Last night we stopped down at Dan and Dawn’s to see their new kid, Aidan. He’s tiny. Berta and Abby seem ok with the prospect of having a little kid around, so that’s good.
While I was there, I helped install that Xenium into Dan’s XBox. I feel bad that I didn’t have the power jumper for the new hard drive, and that I couldn’t get a dashboard installed. None of my disks would boot. I’ll have to try burning an EvolutionX dashboard disk again and testing it at home.
When we got back home, Abby and Berta went to bed (sort of) and I checked out my GameFly arrivals. I received X-Men Legends and Burnout 3.
X-Men Legends was somewhat unremarkable. Maybe I haven’t played through it far enough, though. Sometimes I think that game developers think they can lousy games get by the public by trusting in some emotional connection they have to the characters prior to the game. Meaning, if I was a big X-Men fan, I would buy and love this game no matter how poor it was. See also: Alias.
Anyhow, Burnout 3 is a great game. It’s fundmentally a racing game, and normally I don’t like racing games. But it has that extra something - like Crazy Taxi - that makes it a little special.
The extra something in this case is mega-destruction. Not only can you drive recklessly and bash up your car in a graphically relistic manner, but it’s a requirement of the game. There are actually stages where you can only continue if you exceed a certain dollar amount in total inflicted damage. I repeated a stage several times trying to crash into and blow up the gas tanker, for instance.
Apart from the explosions, the car steering handles like I would want a driving game to handle. It’s not ultra-realistic like the GT series of games, or Midnight Club, or Need for Speed. Those games I don’t like. In this one, when I point the car in a direction, it generally goes that way. You can still drift, which is great - it’s just so much easier and controlled than the “realistic” games. I suppose that I’ll hear opposition from people saying that my preferred control handling makes the game too easy, but why should the developer make the game harder to control to increase the difficulty? Who wants “realism” in their video games, anyway?
So yeah, that was a lot of fun. Definitely a keeper.
Also, while we were at Dan’s we played Mortal Kombat: Deception. That’s a pretty nice looking game. It’s probably a lot easier to play with a fighting stick. My two minor initial complaints are: The control seems a tad delayed, probably only because I’m not used to MK’s timing. The special moves are hard to learn without a cheat sheet, but that’s always been a hallmark of the Mortal Kombat franchise.
The puzzle fighting mode is kind of neat. Play Tetris to force fatalities.
