Rorshac’s Game of the Week

Please watch the following before even continuing:

Now, you have to tell me your blood is not boiling after such a one sided blatant attack on an industry we know and love. I love that in the game, granted which I have yet to play, however do own, there is a story arc about love and compassion. You, the main character are out to save the galaxy. The game is about choice and making choices. To be fair, the game is rated mature, so it is written for a specific market. However, if parents actually sit down and talk to their children about these games and the consequences in them we might be looking at a growing and learning experience for both parent and child. Gee, what a novel concept, a parent parenting.

My biggest complaint about this piece of trash news journalism, if it can even be called that, is everyone on that panel, except for Geoff, has not played the game, let alone spent any serious time actually researching or playing games. The panel is a group of people looking to express uninformed decisions about one game. Last time I checked, there are far worse things out there then some alien butt and the side of a breast. Perhaps we should be happy our kids are playing a game with a rich experience teaching them consequences rather then doing oddball searches on the internet.

Either way, FOX, do your homework before you complain about a game, also perhaps some self-examination is in order, look at FX. There maybe worse on “The Shield”, “Rescue Me”, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, etc. Last time I checked most parents do not use the blocking systems on cable television or even the v-chip on their TV, so how is this any worse.

We seriously need to grow up as a society and stop blaming every outlet someone has and start looking at the real problem, people just not being responsible for their own actions.

It may not be perfect, but it is m version of the achievement unlocked logo. I have had some great internal debate about the achievement. Is it something that is tangible of gamers ability, love of gaming or is it some feeble attempt at a large score and some weird status symbol. Now that the system has been out a while and I have a good dust pile on some of my older games I realized how good the achievement actually is. Having just finished Assassin’s Creed with a rather high score I decided I want to try for some of the other achievements. One of the ones I want to get is the one for Killing all the Templars. I enjoy that act of hunting them down, some in very hostile territories. The other is the one related to combos, since I did not get this one on the first pass and tried a little to far along in the game, I realized I missed out on some amazing animations related to these deaths. To go along these lines, I have revisited some of my older titles trying to pick up a few here and there. At first I thought I was whoring out my gamerscore, then I realized…I am actually having fun and I am getting my full value out of my games. I also find that you see the game from a different perspective. Granted there are some achievements I will more then likely never get, see all online ones for Gears or Halo. I just do not play enough online to ever achieve those.

Anyway, I think the achievement is a great idea and adds a lot to game play. It is value added content that rewards you for tracking it down and trying to get 100%. Even if you maybe looking at a little bit of fame.

So I have gone back, being a bit of a GamerTag whore, and started playing some of my earlier games I either didn’t play much because I was forced to buy it or because something shinier came along. Burnout happened to fall into the later category.

Having gone back and played it for the last week or so I forgot how much fun this game truly is. It has it’s drawbacks, one of which is the lack of hard drive support for level caching. This can make some races shorter then the load time. The Crash Junctions do this great, reloading of the level is almost instant. I do not mind the load on the Grand Prix levels. It really is for Burning Lap that causes me the most head-ache. These are super short and it can be somewhat annoying.

I guess the point I am trying to make is, wouldn’t it be great if in MS added a Cache function to the dashboard that the user can define. Out of my 20 GB hard drive I can tell my system to allocate 2 GB towards caching. Then in the Microsoft XDK they have a function that can go out and pre-load content to the hard drive. Not only would this help load times, but it would make the whole 360 experience that much better.

Back to Burnout, if you have not played this, you should. It is great taking out a days worth of traffic in a video game. Don’t let the title and my description of race scare you off. This is a crash game that happens to have racing elements. The controls are simple and very forgiving. There are tons of modes and lots to keep you busy. The Achievements can be a bit tough to get and do take some investment to get, however there are some dumb ones you can snag right away if you have a live account.

For a great stress burner…try Burnout: Revenge

One form or another of Burnout is available on almost all platforms and portables.