Got it a couple days ago.
A simulation racing game where you drive around muddy Nascar-like oval tracks with small buggy cars with huge sideways spoilers on top.
It's alright, way too hard for my taste, not the kind of challenge I enjoy.
It's a bit choppy too with an unstable framerate and questionable physics, you can randomly flip and bounce around even though there was nothing visually on screen to collide with, the controls are also a bit wonky, you always have to double correct because the game does this weird extra move whenever you turn, I have not gotten used to that yet.
It was cheap so it's not that bad, I do like some of it, I hope it gets better as I get more used to it.
CastleVania Lords of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360)
Got it a couple days ago.
I've only played the demo from Xbox Live so far and it seemed pretty good.
I liked the first game quite a lot, it had problems that made me lose interest and never complete it but I still got enough fun out of it that I felt I could try this one instead as the demo suggested this is a more polished game than the first. I know from videos on youtube that you get to transform into and play as a rat later in the game, I must at least give that a try before putting this game to the side.
The demo did have some really awful parts though, I hope there aren't too many in the game overall, I'm talking about climbing and QTEs combined, very annoying, didn't even finish the demo because it annoyed me so much. I'll give it a more proper try in the actual full game though as it didn't feel worth retrying it over and over just to play through a demo when I was getting the full game soon anyway.
Damnation (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
Really enjoying this game so far, love the intuitive way to move around. The jumping, shooting and climbing is all fun to do and the levels are huge and vertical, just as the game promised on the back of the cover calling itself a "vertical shooter". I like the steampunk western design. The vehicles are specially awesome, I absolutely love the jet engine motorcycles that can be driven so fast they cling to walls, finally a game that lets me perform the cool looking wall driving Lara did with her bike in the cutscene in the original Tomb Raider.
I like the characters and story as well, I will absolutely play through this to the end.
Halo 4 (Xbox 360)
Got it very recently.
Suprisingly awesome. I hate the Halo series, Bungie had no idea what makes a good first person shooter so I'm glad to see another developer give it a go and actually get it right. It feels like a complete overhaul but when you look at the old games and Halo 4 side by side the changes are suprisingly minor a lot of the time, depending on what you look at that is, the visuals are much improved and so are the sound effects but the gameplay is almost completely the same, except it's totally different, tweaked everywhere it needed to be, it feels more responsive, you now have basic abilities that the other games lacked, like sprinting, as standard while you also still have just about all the things you had before like additional armor abilities, vehicles and the weapon loadout, except a lot of new weapons have been introduced thanks to a whole new type of enemies with some really cool high tech stuff on offer, and the storytelling is vastly improved as well, I actually kind of cared about things this time, I mean Master Chief is still the most unoriginal Doom Marine ripoff of all time but at least in this game they gave him a personality, and his A.I. companion Cortana (the most unoriginal Sally from Aquanox ripoff of all time) was also given a personality that actually was interesting and relevant to the story. They're no Doomguy or Sally but at least I didn't hate them this time, that's a HUGE improvement over the previous games in the series.
The problems I had with this game as I played through it were the parts that were still based on the older games, like only being able to carry two weapons at a time, the vehicle controls and the story/characters/universe of the game. I would've loved this game even more had they given you the ability to carry all the weapons you find like in many better series, had better vehicle controls where you more directly control the vehicles and made it an original game with new cast of characters, set in a whole new universe with a whole different story.
In short, I liked all the additions and changes they made but had this not been a Halo game at all it would've been even better.
Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently on PS3 but I've had it on 360 for quite a long time.
The PS3 version is the weaker version so I'm mainly playing this on 360 from now on.
I like this game, I don't really get the hate for it as it's easily the best in the series to date.
The visuals are varied from basic and somewhat dated (it's a game that's been in the works for a while so no suprise there, some things were bound to look dated) to some of the most impressive I've seen this generation.
I like the humor and have gotten many laughs out of it already, the characters and story are entertaining as well.
It controls well for the most part but the aiming can feel a bit off at times lacking the precision needed. I like the vehicle sections a lot, the vehicles so far have controlled very well.
I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches yet, at worst only some ugly dated and low quality visuals like extremely low quality dynamic shadows that update like a slideshow while the game still plays at 50/60fps (50hz on PS3 as PS3 doesn't support PAL60 on SDTVs like 360 does).
Unreal Tournament III (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently.
Not as good as UT2003 and Unreal Championship 1 and 2 were but still a great game. I really miss the adrenaline abilities from the previous games, the new armor system with individual parts is not a valid replacement, not even close, and vehicles are not very good either, just like they weren't in UT2004.
Not much else to say, I usually just play short bursts of a few rounds of CTF and normal Deathmatch and that's about it. I might give the singleplayer story mode another try some day but I don't really care that much to be honest, it wasn't bad but UT isn't a series where I want to play through a story even if it's there, I just wanna play some good classic CTF and Deathmatch with awesome weapons in well designed levels.
Aliens Colonial Marines (Xbox 360)
Got it a pretty long time ago but haven't played it until now.
I was very pleasantly suprised by this game, I thought it was going to be terrible or at the very least bad but turns out it's one of the best games I've ever played.
The atmosphere is perfect, like Alien Trilogy in HD, the motion tracker makes a return and makes me panic like never before, every noise from it fills my head with thoughts of all types of aliens crawling around where I can't see them until it's too late and they've swarmed me and I have to blast my way through barely making it out alive.
I love how you get to revisit places from the classic Aliens movie and see familiar places and find stuff like the unique weapons they had in the movie and stuff like that, as a fan of the franchise and the movie things like that are very much appreciated.
Just before playing this I gave Aliens Isolation a try, also on 360, and it was absolutely fucking atrocious with beyond broken and dysfunctional A.I., glitchy visuals with tons of screen tearing, framerate drops and slowdown, clunky and unintuitive controls, overuse of QTEs, archaic gameplay design that would've felt horribly outdated in the late 80s, very boring, sterile and non interactive environments, tons of humans and evil low tech andirods, literally no isolation and the aliens were a chapter of fail all on their own with a whole new type of bad A.I., predictable scripted events, visual and technical glitches etc. etc., it was just one of the very worst games I've ever played in my life and a HUGE disappointment after having heard things like "it makes up for how bad Colonial Marines was", "the game Alien fans have been waiting for" and "one of the best horror games ever made"... BULL FUCKING SHIT. It was a travesty, at best..
Haven't even mentioned how it had a mandatory install disc of 5gigs and then a mandatory patch download that was almost a gig as well, and because it's a horror game you'll naturally want to install the game disc that takes another 5gigs to install so you don't have the 360s loud humming from spinning the disc during gameplay as the sound in horror games is important, ending with a whooping 11gig installation for a glitchy broken mess of a game!
You'd think all that install bullshit would've fixed at least something, but no, apparently it only made the game "playable" in the first place, if you can count something that broken as playable at all, fuck knows what that 1gig patch did, I can't imagine the game being even more broken than it was as the only steps left to take down the ladder is an error message and not running at all, which in hindsight would've been preferable as the game was honestly that bad.
Also it was clearly meant to only be played on a full 1080p HDTV as on an SDTV the text was so tiny it was almost completely unreadable. I've seen this in quite a few games over the last few years but Alien Isolation was by far the worst, the subtitles for the piss poor voice acting was rendered completely useless because of this.
Anyway, Colonial Marines was better in all ways and it's a really great game so far. I'll be sure to play through it to the end as this is a game I really want to play more of.
This ended up being more about the shitty Isolation game but that's how it is sometime, can't be helped.
FUEL (PS3)
Got it recently.
A huge open world racing game, like Test Drive Unlimited on steroids.
I haven't been able to play it as much as I wanted because it freezes a lot.
I want to play more but the freezing seems to be a common issue with this game according to internet forums, I've seen quite a lot of threads talking about this and it puts me off playing the game to be honest.
Burnout 3 Takedown (Xbox)
Got it recently.
I've never been a fan of the stop and go gameplay this series has but I've decided to give this game a try anyway, I've played the main mode a bit and unlocked a few new cars and stuff and so far it's not that bad, I turned off the crash cam so it only does it when I crash, that helped keep the flow of the game up a lot.
There's a lot of random luck elements to the gameplay that I don't like and feel really holds the game back, it gets really boring really fast when the challenge is super high and needs pin point exact and flawless driving to complete something when there's random traffic coming out of nowhere in less that a split tenth of a second that forces you to restart a race over and over dussins of times in a row.
It controls nicely and runs smoothly an looks great otherwise so it's a shame the bad parts hold it back as much as they do.
Easily one of the most overrated games of all time as I've encountered numerous claims of this being not only the best in the series but also the best arcade racing game on PS2 and [one of] the best arcade racing games of all time.
It's mediocre among other games of the genre and I have to say it's the worst in the series as it's the first after they rebooted it with new developers and the sequels were all better and I personally like the two original games more with the second game being my favorite in the entire series.
DOOM (32X)
Link to my failed playthrough on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmEvY0MeyjPaMKLkwByxAw1KPOsbi6edI
Pretty much my favorite version of the classic Doom. I also love the PSX version and the version on Xbox that comes as a bonus together with Doom 2 and the Master Levels for Doom 2 in Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil is also great.
I love the music in this version, the Mega Drive sound chip has a unique sound I really love and it makes the classic Doom songs justice and then some.
The sound effects are taken directly from the PC version and sound as good as ever, the 32X handles them with respect and deliver perfectly where for example the Super Nintendo version fails miserably.
It lacks a save feature so instead you have free pickings of any level in the game sans the bonus and final level directly from the main menu, making it instantly accessible at all times.
It lacks several levels from the full set the PC original has but that also makes it a lot more approachable as you can play through it much faster, that makes for example a great evening of Doom without having to go on long into the night, past morning and well into next day before reaching the end.
The enemies lack sprites for turning so they end up always facing you, this gives the feeling that they're always focused on you, I like this change a lot, also adding to the feeling of being the center of enemy attention is the lack of the A.I. script that made enemies attack eachother in many other versions, this also adds to the challenge as you have to be the one to take out the enemies, they won't do the job for you in this version.
With the 6 button controller you have some of the best controls of the time, with the map being especially functional in this version, you can also pick between the weapons in your aquired arsenal freely by holding Mode and pressing other buttons for respective weapons, pressing Mode+Start twice being the most important as it's the only way to switch back to your fists after having aquired the chainsaw.
It lacks the BFG as well but that's okay as I never used it except for the biggest bosses anyway and because they're also not in this version it's not a loss that matters very much.
It's on a cartridge so the load times are as short as on a fast PC, unlike many later versions that were on CD and thus had noticeably longer loading times.
It runs relatively smooth and is relatively high res as well, it's not as good as the PSX version but it's still a lot better than many versions of Doom including the Saturn, Super Nintendo and 3DO versions, it's even slightly better performing than the commonly praised Jaguar 64 version.
This is the version of Doom I return to the most and it's a great additional version regardless of what other versions of Doom you might already own.
It might seem as if it's a bad version seeing as it lacks so much but in my opinion the changes created a unique and in many ways better take on the Doom formula, and combine that with how well it plays and you have nothing left but a winner.
Tempo (32X)
One of my favorite platform games of all time. I love the design, the music, the levels, the controls and long list of moves you can pull off, the gameplay, the characters and enemies, the minigames, the upgrades, simply put I love just about everything about this game and I never get tired of playing it, a true classic.
Bomberman Act Zero (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
I never liked the older Bomberman games, I hate the design and the gameplay lacked certain elements needed to be good. This game fixes everything that was wrong with only one drawback, the multiplayer. The one thing Bomberman games did right was multiplayer, I mean it's one of the oldest games I know that had support for four players.
Sadly this game is singleplayer only, at most it has an online mode but because most Bomberman fans didn't like it for reasons I will never understand the online mode is dead, so it's singleplayer only.
A shame because this is the first Bomberman game I've ever liked and I would've loved to have friends over and play this in multiplayer, just my luck the one game in the series I want to play with friends won't let me.
Regardless it's a great game and I'm having a good time with it even if I have to play it on my own.
I love the new design, it reminds me of a game I have on PC but I forget the name, and the new camera angle, life bar and powerups you pick up are all great too.
A criminally underrated and underappreciated game to say the least and a prime example of a game where haters ruined a good thing.
