Pumping Irony

Stay calm. Count to ten. It will be ok.

Against my better (oh, you in the peanut gallery just hush!) judgment I picked up Halo 3 today, primarily because it’s one of the few titles that support cooperative play. My good friend Daniel has been bugging me with XBL messages to get the game, so I did. Logged in, joined his game along with his soon-to-be brother-in-law (/kick hyphen spammer!) and his wife. Cool! Four player game, let’s see what’s up with Halo 3.

Then I watch in horror as the player list fills with 12 other random XBL “people.” I kid you not, the first ten seconds of the game contained every single negative aspect that is normally associated with XBL “people.” In under five minutes I was seriously considering getting back in the car and returning to Gamestop. I sucked it up and completed the match (don’t want to jeopardize my reputation by having those “people” spam negative comments onto my account), shut off the 360, and walked outside for some fresh air.

There are reasons I don’t play public XBL matches, and those reasons are pretty much embodied by the Halo crowd. Ghetto gaming at its worst.

To be fair, after a cool-down period and dinner, my friend called back and he and I did some co-op play which was better, although laggy as hell. Is that normal for Halo 3? I’ve been in multi-player and co-op matches in other games with full player rosters and they were perfectly smooth. I’ve hosted co-op before for some friends, also very smooth. Daniel and I each tried hosting, and while it was moderately better when I hosted, the bulk of the time it was what I would normally consider unacceptable. Do I need to shut off WPA for Halo 3 to get better latency? Jeez…

Today puts me halfway through Week #7 on medical leave, and I’m beginning to find I’ve just about MMO’d myself out. And I’ve barely touched MMO’s, actually. So I’ve spent time on my 360, picking up on games I’ve had awhile and never finished. Common theme with me, unfortunately. Up til now, I’ve only ever completed (as in, the single player campaign on normal mode, not completing every achievement the game offers) Gears of War and Rainbow 6: Vegas on the 360 platform. As of this week, I can add Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) to that list, which is great, now I can start playing GRAW2, which I’ve had for quite some time. Being the completionist that I am, and GRAW2’s story picks up right where GRAW ends, I wanted to see all of GRAW. I also managed to find time for a little bit of Mass Effect (got my first ME achievement, yay!) and even some Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 E3 panel had some very exciting announcements this week. First was the bombshell of the upcoming radical makeover of the 360’s Dashboard. This is major! It does look sweet, in a very Apple sort of way, though count me among the many who are somewhat unconvinced of navigating it quickly enough like I can now with the simpler Dashboard. The whole Avatar thing seems like it is competing with Sony’s Home and to a lesser degree, Nintendo’s Mii’s, though Avatars are less kiddie-fied than Mii’s. All Microsoft’s videos are also available on the 360 from the “Inside Xbox” selection on the Dashboard’s main blade.

Next up was the announcement of a new partnership with Netflix! Netflix will have their own presence on the Dashboard and users can stream their Netflix movies directly to the console, much like we can rent movies from the Video Marketplace currently. I’ve rented several movies and it’s a great experience being able to have full-quality (sometimes even HD!) movies directly to your TV without going to Blockbuster or waiting for delivery through the mail. The Video Marketplace’s selection continues to grow but the addition of Netflix will be huge, and may be enough to finally get me to sign up for their service.

Games. Yes, of course, the games. There’s no doubt that Gears of War 2 will be the heavy-hitter of the bunch. GoW was a massive title and remains one of the most-played games on Live. The sequel does everything a sequel should: take the best parts of its predecessor and kick it up a notch. I thought the addition of bots to the multiplayer game was ingenious, and about damn time too. I was able to add bots to my multiplayer games with Unreal Tournament back in 1999, for cryin’ out loud. UT is also an Epic game, so go figure they’d be the first (I think?) to bring the concept to the console platform. It should allow a player to setup a multiplayer game and fully populate it with bots, then when a real player connects, a bot drops out for him and will respawn if a player leaves. At least I’m hoping that’s how it will work.

Resident Evil 5. Wow, I haven’t played a RE game since… RE2? Been awhile and from the looks of it, the series has come a long way. I likely would have skipped this entirely if it hadn’t been for one attractive aspect: cooperative play! Single player is fine in short bursts, and multiplayer competitive PvP is also good but much like my MMORPG’s I prefer to group and play the content cooperatively, so if my friends happen to pick this up, I’ll be blowing heads off zombies in style right along with them!

Fable 2. I actually never played Fable, not sure that it’s quite my style of RPG. But Fable 2 does boast one feature that is very ingenious! It keeps track of your friend’s progress through the game, and if you and a friend happen to be adventuring in the same area at the same time, you’ll see a little glowing orb in your game. You can interact with the orb and *poof* you and your friend are now playing cooperatively! Many console games have completely separate single- and multi-player aspects of themselves, and even those that don’t require you to go into multiplayer menus, etc. to play over Xbox Live so it’s fantastic to see a (largely single-player?) game integrate the multiplayer directly into the game experience.

Primetime. A new channel called Xbox Live Primetime is a collection of virtual game shows. One in particular, 1v100 sounds intriguing. It’s very cool to see some innovation and taking the console (and online gaming in general) to new and unexplored areas, especially like this where we’ll always have fresh, live, relevant content to jump into with others.

Courtesy of Achievement Junkie’s feed in my Google Reader, I see Bioware have announced the contents of the Collector’s Edition of their upcoming RPG for the Xbox 360, Mass Effect.

• Fiction Book: Galactic Codex: Essentials
• Mass Effect Art Book: A Future Imagined
• 2nd DVD with exclusive videos about Mass Effect (Art of Mass Effect, Interactive Storytelling of Mass Effect)

I’m all for behind-the-scenes DVD’s, after all I loved the LOTRO and Halo 2 ones. I’m guessing Halo 3 has them too, but it might be awhile before I get around to that. I would have liked a soundtrack though, but I’ll still likely pick up the CE anyway, it’s only $10 more than the normal game.

I have an unfortunate sneaking suspicion that the “fiction book” mentioned will simply be a pamphlet or booklet containing most of the content already found at the Mass Effect: Galactic Codex section of the game’s website. Not that I expected anyone to have time to write another full novel like Mass Effect: Revelation but still…