The Gaming Grid

First off, I never thought the Halo series was all that great. Well to the extent most people give it. I have however played and beaten all of them so far. Until now that is. I reserved Halo Wars in the thought that others will grab this and I will have someone to play with. Now this is the odd thing. That stops me from buying most games, so I really don’t know why I got this game. I know it has co-op but I don’t really know if I will play with friends or if I’ll be forced to play with some dick online.

Turns out that most of the people I know did not pick this game up, and there are good reasons for this. Normally I don’t like to give a review on something until I finish the game, but its just killing me. This game is not really that hard, in fact its to easy. Most RTS the units just do straight damage, in this game its a rock, paper, scissors match. The biggest problem is that you are a rock and they are always scissors, and you have a big rock. The funny thing is all you have to do is make marines. That’s it. just run around with them and kill everything. I have found my only reason to have vehicles is if they give them to me.

I also think the controls are not intuitive for this platform. This really just needed to be a PC release. To select units you can select al, select local, or use the painter. 90% of the time you will move some units one way and then select all units by accident and mess up your whole plan. I have found that if I just bunch them all up into a large mobile horde, they kill faster and its less frustrating. The game has programed events that no matter what you do, X will happen. I thought we got past that point 5 years ago. This game has taken the genre back to the original command and conquer, which in my opinion is a better game.

If them made the interface more like End Wars it would have been a better game. It did not even need the voice command, just the general controler layout and level layout. I think I will eventually beat this game, but I just don’t really want to play it. Maybe ill go play some Gears of War 2, they have a new DLC at the end of the month. I will also write a second look when I beat the game. Who knows maybe it will grow on me.

Nominated Games
* A Kingdom for Keflings
* Portal
* Braid
* Castle Crashers
* Bionic Commando Rearmed
* Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
* Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
* N+
* Penny Arcade Episode 1
* Schizoid
* Age of Booty
* Boogie Bunnies
* Roogoo
* Meteos Wars
* Soul Calibur
* Mega Man 9
* Rez HD
* Fable II Pub Games
* Duke Nukem 3D
* Galaga Legions
I have been really enjoying whats been on the XBLA so far. So does Microsoft. Hit up their site and let them know what you think. Yes we can. On this list I have played a few, I really loved that they have Duke Nukem 3D. Mega Man 9 made you feel like a kid again playing on the NES. That goes to show you that graphics don’t count for everything. Castle Crashers is a fun golden axe style side scroller with a new look. For a few extra Microsoft points you and a group of buddies can have fun. Taking you back to the days of old, where trash talk wasn’t a string of four letter words.

So check it out. Vote!
Awards 2008

This episode was originally for The Man Cast. We don’t announce who we are, we just hit the record button and go. We also don’t edit, its just a nice fire side chat with A. David, Paul, and I. Well Sans the fire but you get my point. This conversation drifted to games, so A. David gave me the episode. Now I give it to you.

Have fun.

 

 Tactics Talk [30:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If only it was longer. I loved this game, there is not much to say, it’s a really fun and well made game. It has a lot of humor and Maw is a great character. If you don’t know about the game, it’s a Xbox Live Arcade game. For about 5$ you can get this game. It is your platformer game, where you are an alien creature who controls this ooze creature with lots-o-teeth.

For me it brings back feelings of Katamari Damacy mixed with little shop of horrors. As you run Maw around stages he will eat Yumms, and other interesting creatures. When he eats so many he grows. No characters or NPC have any dialogue, but it’s still a great game. When Maw eats certain creatures he will gain their powers, and that’s just half the fun. Maw supplies the majority of the humor in the game through his reactions to creatures and items in the world. Maw pulls this off with out one word of dialogue while higher budget games have problems with this.

For 5$ it’s simple its fun, you can’t beat running around and eating the world. I hope they bring some other add on content to it later. This was the first game for the Xbox that I got all the achievements to.

Well, with my latest episode over my latest 360, I got Kung Fu Panda for free. Now it has been a long time since I have played a full blo0d platformer. I was really excited about the games. Now I know that this is for kids since the movie was for kids, so I did not figure a very difficult game. What I got was a free fun game.

Now I really don’t feel like I need to talk much about the game, its your standard platfomers. There isn’t much missing, but also not added. It is a platformer there is not much to make this game work. So while I did like this game, I wondered if any of the people making the game had actually watched this game. Now I love watching movies, and since my 3 year old daughter has made me watch Kung Fu Panda 3 times a week. I know that game back to front.

So when the game comes out and there are these extra stuff that completely changes the whole meaning of the game, you wonder where they got this stuff from. It still wasn’t bad, but if the development team was working on this about the same time, if not a little bit before the movie, could then directly pull info from the movie production company?

This is a just the weird side of movies being translated to games for reasons. Usually when they go far off the actual story usually they already announced their death knell. The second is that the only character that is the same in the game as in the movie, is the master that trains Poe. All of the other characters do not have the same mentality as in the movies. But my thinking is that they did a decent job, is that they picked a simple enough game type.

Now, I know that most of the development companies that work are rushed because of the time line. They have to work on a shorter time line, and sometime cant get a good product out. I think this is now more prevalent in this console generation than ever. I would atleast say put this on your gamefly, but not worth it unless its under 10$.