Clinton

Review is sort of what I expected from watching/reading all the ODST previews. The Halo games are horrible at conveying or expanding upon its own story, characaters and lore, leaving all the heavy-lifting to the books and ARGs. Add in some plain, meat & potatoes presentation and gameplay and you have a series that survives on the strength of its multiplayer and historical significance for the Xbox platform. The more I observe the franchise, I more I think of it as some sort of cult. I just don't see what all the disciples see.

Love the box art: edgy, striking, colourful. It'll look great on the store shelves and really stand out.

As for the game, I'm very excited to play it and hope it doesn't get pushed into the now shark-infested waters of Q1 2010. Any roomful of monkeys can slap in a half-decent leveling and loot system into a game but it takes someone special to nail down that tangible feel of a good FPS. The feedback, weapon animations, enemies, sound effects all have to come together. If Gearbox nails this and has the RPG elements properly support the shooting action, they have my $70.

Obsidian has an image problem of being 2nd-tier developers despite having some brilliant, very experienced people on staff. Coming in with very lowered expectations for NWN2, I was still rather disappointed with their work. Alpha Protocol is looking great and since this is Obsidian debut new IP, they had better pull out all the stops.

I'm sorry, but releasing a fantasy-themed MMO when World of Warcraft is still at center stage is completely folly. When were they planning to release this... 2015? 2020? Bethesda really needs to stick with their specialty, which is crafting enormous, open-ended, single-player RPGs.

Highway seems intriguing but really, I want to get into Gears 2 online as a regular thing so all the new maps seem cool at this point.

Pick me, pick me...

Dante's Inferno is looking nice. The dev diary is also well done: the team is clearly passionate about their project but they aren't throwing out absurd hyberpole like you sometimes find in these vids.

And I'd love to work with Yukiko. Professionally, of course.

I'm so uninterested in BioShock 2, they could add 5 more devs to the mix before I could be bothered to raise an eyebrow.

I can't blame anyone for being skeptical though. It reflects poorly on 2K Marin when it looks like they need all this extra help.

Finally they publish a trailer that shows off the meat of the game. A lot of players would eventually get lost or bored without this kind of structure, myself included. I'm hoping they only showed a sampling of mission types and not the whole game... would like to see "mini-quests" and other purely optional activities in addition to the main story-driven quests.

Actually before this post I thought they had locked down a release date sometime in April. I have never seen a game get so many incremental delays, one month at a time. I suppose this is good, assuming all the delays are going into QA. The PC version was very buggy so here's hoping for a much more polished 360 game. Until then, I guess i'll go back to Too Human and polish off some more achievements.

I got the E74 last month and decided to buy a fresh Arcade unit instead of ponying up the $123 for the repair. I still got the dead box, but may try out Chris' idea, open up a RRoD support case and send it back in the hopes of getting it fixed. Either that, or try selling the E74 box to a tech savvy fiddler type.