Halo: Reach

Rating: 7.5/10

Reach is the latest game in the Halo franchise, and the last one done by the amazing Bungie Studios. Somewhat like Halo Wars it raised the question in my mind as to how the Humans had more advanced weaponry further in the past. But that’s easily overlooked once you immerse yourself in the story line. Unlike Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3 you play as a Spartan other than Master Chief. You play as the almost equally powerful Noble 6. Even though it lacks the star of the franchise it makes up for it with amazing customization of your own Spartan and an awesome story line. Everything from a helmet with a skull carved into the visor to having lightning surrounding your armor. The story line also lives up to the high standards of the rest of the franchise. You get to partake in many of the battles leading up to Reach’s near total destruction. For the first time you get to team up with a group of Spartans rather than just a squad of ODST and/or UNSC Marines that usually get shot down without much of a fight. Another addition to the game is the new Armor Abilities. Rather than just having over shields and active camo you can now fly, sprint, and dodge out of battle with recharging changeable armor abilities that vary depending on the map and game type. These replaced the things like gravity lifts and bubble shields in Halo 3. Aside from some of the new cool game types that’s where the bulk of the pros end. Like the previous games Halo: Reach is prone to becoming very repetitive. Due to the rather low variety of weapons and vehicles you’ll find yourself in the same multiplayer experience over and over. The main drive to continue playing is to rank up and make your Spartan a bigger cooler target for the enemy. While Halo 3 had a large number of players that made numerous fun custom game maps I haven’t found too many enjoyable ones in Reach and haven’t found too many people willing to play them, mostly due to their wanting to complete the daily or weekly challenges or just wanting to get enough credits for the new Firefight voice or piece of armor. All things considered it’s worth playing, especially being Halo 4 isn’t due to release until some time next year. If your a fan of the Halo franchise this is probably a good game for you.

Fallout: New Vegas – PC/Xbox 360

Rating: 8.5/10

I personally own most of the games in the Fallout franchise. Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout: Tactics, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas are all in a disk case somewhere around here… But I believe Fallout: New Vegas really stands out. For one it was the first of the Fallout series lacking the typical vault obsession. While it did have many Vaults in the game, the player didn’t start in a Vault, or with any intention of going to one like most of the previous games. Even in Fallout: Tactics you start in a bunker rather than a Vault but they’re still very closely related. In New Vegas you start off in a rather “backwoods” kind of town called Goodsprings. Which, if anyone didn’t know was based off a real town in Nevada. It’s a strange change from the norm but they still managed to work the Pip-Boy in there anyway. The main lacking point of the game however was the fact that there wasn’t a big change between Fallout 3 and New Vegas game wise. The controls are the same, the bulk of the system seemed unchanged, and alot of the additions to the game seemed alot like rip offs of the mods made for Fallout 3 on the PC. None the less it’s a very interesting game, with the same gore and humor of the predecessors. I play games like Fallout, Halo, CoD, and Oblivion for their stories mostly and New Vegas didn’t disappoint. New Vegas had a very engaging story with plenty of very interesting characters. Many of my favorite characters include the ingenious Mr. House, the insane Tabitha, and the (mostly) emotionless Boone. Aside from the main storyline and quest line in New Vegas there were many many side stories and side quests to keep the player entertained. One of the major pros to buying the computer version instead of the Xbox 360 version is the ever growing number of player created mods for the game. Many websites have hundreds even thousands of mods absolutely free. I know I must have at least 30GB of my hard drive full of mods for New Vegas alone. The only con is that you have to have a pretty high end PC to run New Vegas on it’s higher graphics settings. But if you’re like me and computers are the only thing you don’t cheap out on, then that shouldn’t be an issue. Another pro of New Vegas is the fact that they’ve added iron sights to many of the guns by default. So that rather than just zooming in like in Fallout 3 you get to actually look down the sight like in a normal FPS. While the game might be a bit too similar to Fallout 3, it has enough of a difference to be unique. However the major sign that they’re very similar is that one of the free mods I mentioned allows you to combine Fallout 3 with Fallout: New Vegas. After a bit of clever copying, pasting, and extracting of files and folders you can start up Fallout: New Vegas and travel back East to the Capital Wasteland and play through Fallout 3 and it’s storyline. But on the other hand that just makes the game all the bigger and all the better. Any fan of the Fallout franchise, FPS games, or needless gore and explosions should definitely get this game, at least for the Xbox 360. Anyone who has a powerful gaming PC like mine at home should absolutely buy this game for the PC, they’d be squandering their computing power otherwise.

Call of Duty: Black Ops – Xbox 360

Rating: 6/10

I’ve played many games in the CoD franchise and liked many of them, unfortunately Black Ops isn’t one of the games I’m very fond of. One of it’s major problems is hackers, just like both of the currently released Modern Warfare games the leaderboards are dominated by players with absurdly high scores that simply hacked there way to the top, making leaderboard ranks utter worthless. Another one of the games problems is the overuse of “quick scoping.” While I can accept it is a legitimate skill for a game, it’s completely surreal and defeats the purpose of sniping. No sniper in real life can pull up their scope and get a head shot in a small fraction of a second. Another thing is the major repetition involved in the multiplayer. Like most FPS games with a multiplayer the main attraction to continue playing is leveling up, Black Ops does this but with a twist. Once you reach the max level you prestige go back to level 1, loose most of the equipment you’ve acquired, and continue leveling again. In some of the CoD games that’s all there was to it and Prestige was simply for bragging rights, or to show you have nothing better to do than play the game over and over. In Black Ops by gaining a new Prestige you get access to some new items in game, and access to extra class loadouts which allow you to be more versatile in combat. While the extra classes are nice, the other items a purely for show and most of them aren’t worth the work needed to get them. Overall the Prestige system seems like a cheap attempt to make the game longer, at the cost of being the same game over and over with very little change. One of the major upsides to Black Ops is it’s Zombies mode. In zombies there aren’t any levels, and the leaderboards are still very flawed, and it suffers even worse from repetition, but rather than playing against other players you get the satisfaction of plastering the walls in the bodily fluid of hundreds of the undead. A plus to zombies is the wide variety of guns, rather that use classes you start out with a pistol, and by killing zombies your earn credit that can used to buy guns and drinks that boost your ability in combat. Ontop of that you can buy enhanced versions of your guns from the “Pack-a-Punch” machine. You’ll end up killing zombies with (usually), laser firing, over powered versions of the guns you pick up from the walls and from the “Mystery Box.” If they were two separate games I’d very likely give the Zombie mode a higher rating than Black Ops. And for anyone who’s read up to this point you’ll notice I left out the story mode from Black Ops, while I did take that into account rating the game I do believe I’ve written a long enough summary already. To sum it all up, Black Ops is an entertaining game. While it has it’s flaws all games do. Anyone who really enjoys FPS games would most likely enjoy this one. I’d just suggest buying it used being there’s plenty of new games coming out this winter that are bound to blow it clear out of the water and you’ll want to save your money for them.

Global Agenda – PC

Rating: 7/10

Global Agenda is a TPS MMO (Third Person Shooter Massive Mulitplayer Online Game), that just recently was endorsed by Steam. It’s been around for awhile and has seen a surge since Steam added the FTP (free to play), games. The game revolves around a few things: Hexagons, Things that glow, jet packs, and lasers (lots and lots of lasers). It’s very rare to see anything that doesn’t have some part of it glowing in the game, almost every shield is build of small hexagons in some way, and every gun shoots some form of a laser. Ever character gets a jetpack and you won’t do well if you can’t fly well, buying a booster let’s you use a jetpack within the main city which you otherwise cannot do, you can however go out into the desert and fly around to your heart’s content until something shoots at you. The game has great character customization and even lets you customize your armor. You can change your armors colors (all two of them),  and your armor’s neon color. You can also change your weapons color and neon color. If you play enough (or pay enough), you can change your jetpack’s jet trail or it’s color (you can only apply one change, some do color, some do a trail effect, some do both). The game does have some major drawbacks however. When playing multiplayer there are two tiers. One for players under level 30 and one for players over level 30. In under 30 PvP there’s lots of noobs and it’s a pretty fair fight, the same can’t be said for over 30 PvP. In over 30 PvP there’s lots of noobs, but the fight isn’t fair. If your team isn’t organized (which outside of Beta Maps it rarely is), you’re going to lose. Some of the game types and maps also are very biased to the defending team and unless that team utterly fails they can’t lose. Ontop of that the game stops at level 50 which I got to in about a week and there’s only 4 classes. So for those that like shooters and don’t mind repetition it’s a great game. Players can also group together into Agencies, and Agencies can group into Alliances. All that plays into the AvA portion of Global Agenda which might be it’s strongest point. Agencies use the power of their members and their diplomatic skills to fight for hexes on an AvA map and the rewards that come for doing well each season (which lasts about two weeks). AvA has it’s flaws also. The rewards arn’t enough to entice players to keep strong Agencies, as a result they begin, climb, and fall constantly. This almost entirely eliminates team work over the long run. Then those agencies that do have some reason to stay together for long periods of time develop into unstoppable forces in AvA. Many of these agencies simply take hexes without opposition due to fear of being entirely wiped out. AvA does try to stop total domination of the map by imposing penalties on an agency for controlling too many hexes but it doesn’t really help in the overall game. The games one other large major flaw is the story line. Honestly you can play the game and pay absolutely no attention to the story at all it doesn’t really play a part in the game other than explaining why your fighting robots mostly. For those that do choose to follow the storyline and do the missions throughout the desert beyond the main city it is rather interesting but doesn’t play much of a part in the main game at all. But all these flaws aside it offers many hours of fun to anyone that does decide to try it out and I wouldn’t advise anyone against playing it. All in all it’s a very good game.

Rock Band 3 – Xbox 360

Rating: 8/10

Rock Band 3 is probably the best music game I have ever played. That being said I’ve played most of the Guitar Hero series, Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Beat Hazard. While Beat Hazard doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the group it’s still a very good music game. Rock Band 3 has a great variety of music right off the bat. From songs like ‘Crazy Train’ to ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1′ there’s enough music to stay entertained for a great amount of time. On top of that you can go online and download over 2,000 other songs online. It’s really easy to start playing the game too. The only instrument I’ve had any trouble with at all is the Drums and even that just took a little figuring out. But while being easy to learn to play it’s hard to master any of the instruments. Even people that commonly play Expert on any of the instruments, even the Pro instruments, are prone to occasional follies. That can only be expected when hundreds of notes are flying towards you on the screen. The only draw backs the game has are in the graphics. Being it’s a music game graphics aren’t a major issue but the graphics are roughly the same as those on the Play Station 2. The other drawback is in the lip-syncing. A decent amount of the time the vocalist doesn’t even look like they’re remotely singing the right song, sometimes they’re spot on; not a major issue but still noticeable. Overall it’s a great game and I’d advise anyone that enjoys music to play it.

Playing Rock Band 3

Listening to music is fun but I find it a bit too passive an activity on it’s own. Playing Rock Band however I can listen to music for hours and stay entertained, I don’t even mind hearing some songs a few times over.