Flae

A Fae Illusionist with a dark heart, but a good soul.

Gears of War

Well I completed GoW co-op with my brother, on Hardcore. And blow me, I loved every single minute of it. After laying down the main man at the end, I wanted more. I've heard people saying its nothing special, but playing it through even on the single player campaign (which I did initially on Casual mode) I thought it was exciting stuff. Well put together. The action is sweet. Heightened on co-op mode. And the multiplayer mode takes frantic close combat to another level. One which promotes active teamplay, covering each others back, helping downed team players back up again. Games like Battlefield 2 and COD2/3 to some extent allow players to glory in the solo play, medics get little time to perform support duties. Your team mates are usually respawned and off to get a bigger gun(tm) before any of the subtleties of team play can kick in. GoW is down to wire and dirty. But with the help of another you can make it work. The cover mechanism can be a bit fiddly at first, but after a few levels, you get confident with it, and it does become second nature. The concept of the perfect reload, adds to the game immensley. Now even emptying a few rounds to reload and hit the sweet spot in the heat of a firefight becomes all the more important. The finishing moves, whether chainblade or kerb kick are well executed and crucial in some of the multiplayer modes. Put em down and keep em down. The Kryll light and dark concept is fantastic, fancy that, an insta-death mechanic that works to enhance the game and tension and doesn't really soak it in frustration! The beserkers, oh the beserkers...

I have to say I bought into the Halo franchise big style, and it was what tipped me over the edge into the Xbox world. I can safely say, GoW is my next Halo, and I've already bought into their world now. Bring on GoW2 and 3! This game makes you bat shit crazy! Onto Insane co-op now.

Fastcrawl

http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/

I was impressed with this beauty, I had to buy a copy. It's great for a quick play, and although it doesn't actually allow you to specify the characters in the party, it rolls up a random bunch and a random dungeon romp, usually with a quest of killing some boss, somewhere deep in the dungeon. You can customise the length of adventure, so a short one has about 3 levels in the dungeon and takes about 20-30 minutes. You can also customise the difficulty which may affect the time your romp takes. Although its a simplification of party based fantasy combat, it really works with just the right amount of complexity to keep it interesting. It's very good for explaining party mechanics to enthusiastic children. Position affects Melee/Ranged combat, there are cold and heat resistances, additional damage, duel wielding, and even a barebones skill tree to climb, each level you go down in the dungeon. Obviously this doesn't make much of a difference in a 3 level dungeon, but it can start to examplify character skill specialisation in deeper dungeons, where your two clerics are differentiating into a spell based damager and a party healer. The loot that drops is sufficiently tweaked with pros and cons to make judgement calls on its use become a key part to winning battles. Plus theres a resource management game in that you use supplies to take each move as well as a quota of supplies to rest fully and heal and mana up. There are out of combat potions that can be used (no in-combat ones, sadly), as well as scrolls of various kinds, including resurrection which becomes important if you havent got a cleric, or haven't specced him with the resurrection skill yet. Although there is no in-combat resurrection.

I guess the fun of the game comes from having to deal with whatever party makeup you are given at the start of the game, and then customising them, and playing them out in the combat well enough to win the game. It probably won't be a viscious challenge for your average RPG'er, but I've heard the road ahead is tough if you stick it on insane mode. Future enhancements planned are having storied dungeon quests, perhaps a dungeon editor for submitted content, and the ability to generate your own characters. All of which will make this pleasant quickie crawler much more sophisticate, but won't take away its 'quickie' charm. Although there is no save game as such, if you do have to quit out of a game, the state is saved until you continue next time. Theres no library of saves to go back to, but there is an ability to continue with your current foray.

I like these abstract concoctions where quite complicated gameplay can be made accessible and addictive. More like this please..

Sabian Mortis

An evil Teir'Dal Necromancer.

Call of Duty 3

I finished COD3 single player campaign last night. And I must say I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There have been one or two bugs that give me a dry slap (sticking in scenery mainly), not to mention its hung the 360 about 5 times in the whole run through. So I was very careful to save the last checkpoint. Overall though, I'd rate it better than COD2 in terms of throwing you into a combat situation. The set pieces were sometimes a little cheesey - the unarmed combat didn't really play heavy in the game at all, apart from the scripted encounters. I liked the mortar, artillery and flak cannon stuff. The tank pieces were well done, not as exhiliarating as the COD2 desert romp, but taking a Sherman through normandy town streets and having to battle in close quarters was groovey. The guns seemed much better overall, more realistic, better feel to their handling. The rifles especially had me excited, accurate, but slow bolt loading. Smoke was essential in this campaign, or at least I thought it was. My brother claims he never uses it. But its saved my bacon a few times, whiting out MG's and tanks line of sight. The characters were much more believable than before- still a little stereotyped - but you found yourself getting quite attached to some of them. Looks great. I'd love to see it play on a HD setup. Multiplayer does the Battlefield style thing really well, although I'm not totally familiar with all the modes yet. Thumbs up from Bowesy. Now we can look forward to MOH:Airborne and Brothers in Arms 3.