How I felt after a Gears 2 Horde Run or ODST Firefight game

I enjoyed playing Gears of War 2.  I really did.  Right up until the point that I completed a full Horde run.  A few friends and I got together one Saturday afternoon and went through the full Horde run.  It took us about eight hours to complete.  After that, I don’t think many of us have even loaded the game up again.  It seriously ruined the fun factor of the game.  Every time I think of playing Gears of War 2 now I think of that one single marathon gaming session and how I felt afterward.

Last fall Bungie Studios released Halo 3: ODST.  The game was thrown together fairly quickly by a small development team.  As such, they decided not to implement a full multiplayer matchmaking system like they did with predecessor games Halo 2 and Halo 3.  They did, however, include a new multiplayer mode called Firefight.  Essentially, it was a copy of Gears of War 2′s Horde, in that a team of gamers faced off against wave after wave of increasingly stronger enemies in an attempt to gain a higher score.  Once again, I got together with some friends one day and we played through the Firefight mode.  Although not quite the marathon length of Horde mode, it still took us over two hours to get through.  Just as with Gears of War 2, I never really have enjoyed ODST the same since.

What is it about these marathon endurance modes that ruins the gaming experience for me and probably many others?  I think it has to do with the challenge difficulty.  The whole point of these modes is to see how far you can go, how far you can push yourself.  In order to do that though, you have to set aside the fun part of the gaming experience and turn it into something most of us are trying to avoid by playing video games – work.  In order to succeed you really do need to view it as work.  It takes planning, leadership, and a team effort to succeed.  You can’t screw around and just goof off.  You have to take it seriously, otherwise what’s the point of even doing it?

Just today I sat down and played the latest DLC content from Gear Box Software for Borderlands.  Some friends and I managed to get through the first three arena challenges.  These are five rounds of five waves each, facing stronger and stronger enemies each wave.  It took us probably five hours to complete those three challenges.  After beating those three, we find out there are three additional larger challenges.  We went into the first of those challenges just to see what ‘larger‘ meant.  They are twenty rounds of five waves each.   Twenty!

I’m not sure how long before I attempt those later challenges in Borderlands.  Right now I really enjoy playing the game.  I guess I should learn from past experience and just know that once I sit down and force myself to play through them (which I know the perfectionist inside me will eventually make me do) that I will probably not feel like playing the game anymore after that.  Then again, maybe if I actually do it before Gearbox Software releases their next DLC, maybe that DLC content will make the game fun again.  Either way, I still wish developers would move away from these marathon gaming modes and find newer, better ways to make gamers want to play their games for hours on end.  One that doesn’t require gamers to play it hours on end just to actually play it.

May 3, 2010

• GAME OF THE YEAR
  UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves (Sony Computer Entertainment / Naughty Dog)
• STUDIO OF THE YEAR
  Rocksteady Studios
• BEST SHOOTER
  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision Publishing / Infinity Ward)
• BEST RPG
  Dragon Age: Origins (Electronic Arts / BioWare)
• BEST FIGHTING GAME
  Street Fighter IV (Capcom / Capcom/Dimps)
• BEST INDIVIDUAL SPORTS GAME
  UFC 2009 Undisputed (THQ / Yuke’s Media Creations)
• BEST HANDHELD GAME
  Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (Rockstar Games / Rockstar Leeds)
• BEST GRAPHICS
  UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves (Sony Computer Entertainment / Naughty Dog)
• BEST MUSIC GAME
  The Beatles: Rock Band (MTV Games / Harmonix)
• BEST DRIVING GAME
  Forza Motorsport 3 (Microsoft Game Studios / Turn 10)
• BEST ACTION ADVENTURE GAME
  Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft / Ubisoft Montreal)
• BEST TEAM SPORTS GAME
  NHL 10 (Electronic Arts / EA Canada)
• BEST SOUNDTRACK
  DJ Hero (Activision Publishing / FreeStyleGames)
• BEST XBOX 360 GAME
  Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve)
• BEST Wii GAME
  New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Nintendo)
• BEST PS3 GAME
  UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves (Sony Computer Entertainment / Naughty Dog)
• BEST PC GAME
  Dragon Age: Origins (Electronic Arts / BioWare)
• BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
  Halo 3: ODST (Microsoft Game Studios / Bungie)
• BEST MULTI-PLAYER GAME
  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision Publishing / Infinity Ward)
• BEST GAME BASED ON A MOVIE OR TV SHOW
  South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! (Microsoft / DoubleSix)
• BEST CAST
  X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition (Activision Publishing / Raven Software)
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A HUMAN MALE
  Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition (Activision Publishing)
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A HUMAN FEMALE
  Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen / Activision Publishing)
• BEST VOICE
  Jack Black as Eddie Riggs (Brutal Legend / Electronic Arts)
• BEST DOWNLOADABLE GAME
  Shadow Complex (Microsoft Game Studios / Chair Entertainment)
• BEST COMEDY GAME
  Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (D3Publisher / Vicious Cycle)
• BEST DLC
  Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (Rockstar Games / Rockstar North)
• BEST INDEPENDENT GAME FUELED BY DEW
  Flower (ThatGameCompany)
• MOST ANTICIPATED GAME
  God of War III (Sony Computer Entertainment / SCE Studios Santa Monica)

To me, the video game awards are starting to become more and more like the Oscars are for the film industry–where the awards rarely reflect actual fan preferences and work on a flawed voting system.  With the Oscars the problem is that too few people select the winners.   With the video game awards, it’s the opposite problem–too many.  The voting is done through internet website voting, which as many geek knows is far from impervious to manipulation and spam voting.   When something wins an internet vote, all that tells me is they had the most people spamming votes and/or hacking the website to get extra votes counted.

Some of the awards I agree with, while many others I was surprised won (ex. Left 4 Dead 2, a virtual expansion pack).   I kind of felt this was going to be an off year for the awards show ever since I saw the nominations.  I still can’t believe they didn’t have Halo 3:ODST nominated for the Best Cast or Nathan Fillion nominated for the Best Performance by a Human Male.

My personal preference for what games should have won would have been these:

• Game of the Year: Dragon Age: Origins – Not a ton of pre-release advertising for this game, but because it’s made by BioWare, I went out and bought it.  Wow, this game is awesome.
• Studio of the Year: Gearbox Software – Brought us Borderlands, probably the most innovative RPG-Shooter game ever.  Not only that, but in the short time this game has been out, they’ve released one DLC package and have announced a second one.  How many other game studios take care of their customers like that?
• Best Xbox 360 Game: Borderlands – Great blend of the shooter and role playing genres.  Witty dialogue coupled with fun shooting gameplay.
• Best Shooter: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Probably the most anticipated video game ever.  This will be where I’ll spend most of my multiplayer gaming time at.
• Best RPG: Dragon Age: Origins – see above
• Best Action/Adventure Game: Brütal Legend – Great adventure game that brings the heavy metal music to a new medium – video games.  It’s got Jack Black in it too.
• Best Cast – Halo 3: ODST – A game that has Nathan Fillion (Serenity/Firefly, Castle), Adam Baldwin (Serenity/Firefly, Chuck), Alan Tudyk (Serenity/Firefly, V) and Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica, Burn Notice)?  Yes please.

Congratulations to Marty O’Donnell for winning the Best Original Score for Halo 3: ODST.  That game had some awesome music.  I’d recommend the soundtrack to anyone, even non-video game players.

ODST is a game that was made because of opportunity, not necessarily planning. A few years ago Microsoft and Bungie were looking at putting out a Halo based project. They even got movie director and producer Peter Jackson in on it. As the planning progressed, Bungie sent different creative personnel down to work with Jackson’s team in New Zealand. Eventually, however, the plans for the project were scrapped. Bungie now had a great team of people who had been involved since the first Halo game and they had nothing to work on. Development on the next game was already underway so they decided to do something that surprised a lot of people (but shouldn’t have. After all, they are a game studio…). They decided to make another video game. The team came up with a great storyline and plot for the game. Making use of the existing Halo 3 game engine they were able to kick out a stellar game in just about a year’s time. Most new video games take three to four years to make.

In ODST, as I mentioned, you play as the rookie on a squad of veteran soldiers. The war with the Covenant, an alliance of alien races, has been going on for years. The game takes place soon after the events in Halo 2 started, with the Covenant having just discovered Earth and in the process of controlling the African mega city, New Mombasa. The game starts you off on one of the UNSC (United Nations Space Command) carriers in orbit, preparing to attack one of the Covenant carriers below. Prior to starting your mission, your squad gets new orders from ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) that you aren’t made privy to just yet. In the middle of your orbital drop you divert course away from the Covenant ship. As you do so, the Covenant ship jumps into slip space creating a massive electromagnetic pulse and explosion in the atmosphere, sending your squad ballistic.

You wake up six hours after the orbital drop in a dark corner of occupied New Mombasa. You’re separated from and out of contact with your squad mates. As you move around the city you need to use stealth as much as possible to avoid Covenant forces. As an ODST you don’t have the armor or weaponry you may have been used to as the Master Chief in the other Halo games. Your character doesn’t have auto regenerating shields like the Spartan soldiers and has to rely on cunning and stratagem to get by the sentries posted around the city. Soon after starting, you make contact with Virgil, the city’s artificial intelligence, who is able to upload to your suit’s internal navigation maps of the city and locations of enemy forces. This information is vital if you are going to survive, find out what happened during the six hours you were unconscious in your drop pod, and regroup with your squad mates. And after you do all that, you still have to figure out what your mission was and find a way to complete it.

Probably the biggest breath of fresh air Bungie gave to the franchise with this game was with the voice acting. This game features a whole new cast of characters and Bungie didn’t short change us on the actors they got to play the parts. Voicing your ODST squad Sergeant Eddie Buck is Nathan Fillion. Most of you may know him from playing Captain Malcolm Reynolds in the cult sci-fi series Firefly and the ensuing movie Serenity, or even from his latest television show Castle. Bungie must have been Firefly fans because they also got Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk, both Firefly veterans, to play Cpl. Taylor Miles aka ‘Dutch’ and PFC Michael Crespo aka ‘Mickey’ respectively. Topping it off is everyone’s favorite Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, Tricia Helfer, who plays the ONI officer codenamed ‘DARE’.

In addition to the campaign of ODST is a special multiplayer co-op mode called Firefight. If you’ve played Gears of War 2 or Left 4 Dead, this is similar to the Horde mode or Survivor mode in those games, respectively. The basic premise is that your team faces off against wave after wave of enemy reinforcements, battling for a higher place on the leaderboards. The Firefight play is divided into Sets, Rounds, and Waves. There are five waves in a round, three rounds in a set. After a set is completed (all enemies killed) you earn a bonus round. In the bonus round you can earn extra lives for your team if you get above a certain score. At the start of each new round you get bonus lives added to your total, which are shared by your whole team, and at the start of each new set you get ammo refills. If your team is able to play through the fourth set on Heroic difficulty, you will earn the Vidmaster: Endure achievement, one step on the ‘Road to Recon’.

What is the ‘Road to Recon’ you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. In Halo 3 you unlocked different armor and helmet combinations you could use in multiplayer matches to give your character your own distinctive look. One armor set that was withheld and not unlockable was the ‘Recon’ armor. This became one of the most coveted armor sets in the game, only able to be used when some generous soul at Bungie decided to bestow it upon you, and they only did so on the rarest of occasions. Because of the demand and probably because they are tired of gamers whining about ‘I can has Recon?’, Bungie built into ODST a series of achievements gamers can get that will unlock the Recon armor for them. Three achievements of the Road to Recon are in Halo 3, three in ODST and one that requires both games to get.

Along with the ODST game itself, you get a Halo 3 multiplayer disc that includes all of the Halo 3 content for multiplayer as well as 3 additional maps (Heretic, Longshore and Citadel). Two of these are new creations while Heretic is almost an exact replication of the very popular Halo 2 map ‘Midship’. The downside for many gamers is that most rental stores, including online renter Gamefly, don’t rent this multiplayer disc with ODST. This is kind of a shame considering it is required to get the Vidmaster: Brainpan achievement which is a vital part of the ‘Road to Recon’.

Overall though, ODST is a great game with an excellent sound track to boot. It’s a refreshing change to the status quo of the Halo franchise with enough change to feel different yet similar enough to still feel like you’re playing Halo. ODST also gives gamers the chance to help defend earth while Master Chief is off fighting Covenant on the other side of the galaxy.

Cross Posted at CodeMonkeyFoobar.com

“Gunnery Sergeant Eddie Buck has witnessed more war than any Marine should. He fought alongside Cole at Harvest—somehow managed to make it off of Reach alive. The fact that Buck is still on his feet says more about his mettle than his military dossier ever could. Now the Covenant have found Earth. Devastated her defenses. Anyone who could have stopped the invasion is dead or gone. But Buck and his squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers aren’t going to let Earth fall without a fight. These ODSTs may be headed feet first into hell, but they’re going to make damn sure it’s crowded with Covenant when they get there.”

Apparently there was a glitch with the Xbox Live system and the cause of the problem has yet to be determined.  If they are able to restore their database from a backup (really, you’d think they’d have backups) then all will be resolved and gamers will have only lost a few days of stats while they were down.  If the stats are completely lost, they are likely to lose a few gamers.  I know that after Bungie wiped out my Halo 2 (and Halo 3) stats a few times I just gave up on the game.  I understand the reasoning they claimed, but there has to be a better way than just globally wiping everything.