Week of 3/21/09 espion4ge’s Gaming Thoughts

The UNSC campaign in Halo Wars was quite enjoyable – but where is the Covenant one?

Halo Wars – Spent this week taking the time to crank through the campaign on Legendary and grabbed all the skulls and black boxes too. While the game is definitely more simple than I’m used to for a traditional RPG, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. The main issue I have is that there’s no Covenant campaign. I don’t know what that’s attributed to but it seems to be the trend nowadays since the new Starcraft II will also only have the Terran campaign. I’m going to be diving into the multiplayer soon, and without any experience with Covenant my predisposition is definitely more towards the UNSC. But, maybe a few scrimmage games playing as the Covenant will change that.

Resident Evil 5 – Also plowing through the game this week now that it’s become my main single player game with Halo Wars beaten. I’m on the last leg of the game now, and while it’s introducing a few new things, the game still feels poorly paced. I don’t want to go into spoilers with regards to enemy types, but again, let’s just say I was disappointed when I have to fight half a dozen of them at a time when in games past it was really only 1 or 2. The game is just all out action now rather than adventure, and while that clicks a bit for me as a hardcore gamer, it still bothers a little bit of my Resident Evil fanboism. I could talk more about it, but I’d rather not spoil anything!

Street Fighter IV – My beatdown continues. This week I played online and dropped to 800 BP before fiercely fighting my way back up to 1000 BP and calling it a day. Competition is still quite fierce – probably because everyone else is improving but me. Nowadays I seem to be seeing a lot more Blanka players, and Chun Li players too. My friend Jason is coming over this weekend, so hopefully I can talk to him about strategy and maybe learn something more to see if I can get myself at least back up to 1500 BP.

Guitar Hero World Tour – After getting the Rock Band 2 Wireless Drumset last week, I ended up ordering Guitar Hero World Tour from Newegg since they were selling it for $35.99. Thought it was cheap enough to get a few new songs to try out with my new drumkit. While I’ve spent a little bit of time with it before and came away unimpressed, part of me is starting to get a little bit bored of the Rock Band 2 Tour mode since I feel like I keep playing the same Rock Band 2 songs over and over! It’ll be nice to finally jam to something new like Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, for example. The other thing that also had me deciding to purchase it is Stan Bush’s “The Touch” from the Transformers Movie is going to be free DLC for GHWT. Now if only GHWT or Rock Band had “Dare” and Karate Kid’s “You’re the Best Around” I’d be all set.