X-Men Arcade - Xbox Live Arcade

Sit down and let me tell you the story of how I came to own X-Men Arcade for XBL. I remember playing X-Men Arcade as a kid so when I heard that it was going to be released on XBL I was rather excited. Not wanting to jump right in and buy it I decided to pick up the demo and play it. So I started playing the demo, it wasn't really as fun as I remember, but I was somewhat enjoying myself. That's when I got an achievement. Actually a pop up said that if I owned the game I would have gotten an achievement. It also gave me the option of buying the game by pressing A. Well I was jumping around doing kicks at the time that the message popped up... pressing A. So it took me directly to the buy page. You have two options, confirm download or cancel. I'm not sure if you can cycle through back to the top or if I just thought I hit down and didn't, but either way I ended up hitting confirm download instead of cancel.

I now owned X-Men Arcade. Oh boy.

Now I won't say that it wasn't my fault, but it seemed just a little to easy to buy the game. Whatever, I owned it now. Not much I could do about it. So I decided to put my best foot forward, not care, and just play the game.

And that's exactly what I did. I sat down and played the game. It took me twenty-seven minutes to beat it. Twenty-seven minutes from start to finish. Oh well, there was always the multiplayer.

X-Men Arcade Multiplayer allows you to play the single player game with up to six different players. Which is interesting... except that in the next hour I beat the game another three times. In less than an hour and a half I had beat the game four times.

Over the next couple days I played the multi a few more times, beating the game another five or six times. It was kind of fun just to spend twenty minutes or so beating the game, but it's not like I'm going to be playing it a ton more over the next weeks or months. It's mostly just served as a twenty minute distraction.

Here's my problem. This game costs 800 MS points, that's $10 in real life money. That's quite a lot of money for a game that can be beaten in less than a half hour on the hardest setting. Even with the multiplayer this game is worth more along the lines of 400 MS points. Also the multiplayer is kind of borked. You get six players in a game and I guarantee you're going to get some slow down. In some places it becomes downright unplayable.

This game isn't at all difficult either. You're playing the X-Men Arcade game, but with unlimited quarters. Sure you can die, but the game never ends. Even on the hardest difficulty setting this game is incredibly easy. There's almost no challenge.

So should you buy it? I would say no unless there's certain conditions: On sale or 400 MS points? Sure, it's worth $5. Huge X-Men fan? Might be worth it for you. Have massive nostalgia for X-Men Arcade? Probably worth the $10. Overall though it's just not a good enough game to be worth $10.

Squid.

Assassin's Creed - Xbox 360

Assassin's Creed was the second Xbox 360 game I ever played. I owned Assassin's Creed before I even owned a 360. I bought it to play on my brother's recently purchased 360. I remember being blown away by the graphics of the opening cinematic. It was about that point that I realized I needed my own Xbox 360. Within the week I had purchased a 360 and a spiffy new HDTV to play it on.

People have always complained about Assassin's Creed. It was repetitive, the climbing was sometimes kind of wonky, you switched between Altaïr and Desmond way too much. I didn't see this. I loved every minute of the game. Was it repetitive? Sure, but it was fun as hell so I didn't care. Was the climbing sometimes wonky? I didn't know, up until this point I had never played a game where you could climb like that. Everything was so interesting and new that I didn't care if occasionally you made a misstep and fell. And I never felt that traveling between the two time periods did anything but add to the story.

That was my first playthrough. My second playthrough I had a change of opinion.

The first thing I noticed... how repetitive it actually was. Gone were the days that I was just happy assassinating people. After about the first two assassinations all I could think was "I have to do this again?" I went from helping every person I came across, climbing every vantage point I could find, to just doing what needed to be done to get the next assassination just so I could forward the game progress. It was the same thing over and over. It became a grind.

All of the sudden every other game I had played that had a climbing mechanic felt vastly superior. It wasn't just that occasionally Altaïr would fall from a ledge. It's that occasionally Altaïr would do the exact opposite of what I had just told him to do. It was like occasionally Altaïr would get a deathwish and decide he didn't feel the need to live any longer. "Want me to jump to that ladder? Screw you, I'm jumping down three stories into a crowd of angry guards!" The climbing wasn't horrible but felt somewhat antiquated and occasionally difficult to control. It wasn't just the climbing. On more then one occasion Altaïr would draw the wrong weapon (even though I knew I picked the right one) or would just refuse to draw his sword. I have no idea what the problem was but it quickly became annoying. Also once you learned to counter fights became way too easy. I could take on a hundred guards simply by blocking and countering and eventually kill them all. What's the fun in that?

I still don't have a major problem of the switching between Altaïr and Desmond. Occasionally it did feel a little out of place, or slowed down the action, but overall I still don't see why so many people hated this aspect of the game.

The game just didn't hold the same wonder that it did the first time around. It was the same game, I was just looking at it through different eyes. Long gone was ability to overlook some of the more glaring problems this game had. Towards the end I was playing the game to beat it, not because I was necessarily enjoying myself. The repetitiveness of the game finally got to me.

So what are my second thoughts on Assassin's Creed? Well, it was good... but not great. It certainly didn't feel as fresh and entertaining the second time around. However, that doesn't make it a bad game. It still find some enjoyment in it, and assassinating people can be very entertaining. If you haven't played it before I would say that you should give it a try, but I'm not sure that it's worth a second playthrough.

Squid.

Call of Duty: Black Ops - Xbox 360

You would have a harder time getting a bad review of a Call of Duty game out of me then you would the president of Activision. Simply stated, I love the Call of Duty games. Well, the newer ones. Not that I don't enjoy the WW2 CoD games but I absolutely love the modern Call of Duty games. I still rank Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as probably one of, if not the best first person shooters of all time.

So what does Black Ops bring to the table? A lot. New environment, a much different storyline then we are used to, and a whole lot of ass kickery that makes the Call of Duty games so Goddamn great.

Sure, modern times is a great time period with a lot of awesome technology but we're seeing more and more of it now. It's in danger of becoming stale. So Black Ops is set during the beginning of the cold war area. You'll be in places from Russia to Vietnam. You'll drive boats, fly helicopters, and repel off of mountains. From blowing up bad guys, to slitting throats, to zip lining through a window to save a hostage. Call of Duty kicks up the awesomeness notch with Black Ops.

Black Ops is like the other Call of Duty games, short one player campaign but chalk full of so much damn awesome and testosterone (sadly the word "Test-awesome-rone" hasn't been picked up in the common vernacular)that you just don't care. Sure it's seven to ten hours long, but that seven to ten hours is some of the most on the edge of your seat, ass kicking time you can possibly have. It's exactly what you would expect from a Call of Duty game.

Then you have the multiplayer. Say goodbye to your wife and family because you're going to be gone for a while. Remember the multiplayer you loved in CoD 4 and Modern Warfare 2? Well it's back, and in my opinion better than ever. The game may only be seven to ten hours long, but then I played another forty hours(and still counting)of multiplayer. CoD's multiplayer is possibly the most addicting thing I've played in a long time. I don't know how many times I said I would play just one more game only to find myself still playing an hour later. It's fun, it's awesome, it's worth the price of the game alone.

Go out and buy Call of Duty: Black Ops, trust me, you won't regret it.

Squid.

The Saboteur - Xbox 360

One of the many little joys of gaming is finding a great game that you've never really heard of, or heard much about. It happened when I played Metro 2033 and it happened again when I played The Saboteur.

Up until the point that I played it I really knew very little about The Saboteur. I read its review in OXM, but I'll be damned if I can remember one thing they said about it. They only thing I remember from the review was that it was a sandbox game where you fought against the Nazis and that the areas you had liberated changed from black and white to color. I remember thinking I should play it, but I didn't really follow through by adding it to my Gamefly queue or anything. Months passed and then one day while shopping at Target I saw it on clearance for $4.75. That's a hard deal to pass up.

It took a couple of weeks after I bought it to finally get around to playing The Saboteur, but man am I glad I did. Simply put, The Saboteur is a really fun game. It may not be the most original game, but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy every bit of the thirty two hours I spent playing it.

I'm a boy. I like explosions. There are a lot of them in this game. Seriously, you spend a lot of your time sneaking into Nazi installations and blowing them the hell up. That is when you're not driving around in fancy cars, shooting Nazis, or climbing up buildings like Spider-Man.

Yes, you are Irish brogue Sean, a race car driver who also happens to know how to use pretty much every gun and explosive known to man as well as how to scale the sides of buildings as easily as walking up a flight of stairs. You are the Irish James Bond. So when Nazis kill you're friend you decide to wreck their shit up in Paris with the help of the resistance fighters you will meet along the way. You'll do quests for these people to help further their cause, everything from sneaking into buildings and blowing them up to assassinating Nazi higher ups.

The game gives you a fairly decent option of how to complete your missions. Feeling stealthy? You could always steal a Nazi uniform and plant explosives in key areas without them knowing... you also have the option of packing a car with explosives and driving it through the front gate. Just remember to bail out before you hit the building.

Is the story deep? No. It's your standard fare pretty much. Is it going to win any game of the year awards? Probably not. You know what though? At the end of the day if a game is fun I'll play it and enjoy it. Sometimes I don't want some intricate plot with twists and turns. Sometimes I don't want to be lead on a journey through a magical story that will change my life and blah, blah, blah. Occasionally? I just want to get in a game where I can cause a lot of destruction, drive fast cars, blow up buildings, kill Nazis and have a hell of a fun time doing it. And you know what? The Saboteur allowed me to do that and enjoy every minute of it.

Squid.

Fallout: New Vegas - Xbox 360

I rank Fallout 3 as one of my favorite games of all time. Single player wise it's probably the game that I've spent the most time on. I absolutely love it. When I heard there was a new Fallout game coming out I was excited like a fat kid in a candy store. I didn't want to wait, I wanted it now. I didn't care that it wasn't Bethesda making it, I just wanted more Fallout goodness.

Then there was what felt like an eternity of waiting. Seeing screenshots, teaser videos, magazine previews, all for a game that I wanted oh so badly. I soaked it up like a sponge, every time they gave up a morsel of information I ate it up. I don't remember the last time I remember being this excited about a game.

For some reason I had it in my head that it was coming out November 27th, I had that day mentally marked on the calendar. I was scrounging together money trying not to make my bank account weep... that's when I learned I was a week off, it was actually coming out November 19th. This is like learning as a kid that Christmas is going to be on the 18th this year. I was pumped, I was getting the game earlier then expected.

Ahhh the intro. The intro to the Fallout games are absolutely phenomenal, Ron Perlman sets the mood for the undertaking you're about to endure. If Fallout 3 was about what happens to the land after the nuclear strike, Fallout: New Vegas is about what happens to the people. You'll be constantly trying to figure out what side you're on, who you'll betray, who you'll fight for and who you will kill. Fallout New Vegas is about choices. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, and a lot of times they're ambiguous.

One of the things that surprised me the most about Fallout: New Vegas is the decisions. In almost every game I've ever played that gives you a choice you know how it will affect the outcome. The choice is between killing an orphan and her puppy or giving her a new mommy and daddy... you know which one is good, and which one is evil. You know how it will affect you. You don't expect to kill an orphan and puppy and be revered by the people. Every game I've ever played with moral decisions pretty much gives it to you in black and white. Right and wrong, good and bad. Fallout: New Vegas is all gray for the most part. Most of the decisions I made I wasn't really sure how they were going to affect me. I didn't know if I was making a right or wrong decision, but I knew I had to make some decision. Everything was in shades of gray. Sure Caesar was evil, but was the NCR good? Who could I trust? Could I trust anyone? To this day I'm not sure if I made the right decisions. My decisions ended up being good, but could they have been better? Should I have made different decisions along the way? Should I have made different allegiances?

Fallout: New Vegas feels almost exactly like Fallout 3. Same game, different setting. Sure there are definitely some differences, mostly the way certain things are handled and the tone of the game in certain parts, but for the most part it is very similar. If you liked Fallout 3, you will like Fallout: New Vegas. It pretty much feels like a 100+ hour expansion pack.

One thing I would like to talk about is the bugs. From the get go this game has been plagued with bugs... apparently. Honestly I only came across one bug the entire 102 hours I played the game. Occasionally my gun would go all wonky, thinking I was standing up when I was actually crouching, this would cause my gun to show up at the top of my screen instead of the middle. Other then that? I didn't run into one other bug. I know a lot of people did, I however did not. Just sayin'.

Did I enjoy Fallout: New Vegas as much as much as Fallout 3? No. I enjoyed it greatly but Fallout 3 I think is still the better game, from what I can tell this is not the popular opinion. A lot of people I've talked to have actually said they prefer Fallout: New Vegas to Fallout 3. Overall I'm confident that if you like one, you'll like the other.

Fallout: New Vegas is a very good game. Compared to Fallout 3 and in its own right. It kept me gripped for 102 hours and I assume that at some point in time I'll be playing it again with different choices. It is a very good game, and it's one of the first games I've played where the choices are not black and white. Go out and get Fallout: New Vegas, it's definitely worth your time and money.

Squid.

Half Life 2 - Xbox 360

How exactly do you go about reviewing one of the best reviewed games of all time? Were talking about a game that has a 96% on Metacritic. A game that currently is ranked the seventh best game of all time on Metacitic. A sequel to what is considered to be one of the best, most innovative first person shooters of all time. There's not exactly a lot I can say about this game that hasn't been said before.

The best compliment that I can think to give Half Life 2 is that it's just as fun and as good now as it was when I played it in 2004. This games held up incredibly well. Sure, some of the graphics aren't quite up to par with games released now, but at the end of the day they're still pretty damn solid.

In fact this entire game is solid. There wasn't a moment that the game dragged, there wasn't a moment that I wasn't having a great time, there wasn't a moment that I didn't think that this game deserved as much praise as it got. The game was great, and the game remains great.

I remember the first time I played the original Half Life game, I was blown away by it. The game, the story, everything about it was amazing. For the next couple years I was satisfied playing mods, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike mostly. Then I heard rumblings about a sequel in the works. I remember being very excited, but it could go either way. It's an incredibly difficult thing to follow up a game as great as Half Life. Valve was fortunately up to the task though.

Half Life was an amazing game, but Half Life 2 upped the ante. I'm not going to say that it's better than the original, but I will say that from where I'm standing they're pretty much on equal ground.

As I said before, nothing I say about Half Life 2 is going to be something new and exciting. We're talking about a game that's several years old and in almost every top ten list. So all I can say is that it's an amazing game. It's a game that every gamer should play at least once. If you played it and enjoyed it, do yourself a favor and go play it again. I had forgotten how great a game it was. I usually name it when I'm talking about my favorite games, but up until I replayed it again I think I had forgotten why. Playing it again gives me renewed appreciation for what may be one of the best first person shooters of the decade as well as a game that really sets the bar for what first person shooters should be.

Squid.

Clive Barker's Jericho - Xbox 360

Woopsie doodle, kind of forgot to review this game when I beat it. Well, here it is:

In my last review for Red Dead Redemption I talked about what makes a good game, not wanting a game to end. Being so engrossed in the story that you just want to keep going. So what's the opposite of that? Pretty much Clive Barker's Jericho. This is a game I wanted to end. A game that I wish would end. How long is the game? I've heard anywhere from five to ten hours. How long did it feel? Like a goddamn eternity.

In case you can't read between the lines, I absolutely hated Clive Barker's Jericho. I paid $7 for it new, and frankly I wish I could have my $7 back.

I remember putting the game in and the first thing I thought was "Oh, this must have been a launch title." The graphics weren't horrible, but occasionally I noticed that the characters limbs looked like they were made out of 2x4s. They were occasionally incredibly blocky... but it's understandable, being released in 2005... wait, this game was released in late 2007? If this game had been released in 2005 I would say it had decent-ish graphic. In 2007? Some of the graphics are absolutely shittacular. Like I said, not all, but some. It's a here and there problem, not an overall problem.

The AI on the other hand? That's an overall problem. My biggest complaint about the game is probably the AI. Little back story before I get into it.

You're a member of a paranormal team in charge of keeping the firstborn in line. What's the firstborn? It's a long story. Basically the antagonist. You're team consists of six members, all who have different paranormal skills. You can switch between each of these members and use their skills to fight various bad guys.

Each one of these skills comes in handy during different battles, also despite the fact that you have enough guns to take on a small army your skills are almost always superior... and that's where the AI problems start.

A lot of times they're using their guns, even if their powers are charged. I don't know how often every single one of my teammates was going full out with their guns... that is when they weren't getting absolutely slaughtered. My teammates were essentially cannon fodder. You can revive your teammates as long as you are alive, and for the most part anytime their was a firefight I spent a good portion trying to revive most if not all of my team. They would just run towards anything shooting them. There are bad guys who blow up after they're dead, several times all of my teammates would die because they would rush these enemies. The AI was absolutely awful. I can't say that enough.

There were so many things wrong with this game. The AI, the graphics, the voice acting, and frustratingly difficult parts, the awful ending, the fact that it's billed as a horror game but really lacked on the whole "horror" part, and I could go on and on... It's just a bad game. I honestly can't think of one redeeming quality. How do you review a game like that?

At the end of the day I beat the game and thought "I hope I never have to play this game again." That's a bad sign for any video game. Clive Barker's Jericho wasn't enjoyable to me, from the start to the end felt like a chore. I don't think I ever really enjoyed it. I played it to beat it, and I didn't really have much if any fun. If they're handing this game out for free I would say skip it, it's not even worth free. Skip it.

Squid.