HIT
- The Gears of War 2 single-player campaign was a lot of fun. I played through it on Hardcore mode and there were a few bumps in the road, not to mention a couple scenes in Act 5, but it was very doable without bringing in a co-op partner and quite enjoyable. The final couple of chapters were very fun to play in particular. Definitely a big improvement over the campaign in the first game, even if the dialogue and "story" are still a bit underdeveloped.
- The Motorcycle Diaries was a really enjoyable movie about Ernesto Guevera and the trip he took when he was still in medical school. He and his cousin traveled from Bueno Aires through Patagonia, and up the eastern coast of Chile to Peru. And let me tell you, these guys were not very well prepared. But the trip was remarkable and quite an awakening for Guevera. It's in Spanish with English subtitles, but very much worth watching.
MISS
- As much as I absolutely love playing Gears of War 2 with friends on Wednesdays and Friday nights, playing public matches is abhorrent. Not because the game is any different -- it's still the same fantastic gameplay -- but the matchmaking system takes between 2 and 25 minutes to find a game (a game that might only last 4 minutes), the experience is often laggy because of the need to connect people from around the world, and then when you are connected you have to actually communicate with these people. It's a team game so I leave my microphone on in hopes of talking to my teammates, but if ever there was a reason to fear the future of the free world, it's the inane, offensive garbage that gets spewed from the tween-age set on Xbox Live.
- Talked a friend into going with me to see Quantum of Solace on Saturday on account of me having enjoyed Casino Royale so much and both our wives together at a "crafts party". What a mistake that was. QoS was a huge disappointment. Oh, sure, the action scenes were great but for those of us not needing a Ritalin prescription, it was a huge letdown. It jumped schizophrenically from scene to scene and location to location with little narrative, zero character development, and no backstory. If you didn't see Casino Royale, like my friend Alan didn't, you were completely lost. If you did see Casino Royale, you were probably still more than a bit confused. Casino Royale was an excellent, outstanding stand-alone movie. Quantum of Solace is an MTV-inspired smash-up of fight scenes thrown together with little reasoning and seemingly no connection to the Bond lore. It was a travesty and I have no idea how it is receiving the revies it's getting, other than the reviewers still being in love with Daniel Craig. I also have a newfound reason to be wary of fuel cells.
- Hate to admit it, but I think I might be done with Fallout 3. Oh, don't get me wrong, the game is absolutely fantastic. It's the save system that I hate. Or my inability to deploy it correctly. I'm not sure what happened -- I saved regularly, trying to cycle through the numerically-ordered saves and overwriting ones I didn't need anymore -- but for whatever reason I now have an Autosave in a very sticky spot with little chance of staying alive and my most recent save other than the AutoSave is from 4 hours prior to where I am in the game. Who knows where my other saves are, but if there's one thing I hate doing, it's replaying portions of a game that I've already completed. Sure, 3 or 4 hours might not be a lot in a game that takes 60+ hours to complete, but the magic is lost. The suspension of disbelief has been shattered. The game became a frustration.
Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go downstairs and continue to frustrate myself with one of the above-mentioned games.
1 comment:
I agree about "Motorcycle Diaries". I've seen the movie twice and it's incredibly touching and very well done...it is based on a true story, too!
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