Saturday was the first day of Winter, the Winter Solstice, so I thought about what wintry games I could play this week and went out a bought a few and played them while drinking some First Snow Ale. Read on for the results.
The first one I thought about, and then bought for $3 at Gamestop, was Shaun White Snowboarding. I’ve always wanted to play this for the reported amazing mountain graphics. The game does look gorgeous. The mountains are beautiful and the ski trails are very natural looking and interesting to go down. Thing is, I really had a tough time figuring out how to do stunts. The controls baffled me. Perhaps with some persistence I could get it, but doing tricks doesn’t really interest me that much. I just wanted to ski around and take in the sights, maybe do some exploring. So I moved on.
The second game I thought of was Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which takes place on a cold planet persistently covered with deep snow. I had played it back in 2006 when it came out, and remembered it fondly, so I went and picked it up again for a couple bucks and dug in. The game looks great and gives you the feeling of a cold winter planet really well. You crunch through the snow and get buried in it all the time. You’re always on the edge of a white-out condition. You play in third person and the pace of the action is not fast. On foot or in a mech you kind of slog around and shoot everything that moves. I played perhaps half of the game before I came upon a boss that I couldn’t beat because it moved so much faster than me. It got unbearably frustrating so I put it down.
Another game with a wintry theme I thought about, and then bought at my local retro store for $3, was The Thing for original Xbox. This is a 2002 horror game based on the movie of the same name. Its graphics are good for the time, easily holding up to similar games like Red Faction and Half-Life. You play in third-person and are part of a special forces investigating after the events of the movie. The gameplay is of a team-based shooter where you control a medic, an engineer or a soldier. You move through buildings looking for keys and keycard codes and picking up amo, weapons, and other tools to help you like fire extinguishers, medicine, and flashlights. When you go outside, you have a cold meter which goes down over time because of the extreme cold. When it runs out, you start taking damage (Lost Planet has a similar system where if you don’t replenish the energy needed for your thermal attachment, you start losing health). I got about half way through the game before some gameplay mechanic wore out my patience. The issue was using the flamethrower. To kill the larger monsters, you have to shoot them down to the last bit of health and then use flame to finish them off. Switching to the flame thrower is not quick but not too problematic, but aiming it is. The default angle of the flamethrower is pointed down just ahead of your feet. This is shooting from the hip in third person, which is the fastest way to use it, but doing so does not help you much and most of the time gets you killed from taking fire damage. The solution is to move into first person to shoot it but you have to click and hold down on the right analog stick and aim with the left analog stick. This is very awkward and makes you move very slowly or not at all. This is intolerable when you have three of these big Things rushing you at once. I worked with this annoyance for a long while because the game was really interesting and fun, but I finally got to a controller throwing level of frustration and had to stop.
I had some more winter games on my list, like LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias [WIiWare] but didn’t have the cash or time to get them. Maybe next year at this time.
I’m making Christmas Halo themed this year because I’m getting Halo: Spartan Assault on XBL Christmas Eve. So after finishing my winter games, I started Halo 4 again. I bought this game day-one and only played about half of it, getting frustrated by one part where I kept getting overwhelmed by waves of enemy. This time, I played on Easy and got through that part and moved on very deep into the game and saw some new areas I hadn’t before like the Mammoth vehicle section that reminded me of a similar part in Gears of War 3. After playing Lost Planet and The Thing and getting annoyed with their controls, it was so nice to play a game with perfect controls. It amazes me that no one apparently had used the Right stick move, left stick look/aim before Halo: Combat Evolved and that after that everyone used it (The Thing came out about the same time as Halo: CE and, while I played it, I kept wishing it had Halo controls). I still loath the story in Halo 4, but the action in the game is so smooth and enjoyable, and the environments so rich and open to investigation, that I couldn’t get angry at it even once. I ran out of time playing this game on Sunday for five hours straight, but I would’ve gone half the night if I could and finished it in one sitting. Maybe next week I’ll be able to finish it up and try out some Spartan Ops multiplayer.
Here’s some other games I bought this week but didn’t play: Resistance 3 I’ve always wanted and it was $12. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga I thought I still owned, but apparently not, so I had to get a copy. It’s still pricey at around $25 at Gamestop, but I couldn’t be without it. Finally, I got Beyond Good and Evil HD and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World on XBL because they were on sale for $2.50 each. I couldn’t pass those up at that price.
I’m still playing Mario & Luigi: Dream Team but in very small amounts. Every time I pick up the 3DS XL I marvel at how cool a system it is.
I downloaded the free XBL game Shoot Many Robots. I liked it ok except those darn chainsaw robots drove me nuts and I quit.
A new Mass Effect Foundation issue came out, number 6. It’s more about Miranda Lawson and JacobTaylor looking for the body of Commander Shepard for Cerebus. They get themselves nearly killed but soldier on getting closer to finding who has the body.
And that’s it for the first week of winter 2013. Christmas is upon us and I hope everyone’s gaming dreams come true. I know I have something special I asked Sumo Santa for this year. I would make some comment suggesting that he’d better deliver, but I know the power of the Flabalanch and Belly Launcher, so I’ll say nothing and just hope.
Comments