Dream of Waking

This one took about 10 days which is about 50 times faster than the amount of time it took me to beat the first Gears of War. Stupid pumping station. Stupid RAAM. Thankfully, Gears of War 2 has nothing as frustrating as either of those, though it’s not without it’s glitches.

I loved Gears of War and Gears of War 2 is just like the original but better. Better graphics, better levels, better balance. I never felt like any of my deaths were the result of cheap tricks or bad level design. Like I said, no pumping station situations and no damned General RAAM. There’s some difficult fights and a one on one boss that is less about putting him full of bullets and more about patterns and timing.

There were a couple parts where Dom (the AI buddy) would stop fighting. He’d take cover and just sit there. At first I thought it was story related, until I realized that Dom is only an AI buddy when there’s no human behind the controller. There’s no reason or solution that would cripple a coop partner by stopping them from fighting. I had to chalk it up to some kind of pathing or AI glitch. It wasn’t a big deal until I got to a fight in the last act where I was vastly outgunned and outnumbered. I could almost beat it alone until the last pair of enemies where without an AI drawing their fire, I was just mowed down. I had to restart the chapter, which wasn’t an enormous setback and fixed the problem. It was still a huge impediment to my progress though.

I haven’t touched the multiplayer. I probably won’t until I can afford to buy the All Fronts collection.

Overall, 100% awesome. I’m totally lame for waiting so long to get this.

I got Gears of War 2 on sale at Best Buy today. I’ve played up to the title screen. Surprise! It’s a lot like Gears of War 1! Not that that’s a bad thing, I loved Gears of War 1. Except for the pumping station. And General RAAM.

I’ve been slowly playing through Halo 3 again, to get the metagame achievements this time. I’m hoping playing with half of the skulls enabled will help me get my skills up enough to complete the game on heroic difficulty. Fuck the haters. Halo 3 is a great game.

Going back to a basically normal work week this week. I’m not looking forward to it.

Neotokyo is a Source engine mod that released last weekend. I started playing Monday night and I’ve put maybe 2 hours into it. I like it. There’s a lot of people on the internet bitching about it and I think I’m going to chalk it up to either clueless idiots who don’t “get it” and Dystopia fanboys who wanted another Dystopia.

Neotokyo has been described as Ghost in the Shell meets Counter-Strike and that’s not far off the mark. It’s class-based and centered around a capture the flag variant called Capture the Ghost. The ghost is a limb-less torso that requires the capturor to drop his primary weapon in exchange for the ability to see all enemies within 50m of the capturor. In a pinch you can put the ghost on your back to arm yourself with your pistol or knife but if you have any teammates alive around you, you’re better off holding the ghost and telling the rest of the team where to shoot. The setting is near-future (30-40 year) Japan, so while you have things like thermoptic camouflage and all manner of alternative vision, there’s no lasers or rocket launchers. The armature is strictly SMGs, assault rifles, long rifles, and pistols.

I’m not entirely sure why I enjoy this so much. I play recon, which is the lightest class, and I almost never survive a whole round. It’s fun to sneak around back and try to get the drop on as many members of the other team as I can before I’m inevitably sniped. The game doesn’t count assists or else I’d probably score much higher but I’m usually in the top five.

I started this entry to provide counterpoints to other people’s gripes about it but that’s an uphill battle, in the rain, wearing greased shoes. The official forums aren’t up so there’s no real outlet to voice your approval to the dev team so I’m just going to do it here. Keep it up, Studio Radi-8! Neotokyo is pretty bad ass!