Strategy Guide Reviews

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Monday Gaming Diary: It’s not another brown shooter! It’s orange, thank you.

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Fuse

See? It’s orange. Not brown.

When I have been playing games this last week, it’s been all Fuse all the time. Yeah, yeah, another shooter that’s probably just like every other one. Believe me, I’ve heard all of the snooty snide remarks and seen all of the eyerolls. Bottom line is, I’m reviewing this strategy guide and I don’t care that it’s cool to not like shooters right now. I’m having an absolute blast playing.

First off, before you criticize, get one thing straight: it’s not a brown shooter; it’s actually quite orange.

Secondly, it’s actually quite fun. It has that Binary Domain vibe, and I absolutely loved Binary Domain. Each character has their own unique abilities and weapon, and you’re able to switch characters whenever you want to tap into these abilities. I could see how this game would be more fun to play with another person, like Binary Domain, but I’m having just as much fun on my own.

One complaint I am seeing is that the game is too hard to play on your own, and I have NOT found that to be true. The #1 reason why I quit playing Epic Mickey 2 was that I found it to be impossible to play well without co-op. While you could switch to Oswald whenever you wanted, it was incredibly difficult to manipulate him to do what you needed him to do, especially if he had to team up with Mickey for a purpose, such as flying across a chasm or tossing Oswald up to an out-of-reach area. With Fuse, even though some areas would definitely be easier with a co-op partner, I’ve found nothing to be impossible or even frustratingly difficult to accomplish on my own.

I’ve enjoyed the story as well, but I’ll get more into that when I write up my mini-review. But I know no one cares about this today, as today is the day of the E3 press conferences, something I actually have to cover as part of the home team for both Game Revolution and Action Trip. I’m curious if today will dictate which next-gen console I will buy first.

Monday Gaming Diary: Getting Sad about E3

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E3-2013

It’s starting to hit me how grossly sad and disappointed I am I’m not going to E3 this year. I know many people are going to roll their eyes at me when I discuss this, but just indulge me for a minute. I know I should be just happy that I’ve been able to go over the last three years at all, since many people who’d love to go have never gone and may never get the chance to go. But the fact remains that as we close in on the week before the big show, and I’m seeing people’s party plans on Twitter, I’m seeing the press announcements, and I’m seeing my team’s plans for that week, it makes me sad that I had to pull my name from the list of E3 contenders.

I know after the show is over, I won’t feel so sad anymore. In fact, I bet I’ll be happy that I got to stay at home and watch all the press conferences at my leisure. However, I really wanted to play each of the new consoles with everyone else. And most importantly to me, I really want to see all of my friends who I only get to see at these gaming shows.

That’s the biggest kicker for me; when I first went to E3 in 2010, I knew I would want to go every year after that just to see my friends in person again. In fact, when it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to get a press pass, I seriously talked about going anyway just to hang out with my friends at night. It’s not that I don’t have friends in real life where I live, so don’t get mean; it’s that when you work with and have worked with certain people as closely as I have, you get attached to them. Fortunately, I was able to see a good group of them this year at PAX East, so I don’t feel as removed from them.

Yet, I didn’t get to see any of my strategy guide contacts at PAX East, and that really bums me out I won’t see them this year. I always have a good time just discussing love of strategy guides and games with the folks at BradyGames, Prima Games, Future Press, and Piggyback. Last year was the first year I got to meet anyone at Piggyback, and it was a fantastic pleasure talking to these guys for the first time in person. It’s one thing to talk over email, but there’s something about putting a face to a name and just sitting down and nerding out over strategy guides over a cup of coffee.

It is best for everyone that I’m not going, considering I’m huge already, I can’t stand on my feet too long as it is, and I have to go pee every hour or so. That doesn’t make for pleasant line standing, as fun as that is while not pregnant. And I know I’ll get my hands on a next-gen console soon enough, so it’s silly to really be disappointed I won’t get to just a few months early.

Besides, this is good time to focus on the strategy guides I’m currently reviewing, right?

Monday Gaming Diary: Gears of War 3 Insanity vs. Halo 4 Legendary

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suicide_grunt_motivatio-600x480This past week, I finally gathered my team together for a co-op Legendary run of Halo 4. After having so much fun (mostly) playing Gears of War 3 with a team of four on Insanity, I really wanted to do the same thing with Halo 4. When we played Gears 3, our goal was to get through at least one Act a night. Sometimes it happened, and sometimes it didn’t. Some of the scenes in Act III and Act IV are a complete bitch to get through on Normal, and even with four of us, Insanity play was an absolute beating. There were times where we said we weren’t having fun anymore after playing the same scene for over an hour. I was honestly expecting a similar, really tough, really long experience with Halo 4. I’m not going to say that playing Halo 4 on Legendary isn’t tough, because it is quite difficult, but it’s definitely not going to take us very long to get through the game. In three hours, the four of us blazed through half the game.

The differences between the set-up between the two games is quite remarkable for their hardest difficulty settings. Both games put the players at 2-hits-and-you’re-dead, and both games definitely added far more enemies in the higher settings, so those have not changed. In Gears 3, I didn’t notice that the enemies had different weapons from my Normal playthrough, but the Locust were quite the bullet sponges; the lowest ranking were able to take a full clip of the Lancer before falling. Conversely in Halo 4, the HP of the enemies hasn’t seemed to change as much, but they wield far better weapons than before. I cannot tell you how many times I was killed by a lowly Grunt holding a Fuel Rod Cannon. In addition, all of the Covenant are sticky grenade happy! So much blue streaked across the screen…actually, there was so much blue and so much green from the vast amounts of Fuel Rod Cannons, I thought I was going to have an epileptic fit.

So if you asked me if I died less in Legendary Halo 4 than I did in Insanity Gears 3, the answer is definitely no. In fact, near the end when I was so tired, I’m certain I died more often.

The reason why it’s not going to take us nearly as long to get through the game is how differently Halo 4 handles teammates dying.

We played Gears 3 in Arcade mode, so there was no “bleeding out” time for players to crawl toward other players in hopes for revival. You died and you were out of the game for 25 seconds. Once the clock was up, you respawned, no matter what was going on in the game. Twenty-five seconds is a LOOOONG time to be out while playing on Insanity. Our team had to constantly give a rundown of how many seconds we had left, especially if only one person was still alive. As you can imagine, this is why we had to replay a scene for over an hour. This was far preferable to regular campaign mode, though, where anyone dying would trigger a game over screen.

In Halo 4 co-op, when a teammate dies, they’re out for a grand total of 4 seconds and will respawn next to a teammate who is not under fire. So if everyone else is in mid-battle, the dead player will have to wait until someone gets clear. As a result, we had to restart checkpoints a grand total of three times.

We were surprised we made it through the chapters so quickly, but wow, we had a great time. We actually goofed around a little bit, beating up on one another and running over one another with Warthogs that were on fire. We never did anything like that in Gears 3 because we just wanted to get through the chapters. We’ll probably finish our Legendary run in 2-3 play sessions tops, but that’s honestly fine with all of us. I have Fuse coming out next week, not to mention a large back log that requires my attention, so it’s nice to be able to play through this in record time. Besides, season two of Spartan Ops should be out soon, so we’ll be back in Halo 4 Land before too long.

 

Monday Gaming Diary: Rusty Gameplay

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Batman: Arkham Asylum

Nothing takes the wind out of your sails like getting killed by grunts.

It’s happened to all of us at one point or another. We play a game for a couple of hours, get distracted by something new and shiny, and then attempt to pick back up the first game a few months later. Typically, at this point, we’re past most major tutorials. We may not remember what we’re supposed to be doing at all. We’ll resort to looking at controller configurations in the menus and do nothing for a few minutes but press every button in an attempt to trigger remembering how to play. We’ll die a lot at first, and either one of two things will happen: we’ll find our groove back and continue with the game or put the game in the pile of never to be played again, but we say we’ll start it over some day.

Last week, this game for me was Batman: Arkham Asylum.

While I have nothing pressing for the next few weeks or so, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to clear out some games from the stack of shame. Last week, I finally finished Halo 3: ODST, and then I decided I needed to finish Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’ve already started it, I’m not that far into it, so it’s time to play it and clear it off the stack. I’ve only played the game for 2-3 hours tops, but apparently a lot was taught in that time. I could not remember how to do anything, and unfortunately, none of the takedown button combos are in the controller configuration menu. They’re also not in the strategy guide, which greatly disappointed me the most. Those who have played know how important it is for Batman to execute ground takedowns (obviously the inverted and silent takedowns don’t require button combos, just certain situations to trigger them) while fighting and while taking out armed convicts. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I died more in the first 30 minutes of playing last week than I did the first time I played the game. At the very least, it was easy to remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Normally, with my level of zero patience, I’d rage quit or start the game over completely. But for some reason that day, I was determined to get back into the swing of things. I relearned how to do a ground takedown by accident, which has greatly improved my enjoyment of playing. I’m still not very smooth or fluid with combat, but I think with another hour under my gaming belt, I’ll be okay.

With this experience, I can’t help but obsess over another game I have sitting in my stack of shame unfinished. If I’m this rusty after putting down Batman: Arkham Asylum after only playing the game for a few hours, how horrific is Dragon Age: Origins going to be for me when I pick that game back up? I have well over 20 hours logged there and I haven’t played it in well over a year. I have a feeling I’m going to have to start a new game to relearn how to play via tutorial before jumping back into my old game. I am not looking forward to that, as much as I want to finish that game.

Monday Gaming Diary: Difficulty Settings

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The Most Interesting Man In The World guidesI have admitted on more than one occasion that I have zero patience in games (well, with anything, really), hence why I got into strategy guides in the first place. While this may lead many people to assume that I play games on the easiest difficulty setting, this really isn’t true.

For new games or games that I’m reviewing strategy guides, I mostly play them on Normal. With strategy guide reviews, I really, really try to play the games on Normal due to the fact this is the difficulty setting the guides are typically written for. On an Easy setting, you rarely need a strategy guide to help you get through a boss fight because the player is usually quite powerful whereas the boss is rather weak. Not saying that you never need one, but whenever I play a game on Easy, I’ve typically found the bosses to be overly easy (shocker, right?).

The one exception I have with reviewing a strategy guide on Easy is with stealth-based games. I suck at these games so hard, I need the AI to be as dumb as possible, and yes, I still need the strategy guide to help me find the best stealth routes even with this setting. I admit that’s pathetic, and I don’t care.

Now, when I’m playing through my backlog or I’m replaying a game (a/k/a Mass Effect), the game is almost always turned down to Easy. The reason why is simple: I need to burn through this game as quickly as possible, and that means I can’t waste my time dying. Of course, there is the occasional exception, like right now, I’m playing Halo 3: ODST on Normal, and that’s because any lower of a setting, I won’t get Achievements. It’s a stupid reason, but I’d probably play it on Normal anyway because I’m so fluent in how to play Halo games. Another exception is the Gears of War games, as I often replay these with friends, so we play on Insanity for some unknown reason.

Do I maybe lose something by burning through a game? Maybe, but just because I burn through a game on Easy doesn’t mean I ignore all side quests. Please, it’s me! I’m all about the side quests!

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