The Rusted Musket

The last two days I’ve been hopelessly addicted to EA’s free new online shooter called Battlefield Heroes.  The art direction is really similar to Team Fortress 2’s cartoonish animation but game play wise it remains a battlefield game at heart.  To start you sign up, download, choose a faction (loosely based on either Axis or Allies) and then basically hit play.  Before you start capturing flags though you can dress your character up in all kinds of funny team centric styled outfits. Often, I’ll start laughing when I see the guys outfit that killed me in my death cam!  Once you capture enough flags and frag enough dudes you’ll rank up and get to choose what skill you want to boost with your precious skill points earned after every few levels.  Once again, BF Heroes is free but there are these things called micro transactions that you can do were you basically pay real world money to get game world money used for purchasing cooler outfits and accessories offered ingame.  Thus far I’ve been able to deny myself the shiny eye monocle I want for $1.50.  All in all Battlefield Heroes is a great, funny, not to be taken too seriously little shooter that’s worth looking into.  A little tip though, if you end up spending some real world money dressing up your Hero like a man Barbie just don’t tell anyone:)

Image Credit: shfts.com

Mechwarrior is making a comeback!  This snippit of gaming news certainly fills the mech sized hole in my heart!!  Hopefully the graphics are sick, the missions cool, and the story as Mechwarrian as ever.

Image courtesy ign.com

For me Xbox 360’s Mass Effect proved to be a game with long distance legs, I’ve got saves going back to December 2007.  So, fast forward to May 2009 and I’m basically on my fourth play through of the game and here are my thoughts for how to make Mass Effect 2 even cooler than its little brother.

1. The Mako – They could’ve done so much more with this land rover.  It is completely boring and lame in its current state.  All you get is machine gun, big gun, and a small booster lift.  Where are the invisibility shields, gun upgrades, suspension adapters, camo paint jobs, different weapon systems, different scan upgrades, so on and so on?  Also, I hate how the turret turns to the direction your facing when you enter the Mako from ground level not to mention the driving scheme which really sucks.  I’d favor the BF:BC style vehicle control any day over the current lameness.

2.  This game jitters all over the place – The frame rate is abysmal in game and even during the rolling end credits. Jaggies and slowdowns are unacceptable.  This actually may be showcasing the Xbox 360’s weaksaucedness.

3.  For God’s sake don’t fear being a 2 disc game – Word is that the Devs were really surprised they fit all the game on one disc.  Good for them, but we know this means they cut corners.  I’d gladly swap a disc in and out if it was the only thing keeping me from all the other good ideas, textures, and upgrades they had to leave out.

Thus ends my vitriolic comments for Mass Effect.  In no way does this mean the game stunk, matter of fact it rocked and the story was freakin awesome!  So do yourself a favor and go buy it cheap from someone!

It appears Diamond Jim can’t get enough money from the casino’s these days to pay for all his big government plans and government employees so now he has to tax my downloadable content starting October 1st 2009.  Good ole progressive Wisconsin, taxing it’s way to a better tomorrow.

Videogamer.com has compiled a very good list of last years 10 best games.  I’ve spent many an hour with quite a few of the excellent titles mentioned in the video and I’m tempted to run out and get the ones I haven’t…

I bought the limited edition Fallout 3 that came with the lunchbox, the bobblehead, and the behind the scenes DVD exclusive. I bought Fallout 3 because I was excited for a post apocalyptic RPG shooter blend, not because I was familiar with Fallout 1 and 2. And then I played the game and it was amazing, the vault was spectacular and when I left the vaults safety I felt awestruck by the wastelands chaotic majesty. And then, what felt like seconds later, I beat the game and was totally dumbstruck. I thought I was only half way through the game! The story had just started rolling and I’d only spent about 6 hours on the main quest. I wish I would’ve known to make a hard save before telling one of the NPC’s that I was “ready to go” whereby kicking off the final mission. At the end of this last mission I died, not in the “crap I just died” kinda way, I died because the game killed me. I reloaded, I died again, I reloaded and tried to get out of that horrible chamber of endgameness, but just like the Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. You must end the game, and your character must die. It occurred to me at this point that no matter how much I wanted it, there would be no coming back to the world of Fallout 3 after beating the main quest for this hero, even if the hero had only 40% of the side quests done. And the real kicker is the final end chamber battle and climax is so underwhelming you hardly believe it’s the same game. Truth be told, the blundering main storyline isn’t Fallout 3’s only flaw, the graphics kinda suck, the lack of different skins for special weapons is lame, and you can’t create and custom name anything a la Oblivion. Really, the neatest thing about Fallout 3 are the side quests, these are phenomenal triumphs of apocalyptic awesomeness, and worth playing.

All in all I feel so horrible about the way this game ended I’m tempted to sell Fallout 3 on Ebay while I can still get a solid $40 for it. I think I’ll keep the lunchbox and bobblehead though:)

Last night when I logged on I got the new 360 dashboard update. This wasn’t a surprise to me, I’ve been waiting for this to drop for months now. It’s awesome, the first thing you’re prompted to do is create an avatar. My avatar is amazing, it represents a cooler me, but what is even more amazing is the fact that my wife sat on the couch watching the entire process. She even said “I could get into this kinda thing”, the reader must understand that my wife does not do anything video game related, her saying that was a big deal! One of the most important features to me is the ability to load my games onto the hard drive. Lets be honest, the only time the 360 screws up is when the dvd drive conks out whereby screwing up the game with a lethal reboot crash text of “clean the disc because your stupid dvd drive is crap”. the hard drive gets rid of this. I also know the transfer rates are faster from the hard drive than from the dvd drive, this could boost performance in my opinion. Lastly, Netflix on 360 = awesome! I definitely plan on having the entire Netflix library available to me whenever I want.

My final thoughts are that the new dashboard is a sound design full of pretty colors, funny avatars, and fantastic features of which I’ve only just nicked the surface of.