Couple Gaming

First is the anticipated announcement of Gears of War 3, the trailer can be found below.   Not much to say about this, but I can complain that it’s a whole year away!  But good to see 4 player co-op in it.  This is one of my favorites game series.  Right along side God of War

Netflix is sending out disks for the Wii this week, ours is suppose to be here today, lets see how well the tiny machine does with streaming shall we?  I know my daughter has been waiting for this forever.  Just wish that the Wii and PS3 could stream without the silly disk.

And last and probably the thing most people won’t see.  A new paperback book based on DeadSpace will be release July 10 of this year.

Dead Space™: Martyr (A Tor Trade Paperback; $14.99; July 2010), the first novel based on the award-winning Dead Space videogame franchise. Dead Space: Martyr delves into the back story of the fiction including the history of the Church of Unitology, the discovery of the enigmatic “Black Marker” and the mysteries behind an alien artefact of unknown power. Dead Space: Martyr will be available in July 2010 at select retailers worldwide.

As you have seen previously, an RPG became a family affair, and to this day we are still trying to finish Dragon Age.  But we also still really really enjoy it.

So I am not looking forward to Hunted: The Demon’s Forge by inXile.  Not only is it a new RPG that looks amazing.  But it also has co-op!  Seriously, Co-Op an RPG with the wife will be awesome!

More info on the game;

“Set in a dark fantasy world, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is an unforgettable cooperative action game, pitting you and your partner against waves of vicious enemies. Taking control of either E’lara, a ranged weapon expert, or Caddoc, a master swordsman, you must use a variety of weapons, powerful spells, and cover tactics to battle your way through menacing dungeons, overgrown ruins, and downtrodden towns. Discover secrets and complete co-op-based puzzles whilst exploring the sinister world to discover answers to the game’s deep, dark mysteries.”

For the PS3, 360 and PC

Dark Void finally arrived.  I have been looking forward to this game for some time now.  Flying around in a jetpack, taking cover vertically, hijacking UFO’s.  What’s not to love?  This game.  Thats what.

I am SO disappointed in this game.  The story line is shallow, the graphics are not up to par with what this generation of consoles can do, and the game  play is seriously lacking.

My daughter and I sat down to try this game out.  She loves watching me play games and she loves aliens.  So this should have been a good experience for us both.  You start the game flying around with your jet pack and you have NO idea how to control this thing.  So its just you, zooming around trying in vein to shoot UFO’s.  And then BAM! It’s a cut scene and you are starting all over.  And by all over I mean the game is finally starting.  You are no just a normal joe flying over the bermuda triangle.  The of course you crash after seeing a UFO.  Now you are exploring the jungle for some reason.  And then you see an alien robot kill  a guy.  The alien leaves and you go grab the guys weapon.  A huge gun.  Ohh and he has another on him for your partner.  That’s right, he was carrying two huge guns…..anyway! I am not going to tell you everything, for those of you who want to play this game there is no reason for me to spoil it.  But lets just say don’t expect much of a story and don’t expect the game play to live up to the hype.  I do understand maybe this hype was all my own.  But regardless I am disappointed.  What could have been a good change of pace for shooters is just another disappointment and now I am going to go back to Darksiders where I actually enjoy myself and possibly where it ends and my daughter isn’t crying and begging me to stop playing.

Dragon Age is the first real game I bought for my PS3.  I saw it on sale for about $40 for the PS3 right after it was just released, while the 360 version was still $60. I figured since it is a single player game, I won’t need to be on live and it will give the family time to play their other games in the other rooms.  Also the dust on the PS3 was just embarrasing.

Turns out the wife and daughter are big fans of RPG’s.  Who knew?   So for the past two months, almost everynight, we gather in the spare bedroom and play dragon age.  And by play I mean I play, but the girls get to tell me what choices we are going to make and what spells to pick when we level.   The story in dragon age isn’t bad, but it doesn’t really bring anything knew to the table either.  An evil is acending upon the world and you need to gather all your allies and defeat it.  Easier said then done of course.  And the story is interesting enough that you won’t be complaining about it.  What really sets Dragon Age apart is the charecters.  Each one has a back story that you can learn if you find the right items and ask the right questions.  While you are on your journey they will randomly talk to each other about their past or thoughts.   We really enjoyed having Allister and Morrigan in the party because they would always be arguing.  But be aware that to gain approval with one, might be a dissaproval for another.  For instance we wanted to sleep with Morrigan, but with Allistar in the party every choice we made that she approved of he didn’t.  And at one point he almost left our party for good.  So we made it up to him and then dumped him in camp as soon as we found a new warrior.  Dragon age is full of quests that take a fair amount of time, but we have played over 50 hours and we still aren’t bored of it.

All and all if you’re a fan of RPG’s you should already own this game.  If you aren’t sure you like RPG’s you should probably own this game.  If you hate RPG’s but like avatars having sex, you should own this game.  I can’t think of a good reason no one shouldn’t own this game.  And remember.  Just because it says single player on it doesn’t mean your family can’t enjoy it as well.

OK, there are about 2,000+ reviews of what is going on at E3 right now.  If you’re not following someone on twitter, or their live blog, or blah blah blah, then you’re obviously a very busy monkey… Which is why I’m going to recap some of the highlights!

Here’s just a few of the things that have come up so far:

XBOX:

• Rock Band: Beatles will be out 9-9-09.
• “Joyride”: a free game that uses the Avatars
• Lots of new Sequel games :
  • Left 4 Dead 2
  • Crackdown 2
  • Halo: ODST & Halo: Reach Multiplayer Beta
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • new Tony Hawk
  • Forza Motorsport III
  • Modern Warfare 2
  • Metal Gear Solid Rising
• Zune Video Marketplace
• Netflix: Add movies to your queue w/ Xbox, instead of just watching what has been added.
• Twitter, Facebook, & LastFM will be on Xbox.
• Project Natal: Making your body the controller with full body tracking
  • Use your face to log in, navigate the screen with your hands, actually maneuver a ball with your feet, and paint with any part of your body
• 1vs100 BETA started last night for 50,000 lucky players.  Ymiris & I played it for a good hour, fully addicted.  WAY too much fun, and highly suggested as a couple game!!!

Nintendo

• Multiplayer Super Mario Bros. released Holiday ‘09.  Excited about this as a Couple Game, with the same fun feeling of the original Mario Bros, with a smart camera that will pan out & in as players separate.
• Wii Fit Plus – Fall 2009
• *NOTE* UBISOFT announced “Your Shape” for the Wii, which will include a camera & analyze how well you do the exercises.  Looks a bit more advanced than the Wii Fit title.  We’re more excited about this one.
• A new controller “extender” called Wii Motion Plus that detects angle & precision in motion, released with Wii Sports Resort.
• New Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers.. more Shooter than Turn-based.
• New Kingdom Hearts 3.
• Mario & Luigi get microscopic & invade Bowsers body in the cheesy DS “Bowsers Inside Story”.  Looks cute, but I’m ashamed to say it just screams Rental.
• Nintendo Sun DS
• James Pattersons’ Womens Murder Club – DS game that plays like a book.  Unfortunately, this feels like a cheesy pandering to women, pulling together my favorite Room 219 with Nancy Drew.
• C.O.P: The Recruit, a racer much like a good-guy version of GTA.
• Style Savvy, which actually looks like a good Tween/Teen Clothes Shopping/Accessorizing game… one of the things I keep praying Imagine would be, but never is.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed & probably buy this one.
• NOTE: Ubisoft announced yesterday more Imagine games, including a “make crappy bead necklaces that you can buy from us”.  I DESPISE IMAGINE & KNOW THERE IS A PLACE IN HELL FOR THESE DAMNED GAMES.
• Super Mario Galaxy 2
• Finally, some Adult games!  All of look fairly delicious…
  • The Conduit
  • Resident Evil: Dark Side Chronicles
  • Dead Space: Extraction
• Metroid: Other M .  Very wild-cardy, but we’ll see what happens as they release more.  I’ve always wanted more Samus.

SONY:

• Uncharted 2, which looks like a pretty & intense watch-your-mate-play game.
• MAG
• PSP
  • Hannah Montana lilac PSP
  • Patapon 2
  • Rock Band (? — just touched on)
• PSP GO — pretty slide-out controls, tiny, light, Wifi, 16G memory, and SO sexy.  Do Want! 80% reduction in price for applications, more titles are digitally distributed.  You know I’m not a graphics girl.. but I’m seriously amazed by how good the graphics are for such a small, portable gaming system.
• • “Sense Me” analyzes your music library to create playlist moods.
  • Grant Turismo for PSP GO
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
  • Little Big Planet
  • Harry Potter / Hannah Montana
  • Resident Evil (!)
  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Rock Band Unplugged
• Final Fantasy VII will be on PSN

It has been a very long time since I have played a fishing game.  As a matter of fact I think the last one I played was one of those little hand held devices you could pick up just about anywhere.  I liked them enough, but it never held my attention for more then a few minutes at a time and obviously was no where near as fun as real fishing was, but it was nice to pass the few minutes on the car drive to the lake.

I can’t say I am actually excited about this game, and even less so with the rumored $70 price tag, but I am interested.  Watch the video and decide if you would drop $70 for it, in the mean time, see you on the lake!

Ever since Xbox 360 introduced us to their version of a Mii, we have been longing to abuse ourselves in various ways.  Sure, we now have our little avatars having Party Chats, and we can dress our avatars in ridiculous clothing (if no one has seen what I did to Ymiris’ avatar, I highly suggest looking for it. He’ll be the adorable man in bright white pigtails & leather biker jacket), but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

Thus Xbox joins with Ninja Bee (@ninjabeegames for twitterers) to give us Kingdom of Keflings.  In it, we use our lovely avatars to help little Keflings build their little renaissance village.

Let’s get this straight:  Yes, this is a basic building game.  You are given basic blueprints to make buildings (say, a house) and you (and your keflings) gather resources (wood, coal, gems, wool) to build the basic parts dictated by the blueprints.  This is a fairly basic concept for any gamers that have played any of the building games – Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Empire Earth, SimEarth, etc.  “Get Resources, build 1 piece, put multiple pieces together to make building”.  It’s so simple, non-gamers catch on quickly and gamers get that nostalgiac twinge.  Awww.

What makes this game more amusing is watching your Giant Avatar towering over the little keflings.. kicking them around, picking them up, watching them scream & flail madly.. it’s hard not to be amused.  OK, especially when your giant avatar is in a red dress & high heels.. I admit it, I loved watching my Mii..err.. avatar.. wander around in her platforms carrying piles of rocks and bricks. Building up your little kingdom gets to be mesmorizing while you build an art house, schools, a theatre, a wizard house, etc.  I had to fight Ymiris & The Couple Gaming Child Test Subject for 360 Kefling time nightly for a good 3 days.  It was brutal, but I feel justified tying them up & leaving them in the closet (I did turn on my Hulu Queue & now they’re totally caught up on Colbert Report, Burn Notice, & House).

The Keflings have a cute sense of humor in the few places they communicate, and it is fun to put the Keflings through school, and then have them do your dirty work mining/logging/relocating materials.

This game is incredibly addicting, very colorful, and great fun.. until halfway through.  At about the halfway point, you realize a few things:

1. You have a limited number of keflings.  You do not get more, no matter how many houses you build.
2. The buildings you are now making don’t actually add anything to your game play.  You build a hospital or a theatre, but the Keflings never get hurt nor take a break from your slavedriving.  They don’t even change their outfits to an Armani suit when you build them a mansion.
3. You do not have enough Keflings to gather, move, and inhabit all the useless buildings
4. The blueprints leave NO wiggle room.  You cannot point the buildings in another direction, add things to the blueprints to personalize them (like an extra garden or such), or increase their value by doing such things.
5. The only personalizing you can do are paint the roofs, paint the walls, and add random trees & shrubs.  Doing these things does not actually add anything to your keflings, nor make any difference more than slightly aesthetic.
6. There is no adversary, nothing to harm your keflings, no real level of difficulty.  The only way you know that you are increasing difficulty in this game is the number of pieces per blueprint & the amount of resources per piece.  In other words… turn on your game, and then walk away for a night and this game should be easy as pie.

I am about 5 or 6 buildings from the end of the game, and I have just lost interest in it.  I don’t know why I’ve built a nursery, nor a mansion (instead of just a simple house).    I’ve built a hospital, but I think it’s more for myself (in case I trip over a Kefling in my clogs).  I find myself remembering why I don’t like to buy the Xbox Downloadable Content:  When you’re done, you can’t give them to someone else to try.

Still, for $10 we as a family got a lot out of it, and I highly suggest it for gaming couples that may not be experienced gamers.

I am hoping that, if there is a Keflings II, someone throws in a little more than what I can do with my Lego’s… because at least Lego’s I can  listen to Hulu at the same time… Ymiris is refusing to just tell me what happened in Burn Notice.  *sigh*

Fable 2 is one of our favorite games to play as of late, however my kind hearted wife, who won’t kill anything even if it was stepping on her puppy, has decided to be as pure evil as possible, taking the evil or most inhumane path at every opportunity.   Nothing really wrong with that, it’s a little odd but it’s a game and you’re allowed to go out of your comfort level to play right?

Well here is where it gets strange, she was so uncomfortable doing it that she has now turned over the game to our 9 yr old, that’s right, she felt it was to evil to play evil so she made our daughter play it and told her to take all the evil paths……isn’t that more evil then just playing it?!  For instance, in the game you are told to prove yourself by eating some baby Chic’s, my daughter says “What?! What do I do mommy, I don’t want to do that” ,  the wife says “Do as your told hunny” (sounds like June Cleaver too), and the daughter stares at her, looks at me, I shrug and she clicks on eat the chic.

*you hear crunching and the character who told you to eat that says “Oh my god you really ate it, you’re one sic puppy you are”

My daughter stares up at us and glares at her mother, then she gets a little smirk and giggles and eats some more waiting for the responses, and they have a few really funny ones.  But still, so evil right?!  I won’t ever forget the look on my daughters face for a brief instance, like she found out the monster under the bed is real, and its screwing mommy.

Now I am sure she will deny this and say something like “Ohh she wanted to play and you wouldn’t let her play on your account, blah blah blah”

Don’t let that type of talk keep you from commenting on how bad of a person she is.

Ohh and for the record, I picked the good route, so my house of is made of brick, not glass.

*****

Ophilyes Response:

I heard, somewhere, that your choices in Fable 2 influence how you look in the game… so it seemed to make sense that if I created an all-evil girl, she would look somewhat goth or evil or otherwise deliciously dark.    Unfortunately, I had no time to play… so my daughter took over the character with the instructions “Be Evil.”
When I checked back in again, a week or so after I gave afore-mentioned instructions, I watched my daughter play.  I watched her sacrifice towns people.. and then watched her try to sacrifice the townspeople’s children.  Somehow, she was ok with that, whereas I wouldn’t be.
I tried to stop watching after that, but I couldn’t help it.  I  watched as she was told to let prisoners starve.. and she did!    I pressured her “Please, please just feed a few of them.  Maybe you can be evil other ways than actually hurting people..” and she did feed one, losing mass amounts of experience.  She then shrieked at me “NO! I’m not sacrificing my XP for prisoners!” and refused to feed any more.

Both of us lost some of our innocence at that point.. though we gained it back about 5 minutes later when it gained us access to a place where we could be vindicated.

I’ve thought about taking the character back, but to be honest, I’m scared.  I’m not positive, but I Think my daughter might sacrifice me for experience if I do.

In retrospect, I don’t think all of this was worth it just to create a goth babe.  I think next time, I’ll play Rock Band with her, and create a goth babe there.  Of course, her goth babes still scare mine…

Before I give you my take on this game let the following be known.

1. I love almost all mythology
2. I enjoyed BulletWitch
3. I was really, looking forward to this game

With that being said lets begin, as I stated above,  was really looking forward to this game, but as soon as I put it in and starting playing I was instantly disappointed.  The graphics were sub par and the feeling of the game really felt cheap, I don’t know how to describe it, but it had the same feel as Bullet Witch, it was a B game, simple.  I almost just turned it off and wrote the game off as a failure, and I wouldn’t be the first, almost every review I have seen has said how horrible the game is, granted some of the reviewers actually thought the dev was trying to make a statement by calling the game “Legendary” but no, they were referring to the story of the game, which is all about Pandora’s box being opened in modern times.

You can see why this game interested me, being a fan of mythology and hearing of a game being made that revolved around Pandora’s box was such a great idea….

Ok, so it’s a B game, the story really is shallow and the graphics leave a lot to desire, but Odin help me I got sucked into the game and actually finished it, there was something, and I don’t know what, but something drew me into the game enough to allow me to finish it and enjoy it.  Maybe it was all the creatures and the short messages you get about their mythology, or maybe it was the constant werewolf attacks…or maybe it’s because I have been reading the Anita Blake series and the game just went well with it.  Whatever it was, I did enjoy it and thankfully the game only took about 6 hours to finish.

So yes, this game is a B game and I wouldn’t recommend it to most, but if you like Mythology and you have a few hours to kill, give this one a rent, otherwise go ahead and skip this one, you aren’t missing much.

Since Ophilye was kind enough to start a good horror post, I decided I should also post a list of must play horror  games for 2008.  That is not to say these all came out in 2008, but they are good horror games to play even now.

1. Deadspace – An Original IP from EA and a hit!  A must play for this Halloween.

2. BIoshock – Something I have been playing a lot lately and truly a classic game, the big daddies alone make this game.

3. Condemed 2 – I never played the first one, but the second one is very good, and very dark.

4. Dead Rising – No horror game list is complete without zombies and Dead Rising gives you that in groves!

A short list for sure, but I didn’t want to repeat our list from last year.  Also keep in mind that both Left 3 Dead and Silent Hill 5 are coming out soon, they will also provide some seriously awesome game-play.