My 360 was Left 4 Dead

Post Retro dated for 11.13.2008

For the past two nights I have been enjoying/worshiping the Left 4 Dead demo. My friends and I started out on the normal difficulty level and quickly proceeded up to expert. Now keep in mind we are by no means experts. We found that on any other difficulty level that we were massacring the zombie apocalypse instead of the game actually feeling like an apocalypse. This is no discredit to the game because it is always fun (we just found solace in trying as hard as we could to not be butchered). I really cannot say enough good things about the great feelings that I came away from this demo with. I even got my wife to play with me and her greatest fear are zombies. The only thing I can recommend is to:

1. Bring friends (marketing does not lie here)
2. Do not play with your "good" friends from Halo who like to run amok and get themselves unmercifully torn to pieces by undead chunks who would like nothing more than to turn you into a bunch of undead chunks

Play. Massacre. Shoot Em' in the....[writer dragged away by zombie]

Today The Matrix invaded Fallout 3.

I had just lied to Dr. Zimmer about the Replicated Man (bleep-bloop) and left Rivet City to kill a few Talon assassins. I was in the middle of a fire fight with two of three Talons (the other one was questionably crouched by the wall) when as I was hit by a few assault rifle bullets. My screen became infected with, honestly what looked like, binary code. I could still relatively see where I was going but I had this putrid green color all over my screen. I thought, "Well my character must be infected with something," and so I went to the doctor (I only trust the one in Megaton). I asked him to cure me of all ailments and he cautiously did so. Finding that this did not work I thought, "Well maybe a good night's rest will do me some good." It did not, I was still sick with green and feeling worse than ever.

I decided to remove myself from the game and go back to the dashboard and when everything looked fine there I proceeded to boot Fallout 3 again. Same problem. All the menus were there and free from the binary green abomination but as soon as anything graphical was taking place I was Neo looking down that green hallway for the first time. I had honestly convinced myself that I had become so advanced that I could only see games in binary (I feel like I play that much). That was until I actually rebooted the Xbox and I was left with eleven different languages telling me that my Xbox had a system error.

Fun times.

Gears of War 2

Having finished the campaign of the ever popular Gears of War 2, I let myself look at a couple of the reviews for the game.

The OXM review of GOW2 enraged me. The reviewer criticizes the story for basically being there, saying that it (and the boss fights) felt "hokey." At no point, well obviously, in my own opinion, did the story feel "hokey." I know that most of the boss fights felt like they were on vehicles and that they felt just downright difficult for no reason but last time I checked my dictionary that was not the definition of hokey. Not to mention the sloppily put spoiler warning in the middle of the review which was basically just that (an emboldening of the two words right before the description of the end boss battle). The review looked and felt last minute among this holidays stockpile of games. It was as if the reviewer said to himself, "Well it doesn't matter what I write in this review, everyone and their mother is going to buy this game anyway." In the end the review was downright lazy and it just did not look at the game on any of its merits (other than his glowing two paragraphs about the multiplayer that could have been written just based on the promises that it made before the game even shipped).

If you want a clear concise review of Gears, here it is:

Gears of War 2 accomplishes everything it set out to do. The whole game is bigger and more badass. Everything feels EPIC in scale and it is so much to the point that at some points you feel useless against this Locust Horde. The only real complaint that I had was that (and I played through first on Hardcore) on certain parts if I did not get just the right amount of bullets into an enemy I would fail that part of the mission (and have to do it over and over). The greatest accomplishment of the game is its story. Again the story is loose but this time it brings in the emotional side of the war. The last thing that I have to say about the game is that it shows that even through all of the "Hoo-rahs" that these soldiers still feel something about the world that they live in. And multiplayer... yeah that's good too (as if no one expected that).