Normally I only really get hit with one really good games a year. Right now I am in need of about a 36hour day to finish my review of Borderlands prior to playing Dragon Age Origins. Then it's Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed 2, and Mass Effect 2. Hell, I even think I am leaving one out.

Borderlands is really high on my list, DAO looks great so far and the other three titles were all very good in their first incarnation. This is the very thing I and many other gamers have been looking forward too for years. A day when games coming out are new and exciting IP's(or at least very very good ones) that include tons of gameplay instead of the 6 hour model so many others have addopted. Granted some of this is due to changes in the industry and in technology but for the most part the developer has to want to give players more for their money.

If your looking for my initial opinion on Borderlands I can tell you this much, it's by far the best game released so far this year. It looks like it's going to have a lot of competition though. The gameplay makes up for the fact that the story and the overall polish of the game drop off once you leave the initial area. It is worth every bit of the money though and works for every type of player except the RTS/TBS crowd.

ODST

Well I spent a significant amount of time playing ODST's multiplayer in both campaign and firefight and really my opinion of the game hasn't changed.

One thing you will notice is that I have yet to mention sound in a review. This is because only a few titles have ever caught my ear with the sound effects or sound track. I am a big fan of realism and not real fond of the concept of having some epic theatrical score following me around everywhere I go. It rarely inspires any kind of response from me at all and most of the time I disable it in games I deem worthy of a second go. One exception of how music can be utilized is how the Halo Team takes the Halo theme song and infuses it into escalating and epic situations in the game. I admit that at times that gets me pumped up for those sections and add's to the experience. An example of how not to utilize music is ODST. The music isn't bad but it isn't great either. It's like a lot of other video game music, which is to say it's an afterthought in the grand scheme of things. The problem I have with it is its implementation. The music that starts up during the missions flows into the situation without a hitch but the sandbox mode is horrible. There may be a trigger for the musical interludes but if there is I have no idea what it is. In fact the ambient sounds in New Mombasa are pretty good and the music takes away from that experience. One song starts out with a noise similar to kicking an aluminum garbage can across a street which has caused me to question my surroundings more than once. The real problem is it just starts, plays, ends, and then rather than start something else it leaves you with the sounds of the city for a period of time before randomly starting again. A tacked on experience to a tacked on mechanic doesn't help but to make matters worse you can't disable the music in the game unless you replace it with music of your own. If you replace it with music of your own then the only sounds that carry threw are weapons fire, audio caches, and the combat noises made by Covenant and UNSC personnel. The cut scene audio is completely gone for some inexplicable reason. Really it's just an awkward implementation of the audio as a whole. There are no settings to change and it reminds me of the options in old NES games. This is generally none.

As for the multiplayer campaign it's the same as the single player campaign but with two people. Less frustrating this time around because I simply told my friend to follow me and in 3 hours we had nearly finished the game by starting at the closest mission and working our way to the furthest rather than the order they are presented to you in the VISR map. This meant that we played them slightly out of order as Dutch and Micky meeting up took place after Dutch and Micky blew up Naval Intelligence but the time saved was worth it and my friend didn't even notice that the story was going in the wrong order. Mainly because he wasn't attached to the story at all and he had an even harsher opinion of the audio logs.

Firefight is decent. Some maps are significantly more enjoyable than others but the stupidity of some of the skulls when combined with the lack of functional weapons and what appears to be additional poor implementation means it's just mindless fun for achievement whores. When you don't get a weapon drop but get skulls that cause the enemy to be nearly impossible to kill due to over shielding, a skull that limits the amount of ammo the enemy drops, a skull that makes them spam grenades, and a skull that makes you melee to regain stamina, your team can go from 25 lives to 10 when your faced with a spawn of Hunters, Brutes, and Chieftains. Something is wrong when you're having to melee a Hunter folks. Its fun and all but any other game could amp up the difficulty in this same way and get destroyed by critics for it's lack of innovation but not a Halo game. Making a game more challenging and editing modifiers isn't one and the same. Call me crazy though that the same type of players that dog WoW gamers for fighting some silly dragon that takes 150 people to kill will defend taking a standard Brute and forcing you to do the same thing. Never played WoW but Anarchy Online had that same concept for the elite stuff so been there done that. I haven't done it in years but I still say coordinating your actions with a hundred other people to accomplish some big task is far more challanging and enjoyable than a similar experience offered by ODST. I am exluding the douche bags that program their computer, keyboard, mouse, or game macro's to do tasks for them so that because they are what screw up games. The stats keeper is all kinds of fail as well. After 101 minutes of play and 65k points out of the 220k team points my favorite weapon was the silenced SMG with 21 kills. Yeah………that doesn't add up at all but hey whatever. Mindless fun isn't bad but it's rarely going to add value to a game and in this case what little value it would have added is nuked by the stupidity of not including sound options.

If ODST was $30 USD then it would be worth it but the case says it all on the spine. HALO 3 odst.

NCAA Football 10

Had to stop playing after I the third time I threw my remote for some idiotic thing that this game does from time to time. The remote took a bad bounce and hit my sliding glass door really hard. Neither broke but the only thing that saved the disk is the fact that it's got my team's jersey on it.

This game is just so incredibly bad that I think giving it a 2.5 was being generous. I should really lower that as EA continues to regress it's college football titles further into the stone age while charging full price for each craptacular addition to the series. I figured out how to go send a player in motion but since the game may or may not allow you to snap it after you send that player in motion it's really not worth doing just to see if they are running a man or zone defense. In fact it doesn't matter if they are running a man or a zone defense at all. What matters is that helmet schools like Florida and Texas have players so vastly superior to the rest of the nation that when they choose to jam your receivers they will literally do so for 2 seconds or even more while your substandard secondary can't jam their walking gods at all. Keep in mind that Texas Tech beat the living crap out of Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, and Texas aTm last year but is rated as worse than all of these teams. Yeah we lost to Houston and Texas so far but playing the Longhorns in their house and keeping it close is no small feat. Going to a rested Houston and playing shorthanded with a coach who threw the game on poor play calling and decision making the next week isn't too bad even if they got their doors blown off by UTEP on Saturday. Using circular internet logic we are a lot better than UH simply because we hung with UT and they destroyed UTEP who beat up Houston. Don't you love the internet? If anything, this season has taught us and the pollsters to be wary of the hype since a lot of big teams have taken a beating and the only Cinderella's left are the same ones that are always playing BCS teams that are overrated, Boise State and TCU. Boise can be good and might be but TCU sucks. The only time they ever play anyone worth their salt they get destroyed. Winning one decent game a year is easy but playing against top notch teams week in and week out like the Big XII, PAC 10, and SEC do is a lot tougher than knocking off a bottom feeder from a crap conference like the Big 10, ACC, or Big East.

Back to the game, no, never mind. This game flat sucks. It's quickly turning into an arcade style football game like Blitz or Mutant League Football (anyone remember that?) and it isn't as fun as either of those. I stopped giving my money to EA for sports titles, and pretty much everything else, back in 2000. Which brings me to another point.

Economics

A lot of folks probably know about the latest industry push towards cloud computing or digital downloads rather than selling hard copies and I don't think everyone knows how that will effect gaming for good and bad.

The good points are convenience, environmental aspects, and less piracy. Convenience is pretty obvious for the most part as you won't have to make a trip to the store but it also includes the elimination of the midnight launch lines and the lack of product when you go to pick one up without pre-ordering it. Online Markets like XBOX Live and Steam are extremely convenient and Steam is actually cheaper in most cases than going direct though is it really surprising that Live isn't? Microsoft, $30 USD for Call of Duty 2? Anyways the environmental aspects are also pretty obvious and may even be far fetching in the future as consoles could possibly omit and disk drive completely which would reduce failure rates and power usage on top of reduced packaging. As long as the games are produced there will be piracy. Even cloud computing won't resolve this because someone will hack the cloud or create their own private cloud to play off of. Either way a reduction will help us all in the end because anti-piracy efforts increase the cost associated with production not to mention lost revenues. All of these lead to higher cost involved for legitimate buyers.

Right now I bet anyone who will take it $100 dollars that when this finally arrives it will be years before you can transfer the rights to a game you purchased to anyone else. Meaning the old games that I send to my niece and nephew from time to time will stop. This is great in terms of my not buying the games a second time in order to review them…but when I was a kid trading and gifting games was just part of the fun. Steam allows you to play the game on other people's computers but I don't think Live allows the same on other consoles. If the price is the same and the rights are not transferable then really you are paying to rent something. Even if it's a one time payment you don't own it and are not free to do with it as you please as you would any other tangible object. This will have both good and bad consequences. Resale has considerably hurt revenue from developers as even people with the money to buy the titles at full price pass because they know within 4 months the price will drop anyways and resale copies will be available by then. As the age of the average gamer increases with the age of modern gaming the amount of fiscal responsibility of the average gamer also increases. Yes I have been badgered by tweens on live for not having purchased Castle Crashers yet despite having the money to do so. The difference is when you work for your money you tend to value it more. This emphasis on value only increases as you get older so games often take a back seat to more value added item's like a mortgage. Older gamers require more for their money which is why you see a lot of older gamers playing MMO's and RPG's rather than FPS's and RTS games. What it all boils down too is that one of these days the majority of gamers are not going to spaz out over a new title unless it is truly epic in nature. Instead they will forgo the launch madness that largely consists of the young or immature and wait on reasonable prices, sound reviews, or recommendations from friends. I hate to call people out as immature but if your 40 and you dress up like an elf to go stand in front of Best Buy for hours you are immature. It can be done properly where it's actually cool but that ain't it fanboy. Hell I am trying to figure out how to make the blue glowing lines on Baldurs head for my face cuz I actually look like the guy but there are ways of doing it that are cool and not geeky. The good thing about this is that it will hurt monster publishers like EA if they don't own every freaking developer on Earth by then. Resales will be non existent so the money will go directly to the developer more often and publisher won't be near the middle man leach they are now. I have actually purchased new games rather than resale copies because I would rather have more of my money going to the developer than the reseller. Ubisoft gets a lot of my bucks oddly enough even though they are at risk of falling to the Evil Empire. So some of this is debatable and some of it is plain bad.

I for one am looking forward to it. Eventually public outcry over ownership of the rights will win out just like it has in the past. This is really one of my only beefs with the move. Initial downloads at midnight will be painful to say the least as the server spam at that time for popular titles will be just silly. Hell by then I might be old enough that I don't care but I doubt it as unlike my parent's and grand parent's the older I get the later I stay awake…probably a good thing. No I am not in my 20's or younger either.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (SPOILERS IN THIS ONE)

That's a great way to describe this game. That might actually be the theme for my future reviews too as I am looking for a format. While playing this game your opinion of it can easily swing back and forth between a 3 and a 7 so a 5 is about perfect for an objective review. I personally hold this game as one of my favorites but only because I place a lot of emphasis on thinking outside the box, graphics, customization, and story. Fortunately for me I know a decent amount about Norse mythology so I found the relationships between the characters really cool. For example in Norse mythology Hod is a blind god that kills his brother Baldur but was set up by Loki. The game doesn't follow the mythology really but going into it knowing that makes the story more intriguing than it is on its own. Because of these things I am able to look past some of the flaws but standing on it's own this game isn't all that.

The Good. There won't be a lot but the goods are really good.

The graphics are amazing. All the cut scene character interaction is done with in game footage and that footage is second to none in my opinion. About 90% of the visual aspect of this game is flawless and that is just astounding. If you don't think it's all pre-rendered and you own a copy then just mash in the right thumb stick while you're standing around. It's really just impressive on the scale of Mass Effect and at times I think its better. Remember that missing 10% though because that's going to fall under the ugly category.

The game play is probably the most innovative use of a dual analog remote ever conceived despite its simplicity. If you want to avoid most of the bad and ugly you will grab a berserker and basically forsake the use of guns completely. This means you will be using the dual analogs' about 95% of the game. It's extremely easy to zoom around the battlefield hacking things to pieces and there are really only two combinations to remember so the learning curve is virtually non-existent. What really comes into play is the strategy you use of applying these combos's to kill enemies. For a game with so little to remember, compared to a similar title like Ninja Gaiden, there is actually a lot of variety in how you fight. It isn't without its setbacks though.

The customization in this game is really on par with most MMO's. The variety in color, appearance, and function really adds to replayability. The charms add nice little sub-goals to the game that reward you in both loot and function once completed. If you can hang in long enough and complete some of the red charms you are not only an addict but now wielding some of the most powerful and enjoyable features of the game. The Diablo like crafting system is simple to understand and amazingly powerful if you're willing to stick it out into multiple play through's. Finally, the inventory management is excellent with a little lag at times being it's only real drawback.

The goods are really great when compared to similar titles and really add a lot to the game. These three things are some of the big keys to a game like this and add significantly not only for the pure enjoyment of it but breaking the mold is always a plus.

The Bad. The goods don't make the game and the bads don't break it but they sure hold it back a lot.

Too Human came out Too Early, and that's really saying something considering this game was giving Duke Nukem a run for its money. The time spent shows up in some area's but lacks in others and the ones it's lacking in are strange to say the least. Top notch graphics take a long time and stories are normally one of the first things to develop but this game has it backwards. The story is there and it's not bad but pieces are clearly missing. Crawl, walk, and then run just fly out the window as the story crawls all the way to the end and then slams together all at once. They cliff hangered this story so hard that they forgot to actually make you interested in it in the first place. If you are not big into Norse mythology you will be uninterested for the most part. At times there is way too little story going on as well. The game has only a few very long levels and the first one interjects story along the way to break it up and it helps the flow of the game. It all falls apart after that though as you really are not going to get much more during the rest of the missions. The length between sequences can be so long that you feel like your grinding MMO style just to get to the end of the mission. Your character jaw jacking with your grunt's is no substitute. Story is a huge part of any game and the story in Too Human suffers from a lack of proper execution, lack of proper writing, or both. Either way few are going to enjoy the story for what it is without interjecting outside knowledge or the imagination to fill the gaps.

Guns just aren't very good. There is zero balance between guns and melee and even a Commando will end up using his melee much more than you would expect. Some enemies are almost completely resistant to weapons fire and others are actually fueled by it so it become a liability that's best skipped entirely. Especially if you consider that the melee weapons have a ranged attack of their own that is both more powerful and doesn't really have those drawbacks. Not only are the weapons incapable of dishing out damage at the rate brawlers can and drawbacks to using them but also technical problems. Once you kill an enemy you can continue to shoot its corpse which often alters the flow of the battle from keeping the enemy at bay to a general melee. Benefits of guns like dual wielding pistols and running up your combo meter by pinning an enemy in the air are tempered by the waves of enemies overpowering your ability to kill them or kicking your tail while you're trying to run up that combo meter. The ruiners for guns are cool and so is being able to shoot your two pistols in different directions but this mechanic is all flash and no substance, only seeing limited use during co-op or farming the yet to be fixed bugged spawns in the game.

Missing content is also an issue. Normally I wouldn't count something not in a game against it but the inclusion of the online marketplace in the in game stores means they obviously intended for that to be used. Except that it isn't used for anything. DLC is fluff only and we, as a community, really need to give developers a hint that gamer pics and dashboards though downloadable are not content. Don't expect any either. Between the lackluster reception and the lawsuit over the graphics engine if any funding is available for DLC it's probably being sat on right now to keep SK from going under. You will also find yourself frustrated at the lack of a storage medium for your goodies. Your character can hump a lot of stuff around but its runes and charms that clog the system. You need the runes to upgrade your armor and lower tier charms, you need the lower tier charms to upgrade higher tier charms, but keeping all these tiny little items was apparently low on the list of priorities in development. You can carry 20 charms and I think 60 runes but that's not that many when a charm can soak up anywhere from 3 to 7 runes to complete and armor and weapons can take up to 4 per item. Combine this with the fact that coloring your weapons and armor requires die packs that also take up space in your rune inventory and you quickly start to run short on room. Some kind of storage should have been a no brainer considering the replayability emphasis on charm building and set collecting.

The Ugly. Not taking anything away but not helping anything out.

The graphics for all their beauty have some hitches. In pitched battles with lots of enemies you can get low frame rates from all the action going on. The load lag that plagues Mass Effect can be seen sparingly and is hardly noticeable but probably only because there isn't a ton of stuff in the game to clog up the memory like ME has. For all the attention to detail there are parts where they just didn't get around to it. When you walk past two citizens holding a random conversation and they are moving their mouths and gesturing that's pretty impressive but when you walk by the tour guides, who are always there repeating the tour, and they are apparently stoic ventriloquists, it is a clear sign that didn't have the time they needed to finish. Spirit of Fenrir is amazingly anticlimactic while ruiners are pretty freaking cool. What gives? It's nit picky stuff but with the emphasis on replayability these things are going to get picked up by those interested in the technical perfection of the game.

The controls may be innovative but they were designed for ease of use ONLY. There isn't a setting for people who know what they are doing and don't want to slide from beyond cannon range with their Berserker and do a finisher instead of doing a fierce attack. It favors sliding way too much and though that is going to be a lot of the game there are times where well aimed fierce attacks are critical and the difference between a fierce and a slide can mean death or frustration. Aiming ranged attacks can be hit or miss as well. Fierce attacks tend to go towards the closest enemy even if they are already knocked down which exacerbates the problems with DOT's in this game. Guns, for what they are worth, require you to rock the thumb stick back and forth to constantly swap targets or you get locked onto a corpse, a random object, missile of some sort, or just an enemy that you don't want to shoot. Pulling out a gun also means slowing your characters movement speed down significantly. The inclusion of an up tempo gun play mechanic similar to the slide or a gotcha' type mechanic like popping Trolls would have gone a long ways towards spicing up the ranged combat system because it really stands the opposite of the fast paced melee mechanics. These don't kill the combat system but ranged attacks will take a lot of strategic thinking to manage and even then just accept the fact that you're going to get hit with a DOT eventually that may as well be the kiss of death. The camera also seems to have a mind of its own and the multiple modes do nothing to ease the pain. Certain places try to be cinematic and swing the camera to draw your attention to one thing or another rather than cut away into a scene but it's largely pointless, uninspiring, or just inexplicable. Except for the floor of the very first room of the game and most people didn't notice the scene of the Norse fighting the Giant's because starting a game off with a panning graphical interlude isn't what most people have in mind. This random panning causes you to run around in crazy ways because your movement direction is determined by the camera angle. It can be a minor nuisance one second or a major pain the next as your hunt for health during battles runs the camera into barriers, swinging the camera to pointless angles or pinning it down on top of your head where you still can't find the container and you can't see anything else either.

The customization is great but its feast or famine. Not only can you sometimes get in a proverbial rut and not get useful loot but the specialization between human or cybernetics can further reduce the chances of getting anything worth while in a co-op match. That addition to the game mechanics feels like tacked on ballast to make the human branch remotely acceptable. You're also not going to get much from your charms until your closing out the highest tiered ones. Occasionally doing a bit more damage, putting an enemy to sleep, snaring an enemy, or knocking them back is cute and all but to go from that to opening a black hole that sucks up all the enemies within a fairly large radius is just ridiculous. There really isn't a middle ground and to get from one to the other takes some serious dedication to this game. The game is still fun without it but if you only play through once chances are you might not even see a red item other than it hanging on the wall in Tyr's workshop. The armor and weapon system isn't much different but they are certainly manageable. It's unfortunate though that as you get higher you will simply not find some types of armor that are pretty cool. I don't mind sacrificing some stats to look cool but if you latch on to a piece of armor you really like in the early or mid game you can pretty much kiss it goodbye when you get to the higher levels. The dye system also drives you insane. This isn't an MMO so having a credits sink is just plain stupid but that's exactly what the dye system is. You have to buy one dye kit for each piece of equipment you are going to color and the dye might not be on sale the next time you hit the shop. Not only that but you can't preview the dye and certain armor pieces turn out completely different colors than others for seemingly no reason. Some colors are just missing while others are overused. The end result of all this is a game that has a lot of MMO style grinding to it. Grinding for the top tier sets and charms is rewarding enough but the lack of a mid game and if you just like a particular set of armor or color scheme rather than the elite sets then the end game just isn't worth messing with.

DOT's or Damage Over Time status effects start as a minor mechanic but end up being the most annoying thing. If you can get the kill using a ruiner or ranged attack without getting hit with a DOT it's ok but sometimes you have zero available options because the DOT monkey has a gun and can project a dot onto you from a range. Don't get me wrong, your spider and with the right charms even your weapons can do this but your DOT's don't last several minutes and even if they did your enemy should have been dead after only a few seconds. There are no inventory heal kits and when you need the kits they often don't drop from containers you didn't previously destroy for that very purpose. The late game DOT's can do insane amounts of damage and last for an unreasonably long time. The mechanics to counter these DOT's are questionable and that compounds the problems caused by them. The DOT's do give Bioengineer's a great role in co-op play as their battle cries can rid team mate of status effects while their latent regeneration extends to the team mate as well.

Co-op is enjoyable enough but the two player limitation means that the tactics employed are stagnant. If you are just in it for fun it's hard to not pair up a melee class with a Bioengineer's heals because it allows you to play through much more aggressively. Tactics like combining the radius effect of the hammer knocking multiple enemies in the air with the radius damage of plasma weapons keeping them there is niche at best and really exists for players just going against the grain trying to find more challenging ways of playing. This means a lot of the features of the game will really go unused because the optimal play style is so far ahead of the other options that most people just won't care to try them. This isn't just because the classes are unbalance either. Within each class the skill tree is generally unbalanced as well. Damage, armor, health, and resistances will trump everything else in any game but the skill trees often favor things no one cares about. Who wants a spider that shoots missiles when they are easy to avoid? There are a ton of pointless spiders, battle cries, and skills. The good ones are rarely paired together either and since Spirit of Fenrir is handy for those multiple DOT spawns, you are forced to waste points on skills that would be better spent elsewhere. Since battle cries require combo meter to use they play second fiddle to the spider. The entire system seems poorly thought out and actually feels like a lot of last minute balancing took place that didn't help make the other classes any better of an option. The game isn't that hard though so the wasted skill points don't make a dent for the most part.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry about the Boss battles. Whoever designed these things will hopefully not be working on the rest of the trilogy in that same role. Once again it seems that the first level of the game is the only one that really got finished. After that they just slammed it together and pushed the game out. It reminds me of Goldilocks. Grendel and his flea's are a just right. Hod and Hel are too easy and the other bosses are too hard. The battle with Hod is annoying until you get him to the ground floor and then it's really easy and Hel is basically the same. The Troll variant and Hel's dog, though not hard to survive, can be hard to put down. You can't mount and pop this troll like you do the others and it's his arms that are the issue. For some reason you can strip all his armor off and it's still nearly impossible to hit his arms with anything but a gun and we all know how well those work. Plasma and lasers hurt him worse than projectiles generally but, considering that they suck as a whole, carrying a variety is never really part of the plan. The dog is another gun required boss and by gun I mean rifle or cannon because you can't reach him with pistols without getting dangerously close to his paws and the limited time that you will have to take shots at his soft sides are more suited to the grenades that you can fire from the rifle or cannon. Let's not forget that you will spend the entire time running in circles trying to get one of these shot's off while rolling away from the missile spam that Fido sprays out of his head. Not really hard to survive but once again overly difficult to take down. The characters in and of themselves were imaginative but the battles were, for the most part, not.

Last but not least is Thor. Why is one of the world's most legendary mythic heroes a jaundiced moronic caricature? Every single NPC in this game looks like they belong except Thor. Who in the name of Zeus's butthole thought that was a good idea? What is up with the jaundice too? I mean I really like this game but Thor makes me cringe and Baldur is moronic enough to shoot an innocent man but smart enough to figure it out a split second later. Why bend Norse mythology and have Baldur kill Hod, unless Baldur is Vali but nothing lends credence to that concept considering the story of the game. How many times does Hod have to call him Loki for him to figure out something isn't right? Obviously it was enough times he was just slow. Just take his wounded rear back to the house and have the hot librarian chick put him in a test tube unconscious until Baldur and Jaundice Boy go for a stroll in the ultimate off-road doomsday machine. I am sure that the story will unfold if the trilogy is completed but this just didn't help things out at all.

Overall

It's a good game and one of my favorites but tearing it a new one is easy to do. You can get this game on the cheap though and it's a fun game to play by yourself or with a friend. Pickup games are and basically have always been farmers so the online is more miss than hit. There is no split screen though and it hasn't ported well to standard definition for me in the past so be aware of that limitation.

Like I said in my review, it was a fun game but let's face it most games are fun. I also said that I rated only the campaign mode which was good enough that I played through it from start to finish without sleeping. I actually stayed up much later than I should have but I was interested in where the story was going to go so I ended up wishing I had just gone to bed early.

The problems with the game are not huge it's just that there are so many of them. Compare ODST to competing FPS's and it's not as good as Halo 3 or Gears of War 2. What it suffers from is the fact that you are not Master Chief but you are expected to play by his rules of run and gun. Except you are frail and Brutes are everywhere. The two just don't mix well because you constantly have to sit around and wait for your stamina, which is your shields, to recover. Health packs are numerous enough that dying isn't really an issue. It's just a mundane play style that was touted as tactical but is anything but. Prairie dogging is a tactic but doing it because you are forced to do so doesn't make it enjoyable nor does it make ODST a Tactical FPS…or the walk to the toilet any better.

Sneaking is great but it's really just a faux mechanic in this game. You can sneak around all you want when covenant are not present but their detection seems to be chance based which makes it just pointless. I was able to sneak up on a group of sleeping Grunts and a Brute and start knocking them off with a well placed melee but halfway threw the squad for no apparent reason they woke up. It wasn't a problem but why on Earth was I able to kill half the squad and not the whole squad? Other times I ran right past sleeping Grunts and not a peep from them. I have woken sleeping Grunts just by being in their proximity though so it really just seems like some idiotic chance based system which again strikes a blow to the Tactical FPS tag.

Lighting and line of sight also seem to play little role in the game. I have been detected by enemy's above me that couldn't possibly see me while I was standing still. Other times I have been in plain site and a patrol walk right past me without notice. I have even been spotted in the pitch black darkness from 40 or 50 yards away and in the light from near 100 yards. How many nails in the Tactical FPS coffin are we going to put in today? Actually it will be several more.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is probably the pinnacle Tactical shooter on the market right now. It combines neat little gadgets, customizable weapons, and armor configurations with game mechanics like wall hugging, leaning, and blind fire. ODST has none of these things. It does have a quasi night vision friend or foe HUD that really just makes the dark bearable but turns daylight into the surface of the sun. These two things can't be separated from the other so the FOF highlighting system doesn't function during the meat of the game but only during what ends up being a largely pointless sandbox portion. The FOF system works but there are some strange things that happen with it. Red is enemy, green is friendly, orange is just environment, yellow is intractable, blue is normally loot but there are doors here and there that are blue as well but can't be opened and for some reason they override the other layers at times. It never cause any problems but to look up and see an intractable Palm tree just to discover that it was the door behind it and even then the door wasn't either it just added length to an already long portion of that game that was tacked on just to add length IMHO.

The sand box mode isn't very sand box. There is nothing on the map except for mission objectives, enemies, and stashes. Except in one of the feeds on ODST I saw you were not supposed to have the whole enemy on radar thing but whatever. By the end of the game I used it a lot to skirt enemy patrols and sentry's because fighting them really made no sense. This sandbox mode was a monolith of wasted time that added nothing tangible to the game that couldn't have been done by just adding some cut scene storyline of the rookie arriving at all these locations after each level with the rest of the squad. There just wasn't anything present in this mode that separated it from a time sink. Yeah there were the audio files but most people won't look for them all. That story was more intriguing to me than the actual story of the game and yet I still didn't care enough to look around for them because it wasn't anything special either and nothing else on the map was worth looking around for or drew me in that direction. There should have been sub missions and objectives present in the sandbox map that didn't connect to the story and if I had to guess I will bet there will be with some future DLC but you know what they say, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

The story wasn't horrible and I am a huge fan of Nathan Fillion for his character Malcolm Reynolds. I am also a fan of Zoe and Inara but who isn't? The problem is all it did was connect some dots that didn't need connecting. Like we couldn't figure out what the covenant were after when they were carving it out of the surface of the planet…this isn't what Halo needs this is what Too Human needs. Bungie said they were making this game to highlight the human side of the conflict but they made the Rookie totally ambiguous which detracted from the story instead of adding to it. They did a good job with animating the Rookie but since the Rookie never spoke and other than a minor hint as to why (which apparently wasn't because IT couldn't remove ITS helmet since everyone else did so with reckless abandon) it really just didn't help you identify with the character at all. Do you see why? IT isn't something we, as humans, identify with very often. The story actually leaves Humans out of it for the most part and you end up rescuing and allying yourself with some previously unknown Covenant alien that is primarily helpless. It isn't bad per se but it doesn't do anything to add to the game or the series. I am not an RTS fan at all and I enjoyed Halo Wars for both its game play and its story. That just isn't right considering how much I really like FPS's.

The graphics were not very good. They created a bunch of high res cut scene stuff but not for the game, for advertising it. This is why I used the key word over hyped to describe it. In fact, I don't think there was a single rendered cut scene in the whole game. When I jumped in the first thing I did was graze threw the options where I discovered that the graphics used to display the armor customization screen seemed to be downgraded from the industry standard. Yeah I may be spoiled by games like Too Human and Mass Effect but guess what folks…those games are industry leaders in that area. Follow the leader and you will find the cash. It isn't impossible to do but when you are making cookie cutter games then this is what you get. This is exactly what ODST was. Minus the costly pre-rendered cut scenes from the Halo series that actually make those games stories stand out. The game cost the same at the register though. I just recently got threw wasting a solid weekend +2 on Civ Revolutions and that is what Dare looks like, a Civ caricature type avatar. At least she looked reasonable despite her head not fitting into the game at all. Everyone else looked like complete garbage. They should have just kept there helmets on and the glass tinted because from the neck up this game was a joke. Why is that again? There are about 2 dozen alternative game engines right now that have good in game graphics but this isn't one of them.

ODST isn't full of bugs or broken mechanics that normally cause otherwise good games like Too Human to get poor ratings. It suffered from mediocrity in everything it did. Which is why I think it is a poor game. At least Mass Effect, Too Human, and numerous other titles had redeeming qualities that make them fun enough to continue to play threw the issues. ODST has none.

Let me start this off by saying I am not some gaming fan boy. I don't get geeked out and listen to podcasts and scrounge the internet for every tidbit of info concerning an upcoming game because I used to do that and it ruined games. I might look up info on them to try and keep moderately informed but I just don't get geeked out on them. I also don't view geeked out as derogatory as I am geeked out on gaming but not on any one game in particular.

It sounds strange I know but I have this disease call morals which means I hold people to their word. So when a developer tells me they are adding a feature but never inform the masses that said feature was cut until the game was released then I will burn them down for it in any review. Yes more reviews are coming and just wait till I get done with Mass Effect.

The other thing is I don't give every game that I enjoy a 5+. Games are supposed to be fun and I can almost always enjoy them to some degree. I tend to find the fun in games anyways so I only consider fun one aspect of the game that goes alongside other technical aspects that can really take away from a game when you consider how much was paid for it. If I drop 20 bucks on ODST then it was worth 20 bucks but it cost 60+ and as such it received a 4 because it really wasn't worth 60 bucks. A 10 is an epic title that significantly impacts the future development of gaming and a zero is broken. A 5 is a nothing special. Top heavy reviews are just not my thing. A 7 is a pretty good game IMHO but you will see a lot of people dropping 10's on games that I think deserve a 7. Remember we are all entitled to our opinions but at least I am here qualifying mine.

Now just because a developer bragged about a certain function in a game and then didn't include it doesn't mean I will take a ton of points away on my review. I will call them out if I knew about those missing features but I will review the game I have on hand and not the would have and could haves.

I also don't like giving too many props or penalties for multiplayer. Not co-op but death match style multiplayer. Just like ESRB can't be rated for online interaction you can't penalize a game for having less than stellar participants. I am really a co-op kind of person so the multiplayer aspects rarely appeal to me and as such I rarely play them. For instance I absolutely despise the multiplayer portions of the Halo FPS series. Not because it's poorly done or anything like that but because a casual gamer can not realistically jump in and compete with people who memorize the weapon locations on every map, stack the map settings against casual players, and when they reach a rank they themselves can't compete at they create new accounts to play as so they can keep killing noobs to stroke their epeen. Don't get me wrong, I get it. You're good and you like your game but if you're good play against other people who are good. You are not good if you are intentionally targeting noobs because that makes you pathetic for trying to look better than you really are. You can't compete on the level like an adult so you run back to the minors because it makes you look like a star.

If you think I don't know how to throw down with the best of them you're wrong. Granted you won't find me on the top ranks of any xbox games...mainly because my sig isn't umpalumpa...but also because my days of playing a game to death are behind me. I have been on top two boards on Planetside and Unreal Tournament(Pro Servers) so it's not like I haven't been there. I just don't have the time, patience, or addictive personality to get geeked out on games like I did when I was a little younger. Mix that with the fact that I make a lot more money than I did back then and the need to squeeze every last dollar out of a game is gone. Too make things even more interesting my best friend works for Micro$oft so I get the occasional free game and get to play tons of games I would never likely buy and that brings me to why I am going to start writing reviews.

Well it's because of my best friend. Shortly after we met he told me that I should be reviewing games. Back then we were in college and had very different goals. He already worked in the industry for Sony back then and though I had offers I had no desire to ever work in game development despite my passion for playing them. Fast forward a few years and the critical reviews I have been making to him have been traveling to work with him as well and largely considered accurate by his peers at work. Most of the time he has been unable to inform his co-workers of where he actually got the knowledge but as his faith in me not breaking his ND agreements has grown so has his willingness to share the source of his information which has certainly made for some interesting lunches and dinners here lately. The crowning moment was when, after years of badgering me for input, a game proposal that he had been pushing was accepted and the developer is basically making it word for word from what we proposed. I always told him I wanted nothing but good games and that my ideas would freely pass to anyone who wanted them as long as gaming moved beyond the stagnant stalemate we have today. I guess that would be a good time to interject that games that don't fit the mold get brownie points from me. Anyways, our success and his renewed badgering have lead me to writing reviews.

Now if I could just get the fan boy moderators to quit removing my reviews...

Keep this in mind.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

~Sigmund Freud