Shooting brown things that bleed brown in brown environments
No, I'm not deployed again, I'm just playing Clive Barker's Jericho! Ha!
Seriously. Can this game get more brown? I'm in the World War 2 period of it and I'm not shooting undead nazis, I'm shooting big brown monsters with chainguns and flamethrowers. At one point I was shooting a dead woman with a German accent named Lichthammer whom I assume was in nazi regalia but I can't be sure because everything was brown. I could only tell by her stylish hat.
And the voice acting. It's god awful. I want to strangle Father Rawlings and Delgado and I'm positive I only don't hate the rest of the characters because they don't talk as much as those two. The best one so far is Arnold Leach and he has barely spoken at all.
This is all such a far cry from Undying it's unreal. Undying was a colorful, well voiced, genuinely scary game. The best I can say about Jericho is that the fiction is pretty good (but not as good as Undying so far) and Leach is a well designed monster. He looks like he's straight out of Hellraiser. The concept art is impressive but seeing him in motion at the end of the first section of the game is damned near terrifying.
I know Undying didn't sell well, despite being a great game, so that probably limited Clive Barker's options for studios willing to take the risk in developing another game for him (especially after Demonik was cancelled) but I do hope if he has it in him to give us another game he shops it around until it gets picked up by a studio that can do him some justice and stays involved in it's development. Until I get further all I can tell is that he gave the studio a script and a couple of concept sketches and let them fill in the blanks and when his name is in the title, it really only hurts his reputation that this game turned out to be a big disappointment.
#13 – Gears of War 2 (X360)
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.
Brodown
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.
#12 – Silent Hill: Homecoming (X360)
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill game.
I spent the last four hours (or so Katie says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it's lack of health items and somewhat steep difficulty), I can safely say there's nothing really inherently wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming. It doesn't have a godawful long escort mission like The Room did. The combat is a little more involved than previous games but not to the point of turning Silent Hill into River City Ransom. There's some fresh new enemies, and that ol' chestnut Pyramid Head makes a couple of cameos. He just pops his big old head in, does something fucked up, and ducks out.
I suppose my biggest complaint about it is that it's kind of boring. The enemies don't come off as scary more than they do annoying. There's a spider thing that is an utter pain in the ass as you need to duck and dodge his attacks and he's CONSTANTLY blocking yours. You encounter more living people in this Silent Hill than any of the others, yet none of them really contribute much.
The game has a couple decision points where what you choose determines the ending you get. They occur late in the game and if you save before the first one, you can revert back to that save and you'll only have to redo the last two hours of the game to get the majority of the alternate endings and then there's one more for finishing the game on Hard difficulty. I may have the gamerpoint greed to see the low hanging fruit (the decision point endings) but I probably don't have it in me to grind through the whole game again to see that Hard difficulty ending.
I won't play the Rate Silent Hill Games game because I haven't played the first three in so long but I'll put Homecoming above The Room but definitely below 2 and maybe below 1 and 3. It's a good game if you're a fan and you can get it for cheap.
#2 – Condemned: Criminal Origins (X360)
To be honest, I played most of Condemned while I was on R&R leave last year. I wanted to finish it before I went back to Iraq but only made it up to the third-to-last level. This weekend I decided it was about time to finish it off.
This one was pretty much a winner through and through. Scary, visceral. It could have done without the supernatural crap though. Not a lot of that made much sense and the game probably would have been better off without it, though I've read that the supernatural stuff is explained more in the sequel, which I may start tomorrow if I'm feeling froggy. Or I may go back to Silent Hill Homecoming and pick that up again.