What a difference a few months make. This travesty started back in May, and a mere four months later the price of “Plus $10″ games has plummeted. Is it because the games suck, or is there less demand for games that bend you over? I have no idea. But, what I do know, is that it isn’t very hard to get a new copy of Mass Effect 2 for around $20, 33% of the original retail price.

I cannot even imagine how badly this hurt the aftermarket for this games. Would you pay $10 to play a used game online? I know that I wouldn’t, especially if that is 50% or more of the price I paid to get the game in the first place.

And now, with the rising price of Xbox Live, it is becoming increasingly expensive to game online, and I continually find myself asking, “is it worth it?” Sure, it is great to hammer some enemies and wax some fools with your friends, but how often are they online? Are you spending hand over fist to play with people you’ll never meet in person? What’s that worth?

Crackdown is an open world game with RPG lite elements. Basically you play the role of an elite law enforcement agent withing a corrupt corporation. Your mission is to take out various organized crime syndicates throughout the region.

The strength of this game is the multiplayer, its great fun to jump around the city waxing criminals with a buddy. Whereas, the solo game play is the definition of grind. The game play is repetitive, and the pokemon style leveling system is rather taxing. So, I whole heartily recommend only playing this as a team.

While the game was not extremely long, it was probably too long, by the time I finished the third region (of four) I was ready to be done, but I powered through and finished it anyway.

And, since I am sure everyone has already heard all they ever wanted to hear about this title two years ago I’ll finish up here.

On the undecim scale, I give this game a 1.

vanlandw and I play our final rounds of Halo 2 together

Today, I played my final few rounds of Halo 2 online. I seriously cannot believe they are canning XBL support for all Xbox games. It looks like Bungie knew some people would be coming back for a last round so they flooded the “Did You Know?” tips with amusing little snippets.

On the flip side, I honestly don’t think that I’ll miss it. We played several matches, only won two. And, I played just abysmally. I sealed the night by receiving an ass kicking in Big Team Battle. Yup, that pretty much sums up my entire Halo 2 experience.

Check out the miserable abomination that was my Halo 2 career

Our loosely organized crew all arrived at different times. Next time we should probably coordinate better so that I can get more sleep! Jason and I first arrived at 12:20, followed by Bunny at about 1, and vanlandw finally stumbled in some time afterward. Originally I assumed this was going to be a quick 1-2 encounter adventure to show off the new PHB3 rules. We were all surprised to discover that it was a 5+ encounter adventure. Unfortunately, since we did not start early we did not have enough time to finish the game. We did manage to defeat the scourge and close the rift, but did not fight our way back out of the dungeon. Regardless it was a pretty good time.

One of the early highlights was Bunny getting his Seeker ambushed. All the tanks were engaged on the other side of the cavern, I teleported to safety leaving Bunny to solo two giant creatures. Good times. Once Bunny became diseased and incapacitated vanlandw charged in to save the day, using his encounter power to switch places with Bunny, and then blasted one of the creatures back into a puddle while Bunny recovered in relative safety. Not bad for his first time playing an RPG ever.

This moment of greatness was counter balanced by the infamous rolling of a “0″ on a d10 with the exclamation, “I rolled a ZERO!” I merely pointed out that it was actually a 10, just not labelled as such. The rest of the party got a pretty good laugh out of it. I can honestly say in all my years of gaming that situation has never come up before.

Other highlights of the game included:

• Encountering a magical portal we knew nothing about, tying a rope to the tank and sending him through
• Me getting swarmed by worms only to teleport away behind a meat wall much to the frustration of the DM
• The group trying to convince Bunny to jump in the pool of acid to put out his fire since the fire was doing 10 damage and the acid would only do 5.

As per vanlandw’s request I am posting the details of this event. Jason and I are planning on going. We’ll probably get there after I roll out of bed and shower. Wes will probably claim to be exhausted from his fun run and not show up.

I should also note that something called “Weekend in the Realms” will be going on as well, and I have no idea what that is. I suspect it is what they call their weekly RPGA event, however I do not know if they will be running a module, or a my realms adventure.

Anyone who is interested is encountered to come. the Game Day adventure will run 1-2 hours, and you shouldn’t need to bring anything if you’re new. Players will be provided with PHB3 pregenerated characters (I assumed level 1 characters made with DDI character builder will also be valid). No experience is required, but you might want to pick up a set of dice if for no other reason that its cool to have a d4.

Overview

As I mentioned in my MW2 post, I started playing these games on veteran because vanlandw has started the trend. Somehow, he powered through COD4 on veteran on his first play through. And, he considers it the paramount of his gaming career. Obviously, I thought that he was being a little melodramatic so I played through MW2 on veteran on my first play through. MW2 certainly sucked on veteran, but it was not a life altering event. So, I was prepared to give vanlandw a rough time about it. But, I figured first I had better play Call of Duty 4 on veteran.

This did give me the opportunity to discover that COD4 is a much better game than MW2 in numerous ways. The story makes much more sense, the kinds of activities you participate are plausible (no snowmobile races with enemies, etc…), and it just feels more realistic…to a point. There are a few major flaws in COD4 that utterly destroy the experience, I’ll try to outline those now.

Elite Dogs of Utter Death and Destruction

Frequently throughout the game you will encounter dogs in the game. They are as annoying as all hell. When a dog attacks you, nothing else matters. You can get shot while grenades explode around you like fireworks. The only thing that matters is that this dog is going to rip your throat out, and it is nearly impossible to stop it. Once the dog “quick time” event starts, you have to hit melee when the button pops up on the screen. You give about 1/10 of a second to react. So, effectively you need to anticipate when the prompt will come up so you can already be pushing the button. If you hit it to soon, you die. If you hit it too late you die. If you do not hit it at all, you die. Luckily, the fixed this in MW2, so it is actually possible to hist the button in time.

Hey Captain, Look, its Raining…Grenades

The United States spends more on defense than the rest of the G8, and they do not equip their soldiers with infinite grenades. So, where the fuck are these people that live in the ghetto getting all their grenades? It is wretched when you find yourself in a situation where you are trying to pick off enemies to advance, or are just waiting out a timer and you cannot sit in cover long enough to crouch without being surrounded by grenades. On numerous occasions I stopped to scratch my head in an area without enemies only to see the grenade warning pop up because I was standing still for too long. I know this is suppose to be a game play mechanism to encourage you to advance, and feel the pressure of battle, but they take it to the point of absurdity. To a certain extent this has been fixed in MW2, but the enemies still have enough grenades to make you feel uncomfortable.

Hurray, another Choke Point

Frequently in the game you find yourself funnelled into a hellish littler area where you are forced to fight endless waves of enemies unless you advance. Advancement is usually forced down a linear path with spare cover (which does not matter because if you stop behind cover you’ll get naded). Most of the time these choke points are only really difficult because of the poor game testing this game received on the veteran difficulty. And, there is perhaps the mother of all choke points on the stage, “No Fighting in the War Room.” Vanlandw mentioned it in his post, and I experienced it myself. I cannot think of another section of a game that takes two minutes to get through, but it took me countless tries over three hours and two days to get past it. If you want the video below, the section in question is at 4:36. However, I think most of the videos up for this were actually played on hardcore, rather than veteran because I encountered quite a few more enemies in this section. And, to help illustrate this I whipped up a quick graphic to show how bat shit crazy it is.

Another section that was really annoying is the ferris wheel section of One Shot, One Kill. After attempting repeatedly to play this legitly, and just getting naded to pieces I broke down and hid in one of the ticket booths. If you want to know how to do that, here is a video that demonstrates someone pulling it off. Keep in mind that it requires luck, if someone throws a nade in there you are pretty much toast, and when you leave it is a crap shot whether or not you die instantly. Persistence in the key.

The other really annoying area is a shining example of poor testing. The final section of the stage, “Heat,” gives you air strikes, and very little hope of getting to the LZ. On veteran it feels impossible, but it is amazing what a little information will do for you. Check out the video starting at 0:44. Basically all you need to do is follow the timing, and path of this guy and you should be in good shape. You can actually get through the stage without using a single air strike (I did).

For the most part these kind of things are gone from MW2. Sure there are choke points, but there is nothing remotely close to these three travesties.

These situations are extremely frustrated because you can stand their and just watch your team mates shoot at nothing in particular, while waiting for you to pave the way to salvation, which brings me to my next point.

Who Do You Think You Are, Soldier!?

You have team mates in the game, but they are just for show. Basically the only useful thing that your team mates do is let you know when you have advanced past a choke point because they magically teleport up as if they helped you the whole way. Frequently they will just stand out in the open and get totally obliterated, but it doesn’t matter because they are invincible, just like real soldiers. Sometimes they will go out of their way to step in front of you and draw friendly fire. The game rewards you by giving you the game over screen.

The stupid soldier issue is kind of fixed in MW2. You can shoot them forever without repercussion, and they move around a little bit better. But, it is still very much the same.

Conclusion

I could go on for hours, but those are my biggest gripes about the game. And, I whole heartily agree with vanlandw in warning everyone not to play this game on veteran. If you do, you’d be doing it for bragging rights, but not because you could receive in the slightest amount of enjoyment from it.

In conclusion, COD4 is in theory better than MW2, but some show stopping bugs, and balancing issues make it nearly impossible on its highest difficulty. While I ranked this game a 0 based on my first play through (I believe on hardcore), I have to give this game a -5 on veteran.

Parting Thoughts

Despite all this, I think vanlandw did overrate, if only slightly to the difficulty of the game. I receive an equal, if not greater level of frustration on my play through of Ninja Gaidan on the original Xbox.

Well, I knew of a web service you could use to make your own gamer card. So, I thought that I could use it pull in achievement information, and then weight the games by their aggregate scores on metacritic (I was also going to have games older than four years automatically drop off).

The first hurdle was trying to find an api for metacritic. Let me save you some time, there isn’t one. What I ended up doing was writing a quick screen scraper that I could use to extract the information, and then cache in my database. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked.

The next phase was pulling in the achievement information. This is where the wheels fell off the truck. I had not tried to pull achievement information form this before and, I was horrified to discover that it only pulls “Recent” game achievements. Or, roughly the last twenty or so game you played. So, for me, it was missing over 13,000 of my total gamer score. That’s no good.

Upon doing more research into the matter, there is no public way to retrieve this information. Basically, what you would have to do is log into people’s accounts on xbox.com, and then download all the html files with achievement information, and parse them. Fuck that.

I declare this project officially dead for the time being.