Year in consumables: 2007 games

Crackdown boxTime to finish this series off for 2007. The first two parts were music and movies. Also, I just read my 2006 games post and damned if I wasn’t entertained by it. Maybe you should read it (again?)… for added incentive, I make fun of Mookie a little bit.

Speaking of which, I heard via Ed that his 360 finally red-ringed him. (Did we have a pool somewhere about this?) Well, I’m actually sorry to hear that. I thought it was going to beat the odds, but it might have finally succumbed after being subjected to the indignity of the Bee Movie game. I mean, a 360 that thinks it is owned by a man can only take so much girl/kidz games over the course of a lifetime, right?

(I kid ya Mook, you knows I luvs ya!) 😉

Back on track, the good news of the year was Ed got back into the 360 fold and we did a lot of good co-op gaming together. As I referenced in last year’s post, we did play Gears of War together, twice, so that was fun. Insane was… insane, but utlimately beatable. Anyway, that game doesn’t count for this list.

The bad news of the year was my 360 red-ringed me having just broken the 10k Gamerscore boundary. That put me out of commission for a couple months, but I came back strong and finished the year tearing thru games to close the year above 14k. That said, I haven’t picked up a controller for more than a month. In fact, my 360’s blog reports “OB1’s xbox has been ignored for 42 days and refuses to blog until the drive spins again.” It currently “Hates” me.

Too much setup. List is coming. I think.

I didn’t do any full post reviews for any games this past year. I guess that is much like my dealings with movies and music (not that any of you listen to it). It was because I was way lazy last year, but not so this year. This year I will do some reviews. Anyway, I’ll link to stuff where I mentioned the games, but without further ado, here’s my complete list of played games for 2007:

  • Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
  • Rainbox Six Vegas
  • Crackdown
  • Marvel Ultimate Alliance
  • LEGO Star Wars II
  • BioShock
  • Halo 3
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
  • Mass Effect

I played a lot of Xbox Live Arcade games too, but those are considered a separate thing and dealt with at the end of the post. (Additionally, I started LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Series but did not complete it, so that can wait for the 2008 list.)

Well, that’s only nine games total. I guess not bad given the cost of each, etc., but do I just pick five or do them all? I barely “reviewed” those linked too. Cracka got decent coverage in many posts, but the H3 one was just about the beta experience in multiplayer… dang. Okay, I’ll rank ’em all, but the accompanying text will be kept short in the interest of your time (and mine).

  1. Crackdown: Yeah, I can’t believe it either. If you told me at the start of the year this would be tops on my list with Halo3 and Mass Effect dropping, I’d ROTFL. (Yeah, that’s old skool web speak.) Game was fun as he11 and the first one I ever completed 100% in achievements.
  2. Halo 3: I had been meaning to do a full write-up on this one, but never did. At this point, I don’t see a point, but you never know. Suffice it to say, it rocked it hardcore and it barely missed on numero uno. When the second map pack drops, I’m revving it back up. Maybe that will be when I write more, but for now, the single-player (and co-op) gaming was righteous. The multi-player wasn’t as annoying as H2, that’s for sure, but still not always my bag. I hope this isn’t for reals the last Master Chief based Halo game.
  3. Mass Effect: I forget how many play-thru’s I am on now. I’m taking a break, but I’ll get back to it. There’s achievable achievements on the board. Getting real close to feeling like you are playing a movie. Characters were pretty well fleshed out, but could have been better. Game is looooong, but that’s good for me. Might as well get a lot of play out of a game like this. New downloadable add-on is supposedly only 90 minutes though. I’m gonna grab it, but that’s a little disappointing. We’ll see how it turns out. Definitely like the start of this franchise (how can it not be?) and Bioware rocks on.
  4. Call of Duty 4: This was, without a doubt, the best of the CoD series. No doubt… and I didn’t even play CoD3 yet (maybe won’t either). This was the first to take place in modern times, hence the Modern Warfare subtitle and it exceeded my expectations. Of course, playing it the first time thru on the hardest setting exceeded my patience on many occasions (like Rainbow Six Vegas) and I’m lucky I didn’t trash a window or my HDTV with a flying 360 controller. Serves me right for being an achievement monger — not a whore since this was tough and very much earned — and a lesson to not do it again. Anyway, if you told me this was a Clancy game, I would agree, but it is not. In fact, it might have been better in a lot of respects. It was certainly higher on this list than the Clancy games I did play this year. The “Mile High Club” achievement still eludes me… and this… angers me. I want my 1K!
  5. BioShock: Very cool game that could have been #4 but for a coin toss. Excellent story and concept. Loved the mix of weapons and abilities to make your way thru the game. Would love to play a sequel, but don’t seem to recall the story lending itself well for it, right? No… I think maybe it did. Probably ties with Mass Effect for best story of the year.
  6. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2: Took the things that were bad about the first one and made them better along with some added improvements. In fact, this game was probably what the first one should have been had they not maybe rushed it to be closer to the 360 launch date. The thing I liked was they didn’t waste time making a huge evolutionary jump with this one over the first, they did it small and quick. I have no problem buying a sequel that is much like the predecessor as long as the make improvements. It means a new game in hand faster than the years it seems to take now. Charge me $40-50 and call it a glorified expansion pack, I don’t care! Thought it was great and wished GRAW3 dropped next month.
  7. Rainbox Six Vegas: Possibly the best in the Rainbow Six series. I’ve enjoyed this series almost as much as the Ghost Recon series. I wish the control layout for this game was the same as GRAW. That goes across all RS games. Anyway, this one uses cover like Gears of War did, but I liked its implementation a lot better. Vegas 2 drops this week. I’m guessing this is going to be like what they did with GRAW2, which, again, is awesome. That said, I don’t understand why this one is in Vegas again. Can’t we go somewhere else? Is Vegas a mecca for terrorists? (That question isn’t meant to imply anything. No pun intended???) I just don’t remember if the story was left open-ended. It didn’t feel like it was. Oh, and this game was like CoD4 in that it was wicked annoying on the hardest setting. This had more to do with how crappy they are about giving you checkpoints at good spots. This has been a traditional failure in many Clancy games though…
  8. LEGO Star Wars II: Well, I feel like I am playing thru this again with The Complete Series, because… I am! But, it was a good game on its own and fun! Yup, humble pie here for beating on Joe about it in the past, but I loves me some Star Wars and LEGO, so how could I not love this? You were right Joe, you were right…
  9. Marvel Ultimate Alliance: Other than the fact Mookie was surpisingly bad at this, I don’t remember much except for tossing guy’s off cliffs and platforms was fun. Ed and I picked this one up to play with Mook on-line. We might have gotten a few nights total before he was out, but that also may have been because I was a jerk to him. Anyway, not as good as the X-Men games, but still okay I guess… just… it becomes so tedious after a while, kinda like this post. Wonder if they’ll ever figure out how to make that not so… and me too, about my posts…

I also played a crapload of Xbox Live Arcade games during the dead spots for new games. I didn’t count these in my regular list, and I don’t want to rank them all either, so I numbered the five best at the end of the list:

  • Pac-Man
  • Ms. Pac-Man
  • Dig Dug
  • Galaga
  • Time Pilot
  • Paperboy
  • DOOM
  • Sonic The Hedgehog
  • Assault Heroes
  • Alien Hominid HD (1)
  • Pac-Man Championship Edition (2)
  • Cloning Clyde (3)
  • Prince of Persia (4)
  • Aegis Wing (5)

What do your lists look like?