Game Log #3

I purchased a 1600 point XBLA card with the intent of buying Tetris Splash. After a few sessions alone with it as well as a couple multiplayer matches against my mom (an avid Tetris player herself), I can say that it is indeed a Tetris game. And Tetris is hard to fuck up. There's not much to say other than that. The music is pretty damn nice, that's a plus. Of course, the game only being 800 points, I had 800 left over. What did I buy?

- Streets of Rage 2 was probably the most successful of my XBLA purchases on Saturday. I was a pretty obsessed player of the original back in the Genesis days, but somehow I never got around to the sequal until just now. It's interesting to see a beat em up with distinct characters who are different gameplay-wise, which never happened enough back in the day, and true to the first one, I pretty much stuck to playing Blayze the whole time. She has a hadoken in this game. Beat that, Axel.

- And then shit took a complete turn for the shitty shit shit when I bought Doom. To say this version of Doom fails ay everything you could possibly want it for would be a severe understatement. To be fair, the emulation itself is just fine in the sense that the game looks about as good as Doom normally looks. But that's where it falls apart. The first nettle that alone pushed me over the edge was the complete nonsense local multiplayer. Multiplayer was pretty much the reason I bought Doom, especially local multiplayer, as it's not like you can really do that anywhere else. The screen for playing locally is just completely bizarre, and that's what kills it. The best way to describe it was if you had two very small TV's side by side so that you can see both, but they don't take up even half of your field of vision. Now imagine what you're seeing, except inside the TV screen itself.

Words do not exist to describe how frustrating playing any game like this is. And then the online multiplayer is complete butt due to Microsoft's amazing XBLA online. And then you have shit like the controls in this game. Imagine if you took the controls for any 360 shooter (Halo for example) and eliminated the right sticks ability to move vertically. I guess it make sense being that Doom never had mouselook until ZDL and Legacy and such hacked it into the game, but this control scheme just comes off as bizarre and disorienting. And so, I ragequit the game, only to find that any time I try to exit the game through the game itself, it freezes up. This is a complete fuckup, and the fact that Microsoft found it acceptable to put this shit out is amazing.

So aside from my XBLA experiences, I also had an experience with the demo for Operation Darkness. I really didn't spend enough time to be conclusive on it, but I got the vibe that I get from just about any SRPG I play: there's probably a hell of a lot of depth to be had, but I'll have to spend a hell of a lot of time with it to grasp it.