Impressions time again!

First, I got around to Halo 3. Yes, I know, late to the party. I was late with the whole series, actually, just recently playing the first two as well. Note that the impressions for these, thus far, are entirely single player. Anyway, to sum things up, Halo 1 was very good mechanically, and the outdoor areas in particular was great. However, a few things that especially bugged me popped up and really hampered a number of areas for me. First was the cookie cutter rooms - at some points you go through the same rooms multiple times in a row, so you already know how to handle each room when you first enter it. Next is the large amount of backtracking - if you like a level, don't worry, you'll be coming back! Toss in the Library, and many parts just didn't appeal to me, while the other parts were great. In fact, Halo 2 fixed many of the issues I had with Halo 1, and I enjoyed it a lot more. Using two plasma rifles, and they were relatively plenty in this game, did mow down some enemies very quickly though.

Anyway, Halo 3. Ironically the first thing that jumped out at me was the jaggies. I never notice jaggies in games, but I did here. I think it was the surprisingly blocky heads that really stood out. The 540p was very easy to tell, and in many ways was barely a jump up from Halo 2 in some regards, but some of the large outdoor areas were great with a lot of great hectic action. Hated the late-game Flood level though. I think I just hate fighting the Flood in general, so I guess I just have to accept that and move on. I did like the ending sequence, though. Also, the one taste I had of co-op with Halo 3 several months ago was a lot of fun, so that should boost the campaign considerably. As it stands though, from the solely single player aspect, I found that I enjoyed Halo 2 the most. Odd, I know, but it contained the least number of aspects that I didn't like about the Halo series in general.

I then went back and played Uncharted: Drake's Fortune again. I played through this game once on Normal back in November when it released, and enjoyed it well enough to place it in the top five 2007 games that I played (with God of War II, Persona 3, the TF2/Portal portions of The Orange Box, and Galaxy being the overall best). I did catch up on 2007 titles and would add Call of Duty 4 and BioShock up there as the most enjoyable titles from 2007. The trophy patch landed this past week and, well, why not?

I fired up a playthrough on Hard, and I enjoyed it a good deal better than my first time around. The game is as beautiful as ever, and is probably still the best-looking console game out there. MGS4 is a little slicker in the cutscenes, but Uncharted probably narrowly beats it elsewhere. Toss in the fact that there's no install, and it takes 5 seconds to load up from the main menu then never has load times after that, and the game is a technical milestone. People have compared the main gunplay to Gears of War and, well, fair enough, but I think Uncharted does a better job in that department. I just feels more refined, more tactical, not to mention a hell of a lot more colorful. Very good enemy AI too, and it just gets more impressive the harder the difficulty.

I started a playthrough on Crushing, its most difficult setting, and am currently about two thirds of the way through. It's brutally unforgiving, but it's also pretty fair. You always get the sense that if you execute correctly, you'll prevail, no luck necessary. And oddly, I'm enjoying it. I hate hard games, where you die multiple times each encounter. Yet, I'm liking this. It's weird. Also, the higher the difficulty setting, the more the actual game design shines, and how the AI acts that much more intelligently. Each encounter is tuned and scripted well, and enemies can get much more aggressive with flanking and flushing you out with grenades. Just an enjoyable game, and certainly one of the top games of this generation so far in my eyes.

PixelJunk Eden is a game that I simply haven't gotten into yet. Not sure why, since it's so interesting, but it could also have to do with Uncharted almost consuming me right now. I'm sure I'll be playing more downloadable games for the rest of the month.

Braid is probably the best downloadable game on consoles today (that isn't a dump of a ROM of a 20-year-old game). I'm still pretty early on. However, that concern about how it's $5 more than you think downloadable games should cost? Yeah, it's pretty much worth it in my eyes, without question. Looking forward to finishing the later levels. Basically, it's the Portal/Crush of 2008. The question is whether people will buy it like Portal, or not buy it like Crush. I also think that if it was sold on a DS cartridge for $30, people would think it's a bargain. Ah well.

Geometry Wars 2 is pretty good. I kinda like how short each game is, as you can get a full run in just a couple of minutes.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings off and on, with a bit of the "on" being recently. I'm on the last fight of Chapter 8, and I think there's 10 in the game. Some of the end of chapter fights can be rather tough. Then again, I'm about a dozen levels under the enemies, despite completing every side mission. Sigh, maybe I need to just grind a few map areas over and over, but I'm still somehow prevailing at my current level.