PixlBit

                                      

     My Mondays are like most people's Sundays since my work week is Tuesday through Saturday. So I thought I'd lay off the serious stuff like Mass Effect and go easy and super cheesy and get some games that promise easy gameplay and easy achievements. I wanted to taunt my friend I play with as I hit chievo after chievo with my stack of cheap thrills.

   So I went through the list of early 360 games and looked up how easy they were on Xbox360achievements.org eliminating games that I just don't want play like most of the sports titles. I came up with a list of eleven games, five of which I already had in my pile of shame.Then I bought Superman Returns, Bionicle Heroes, and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (I meant to get Lego Star Wars II Original Trilogy but someone at GameStop put the Complete Saga disc in there. I didn't complain. The Complete Saga has LSWII and the new trilogy together and costs $10 more).

   When it came down to playing I started with what I thought would be the easiest in my list of cheesy games, Cars. This game is not too bad but I got really annoyed with the camera in the mini game Tractor Tipping. You have to do eight rounds of it all at once and the first time the system froze on me and I had to do it all over again. It finally annoyed me so much I moved on. Which is the beauty of this day of cheesiness. There's no such thing as sticking with any game that annoys. Its just move to the next one in the stack and be happy.

    The next one was Superman Returns. This surprised me because it has good controls and is a lot of fun flying around the city. The only issue I had was a lack of direction in the game. I was never sure just how to advance the story except to just follow the arrows that pop up from time to time asking you to defend the city. After a while it seemed like I was just fighting the same robots over and over again. I was leveling up, improving my heat vision and freezing breath, but I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere in the story. I decided to move on, but I will probably look up a guide next week when I do this again and see how to progress. All in all, this game reminds me of Ultimate Spider Man on original Xbox. Superman Returns is not quite as good, but it's much better than I expected.                                                                                                                           

      Then I tried Open Season and after an hour or so I found that this was the game I was looking for on this cheesy Monday of gaming. The gameplay is simple as heck, but fun, and not broken or plagued with a bad camera. It's really just one step beyond a point and click adventure game.  It has a lot of humor, good voice work, and an interesting story.There's lots of wildlife info from collectibles you find in Beth's workbook because she is a park ranger (pictured above). I kept thinking of Rangergirl here on Pixlbit. 

     In the beginning, you play as Boog the bear and you live with Beth the park ranger and ride with her in her jeep (Is that a familiar activity for you Rangergirl? LOL).

     You start out in the the garage of her house and have to find your teddy bear Dinkelmon before you can leave. Then you ride in the jeep and catch badges by tipping the jeep and reaching out with your paw.

     The game just paints such a wonderful picture. This woodsy house, a jeep, ranger stuff and being one of the wildlife. I really couldn't ask for more in terms of setting for a game.

     And best of all, the chievos were dropping fast and frequent. It was just what the doctor ordered on this my end of week, breezy easy game day.