Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Games
If you’ve played X-Men: legends, either the first or the second one, you have played Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The mechanics are basically the same, you just play with different characters from all over the Marvel universe. The story is pretty good, though comic-book-ish (well, what did you expect?), and there are some cool side-missions you can do that give you back-story on each of the characters.
The RPG elements are there, but it’s clear that this is aimed at players that are not hardcore about their RPGs. By default all of your leveling is done automatically, and I mean automatically. It chooses everything for you. You can opt out of this on a character by character basis, which seems annoying if you want to do it for every character, but in reality you settle on a half-dozen or so that you want to be OCD about and let the rest upgrade automatically.
Like X-Men Legends, the combat gets a bit old about halfway through the game. It’s pretty much just button-mashing and using special abilities every once in awhile. There’s some God of War-style cinematic moves every once in awhile, where you have to press buttons as they flash on screen in order to complete objectives, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward.
I finished it just because I like comic books, easy games, and the story was interesting enough. Plus, there are some awesome rendered cut scenes. Specifically, there’s one with Nightcrawler that is incredible. Worth playing if you enjoyed X-Men Legends at all. If you didn’t get into X-Men Legends, it’s probably not interesting to you.
Tags: xbox360
Lego Star Wars
Posted by | Filed under Games
I really enjoyed this game. It was pretty easy – I beat all three episodes in about 9 or 10 hours, but it was fun. It pretty faithful to the Star Wars storyline, and the Lego motif was well used. For example, there were lots of places where you would have to build a piece of equipment, a vehicle, or grappling hook pad, etc, from a pile of Lego pieces. Pretty cool.
The puzzles were pretty easy, but still enjoyable. There weren’t too many places where I was annoyed by the platform mechanics. There were still some times where I died unnecessarily because the camera angle was a bit off and I couldn’t tell exactly where my character was going to land. But it was all pretty forgivable.
Playing through the game in Story mode was really only the beginning, though, since you can then play every episode through in Free Play mode, which allows you to access a bunch of secret areas and collect items. I only managed to unlock 60% of the game before I got bored, but if you’re really into finding and collecting items, then this one is definitely worth a rental.
Tags: xbox360
XBox 360 R0×0rs
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Games
Yes, I have entered the ranks of the 1337 gamers. I finally gave into the urge and paid $75 premium to get an XBox 360 off of eBay. Yeah, I could have waited even longer, but frankly, I was sick of the constant monitoring of the unt1tled XBox tracker, the random phone calls to friends to see if they could pick me up one in their area, etc. Anyway, the unit arrived Saturday morning, so I immediately plugged it in and wasted an entire day playing with it. :-)
So what do I think of it? Well, in a word, it is awesome. It outputs beautifully on my 480p HDTV (alas, I don’t think my TV supports 720p – time to buy a 73") in glorious widescreen deliciousness, and it was brain-dead easy to get logged on to XBox Live. Once there, I downloaded a bunch of Arcade game demos, including the utterly fantastic Geometry Wars, which I bought for 400 Microsoft Points ($5) within 20 minutes of playing. There is so much awesomeness in this sexy little machine that it is tough to write it all down. But there are a couple of areas that really stand out, so I thought I’d write a little about them.
Achievements
The concept is so simple – set mini goals within games and award players points when they achieve these goals. Then centralize everything on a website so players can compare their results to all players globally, or just amongst their friends. This is what the XBox team has done with Achievements. An example of an achievement in Geometry Wars is the Pacifism Achievement, which is awarded for playing the first 60 seconds of the game without shooting (pretty tough when you first start out). Another is awarded when you earn 100,000 points, and still another when you make it all the way to 100,000 points without dying once. You get the idea. Because achievements are super-public – you can go visit my profile on xbox.com and see all the achievements I’ve attained for a certain game – it adds a huge competitive edge to the games. For example, because I can compare my achievements with my friends, I am more apt to keep playing so that I can keep my edge over other players. It also adds extra incentive to purchase full versions of games, since you can’t earn achievements in demos.
Demos
And speaking of demos – the online nature of XBox Live allows publishers to put up downloadable game demos in the XBox Live Marketplace. So if you have the hard drive, you can download demos of games such as Condemned, Fight Night, Full Auto, etc. before you buy them. It’s great – but unfortunately the demos are very large (nearly 600 MB for the Condemned demo), and there is no way to a) queue up multiple downloads and b) download in the background. This actually really sucks – it means that while you’re downloading a demo, or any other type of content, you can’t do anything else on your 360. The only silver lining is that downloads are resumable, so if you get bored downloading something and want to get in another round of Geometry Wars, you can cancel it and resume it later. You’d think with 3 cores on the CPU, they could spawn a background thread to handle downloads in the background, but whatever. Its still freakin’ cool.
Media Center
The original XBox had a Media Center extender that you could use with your Media Center 2005 PC (I’m ignoring the hacks you could use to get XBMC or Linux on there). Unfortunately, there were two core faults – it required a disc to be inserted into the XBox, and it was pretty low quality because all the graphic processing had to be done on the Media Center PC and then transmitted through the network. Plus the XBox couldn’t be turned on and of remotely (the 360 does this beautifully). In short, I bought it and did not like it at all. The 360 changes that. It runs the media center app natively, and connects up to your Media Center just to start streaming the video/music/pictures. I think all the graphics processing is done on the 360 itself, so it just looks better and is more responsive. Plus, it uses the same remote as a typical media center remote, so you can move your large, loud Media Center PC (which is what you wind up with when you build your own on a budget as I did) into some dark corner of your apartment and use the 360 as your sole media center. Trust me – words cannot describe how freakin’ awesome this is.
Well, there’s a ton more to say about this stunning piece of hardware/software engineering, but I am already suffering Geometry Wars withdrawal, so I’d better get back to it. I have achievements to earn, after all. :-) Look me up if you’re on XBox Live – my Gamertag is Diametrix.
Tags: xbox360
This is the online journal of 
Hello, visitor from the Internet. You may have arrived here expecting to see a site built on top of SharePoint, and are no doubt confused by the fact that tylerbutler.com is running on WordPress. 
You can subscribe to this site in a variety of different ways. The best and simplest way is via RSS. There are three main RSS feeds: