Tag Archives: xbla

Top Ten of 2010 – No. 5

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It’s back ladies and gents! The feature that I thought would just crawl away and die and hope that no one would notice is back with a vengeance. Actually it’s just back because I had time to kill on two mammoth train journeys to and from London and I needed to not be raging at the lack of quiet on the Quiet Coach.

5. Super Meat Boy

I’m not sure any other game in my Top Ten of 2010 has as good controls as this game. None of them are as finely honed and perfected as Super Meat Boy; they will all have some minor failing somewhere between what your fingers do on the controller to what you see occur on screen. Not so with Super Meat Boy.

When you die (and you will die a lot), it was your fault. Your fingers failed you. I apologise for writing that; I really hate it when I read that stuff in reviews. I can make an exception in this case however, because it is actually true.

For some, this will be too much to take and they will give up. For others, it will spur you on to greater and greater feats of appendage dexterity. It is a remarkable piece of programming.

Super Meat Boy

Everywhere you go you leave a trail of blood

The path through each level is (usually) obvious and even when it isn’t, each of your untimely demises will quickly start to reveal patterns as to what you should be doing. I think that’s part of the appeal for me, there’s a certain evolution that you go through on every new level that you play.

Initially you’re just feeling your way around, trying to work out what to do. Then you go through again and again until you can comfortably complete it (this doesn’t really happen on the later levels). Eventually as you continue to refine and streamline your path, new opportunities for time-saving become apparent (“Ooo, can I take out the need to land in front of saw blade after the wall-jump by just wall-sliding a little higher on the wall and jumping it in one go?”).

Super Meat Boy

Too much salt is bad for you, m'kay?

I found myself doing this for every little chunk of a level, trying to critically analyse its make-up and navigate the most efficient path possible, trying to hone my muscle memory such that I could replicate it every time. After you’ve reached that level of depth, that’s when you try to string everything you’ve learnt together in a perfect run for a world-beating leaderboard time! Incidentally, if you like competing with your friends on leaderboards you will love this. I was ranked pretty highly around the time it came out (both amongst my friends and the wider XBL public) but I dread to think how far I’ve slipped down now.

It’s very addictive and there’s nothing more exhilarating than nailing a perfect run and rising up the leaderboards. On some of the levels, there’s nothing more exhilarating than actually finishing it!

This Week in Gaming #5

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It’s a short one this week. My gaming activities haven’t really changed from last week, other than I feel like I’ve barely played anything. It’s probably because work was quite busy (as it is this week too).

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer is still a regular feature of my evenings. The servers have been completely ballsed up for the past week or so which has resulted in empty servers and one-sided games (yes, even more than normal). Strangely, vanilla BFBC2 didn’t seem quite as badly affected as Vietnam, so we did a bit of modern warfare too.

Last night I jumped into a game with my usual crew and found myself in a Hardcore game, where there’s no map, character health is significantly lower, you can’t enemy characters and generally things are a lot tougher. It was quite a different proposition, but it is good fun. I also picked up the co-operative Onslaught mode, which now seems to be permanently discounted. In Onslaught mode, you (and your squad of 3 teammates hopefully) progress through four of the multiplayer Rush maps, taking flags and fighting off hordes of AI enemies and vehicles. It’s great fun. The enemies aren’t totally stupid either and they seem to have a proper line of sight system as well, allowing you the opportunity to play it sneaky and flank them if you can keep out of sight.

I made a tiny bit more progress in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I think I’m still in Memory Sequence 4, so I’ve still got a way to go! Grabbed a few more games of Carcassonne, often in the 10-20 minutes where I’m waiting for my food to cook and the like. I tend to lose a lot. Disappointingly there still aren’t many people playing it, despite it having been on deal over Christmas.

And that’s about it. I’m going through a board game phase at the moment, but I’ll talk about later.

This Week in Gaming #4

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The Christmas break is over and regular service (having to go to work, cooking your own food, washing your own dishes etc.) has now resumed. Boo! On the bright side, it does mean that I’m back home, back online and back to my regular gaming schedule (which is essentially, all the time I’m not working).

I finally got hold of my Pro Drums for Rock Band 3. Marie had ordered them long before Christmas but the snow conspired to deny me my present. She got a message from our office manager that they’d been delivered to work on Christmas Eve (after we’d both left). Anyway, I have them now and they are awesome. Ridiculously awesome. The cymbals add an amazing level of extra depth to the gameplay. I did have an issue with one of the cymbals double-hitting, but I think I fixed it. I’ll try to do a full review later (and a walkthrough of how to fix a double-hitting cymbal) soon, perhaps this weekend if I’m disciplined enough!

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the first of my new games of the year. It’s predecessor, with its spectacular level design, beautiful graphics and razor-sharp controls is probably within my top ten games of all time. Only a few hours in and SMG2 is already working its magic on me. It doesn’t perhaps produce quite the same feeling of fresh, newness that the original did, but it’s lost none of its polish nor that wide-eyed excitement and desire to explore you experience every time you load up a new level.

I think most of my time this week has been spent playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I was a bit ill late last week, so I had quite a vegetative weekend sat in front of my TV not doing much else. I want to do a big, proper review once I get it finished but it’s fair to say that it is an excellent game. It takes the improvements AC2 made over AC1, refines them yet further and then just gives you more. More, more, more. Within a few hours of play, your world map is chock-full of stuff to do, it’s amazing. It might also surprise you to know that I’ve been playing a lot of the newly added multiplayer mode and it is also fantastic. If you’ve got AC: Brotherhood and have only stuck to the singleplayer thus far (I know a lot of people were quite sniffy when Ubisoft announced there would be a multiplayer mode), I urge you to try it. It’s unlike any multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Once you understand the mechanics and get into the game flow, it really is very addictive!

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a regular fixture in my 360’s disc tray so regardless of what else I play, I’ll nearly always sneak on for a few games most evenings with my Xbox Live chums. Vietnam is a fantastic add-on which manages to feel quite different to vanilla BFBC2 but be just as good. The main problem is getting a decent game of Rush. In the event we get all the EGers on one side, we’re normally so effective with our communication and tactics that if we absolutely hammer the opposing team whilst, for example, attacking, we hardly ever get to play the defence as everyone will have quit. Very frustrating!

I picked up Carcassonne on XBLA in the Christmas deals and gave that a few goes against the AI the other day. It seems fun, not as good as Settlers of Catan of course, but it does benefit from not having cards, therefore local multiplayer is possible. I’ve got a bit of a board game thing going on at the moment (I’m waiting for my copy of Civilization: The Board Game to arrive at the moment), so Carcassonne is a nice addition to the arsenal.