Reach was great. Maybe the problem was me, maybe I wasn't giving them the chance that I should have. It's either that or Halo Reach was a great end cap to a series that was overrated. I'm not really sure.

At the end of the day though Halo Reach was a great game. Even if you're like me and didn't particularly enjoy the series you should certainly give Reach a chance.

Squid.

BioShock - Xbox 360

BioShock is kind of a conundrum to me. Everyone seems to love this game; it currently has a 96 on Metacritic. It is almost universally loved by fans and critics alike. It seemed like a game I should enjoy. A story driven FPS with a very interesting setting? Sign me up!

When I first played the game a year or so ago I was underwhelmed. I didn’t dislike the game, but on the other hand I didn’t really like it either. I never quite got into the game, it was decent enough but I didn’t find it as compelling as everyone else seemed to. The story was good, the setting was good, but I just couldn’t get engrossed in the game. The problem is that I can’t really tell you why. Everything tells me it should be a good game, but I never found it more than just somewhat entertaining.

After beating it the first time I thought it was just me; maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood. I had just beaten Fallout 3 a couple days before, maybe I was kind of burned out on first person shooters the first time I had played it. Maybe I was unfairly comparing the two games… who knows? I just felt like I should give it another chance, another try.

I started it up and for the first couple hours I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the ambiance of the game, I enjoyed the writing, I enjoyed the music… and then the enjoyment just kind of stopped. I still liked all of those things, I still thought they were very good, I just wasn’t enjoying myself. I felt like I was trudging through the game, I wasn’t having fun, I was just playing it to beat it.

And I did. I stuck around long enough to beat the game. I felt the exact same way the second time around. I didn’t think it was a bad game, but I didn’t think it was a good game… but again, I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t know what it is about BioShock but I just can’t seem to get into it.

I appear to be one of the few who didn’t think that BioShock was an absolutely amazing game, and I don’t understand why. BioShock appears, even to me, to be a very good game… it’s just a very good game that I don’t seem to enjoy.

Squid.

Snoopy Flying Ace - Xbox Live Arcade

If you ever told me I would really enjoy a video game based off of the Peanuts cartoon strip I would have probably called you crazy... there are just some things that I wouldn't think would lend themselves well to the medium. Turns out I was wrong. Though I think if you had told me the Peanuts game I was going to enjoy was going to be a World War I flying game I probably would have tilted my head the same way a dog does when you tell it something.

A while back my brother bought Snoopy Flying Ace, but I never really played it. I heard it was fun but it didn't really interest me all that much. Then XBLA had a huge sale and Snoopy Flying Ace was dropped to 400MS points. It's hard for me to turn down a $5 game, so I bought it.

Snoopy Flying Ace is just cartoony fun. It's what you expect from a dogfight sim based off of Peanuts. The single player isn't a huge long experience, but it is fun. It's just difficult enough to not be frustrating and just easy enough to just be fun. I spent a couple hours going through the campaign one weekend and had a good time doing it. I never made it to the multiplayer (I was sans internet at the time) but if it's as fun as the single player I can see sinking quite a few hours into it.

Snoopy Flying Ace is totally worth the $5 I paid and is certainly worth the $10 it normally is. If you want a kind of cartoony flying/dogfight game it's definitely worth checking out.

Squid.

Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy - Xbox 360

I've always said I loved the Lego games. The first one I played was the Lego Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and was hooked. Here's the kind of interesting thing: I realized that up until I played the original trilogy game I had only played two of the Lego games. Star Wars 1-3 and Lego Indiana Jones. Star Wars 1-3 I thoroughly enjoyed and Indiana Jones I hated with a passion. So basically my love of the Lego games was based off of enjoying one game and hating another... and yet I would have said I loved the Lego games.

When I started playing Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy I went into it thinking I enjoyed the Lego games. You know what I found out? I really don't. When I originally played Star Wars 1-3 I believe I truly enjoyed it. However every Lego game after that has felt exactly the same, and every thing I've disliked about the Lego games just gets transfered over to the next.

When I have to trudge through a Star Wars game you know something is wrong. I love Star Wars, I love everything about Star Wars. Hell, I actually enjoyed the prequels to an extent, but you know what? It was a chore to play Lego Star Wars The Original Trilogy. By the end I just wanted it to be over. Where do I even start?

The AI? The AI was absolute shit. This doesn't really surprise me and frankly I don't expect the game to have stellar AI. Here's the problem though. You have AI teammates. Teammates that I expect to at the very least SHOOT bad guys... and they don't. I once had three AI teammates stand there and watch stormtroopers kill me. They didn't do anything, they just watched. This wasn't an isolated incident. It happened all the goddamn time. Your teammates do absolutely nothing while they're being shot or you're being shot. Occasionally they fight back but for the most part they just die. This wouldn't be so bad except occasionally you have to build things from destroyed Lego blocks. Every time you get shot you have to start over. Bad guys almost always target you. Bad guys respawn infinitely. See the problem? For the most part I just tried to make a barrier with my teammates so at least they would get shot so I could build things. And forget if you need the AI to actually do something, press something, or help you out in some way. That was just a practice in frustration. The AI in this game is beyond terrible.

Jedis are absolute bad asses... in every other Star Wars game. In this game? I would take a blaster over a light saber any day of the week. If there was an option between a Jedi and some sort of generic trooper with a blaster you can bet I'm going with the trooper. The light saber is the most ineffective weapon in the entire game. Makes total sense, right?

Only Bounty Hunters can open this door. Get used to seeing that phrase. Littered throughout the game are doors that only bounty hunters can open. What does that mean? It means that once you beat the level you have to re-beat at least part of the level with a bounty hunter character (which you may or may not have unlocked somewhere in the game) just so you can open that door and see what's behind it. If the game was a little better I might have wanted to try it, but considering for the most part it was a trudge to beat the level the first time I rarely wanted to replay the level with a different character.

It's dull and repetitive. Basically I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over just in different locations. There seemed to be absolutely no variety in the game. Nothing surprised me. Mostly I just killed some guys, found some puzzle pieces, built something, moved on to the next screen. Over and over and over again. That's what I felt like I was doing all six hours I played the game. Occasionally you would get a flying level or something that was a bit different, but overall it was incredibly repetitive.

The flying levels. Sure they broke up some of the repetitiveness, but here's the problem: they're horrible. Remember in Empire Strikes Back where Luke had to attach a rope from his A-Wing to a boulder and then crash the boulder into a wall blocking his path, but unfortunately the boulder was insanely difficult to control and also he had to kill 3 AT-ATs, 6 AT-STs, and 8 Imperial Probe Droids before he could that? Me either, but you'll sure do a lot of that kind of thing while on the flying levels! The ships control like absolute shit, you're tasked to do repetitive shit that just feels like padding the games length, and overall you just want to flying levels to end. So yeah, they break up the repetitiveness but you have to deal with all that.

The camera. Yeah, the camera is bad in a platformer. Shocking, I know.

The save points or lack thereof. This has been one of my major complaints about the Lego games. Their save point system is absolutely shit. You save when you beat a level... with no middle checkpoints of anything of that nature. You can save when you beat a level, that's it. These levels may take 45 minutes, it may take an hour. Need to turn your system off before that? Have fun completing the level all over again. Listen, we're no longer playing on the SNES or something with limited memory for saves. You can give us more then one save every 45 minutes. The one reason I've heard against save anywhere is that it makes games easier (which is complete BS, it generally makes games less frustrating, not easier) but with the Lego games you're literally playing a game where you can't fucking die. It doesn't get much easier then that. Give us a save anywhere feature. I was playing a level in Return of the Jedi when I realized I needed to get ready and go out for the night. I needed to leave in 15 minutes and just didn't have time to finish up the level. Rather then leave my Xbox on for the next five hours or so doing nothing I opted to turn it off. Guess what I had to do the next day? Beat that entire level over again because I couldn't just save. Awesome. The save system in the Lego games is absolute shit. Each level is broken up in two or three mini levels, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to save at the end of each of those mini levels if you're not going to give us a save anywhere feature.

All of the Lego games feel exactly the same. They feel like you just changed the backgrounds a bit and went from Lego Star Wars to Lego Indiana Jones or to Lego Batman. They all feel like the exact same game with the exact same flaws. That's why I enjoyed the first Lego Star Wars game, at that point it was new to me. The humor was new, the feel was new, it was new... but after playing two more games that felt exactly the same with the exact same flaws? I've had enough. Until there's a major overhaul with the Lego Games I might has well just not play them because I already have.

Squid.

Doom II - Xbox Live Arcade

We all played Doom 2. If you're over the age of about 25 there's a good chance you spent many hours killing demons from hell. The Doom series wasn't the original first person shooter, but it was definitely the game that skyrocketed the series to what it is today. Everyone played Doom. Hell, my dad has beat Doom.

I picked up Doom 2 on XBLA a while back, not really sure what to expect. I hadn't played Doom 2 in quite some time and a lot of computer games from that time have not aged well. Blocky graphics, clunky controls, and you know how in modern games you can aim up and down? Not in Doom 2, bitches. I was very curious to see how a game like that would transfer over to the 360.

The answer? Incredibly well. Shockingly well. The last time I played Doom 2 the one major complaint I had with it was the control scheme. These were the days before WASD, you had to use the arrow keys. As odd as it seems this is incredibly awkward, especially after years of using WASD, but with the controller this is a thing of the past. The controls are great, I couldn't have asked for a better control scheme.

You know what else I found out? Doom 2 is still very fun. The later levels somewhat dragged on a bit, but overall Doom 2 is still a blast. It's nice to go back to a time in FPS games where there was a paper thin plot but a shitload of bad guys for you to kill. That's what Doom 2 is. A game where you can turn your brain off and just kill as many of hell's minions as possible.

If you haven't played Doom 2 before I want to welcome you out from that rock you've been been living under (I'll also accept the excuse of being too young), but you know what? With the great port we have of Doom 2 for XBLA there is absolutely no excuse for not having playing this game. Go out and buy it, it's well worth the 800MS points.

Squid.

Trials HD - Xbox Live Arcade

I first played Trials HD over at my brother's house, I'm not sure how he discovered it but all I know is that after playing it I was hooked. I went home that night and bought it for myself. I've been playing it ever since. It's been at least a year now, I would say that a month doesn't go by where I don't play Trials HD at some point.

Trails HD is just fun. There's no other way to put it. It's fun. Incredibly fun. It's a game that you'll find yourself playing when you have a few spare minutes. Have a spare five minutes? Hop on and play a few levels. Have a spare hour? Hop on and play a bunch of levels. Have a spare couple hours and some friends? I guarantee you can kill those hours with some Trials HD. You know how I know all of this? Because I've done all of those before... many, many times. You know what? I'll probably keep doing those things in the future.

Trials HD doesn't really seem to get old. I don't know how many hours I've played it, or how many times I've played certain levels, and yet I haven't grown tired of the game. I still try and beat my fastest time. I still try new things. I still try different bikes on different levels. I still haven't grown tired of it.

As I said, Trials HD is fun. For a fairly simplistic physics motorcycle game I seem to find myself playing it over and over and over again. If you don't own it already go out and buy it right this second. Trust me, you won't regret it.

Squid.