And the winner is…
Xbox 360 won out in the end.
PS3 has the Blu-Ray, but I’m just not that concerned with Blu-Ray right now. Maybe in the future I’ll get a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player, but right now from what I could tell people were leaning toward Xbox as the better unit for gaming, and especially first-person-shooters. Well, I’m a first-person-shooter guy, and I really love the Halo franchise.
Yeah, I’m going to regret not being able to play Uncharted 3. That looks pretty fantastic. But I would have also regretted not being able to play Halo and Gears of War if I’d gone the other route.
Sure, when the Wii U comes out I’ll want one of those, but I imagine it’s going to be a bit pricey. So, we’ll see. This is all basically so I can review more games. If I can make that work out financially, I’ll just get another console eventually.
This opens the door for Kinect games as well. The Gunstringer and the Dance Centrals foremost among them.Report
Yeah, the Kinect was part of this decision. Fun for kids I hope.Report
gamertag: Bookninja
Backlog recommendations: Alan Wake, Fable 2, Super Meat Boy, Shadow Complex, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Gears of War 2+, Assassin’s Creed 2+, Batman Arkham Asylum/City
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The console came with Halo: Reach and Fable III. Mass Effect looks awesome. Bioshock was great. I definitely want to play the Batman games also, and Gears of War. Thanks for the recs.Report
I’d suggest LIMBO and Braid as well.Report
Loved Braid, indifferent about Limbo (great atmosphere, mediocre game)Report
If it’s primarily job-related (reviews!) it’s tax-deductible. Save the receipt!Report
Great to hear Erik.
I only just got my X360 last summer, So I’ve been catching up with all the RPG franchises, most notably Mass Effect and Fable.
I just beat the first Mass Effect last October and it blew my mind. I also picked up Fable II because it was $4.99 used and is apparently still better than the third.
Alas, unless your a hardcore bro-shooter fan, I wouldn’t rush to Gears of War. Coming to the series fresh I was entirely underwhelmed. The hardest thing about maintaining one’s love of video games despite growing up is dealing with some of the horrible writing that persists. Especially for anyone who’s knee deep in the movie/television scene, or fantasy/sci-fi books like yourself, you start to wonder why if the dev studio is spending tens of millions to put out this title, they couldn’t afford to pay one or two B+ list writers to put out/tell a good story.
Bioshock remains distressingly exceptional.Report
The problem with that notion is that writing a novel and writing a game don’t have a lot to do with each other. In fact, a lot of game companies make a rough outline, design all the set pieces, then tell the writer to write the story around what they’ve made. Even when that’s not the case…..well, look at Gears 3. They hired Karen Traviss to write the third one and it is easily the weakest one in terms of story and character development.
(That also works in reverse. Chris Roberts, the guy who created the Wing Commander Universe, was also behind the Wing Commander movie which was……disappointing.)Report
Matthew Lillard, Freddie Prinze Jr, Saffron Burrows, *AND* Jurgen Prochnow???
IT’S A LICENSE TO PRINT MONEYReport
Plenty of movies are built around great looking set pieces as well, and yet many more appear to have found a way to marry the two.Report
i find it a bit hard to reconcile these two statements:
I just beat the first Mass Effect last October and it blew my mind.
The hardest thing about maintaining one’s love of video games despite growing up is dealing with some of the horrible writing that persists.
🙂
bioware and good writing are kinda at odds. maybe not an eternal struggle, but definitely a pretty serious smoldering resentment kinda deal.
even planescape torment – aka the most well written game of all time – is kinda ehhh. it’s a good ehh, but good for what it is. which is good, mind you, butReport
I still find Infocom (specifically Zork) to have the best written games of all time.
The universe was created before the puzzles.
When you can solve puzzles without knowing that they are puzzles because you think the way the creators think? Now that’s good writing.
After Zork 2, I think we had to wait until Wasteland for writing of that quality again… and from Wasteland we had to hibernate until Fallout came out if we wanted to survive the winter without writing.Report
Sometime they got Niven on something… and Adams wrote his own videogame.
Thing is? theyc an’t afford jack, now that the prietty pictures costs so much. Because what you need to afford is gameplay, interactivity — and that’s not what writers do.Report
That pretty pictures, in contrast with a handful of poor writers, cost so much more is precisely why they should be able to afford better writing.Report
EC, you do realize the video game industry now dwarfs the movie and music industries combined? It also surpasses the book industry by a comfortable margin or soon will. My son worked at Microsoft on the Kinect at their beautiful Studio campus. He was very disappointed with management’s willingness to break their (self-imposed) mold. That’s why he’s at Google now, but completely away from gaming development.
Someone will crack this nut eventually, I just don’t expect it to ever be Microsoft. They’ll do what they always do, sit around and wait for someone else to do something innovative and try to steal it if they can, and buy it if they must.Report
Break the mold of…good video game story telling?
Plenty of developers have, if it were injected into a game with polished mechanics and a beautiful exterior (Gears 3) I can’t imagine it would hurt them.Report
Arrgh meant to say unwillingness. Without giving away too much of what might be considered proprietary, Microsoft is very formulaic about these things and decidedly unimaginative if you get my drift. Their best products you’re familiar with were never developed /by them/ but purchased from others. Sometimes those purchases include stringent non-disclosure agreements so to the outside world it appears to have been self-developed.Report
For family fun — Lego Star Wars, the Complete Series, Lego Batman and Lego Pirates of the Carribean are all good. Lego Indiana Jones is nice, but defintely the weak game of the series — badly designed jumping puzzles and erratic difficulty make parts of it frustrating and annoying.
Still, they’re all good games with a lot of humor. Rock Band is worth the accessories if you’re a music fan (although you can spend tons of extra songs!).
For RPGs — Mass Effect 1 and 2, Dragon Age Origins (have yet to play DA2) are all good — I hear solid things about Fallout: New Vegas (I’m still poking at Fallout 3).
Their arcade and Live stuff is pretty good — I picked up a copy of Jade Empire (an older Bioware game) that way, and of course things like Puzzle Quest and Plants versus Zombies….
Carcassone is a fun little game too.Report
I’ve been meaning to pick up Jade Empire as well. I got around to KOTOR over the summer, and was amazed at how I was somehow able to get by the game’s glitch fest and still extraodinarly enjoy it. So I’m trying to find the time to get through the rest of BioWares’ library.Report
I *ADORED* Fallout 3.
When I played Fallout:New Vegas, I realized that Fallout 3 was the tutorial.Report
As someone who played Fallout 1 and 2, Fallout 3 didn’t feel like Fallout, but New Vegas was a Fallout game, no question.Report
See, I thought it did… the Overseer, 3 Dog, and My President John Henry Eden all really, really came together for me.
(I want that as a bumper sticker. “John Henry Eden is my president”.)Report
Oh, and check out 2011’s game of the year – Saint’s Row the Third. That wasn’t my ironic voice.Report