Deus ex

I got this yesterday for 360. Played for an hour or so.  It's incredibly difficult.

Red & Blue

Outland was an XBLA game that I picked up a while back and have been slowly making my way through. I finished it not long ago and thought I'd mention it on here since it was really good and as far as I can tell, hasn't gotten a ton of press. It has a really cool visual style and the sound design fits in really nicely with it. In fact, when I started thinking about the game to decide what I'd write, the "starting a new section of a level" sound played in my head. You hear that a lot. This game also got my wife's approval as far as sound goes. She said it was "soothing" and didn't mind being in the room while I played.

Basically it's a side scrolling platformer (the controls are really tight) where a huge part of the game is based on switching your character from red to blue and back again. When you're blue, blue bullets don't hurt you, likewise with red. And you have to be the opposite color of enemies in order to do any damage to them. The difficulty scales really well, starting at super easy and getting to be pretty tricky towards the end. It's not uncommon to be toggling colors in mid air to get through some bullets and kill an enemy of the opposite color. Fun stuff.

My only minor complaint are a couple of the boss battles. They can be fairly long and you have to memorize lots of patterns. So you end up fighting them multiple times in a row. Well, I did anyway. If you have a PS3 or Xbox, you probably ought to at least check out the demo. I think it's something like $10 or $15.

Little Big Planet 2

So this post has been a long time coming. I finally finished Little Big Planet 2. I'd say 98% or so was done co-op with my wife. But the last level which is entirely fighting the last boss, is a pain in the ass. We tried probably 10 times and it was incredibly frustrating. You could tell what you were supposed to do but the crappy, imprecise, and floaty controls often prevented you from doing it. I finally decided to just finish this part on my own and not subject her to this bullshit.

So after another 10 or 15 attempts that involved a lot of yelling and smacking the table in front of me, I finally finished it. The ending briefly trotted out all the characters you'd met along the way and went right to some silly voice over and music while the credits rolled. The first song was one I actually recognized, Sleepyhead by Passion Pit and it fit in with the rest of the music for the series. Although after all the great music from 1, I was sort of disappointed with the comparatively bland stuff from 2 other than this song.

The big new addition in this game are the more varied creation tools, which I never used directly, but got to experience second-hand since they allow you to play mini-games that vary greatly from the normal platforming. The instances of this in the main campaign did a great job of being immediately understandable. Often your Sack Thing is piloting some sort of vehicle and the mechanics approximate an old school videogame like Space Invaders or Breakout. Also, note that they always refer to your character as Sack Thing instead of Sackboy like the previous. Sure it makes it open to be either a boy or a girl and the character is pretty androgynous anyway, but it's sort of jarring when you're used to one way from the old game.

The story in this one is even weirder and disjointed than the first. You meet several odd characters along the way, one for each group of levels. None of them were very memorable compared to the first game. In fact, it feels like they spent all their time making the new game creation tools (which I didn't bother to use), did a bunch of drugs to make a weird half-assed story, removed the cutesy stuff and called it a day. All of this together makes it sound like I hated the game, which isn't accurate. There were just some frustrating things and I guess I was just expecting more from a sequel to a game that my wife and I loved to play.

The Old Man and The Kid

I mentioned that one of the XBLA games I've been playing was Bastion. At first I thought I was more taken with Outland, which I bought at about the same time, but Bastion is really growing on me. I guess that makes sense, it's a game that relies heavily on your desire to collect!, upgrade!, and replay! The replay part of is actually my favorite so far. I started a New Game + immediately after I finished it because you get to start over with all your weapons and upgrades. Also, you make a couple binary choices at the end of the story that I'm sort of curious to see the effects of the opposite choice. Also, since I spent a good chunk of the original playthrough feeling underpowered and confused on which weapons (there are a lot) to use, I was excited to give it another go with a more powerful character and the knowledge of what weapons and upgrades I wanted to move towards.

Oh right, what kind of game is this? It's basically a top-down hack and slash with some RPG elements. The art style looks more sprite based than 3D-heavy, but it looks great. The story is purposely left pretty vague. You never even learn the name of The Kid that you control. The Old Man is your constant companion. Well, his voice is anyway. Think of it as a gravelly Tom Waits sound that narrates your almost every move. The amount of lines that guy had to record must have been insane. He'll often make reference to the fact that you have full health, what weapons you have equipped and sometimes just references to stuff you're doing. My favorite was him pointing out that "the Kid's smashing every bush he sees like there'll be some sort of prize." Basically pointing out the stupid video gamey concept of something like that.

This game is rich with different ways to play it based on all the weapon and upgrade combinations and it's as good as everyone says.