Studio711

So far I have reviewed Tiger Woods 2006, NFS:MW, PGR3, CoD2, and Gemoetry Wars. It's time to catch up on the games I've been playing in the past couple months. I'm going to save myself some time and only review games I've actually purchased (instead of including demo games I've downloaded.)

Marble Blast Ultra
This is a $5 (or was it $10?) game from Live Arcade. I bought it because it was the middle of a party and a girl said she wanted to play. Combine that with a credit card and I know own the game. The game got a lot of good reviews and I played through most of the single player game. It's an interesting game based on Marble Blast which was on arcade machines and NES. It held my interest for a while and it's a good one to have on the box for non-gamers.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW)
This squad based tactical shooter was a nice change of pace from the Halo-style run and gun games. The squad AI was good most of the time but it got frustrating when they would stand out in the middle of the street getting riddled with bullets. The load screens are well hidden. You fly above Mexico City in a helicopter while you get briefed on the current world situation from news feeds and your officers. The picture-in-picture style controls provide a ton of info that takes a while to internalize. The graphics in this game are some of the best I've seen on the 360 so far. A couple levels did get incredibly frustrating as I would die over and over and over and over again. For a real test of your skill, crank it up to the hardest setting. Get hit by one shot and you're dead. Dying after one shot isn't fun in real life and it's not fun in a game. If you're and FPS fan, you should have this game.

Hexic HD
This arcade title shipped with the 360's, but I never played it. I decided to give it a chance and it's surprisingly addictive. You can play it online on your PC for free at various sites. The gameplay is very simple, but it's addictive. Again, it's a game for non-gamers.

Fight Night Round 3 (FN3)
I bought this game the week before I left for Seattle while I was staying with Jay. At first we were both flummoxed because we couldn't figure out the controls. Eventually we opened up the instruction booklet and voila, a world of punch options were revealed. You control most/all of the punch/block options with different "gestures" on the two thumbsticks. It definitely takes a while to get used to, but once you figure it out it really fits the game. I got all 1000 gamerpoints available from this game. I'm not a fan of boxing and I don't watch it on TV, but this has turned into one of my favorite games. How can you go wrong with a game that lets you hire the Burger King king as your trainer? If you have a bunch of guys sitting around a TV, this is the game to pop in. The graphics are insane and you can fight without getting blood on the carpet.

Perfect Dark Zero (PDZ)
I picked this game up because it was cheap at the Microsoft Company Store. I wish I could return it. The graphics would have been bad on the original console, and the game design drove me nuts. The worst part of the game (it's hard to choose) was the lack of checkpoints in the level. If you're lucky you get one checkpoint halfway through the level. The result is that you'll play every level about 10-15 times. At one point I almost threw the game in the trash, but I have this need to finish every game I start. So I turned the difficulty down to Easy and opened up the game walkthroughs on the Internet. It was still hard to figure out where I was supposed to go in the levels. Save your money. Don't buy this. Ever.

Kameo
I bought this one because it was cheap at the Microsoft Company Store. (Sound familiar?) I don't know why I bought it. I don't do role playing games. Anybody want a shiny new copy of Kameo? I had it in the 360 for about 15 minutes.

I'm probably going to have some fresh Kool-Aid sitting on my desk tomorrow. I just trashed two Microsoft Game Studio games.

Moto GP 06
Ahhh finally, back to my core genre: racing. I love racing games. At least 50% of my game collection is racing. This was my first foray into motorcycle racing and it takes a while to get used to. You have to do all your braking before you get to the corners and get set up well in advance. Once you're in the corners you can't do much to adjust where you are going to end up. This game has an incredible number of tracks and most of them look pretty good. I liked this game, but it loses a couple points for crashes. If you touch another player, you're the one who will crash while they continue on their merry way. I understand that it's easy to crash on a motorcycle, but why don't the AI racers every fall? This game should hold a racing fan's interest for a long time.