Games For Windows Live sucks
There is no way I can put it any better; Games For Windows Live (GFWL) is awful. Not only is it cumbersome, especially when combined with other forms of DRM such as those built into Steam, but it openly punishes gamers who most want to use Microsoft products.
Way back when, my first encounter with GFWL was Fallout 3. At first, I thought it was pretty cool that I could play Fallout 3 on my PC and get achievements in it that were reflected in my Xbox Live account. I don't recall having any problems with using my Xbox while playing Fallout 3, so I didn't get why so many other people had complaints about GFWL. It was just one more login to get it started, what's the big deal?
Not too long ago, I bought the Game of the Year edition of Fallout 3 through Steam so I could play through all the DLC that I missed. I wasn't thrilled to find out that even the Steam version had GFWL, but that didn't immediately make me regret buying it. Since then I've gotten Fallout: New Vegas, which uses Steamworks, which provides the achievements and the ability to buy DLC through Steam.
I've played through Fallout: New Vegas and purchased all the DLC separate from my initial purchase, and never had a single problem. Throughout almost the entire game, I've watched TV shows and movies through Netflix on my xbox 360, which requires me to login to my Xbox Live account because an Xbox Live gold account is required to use Netflix.
Now I want to go back to Fallout 3 and play through it again, except when I start the game, it logs into my Xbox Live account and promptly disconnects from my xbox. GFWL and Xbox Live will not allow me to be logged into both services at the same time on the same account, despite the fact that I'm doing entirely different functions on two different devices.
I want to play Fallout 3 on my PC, and watch Netflix (which requires its own login and account, with its own costs!) on my Xbox 360. Because of Microsoft's policies, I cannot do both without some inconvenience, being either having to re-login every time I finish an episode of a TV show or movie, or risk having achievements malfunction and not being able to use the DLC that I want to play in Fallout 3.
Because of these hassles, I can barely muster the enthusiasm to play Fallout 3. During my vacation, I sank over 40 hours into Fallout: New Vegas and watched an unholy amount of Netflix because the DRM and copy controls were not preventing me, the legitimate, paying consumer, from using those products which I've paid for. The other side of that is Fallout 3, where the DRM is actively working against me to prevent me from using both products at the same time.
These frustrations are what drive so many others to video game and movie/TV piracy. If I were downloading movies and TV shows illegally, I could watch as much as I want while being logged into GFWL because watching local media on an Xbox 360 does not need an Xbox Live gold account. Similarly, if I were playing a pirated, cracked copy of Fallout 3, I'd at least be able to play the game while being logged into Xbox Live because the cracked copy would bypass GFWL.
This doesn't just affect Fallout 3. I have Section 8: Prejudice, which also uses GFWL, which I also can't muster any enthusiasm to play. Section 8: Prejudice is also mostly a multiplayer game which takes advantage of GFWL matchmaking services. There is no logging in, logging out, logging in like sometimes works out in Fallout 3. It's either GFWL or Xbox Live but never both. With these kind of irritations, it affects the community of a game. If it's a hassle to play Section 8: Prejudice because of GFWL, it's easier just to play one of the bazillion other multiplayer action games on PC that don't need GFWL.
DRM only punishes legitimate, paying customers. It's not a hassle for people who illegally download and pirate games and movies. Games For Windows Live is particularly bad because it doesn't just affect one product, it affects multiple products across multiple platforms. I will be more wary in the future not to buy games that use Games For Windows Live because it sucks.
Brutal Legend
Oh boy, I sank some time into this one this weekend. Brutal Legend is the definition of a mixed bag. When it starts out, you're hacking things to death with an axe and blasting them lightning bolts out of your guitar. Soon after, you've got a car and it's an open world game where you're driving around and doing side missions and collecting stuff. Then you start collecting followers and guiding them into battle. About halfway through, you've got a handful of units, you can fly, give orders, build stuff, and it's a full blown console RTS.
The transition from simple action to RTS is very smooth, and you never lose the open world aspect when you're not in the middle of a story mission. What is kind of a jarring is that the whole first half of the game is the tutorial into the RTS side. The game has three continents and that whole first half of the game takes places on the first one alone. On top of that, there are two other factions in the game, but you spend that first half fighting against the same units you're using. You then spend almost the rest of the game fighting the second faction, and you only really fight the third faction in the absolute final mission.
It's pretty obvious to me that a lot of time and effort went into the first continent and first half of the game, then the rest was cleaned up and rushed through. Everything about the pacing in the second half of the game is off and rushed, and the end drops like a hammer. There's that final RTS mission and one final action sequence and then you're done.
Despite this, Brutal Legend is a ton of fun. It's fun to drive around in. It takes place during the Age of Metal and the backstory and environments and soundtrack are all fantastic. It's simply a fun world to exist in if you're into metal. I'm pretty horrible at RTS games, and I still enjoyed the RTS battles. The controls kind of take some getting used to because they focus on your character as a leader, and so you can only issue orders to your units if you're near them. This is probably why the first half of the game feels like a tutorial, but by time you get off the first continent, you're definitely proficient at commanding your units.
I don't know how to recommend this. I was turned off of it when it was released by reviews saying it was half-baked, and not that fun. It is true that it was definitely a rushed release, but it never feels incomplete. Everything is there, it's just paced poorly. And I definitely had a lot of fun with it. I guess it boils down to whether or not you like metal. If I didn't enjoy the setting so much, I probably wouldn't have spent so much time playing it.
Spring break ends with a dick punch
Spring break was pretty enjoyable. Got to spend some time helping my friends move into their new house, played some games, had a good time. I found a new love for Wii Fit Plus. Biked almost 20 miles on the first nice day of the year, and then got my nipples pierced again. That was a fun day!
I came back to Carbondale last night. Okay drive but it was all in the rain. Both of my roommates were gone. This morning I found out the little refrigerator that I use to keep my soda in was turned off for however long they were gone for. It was gross though because my roommates keep some meat in the freezer section and it had all de-thawed and stank.
Then my xbox 360 died. Not like the last time it died, where it was acting weird and not turning on but ended up working fine. No, this time it won't turn back on without showing a screen that says E79 error. E79 is hard drive related, and since it won't turn on with or without the hard drive, the internet tells me that the console is fucked. I have the good fortune of having just received a big check from the government for god knows what, so I didn't have much work convincing myself that the best solution was to replace it entirely.
Soooo I did. I went to Best Buy first but they didn't have any of the bundles with Halo: ODST and Forza 3. I found one at Gamestop. It was possibly one of the best experiences I've had at a Gamestop. I asked the lady behind the counter if they had one, she said they did and got it for me, and rang me right up. No Game Informer, no reservations, no warranty, no bullshit. In and out in less than 5 minutes.
I got it home and agonized over opening it. Unopened, I can still return it for a full refund. Once I opened it, though, it's all mine. I stared at it for a while. I plugged my old xbox back in and tried it again. Same crap. Then I bit the bullet, took out my knife, and broke the seal.
Don't get me wrong; I did want a new xbox. I wanted a bigger hard drive and quieter console and more reliable hardware. I just didn't want it like this; my old xbox in a state of limbo, not entirely dead but definitely a brick until I open it up. I'm still going to need a transfer kit to move all my savegames and downloads from my old hard drive to my new hard drive.
I did it. I have a new xbox, huge (well, 120 GB) hard drive, HDMI support, another controller and headset, and Forza 3 and a bonus copy of ODST. Life is almost good again.
#32 – Bioshock 2 (X360)
Did you like Bioshock? Then you'll like Bioshock 2!
They're really rather similar. The biggest difference is that since you are playing as one of the first Big Daddies, instead of your options being "rescue" or "harvest" little sisters, your options are now "adopt" or "harvest", wwith adoption requiring you to either drop off the little sister at a port hole for a small amount of ADAM or you set them down near a corpse and defend them from splicers while they gather ADAM for you. I'm a nice guy with a thirst for ADAM so I saved all the little sisters and gathered all the ADAM that I could, so I spent a lot of time fighting off splicers.
I played on medium difficulty, and maybe I'm spoiled from recently replaying Bioshock 1 on easy, but Bioshock 2 seems significantly more difficult. You can't carry as many health kits as you could in the first game, and I seem to remember the first one auto-using health kits when your health bottomed out until you ran out of kits. No such luck this time, and the first-aid button is on the d-pad so you can either move around or heal. The tradeoff they made here is that every weapon can be used for a melee attack, rather than having to switch to the melee weapon, which in this game is a massive drill.
Now in Bioshock 1, the melee weapon was traditional Irrational Games wrench. With the electric jolt plasmid (the first plasmid in the game), and the wrench (the first weapon in the game), you could almost beat it without picking up a single other weapon. It was a super effective combo that only got better with support tonics. You have no such luck in Bioshock 2. In fact, as massive drills go, it takes a couple support tonics to make it feel like it's doing some real damage. It's kind of a bummer.
The plasmids got a healthy balancing. Winter blast is far more useful than I remember it being in the first game, and even insect swarm is more fun! I didn't really use some of the less hands-on plasmids, like decoy, or scout, or hypnotize. You get the same eight slots for them as in the first game. The tonics are better handled this time too, with no distinction being made between them. You just get a number of slots and you can fill them with whatever tonics you like without regard for their purpose. A lot of them return from the first game, with a handful of new ones suited for the changes in weaponry. Wrench lurker became drill lurker, and what not.
I won't get into the specifics of the plot. I got the gist of the first game but some of the details escaped me, and there's no change here. There was an achievement in the first for collecting all the audio logs, and it has been replaced in Bioshock 2 with an achievement for getting most of the audio logs that I find far more reasonable.
There's another for getting all of the weapon upgrades, and towards the end I was beginning to get nervous because I had a lot of upgrades unfulfilled but I found them all regardless. Apparently you won't get every weapon up to full upgrades by the end of the game, so you should be choosy with what weapons you want to use. The game has a nasty habit of giving you a new weapon right after you've come across an upgrade station, and that kind of sucks because you can't un-upgrade a weapon and then use that upgrade station on the new gun.
Hacking has changed for the better, unless you've got slow reflexes. Instead of being a game of pipe-dream, it's a simple needle that goes back and forth and you just need to hit the A button when it's over a green section. Sometimes you need to hit a number of green slots to succeed, and if you hit a red slot you set off the security systems, and if you hit a white slot you take damage. It's easier and faster than the first game, and from the start you're given a tool to hack machines from a distance, which replaces the need from the first game to shock them with electric jolt and then run up and hack them.
There's a multiplayer component this time. I haven't played it, but not for lack of trying. I setup my character and tried to join a game but none were going on. Within the first week of release, this, to me, is a bad sign. Hopefully I can get some friends to play with me because a lot of achievements are tied into the multiplayer. I really hate when games do that, especially in the xbox live climate where every game has a multiplayer component and all anyone ever plays is Modern Warfare 2.
If you've liked Bioshock 1, this one's a no-brainer. It's more of the first game, but better, with only a little cognitive dissonance from making a sequel to a game that wasn't made to have a sequel. If you didn't like Bioshock 1, you probably won't like Bioshock 2. It doesn't change enough from the original formula to make it a different game. If you never played the first game, I'd recommend going through it before hopping on Bioshock 2. It's a fantastic game, it's only $20, and Bioshock 2 basically assumes you played the first game and doesn't make an effort to explain the world of Rapture again.
Lamenting Dead Space 2
Visceral Games may or may not be killing me. Visceral Games used to be known as EA Redwood Shores. EA Redwood Shores made Dead Space, one of my favorite Xbox 360 games.
Visceral Games is now making Dante's Inferno. It's a God of War-esque button smasher. They took a low-key walk through hell and social commentary, and turned it into blood soaked tits and violence. It is a remarkable departure from the source as well as an enormous shift from the tone of Dead Space.
Dead Space has a lot of action and violence but it's deliberate. You're encouraged to conserve ammo by taking aimed shots at limbs. There's an equipment upgrade system that allows you to choose what upgrades you want and how you get to them. It has a lot of scares and shocks but it's also nearly impossible to fight off a crowd by panicking and wildly blasting away. There's only two actual guns in the game! The rest are industrial tools!
After Dante's Inferno, Visceral's focus will shift to Dead Space 2. There is so little information that has excited me about Dead Space 2 that it may drop off of my wanted list entirely. From what I've read, it features more wide open environments, more aggressive gameplay, and a no-longer-silent protagonist! So what, they're turning Dead Space into Dante's Inferno in space?
For being an unreleased and, thus far, barely developed game, I am amazingly bitter and unexcited about what should be an impossibly easy sale.
#27 – 1 vs. 100 (X360)
Now that I've gotten all the achievements in this and sunk enough time to get up to level 20+, this totally counts.
This is almost two games; the live game and the kind of live extended play. In the live game, one player is chosen as the one and a hundred are chosen as the mob, everyone else still plays along but they are in the crowd. The one and the mob are the only players who have a chance to win prizes. A round is finished when either the one gets a question wrong, the one eliminates all of the mob, or the one chooses to take however many points he's earned and quit. Then a new group is chosen and it starts all over. Live play is kind of exciting because you never know if you're going to be chosen for one of the special positions. Unlike last season, where Katie and I played a whole lot of 1 vs 100 and never got to be in the mob or the one, Katie has been in the mob once already and our friend Jake has also been in the mob, so it does actually happen to real human beings.
Extended play is a faster paced version of being in the crowd. No prizes are awarded but there's a leaderboard and what the game tells us is that extended play comes into account when the mob and the one are chosen. The questions in extended play sometimes have themes like cooking or commercials and are generally a lot more difficult than the live game's questions.
This is the second season of 1 vs 100 and the game has had a lot of its old quirks worked out. There's a level system where your score accumulates and unlocks different emotes, which have no practical value besides bragging rights. The achievements are new and another good way to encourage people to play longer. The themed question sets are more varied than last season's also.
The best part about the game, though, is playing with friends. It's not exciting at all to play alone unless you're really into pointless trivia but when you can get a couple friends together, either through Live or just in the same room, it becomes a lot more fun.
#25 – Borderlands DLC: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned (X360)
DLC counts, right? Sure! Especially when it's in such a neat little package as Dr. Ned.
I blasted through this today. Do you like Borderlands? Do you like shooting the undead in the face with your shotgun? Do you enjoy a setting that mixes classic horror with humor? If you answered yes to any of these, you'll love The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned!
One word of advice though; as soon as you can get to Hollow's End, go straight to the shack in the most southwestern end of the map. There you will get a quest to collect zombie brains, of which you'll have probably already seen many of. Get started on this right now! And when you fill up on brains, go back and turn them in, because you'll be collecting more. You'll be making five brain runs in increasing numbers. I neglected to turn in my brains as soon as I was full of them and ended up having to chase down 100 more after I'd finished all the rest of the section's quests and I was quite aware of the necessity of completing these brain runs. If you don't start early you'll either be grinding for brains in areas you've already been through at least twice or you'll have to skip on getting that achievement.
I started on Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot and it's hard. It's all arena fighting with enemies tailored to your level. Going at it solo will probably be a lot harder than it has to be. I may hold out until a friend or two has it and we can grind through the arenas together.
The annual holiday Steam sales are killing me. I'm now the proud owner of Max Payne and Max Payne 2. I've never played the first and I barely started the second. So far the first is good if a little difficult!
#24 – 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (X360)
Yep, that 50 Cent. This game was far better than it probably had to be. It's an inappropriately competent Gears of War clone. Compared to the last 50 Cent game, Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand is nearly a masterpiece. It's fun, looks good, and plays well. It's basically everything Bulletproof wasn't.
Now I'll either go back to playing Bionic Commando (which is decidedly less fun than Blood on the Sand) or I'll go back to Condemned 2.
#23 – Borderlands (X360)
Borderlands is awesome. I'm still playing it, to fill out the achievements. The four player coop works so well, I can play with random strangers with no voice communications and it's basically impossible to not have fun. The AI kind of falls apart in live coop though. Playing alone, I was always mobbed. Often enemies would spot me well before I'd spot them. Playing on Live, there were a lot of instances when I'd walk up to a couple of enemies, blast them to death, and move on without a single reaction from them.
Also, the ending is a whole big bag of what the hell is going on here. Seriously. I honestly hope I missed something along the way.
#20 – Dead Space (X360)
Last night I beat Dead Space. I don't know why I waited so long to get it. It's exactly the kind of game I get hooked into and don't want to stop playing. That's also the third game of the five I bought last month that I've finished. The only two left now are Far Cry 2, which I'm halfway through, and Red Faction Guerrilla, which I've barely started because I've been spending all my 360 time on Dead Space.
I used to buy every "good" game that came out, unless it was a sports game, and I'd play them for about an hour or until I got stuck and I'd shelve it. I've got mounds of games that are technically fantastic and I'll never finish them. Because they're not my type. I have learned now that I have a specific type of game. There are certain genres that when presented alone, or sometimes merged with other genres, that I will play right through. Sometimes regardless of whether or not they're worth playing.
And my wallet has suffered for it in the past. I'm usually rather good about waiting until a game goes on some insane sale before I get it though sometimes I'd buy a title outright that I had no business in buying. I think if I finish all five of these games I'll have shown to myself that I know what I like. Even if I only manage to get four of the five (because Red Faction Guerrilla might get dropped), I'll at least be able to say I'm familiar with what I like but need to work on my spending control.
Here's some games that I may recognize as "OMG AWESOME" but I'm never buying (unless they're ultra cheap, or gifts): Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, any future Grand Theft Auto, any Final Fantasy.
I may not get Dragon Age, even though it's awesome, because it's a Bioware RPG and even though I love Bioware RPGs, I've only beaten one of them. I'm getting Borderlands, even though it's a loot game, because it's a first-person shooter.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. Point is, some video games are awesome but I don't need to own them. Some video games are awesome, and I love them. Some video games are garbage but I love them anyway because they're my type.