There will be spoilers. I'll start off by stating I think the game is fairly good. Great? No. Worth $60 (plus tax)? Err ... possibly. Game of the year? If EA and Bioware pony up more toys to game reviewers than Microsoft does when Halo: Reach comes out, probably. (GT5 would get 'game of the year' by default for finally releasing ... but it won't ... so, no worries there.) The bulk of my frustration is that I can see where this, could've been a truly great game instead of a mediocre game cloaked in a shroud of game reviewer hype declaring it a great game. It's the same frustration I've had with Bioware games since KOTOR (although I have fond memories of KOTOR that would likely be dashed if I played it now); they focus too much on the voice acting and leave the quest and level design to rot. I have to say though, for the NPC specific missions they did some work on level design. But once you're in it, just the same one-track corridor with random crates / barriers to hide behind. It feels, and is, forced. ...

Okay, so I've been a big Forza fan from the beginning. To me, it just seems more sim-y than Gran Tourismo; especially GT5 Prologue. I love the new tracks, and I love the new graphics. But, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't hyper critical; Forza 3 is weak sauce. What's weak sauce about it? The damn cars! They're the same damn cars that were in Forza 2. Hello, the world has moved on since 2007. Yeah, sure, there are a couple of new cars here and there, but for the most part it's the same old same old. Audi R10; Audi is racing the R15 now. Oh, and they felt necessary to add the Benz ML63, but not the C63 or the E63!? For that matter, they add a couple of SUVs but then neglected to put an SUV racing series. So, what? You're supposed to race around in normal races against normal cars with a big old SUV? W E A K sauce. And then, I hadn't been paying attention and apparently I have to purchase the Limited Edition if I ever want to get ...

I'd turned on the previous night and played a couple of E3 demos and all was fine. But last night when I sat down to play I got the infamous 3RROD. Error code 0020. So, of course, I turned to google and quickly found the 'x-clamp replacement fix'. (just google it, you'll get a ton of hits with tuts, videos and actual Lowes and Home Depot part #'s).

[post update] I've switched to using mkv2vob exclusively. I have better luck fast forwarding with files created there, and since I first started experimenting, there haven't been any issues with bad muxes in mkv2vob. Also found that the PS3 will kinda sorta try to play x264/ac3 in an avi container (shows thumbnail image) but won't play it. It was thought that I might abandon the ps3 and remux the mkvs to avi for xbox360 playback, skipping the mkv to wmv transcode. But I haven't found any good info or muxers for that yet. I've also given up on meta for m2ts, I don't believe it exists outside of the bluray structure. This is mainly for my use, because I've been all over the place in the last few days collecting crap to get this to work. And I'm still working on getting WMP to play the files natively so that I can get thumbnails in the WMP Library (just icing, not really necessary). So why am I doing this instead of using encode360 to transcode the mkv to wmv? Takes too long. Takes about 12hrs on my core2duo imac to do a 2hr movie. With this method, ...

So my first thought, because naturally I was comparing it directly to Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, was that it wasn't very polished. My second thought was that it seemed short. After playing it for awhile, it is and it isn't. Level design doesn't seem as polished or thought out as Lego Star Wars; seems to be a lot of bad camera angles and clipping. And of course its short, there are only three movies to cover instead of six. But the levels still feel a lot shorter than Star Wars levels. Still like it though. I was getting tired of trying to mine achievements on GTA IV.

You know how people complain about Microsoft not doing anything right? Well, I offer that Sony is about 100 paces further behind. I'm now convinced that everything Sony touches will be shit. I really want a reason to like my PS3; even though I've only turned it on three or four times since I bought it almost a year ago. It should be a great media center console, but it seems like every format is gimped in some way to protect against watching pirated movies (valid concern, but come on, just look the other way ... oh wait, yeah you guys own a movie studio ... okay I'll give you that one). And then there's forced installs on games. Who thought this was a great idea? Is the drive really that slow? Because even after the game is installed, wait times are still awful. I get home last night, and excitedly throw in Prologue hoping to get a few races in before it's time to get Logan off to bed. And here's how that went.

Gamestop burned me again. Why don't I ever learn to stay away? Sure enough, I go to pick up my copy of GT5 Prologue (the first reason for me to turn on my PS3 since I bought it) that I'd reserved, and it's not there. "Tomorrow, it's on the UPS truck today." Argh. I need it beat into my head a few more times before I quit doing the reservation thing with them.

I've been waiting for this game for a long time. I've liked every Bioware game I've played. (Well, maybe not Jade Empire so much) But I won't lie, this is KOTOR re-skinned. Which might be excusable since KOTOR II (not done by Bioware) was a complete recycle. I still like it though; I'm a sucker for RPGs. And as much as I hate fedex quests, I still do them to see what kind of special trinket I'm going to get to collect. Every nook and crannie of the game has to get explored. Every dialog option. Every dungeon crawled. A lot has been made about the real time combat system, is it a shooter or is it an RPG? I don't mind the real time combat. It's not as good, or fluid, as a tactical shooter but it's a lot less jarring than the traditional turn based combat of traditional RPGs where everybody stands around until it's their turn to do something. Do I think, given another year of development time they could've made it better? Yeah, there's room for improvement.

I've spent a bit of time on Halo 3 Live over the last week while Heather was out of town. At first, I was super annoyed; I'd lost all my Halo skilz and I couldn't even make it out of the basic training area. But then once I got my feet under me, I quickly progressed out of there, and got punted into the deep end. Where I sank back into getting my ass handed to me. Everything in time. I'm starting to get better, but now I'm in that gray area where I'll have one really good game, proceeded by another where I get my ass kicked around like a chew toy. There's no consistency. At least now it feels like if I were to stick with it, there's the possibility I'd climb the ranks. But that's the point. Where's the need to be investing so much time to enjoy a game? With more and more game developers ditching the single player part of their games and focusing on multiplayer there really needs to be a casual arena for people who just want to jump in and have fun without investing weeks of ...

No matter what I say, it's worth $60. Remember that. This is not the great game Halo was. Like Bioshock, the single player is simply a narrative to be interacted with. It's strength lies in multiplayer, and sadly I don't think we're likely to see many more, if any, single player games that aren't RPG. My initial complaint is that it feels very short. I'm nowhere near finished, so I can't claim to have seen the whole thing, but I've heard there's only 10 levels. I've played for an hour and a half and I'm on level 4. My second complaint is the huge jump in difficulty between Normal and Heroic. On Normal you can bust around and feel like superhuman gamer destroying everything in your path. Heroic you're reduced to hiding behind rocks and scrounging for enemy weapons because you had to unload all your ammo on the first Brute. Normal, enemies stand around waiting to get pummelled. Heroic, the AI suddenly jumps to life. It's such a striking contrast. My second complaint is moving the action button up to the right bumper. I've never been comfortable hitting bumper buttons, ...

Don't buy into the hype; this game isn't that good. They didn't spend as much time on the story as they'd like you to believe. It plays out like d-grade film noir, with the requisite twists are seen coming from miles on. Worst of all, they attempt to sell the game as a big open area to explore. No. It's all rail levels, there is only one single path through the game. Once you've been in a room, there's no point coming back even though you could move freely from level to level there's absolutely no need to. Unfortunately, the environment which seems rich and compelling at first, quickly becomes monotonous because there's not enough diversity between levels. Then they tried to mask that it was a substandard shooter by giving you mini games (hacking) character level up (splicing) and weapon level up. But it doesn't make up for the poor mechanics. They give you a couple of different objectives instead of just shooting things, which is good because the opponents are boring after the first few encounters. Enemy taunts repeat quickly and become annoying fast. Plus there's nothing new ...

Sony dropped the price on the 60gb PS3, to make way for the new 80gb model. I've been wanting a blu-ray or hd-dvd player for awhile so I figured why not. I get a decent 1st gen blu-ray player and a game system for the same price as just a stand alone player. And that's where the problems started. Reading up on the blu-ray vs hd-dvd battle, on paper, it seems clear blu-ray's going to win (not that sony has a good track record for their proprietary media formats winning) eventually. Blu-ray's got two movie studios that are blu-ray only, Sony (duh) and Disney. Having a kid, Disney movies are important ... but being a Disney nut and having a kid makes it key. And along with Disney comes Pixar FTW. Then there's Fox and MGM that are releasing on both formats. But then comes Universal, who got burned on UMD, and who's big-up is on the hd-dvd board, who is hd-dvd only. Seems like a no brainer.

If you can only buy one game, get GOW. COD3 is good, it's fun, but it's a little stale. On the Halo fun scale, this one gets a 6. Different developer did this one, and they really like they're scripted events which I'm not a big fan of. Enemy AI is a little dumber this time around too. Graphics seem like they're actually a little worse, or maybe the stuff they spent time on I'm not looking at. Also, when you continue your game from the last checkpoint you're forced to watch the cutscene that proceeded the level ... no way to skip through it. Gets real old fast. Along with COD3 came the infamous fall update lock up issue. After the update I'd had a couple of lockups in GOW but then they went away. COD3, or any other game now, locks up just a few minutes into it except if I play GOW first and get the box nice and toasty. My theory is they modified the firmware for heat handling and now something's not triggering a fan to ramp up when it should and a chips overheating. At least no ...