Halo 4, continued

This weekend I had planned on replaying Zelda, Wind Waker until I realized that I didn't have the disc. I must have loaned it to somebody and forgot about it. I'm looking at you, Craig.

But since that fell through, I figured I'd make use of my free month of Xbox Live Gold with some Spartan Ops (a Halo 4 play mode). It's cooperative or solo, but I've been playing the first 5 episodes solo. It's a weird mix of the old Firefight and competitive multiplayer. By that I mean you have tons of dudes you have to kill, but they stay dead every time you respawn. Which is different than the campaign. So sometimes I just plan on getting killed 5 or 6 times in a row when a ton of dudes all come out at once in a big open area. As long as I take down one or two before I die, I don't feel so bad. I don't know though, maybe I'm playing it wrong?

Anyway, I thought I'd post about it as I wait for episodes 6-10 to download (36% complete). Oh, that's another thing, this game is really chewing up my limited hard drive space. I'm still using a 20 gig version and just being careful about what I keep around. I typically have about 7 gigs free, just enough to install a game if I know I'll be playing it a lot. But this has had two separate installs of about 2 gigs a piece. And I never know what stuff will run well on the 16 GB USB memory stick I have stuck in there. Basically, I"m just trying to limp along on this hardware until the new stuff comes out in the fall.

Winter game catch up

Almost 3 months since my last post. A new Dave Record! I think. I don't feel like looking it up. Anyway, I've played a few games but only one or two have really stood out.

I picked up Halo 4 and immediately realized that I'm not very good at Halo. This is without ever even connecting to Xbox Live to play other humans. This is just getting destroyed over and over by the computer. So I dropped it down to Normal difficulty from Heroic and carried on. I wouldn't have said I loved it at the time. Not nearly as much as I loved Halo 3. But I apparently loved it enough to play through it again on Heroic once I finished. So maybe it gets a solid B overall. I still need to try Spartan Ops at some point. It sounds like it's sort of a single/multiplayer hybrid. I suppose I could stomach that.

And for something completely different that grabbed a hold of me for a week or two: 10000000. A silly little iOS game that's a combination dungeon runner and frantic match 3 puzzler. All of this in 8-bit throwback graphics (even more so if you play the iPhone version at double resolution on an iPad like I did). It sort of reminded me of the fantastic Henry Hatsworth game which had you sliding blocks around on the lower screen and platforming on the top screen. 10000000 solely has you sliding blocks, but you need to match different things depending on what's going on up near the top of the screen. It's called 10 million since that's the number on the dungeon wall where your guy starts out that says "Freedom: 10000000." That's it, that's your whole motivation. Get 10 million points and your guy goes free. You upgrade your sword, etc. in an attempt to get more points faster. Listen, I can't fully explain why I liked it, but it's probably worth your time.

I was about to wrap this up when I remembered that I made my way through another one in it's entirety, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. That's what happens when you don't write for so long. You forget about games that you loved. Look, I can't really do this game justice. I liked the strategy of plotting out my moves with no time constraint. I also liked the slow leveling up, RPG-style. I also had to get this game out of my house as soon as I could since it sort of took over my life. As soon as I finished I considered playing it again on a harder difficulty. But that seemed like crazy talk and I took it back to Matt the next day.