It’s that time of the year again, where we check who were naughty or nice and reward accordingly, for the gamers in your life I’ve come up with a list of 10 titles that any good gamer must own. Here is part 1 of my 2 part guide.
The folks at Activision have hit it out of the park with, what I think is the best shooter of all time. Call of Duty 2 for the 360 set the bar on multiplayer shooting. Before COD 2, I absolutely HATED playing shooting games, they hurt my eyes, gave me a headache and were completely unbalanced in gameplay. Call of Duty 2 for the 360 changed all of that for me. So I was waiting with baited breath for Call of Duty 3 and frankly that game was a steaming pile. After that disappointment I wasn’t looking forward to COD 4 Modern Warfare, the first time I fired up the beta multiplayer I was in love again. And ran out and purchased a copy, I didn’t wait for Activision to send me one, I spent my own hard earned cash and have been addicted to this game for the last two month. I’ve played nothing but the multi-player aspect and it’s absolutely perfect. Graphically it looks amazing, the play mechanics are flawless and in one of the more unique aspects of the game, there’s a neat level up mechanic that is addictive as heck. Even if you are a mediocre Online death matcher like myself, it’s worth sticking with a match because you get rewarded for your efforts. The points let you level up your weapons, gives you special perks like steady aim, more powerful explosives, and more. The really cool thing about the system is you get all the good perks, great guns, and red-dot scopes after only a couple of rounds of play. When I first heard about this feature, I thought the game would be just as unbalanced as Halo but it works surprisingly well. This is truly a genre expanding game that even non-shooting fans will love.
Guitar Hero has a challenger and it’s Rock Band. With the MTV machine behind it, the track listing is impressive, but the $170 price tag will make people stop and think. But with the kit you get a guitar, microphone and drum kit. Since I already own 3 Guitar Hero guitars the only piece that I want would be the Drum Kit which won’t be sold separately until Jan or February. The track listing on this is really impressive and contains more songs that I would want to listen to than Guitar Hero 3. But I’m not entirely impressed with how well the guitar mechanism works. I fired this up a few weeks ago and didn’t like the feel of it, compared to Guitar Hero’s crisp controls. It felt slow and too easy and I was playing it on normal level. Where this game truly shines is in a group dynamic, I played the drums with a band at E3, E For All, and a couple of other events and it is a blast to play with a bunch of friends. Just not so much alone and everyone will be fighting over who gets to play the drums. At the moment I think Guitar Hero II (Playing Freebird, just rocks!) is better than Rock Band and Guitar Hero III. But if you have a group of friends to play with, there’s nothing better than Rock Band. Just give me the drums and mic.
Come’on, it’s Mario you know you want it. I really don’t like the Wii Controller, but I’ve been playing this the last two weeks and am really digging it. It totally reinvents Mario and how platform games are designed. If it wasn’t for the lousy Wii Remote this would be a solid AAA title. And frankly, it still is.
When I was in Junior high school, one of my passions was playing the Piano. I played for about 11 years and was actually planning on attending Berkley College of Music. Unfortunately, attending Berkley would have cost a fortune and my parents and I were in that weird middle ground where the earned too much money to qualify for loans, and I couldn’t get student loans because of my parents income bracket, but we also didn’t have enough to afford the $15 – 20 grand a year to attend, so my dreams were dashed. And you wonder why I’ve become a bitter old critic. Anyhoo, I stopped playing, last year I decided I wanted to start up again and man do I suck now. So I found this really cool piece of hardware called Piano Wizard. It’s pretty darn amazing and cool. The package comes with a 49k midi keyboard from M-Audio and the software. The software does an amazing job of teaching you how to play, you can learn at any tempo or pacing that you want. It starts very slowly and you learn to play either the left hand or right hand part of a song, then slowly progress to playing with both hands, after you get proficient just playing the song, then the software goes through the notes in the song so you will actually learn how to read music and again, you can play the song at any tempo you like. The software comes with 200 songs, everything from Bach to the Beatles to Ragtime to Showtunes, and the neat thing about the software is that it’ll automatically convert almost any Midi track of any song. After playing with this for the last month, I’m not back up to my Berkley level but I’m able to play again.
I’ve never been a fan of PC Gaming – no matter what the genre. I have an Alienware Gaming SLI laptop so hardware performance is almost never an issue. What I don’t like is the complex controls and trying to play a game with a mouse and 10 different keystrokes just doesn’t appeal to me. But I have to say, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an amazing game experience. It goes without saying that it looks STUNNING, but it’s the multiplayer aspects that really shine. You get to play as either humans or alien invaders and you actually control vehicles and guns that unique to each race. It adds a new element to big team battles. If you want to get into multiplayer PC Gaming, I’m not entirely convinced this is the right one to start with, but if are hardcore, then it’s definitely one to add to your collection. I especially like this limited edition version, the packaging is beautiful and it comes with collector cards, a nice dvd of video diaries and more.
In part two of the Hardcorequeen’s Gaming Guide we talk Guitar Hero III, Bio Shock, Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect!