1.) Rock Band 2 – I am always playing Rock Band 2, even when I’m not physically playing it. If I’m in the car, I’m either singing songs that I’ve purchased already, hoping to match my pitch up just right, or I’m listening to songs with an ear to whether or not they’d make good tracks for the game. At this point in the game I’ve completed the tour, as well as all of various tour challenges and am working on singing 25 challenges on Expert. I’m less then half way there with 10 under my belt, so I don’t think that achievement is going to pop any time soon, but it’s always fun to belt out a few songs every now and then. I should go back to drumming, especially since I bought cymbals for my drum kit, but honestly, those drums scare me. I’m such a bad drummer I keep thinking that I’m going to hurt myself. Lord knows I’m hurting the song.

2.) Gears of War 2 – I recently picked this one back up to help a co-worker get his co-op achievements. I was pretty disappointed in how this game ended up. Oh sure it’s pretty, and the co-op is nice, but all of the intensity that the original brought to the table has been removed. Once I’m done on the co-op side, there are some new multiplayer achievements I need to get. Some require maps that I won’t be buying, so Ye Olde Completion Percentage is just going to have to take a hit on that one.

3.) Left 4 Dead – By far, this game is taking up most of my time right now. Every Friday night I get together with three other guys and we tackle a campaign on Expert as we work towards the “What Are You Trying to Prove” achievement. Expert sucks, but so far we’re 75% done. Only Blood Harvest stands between us and victory, but Blood Harvest is a cruel, cruel mistress. I’m hoping that we can be done with it tonight so that I can mop up the remaining achievements and put this one to bed, but if last week was any indication, that ain’t happening.

So, that’s it, not a lot of games there. My handhelds have been dark for some time now as I await the glory and splendor that is Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I’m sure I could find something to play on them, but I do have a review copy of Inkheart in the mail to me, and Galactrix drops at the end of the month, so why bother? February also brings Deadly Creatures for the Wii and the new 50 Cent game for the 360, both for review purposes. Killer spiders and pissed off rappers. Should make for an interesting month.

At this point of time, I think it’s safe to say that I’m done with Gears of War 2.

I’ve fought through the campaign multiple times, finished all 50 levels of Horde mode and ground out every achievement that I can reasonably expect myself to get.  I have no desire to play the game’s multiplayer mode, and if I did, the busted matchmaking would prevent it any way. The only achievement I have left to consider is “Seriously 2.0” with its 100,000 kills, and while I can do it, I probably won’t.  I would love those additional 50 points, but I just can’t justify the time needed to do it.

Now that I’m finished and have had time to reflect a little, I’m somewhat disappointed in the game.  The original Gears of War was one of my favorite games and, at the time, the only game I restarted to play on the highest difficulty level. The co-op was great, the combat was greatand even though the story was pretty slim, when it wasn’t nonexistant, it didn’t matter.  The gameplay made up for it.

Strangely, rather than build on the intensity of the first one, Epic chose to instead throw a lot more variety in to the sequel, and as a result you end up with a very unfocused game.  There are combat sections, platforming sections, parts where you ride on a weapons platform, parts where you drive a tank, parts where you ride Locust beasties.  See what I’m saying?  Sure, there was more of a story, and the new parts helped clear up things from the first time, while at the same time make the overall plot even murkier, but there were so many other new things as well, that the entire experience isn’t as focused as the first one.

If the original Gears of War could be described with one word, it would be “intensity”.  The game simply did not let you breathe, unless you physically stood still.  Clearing out an area and then moving on to the next area, which wasn’t that far along your linear path, would then bring on a new selection of things to kill.  The action never let up, and, when you were behind cover, fighting for your life, your enemies would not let you sit there, contentedly lining up shots.  They were brutally relentless, rushing you in a heartbeat, getting behind you and eviscerating you.  You had to be on your toes constantly and when playing on Insane, having a good partner was essential.

Not so for Gears of War 2.  For one, there are long, and I mean long, sections of walking around with nothing to fight.  An entire chapter takes place in an area where aside from some small critters that are easily dispatched with melee attacks, there’s nothing to fight.  There are environmental hazards to avoid, but it’s fairly easy to do so.  When you did fight the Locust, they stayed put.  Rarely, if ever, are you rushed, with the exception of the Mauler Boomers, who only have a melee weapon, and the Flame Grenadiers with their flamethrowers.  All of the other enemies would just stay behind cover and light you up.  Or, if they did try to rush you, the size of the battlefield was so large, that it would have taken them forever to get to you.  I am the world’s worst video game sniper and I got to be pretty damn good with the Longshot (the game’s sniper rifle) because of the copious opportunities for long range kills.  These two changes, made for a considerably less intense experience.

That’s not to say that GoW2 didn’t have intense fights, because it did, but the intensity of those fights came from the game throwing more enemies or larger enemies at you rather than having more aggressive enemies.  I think that part of this is from the design of the enemies themselves.  The Grinders, basically a Boomer with a chain gun, can light you up from across the map, so he doesn’t need to get close.  The Reavers, a flying beastie, and the Brumaks, a huge, lizard like creature, also pack some pretty heavy armament, so they don’t need to be up close to do damage.  One note about those last two.  At different parts of the game, you and your team ride both the Reavers and the Brumaks, and the end result, for me, was to make me feel guilty about having killed both such creatures earlier in the game.  In the first game, you killed Reavers, but hey, they’re Locust and Locust are bad, so no sweat.  Riding them in this game, made me feel like I had spent a lot of aggression on a very ugly horse, and horses aren’t inherently evil.  They just do what their riders tell them to do.

Getting back to the firefights, when these large beasts show up, you know that you have to kill them, because they pack a real punch, but you also feel like as long as you stay behind cover, you’ll be ok, because they won’t ever rush you. The only real threat from rushing were the Bloodmounts, mini-Brumaks that had no problem getting up on you and tearing you a new one.  The fights with the Bloodmounts were intense, but those were few and far between.  Now, yes, tickers and wretches would come after you, but tickers could be picked off and exploded from a distance and wretches were easily taken out with one melee hit, even on Insane.

Even the boss battles lacked punch.  The boss battles in Gears where you fought Berserkes, the females of the Locust race, also strangely absent from the sequel, were pretty intense fights.  You couldn’t shoot them, well you could, it just didn’t do anything, so you had to lure them to a spot where you could use a satellite laser on them. Luring them places meant pissing them off until they charged at you and you dove out of the way, causing them to bust open a door.  The final confrontation with General Raam required you to whup his ass quickly, or get tore up for your troubles.  In the sequel, one fight is against a giant fish and involved a lot of waiting around, one is against the new baddie Skorge, and involves a lot of you running away from his various ranged attacks while waiting to get in a chainsaw duel and break his weapon, and the third was against a giant mutated Brumak, while safely protected from within a helicoptor.  None were intense, and the fight with Skorge wasn’t even a fight.  You can’t hurt him, so you run away until you break his stuff enough and then he runs away.

Where the intensity of the game comes out is in Horde mode, which is, I think, why fans of the first game were so enamored with it.  In Horde mode, enemies will rush you and you have to be quick and efficient about taking them down. You have to prioritize targets and communicate with your team or you’ll get slaughtered.  As much as I liked the intensity though, once you’ve gone from level 1 to 50 in one sitting, you’re pretty much done with Horde mode.  At least I was.

That’s not to say that Gears of War 2 is a bad game.   It’s a good to very good game.  It certainly looks pretty and runs well and the co-op is as enjoyable as ever.  They even made the achievements easier to get, which the whore in me greatly appreciates.  While there’s more to Gears of War 2, it’s not more of the right things from Gears of War, and that’s the problem.  I wanted more intensity and I got more running. I wanted more brutal fights and I got more vehicles.  I can only hope that for the third one, Epic goes back to what made the first one so great, that two minute loop of crazed intensity, repeated over and over until the inevitable, nail biting conclusion.  A coherent story would be nice too, but I’m not so naive as to expect the impossible.  After all, they make games, they’re not miracle workers.

But I digress.

Rather than get into everything that’s been bugging me of late, I’ll just touch on the high points. After all, I don’t want to give everyone the impression that all I do is complain. I mean, all I do is complain, but we should probably build up to that.

I just finished one of my many runs through Conan on the 360, all for the glory of achievements no less, and while I really enjoyed the combos and the super visceral thrill of taking a dude’s head off with a shield, the boss battles in this game were just abysmal. Conan, as we all know, is a barbarian. It’s like, in his title. Conan is known for his lightning speed, blazing fast reflexes and unmatched savagery in battle. What he is not known for is flitting around the melee range of a boss and goading the boss into attacking so that Conan can chuck an axe at it. Yet, this is pretty much exactly what I had to do for more than one boss battle in this game. It’s not that I’m bad at Conan. I got pretty dang good at popping off combos and such. It’s that all of the bosses had various ublockable attacks that would completely destroy you should you get caught under them. In fact, just for fun, I took on a boss Conan style, namely wading in and beating this fool down with the bladed weapon du jour. I got two, maybe three hits in before I was rent asunder. No one rends Conan asunder, or puts him in the corner for that matter. You never saw Kratos throwing vases at Ares, or using harsh language against Zeus. No, he got in there, flung his blades all about and made with the choppy choppy .We know that if there’s no Conan, there’s no Kratos, Kratos being the emo version of Conan after all. Hear me oh game designers! Be true to your character throughout the entire game, lest you lose your audience.

I’m also playing Dungeon Siege for the PSP and while it’s a competent dungeon romp, and quite a lot of mindless fun, whoever designed the Town Portal spell needs a good thrashing. Everyone knows what a Town Portal spell is. If you’re deep in some dungeon or haunted forest and you’ve run out of inventory slots, you simply cast a Town Portal spell and you’re back in town. You can sell your crap, buy some new crap and generally get all of your affairs in order. Once you’re finished, you go back through the portal and you’re right back where you started. In Dungeon Siege, they got everything right except for the part where you go back through the portal. In this game, you don’t go back to where you started, you go to the beginning of the level, complete with a full monster respawn. Niiiice. So not only do you have to trek all the way back to where you left, but you have to fight your way there and you’ll probably gather enough crap so that you need another trip back through town

Finally, I’m playing Too Human, a game so rife with bad game design choices that it could be used to teach a class on what not to do in a game. The one that seems to be bugging me the most is that I’m spending as much time walking through some huge hallway as I do fighting. It’s bad enough that every battle is pretty much identical to the last one, but making me trek a mile and a half to get to the next identical battle makes it seem even worse. This isn’t even counting Cyberspace which is the Too Human version of the Poconos, complete with long walks in verdant meadows all so that you can open a door that goes absolutely nowhere. I’m sure that Silicon Knights has some really great level designers and environmental artists, but if your game is supposed to be about goblin mashing, perhaps asking the player to spend minutes at a time undertaking a leisurely stroll isn’t the best of ideas.

Now that I’ve voiced my displeasure, I guess this is where I storm out. Which way is out? This way? No. Oh, got it. All righty then. This is me storming.