Oh Games: 360!

Now that we got Macho Man Randy Savage doing a 720 instead of a 360 out of the way, let's talk about 360 gamezzzzz.

IGN recently wrote a top 25 games for Xbox 360 and in usual IGN fashion, it completely baffled me. Maybe because I usually don't understand why most game sites go hog wild for certain games like for instance:
Halo 3
I know that this had to have some place on the list since Halo is pretty much thee Xbox exclusive, but over Grand Theft Auto 4? As I've been told, Halo 3 is pretty much Halo 2.5(never did play Halo 2), which I'm sure a lot of people are completely happy with, but I find it particularly odd that a game that legitmized the idea of storytelling in video games to me would be placed below this. I've never played through a Halo campaign so maybe I'm just ignorant of the fact that the Halo games have a totally awesome stories(I highly doubt it), but it's multiplayer is some of the most lifeless sci-fi shooting nonsense I've ever had the opportunity to play. That's not to say that the game doesn't have good production values because it does, but that's all there really is to praise with the game. Getting a multiplayer game is also a borderline braindead process since the developers decided to make it completely random, meaning that you'll have to play on a lot of maps that aren't particularly good. There is a veto feature that randomly gives you another map instead so there's always that possibility that you'll veto a certain map that you're not particularly fond of and end up with an even worse one. Oh joy!

Call of Duty 4
Yes, this is one of those popular multiplayer shooting games and I'll be the first to say that it's leaps and bounds better than Halo 3, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have the generic feeling that every other modern war game on the market does. To describe the multiplayer experience in a cute way, it's basically Battlefield 2 minus vehicles and with better gunplay. The gunplay is fast and furious at first and then eventually it becomes numbing. Even if you're kicking ass, it's not particularly rewarding probably due to the fact that most of it has to do with being lucky. A lot of the times when you kill someone, it's because the other person doesn't know where you're at, meaning that there's usually never a 1-on-1 firefight that lasts long. People are disposed of so quickly that it's kind of hard to cherish any of it. Picture trying to cherish the images in a film with rapid cutting the whole time and you get the picture. The campaign isn't anything to write home about, either. I find it progressively hard to play videogames that have a jingoistic atmosphere about them. I know this game attempts to make the morality murky, but I don't really buy it. You never really learn why the enemies are doing what they're doing so it's kind of hard to really give a shit about what you're doing. Of course, I wouldn't be complaining about things like this if the gameplay was fun, but it's not really. It might because the whole theme of modern warfare to me isn't a very interesting one, especially in regards to first-person shooters. I played enough Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2 already. I want something new.

Bioshock
Spoilers coming up!
Bioshock placed behind Grand Theft Auto 4 and thank goodness for that. Bioshock was a game I loved when I started, but as it went on, I become increasingly underwhelmed. It's probably because the facade of the whole enterprise kept getting peeled away as it along. I started to realize more and more that this was not a particularly inventive game that has some incredible audio and visuals. There's the whole moral quandary nonsense with the little sisters that everybody loves to praise, but it's not much of a quandary since it's so black and white. The story is not anything to write home about either since it basically boils down to The Usual Suspects under the sea. The game, at first, is spooky and then you realize that all these splicers that are supposedly scary are easy as hell to kill. I spent most of my time in the game just using the shock plasmid and the wrench. The only time the game really got challenging was when you fought Big Daddies, which were pains in the ass, and portions near the end, but the game's respawn system makes the game as forgiving as humanly possible. That's not to say that the game would have been better if it didn't have that respawn system since it would have been probably frustrating as hell at given points like fighting Big Daddies. The game's pretty much the poster child for all this "games are art" madness, but I don't know if it's particularly a good one to latch onto. There's nothing really extraordinary about it other than the world it creates, but even that becomes kind of flat when you realize how linear the game is and how limited the scope of the art style really is. Some of the audio logs are actually intriguing and if only you got to see the events described play out instead of having to trek through this "nightmarish" and "wondrous" environment in such a repetitive fashion, it could have amounted to much more.

I'll probably add games that I really enjoy on the 360 later...