Winches, Pulleys and Big-Ass Guns

So for the first time in a while I ended up not posting a blog last week, not because of any lack of desire to but because I feel I just didn’t have enough to say, however now I’m back and better than ever... Well, I’m back at least.

This week I’ve been playing more of Gears of War 2 where I completed the co-op campaign on hardcore difficulty (which was nowhere as difficult as I expected) but my real enjoyment from the game came in playing the horde mode which I’d never really gotten into before but even after experiencing Halo 3: ODST’s firefight the original horde gametype still holds up really well. I’ve also had a lot of fun with Garry’s Mod which is usually always good for wasting an hour or two attaching thrusters to things that probably shouldn’t have thrusters on them, but yesterday I convinced my brother to download Garry’s Mod and Team Fortress 2 and he seemed to take to Garry’s Mod very quickly. For the past several months all the games I’ve played in co-op mode have been somewhat linear titles and collaborating with someone else in such an open-ended environment made me appreciate a different kind of multiplayer experience again. When you can play GMod with someone else you’re able to properly interact with, be it building giant vehicles out of cargo containers or just fooling around with catapults it provides a great sandbox environment to enjoy.

On the subject of games I haven’t yet played the upcoming Monday Night Combat certainly deserves a mention. When I first saw the game I was not impressed with what it had to offer, it came across as just being too close to Team Fortress 2, however I feel that was somewhat of the fault of their marketing campaign, their early trailers showed off a cartoony world full of highly characterised characters and I must admit I had my head in my hands after hearing the line “The assassin is a girl!? How did I miss that!?” delivered in the most off-putting way possible. When Uber Entertainment put out a walkthrough of some of their gameplay I was very pleasantly surprised, while I’m still not interested in the characters themselves they seem to be doing more than enough to separate their game from Team Fortress 2. The weapons for each class are not what you’ll find in TF2 and features like upgrading your weapons throughout the match and buttons that will launch opponents standing in a specific area into the air seem like a great addition to the game. I feel that if I do get Monday Night Combat then my enjoyment of it will be decided by how much I can personally detach myself from TF2 because that has really been the only class-based shooter I’ve played to any serious degree, however I’m sure whatever weird connections my brain wishes to establish between TF2 and other games, Monday Night Combat will be at the least a good game.

Before I wrap up for this week, a short list of closing thoughts:

• It’s somewhat unbelievable that Gearbox leaked such a massive amount of information on the next Borderlands DLC.
• The villager-creator pre-order bonus for Fable III is a very nice feature.
• The wait until the Arkham Asylum sequel is going to be painfully long.
• I really wish I could run Starcraft 2 on this PC.
• I should get back to Garry’s Mod and blow up more citizens.

This concludes another week of vidja gaemz. Thank you for reading and see you on the forums.

-Gamer_152