I finished no less than three games this weekend. Red Faction: Guerrilla, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Fallout 3 all rolled their credits across my TV before the Monday morning dawn. Coincidentally all three of these games came out around the same time in late 2008, but I bought them at different times, and then finished them within days. Friday night I spent about 6 hours playing Red Faction’s multiplayer with Will and JT. They live in Hawaii now, and being 6 hours behind me actually works out well. Once they went to bed I dug in for end of the campaign. Red Faction was a great game and the last mission was particularly satisfying. You square off against a whole army of baddies, but it’s OK because you get to drive a big ass tank.
The Force Unleashed was a disappointing game only because it was hyped so much. I got it for Christmas and I’ve spent less than 10 hours with it in the intervening 7 months. It’s not that it wasn’t a fun game, it was, it just wasn’t as good as it could have been. I might play through it again on a harder difficulty or mine for achievements… or I might forget about it entirely. I had heard that there were two endings and going into the last stage I fully intended to get the “evil” ending but when the moment of truth came it was unclear what I was supposed to do and I ended up with the “good” ending simply because I walked in the wrong direction.
I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for almost a year now. I had played through to the very end with one character, Ilsa, who I played as a good-guy (or good-gal). I only had one side quest and the last main quest left when I stopped and started a new game with a character named Norman. The side quest was “Strictly Business” where you are tasked with enslaving four denizens of the waste. I had a very clear idea of who Ilsa was at that point and while she’s an opportunistic bitch she’s not a slaver. Slavery is not her bag, baby. Norman is a different animal. He’s a sociopath at best and a homicidal maniac at worst. He had no problem enslaving those people and shooting his way out of Rivet City in the process. I started Norman’s game out with the Operation Anchorage DLC, which I wrote about in a previous post. Anchorage is a very easy campaign made for low level characters and playing it first completely changes the main game. I basically started with a level 8 character, power armor, and advanced weapons. My goal for Norman - his entire purpose really - is completely different from Ilsa. While Ilsa was created to play the game, Norman was created explicitly for evil. I needed him to get the bad karma achievements that Ilsa never could. His story arc has nothing to do with finding his lost father or combating the Enclave. His story is about getting to level 30 as fast as he can, as brutally as he can. As you can imagine this makes for a very different gameplay experience. I don’t usually spend this much time with a game this dynamic, investing myself in multiple playthroughs. I can’t think of another game where I’ve played it twice and played two different games. My hat’s off to Bethesda on this one. All that’s left now is the Broken Steel expansion, and perhaps Mothership Zeta.
Will has been cajoling me to get Borderlands for a while now. He and JT have already played through it but he promised me that he would play it again if I jumped on board. I grabbed the game Sunday morning and we spent a couple hours with it. I’m liking it so far. The description “FPS Diablo” was thrown around a lot before it came out. I can’t argue with that. Level grind + loot orgy + guns, that’s Borderlands. Will is out of town all week and I’ve got to work all weekend so the earliest we’ll be able to play it again it next week, probably next weekend. I think it was this kind of agonizing waiting that made me reluctant to get the game. I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t like it, I was worried that I would like it too much.
I guess in the meantime there’s Midnight Club LA…
