Would ya look at that

Turns out I get an advanced look at the New Xbox Experience afterall. I guess they weren't done handing out betas to people. Yay me. I get to check it out tomorrow. I'll post my first impressions about it.

Review: Gears of War 2 - 9.5

Gears of War 2 brings the same game play elements from the first but adds new factors to keep you interested and coming back for more. You play as Marcus Fenix, leader of the Delta squad, six months after the events of the first Gears of War. We can see that the humans struggle against the Locust has gone from bad to worse. You must fight and gun your way through various different terrains in order to try and save the planet Earth from enslavement.

The biggest point that hit me with Gears of War 2 was that I actually enjoyed it a lot. What made this shocking to me was I quite disliked the first game. It should be noted that I only did about the beginning act on the first one, but that was all it took for me to decide I don’t need any more of this. On the other hand, Gears of War 2 started off big and kept me thinking about it and wanting to come back over and over to continue. It had a great beginning that, unlike its predecessor, got me intrigued.

The biggest difference you will probably notice about Gears of War 2 is its inclusion of a deeper plot. Along with this, you will find more emotional scenes tied to the characters. You start the game out knowing that there is a war going on, but you also are told of a side plot in which your teammate Dom is trying to find his captured wife Maria. Throughout the bloodshed you will ensue upon your enemies, you’ll keep being reminded of this extra story going on and begin to feel a connection to Dom. The game causes more emotional relationships with some of its other characters too, such as Tai. This is such a good aspect to the game because unlike the first one, you have more to think about. The first game had you going through it and just killing anything, your objective was clear. Gears of War 2 has you doing the same, but adds in more reasons for you to fight through the Locust army. To some this may seems as almost a letdown or unnecessary part to the game considering it’s so different to the first. Though it actually helps the game quite a bit by connecting us to the characters and trying to make us realise how awful our enemies really are. Overall, it makes the game more engaging and a generally better experience.

The graphics in Gears of War 2 are also incredible. You can just see how much detail Epic Games put in through all the subtle aspects like Tai’s facial tattoo or Marcus’s grotesque face scar. Also the color works so well considering much of the last game was manly shades of grey. Underground you will find nicely glowing mushrooms in fluorescent greens and blue, while the fire and blood have a vibrant and sharp red or orange to them. Gears of War 2’s graphics are definitely top notch and one of the best to date on the system.

Besides the absorbing storyline, the next best thing about Gears of War 2 is its online multiplayer game modes. The newest addition to the Gears of War franchise, online wise, is Horde mode. This was by far my favourite part of the game to play and was actually sad when I had finally completed it. In Horde mode you and up to four other teammates take on horde after horde –or wave after wave - of enemies. Each wave gets harder and harder because the enemies swarm in bigger quantities and their stats begin to increase. You may find that on the first wave the enemy only takes fifty bullets to kill, though on the tenth wave you can see he takes 200. What makes this mode so fun to play is you actually NEED to work as a team to get through it. If anyone decides to hang by themselves and take on some of the Locusts solo, you can bet that he or she is going to die sooner or later. This makes you need to strategize and figure out the best spot on the map to set up a ‘base’ in which you fight off all the monsters from. By far this was an incredible addition to the various online modes offered.

The other online modes also add huge variety to the game in ways you choose to play it. There are the standard warfare modes where your goal is to kill everyone and be the last one standing. Apart from that is modes like Annex in which your team needs to stay in a certain spot for as long as you can before your opponents come and kill you in order to claim it. They also have a capture the flag like game in which the flag is actually a human with a shotgun, so he’ll try to fight you off before you can grab him and drag him around. Overall the multiplayer adds much more diversity to the style of game play you’ll need to use in order to win these games. Just shooting blindly won’t always work for you.

Though the online multiplayer is a bit of a double edged sword. You will find a lot of the time it will be very hard to get into a game; the matchmaking is really bad. The problem is that it takes so long to find you a full team and then find another full team to play against. There were times I had to wait around five minutes from the time I hit “Find Team” to actually getting one. To make things worse, when I got fed up with waiting to get in a game and decided to cancel it, it actually took a good ten to fifteen seconds at times to cancel the searching. This is a real let down considering the online play is so damn fun, luckily it only happens about half the time.

The only other downfall Gears of War 2 has is a collection of technical bugs here and there. I can’t count how many times I saw either a team mate or an enemy appear as if they were floating a few inches off the ground. The other bug I saw happen the most was when someone was knocked back by something. For example, when you’re hit with a smoke grenade (a grenade used to cause a cloud of smoke around the area) your player will be sent flying to the ground due to the shock. Most of the time when my character was hit, I would either slide across the ground like there was no friction at all or my body would twitch consistently until long after I had died.

The achievements in Gears of War 2 are also very well laid out. Of course they have the certain ones for going through the story and beating it. They also have ones for going through a number of chapters in co-op play. The best ones though are the ones that require you to do certain things with your opponents. For example, in one, you must use a downed (crawling) enemy as a meat shield ten times. This forces you to focus on shooting your enemies legs so as to cripple them instead of kill them, then you’re free to grab them. There is also the one for having to kill a down enemy eleven different ways, which causes you to always keep in mind which weapons you should be holding onto for just such an occasion. Then there are the multiplayer ones that are spread out evenly through all the forms of it.

The replay value in this game is through the roof. Once going through all five acts of the story mode on any difficulty level you unlock the Insane level (hardest). That alone gives you four different levels to play the campaign on, as well as the option to play through any of this with someone in co-op. And of course there are all the different kinds of multiplayer options to choose from. Even if you just want to play online and work on your rank you’ll have reason to come back, especially since it shows gameplay level beside your gamertag when online (which is totally awesome).

Overall Gears of War 2 does a great job of continuing the series, especially since fixing the issues the first one had. The game starts off big and continues strongly throughout. It does a great job of keeping the player interested with not only the gorgeous graphics but the storylines weaving through it. The campaign mode also feels like a great length and even when it’s done you will always have the online to go play, if you can get past the annoying wait times it requires. This game does a good job of making sure you will enjoy your time with it and always want to come back for more.

Overall: 9.5/10

Review: Wii Music - 4

Wii Music combines over sixty instruments and four different game modes for you to wave your wii-motes at until you’re bored. The four modes open to you are Lessons, Jam, Videos and Games. At first glance this seems like you’re getting your money’s worth, but in the end you’ll just be doing the same arm movements to the beat of every song.

The game play revolving around Wii Music is all about making you feel like you’re in a band. It does a good job of recreating the mass amount of instruments you’ll get to play such as a violin, drums, guitar or even bark like a dog; though, each will have you just waving your arms or pressing buttons in no set order. Unfortunately, that’s all there is to the game.

Once starting up the game you will be instructed on how to work some of the most basic instruments. As every other type of instrument to play works off the same mechanics, this is a good way to make sure you know how to play anything in the game.

The game has four game play modes that are all unlocked for you from the get go. The most basic of these is Jam which is like a ‘quick play’ mode. In Jam you get three choices, Instrument Improv, Quick Jam and Custom Jam. Instrument Improv has you picking one of the available instruments and just messing around on it. After a few seconds ‘Tutes’ (computer players) will join you until you have a full band. It does a good job of making you feel like, all together, you’re making music since the computer players will play their instruments at the same pace you are. This won’t last for long though as you don’t have any task or goal to this besides just play until you’re done. Quick Jam is exactly what it sounds like; you get set up with a random instrument and song and go right into it. Custom Jam is similar except you get to choose which instrument you want and which ones you want the Tutes to be playing along with you.

The next mode is Lessons which is just what it sounds like, tutorials. It contains the lesson you had to go through at the beginning and another for harder skills.

The third mode is Games, which I personally found to be the best of the four choices since it contained the most in terms of varying game play elements. In this you can choose Mii Maestro, Handbell Harmony or Pitch Perfect. Mii Maestro is the least enjoyable of the three. You get to be a conductor. This includes waving your wii-mote up and down as the virtual Mii band plays along at your speed. The difficulty here goes up by the addition of a percentage at the end. You get a higher (better) percent if you played at the correct speed and hit A or B to make the band play a special note at the right times. The downfall here is that there is nothing to tell you when to play these notes or the correct speed to go at. You have to guess whether you’re going at the right speed or not; and finding out when there are slow parts can be impossible if you have never heard the song before. Handbell Harmony was my personal favourite part of the game by itself. It’s the closest to a average rhythm based game where you can see the notes coming across and what the correct time to swing your “bell” is. Each song is made up of eight different bell sounds and you control two of them. When you see your color of bell coming, you either swing the numchuck or the wii-mote in time with the song to play it properly. To make it harder, the game throws in special notes that make you have to hold a button down while swinging to hit the note. However, this mode is generally too easy and since you only control two of the eight bells, there will be times where you’re either just the back beat or you might not even play that often because you might be an uncommon bell pitch. Pitch Perfect is small mini game that is taken a bit too far. You get eight levels of difficulty, fittingly titled Level 1 though 8. In this game you need to match tones and pitches by singing or playing Mii’s to one another. You will encounter things like “match the Mii that has the same pitch as the speaker” which will require you to listen to each Mii sing and then select one. This mode gets boring quickly and you won’t enjoy every minute of the eight levels if you feel the need to go through them all.

Videos is the final mode. This is more of a music video like option where you can watch any of the past performances you have saved. In modes like Custom Jam, you’re able to save the performance you just did in order to watch it later here. This is also where the online aspect of Wii Music comes in for it allows you to share your video with friends who own the game. The downfall to this is it’s just for watching. Most people would rather go and play that song than sit there and watch their Mii(s) play it by themselves(s).

The graphics in the game are fine but you shouldn’t expect them to be bad since we’re dealing with almost Lego like detail for the Miis. Apart from that everything is just a video played behind your own personal character so you don’t control too much of it.

The biggest thing of course in Wii Music would have to be its library of songs. The game contains over thirty songs that range from Happy Birthday To You all the way to Material Girl by Madonna. Nintendo has even thrown in some of its own songs like F-Zero’s Mute City Theme and The Legend of Zelda Theme. The Nintendo songs are personally my favourite to play and I had the most fun with them. The majority of these songs are fun to play, especially since you can customize the instruments playing them to themes like “Galaxy” which makes everything sound all techno like. However the overall selection of music probably isn’t what most people really want to hear/play. The bottom line is does anyone really want to play O Christmas Tree that badly?

The worst part of Wii Music is that it has no replay value. Any replay value you will find will just be because you most likely didn’t play it for very long at your last gaming session. The basic game play element is so linear that you won’t find much of a need to continue with it for too long. After you get the just of how every instruments mimics a good portion of the others, there’s nothing really new to experience.

Unlike most music rhythm games, there’s no “note chart” that is scrolling across the screen. You’re left to play the notes in whatever way you like. Though it does try to mix things up a bit, for example, hold the A button down when swinging to hit the drum so you make a different noise. These don’t really have much of an impact to the game as it plays the note it has to in order to complete the song properly. This means that if you’re not playing outside the original song chart, no matter what special notes you’re playing, they won’t sound different. This gives you the feeling that you don’t actually control too much.

Overall, Wii Music feels more like a full priced mini game collection that had a lot of work put it in; despite the fact that this work didn’t help make it a game worth the money you’ll put down. The repetitive game play will make you wish for more and the short extra modes will only be fun for an hour at tops. The game does offer four modes, but only two of them let you actually play parts of the game. And the game play you’ll be faced with is either vertical arm waves, or hitting the two buttons when you think it would be a good time. The game is just too linear.

It should be noted that Wii Music can be played with the Balance Board for use with the in game drums. This allows you to not only swing your arms to hit the notes, but tap your feet for uses such as a foot pedal. I however didn’t have access to a Balance Board and was unable to test out this factor.

Overall: 4/10

Tales of Symphonia 2: Dawm of the New World Intro Movie

God I can't wait for this now!

Chunk some bullets

So on Wednesday, along with Wii Music, I also received a review copy of Gears of War 2. Lucky for me, I don't have to review it. Many of you probably know that I didn't like the first Gears and quite after the first two acts (or whatever it had). The second is different for me, I'm actually feeling an urge to go over and play a few more minutes before I'm off to start my day. I had planned to make up a review for this site alone but then I was informed of another game I will be recieving this weekend: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows for the PS2. So yes I'll be lugging out my PS2 from the closet this week. This game has come as a complete surprise sine I originally hadn't asked for it, but it's a game and it's Spiderman so I'm glad to have it.

This weekend will consist of Wii Music wrap ups/review. Play more Gears 2, if you pick it up tonight - and I'm sure many of you will - we should get some multiplayer on, Horde mode is very fun! I'll definitly get my first impressions of it up soon and if I don't do a review due to time, I'll just make a huge point form post about it. And Spiderman. Woah lots of games!

Wii Music first impressions

So it's pretty dumb.

• I don't think there's enough to do, especially if you're planning to sit down for an hour or so of play.
• The difficulty goes from very easy to some way hard parts; though, I would imagine it wouldn't take to long to master these.
• Playing the instruments isn't really that fun, maybe it's cause I'm a "core gamer" though.
• Playing the Zelda theme was fun.
• Co-op is either just as lame or very hard.
• Nothing really there to unlock except harder tasks, not enough songs to unlock per game play mode.
• Does anyone really want to play 'O Christmas Tree' that badly?
  

100th post!

So Wii Music should be arriving at my door step in the next couple days. Look forward to my thoughts on that because I'm sure I'll have choice words for it.

Also now you can find this blog site by searching the name on Google.