It’s been a while since I’ve really chimed in about gaming, and I’m starting to feel a little guilty about it, but I can tell you I’ve got a good reason (..ok you got me, I don’t). Truth is I couldn’t tear myself away from World of Warcraft long enough to write, I’ll get to that later. It’s not the only game I’ve been playing though, without further ado here I go!

Call of Duty: Black Ops

I like everyone else on the planet have been playing Black Ops, I got through the single player quickly (it felt a little longer than MW2 thankfully), and while from a story perspective it was one of the most interesting of all of the COD games it’s not without it’s flaws. The issues with the barrel level went fairly well documented, but I too got stuck here, and the areas where you encounter non-stop enemies is just annoying. I played a lot of multiplayer the first couple weeks but that has tapered off for me now too. It’s pretty fun, I wouldn’t say it’s better than MW2, but it was fun because people hadn’t unlocked or figured out all the load out exploits yet (although it seems that they’ve started showing up).

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

I’m not gonna lie, this is a Burnout game (this is not a bad thing at all), except you’re driving cars that feel like they actually have some weight which was my biggest complaint about the Burnout series. The result is a fast paced arcade racer, that requires a bit of finesse to really eke out every last millisecond on your time, and you want to because of Autolog, basically an internal social network feature that compares your times versus the times of your friends lists. Depending on the commitment of your friends, this can create some truly frustrating, and rewarding competition, meaning a lot of replayability and tons of value to this game. They were lucky to get this out before Gran Turismo 5 and the lack of a cockpit cam is disappointing, but I can honestly say that both of these games can coexist on your shelf. If you can get your friends to pick it up, you would be wise to get this game.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

I haven’t played much of it, actually I did the first 4 objectives or so and they were so mundane that it made me want to turn it off, I haven’t turned it on since, but I’m sure I’ll be back to it. I don’t know why I keep buying these, I was not a fan of the last one despite it being one of the two games I’ve platinumed.

Donkey Kong Country

It looks and more importantly sounds like Donkey Kong Country, I haven’t played it yet, but I watched the gf play for a while, so I will defer to her for comment. “It’s cool! It’s like (punching motions) BOOM! BOOM! BANANAS!”… couldn’t have put it better myself. Looking forward to some quality time with it later.

World of Warcraft

This has been the biggest time sink for obvious reasons. I got back into it because the events and changes for Cataclysm have started and I wanted to give the “old” leveling experience another go so I can look at it comparatively post Cataclysm. I was able to get to level 71 in 7 days (real life time, not played), and I had a pretty good time doing it. The map changes go live today, so I can’t wait for the realms to get back online so I can check it out.

Dance Central

This is the only reason to own a Kinect, it’s still getting a lot of play around here, and it’s fun… moving up to medium routines and the extra challenges are making it more fun for sure. it would appear that it has legs and Harmonix spit out a new set of DLC today including Cameo’s “Word Up!”… oh yea, that’s gonna have to happen.

My apologies for the lack of content lately, but no wonder I haven’t had time to write my Blops and NFS reviews, that’s a lot of games to play. Also, Gran Turismo 5 is out tomorrow, and today the Wheel Stand for my logitech G27 arrived, I’m STOKED, I will be spending some time in the driver seat this evening and tomorrow.

I got home with my copy of Need For Speed Hot Pursuit this morning, and as is par for the course for EA games now, it comes with a code for “Online Pass” which enables the online content. So when the game boots up for the first time you’re prompted to enter your code or start your 2 day trial.

Sadly, when I try to enter my code:

I know the image is blurry, it says “Unable to Process Online Pass Please try again later”…

For a game that is basically built around Autolog and online competition, this should work on launch day… I’m thoroughly disappointed by this.

UPDATE: In the interest of fairness it would appear that EA is working on it… and issued this notice http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/3834779.page

To our North American Playstation 3 customers: our apologies, but there is a delay in the activation of PSN Online Pass codes for Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. We have been working with Sony to resolve this issue, and you should be able to enter your Online Pass codes shortly. In the meantime, you can still jump online immediately by activating the free two day trial.

I seeeee you...

I, like many people apparently picked up Kinect last week, along with it a handful of the launch titles just to see what the tech is all about and to see if they did anything gameplay-wise that might suggest that my reservations about the technology have been wrong.

My pre-launch impressions on this tech is that it could be fairly good at the things it can do, and be successful staying within those constraints. Things like fitness, and dancing games have a chance to excel because with the skeletal tracking functionality the software has the opportunity to correct things like over all form, something that has been missing from the fitness genre up until now, on top of adding a great deal of depth to the video game dancing formula.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Interfacing with the dashboard with your body is cumbersome, it’s not very precise and it’s pretty slow because you have to hover over a button for 2/3 seconds to confirm that this is what you’re trying to do. In canada there isn’t a ton of things of interest in the Kinect Hub of interest. The voice commands are kind of neat, but the only command I’ve really used is, “xbox play disc”, which is handy if the game you want to play is in there, but if it’s not it’s completely useless. I haven’t figured out how to eject the disc or power off the console with voice commands yet so I’m finding it very limited. I also don’t use Zune for anything… at all… so while I poked around I didn’t see anything interesting there either. To make matters worse, it would appear that there were no interface standards set out by MicroSoft and as such it seems like every game I’ve played has a different control scheme for navigating the in-game menus. For a system that is all about this get up and play methodology, spending time figuring out menus is fairly annoying, even when they are working. The only consistent piece is the gesture to pull up the guide, and even that is honestly a fraction of the guide you get from your controller. Why can’t I check my active downloads from there as I can with the controller. In my opinion it is only half ready.

Kinect promotes this jump in jump out recognition to automatically sign you into your profile, this appears to work great at the hub, however setting up KinectID in my living room was extremely challenging the 6 foot mark pretty much has my heels up against my couch so getting positioned where they wanted me to, I had to climb up on the arms of the couch and everything. Some games the recognition works a little better than others or doesn’t behave the way I might expect it to, for example, if i play a song in dance central, and then step out, and let the gf step in, it signs her in, but it seems as though it is still playing under my profile updating my scores and whatnot until I back out of the track list entirely and select the ‘active user’ in the interface. I suspect that is more to do with the design of the software than Kinect but I’d think some best practices would have been communicated.

As for the software, Dance Central is fun in small doses I guess, but i don’t think it’s going to have the longevity it’s going to need to be as successful as Harmonix wants it to be (and apparently needs to be), and it most certainly isn’t making me a better dancer.

I also picked up Your Shape Fitness Evolved mostly because my gamer life style has gotten the better of me and I’m out of shape, pretty badly. I figure I can use this to get me to a point where I can bridge the gap between where I am now to being able to do the warm up of an actual exercise program… and if it can do that then I’ll be happy with it. So far the tracking seems to be pretty good, and I’m only scratching the surface with my exercises since I can really only take it for 20 mins or so every other day… I am having some problems with the methods they use for correcting you if your form is wrong however. It simply tells you that you are out of rhythm, for example I was doing a side step exercise and I apparently wasn’t stepping wide enough, it did mention one time to widen my step, and I did, but not wide enough, but i was in rhythm for a couple steps then it didn’t give me the specific correction again. It was frustrating because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing wrong and why it wasn’t counting my reps. Aside from that, it is kind of neat but I’ll need to get in better shape before I can actually get into this in more detail.

Kinectimals is cute and all but so far it’s been more of a throwing simulator then a pet type game. Also, I really feel like I need something in my hand to do the throwing parts… a key aspect to throwing something in real life is identifying the release point… since there is no way to tell kinect what the release point is, it doesn’t give me the sense that I’m in control, and the accuracy of these things feels off because of it. Luckily it’s pretty forgiving but I don’t think it’s “that kind of game”. I was sort of expecting the pet to just interact with me, I mean if we’re playing catch with a ball, and I ask him to do a trick, I’d expect him to do it. It would seem that you need to go into the toy box and select the whistle before you can do any of the “tricks”. To me it just seems like that stuff should always be on regardless of what else is happening in the game. I’m obviously not the target audience for this though…

Kinect Adventures is a typical pack-in tech demo… the stuff works, and it shows a few ways to interact with kinect, but it seems like it’s just an advertisement to developers who will endeavor to fill up the kinect library with shitty minigame collections. The games here are OK-ish… they work but it’s more or less just shuffling and jumping. It’s nice that they put some kind of progression around it beyond just a “here’s a bunch of mini games pick one”, but it’s pretty much a throw away, but if you’ve got kids I’m sure there is some fun to be had here.