Mass Effect

See you in six light-months. Worth: $50
based on the Xbox 360 retail

Billions and billions of hours of gameplay.*

Mass Effect looks great, sounds great, and plays great. It's got awesome storylines, characters, and settings. It's Oblivion and KOTOR and GRAW all crammed into one colossal experience. It redefines "Life" itself. As in, once you get this game, you won't have one.

The GamerGal gave us this for Xmas. That was three days ago, and since then she and I have played Mass Effect for over 40 hours. She's way ahead of me because she played KOTOR 1 & 2, so she's got the vibe on how BioWare likes you to play. I keep running and gunning past all the goodies, but I don't care because I'll do this game at least three more times.

You can find a very detailed description of this game at Wikipedia, but something I wasn't ready for was how beautiful the galaxy is. Zooming in on star clusters, then down to star systems, then down to planets is a completely new experience for me and one I'll never forget. (It's awesome like the BFG9000 from Doom 1 was awesome, but adjusted for today's inflated awe-dollars.) I really feel like I'm traveling the galaxy and landing on alien worlds (and killing everyone I find there).

More on this outstanding experience as the GamerGal and I go along...

* UPDATE Jan 8, 2008
Well, maybe not billions of hours of gameplay. I finished my first play-through in about 35 hours. That's doing most of the side quests, and rummaging around for a lot of the collectibles. I had a great time. I'm playing my second character as a fast-paced gun-toting guy who always says the most obnoxious thing possible and ignores anything not related to the main quest. I'll do a third character as a primarily magic character that will attempt to do 100% of the game.

* UPDATE Jan 15, 2008
Second character done. The endgame is the same, but the final cut-scene is very different from what I got with my first character. This guy got the "Completionist" achievement, so I may never bother to get all the collectibles as there are a _lot_ of them and hunting for them slows the game down. I've started a 3rd character and found out something about the game. If you get an Achievement with a certain weapon type (like Assault Rifles), your next character can take that weapon as a trainable skill, even if their class doesn't include it. You can only pick one of these bonus abilities per character, but it's a great bonus because now I can have all my characters be gun-toting freaks, even if they're otherwise all-magic.

1st character: name "Hungry Joe", class Infiltrator (guns and tech combo).
2nd character: name "MachineGun", class Soldier (gun-toting maniac).
3rd character: name"AssBlaster", class Engineer (tech specialist).

Project Gotham Racing 4

Totally awesome racer. Worth: $30
based on the 360 retail, December 2007

One word: Ferraris. One more word: Motorcycles. Like sex and ice cream, these are two things I never thought I'd get in one place. The gameplay is fast, the graphics rock, and the sound is outstanding.

So why isn't it Worth more? Because as much as I love racers, they're still just racers. There's no story, characters, boss fights, inventory, or guns. This puts a fiberglass ceiling on the Worth. With that said, PGR2 is my fourth-most played game after Oblivion, Halo 1, and Morrowind, followed closely by Mercenaries, Halo 2, Galaga, and Doom 1. In fact I played PGR2 for so long, I skipped PGR3. This is fine with me since PGR3 has the sex but no ice cream - uhhh - I mean the Ferraris but no motorcycles.

The game handles differently than PGR2, but it's still good. Within 30 minutes I was able to take Silver in one of the first races.

The multiplayer is much improved over the already excellent multi-player from PGR2. You can customize the matches, and even include a few AI drivers to spice things up. The most fun so far has been me on a motorcycle trying to avoid getting crushed by Angus in his big American muscle car.

The Career Mode sounds a little wacked, but it works well. It's based on a calendar, so you progress through a "season". It sounds more confusing than it is. The game takes care of it, you just race.

The Store sells you cars, but not singly. You buy them in groups of 3 to 6. The developers did a good job of only bothering with cars you'd want to play, so this bundling isn't nearly as annoying as it sounds. The motorcycles generate Kudos so quickly that you'll wind up buying everything anyway.

The difficulty is all over the place. Regular races are wicked easy, just crash your way to the front and get wide for the win. Some of the other race types are totally wacked and required me to get a _lot_ better at the game before I won them. Now that I've got the hang of them it's fun, but there were some unexpectedly steep learning curves here and there.

More as I drive my way to glory.

20 December, 2008
UPDATE: I played PGR4 for about 4 months. At one point, the races got so difficult that I sold the game back to EBGames. After a while I found myself really missing having a good driving game, and last week I bought the game again (used, 'natch). It turns out my problem was I had the difficulty too high. Sure, I _could_ spend weeks and weeks mastering this game, but I'm in my 40s and my real life is already plenty challenging enough: career, family, middle-aged thoughts of mortality. What the hell do I need my games to be so hard for? I set PGR4's Career mode on Easy and now I'm having fun again. It still looks great, plays great, and now I can just (mostly) win everything and have a good time escaping from how stressful my real life is. :)

Frontlines: Fuel of War

Gosh, you've really got some nice toys here. Worth: $30
based on Xbox 360 demo

Is war really hell when you've got so many cool gadgets?

Toy remote-control cars are always fun. I love steering them around my living room, especially under the coffee table because my dog goes bananas trying to chase it under there. Go get it girl! Woof woof! Now imagine that you have an RC car packed with enough C4 to blow up a tank. Who says playtime isn't Army training?

FFoW is a smooth and solid FPS with a good premise and lots of creative and well-executed gadgetry to help you mercilessly slaughter the enemies of, uh... us. Whoever "us" is. Ahh, hell, who cares? The bad guys make my aiming reticle turn red, so they must be unholy monsters that deserve to be riddled with bullets, blown to bits, set on fire, and/or crushed to death. Makes sense to me, and not just because I've been raised to do whatever my warlord Premier (oops, I mean Secretary of State) tells me to do.

It's touted as an "open-world" shooter. What they really mean is you get a finite area to fight in until you've killed everything in whatever order you want. This relative flexibility, combined with at least 3 or 4 ways to achieve each objective makes this a game I'm really looking forward to.

UPDATE: Feb 28
New videos from Xbox Live shows some fantastic Multiplayer features. Much more objective-based than most other games. Strategy has been built in to every map, and they all seem very team-oriented, which is smart. I think a lot of gamers have had enough free-for-all deathmatch and are looking for something more strategic.

Kane & Lynch

The link to our @#$%-ing ancestors has been found! Worth: $5
based on Xbox 360 demo

Nah, no picture for this Neanderthal.

Back in my day, we played primitive games like Doom, Marathon, and Tigers Over Leyte Gulf. They were "3-D" in that you moved forward and backward, but otherwise it still took imagination to immerse yourself. Nowadays, we have games -- no, no, "experiences" -- that are so detailed and well-rendered it makes the real world look like crap. Somewhere in between there we evolved. This game is a jump back to video gaming's adolescence, sometime in the late 90's. Think about a good PlayStation 1 game. Then.

Just like Two Worlds, this game got horrible reviews and they've had to release a demo to try to entice some sales. Being a freebie-ho, I'll try anything for nothing. I download the demo and fire it up, bracing myself for a truly awful game. It's not quite that bad. The big difference I have with what I've read is that it _is_ playable. Barely anyway. The targeting sucks, the moving sucks, and the graphics suck. But there's lots of cursing, which I like. There's also a lot of shooting, which is why I play shooters, so that's no so bad.

K&L isn't completely worthless. When it hits $5 I'll pick it up with a friend so we can rob a couple banks together and then move on to Gears of War 2.