My Top Games of 2011
So this year I decided not to do a game of the year because well I’m not a huge fan of that concept to be frank. I’ve decided this year to do my favourite games of 2011 and some honorable mentions. To be up front I haven’t played every single game that came out in Q4 this year. There isn’t enough time to play every single game yet afford to buy all those games.
My top games of 2011
1. Batman: Arkham City – Who doesn’t like Bruce Wayne. Arkham City is basically Arkham Horror but with the ability to roam the streets of Gothom and experience
the open world in your quest to find a cure and to stop The Joker and Hugo Strange. Along the way if you bought the game new or bought the DLC you’ll get to enjoy a few missions as Catwoman there fun but not necessary in order to enjoy the overall game. Rocksteady refined the fighting mechanics and brawling couldn’t be easier and more fun. The story was very well told the various sub plots always kept me wanting to play. The challenge rooms are back and been updated. How many bad guys can you kill and how well can you use stealth. The real fun happens when you start new game plus mode where you start a new game but carry over all upgrades, gadgets you earned through the first play through and face tougher enemies. Overall I had a ton of fun, didn’t experience many issue with game and enjoyed a well written extremely polished game.
2. Gears of War 3 – This was my most anticipated game of the calendar year. It’s no secret that my love for this franchise and characters is out of this world.
Considering that this was the third game in the franchise. There were a lot of questions that needed to be answered in game and Karen Travis did an
outstanding job putting the story together. We found out where Chairman Prescott went, what happened to Adam Fenix and mostly importantly in my eyes the truth
about the Locust and why the E-Day happened. There was some new weapons in this installment The One Shot and Sawed off Shotgun and the roadie run, cover mechanics
where polished. The storyline was filled with up’s and down’s and cheers of joy and tears of sorrow throughout the game. The end of Act 3 without spoiling it
was one of the sadness moment’s I’ve had in a game and generally brought a tear to my eye, well more than a tear to be honest. I felt connected and joyful that
Delta squad finished what they had set out to do 6 years ago. Horde mode was refined and had added a tower defense element to it which is an unique addition that
makes the player think about what defenses to buy and what to upgrade in order to survive against the Locust. Any Gears fan knows how bad the multiplayer
was in Gears 2. Epic couldn’t just get it right in that game. Epic set out from the beginning to ensure this didn’t happen this time and it didn’t. Gears 3 moved
from player hosted to matches to dedicated servers, no more host advantage with the shotgun!. It’s Gears competitive multiplayer without issues which really
tickles my fancy. Also a good fun edition was Beast mode which allows you to play as the Locust in Horde mode. It’s genuinely a lot of fun to tickler and run
around and cause havoc!.
3: Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception – Another 3rd game in the franchise coming out this year and having to live up to the expectation’s set up by Uncharted 2: Among
Thieves is a really tall order and Naughty Dog was up to the challenge but didn’t deliver on exceeding those expectations. I’m not saying Uncharted 3 was a bad game at all, I’m just saying it wasn’t as good as Uncharted 2. Uncharted 3 started off really slowly for me and didn’t pick up until we hit the ship yard at that point I was questioning why we were in a ship yard and the relevance of these chapters were to the story. I got really hooked into the game once we were at the airport the action picked up, I was engrossed into the story. One of my biggest complaints about this game was the shooting mechanics they were horrid!. There was a patch to address these concerns but I was already 2/3rd’s through the game and I wasn’t completely convinced the patch had made a difference. I really enjoyed how Uncharted 3 ended which was for once wasn’t a boss battle. When Alana and Drake left together holding hands in Uncharted 3 I felt satisfied. I haven’t gotten
much time to sink into Uncharted 3 multiplayer but I have dug in and finished all the co-op missions with my dysfunctional guest writer DartAlbertIII (Scott). I
hope Naughty Dog continues and supports this mode and also looks at ways to incorporate more puzzles into the mix and stay true to the Uncharted franchise.
There were many other great games in 2011 and some titles worth mentioning are Resistance 3, Forza Motorsport 4, Killzone 3, Assassins Creed: Revelations, Alice: Madness Returns, F1 2011, Saints Row 3,Kinect Sports Season 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
read moreGears of War 3: General RAAM Shadow Expansion
RAAM’s Shadow Expansion
The third piece of downloadable content for Gears of War 3 is the first single player add on content available. It costs 1200 MS points or it’s free if you’ve purchased a season pass. I was able to beat the DLC in just over 2 hours.
The DLC takes place just after Emergence Day (E-Day) as Zelta squad is on a missin to evacuate the city and protect it from the Locust Kyrllstorm that is starting to blanket IIima City.. Yeah, you heard me no Delta Squad in these chapters. Zelta squad consists of Michael Barrick, Lt. Minh Young Kim, Tai Kaliso and Alicia Valera. There are no mechanics to speak of but several weapons found in Gears 3 make an appearance like the sawed off shotgun (still way over powered in my opinion). There are several cameo appearances along the way from various Gears that we’ve meet over the life of the franchise. It also reveals the story and introduction of Jace.
The interesting piece in this act is that you get to do something that you’ve never done in any other Gears game, play as the Locust. You can control and be General RAAM. There’s no dropping in cover, no roadie run and no dodging the Gears attacks. There isn’t really much of a challenge being RAAM you feel like your a god walking through the streets steam rolling people. RAAM has two attacks one with iconic knife which allows you to run at people, stab them and slightly places them into the air. The second attacks is he can fling Kryll at any target and watch them die instantly.
For you Gears multiplayer or horde players don’t worry Epic hasn’t forgotten about you. This DLC also comes with the chocolate weapon set, 250 worth of achievements, 6 new multiplayer characters including General RAAM, Theron Elite Commando, ALicia Valera, Lt. Minh Young Kim, Tai Kaliso and Michael Barrick.
If you have a seasons pass or your dying to play more Gears of War you should definitely shell out the 1200 Microsoft points and pick this up. There’s an interesting story to be told and well haven’t we all wanted to play as RAAM at some point? you can satisfy that itch once and for all.
read moreForza 4 Motorsport Review
For gear head’s there are two thing’s that they love racing and car show’s. Forza 4 Motorsport open’s up
with the BBC’s Top Gear host Jermey Clark talking about how this game is for car enthusiast’s and not people
who are concerned with how many miles to the gallon a car gets and how environmentally friendly a car is. This is because
we don’t care! we want the raw power, we want to hear the noise of the engines screeching as we take that corner a
little fast and most importantly we want to feel a live.
Players will notice a quicker push to level 50, which was the maximum level in Forza 3 that’s gone now. In Forza 4 the maxiumum
level is 150 to reward those die hard Forza fan’s. As I write this I’m already in the mid 40′s and the fact that I’m now given
a choice of car’s as a reward time I level is fantastic. I really enjoy the fact that I get to choose my reward. After hitting level 50
the car rewards are gone and replaced with credit bounus’s ranging from 100k to 350k. Car manufactuer affinity rewards you to being
loyal to your favorite car manufactuer. Love Ferrari? only drive Ferrari? leveling your car manufactuering affinity gives you bounuses
like free parts, badges and titles for your player card.
You’ll notice in the early stages that the AI is quite different then in Forza 3. In Forza 3 they removed power from the
AI to make slower on easier difficulties. This isn’t the case in Forza 4 what they do is reduce there confidence when there
in corners. What this does it makes the AI brake earlier into corners which is where you as the player can out break them and
slip in front of them. The moment the AI it’s the apex in the corner they will be flat out regardless of the difficulty level.
The key to beating them on the straight’s is to block them down the straights. What I’ve found so far is that this is producing
closer, better wheel to wheel racing and I’ve actually lost a few races to the AI. This is a great improvement as generally there
really isn’t much of a contest from the AI.
The team over at Turn 10 partnered with Pirelli tires with new data which mean’s the tires in Forza 4 behave exactly as they
tests indicate on real tracks on the real cars. Hardcore racer’s will notice that car’s behave a bit different and that’s because
Turn 10 made some changes to their steering model, let’s be real not all track’s are smooth and are there some bumps along the way, so
expect to see a bit of track bumpiness as well. These changes truly impact the way the car’s handle very different from Forza 3 and
for me make it a bit harder to handle with most of the assist’s turn offed.
One of my favorite little features to Forza that is completely seperate from the overall in game experience is the ability
to navigate the menu’s using my voice and the power of Kinect. When I first discovered this I played around about 5 minutes going
Xbox, My Gargage. Simple use of Kinect but so very convienent.
Turn 10 has also gone a head to implement the ability for racers to drive with there arms. Gas and Braking are controlled by
the game for the gamer and all the racer need’s to do is steer using there arms. I’m not a huge fan of this to be honest and
this is suppose to be a sim racer and well this portion of it isn’t but I understand that it’s trying to get the family together. I
appreciate that but would rather they hadn’t.
Autovista is a new feature that integrates Kinect into the Forza experience. Imagine your own personal automotive showroom
that allows you to fully explore supercars like the Ferrari 458 Italia, Lexus LF-A, 1993 McLaren F1, 2008 Lamborghini Reventon
the 2006 Koenigsegg CCX. With Kinect this allows the player to walk around the car, open doors, sit in the car, turn the engine
on and most importantly hear what gear head Jeremy Clark has to say about these cars. This is a really cool feature but it’s not
available on all cars.
So should you buy Forza 4? that’s the question and since it’s notably the best in the franchise you should. The visual upgrade isn’t
Significant but the changes to the physicis, AI and community are sure to make this game worth your dollars.
Gears of War 3: RAAM’s Shadow Game add-on
Today, Microsoft and Epic Games announced “RAAM’s Shadow,” the new campaign experience for the award-winning blockbuster, “Gears of War 3.” Starring a cast of characters both new and eerily familiar to the series, “RAAM’s Shadow” will deliver more than three hours of gameplay set in a storyline that precedes the events of the first “Gears of War,” as well as six new multiplayer characters, the Chocolate Weapon Set and an additional 250 Gamerscore. “RAAM’s Shadow” will launch Dec. 13 for 1,200 Microsoft Points on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, marking the second major game add-on for this year’s critically-acclaimed blockbuster, “Gears of War 3.”
read moreGames of the Year
2010 was a year of many great games like Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Civilization 5, StarCraft 2, Grand Turismo 5, and Call of Duty Black Ops to name a few. With a pretty darn good year in video games how could I possibly pick a game of the year? The simple answer is I couldn’t. When I sat down to think about the year in review 2 titles came to my head Mass Effect 2 and Grand Turismo 5. Both games brought me many hours of joy and in the case of GT5 continue to do so.
But before I dive into why I choose GT5 and Mass Effect 2 I wanted to take this time to try and understand how we come to the conclusion on criteria is used for game of the year. What makes a game worthy? is it the most polished, most complete package? is it the game that we had the most fun with, is it the game that left us with the most awe dropping moments?
For me I sit down and thought of 2010 and instantly thought of Mass Effect 2′s opening scene where the Normandy is attacked and my living rumbled by noise of a battle of two ships. I was blown away and knew I was in for a very good ride. I sat down after worked and played for about 5 hours. I couldn’t put the game down but knew I had too. Bioware did a great job in allowing the decisions I made in Mass Effect to be carried forwarded and ultimately help shape some of Mass Effect 2. This was an evolution in the gaming industry in 2010 for myself and I sincerely hope Bioware takes this a step further in Mass Effect 3. I’m going to get into some spoilers here so stop reading the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t played Mass Effect 2. The plot generally involves the Illusive Man bank rolling Commander Sheppard’s operation. Sheppard travel’s around the universe recruiting individuals than goes out to ensure he has their loyalty by doing specific missions for those characters. They ultimately find the collector base and Sheppard needs to decide to destroy or preserved the Collector base. I sat there for almost a half an hour weighting the pro’s and con’s of each decision before ultimately coming to the conclusion that the Collectors need to be destroyed. Mass Effect 2 had me on the edge of my seat for most of the game but for when I was bored out of my mind mineral hunting.
After 6 years of development, a delayed launch and finally a very low profile launch of Sony’s biggest title of the year Gran Turismo 5 failed to live up to a lot of peoples expectations of perfection. This game is far from perfect, from it’s horrible UI, unlocking of damage, and confusing online lobby system when you get down and dirty and look past these faults this is a simulation racing game at it’s finest. Buying, racing and tuning car’s has been a blast. I just enjoy it, no gimmickie rewinds or anything, just pure racing if you screw up it’s your fault. The game has been out over a month and we’ve already seen 3 huge patches to the game. To me this means continued support as we wait 12 year’s (I’m only joking) for the next Grand Turismo game.
For these reasons I listed above I must co-name Mass Effect 2 and Grand Turismo 5 my games of the year.
Dj Hero 2 Review
wiki wiki wiki what! Scratch that, hold up, the batteries in my turn table died. That’s right I’m here to review DJ Hero 2. As you may remember just under a year ago Dj Hero was launched and I reviewed it here and I loved it because of the music. Nothing has changed this time around. The music is kick ass and there is already downloadable content on the market place. There is no secret that the DJ Hero franchise is my music genre game choice.
The track list in DJ Hero 2 is awesome and aims to attract and branch out to reach a different type of audience. Sure, Lady Gaga, Pitbull, Rhianna and Janet Jackson are stars but they’re not my thing. The first game featured a ton of Jay Z and Eminem and they don’t have many tracks in this game, however, my favorite tracks so far have been Eminems “Not Afraid” and Lil Wayne feat. Static Major “Lollipop.”
When I first played Guitar Hero 2 it was all about the music and that’s evident here in Dj Hero 2 as there is no world tour and story modes. Empire mode is where you begin DJ’ing house parties and you can make it all the way to an international sensation. The issue with this approach is that I never felt like I was progressing my career at all. Another problem is that all the characters are pre-defined and sometimes you get replaced a real life DJ. I can use my Avatar in the game but why they did not go the extra mile to incorporate that piece of functionality into the single player is beyond me. Along the way you have to battle fictional dj’s as well as David Guetta and Tiesto, but it never felt like it was a real challenge against these real life stars.
Once you’re done unlocking all 83 songs for quick play mode set up some play lists, rack up the high scores, and challenge your friends to beat it. Alsok from the main menu you can enable party mode which will randomly play songs so you can sit back and enjoy the remixes. The only downside to this mode is all the song selection is randomized.
One of the main complaints of the original DJ hero was that as the DJ you had no control of the mash ups. In each mash up there are freestyle sections where you can control the crossfading, scratching and trigger samples as you like. The best implemenation of this is crossfading where you can choose to play either track A or track B or mash up the two tracks how you like it. This is one of the best parts of the game for me, I wish I had more control of the mash ups. trigger samples are hard to keep in tempo with the song and scratching is fun but doesn’t sound as good as the recorded scratches.
DJ Hero allowed players to sync up a microphone and give shouts over the music, this has been taken a step further in DJ Hero 2 and allows players to sing along to the songs. Since the songs are mashed up this can make singing along to your favorite song very impossible since the lyrics to another song could pop up at any moment. I personally would have been happy with this portion of the game not being included.
The two-player battles have also seen a face lift. Now player 1 will perform a section of a song and then player 2 will have to perform the same section of the song and try to out perform the other DJ. A winner will be decided at each checkpoint and when a player reaches a certain number of checkpoints won there is a winner. This mode can be played locally or on Xbox Live/PSN against other players.
Also, from the main menu you can view your Rep, check how you are progressing on your Achievements/Trophies, compare your your scores on the leaderboards and you read the Hero Feed which provides all sorts of statistics from how many mixes you played to how many hours you’ve played.
Overall this DJ Hero 2 is a good improvement over the original game and it’s kept me entertained for hours and hopefully through DLC it will continue to provide many more hours of entertainment.
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