Fight Night : Round 3

I bought Fight Night : Round 3 the other day.  I was going to buy Full Auto but decided to buy a sports game instead to help round out my collection of games.  I realize that Full Auto hasn’t gotten very good reviews but I really liked the demo and am pretty sure I’d like the retail game as well.
As far as FNR3 goes so far I like it, I played the previous games on the XBOX1 and enjoyed them too.  I’m a boxing fan so the genre in general is of interest to me.  The game is fun and while I’m not finished it I will give some suggestions that I really think would have made FNR3 a MUST HAVE title.

My suggested improvements to the game:1) let the player chose rivals (loss, tie or length of fight lets the player tag rivals, not just guys you know you can slaughter)2) let the player use their own money to buy / create matches with rivals3) more pre-game press release stuff, i'm near the end of the game and I've only seen one pre-game event that was over so quickly I didn't even know what was going on4) better game AI, while it's okay the game seems to suggest to use the impact punches yet the AI doesn't use them very often, certainly not often enough5) manager type mode. boxing depends a LOT on your trainer and manager to 1) get you good fights, 2) help you increase your strength, skills 3) promote and generate good hype around your boxer. almost NONE of this is evident in the game and it should be6) training mini-games don't seem to have as much "physical" effect on your boxer. I've created a VERY power heavy boxer that should be an absolute muscle bound monster yet he looks, moves and feels the same as he did when I first opened the box7) some of the commentary gets very repetitive not only the announcer but the trainer. I would even accept to get rid of the trainer's voice and simply put a nice text field in there with information depending on your trainer chosen, his area of expertise, how he sees the fight going, some suggestions for fighting your opposition. do the same for the opponent trainer screen.8) hello? interesting achievements where are you? where is the "win the fight using only the left jab?" achievement? Where is the "win the fight by decision when knocked down 3+ times during the match"? Where are the online achievements?FN:R3 is a great game but it could be so much better. Graphics are one thing but it seems like the gameplay could have been expanded on so much as well.

more mini reviews

Here are a few more mini-reviews.
Quake 4:
Just a final wrap up of this game.  I finished this last week and as I mentioned overall I was impressed.  Some complaints are that the weapons just don’t feel appropriate, they’re accurate to the Quake series but I’m not sure if it’s the sounds applied to them, the damage they inflict or perhaps the fact that dead bodies disappear after you clobber them but the weapons seem out of place.  I didn’t like many of the boss battles either, they were presented well but felt rather easy.   Online is quite good but due to lack of players and brutal load times really hurts the experience.

Tony Hawk : American Wasteland:
Rarely do I play a game that frustrates me to the point that I want to smash the controller.  THAW is one of those games.  The graphics are poor, very poor even in HD.  I’m not a total graphic whore as I did enjoy GUN (developed by the same company) but THAW just looks like shit.  The gameplay is the same as it has been since the original Tony Hawk that I played on the PC probably 3 years ago.  The blatant lack of improvements really hurt the experience.  I dream of the day that someone actually tries to make a skateboarding game that bothers to at least try to put some rudimentary physics in it.  I ended up giving up on THAW (the story mode) mostly because I got tired of trying to complete a few tasks over and over and over again, having to listen to the same segway tie-in and absolutely no hints as to what I’m doing wrong to complete the task.  The classic mode is only slightly better and again wasn’t enough to keep me playing.  The online experience while lag free is mostly populated by people who abuse the gameplay mechanics by repeating the same move over and over again on the game’s geometry in order to get absurdly high scores.  Rather than actually skate on the map and have fun they just bounce between two points creating stupidly high multipliers and generally making the game un-fun online.  I can’t even recommend this game as a rental.

360 mini game reviews

Since I’ve been able to play a few 360 games I’m going to write a few mini-reviews of them thus far.

Call of Duty 2:
I really liked Call of Duty 2,  I finished it once on normal mode and then went back to play it again on Veteran (hardest difficulty).  I actually found that I enjoyed the hardest mode a lot more.  The game has really good sound effects and voice acting, not much of a story and the game ends rather abruptly but in general I was impressed with it which was good because I did buy it.  The online portion of the game leaves a lot to be desired.  If you can get into a good match the game is fun but most of the time you’re trying to connect to the servers or connect to the game.  Once in the game often the game lags so bad that it’s unplayable and people just drop and start the whole process again.  The developers stated they’re working on a fix but I have a feeling it will probably be too late, by the time they release a fix some new games will be out that offer a better online experience.

Kameo : Elements of Power:
Kameo was a game I bought only because of things I read about it and some gameplay movies I viewed online prior to launch.  To be honest I would say that Kameo is probably the best launch title.  True it doesn’t have any online portion (though the developers again say that a co-op patch that works over live is in progress)  but the single player and co-op (splitscreen) is so good that the lack of online really doesn’t matter.  This the game you buy if you want to show off High Definition gaming, it really does look that good.  Some of the reviews gave the game a low score because it was too short but it took me around 12 hours to finish the story mode.  I then spent another 4-5 hours playing co-op with my wife and brother-in-law and then at least another 10 hours actually completing the game and getting all the achievements.  The game really has a lot of depth, a lot more than I initially gave it credit for as well and the only reason why I discovered the depth was because I went back and trained myself to get all the achievements.  I realized through the ‘A rank’ achievements that there were so many different ways to get proficient at the game and that I hadn’t even uncovered 1/3rd of them when I played the story mode the first time through.  Kameo is also easy enough for casual gamers to be able to pick up and play for an hour or two and enjoy.  I’m glad I bought this one.

Perfect Dark Zero:
I rented this one and I’m REALLY glad I did, what a horrible game.  The single player game is extremely disjointed, the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense and often you’re wondering who the characters are and why you should bother caring about them.  The voice acting is poor to the point of cheesy.  The graphics are a mixed bag, some levels look really nice while others not so much.  The character animation also is only ‘good’ and I’ve found that the game just seems sluggish to me.  The single player portion was so bad that I couldn’t even bother to finish the single player story, no amount of achievements would encourage me to do it.  The multiplayer portion is much better but again the graphics and animation still bother me and marr the multiplayer portion.  It’s nice that the game offers bots so you can create a quick game with friends but in general the multiplayer was not enough for me to like this game.  I really tried to buy a used copy on ebay (prior to renting it) and thankfully none of my bids actually won otherwise I’d be really pissed off.

GUN:
Rented.  This was a game that I was always interested in but initial reviews lead me to shy away from it.  For the most part I disagree with the low ratings this game got.  Sure, the graphics aren’t very good, not much different from the XBOX1 or PS2 which is why I think the reviewers hammered the game but there were so many other good portions of the game that made up for the lackluster graphics.  The voice acting is awesome, some big name actors in there really make the game engrossing.  Here are some of the voices in the game:
Lance Henriksen (Alien vs. Predator, Aliens)Thomas Jane (The Punisher)Frank Collison (The Village)Brad Dourif (Seed of Chucky, the voice of Chucky!!!)Kris Kristofferson (Blade Trinity)Ron Pearlman (Hellboy)
The story is quite good, short (which also didn’t help the game’s end score with the reviewers) but long enough that you never got bored.  I completed all the side quests which I think really was how the developer hoped the gamer would play but of course reviewers rush through the game to get a review out and miss 80% of the game thus giving it a bad rating.  The game doesn’t have a lot of replayability but in general I was really impressed with the game and disappointed more people didn’t actually bother to review it from a ‘fun’ factor rather than a ‘graphic whore’ factor.  If you’re looking for a fun game to play for a week or so (of casual gaming) make sure you try GUN out.

Quake 4:
Rented, still playing.  So far I really like it, more than I though I would anyway.  Initially I was disappointed that I was getting Quake4 for my next rental (see my post on game renting and the queue system) because I wanted to play Condemned but once I started playing Quake 4 I was impressed.  Yes, the game has some pretty big slowdowns, hence the low review scores but maybe I’m just used to games slowing down on my PC because the occasional lag never bothered me.  The game looks VERY nice.  I bought Doom3 for the PC but I was disappointed, Quake 4 looks and plays much better.  The voice acting is good the story hokey but good for a sci-fi game.  The enemies are dumb as shit but good enough for a run-and-gun game, they’re good enough to scare the shit out of you when you’re playing late at night which makes up sometimes for their crappy AI.  The game really does look good if you can find a minute to just admire the scenery (and not get roasted by enemy gunfire).  The online play so far reminds me of Quake 3 Arena which may also be why I like the game.  I haven’t finished the game yet but in general I like it and would actually consider buying the game for the online portion alone.

Update (TV&Games)

Man I’m a lazy shit, why the hell do I keep forgetting to update this thing? It’s not like I don’t have anything to bitch about it’s just a lot harder than I thought to find time to actually work on it.

Well it looks like Sony has some problems with some models of the TV I bought, you can go online and enter your serial number to see if your TV is affected. Visit here to find out if your TV is affected (Canada only). I haven’t bothered to check my TV yet but it’s been running flawlessly so I’m pretty sure I’m okay.

I also found a place where you can rent 360 games online. http://www.GetGames.ca works pretty slick, probably the same as GameFly for the USA. My only complaints are that it takes nearly a week for the games to arrive. This sucks because you’re paying monthly but ¼ of the time you’re stuck waiting for the next game to arrive. The way it works is that you create a ‘queue’ of games you want to play and when you’re done playing one of the games you ship it back and the service mails you the next game in your ‘queue’. The problem I’ve seen is that they must not have a whole lot of titles ever in-stock at one time. The last game I shipped back (PDZ, I’ll get to a mini-review of it later) was replaced with a game that was WELL down on my list of games to play, almost the bottom (Tony Hawk : American Wasteland). That means that the 5-6 titles I had above Tony Hawk were all out, every single one of them, every single copy. The DVDs look a bit beat up too though I haven’t had any problems playing them yet but it worries me that someday I’ll get an email saying that I scratched one of their copies to shit. Anyway I’ll stick with GetGames for a while. I know there is another rental site that I could use but for now GetGames hasn’t given me a reason to switch.

On the topic of game rentals, it sort of gives me mixed feelings. On one hand I want to support game developers by buying their games but on the other hand there are a lot of games that I’m not interested in owning but want to try anyway. I’m going to try and use game rentals as a way to see if the game is worth buying. Dunno if that will really work (will I really rent and play a game then return it and run out to buy the game?) but it’s the cheapest solution right now and gives me a chance to play a lot of different games for cheap.