Hordes, Agility Orbs and Booty Calls
I haven’t updated my blog in over a month, which is strange given I’ve been playing my Xbox a fair bit.
I finally got into Gears of War 2, in particular the multiplayer mode, Horde. My friend and I are (very) slowly co-oping our way through the campaign thanks to intermittent connection problems, and the fact Horde is so damn fun the temptation to play it overrides that of the campaign itself.
I happened to buy Gears of War 2 during one of the crazy Anniversary weekends (or something), so the Epic developers had decided to multiply XP by 8, which saw me level up stupidly fast, and change every 9 waves from being a mixed bag of enemies to simply Tickers. Having never played Horde I didn’t know that 9 rounds of Tickers was unusual, and it certainly wasn’t as fun as it is when you have Boomers, Maulers and Bloodmounts attacking you from every angle.
Yes, I like a challenge.
With that said, by the time we had reached Wave 40-odd the Anniversary weekend was over and Horde returned to its normal formula. There’s a good tactic for facing the higher level waves on a map called Stasis, where you kill a couple of Maulers and block the steps with their shields. We managed to complete Wave 50 on Normal using this tactic.
I’d sure love to attempt Horde on Hardcore with a good team of people, but it does seem nigh on impossible the higher the wave you get.
So with the multiplayer side of my gaming spectrum successfully covered, this left me with a gap in some single player goodness to get stuck into . I think I’m pretty much done with Skate 3 (in fact, I have a video lying around awaiting to be uploaded regarding my thoughts on it), and I was waiting on my friend posting me Crackdown 2 (which has now arrived, yay!).
I dived into a couple of older games, but found it difficult to really get into anything. Firstly, I revisted a JRPG I started last year yet never finished, Infinite Undiscovery. Infinite Undiscovery came along at a bad time for me, so while I began to really enjoy the story, I never quite finished it. I have kept meaning to return to it, but it’s hard picking a JRPG up 12 months after you last played it and finding your flow. I stuck with it for about 30 minutes, but lost all my progress when I was team killed by the fucking bear in my party.
Infinite Undiscovery has been shunned to the shelf, possibly for good.
Next up was a brief stint with GTA IV. Despite the magnitude of GTA IV, I’d still consider it a game you can pick up and play fairly easily; there’s always a mission marked on your map, or an area of the game to explore while you await a booty call from Michelle or whatever. I did one story based mission before feeling restless with it.
Sadly, these couple of games are ones I’ve always said “I’ll get back to”, but I just don’t know if that’s the case.
So Crackdown 2 has arrived, and despite the mixed reactions I’m looking forward to agility orb hunting and maybe even a little co-op. I’ve also finally downloaded Shadow Complex, which will be a fun quick fix for the evenings I fancy something light.
I’m covered! What about you?
I don’t have anything derogatory to say about Alan Wake. My advice to you? Spend a night in Bright Falls and soak up the eerie atmosphere. Alan Wake excels at thrilling you psychologically. Which is why it’s called a psychological thriller, I guess…
Andrew