You shot 1153 pounds of meat

I told Dave I would write a blog post about Red Dead Redemption. I don't usually get worked up about unreleased video games, but something about the preview videos for RDR grabbed onto my brainstem strong enough for me to actually preorder it, which is something I hardly every do. Something about the footage of players riding through the high-poly-count southwest desert stimulated the same neurons responsible for my obsession with Fallout 3's wasteland, I suppose. Turns out that preordering was a smart move, since Amazon gave me $25 worth of kickbacks... thanks, Mister Bezos!

Anyway, I was all fired up to write down my thoughts on this game, but then I heard this Giant Bomb podcast and decided it would be a lot easier to make you go listen to that instead. I agree with pretty much everything said therein, which saves me a lot of typing.

I especially agree that the designers almost throw the whole world open for you to explore a little too soon... in fact, it was only from listening to the podcast that I realized I had skipped a huge part of the tutorial because I didn't visit the correct NPC before I went running off across the desert. In my several hours of playtime to date, I have barely made a dent in the main plot. That's because I've been too busy just riding my horse across the countryside, checking out the HDR-illuminated scenery and doing little random side quests. I'm probably missing all kinds of stuff, but it's still a lot of fun.

We were talking about this over low-quality Chinese food yesterday, and a pretty useful analogy was put forth: Remember playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II in third grade? Of course that game was a lot simpler than Red Dead, but it still had an end goal and a whole series of steps required to reach it... and all anyone ever remembers about it was how much fun it was to hunt buffalo. To me, RDR has the exact same thing going on: I'm sure I will eventually get around to making forward progress, but at the moment it's too much fun just messing around in the world. "Shoot coyotes and earn Master Hunter achievement" ranks pretty high up on my to-do list for Memorial Day weekend.

Come to think of it, not only is Red Dead a sandbox game, but when you are running around in the desert you are literally in a sandbox. Did I just blow your mind?!

Requiescat in Pace

If you put the Assassin's Creed 2 disc in your Xbox 360 and don't touch it for a while it plays a cinematic intro video that acts as sort of a trailer for the game. It shows Ezio sneaking into a masquerade in Venice and assassinating a rich dude in the midst of a crowd of people. It looks fantastic and gets you ready to play the game. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't look quite as good, even in cutscenes. Faces especially, looked a bit off in the actual game. But never mind that, this game is all about moving around the city undetected and dropping in for the kill.

This sequel picks and chooses elements from the first game to abandon or include. The excellent terrain traversal animations are still around. You just push the control stick in a direction and Ezio figures out how to get there for the most part. The same four or five types of tasks that you had to do over and over in the first game are gone. Because of this, I never got bored playing through the game. But the story missions that replace them aren't that impressive. I often found myself running off to kill a dude on the other side of town just because somebody told me to. The story wasn't really engaging enough for me to remember why I was doing this. I just liked traversing and killing.

Honestly, I waited too long between finishing the game and writing about it, but I have in my notes that there are "lots of new features, some work, some don't." None of the new techniques will hold you up. Meaning I didn't run into a situation where I wanted to stop playing because of some stupid unskippable task that made me mad.

One annoying thing that stuck around from the first game is that you walk by default. To run, you have to hold down the right trigger. Since I was running 90% of the time it was really annoying (and eventually painful) to have to hold it down all the time. Luckily I remembered my trick from the last game. I posted this on Twitter about it:
The only way to play Assassin's Creed 2: always running.

So I liked the game overall. I complained about the forgettable story earlier, but that's just the day to day missions. The whole story of Ezio losing his family, seeking revenge and looking for answers is sort of neat. Especially the ending.

Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2 is good. It got generally favorable reviews, and it's easy to see why. I kept playing longer than I meant to and I often played for long stretches at a time. It didn't keep track of hours for me, so maybe it was just a relatively short game, but I went through the single player very quickly. I played both it and the previous one on the 360 and got probably 70% of the available achievement points. I mention that because it illustrates how I played the game. I collected stuff.

I collected a lot of stuff. Not that I went out of my way tracking down every last hidden flashing thing to get 100% completion, but this game certainly strikes a chord with the loot collector type person. I often found myself picking through the fallen splicers' pockets while a battle was still going on. Or I'd be raiding all the cabinets without really making sure the room was safe to do so. This must have been an intentional decision on the part of the developers. You actually have to look down at dead enemies on the ground and push a button to collect their stuff. And they always have stuff. Occasionally you'll already be full of that type of ammo or whatever, but you never have to decide whether to pick up the new thing or keep your existing thing. Since there's no penalty for picking up everything, I almost would have preferred if you automatically picked up stuff as you walked over it, like lots of shooters do. Then maybe I would have spent more time devising devilish ways to dispatch deranged denizens of the deep instead of collecting crap (sorry, sentences are fun sometimes).

In the last game I was a bit schizophrenic with regards to Little Sisters. These are the young girls that help you along and collect genetic gunk from corpses. They're all about 9 (?) years old with identical brown hair and dresses. Anyway, I killed some and rescued some when the game gives you the binary choice. You are rewarded more if you pick a path and stay with it. So that's what I did in the second game for the Little Sisters. But you're also given a few chances in the game to either kill or spare some other story characters. The way they're presented isn't quite as black and white as the Little Sisters, so I ended up saving some, killing others. So I ended up getting the nice guy ending I think.

Some of the general sentiment about the game was that the original was a story masterpiece that stood on its own and the sequel was only made because they saw dollar signs. While I suppose that's partly true, the sequel never felt contrived and it gave me another chance to explore a beautiful and strange world again. I was happy to go back to Rapture.

The new addition this time around were the Big Sisters. A nice touch that fit in with the story well. But I had a lot of trouble with them on the Medium difficulty which was fine for everything in the game but that. Switching to Easy worked but I got bored with it as soon as I wasn't fighting them. So the difficulty is a bit uneven, maybe.

Once again I skipped the multiplayer portion and sent it back to GameFly pretty quickly. Although I was amused to get an e-mail from them saying I could 'keep Bioshock 2 for only $16!' while I was playing it. If I felt like getting into the multiplayer this would have been a steal. I see that Assassin's Creed 2 is on it's way next, so I'll be back with words about that eventually.

Wii and DS

The odds are pretty good that you or someone you know owns a Nintendo Wii or DS. These two systems are insanely popular. But to reach that large of an audience, they are in the hands of people who don't know about or even care about their full potential. How many of those Wii owners bought the system because they heard about this "bowling game" or "fitness board thing" and haven't done anything with them since? One study showed that only 54% of Wii systems have ever been connected to the internet. Since it's WiFi only, it might be a bit trickier to set up than just plugging in a cable. But once you get online, is there really much to do? You could buy old Nintendo games from the Wii Shop Channel or Wii Ware but then you have to deal with those stupid points. You could play games against other people. But without voice chat, it's sort of pointless. The only time I've tried to play MarioKart with friends we ended up using Xbox Live to be able to talk while playing.

And how many DS handhelds were bought to pet puppies or solve puzzles, only to be set on the shelf after the owners grew tired of those games? The DS is great, but other than some Brain Training games it can't seem to shake the stigma of being a kid's toy. What I'd really like to see is some Wii/DS integration. I think all they've managed so far is are demos of DS games that you can download from a Wii channel. The same sort of thing you can do from DS kiosks at stores and airports. No, I don't know what kind of integration would make sense. But I just think of all the people that have one of each and think there must be something that makes sense and would be fun.

So bring it on, Nintendo. Entertain me.

OMGsoCUTE!!

Little Big Planet seemed to be THE game to get a Playstation 3 for when it came out. The graphics, of course, were stunning. But it really showcases the connectivity of the box as well. Since I didn't play it until a year and a half after its release I had the fun of downloading and installing for almost 30 minutes before I could even play.

It's basically a different company's take on Mario. I'm sure it's much more than that, but I kept coming back to that feeling. Where Mario games have bright happy colors and simplistic levels, this has realistic graphics and sometimes somewhat dark story lines. It's not all run and jump. There are several "ride in this type of vehicle" segments that break up the familiar platforming. The hero's nature is really taken to heart. Your Sack Boy looks to be made of a tiny stuffed burlap sack and the physics keep reinforcing that. You can clutch onto soft materials or get catapulted across the level and land without a scratch like, well, a rag doll. You quickly start collecting costumes and accessories to make your sack person your very own. And this was the part that hooked my wife.

I went out and bought a second controller hoping that she'd play along with me. I had history on my side here, since she played through all of New Super Mario Bros. Wii with me. A similar thing happened here in that I was quickly banned from playing without her since she didn't want to miss out on collecting any of the OMGsoCUTE costume parts. The level progression and gradual sense of completion appealed to me where the collecting and cuteness appealed to her. After we were deep into this I asked if she wanted to jump in to NSMB Wii again, but I think the choice of Luigi/blue/yellow Toad just couldn't compare to the customization available here.

The co-op is very intuitive. It seemed very natural to figure things out as we went along. "You go down there and hit that switch while I hang on to the handle up here" sort of thing. We played a few user-created levels and there seemed to be a wide range of competence there as you'd expect. I didn't bother with any of the creation tools. Every time you start a new level you choose Play Online or Play by Ourselves. We played online a few times and for the most part the other players that joined our game were really helpful. I'm not sure if the game even supports voice chat, but without a headset we were forced to use text chat anyway. It's done well but it relegated all our conversation with other people to things like "sorry" or "thx good game."

So I'm happy to say we both had a blast with this game and were always looking forward to another chance to play. Now it's time for GameFly Roulette to see what comes next.