Gearheads of War

Yes, folks, we can now get precious experience points by playing Horde.  I guess my treasured "1" ranking next to my name will need to go buh-bye now.  

So I'll be signing on tomorrow night probably around 9 p.m. PST or so.  I'm going to a big fourth of July bash with some friends and they're getting a bounce house and all that jazz, so my daughter will be pretty wound up but exhausted by the time we arrive back at the house tomorrow evening.

In the meantime, you should check out this interview with Rod Fergusson that Blankman directed us to in the TU4 post.  It's some pretty fascinating stuff and something that I was discussing with Cliff recently about how people rarely, if ever, go in and change the settings from what the designers originally have it set as.  I was telling Cliff that Killzone 2 was epic fail for me because you couldn't change the controls enough for them to be manageable.  I mean it was probably the prettiest game I've ever played.  Just gorgeous, but I kept fighting the controls over and over to the point of feeling so frustrated that I wound up shutting off my PS3 and switching over to COD4.  And for all the frustrations that COD4 brings from the camping and the nade spam and the martyrdom, well, it pales in comparison.  

Any way, some good insight into the mindset of Epic in there.  And with that, I'll hopefully see most of you tomorrow night, maybe for some Horde.  Happy and safe 4th everyone!

The Wii has started something that I've kind of dreaded for a while.  Each and every console manufacturer is moving towards having their own version of jumping around in front of your television set.  I think the idea of Natal is cool.  The Sony motion controller looks like it's true one-to-one motion.

But here's the thing.  I don't really know if I want to play games where they take the immersion level up to nearly real-life.  I don't want to necessarily want to sneak around in front of the camera like Sam Fisher.  Or pretend like I'm driving around like Niko Bellic.  Or pretend like I'm bending it like Beckham in FIFA 10.  Maybe it's just because I'm an older gamer and perhaps a bit grumpy about them trying to change the way I've interacted with games since the Atari 2600.

But I get my exercise at the gym.  My game time is my relax and enjoy myself time.  It isn't about pretending I'm an elite supersoldier or a Spartan fighting the Covenant in my living room.  Wait, actually it is about pretending I'm those things, but by controlling them through a device I use while I relax and sit back in my chair.  I know that the controller has been a barrier to entry to a lot of people through the years.  My wife is one of those who often has complained that the controller has too many buttons and she doesn't get the whole dual-stick thing.  

At the same time, there will be good options for her with these new controllers.  Natal, Sony and the Wii are working to meet that market and exceed their expectations for ease of use.  I have no problem with it, but I just hope that all games don't go that direction or they might just lose some of the old school gamers like myself.  I don't think that they'll stop with the controller interaction at all.  I just hope that they don't go totally crazy with the application of things.  Because sometimes, pushing a button is the only thing that will do.

Where do you stand on the whole motion controlled future we seem headed for?

Gearheads, my apologies for not making it last night.  Yesterday was a pretty long day for me.  It started with me getting my first ever performance review for the company I founded.  That was kind of surreal, but good.  

But later I went on a 10-mile bike ride with my new bike.  I towed my 50-pound daughter behind me in a trailer, so that was kind of tiring.  But then we went to Disneyland so my daughter could see the fireworks for the first time in her life.  She loved them, but it was crazy busy as most of the other So Cal residents were there.  It took us forever just to leave the park once the fireworks were over.  Now my daughter can't stop talking about the fireworks, so it was worth it, but I'm kind of glad I'm blacked out from going to the park over the next few months.  I need a little break from that place to recharge my batteries.  

Any way, that's a long way of saying that I didn't get home last night until about 11 and then I volunteered to put my daughter to bed since my wife was also wiped from the day.  By the time all was said and done it was 11:30 p.m. and if I'd jumped on to play some multiplayer, I might have kept my daughter awake as I'm wont to do when I have my turtle beach X4 on.  So I watched the NHL Draft on DVR and passed out half way through.  

That's my exciting Friday story.  I imagine you guys had fun last night though and I want to read about it.  So let me know what happened.  What game was the hotness?  Did SweetTea actually make a rare appearance?

As many of you know, my family has annual passes to Disneyland.  My daughter is obsessed with Beauty and the Beast (which I'm OK with as Belle is one of the few princesses who is revered for her bookish intelligence).  So we're heading out tomorrow evening to take Maya to see the Electrical Parade and Fireworks for the first time.  She's never really been to Disneyland at night.  We're going to say to hell with her bedtime tomorrow and keep her there late.

That being said, I still plan on getting online when I get home tomorrow night.  I've been alternating lately between inFamous, Prototype and Red Faction: Guerrilla.  I almost wish there was a hybrid of all of these games.  I would love the story telling of inFamous and leveling system, the movement of Prototype combined with the freaking awesome sledgehammer in Red Faction to make one huge uber-game.  

Any way, sign up below.  I'm up for anything.  Literally. Call of Duty: World at War?  Team Fortress 2?  Call of Duty 4?  Gears of War 2?  Whatever and I'm down.  I'm guessing I'll probably be on at about 10:30 p.m. PST.

I signed onto FFF this week a little early, but the Gearheads who were on already were playing in public matches, so I popped in a little Mass Effect and got some more done on the way to trying to stop Saren and his treacherous plans.  After a while, I finally sent Blankman a message asking if he was going to play public all night and we got a private room together.

Apparently the new hotness is Warzone for the play type.  I'm not a fan.  I never was in Gears 1 and I'm not in Gears 2 simply because it allows you to finish someone off from a long, long way away.  I think it's a much more strategic game if you have to get up closer to the downed opponent in order to finish them off.  But that's just my personal opinion.  It's tough to play that game type when I literally have only been playing the other game type since 2006.

Any way, I still had a lot of fun playing Gears 2.  It had been a while since I'd played with a full room during FFF so that was really nice.  I will say that I was lucky enough to pick up the Turtle Beach X4 headset for my 360 on Friday so I used it on Friday night.  I entered a contest from a local real estate agent to win a Best Buy gift card and I actually won, so it was subsidized by a real estate agent.  Woo hoo!  And let me just tell you that the headset kicks major ass even though my wife says I look like an air traffic controller now with the things on.  The sound is fantastic and the X4 wireless works fabulously well.

Tell me what you remember from the evening.  I played so poorly that I don't really have a highlight for anything I did.  But I do remember Johann, Suns son going through pretty much our entire team at one point.  Zoso had a couple of remarkable torques.  But other than that, I don't remember much else except for some great battles for the boom under the bridge on River.

Gearheads, we're halfway through 2009.  It's been a pretty damn good year for gaming so far that will likely only get a lot better.  So far we've had Prototype, inFamous and Red Faction.  And that's just been in the last few weeks.

And we've got the Gears 2 downloadable content coming in just a month.  I should definitely be on tomorrow night starting around 8:30 or 9 p.m. and I'm open to pretty much anything. I've been so into Mass Effect lately that I haven't really played much else.  

So sign up below and maybe give me your half year game of the year.  I haven't really played enough of Prototype to make that call yet between Prototype and inFamous, but my initial inkling right now is to go with inFamous.  See you tomorrow, Gearheads.

I know what I'm going to spend the most time playing in 2009.  It's definitely going to be Modern Warfare 2.  That's a given.  And the majority of that time will be the multiplayer, probably once I actually beat the campaign, but maybe not.  It might be sooner than that.  I'm almost as excited about leveling up in the MP as I am about an incredible single player campaign.

But here's the thing.  Outside of Modern Warfare 2, I don't think I'm going to be playing MP very often at all because there isn't really another game out there that has the compelling MP impact for my personal tastes.  I know many of you are excited about Left4Dead 2.  And there's another segment that's pumped about Halo 3: ODST.  But Left4Dead just never grabbed me the way it has many Gearheads and the Halo franchise multiplayer has felt a bit stale to me.  I mean I'm going to get Halo 3: ODST and I might give L4D 2 a chance when it's released later this year if a bunch of Gearheads buy it (although if the controls for the infected are still balls, it will be a tough sell for me).

A game that's kind of flying under the radar right now is Borderlands.  It's a game by Gearbox and Randy Pitchford and it looks like the game is going to be really freaking cool.  The good folks over at GiantBomb.com have been pimping the game hardcore since E3.  It looks like there is a ton of customization as to what exactly you can do with your individual character.  So some of the rewards you get in single player, they come over as well to the multiplayer experience.  So by pushing your character in single player and investing the time, you can bring that with you.  How cool is that?  Not only that, but they completely revamped the art style and it almost looks Crackdown-esque now. If you want to see what it looks like in motion, check out this video.

The only other game that I will probably spend some time in multiplayer will actually be Uncharted 2.  I've played the beta and I really like it.  I didn't think I would, but it's pretty fun because it's somewhat similar to the pacing of Gears and you can be a sneaky m'fer.  I can't tell you how many guys I've killed just by quickly moving into a good position and letting a guy run by me because he's trying to play it like a regular shooter and then I'll just drop the hammer on him from behind.

But Gearheads, tell me with the upcoming release schedule, what multiplayer games have caught your eye?  What do you anticipate spending the most time with?  I added a poll to see where the Gearheads anticipate spending their MP time this fall.

OK so you all know that I let my daughter play games with me.  But I watch what she sees like a hawk.  The games we play are games like Up and LittleBigPlanet.  She loves games, mind you, and she looks forward to Friday evenings with Papi because she knows it's LBP day.  She goes crazy over that stuff.

So what's my point?  I'm not trying to judge how someone else raises their kids but I can't help it.  Especially when I did venture out on XBL or PSN and hear some nine year old screaming some nasty expletives.

I was out looking at houses and we came to this one house we really liked.  It was being rented out to people who happened to be home at the time, or at least a grandmother and her grandson.  The house had a third level that was basically a small loft area.  And the grandson was probably around 7 or 8 and he was sitting there in nothing but his undies playing Saint's Row 2.  I quickly told my wife to make sure that Maya didn't go upstairs for long because I know my daughter and if she sees someone playing video games, no matter who it is, she's going to want to sit down and play with them.  We ushered her out of there as quickly as we could.

But here is my question, fellow Gearheads...what is a kid that age doing playing Saint's Row 2?  I guess maybe somewhere down the road I might understand how if your child is mature enough to handle the distinction between reality and fantasy, then maybe you consider it.  But I just have a hard time believing that this would be the case.  Am I just being a prude about this?  Or can you see it being OK for a kid that age to be playing that game?

I believe I've mentioned before that Man on Fire is one of my favorite movies of all time.  I don't know whether it's because I'm a Dad now or what, but there's something that just resonates with me about a guy out for vengeance for the little girl who came to show him redemption and love again.

Why am I bringing this up now?  Well one of the things that I took with me from E3 was just how cool Splinter Cell: Conviction looked.  And I'm not really the biggest Splinter Cell fan.  The stealth genre in general just hasn't held much appeal to me.  But this appears like they're going to Jason Bourne route with Sam Fisher being one bad ass MFer.  But the coolest thing about the new Splinter Cell is the elements that kind of tell your story or your next objective in the environment.  It's similar to how Man on Fire does a lot of the parts of that movie, spilling text on the screen.  And Fisher is also looking for revenge in this story for someone killing his daughter.  I'm telling you, the inspiration for this next iteration came directly from Man on Fire.

So, any way to the task at hand.  Let me know what you want to play tomorrow night. Maybe some Gears 2 MP?  Maybe we can get an Uncharted 2 game going if folks are interested?  I might not be on until a little late because I might be going to see Star Trek tomorrow night.  I'm not sure yet.  But it looks like around 9 or so, maybe 9:30.

Sign up and we'll get a game going.  Hopefully we can start to get full rooms all over the place again.  I miss you guys!

OK so it's been a week now since I experienced my first E3 and I've realized that there are a few things that have changed about me since that experience.

First and foremost, I've decided to give Mass Effect another spin.  One of the games that nearly all the enthusiast press came away talking about was Mass Effect 2.  And it made me realize that I may have never given the first game a fair try.  I got to this part in the Citadel where I just got bored and finally gave up, especially because I chose the sniper class and I couldn't seem to snipe in the game.  It was like I had serious arthritis and Parkinson's Disease all at once try to snipe the Geth.  So this time I restarted the game as a soldier and it works sooooo much better.  The shooting still isn't terribly smooth and where I need to go at times is still a little confusing, but I'm enjoying it 1,000 times better so far and I'm determined to get through this game if it kills me.  I desperately want to be able to bring over my character to the next one which looks and supposedly plays much differently.

The other big thing that came out of E3 was that I'm seriously excited about a game called The Saboteur.  If you haven't seen much here, check out this video on Game Videos.  It really looks like a lot of fun and the art style is pretty impressive.  I love the black and white combined with splashes of color.  And how can you not love the dude from Pandemic who is sporting the Mercenaries-like hairdo?  I mean seriously, you have to support that guy.

Finally, I picked up Prototype today and played it a bit tonight.  My initial impressions are good so far.  Although I ran into the first boss battle tonight which seemed like it should be a battle that should be in the latter part of the game considering the difficulty of it because you're running around at such a frenetic pace in an enclosed space that it's tough to figure out how to complete the mission and Alex Mercer doesn't necessarily do what you're trying to have him do.  I'm now a little fearful that one of the games that I was looking the most forward to in 2009 could be a letdown because of control issues at times.  I'll let you know if it persists or this initial boss battle was an aberration.  If anyone else has gotten deeper in the game, by all means, share.  I'd love to hear if it continues like that or gets better.  I noticed a lot of people playing Prototype already.

I still have a lot more to say about E3 and will continue to jibber jabber about it for a while as stuff comes to mind.

I've told you guys how I convinced a buddy to get a 360 this past Christmas, right?  Well when I signed on late last night thanks to a really long wait at a restaurant for dinner (my daughter had an ear infection yesterday for the first time in about 2 years, but she was finally feeling better and very hungry last night, so we went out with my wife's friends for dinner), Suns and Kenai were already firmly entrenched in some Horde with a full five, so I kind of hung around for a little bit until I saw that my buddy was playing Gears 1 campaign.  I promised to help him beat the game when he got the 360, so I bowed out of Suns party and went over to my buddy's campaign.

It's fun going back to Gears 1, especially the campaign, after playing a lot of Gears 2.  It reminds me of the joy I first felt when playing the Gears campaign for the first time.  The first time I shot a torque bow, etc.  Although I will say that I miss the head popping good times with the TB from Gears 2 when playing Gears 1.

After playing that until about 11 or so and my wife announced she was going to bed, I signed off and played a bunch of the Uncharted 2 beta.  Let me tell you, I think I'm going to play it quite a bit when it comes out.  There is nothing new or revolutionary about it but the gameplay itself is very much my kind of pace.  You can be sneaky about getting kills if you angle yourself perfectly or stay still.  A couple of times I saw someone coming and hid behind a wall, waiting perfectly still until they passed me by and then meleeing them and shooting them from behind FTW.  It's not the whole straightforward, run around like a chicken with your head cut off gameplay of most FPS.  I led my team three times last night.  And there are people who've put some serious time into this game, being in the level 20 plus.  I'm only a level 5 now.  But it's a ton of fun.  

I'd love to play with some Gearheads sometime but no one was on last night.  I know Blank gave out a bunch of codes, so let's get something going sometime.  Uncharted 2 was already a must buy for me because I loved the first game, but the multiplayer is really surprising good even though this beta is really bare bones.

So Suns, let's hear about your Horde stories...and whatever else any other Gearheads did last night.

As Blankman wrote up yesterday, E3 was a hell of an experience for the first time.  I really wanted to go in large part because I wanted to meet some of the folks behind the sports game categories but because Take Two isn't exactly rolling in dough, they didn't really have a presence there and Peter Moore was no where to be found.

It was great to be able to hang out with Blank all day long.  And I got to meet MDK for the first time, which was a pretty cool experience.  Both he and I have lost a tremendous amount of weight so we both kind of looked like different people.  I think between MDK and myself we've lost about 125 pounds.

For me, it wasn't really the swag-fest that I expected.  Everyone talked about how freely the swag was flowing in years past, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't there in abundance this year.  I had a big bag but basically came home with something like three tee shirts and one of them being Red Steel 2 (anyone a fan of this franchise who might like it is welcome to it).  Blank also noted that there was a lot more space to walk around than in years past.  

I think one of the coolest elements of the show was being able to just see so many new games that I've discussed for seemingly years (God of War 3, Prototype, Assassin's Creed 2) in one place.  I only got to go hands on with really three games.  Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Prototype and Uncharted 2.  Blank got his hands on Shadow Complex and the new Gears 2 content as well.  But I've got to say that of the three things I played, Prototype was the game that had me smiling from ear-to-ear.  And it wasn't because it was exceptionally beautiful (it's kind of brown, drab and depressing), but it was the gameplay that just completely rocked.  Dropping flying elbows on tanks seemed like it would never get old.  And I've always talked about the one thing that would always make a game appealing to me was the level of badassery.  Prototype definitely kicks it up to an 11 because it's just about ridiculous amounts of destruction.  I beat the crap out of anything in my way and I looked like a freaking animal doing it.

Uncharted 2 multiplayer was a lot more enjoyable than I expected.  I've been a pretty big naysayer on shoving MP in a single-player oriented game, but the minute I picked up the spinning mini-gun and mowed down a bunch of fools, I was pretty sold on it.  I wound up killing the most dudes on my team and game (eight).  I then used that as the excuse as to why I suck at most online games.  I told Blank, "If only I had the time to practice, I might be able to keep up with these kids like Infidel."  Heh.  I also really liked BC 2, but I will say that the new control scheme that they have (a lot of stuff is mapped to the d-pad now) really screwed me up for the first half of my game.  I couldn't find the gun I liked and I couldn't seem to locate the gun-mounted grenade launcher that was so effective at blowing holes in the wall in the first game.  And in MP, you just don't have time to ask how to do certain things.  

Sadly I never got to see Assassin's Creed 2 in motion, which I really wanted to do.  It's easily my biggest contender for my personal game of the year along with Modern Warfare 2.  I saw plenty of Splinter Cell: Conviction and it really appears like they're going for a Jason Bourne vibe to it which actually holds appeal for me.  I was never a big fan of sneaking games in the past because it appeared like if one person saw you, the whole game was messed up.  But it looks like there is a myriad of ways to play this game.  Still, I will probably withhold whether or not I actually buy it until the reviews come out on it.

I really wanted to also see MW 2 in person, but it was cool enough to meet Robert Bowling, aka fourzerotwo.  We had a good laugh over the ass kicking they gave us last year as Blank mentioned.

I realized that I never spent a single moment at the Nintendo booth at all, so I can't give you any insight on them.  I still haven't actually even seen their press conference.

Other games I saw at the show that sparked my interest are Singularity, Split Second and The Saboteur (the demo at the EA press conference was so freaking cool).

Oh and God of War 3 looked absolutely beautiful and gorgeous and remarkable.  I'm so stoked to play that.  Already in early 2010, it sounds like we're going to have God of War 3 as well as Battlefield: Bad Company 2.  Thank goodness some of this stuff got pushed off.  As for my takeaways from the show, my head was essentially ringing from all the noise.  It's incredibly loud and there's a ridiculous amount of sensory overload.  

By the way, one of the PR guys for EA was telling me that Mass Effect 2 has a much better shooting mechanic and that it looks like it will play a lot more like a shooter with RPG elements to it.  That makes me a bit more interested than I was before because I hated the shooting in the first Mass Effect.  So much so that I wound up quitting on it.

Halo: ODST does look pretty cool.  The line for people to play it was pretty huge and I didn't really want to wait in it, but it looked like it had very similar mechanics to everything in Halo so those that love those mechanics will love it.  Those that don't, probably won't.  I don't know if it's me alone on this, but there's something about Master Chief missing from the game that makes it so much less interesting to me.  It isn't like the MC is some outstanding developed character, but I grew attached to the big green guy over the course of three games.

As of right now, coming out of the show, my top five most anticipated games this year are:

1.  Modern Warfare 2:  IW just knows how to make a killer first person action game with the perfect controls and feel.  They are the standard.

2.  Assassin's Creed 2:  One of my favorite franchises now.  Altair was a bad ass and Ezio looks like he's a step above what Altair was with much more to do to get the job done.  Interestingly because of the PSP Assassin's Creed game, I might switch consoles on this one and get the PS3 version instead of the 360 one.  I love this franchise and want everything surrounding it.

3.  Uncharted 2:  I loved the first game, but this one is possibly the prettiest game on consoles I've ever seen.  And if the multiplayer lasts more than a week, I think it has a chance of being pretty damn good (although the map we played on was very small and straightforward which was probably good for a demo, but not good over the long haul).

4.  God of War 3: Good lord, they amped up the brutality in this series.  It was freaking incredible and amazing to see Kratos as Mr. Bad Ass literally ripping a guy's head off in slow motion.  They might have to tone this down to get an M rating because, well, wow.  Still, the pacing of the demo looked fantastic.

5.  Prototype:  This game is so much fun.  My only question is, will this game have lasting appeal over 12 hours or so of gameplay?  Or will it pull a Wolverine and die on me half way through?  I hope not because I felt like such a bad ass playing this.

I've probably got more to share.  But one thing I will share is that David Ellis is pretty much a king among men.  I loved meeting him and I hope to hang out with him and have beers sometime in the near future.  He's a fantastic person who helped me score my way inside.  So I wanted to publicly thank David for that all access pass he got me.

Oh and for FFF this week, I'm up for whatever.  Maybe we could even get a few Gearheads who got the Uncharted 2 code to play a little bit of that later on? I don't know if you can party up as I haven't played it yet.  But definitely some Gears 2.

Sorry for the extra long post, but sign up below and maybe I'll catch you tomorrow night at around 9 p.m. PST.