Jay’s Internet Log

I’ll start this off by saying that the original Puzzle Quest became one of my favorite DS games, and overall one of my favorite puzzle games in general.  I liked the DS version so much that after maxing out two character builds on it, I bought it on XBLA, along with the DLC, and maxed out my character there as well.  When Infinite Interactive created a “sequel” called Galactrix, I was very excited…until I actually played it.  They decided to use a hexagon-based puzzle board instead of the standard square-based board, probably to keep up with the futuristic space theme the game was based upon.  This wasn’t the problem I had with the game however.   The big issue that I had with it was that in order to move around the map, you had to solve puzzles, which first off didn’t give you any experience or items, but even worse, they reset after a certain amount of time.  This meant that you had to solve these useless puzzles over and over again as you navigated the map…which angered me like nothing else.  I powered my way through that disaster and have never touched it since.

A few months after this, Puzzle Quest 2 was announced.  Everything pointed to this being a direct sequel to my favorite DS puzzle game, and early screenshots showed the same square-based puzzle board.  At PAX East, I was able to see the XBLA version with my own eyes, and it looked really good.  I didn’t get a chance to play it, but just seeing it got me excited for the retail version.  The game is being released tomorrow, June 22nd, but for some reason, Amazon was selling it last week.  My copy arrived Friday evening, and since then, I’ve put about four hours into it.  I’m still in the first area, and have gotten my character up to level 13.  Navigation in PQ2 is different than PQ1 in that your character is more than a tiny sprite in a huge world.  He’s walking around, talking to people and creatures, and able to interact with them on more of a personal level.  It can still be confusing at first, but I think I understand how it works now.  When it comes to the puzzles, the DS hit detection has been vastly improved over PQ1, and you won’t be making any dumb mistakes here and there because the stylus was just a tad outside where it was supposed to be.  Enemy battles are standard player-vs-computer battles, switching up between each turn.  Other types of battles that I’ve come across include those to pick locks, loot items, and unfreeze a block of ice.  I haven’t come across any creature capturing puzzles, and all the spells I currently have were obtained via gaining levels.  I started my character as an Assassin, one of the four playable types.  The Assassin is cool in that the spells are mostly about changing gem colors from red, green, and yellow to purple.  This can be devastating to the enemy when played correctly, and I look forward to continuing with this build.  I’m focusing my stats mostly balanced, which is far differently than I played the original game.

I have a few issues with it so far, but mostly, I’m having a blast with this game.   First off, the developer decided that instead of creating regular skulls and red glowing skulls, the stronger skulls would just have a 5 on them.  The red skulls are much cooler.  The 5 is pretty lame in my opinion, and I’m not even sure what it’s representing.  It’s a skull that blows up all skulls around it, so red would have been my choice, and it keeps with the Puzzle Quest tradition in a nice way.  Secondly, the game saves too much.  After you battle an enemy, it saves.  That’s okay, but then when you look at your stats, equipment, and spells, it saves.  These are not in one menu, so whenever you want to check out everything you have, the game ends up saving at least three times.  It’s a bit annoying even right from the get-go.  As far as the music is concerned, most of it is based upon the original’s soundtrack, but has been reworked to put the themes more in the background.  I still haven’t heard the iconic Puzzle Quest theme that I can easily get stuck in my head, even today.

I was skeptical about this game after the Galactrix catastrophe, but so far, this game is pulling me in like few DS games can do.  My DS battery died last night, which is something that rarely happens, and it’s only because of Puzzle Quest 2, a game which I look forward to maxing out on both the DS as well as XBLA when it releases later in the week.  I just hope that the game as a whole is as good as the first few hours.

Chances are, if you see me on Xbox Live on any given weeknight, I’ll be playing Modern Warfare 2; well not last night!  I receieved a beta code for an upcoming racing game called Blur from the developers Bizarre Creations yesterday just prior to leaving my office.  After a nice dinner and a horrible movie (Jennifer’s Body – seriously, do yourself a favor and never watch this atrocity), I decided to give the beta a “try” for 30-60 minutes before jumping onto MW2.  That 30-60 minutes became 3 hours before I had to stop and go to bed, a half hour later than normal because I didn’t want to stop playing this game.  For those who don’t know what Blur is, it is a racing game that has an arcade-like feel to it and each track contains a plethora of respawning weapons and powerups ala Mario Kart; a game that I’ve loved for many years.  These powerups can be anything from a speed boost to heat seaking missiles and bombs, or even health restoration.  The races can hold anywhere from 2 to 20 players and last about 3 or 4 minutes each.  When you decide to join a friend’s game, you don’t just jump into their race but instead wait in the lobby and after the race, they pop back in there with you.  It’s a strange feeling at first but once I knew the mechanics of the lobby system a bit more, I realized that it works very well.  The menu and unlock system is fairly well done with my only gripe being that you don’t have much time between races to customize your cars and mods.  Speaking of mods, as you race more and especially do well, you earn fans which are equivelent to experience that allows you to level up.  Once you get to specific levels (the beta goes to 10 so far and I’m hoping for a level cap increase) you unlock new cars and new mods, which act like the perks in Call of Duty.  They give you an advantage such as stronger ramming power or a free powerup at the start of the race.  You can customize three of them and the beta gives you 7 to choose from, though none of them really seem to give you a huge advantage over others at such a low level.  The game shows many more mods available that are currently locked in the beta.  The cars are based off of real-world automobiles and are fun to drive, though the e-brake always messes me up, so I stopped using it altogether.  After the 3 hours of playing, I maxed my rank, set up twitter integration (though had no idea how to actually get the game to tweet), and had a lot of fun.  One thing that kind of annoys me is that when in a race, there’s really no easy way to tell who your friends are compared to everyone else in the game.  I have a big 50″ TV, but the game just puts my friend’s gamertags above their cars just like everyone elses, and you have to be very close to tell who it is, and at the high speeds of this game, it’s difficult to do so.  It would be nice if friend’s gamertags were a different color or something.  I’m not sure what date the game is being released; the menu says sometime in the spring, but this one is looking like a day 1 purchase for me at the moment.  You can tell that a lot of work has been put into this project and it wasn’t just thrown together.  I hope the developers can take pride in this piece of work, as just a few hours with it proved to me that it’s going to be a great end product.  As far as racing games go, this is the most fun I’ve had since Mario Kart DS, which I still think is the best kart racing game ever created, and I look forward to playng more of the beta.

I never played the first Assassin’s Creed game.  I’ve had a long-standing issue with Ubisoft since they first incredibly reinvented the Prince of Persia franchise with The Sands of Time, and then just completely destroyed the whole series with everything they released after said game.  That’s my opinion, but this is my place to put these opinions, so that’s what you’re going to get here.  With that out of the way, I’ve heard good things about this game so I put it on my Christmas list as a possible present.  I was excited and nervous to start this one up.  It’s my first Ubisoft game since the horrid Prince of Persia: Rival Swords back in 2007.  I remember being so excited for that game, and bought it directly from Ubisoft, just to get it home and have a little piece of my soul removed due to its awfulness, but I digress.  AC2 seems to be built upon the same engine as the PoP games as you’re having to jump around, climb ledges, and move just like in those games.  What initially intrigued me about this game is that it takes place in Italy, namely Venice.  I lived in Venice for two months back, whoa, 12 years ago.  Again, whoa.  It was that long ago huh.  Okay, back on track.  I haven’t gotten anywhere near Venice in the game yet, as I’ve been focused on Florence and a city that your family supposedly owns and needs repairs.  I like games where you have to upgrade a town because in the end, that town is usually awesome.  I hope this one will be as I’m going to renovate the crap out of it.  I’ve put about five or six hours into the game this past weekend, and am really enjoying it.  Some of the climbing mechanics are a bit difficult for me, and the game is too dark.  I can’t find a brightness control anywhere in it, which I blame on Ubisoft, but overall, I think this will be a great game and I look forward to putting more time into it.  As for my beef with Ubisoft as a whole, I think it may be over, but only time will tell.  The Uplay online aspect is a really cool feature that I hope more publishers incorporate.  I probably won’t be running out to buy the next PoP game, but Splinter Cell: Conviction looks fantastic, so that may be the game that allows me to drop this anti-Ubisoft feeling that I’ve had stored up for the past two years.

I held off on Borderlands when it was released for just a single reason; Modern Warfare 2 was coming out in two weeks. I wanted to get Borderlands but knew that it was a big game and I’d never finish it by the time MW2 released. Instead I purchased DJ Hero as it wasn’t such a time sinker. My wife asked me to write a list of some things she could get me for Christmas, so I put this game on the list. Her being awesome, got it for me. Borderlands is a FPS/RPG sort of game that takes place in a cool, animated world. I’ve only put about 2, maybe 3 hours into it, and I’m enjoying it thus far. The game can be played by yourself or with up to three friends, though I haven’t attempted to play with anybody else yet. People tell me that it’s much better with other people, and that you want to be all around the same level. I’m at level 7 now. I’ve been wandering around the first and second areas of the game, doing odd quests for a few people, and I can see how this game can get boring playing by yourself. There’s a lot of distance to travel between objectives, and it would just be cool to have others there talking and killing alongside you. The controls are good, though I wish there was a tactical setup like CoD has because that’s what I’m used to, so I’m accidentally knifing all the time. They also seem a bit loose, but that may be due to my low level weaponry being inaccurate. So far though, I really like this game and can see where its popularity has come from. I definitely want to put more time into it, hopefully with some friends.

How do you improve on the best game ever created?  You make a new one and slap a “2″ on the end of it.  Here are my initial impressions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  Anybody reading this knows that I’ve been a tiny bit excited for this game to come out, and I’ve hoped that it would be better than CoD4.  I can’t say that it’s better in every way because it isn’t, and I’ll explain why, but it’s pretty darn good.

As far as initial impressions go, this game comes in very similar to how I felt about Resident Evil 5.   I wrote “the game is just so freaking good that I didn’t want to take any time out over the past weekend to write up my impressions, but instead throw all my free time into such a masterpiece”.  I took the last two days off work, so I’ve had about the same amount of time with this game.  I have completed the story on Normal difficulty, tried some Spec-Ops missions out, and have put just over 13 hours into multiplayer.  I think I’m ready to do a little writeup on it now.

When I got home from the midnight launch, I immediately installed the game to the hard drive of the 360, waited for a few minutes, and jumped into some multiplayer with friends who were also playing around 12:30.  It was cool to see everyone at low levels, and none of us knew the maps, so that was also interesting.  We’re coming off of CoD4 where we all know every inch of every map, and now we’re completely lost.  After about 2 hours of playing, I forced myself to bed, though couldn’t get to sleep for another few hours as my mind was racing.  I awoke the next morning and played about 25% of the single player campaign before getting pulled back into multiplayer.  This back and forth continued until I finished the campaign yesterday.

The single player campaign is where this game doesn’t really stack up to its predecessor.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s excellent, but CoD4 was epic.  If you never played the CoD4 campaign, you’re going to be completely lost in MW2, and even then, I was pretty lost as the storytelling kind of goes everywhere.  It’s definitely one that will require multiple playthroughs to understand completely.  That’s all I’ll really say about it.  It’s great, but not CoD4-great in my opinion.

I played through a few of the Spec-Ops missions with Glenn.  They are incredible.  You need to play them with someone who is both good at the game and has good communication.  Communication is key in Spec-Ops, especially on the Veteran difficulty as things get pretty crazy very quickly.  We did play the Overwatch mission where one person is on the ground, running through the CoD4 map “Downpour” while the other is in an AC-130 firing down on enemies that are running towards you from every direction.  It’s a lot of fun, but we couldn’t finish it on Veteran in the short time that we played.  We will though.

Multiplayer is going to be where I end up spending most of my time in this game, and I’m glad to say that it feels like CoD4 but better in every way.  The new killstreaks are very awesome, though I think I’ve overdone myself a bit with them so early on in the game, so I’m not getting many of them!  I need to rethink a few things in the setup.  By far my favorite killstreak now is the Chopper Gunner, where you call in a helicopter, but you actually fire the guns.  You just find enemies and shoot them up for a massive amount of kills.  It’s very entertaining.  I am also particular to the amount of unlocks there are and how you can use them.  I have one class that consists of an assault rifle with RDS and silencer as a primary, auto shotgun with silencer and grip as a secondary, so it’s good for most every range.  The ACOG scopes are much improved and work very well in this game.  I haven’t done much sniping as I’m horrible at it at first, so I’m sticking with more traditional setups.  I’m enjoying the silenced RPD a lot so far.  The only problem so far that I’ve encountered is random dropping of friends when trying to get into some rooms.  This is something that should be easily fixed, so only time will tell if this will get a patch.  After 13 hours I’m at level 33.  I could talk for a long time about multiplayer, but just know that IT IS EXCELLENT.

So what do I think about Modern Warfare 2?  It’s defintiely what I’ve been waiting for, and I look forward to sinking a lot of time into it.  I plan on finishing the campaign a few more times on varying difficulties, completing Spec-Ops, and playing a lot of multiplayer.  The only thing that I think could have been done better storytelling, but that’s a small gripe in an otherwise excellent game.

Fifty thousand people used to live here.  Now it’s a ghost town.

As some of you know, today has been a day that I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.  That time being about 11 months ago on December 5th, 2008 when the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) was announced (at least that’s when I first heard of it).  However, this post is not about Modern Warfare 2 (MW2).  It is about CoD4.  Look for my initial impressions of MW2 most likely on Thursday, after I’ve had a few days to dig into it a bit.  I have been working on this note since mid-October as I’ve had lots of thoughts about CoD4 and not sure what to do with them all, so I decided that I’d write something up in honor of the game.  It may sound strange that I’m honoring a video game, but this is the way I feel about this piece of work.

I could start this by going all the way back to Christmas of 1987 when I was given a Nintendo Entertainment System, but let’s just go back to the Summer of 2007 instead.  I had just gotten married, and worked with some wonderful people at Auspice, Inc in Waltham, MA.  I was a Nintendo gamer, proudly and solely.  I have never been a fan of the Sony Playstation controllers, and worked at Sun Microsystems for a few years, so I was somewhat anti-Microsoft.  This last little bit changed when a few people at Auspice (Bill, Bates, Wes) coerced me into picking up an Xbox 360.  Halo was all the rage at the time, so I decided to pick up a 360 before Halo 3 was released in late September.  In August, my wife and I went to Best Buy and bought a new 50″ Panasonic Plasma, a 360, and a bunch of other things that don’t matter.  When I hooked up the 360, I immediately realized that I was holding the best gaming controller I’ve ever held.  The online component, though not free, was absolutely amazing.  I never thought that I’d come across such an incredible gaming system.  I went away the following weekend to the Penny Arcade Expo out in Seattle and was amazed at how many people played the Xbox 360.  I felt like part of a new club, and was very excited.

In the first few weeks of owning the console, I played mostly Bioshock on Easy difficulty as I was trying to grasp the control of a first-person shooter at a much faster rate of speed than I was used to.  In early September, which for some reason that I forget right now, I got a code for something called the ”Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Beta”.  I had no idea what it really was, but as soon as I got it, I fired off the following email to my friend Glenn:

Glenn,
I got a beta code for Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare…I’m gonna try it out…..first CoD game that isn’t WWII, so we’ll see how it is…jlj

Glenn replied:
what war is this CoD?

I replied back:
not sure…it is modern though….so probably the middle east
i’m sure to get pwned in multiplayer.

And finally Glenn replied back with this, which ended the conversation:
I want a Wii.

That evening, I input the code that I was emailed and fired it up.  The multiplayer beta consisted of three maps: Crash, Overgrown, and Vacant, which are still some of my favorites.  I still remember my first game like it was yesterday.  I was placed into Overgrown, near Grandma’s house, and instantly had to change my control scheme because I am one of those people who have to play FPS’s with an inverted Y-axis.  When I came back, two of my co-workers were there with me.  This is the first real time in my life when I had been able to play a game with other people, over the internet, with such fluidity.  I died many more times than I killed, but I had a blast doing so.  Over the next few days I was able to rank up to the maximum rank of 16 before Halo 3 came out, which took my focus away, but the whole time I played Halo 3, I was looking forward to the November 5th release of CoD4.  My favorite aspect of this game was how Infinity Ward (IW) allowed you to customize your character by being able to make your bullets stronger or become invisible to radar, etc.  This wasn’t something that I (or the world as far as I know) had ever really seen before.  These “perks” were something special.  In Halo, you always start matches with the same gun.  In CoD4, you could have up to five customizable classes, that you set up, the way YOU want!

On release day, I had to work, but my wife is awesome and went to Circuit City two hours before the truck got there to pick me up a copy.  She was the first in line, and she told me afterwards that the amount of testosterone that formed in that line was something else (I can only imagine how tonight’s midnight release will be!).  When I got home from work, I started up the single player portion of the game, which just completely blew me away.  After a short tutorial, you’re thrown onto a ship in a storm for the first mission.  I didn’t know what was going on, and completely freaked out when the ship started sinking and I had to run from inside of this thing, along catwalks while water poured in, up to the top deck and then jump into a helicopter as it takes off.  I then let my breath out.  On the screen, it said Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and I knew I was in for a wild ride!

The story that IW created for this game is like nothing else I’ve ever seen.  They have said before that they wanted to create a game in modern times (versus WWII) because they could write whatever they wanted, and didn’t have to work with historical references.  What they did for CoD4 was simply amazing, from the nuke going off to the throwback ghillie suit stealth mission, it was spectacular.  My favorite part of the whole single player campaign is when I got to shoot out of the AC-130, something I’ll soon be able to do again, though this time in multiplayer!  This brings me to the real meat and potatoes of CoD4: multiplayer.  IW did a fantastic job with it, and the additions that were put in place could be called “Revolutionary”.  This aspect of the game is definitely what put it on the map as one of the best games ever created.  I’ve put a lot of time into multiplayer (as compared to my estimated 30 hours of single player to 1000/1000 the game) and it’s something that I deem worthy of posting my final statistics for.  I say final because today is the eve of the release of the sequel, so I doubt that CoD4 will get much more playing time unless I decide to give it a throwback run in a few months.  We’ll see.  So here are my ending stats for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare:

Leaderboard Statistics

Rank                                    Score                               Time Played

138747                                 956503                              40 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes

Wins

Rank                 Wins                  Losses               Ratio                 Streak

341476              4509                   4119                  1.09                   20

Kills

Rank          Kills           Deaths       Ratio      Streak        Headshots      Assists

55425         84878         69016        1.23        26              8767              9296

Accuracy

Rank                 Accuracy                Hits                     Misses

6913982             12.94                      160199                 1076975

Being ranked 55,000 isn’t usually something to speak highly of, but in this case, it’s out of well over 10 million, so I feel pretty good about it.  I’m definitely not the best at this game, and have never thought that.  What I do know is that I’m not horrible at it, and have progressively gotten better at it with time.  I remember when I tried to get my kill/death ratio up to 1.00.  It was around when I had about 6000 total kills and about 7300 deaths.  Each game where I would have at least 1 more kill than death, I was happy about, and it was a good day when I got to that 1.00 ratio.  Since then it’s been mostly positive and I finished the game with around 15,000 more kills than deaths.  That’s not too bad.

CoD4 has broken about 3 of my Xbox 360 controllers; not because I got mad and threw them, but because the insides of them wore out from use.  I’d realize that while standing completely still and not even holding the controller, my guy would just slowly turn to the left, or clicking to run just stopped working altogether.  Buying a new controller is always fun because it’s rough and new as compared to the smooth, worn-out feel of an old one.  I have a new one sitting at home ready for MW2.

It seems as though as we move along through time, we find something that could be called “Best in Class”, and as technology develops, these items evolve and then all of a sudden, there’s a new “Best in Class”.  Maybe this is why the Academy Awards are given out each year.  For the longest time, my opinion of the best video game ever created was Metroid: Prime which was released on the Nintendo Gamecube on November 17th, 2002.  The music in that game is something that I will probably never forget, and even now, I can hear the opening menu tune (though to be fair, it was my ringtone for a while).  It still holds a very high ranking in my mind, but can’t really compare with the complete package that is CoD4.  In its time, Metroid: Prime opened my eyes to a new type of game, in a universe that I was familiar with but also one that had much exploration to be had.  CoD4 does this in a slightly different way; I play the same maps over and over again, but every single time, even if I plan to go to the same places in the maps, every time it’s different.  The game keeps me coming back for more.  I want to try out new customized setups, and the game drives me to want to play it more.  Even after I finished ranking up and unlocking new items, guns, and attachments, I still look forward to playing it.  CoD4 has taken the place that Metroid: Prime held as my overall, and all-time, favorite game.  It did this a while ago, but I’m only coming to terms with it now.  The Empire Strikes Back is still my favorite movie however.  That’s going to be a tough one to top.  CoD4 is the best game I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a lot, but I have a feeling that the torch will be passed on to a new game… in just a few hours.