Welcome back to a blog post about actual gaming news and what I think about it (as opposed to the past several posts where I focus on how busy my life is.)
First I’d like to jump into something that I am completely biased toward.
So this game came out last week:
I died a little inside last Tuesday when it flew off the shelves. I am completely biased. I am almost physically incapable of looking objectively at this game. I’ve played Halo for years, ever since Halo 2 was released in 2004. Okay, so it wasn’t that long ago, but I was a dedicated Halo fan … and then Bungie signed over the IP to Microsoft and now Bungie is out of the best IPs it has ever created (personally, I liked marathon quite a bit, but in my opinion nothing comes close.)
So long story short: do I think the game is bad?
Absolutely not. I won’t judge a video game’s quality before I play it.
I will, however, continue to wish that Bungie had never signed the Halo IP to Microsoft, that the hardcore Halo development team had never had to leave Bungie and that Bungie would have been able to use Halo as a financial stepping stone to produce more awesome things. Instead, Microsoft wants more Halo, and while it’s true some of us die-hard fans want more Halo, we want more of what made Halo great — the familiar art style especially, which just so happens to be my biggest problem with the game thus far.
It’s a fantasy, and that folks, is why video game publishers destroy games. It isn’t intentional, and it is a slow process, but if someone as in love with a game franchise as myself can reach the point where they give up on it, you know the franchise is going to hit the dirt hard.
All of that is opinion, but it isn’t the only thing I wanted to mention today. I started playing Mass Effect 3 — about time right? Ironically, ( if you don’t get it as you’ll understand in a minute) I borrowed the game from my friend and began playing through the campaign with my ME2 save — which was originally a ME1 save.
First impression:
MASS EFFECT 3, Y U NO LET ME MAKE CHOICES. ALSO NEED MOAR CHECKPOINTS AND SKIPPABLE CINEMATICS.
Let me explain myself. Within the first hour I became incredibly frustrated by the fact that there were very few choices in the dialogue and, as most of the first area is tutorials (which were helpful to me but not super necessary having played the others in the franchise), I soon grew incredibly bored and frustrated with the game, but the game play and story kept me going.
Fortunately about 4-5 hours the decisions started showing up and I was soon very well pleased again. I was having lots of fun gathering troops until…
…Insert Disk 2
… Nothing
So, my friend’s second disk was scratched. I guess now Ryan Shepherd remains on Tuchanka, doing nothing until further notice. I bet Joker and Mobile EDI are having a good time right now. Unfortunately, because the disk is borrowed I can’t play multiplayer, so the great irony is that the game I borrowed happened to be one of the only games that discourages sharing.
Since Mass Effect 3 is no longer an option, now I’ve gone back to playing Guild Wars 2 — check out the Zero Punctuation review, even though it’s great, although it includes a few somewhat inaccurate points about the game.
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