Category: Games (page 6 of 6)

April 14, 2007

Gears of War

Gears of War from gearsofwar.com I’m slow on getting the latest games. A few weeks ago my pal told me he got Gears of War for his Xbox 360 and loved it.

He and his son completed it on coop play. He described it as having fantastic graphics and great game play. The fact that if you don’t get cover, you’re dead was a nice touch.

I told him I’d get the game this weekend. I picked it up last night. I moved the Xbox 360 into the bed room so the kids would not get woken up by the carnage.

Except for Call of Duty 2 on the PC I’ve never seen a game where cover was required. And even on CoD2 ducking for cover is not done well. GOW handles getting cover and poking out from behind cover amazingly well. When the game started I opted for the tougher way to get out of the building. I picked up a couple of weapons and hit the game.

This game is done so well that I’m not sure a keyboard and mouse would make the play better. And the graphics were amazing. This game shows off the Xbox 360 so well that if I had gotten this game before I picked up the PS3, I might not have bought the PS3 at all. The shooting from cover is amazingly fun. You dart from cover to cover trying not to get shot.

What makes the game more fun is that the enemy does the exact same thing.

If it were not late and Lily did not remind me that today we have lots to do, I’d have played for a few hours.

February 11, 2007

With the proper medication a productive life is possible…

This morning Lily saw the Toy’s R Us flyer with a Nintendo Wii bundle. It came with

One Wii Console (1 remote, nunchuk, and Wii Sports)
One Rayman: Raving Rabbids
One Mario or Zelda organizer stand and CD case

The store opened at 11 am. We were the sixth couple and we got two sets. We are giving one set to our niece and nephew.

So now in my living room I have an XBOX 360, a PS3, and soon a Nintendo Wii. On the Xbox I play Burnout Revenge, on the PS3 I’d love to play Call of Duty 3 (Sigh, can’t explain or play that one around the kids), and on the Wii Rayman is too cool to put down.

Can’t wait to get an additonal remote and nunchuk…

Image lifted from Kotaku.com

January 20, 2007

PS3 and no Wii yet

256px-Raymanravingrabbidswiibox Around New Years day, me and the family went out to hunt down the mythical Wii. Our expedition had seen first hand that the Wii was real and with the right game be hysterical.

Alek bought a Wii in December and among other games got Rayman: Raving Rabbids. The graphic is from the Wikipedia entry. If you are unfamiliar with the game, then you wont understand when I say “The cow tossing mini game is great!”

You really needs to play the Rayman on the Wii to understand. It’s a low budget, lower graphics, unconventional controllers game system with no hard drive. Nintendo is brilliant.

The mythical Wii eluded us. But Target did have a large number of PS3’s so we picked up the 60 GB Playstation 3. It’s a slick package and Call of Duty 3 is good fun (not for when the kids are around). The built in Blue Ray DVD is attractive and I picked up a PS3 Bluetooth remote control in Chinatown.

I don’t recommend that people buy the PS3 right now. I told a friend of mine that I got one and he said “But you have a 360. Why buy the PS3?” He was right: the two consoles are not different right now. Buying one really makes no sense until really good PS3 only games become available.

November 21, 2006

Just Cause PC Game

Just-Cause-PC I am on vacation this week and besides

Chasing the kids
Shopping
Building from my pile of Gunpla
Blog entries

I also play PC based video games. I just picked up Just Cause and started playing. You play Rico Rodriguez and run around shooting people, stealing cars, and helping la revolucion.

Rico Rodriguez is a cousin of Max Payne; the action is right over his shoulder. So far Max Payne 2 plays better (probably just the atmosphere, Max Payne 2’s cut scenes and music really make the game), but the same point of view is maintained in the game. Rico even gets stunt moves which I have not yet figured out why. Although parachuting into a gun fight right at the beginning was very 007. It’s a fun game and so far not as hard as Max Payne.

If you have a wide screen monitor see this solution to getting the resolution to 16:10 versus 4:3. I installed the fix before I played the game so I have no before and after to compare. But the screen layout works so I am happy.

November 1, 2006

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

Untitled-1 Over the weekend I purchased F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and Battlefield 2142. First person shooters, good fun for the whole family. Provided that the family is over 18; I don’t play these games with the kids around.

I’ve been playing F.E.A.R. Extraction Point since Saturday and just finished it. It’s an expansion pack and is a bit short. It does not really answer any questions about the story.

It does maintain the same atmosphere as the original game, just not the feeling of being in a horror/mystery movie. There are some points in the game that my reaction was “that’s not bad, pretty scary” but it lacks the story that drove the first game. The first F.E.A.R. game played well but had a story that made you want to get to the next part just to see what happens next. The original ending was very cool and creepy.

This follow up is okay but I can’t wait to see what Monolith does for a real sequel.

Oh, the graphic? You can’t read it but the launcher seems to be wanting to go to the URL http://whatisfear.com/us/launcher/us/html but for some reason that web page does not exist. The funny thing is that if you change the us/html to us.html the URL works.

Nice to see that Sierra really QA’ed the software.

June 3, 2006

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.

I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.

I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.

Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.

Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.

Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.

Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.

I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.

June 1, 2006

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.

The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.

The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.

The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.

April 14, 2006

Burnout Revenge vs PGR3

Okay I’ve gotten the Xbox 360 and have been playing for a couple of days now. My son really likes it and I have to keep him off of the console for the most of the day. He only can play for a little more than an hour and with me the whole time.

I am beginning to see why people prefer game consoles. I had been playing PGR3 which is a great looking game and easy to get into.

It’s a straight you drive, you win, and get money kind of game. It’s lots of fun and very addictive and the more races you win, the more parts of the game are unlocked.

Then I started playing Burnout Revenge. This is really just like PGR3 except you score points by making your opponents crash in horrible ways. You have racing just like PGR3 but you also get to check and force the other cars into the walls, traffic, etc. You get a boost for the more aggressive driving you do.

Burnout Revenge really appeals to me. I like the driving of PGR3 but the other game is great with all the things you can do and points you can get. Once I get more practice I’ll play on the Internet and see how I do against the 10 to 15 year old crowd.

April 8, 2006

Woot: Xbox 360 arrives

XBOX-360 Okay when the xbox 360 came out, like many folks I figured I’d just go and pick one up at the store.

R-i-i-i-i-ght. Supply was non-existent and people were lining up the night before. So I ordered the premium system online at EBgames. It arrived Thursday. My boy loves it. I got the racing game Full Auto for the kids, it is a game where you drive around and blow stuff up. I also picked up a few other shooter games that I don’t allow the kids to even see.

The graphics are amazing and the system interface is very well thought out. I hooked up the box to the Internet, setup my online “gamer tag”? and poof. In another racing game Project Gotham Racing 3 I am going through the qualifier races. Thanks to Internet connectivity I get to see online how badly I rank in the world…

I usually do all my gaming on my PC, so switching to a console after all these years ought to be a challenge. As long as I’m careful as to what games the kids can see or play it ought to be fun for all.

November 24, 2005

F.E.A.R. Game

Two weeks ago I purchased a really cool game called F.E.A.R.

This is a scary well written horror/action flick. It’s meant to be played in the dark with the volume turned up. And the kids asleep, the game is very graphic.

The game is so good, I upgraded my 128MB Geforce 5700 to a BFG 6800GT OC 256MB DDR card. It was well worth it, even if I still cannot run the game at the maximum settings.