Halo 3: My Triumphant Return to Gaming

College effectively killed my time for actual productive gaming, so I was forced to fall back onto straightforward and easy-to-save-and-quit shooters. Namely, Halo 3. Like most every other person on an American college campus, I was at least familiar with the Halo franchise prior to borrowing the game from a friend's roommate. I'd of course played Halo in the past, but I have never been anything close to any game's MVP, campaign OR multiplayer. But hey, what better way to kill time between classes than to improve what could become a valuable life skill? So, after working my way through the Normal and Heroic difficulties of Halo 3, I finally decided that I was ready for Legendary. After a relatively long time, I finally improved enough to be able to get through each level of the campaign with relative ease, and before I knew it I was watching the secret ending after the credits rolled. Ironically enough, not long after this accomplishment I got a call from a friend seeing if I wanted to come over for a Halo LAN party. It was this call that prompted me to think about whether or not I was actually prepared for facing off against actual human opponents.
Now in shooters, certainly not unique to Halo, there is more often than not a marked difference between playing through the campaign and playing with and against other people. Campaigns, be they solo or two player, tend to be you and whatever meager allies accompany you against a veritable horde of enemies (albeit not always all at once). Games involving human teams and opponents just require a slightly different skill set. Campaigns need players to be able to fulfill one objective after another while shooting at mobs that are shooting back at you, and while they can be numerous, these mobs and their abilities tend to be very scripted and relatively simple to out think and maneuver. Games against human opponents can be more or less the same, but the key difference is that you are up against opponents that are not scripted and, odds are, have out thought and out maneuvered the exact same enemies that you have.
While being great at one doesn't necessarily guarantee being great at the other, skill in one area does make it easier to adjust and adapt to the other. I suppose I'm banking on the hope that facing off against an opponent in a first person shooter is more or less the same as facing off against an opponent in a real time strategy game in that it all comes down to being able to read your opponent and reacting accordingly. I guess we'll see!

Devil May Cry -Lots of Headway-

So last I wrote about my sojourn into Devil May Cry I was standing victorious over a gigantic lava tarantula/scorpion named Phantom. As much as I had accomplished though, I was really only 4 missions into the game! Now though, I have made HUGE progress. I am now up to mission 12! In that time I sent that same monster tarantula/scorpion through a castle's sunroof and watched it die with its legs crinkled above it in typical dead spider-fashion. I fought a demonic black knight too. TWICE. The first time it was kind of a draw, but the second time I totally schooled him! My main challenge lately has taken the form of vicious little reptilian devils that are incredibly agile and quick to attack. Their speed wouldn't even be that big of a deal, but they hit decently hard too.
In fact, pretty much everything hits hard in this game. The best way to survive is to just not get hit or pray that there is a health orb somewhere nearby that you can limp off to after a fight.
As a character, Dante is pretty cocky and cool. However, despite the fact that he is quite the bad-ass, this has no bearing on whether or not the player is capable of survival. The farther I get into this game, the more brutally it illustrates the act that one's skill as a gamer is what counts here, not how tricked out your character is.

Destroy All Humans -Pretty Straightforward-

So the latest game I've stuck inside my old but reliable playstation 2 is Destroy All Humans.
Now, I am only about 3 out of who knows how many levels into the game, but so far the title seems slightly misleading. The player takes control of 'Cryptosporidium,' a pretty eccentric and aggressive Furon warrior who is basically clearing the way for a full-scale Furon invasion of Earth. However, while his race's intentions towards ours is hardly friendly, they haven't really implied that they actually intend to wipe out the human race.
In fact, the entire reason that the Furons have come on their warpath to our "pitiful insignificant planet" is because they as a race are in a genetic decline due to excessive cloning and they need the fresh primal brain stems of humans in order to stabilize future clones and significantly lower the chances of unpredictable genetic abnormalities forming.
However, I would hardly call this game a potential epic series. In a serious sense anyway. Why? Well, the main character keeps up a constant Jack Nicholson impression for starters. The game also takes place during the height of the Red Scare, and the humans are portrayed quite ridiculously (albeit not really falsely). So far, the game is a sarcastic yet not very bright alien anally probing and zap-o-matic-ing silly stupid 50s minded humans. Now, I'm not saying this makes the game bad, it just removes any chance of me as a gamer taking it seriously. Which is quite all right, I'm only saying.
We'll see how this storyline develops as I get farther into the game, but for now events are still unfolding. I'll likely post more on this later, but for now the game is still enjoyable.

Phil > Giant Lava Scorpion/Tarantula

Yup, I beat the bastard! Devil May Cry, I have beaten your first boss! I sent it running away down a molten hole of its own making.
...Although that leads me to believe that I may in fact have to fight it again, seeing as how it kind of got away...
But no matter! I still win! Devil hunter triumphs over devil once again!
One thing that this game is teaching me though is that recent games have really influenced how I approach new things as a gamer. This one is really forcing me to relearn the virtues of patience and persistence.
So, in the end, even if I end up murdering my roommate out of frustration with this game, I will hopefully have picked up some amount of tolerance in regards to unforgiving games.

Crysis

Well, I haven't actually played this game recently, but for some reason it popped into my head.
I don't really go out of my way to keep up with new releases and whatnot, I missed the Crysis bandwagon by about 2 years. Still, after discovering it on my roommate's computer I decided to give it a go.
The game starts out pretty much like any other serious first person shooter based more or less in reality. You are Nomad, part of an incredibly elite ridiculously awesome team of United States commandos sent to some island vaguely in the vicinity of Japan to rescue archaeologists being held hostage by Korean aggressors. Standard stuff right?
Sure, but there's a twist. Well, two twists actually, but the first twist is there right from the get go; your super awesome team of commandos is outfitted with super advanced nanosuits that pretty much grant them superhuman abilities.
Now, with super strength, super speed, invisibility, and super, uh, bulletproofness, one might think that the outcome of this game is a foregone conclusion. The main characters are superheroes, this will be easy, right? Haha...wrong. While these, for lack of a better term, super soldiers are vastly superior to most any single enemy they will encounter, the nanosuits are still relatively new technology in the game and while they provide a huge advantage for your character, they can't make you do super-duper things indefinitely. In fact, you can't do every single super thing at once anyway. You have to constantly assess your situation and adjust your suit's settings accordingly. Need to infiltrate a Korean installation undetected? Better turn that cloak on. Get caught in the installation? Better turn maximum armor on. Outnumbered and outgunned? Switch on maximum speed and make your getaway! Trapped in a burning room on an aircraft carrier with the door caved in? Might wanna bulk up with maximum strength and knock the door off it's hinges.
The concept of protagonists with advantages over their enemies is hardly a new things in video games, or any other medium for that matter, but Crysis manages to do exactly this while at the same time incorporating a unique system of real-time suit mode changing that is both convenient and fun to experience.
Oh, right, and the second twist? It's aliens. There are aliens on the island. They've been asleep for a few millenia. Apparently. They woke up because the Koreans decide that they want a new power source to finally become important in the world, consequences be damned. Naturally, this being a game with a storyline and all, the shit hits the fan all hell breaks loose.
Now, not a ton is resolved by the end of the game. This is because this is apparently the first of an intended trilogy. Actually, another version of this game is out, although it isn't necessarily a sequel as it happens in exactly the same setting only from the point of view of one of Nomad's teammates. Nonetheless, this game certainly delivered and the series has awesome potential. Hopefully sequels are released and this incredibly enjoyable game does not fade into obscurity.

Devil May Cry -First Boss-

All right, so I started playing Devil May Cry. Why? Well, my dad always used to play this game, and it is one of the 'golden oldies' as far as playstation 2 games go, so it only seemed right that I give the game its dues.
So, I stick the CD into the console, let the game start up and do its thing, and soon enough I've started a new game as the cool and cocksure devil hunter Dante, who apparently can make devils cry. I won't go to far into actual game play at the moment, but suffice to say that that while a not especially awkward game, one can tell that this is the period during which camera angles were at times disgruntling.
The first two missions go by with relative ease. Cutting through demons, shooting at whatever moves, witnessing the occasional "extreme gore" filled scene, but nothing really life-threatening to Dante. What I am getting from the game at this point is that Dante is a total bad-ass that can't be touched.
Along comes mission 3...
Dante just got past some 'trial' in order to retrieve some kind of artifact and right as he grabs the artifact, CRASH! Enter the giant molten lava scorpion/tarantula that decides to burst through the ceiling. After some banter (yes, the giant lava scorpion/tarantula can talk, albeit unintelligibly, yet somehow the designers expected us to understand it) I'm thinking how cool it'll be to take this bastard down. Two minutes later I've suffered a horrifying molten death. All right, that's fine. First boss on a game I've never played before. It's cool, I'll just try again. Three tries later and the best I can do is chip away a little more of the beast's vitality before I meet another fiery demise.
I ended up turning off the system out of rage. I'll likely try again in a few minutes, but I would just like to say for the record that the first boss ('Phantom?' come on guys, you name the giant lava scorpion/tarantula 'Phantom?') is ridiculous as far as first bosses go.

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves

Well, for the first time in roughly 3 years I picked up this game and played it. I am pleased to say that despite this I managed to get through the game without feeling thoroughly annoyed with either myself or the game itself.
As one can imply from the title, this is the third (and presumably last) installment of the Sly Cooper line of games in which the characters are all some form of anthropomorphic animal. Having a relatively full in-game 'history' if you will, this third chapter was able to incorporate a rather grandiose element into its storyline.
The player takes on the role of Sly Cooper, a raccoon, and his gang of thieves, contributing to the title of the game itself. As presented and further solidified in the previous two games, Sly is the latest of the 'Cooper Clan,' a family of master thieves. However, throughout the series it is continually reaffirmed that the Cooper Clan manages to take the moral high ground. Not a family of Robin Hoods as they tended to keep what they stole, but a family of 'good guys' if you will. All of the family's thieving techniques and skills are recorded in an incredibly old book called the 'Thievius Raccoonus.' This book is a referenced constantly throughout the series.
Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves begins with Sly telling the player how he and his gang had made there way to Kane Island, an island apparently belonging to the Cooper Clan and the home of the fabled Cooper Vault, the vault which apparently housed the amassed wealth of the entire Cooper Clan. This island however is occupied by the shady "Dr. M.," a mad scientist obsessed with gaining entry to the vault. As such, the island is now a fortress and practically impervious to entry. The greater part of this game is effectively a flashback in which the player is recruiting 'the best of the best' among thieves in order to form an incredibly talented team of specialists in order to infiltrate this island and gain entry to the Cooper Vault.
The "grandiose" aspect of this storyline is the fact that the Cooper Vault is the accumulation of Sly's family's "work" for the past couple thousand years. This effectively makes the entirety of the Vault Sly's legacy, and from the beginning Sly considers this his last huge job.
The game makes use of extremely exaggerated "comic book graphics" if you will, an element that further contributes to the novelty of controlling an anthropomorphic raccoon who steals things. As with the previous games, Sly is constantly tailed by his foil and love interest, Carmelita Fox. While she displays no such feelings towards him, Sly constantly goes out of his way to let her know that he cares, much to her chagrin.
Game-play, while by no means seamless, flowed very well and besides the occasional finicky camera angle or, "What the hell? I did too press the circle button!", I felt that navigation throughout the game world was quite enjoyable and efficient. Another aspect of game-play that I feel is important to recognize is that while this is a game that relies on stealth and avoidance of enemies, the game does not completely shaft you if you happen to be noticed. Dare I say it, the mechanics of this game actually made being stealthy enjoyable.
All in all, the combination of game-play, storyline, and elements as simple as having the core members of the group fulfill basic niches such as the thief, the brains, and the brawn, make this a very enjoyable game that manages to simultaneously be lighthearted and quirky and foreboding and ominous.