While Torchlight has been available for the PC for a long (long!) time, it just came out last week on Xbox 360 as an arcade game.  And it is a great game!  It’s probably the best value for an Xbox live arcade game so far.  I can’t believe how much stuff they fit into that ~400 meg download!

It wasn’t the best story ever, but I thought the story made more sense than Borderlands!  The side quests were ok, but I think I “broke” some by going through the area and doing something before I got the quest for it.  There were other things where I swear I scoured the whole level, and the thing that was supposed to be there wasn’t there.  And I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking when there was so much other stuff to do.

The controls were pretty good for a PC to Xbox port, although I think some things, like inventory management, could have been simplified.  I accidentally sold or equipped things lots of times because the selection outline and the equipped outline were very similar at first glance.  The text in some areas still seemed to be set up for a PC as well, with a really small font that only used up a small area at the bottom of the screen, with the torchlight logo covering the other 70%. 

But I can easily overlook any of those nitpicks for this one.  About 3/4 of the way through, I felt like I was cheating.  Once I started getting really good equipment and skills, I was just destroying things.  In most games, as you get stronger, so do the bad guys, so even though you’re now doing 10x the damage at level 10, the bad guys are 10x stronger, so there’s not a lot of difference from level 1.  While that was somewhat true in Torchlight, I felt like my character really was a hero.  Hacking and slashing and fireballing zombies and dragons and such was awesome fun.  I didn’t die until the very last boss monster, as health potions were pretty easy to come by.

The verdict on this one is 100% clear.  Spend the points and buy Torchlight.  The only thing that would be better would be co-op multiplayer, so here’s hoping for that in Torchlight 2. And here’s to double hoping the Xbox port comes sooner for the sequel, with how well it has done in sales!

This is one of the few sequels that doesn’t have a number or subtitle.  It should be something like “Medal of Honor: Tier 1” or something, as the game was mostly following some Tier 1 special forces operators through the storyline.

Like the Call of Duty series, I played through MoH on the hardest difficulty (until I saw the “Tier 1 mode” or whatever that I didn’t go back through and play).  But unlike recent CoD games on hard, I didn’t see any real “bugs” with the “good guy” AI.  And the special forces guys in this game could shoot.  While you, as the player, still have to do the majority of the work, the computer controlled players could at least draw fire and provide cover so that you could flank the bad guys.  So for this game, I don’t have to write a version of my “letter to my idiot squadmates” posts.  The effectiveness of my squad did make the game feel a little easier than CoD, but it did make me feel like a good player on a great team, instead of the great player on a crappy team.   However, the game not being as hard didn’t make the game any less enjoyable.

The scenarios and script of the single player campaign seemed very realistic. In fact, some of it seems to be loosely based on the real life situation that was documented by Marcus Lattrell in his fantastic book Lone Survivor. Some other parts of the game were so engrossing that as things started to unfold, I actually was getting worried.  In one section, you’re fighting your way down an Afghan mountain with a small squad of soldiers, vastly outnumbered by the Taliban.  You’re trying to call in close air support, but things just aren’t working out.  You’re hiding in buildings that are slowly getting destroyed by small arms fire and RPGs, and you continue to fall back.  All the while, your squad-mates are counting down ammo.  Soon, they start firing kill shots only.   Then you start hearing “last mag!” and other not good commentary.  When the radio guy tells command to use the air support to help another group because we’re about to be overrun and it would just be a waste of time… At this point, like my squadmates, I’m also getting very low on ammo, and I’m starting to freak out…back in the real world, on my couch, my heart is racing!

There was also a section where you get to be the gunner in an Apache (my favorite helicopter of all time).  Surprisingly, on the hardest difficulty, I got through it pretty quick, and I was only using the main gun.  When playing through again later on easy to pick up some achievements I missed, I realized that the apache also had rockets, and I never used them on hard!  I died a lot more on that section on easy than I did on hard.  But it sure was fun!  Now someone needs to make a game featuring my favorite airplane of all time, the A-10 Thunderbolt II, aka “The Warthog”, but that’s a discussion for another day!

The multi-player was Ok.  I liked some of the progression aspects, but I think the Call of Duty franchise has a better overall system for that.  As a new player unfamiliar with the maps, I was getting sniped far too much for it to be a lot of fun though.  In the Call of Duty games, after you get killed by another player, you see an instant replay from that player’s point of view, so you can at least see where the person is camping as they kill you over and over…

There was a lot of hub-ub when the game was coming out that in multi-player, one side was good guys, and the other side was the Taliban.  There was a huge negative press that you get to be the Taliban.  After EA changed the name to the more generic “OpFor” (opposing force) that is used by militaries around the world in war games (and used in the Call of Duty series of games set in modern day), the rhetoric didn’t seem to calm down much, and Exchanges on military bases still refused to sell the game.  I wonder if they ever sold “Counterstrike”, or the Call of Duty games.  In counterstrike, one side was always the “Terrorists”, and the other was trying to rescue hostages or defuse a bomb planted by the terrorists.  The Call of Duty games always had one set of players being the Axis and the other side the Allies.  Personally, I don’t see the big deal, particularly since the game is rated Mature.

All in all, I thought it was a really good game, and can’t wait for the sequel (bring on lucky number 13 in the franchise!)

This is the (by my count) 7th game in the Call of Duty series. Of the recent ones (since CoD:Modern Warfare), this one had the best story.

It had a very interesting psycho-drama going on, with the main character being captured and interrogated by someone, causing flashbacks. The missions occurred in the flashbacks, not entirely in order, and interestingly, sometimes without clear beginning or end. I liked that. Several times you’d be what you’d assume 3/4 of the way through something, and then you’d see something that didn’t make sense, and you’d get shocked back to the interrogation. I thought I had figured out what was going on, but I hadn’t. I like it when a game keeps me guessing.

But, like all of the recent call of duty games, i have to complain about the computer controlled characters. There were many many cases where a bad guy would “rush” wherever the good guys were, and would either kill me, or all the good guys in that vicinity, without the other good guys ever firing a single shot. It was if the good guys never saw the bad guy at all. I always play through the CoD games on the hardest possible difficulty, and maybe that’s what exposes me to the worst flaws. I assume as the difficulty goes up, the good guys in your squad become less effective, requiring you to do more, and makes the bad guys more effective. I get that, that’s fine. But its inexcusable to let a bad guy run across 50 yards of open ground uncontested into the middle of a group of what is supposed to be highly trained special forces soldiers. At least in the previous games, most of the time the offending soldiers were just regular soldiers. In this game, they’re supposed to be operators! The elite! If you’re so elite, do something, other than stand there and die!

Red Dead Redemption was one of the best games I played in 2010.  Well, I’m finished playing it in 2011, so it might be the best game I played in 2011 too :).  If you haven’t played it, its Grand Theft Horse, basically.  Same developers, same engine.  But the story in RDR was a lot more interesting to me than GTA was.  I think when you set a game in modern day, you really have to get every little detail right, because people’s brains are so used to seeing that stuff, that you will notice if the cars are too shiny, or the windows don’t reflect right, and all kinds of other things just won’t look quite right.  But when you set a game in the wild wild west, not a lot of people are used to riding horses, or herding cattle so you aren’t going to notice little things that are incorrect. 

Even so, I can say that I hated herding cattle.  Seriously.  One time is enough to show me the hardships of the old west, but one time is more than enough herding cattle for me :). 

The interesting (no spoilers!) thing about the story is that while it might have been a little predictable, I think part of that predictability came from really understanding the main character and his predicament, and the helplessness of the whole situation.  There were certainly things that I personally wouldn’t have done in that situation, but I know that John Marston would have.  I saw most of what I’d call “Act III” coming, and yet when things started unfolding I was not disappointed at all.  It was somehow…fitting.

The dead-eye system worked really well for shooting, especially from the back of a moving horse.  The duel thing was ok, but I didn’t realize until real late in the game that there was a rhythm factor to the shooting that I didn’t notice (or missed in the first tutorial), so a couple of the story related duels I failed and had to do over and over and I never noticed that there was a specific indicator to watch for while aiming.

My only other real complaint (aside from the frigging cattle rustling!) was some of the voice acting.  It seems like a ton of the dialog was just yelling.  Yelling for no reason.  Yes, people are riding horses so you might need to increase the volume of the dialog, but that doesn’t mean the actors should just be yelling all the time.  That just decreases its impact when people really should be yelling.

The hunting/gathering/treasure quests were ok, but what made me stop completely stop dong them was the last gathering one.  Get 15 of x, fine, I’ve been doing that the whole game.  But “get 15 of plant x, and 2 more of every other plant?”  Screw that.  Get your own plants you jerks!

AC2 was probably one of the best games I’ve played this year.  Most of the time sequels aren’t as good as the original, but this one was as good, if not better than the original.  Yes, it was a little formulaic,  and there was a fair amount of repetition, but I really liked the story.  It had one laaaaaaame moment, but I’ll let it go and see if AC3 cleans it up.  I thought the addition of the interaction with Leonardo Da Vinci was pretty clever.   There’s also a part now where you kindof run a city in a very minimal way, so that was an interesting way to make money.  Towards the end I had so  money I didn’t know what to do with it all, so I wish there would have been something else to do with it 😀

Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood just came out, too, so I’ll have to add that to the top of my gamefly list.  I know the new one has some multiplayer, so I’m not sure how much the story continues, as it doesn’t have “3” in its title anywhere…but I’m definitely going to find out!