Gaming Roundup
When I play video games nowadays, the bulk of my time is spent on the Xbox 360. I've been meaning to write a blog entry about that but it'll have to wait. In the meantime, here's a brief rundown of what's caught my eye.
Age of Booty: $10, Xbox Live Arcade. I've been getting a lot of bang for my buck out of this. I've completed the single-player campaigns, probably won't ever play online (that's not my bag, baby). It's a real-time strategy game on a hex grid where you go around blowing up enemy pirate factions and upgrading your ship. Simple to play in the same way that a Doom deathmatch is.
A Kingdom for Keflings: $10, XBLA. Another great game, but replayability is pretty low. Once I finished my "kingdom" and unlocked all the achievements (a weekend's worth of work), I wasn't sure where to go next. It's basically a real-time strategy game like Warcraft or Age of Empires, only without any conflict or fighting. Beth loved it.
Fable: The Lost Chapters: Xbox. I've had this for a while and have been slowly but surely playing through it in preparation for Fable 2. I finally finished it over the week of Thanksgiving. My saved-game timer says I put in a little over 20 hours, but it didn't count the hours spent watching areas load, nor the hours I had to replay when the game would lock up and I'd have to restart. I liked it - enough to want to play Fable 2 - but I didn't love it.
Assassin's Creed: Xbox 360. I'm currently working my way through this. I think I'm about halfway through. Visually it's spectacular. Weird thing about it is that I see a lot of graphical effects (like their 3-tier level-of-detail self-shadowing) and pat myself on the back for thinking I know how they implemented it. I really enjoyed the sci-fi twist to it - t hat was totally unexpected. That said, it's starting to get pretty repetitive right now. I think they ran out of gameplay ideas halfway through and just started repeating the same ones over and over to make the game long enough to justify the price. If it had more variety in the mini-missions, it'd be a great game instead of a good one.