Not much to report as usual. I have been playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox Live a lot lately. I have been playing some of it with a friend who finally got a 360. Been teaming up with him and his uncle and another guy they know from time to time. Also been playing with plenty of random people just to get my level up.
CoD4 is a game that does everything almost perfectly in my opinion. It doesn’t push the system to its breaking point. You can be in an online lobby in less time than it takes some games to load the title screen. No sacrifices were made to the single player game in order to include multiplayer. The multiplayer isn’t just tacked on. It supports four player split screen, Xbox Live, and LAN play. If I had to find something to complain about it would be the lack of co-op for the single player campaign and while that would have been a killer addition it isn’t really missed that much.
As happy as I am with CoD4 I have to say that I am a bit disappointed with Mass Effect. I have put some time into it, but I haven’t really been caught up in playing it the way I expected to be. It has a lot going for it, but it has a number of issues. If it was just a third person shooter no one would want to play it. Because of all the dice rolls and stuff going on behind the scenes it doesn’t feel like that much like a shooter.
One of the things I was worried about before Mass Effect was released was that the galaxy they were hyping so much would be pretty bland and I was right. There are a lot of planets that you can visit, but you can only land on probably a tenth or less of them and most of the ones you can land on are bland and boring. They use the same buildings over and over with very little variation and enemy encounters are pretty predictable on the side quest planets.
The game looks pretty good sometimes as long as you don’t move and you give it a few seconds to load all the textures. It really gets annoying during conversations when you have to watch the same texture redraw itself on one of the character or the environment every time the camera angle changes. As others have mentions it has some really long elevator rides that are used to hide loading screen, but the funny part is that when you are in an area with a fast travel option the loading screens actually take less time than the elevator rides do. Also the inventory system is horrible. There is basically no rhyme or reason to the order that items show up in that I can determine. It isn’t so bad when you are equipping your squad except when you are equipping mods. The item selling screen is really horrible though.
One of the most annoying things is the AI for your squad members. It does decent sometimes, but I keep running into situations where one member of my squad will just lock up and stop moving. The KOTOR games had some pretty terrible squad AI as well, but at least there you could switch between characters and give them commands manually. In Mass Effect you squad will switch weapons and use their abilities when you order them to, but other than that you seem to have at most a fifty-fifty chance of your squad actually doing what you want them to do.
I am not saying that it is a bad game, but it needed more time to be polished and they probably should have toned thing down a little bit graphically so that the hardware could handle it better (though truthfully I do think there are better looking games that run better and even use Unreal Engine 3 like Mass Effect does, BioShock for example). The load times aren’t too bad, but you have to put up with frequent smaller loads that cause the game-play to stutter or even freeze for a few seconds.
The thing it really has going for it is the main story and the settings. Bioware put a ton of work into the back story and it shows. They have detailed histories for all the different races, the technology, the various wildlife, and even many of the planets that you can visit but not land on. The conversation system is really amazing. I don’t think anyone can really appreciate the conversations without being in control of them yourself. You can’t experience just how well the conversations flow through a video alone.
Over all it is a good game, but it has issues that make it hard to enjoy at times. Perhaps they can patch a few of them out or at least work them out of the future titles in the series.
One last bit of gaming thoughts before I sign off.
I really think that Capcom has a great line up of downloadable titles due out this year. I have been interested in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (can we please come up with a shorter name for this Capcom?) from the first time I heard about it, but they finally have some videos for it up on GameTrailers and I have to say it looks beautiful. If you don’t know what is up with this game it is basically the best version of Street Fighter 2 with all the art assets redone with beautiful illustration quality hand drawn sprites. The are also redoing the music and rebalancing the game as well as adding online play. Now if someone would just make a decent classic controller (maybe one that looks like this, yes I own one of these for my SNES) for the Xbox 360 to play it with.
In a similar vein to the Street Fighter 2 remake they are also releasing new games based on a number of classic games including one of my old favorites with Bionic Commando Rearmed. It looks pretty awesome as does the very recently announced shmup 1942: Joint Strike. Commando 3 also looks promising from the recently released videos. Unlike some other companies I think Capcom really understands what gamers want with these updated classics. Though I think the hot dog arms in the other new Bionic Commando game calls this theory into question a bit. If they were to bring Megaman Powered Up! to the download services they would officially prove the theory.
I just finished reading a great series of books by S.M. Stirling called 
