What Might Have Been

Spoiler Warning! ArrOOga, arrOOga! Spoiler Warning!

The body of this post discusses major plot points from Gears of War 3, in particular a characters fate toward the end of the game. Don't read the rest unless you have finished the game. You have been warned.

Previous posts in this series:
The Coalitions Finest
User, Why?
Brothers To At Least Act Three 

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Hidden Blade To The Cooling Fan

I got a half day from work yesterday, so I was home early to relax and enjoy Assassins Creed: Revelations. Except my brother was also online, so we raced through Acts 3, 4 and 5 of Gears of War 3 in just short of three hours on Casual to get him his four-player co-op Achievement. It was insanely good fun, very frantic and a totally different experience from the cautious approach of Hardcore and beyond.

But once we had it wrapped up I had the evening free to enjoy the final chapter in Ezio Auditore da Firenze's life as a master assassin.

I eagerly jumped into it, having only played a short few minutes before bed the night before, and was completely engrossed in the world in moments.

I was ripped savagely out of it again when my Xbox 360 decided that it was feeling a bit hot under the collar and shut itself down, displaying a red semi-circle around the power button.

I've had the dreaded Red Ring Of Death before, and it's not fun. But my Xbox was running fine since I got it repaired, up until recently. I got this over-heating shutdown once about two weeks ago, but moved the powerbrick, cleaned the vents, did anything I could think of to help, and all seemed fine.

Today, it red-semi-circled on me three times.

Hoping that it is just a heating issue, we've moved it onto the main dinner table, next to a window we can leave open. There is a cool, early winter breeze blowing across the machine now, and I managed to get through a fair chunk of the game without any more failures.

Out house does get very warm. We have, at times, a laptop, a PC, an Xbox and the heating, which we can't adjust for our individual apartment because it's a whole building thingy, and then on top of all that we have cooking just adding to the rising heat. I find it stifling. Claire complains if I open a window. It's a definite impasse at times.

For now, the Xbox is going to live on the table. We'll have to see how long that lasts. Should it die, I'm going to either grab a second hand one on the cheap, or hold out for the matte black S model due next month and treat myself to a shiny (not gloss shiny, though) new Xbox 360.

Hopefully I won't have to choose. I really like my Xbox, and the thought of having to sort out data transfer and region coding just frustrates and confuses me.

Brothers To At Least Act Three

In my first post, in what has become a series related to the Gears of War franchise, I mentioned that my first experience of the games was through Horde Mode in Gears 2, and that I had ignored the story for some time even after I purchased it thinking I'd hate it. On the surface, it looked like everything I disliked about testosterone fueled war games turned up to eleven.

Turns out I was wrong, and right, in that order.

Make no mistake, the universe of Gears of War is a truly nightmarish place overpopulated with males who sport enormous muscles and necks that resemble tree-trunks, a thriving steroid manufacturing and distribution industry, and tech level beyond our own, while simultaneously never spotting the vast race of cave dwelling monsters that lived below their feet until they burst to the surface. There is so much wrong with the world of Sera that I find it hard to understand how it got past the design process.

I was right in thinking that I'd dislike that kind of game, I was just wrong in thinking that I already disliked the Gears series because of it.

You see for some reason, in this case, it works. It still has all those things I dislike about war games, but by turning them up to eleven, Epic managed to make them entertaining, poking fun at the absurdity of the tropes on display. It's an over-the-top universe of action and adventure, epic battles and heartbreaking personal moments. It has, in my opinion, some great incidental dialogue that characters shout in the heat of battle, fantastic characterizations, and an awesome array of enemies. 

I ended up playing both the first and second games through with friends, both through the couch-sharing, split-screen mode and the Xbox Live full-screen version. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever played any Gears of War story by myself, and I've finished the first game at least three times, and the second game more than that!

Through Horde Mode, my wonderful wife joined me on the world of Sera, at first watching me play through the story, enjoying the story together, before playing the game herself. She never got around to finishing her own run through, but she put in hours of combat training killing Locust in Horde. 

On the release of Gears 3, I knew I wanted to experience the story together with Claire this time. We sat down and played through the entire campaign together over several nights. Our first run-though was even on Hardcore! The campaign allows for 4-player co-op, so we had two bots running and gunning along with us. In practice, this meant that they raced forward, took a tonne of fire, one went down, the other picked his fallen friend up, rinse, repeat, and Claire and I sat back picking everything off at a safe distance.

With our run-though complete, Claire and I joined Bob and Jp on Arcade Mode and played through it a second time in quick succession.

All in all, I can't say that I didn't enjoy the game. There were some spectacular scenes, loads of genuinely funny moments, fantastic dialogue, nice nods to the earlier games and some great easter eggs scattered throughout. The story moved along at a good pace, and while it clocked in at easily the longest in the series, it never once felt like that. The ending almost came too soon.

Playing it on Insane in the Arcade four-player co-op was tough. Instantly dieing instead of the usual safety net of Down But Not Out was at first frustrating, but once you adjusted to it, it simply made some scenes even more tense and nerve wracking. Adding Mutators, fun game changers such as infinite ammo, or bonus weapon damage, certainly made things more enjoyable, shifting the tone of combat from a defensive stance spending the majority of time behind cover regaining health, to a more proactive offensive ideology. There were still a number of really, really difficult-to-finish areas, but the ones we were dreading the most often proved to be the quickest to complete!

I have to say, I was well proud of our little band of heroes when we nailed the final boss without too much trouble. I want to say that we didn't even wipe out once, but I think we may have had to restart once or twice early on. But it was far less painful that certain earlier levels (I'm looking at you, Formers!). In the end, it was some awesome teamwork, combined with a sprint around the tower a few times while the three dead teammates rejoined the fight, that won the day!

Visually, the game is beautiful. The environments have a massive amount of variety, from battling in dark tunnels to stunning, sun drenched walkways. Even the darker sections of the game are brighter than most apocalyptic games, filled with torches, dynamic lighting effects and clever tricks to avoid having to play through an area with my screen brightness maxed out. The character models are crisp and incredibly detailed, with everything moving realistically, whether it's the faces as they talk and react or the solid plates on the armour.

It's also refreshing to see a game with several strong female characters, and even more refreshing to see them wearing much the same amour as the guys, instead of skimpy chainmail bikinis or a body armour that inexplicably leaves the midrift exposed! The girls are just as bad-ass as the guys here, and everything they do, say and wear reinforces that they are not just onscreen to look pretty and kiss the men on the way to battle, but could easily hold their own in any fight. The only thing I'm upset we never get to see is an all female chapter, where the girls have to defend or attack a key location while the boys are busy elsewhere. Admittedly, the main game only has three named female COG characters, so maybe I can suggest that idea for future DLC!

Story-wise, I was bitterly disappointed in some of the major choices made, especially towards the end. I'm not going to go into it here, as I'm going to leave my thoughts and ideas on that subject for another post, but suffice it to say, I still think Gears of War 2 is the stronger story, or at least the stronger resolution.

Gears of War 3 feels like the appropriate ending in the story for control of an entire planet. Unfortunately, it just seems to push itself over the thin line between "epic action adventure" into the field of "ridiculous nonsense" as it gets towards the end. There were several times I found myself close to screaming "WHY?!?" at the Xbox, and at least once when I did. Despite this, I enjoyed it then and still enjoy it now. I've played it through once on Hardcore and once on Insane in four-player co-op, yet I still enjoy joining friends games and playing through a few chapters when I have the time. There are some amazing climax moments, none better than the start of Act 3 where you have to defend a fort against a tidal wave of seemingly unending enemies. The dialogue and character interactions are funny and enjoyable, and once again the Baird/Cole buddy team-up steals the show for me.

A flawed but enjoyable masterpiece, the story of Gears 3 was enough for me to enjoy playing at least twice. While it won't keep me coming back like Horde mode does, it wasn't something I felt I could put off playing, as I had done in Gears 2. In fact, more than anything, playing the Gears 3 campaign has made me want to go back and play the story in Gears 2 again, and relive how an emotional moment in a game is done properly.

Previous posts in this series:
The Coalitions Finest
User, Why?
Still to come:
How I would have written things if I was in control (But with a much snappier title)

User, Why?

If the internal workings of a computer are anything like in Reboot, my Xbox is developing a lasting hatred of me right now.

Gears of War 3 has a plethora of unlockables that you earn for completing set tasks, such as being awarded X number of one particular ribbon, getting X number of kills with a weapon, or playing X number of matches in each multiplayer game mode.

It's this last one that has caused me to start leaving my Xbox turned on for hours while I did other things. In order to unlock a particular character skin you need to play 300 matches of each of the six modes in competitive multiplayer. As I have no interest in actually doing any such thing, I have taken to setting up the game to play match after match after match against bots while my chosen character simply stands there and dies, hopefully as quickly as possible so that I can get through another match. This has been a slow process, but as I'm not actually playing, it doesn't effect me, apart from destroying my Win/Loss Ratio.

However, there is one game mode where this system has an unfortunate outcome for someone else. Wingman is all about teamwork. There are four teams of two, and the objective is to be the last man or team standing while scoring ten kills before another team does. Because of this, I have a fully active bot teammate with me during my attempt to clock up those 300 matches.

A fully active bot teammate who hates me.

Most of the time I'm not even paying attention to the screen while it runs through the matches. However, now and then, I do catch a glimpse of what's going on. Let me give you just two examples from the 300 matches that he helped me through.

In one game our team spawned in a nice open area with lots of nearby cover. My teammate, whom I lovingly nicknamed Private Bottington The 3rd, took cover at a nearby low wall, and watched as I was taken down by some dastardly villain. Bottington raced over, providing covering fire, picked me up and dashed back into cover. No sooner had he done so when I was dropped again. Like the true hero that he is, Bottington came to my rescue once again, and once again made it safely back into cover. From the safety behind the wall he turned to look at me. He silently implored me to move, to run, to hide behind something, anything. He watched in dismay as the bullets ripped through my armour one last time, dropping me, ragdoll-like to the ground. This time, there was no reviving me. In a fit of rage, Bottington went on to hunt down and execute my assailant, his teammate and two other bots, single-handedly scoring the highest point total that round.

Just a short few matches later, Bottington and I spawned in a nice, sunny area. Bottington ran about looking for the other teams, but always stayed relatively close by. A firefight broke out around me, and Bottington valiantly attempted to defend me. He raced across in front of me and had just left my field of vision when I saw his indicator change to the Down By Not Out circle. A moment later Bottington crawled back in from right of screen, a trail of blood smearing the dusty ground behind him. He dragged himself over to my feet, pleading to be picked up. I stood there, my only movements the involuntary flinches caused by stray bullet impacts. Bottington begged for help. I did not give it. An enemy rolled into view behind my teammate and stomped his head into the ground, before turning on me and blowing me into several gooey little pieces.

Long after I get my unlock, long after I have given up grinding out match after match for something that means so little, I will remember Bottington and his heroic actions.

And every time I play on a match where the opposing team has one bot to fill out their numbers, and that bot hunts me down and kills me, a little tear will well up in the corner of my eye, and I'll think to myself "Well played, Bottington, well played..."

The Coalitions Finest

Gears of War 3 has taken up residence in my Xbox almost exclusively since it's launch in September. Apart from hacking and slashing my way through the dungeons of Torchlight and rocking out to the Coldplay pack for Rock Band 3, I've been investing an extraordinary amount of time in the third game in Epic Games' console flagship series.

My first experience of Gears of War was via the second installment. Aidan and Rob had bought the steroid abusing sci-fi action shooter and invited me to try out this new game mode called Horde.

From Wave one, I was hooked. Team based co-operative multiplayer with no competitive element! Wave after wave of inhuman enemies in steadily increasing numbers and difficulty, this was pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights.

My love of Horde was so great in fact that I pointedly ignored what I thought was surely a terrible, machismo, testosterone filled, steroidal, brain dead campaign. By the time I did get around to playing it, I knew how to defeat every enemy it threw at me, apart from the bosses. This somewhat robbed me of experiencing the terror of the bullet absorbing Sires, as I already knew to simply walk around the area with my chainsaw permanently revved up!

Going into Gears 3, I promised myself that I'd get the campaign finished before trying out Horde 2.0 or the new mode, Beast. Once the surprises of the story were out of the way, I was eager to jump into my favourite gameplay mode in it's newest incarnation.

Horde has seen a vast and sweeping overhaul since it's appearance in the second game. Now you earn cash for kills, and can buy fortifications, ammo boxes or weapons across the map space. Way back when this was first announced I was a little apprehensive that they had messed with a good thing. Horde was great because it was so clean. Just you and up to four friends versus 50 waves of Locust creatures looking to decorate their fireplaces with your skulls. Nothing else.

But the new additions not only work, they work spectacularly. Earlier I called Horde Mode "pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights". Horde 2.0 adds heart pounding building, repairing and upgrading of all too often meager defenses to help you survive the rising flood of enemies. The fortifications further encourage team-work, as people co-ordinate to maximise the work done in the short time they have between Waves. Players can even share cash with each other if they wish to, although while I have seen this used occasionally in private games with friends, I have yet to witness it during a random match-up over Xbox Live.

One of the best additions to Horde 2.0 however has to be the Wave 10 Bosses. Horde is still played as 50 Waves broken into five 10 Wave sets. In the first version, this meant that the number and difficulty of the enemies per Wave steadily increased up to Wave 10, where we were terrified of Bloodmounts, before resetting to the enemies of Wave 1 again for Wave 11, but making them tougher. Horde 2.0 makes that 10th Wave even more fun by giving it a random Boss, from a choice of about seven or eight. The bosses are usually bigger and badder than anything else in the mode, and standard tactics for almost every one of them is to take out all the regular enemies while avoiding the Boss characters until they are the only things left, and then combatting them. Standard tactics usually result in death. Non-standard tactics however, focusing fire on the Boss characters first and then the little guys, just results in additional iterations of the Boss character appearing. If there is anything worse than dealing with a Burmak, it's seeing its twin brother step out from the smoke of the exploding first one.

Horde kept me playing Gears of War 2 much longer than I have played any other shooter to date. Through it I made some great friends over Xbox Live, and enjoyed many frantic and hilarious moments of both victory and defeat. Horde 2.0 has successfully improved on the original design, and I know I'll be playing it for months, if not years, to come.

Mr Ryan Goes To PAX 2011

Last weekend my wonderful wife and I took a bus south across the border to the city of Seattle for the best gaming convention in he world, Penny Arcade eXpo, or PAX. We headed down on Thursday and met up with some friends, one of whom lives in Seattle now and the other two traveled up from New Mexico for the convention as well! Our charming company was a welcome bonus!

This was our second time at PAX, the first being in 2008 at the end of our Epic Holiday[TM]. I never did get around to a write-up of that stop, but you can safely assume that it was incredible, and we couldn't wait to get back. This year I decided to step things up a bit by going in costume. Thanks to my amazing mum, I was able to get my Rocketeer helmet brought over from Ireland, and I already had the jacket with me. And so, for most of Friday and Saturday at PAX 2011, I could be seen wandering the many areas, slowly sweating to death in a heavy leather jacket, carrying a heavy, metal helmet[1].

A lot of the guests and exhibitors fist bump rather than shaking hands in order to avoid picking up nasty infections. This year I even saw the more extreme version, elbow bump, used by many. It certainly worked for me. I have not come down with any PAX crud as of yet, apart from being utterly exhausted for a few days after!

The whole event was awesome. We met so many incredibly nice people, and I got to talk to people I never expected, about interests I never expected to share with them. I got to meet AJ LoCascio, the voice of Marty McFly in the TellTale Games episodic Back to the Future video game! Not only was he probably the most down-to-earth, nice, honest-to-goodness coolest guy I met at PAX, but he's also a huge Rocketeer fan[2]! He was able to recognize that I was holding a Disney Master Replicas version of the helmet from across the booth, and he recognized the Wested jacket as well! If you can imagine how blown away I was by that much, I almost collapsed when he told me that he made his own Rocketeer helmet from fiberglass. We spent about ten minutes geeking out about the movie, the props and the awesomeness of the Replica Prop Forum.

The weekend was just chock full of amazing stories, though rather like Empire Strikes Back, I feel I opened on the best of them. My costume was a huge success, and I got stopped everywhere I went by other attendees, exhibitors and even a VIP or two as they gushed over the character and took photos. It was heart warming to see so many fans of Dave Stevens creation in attendance. For me, one of the things I enjoyed most was watching peoples eyes widen as I let them hold the helmet and even try it on. Unlike the more accurate fiberglass versions available, the metal Master Replica I have is far from fragile. It was nice to be a part of fullfilling a small number of peoples dreams to hold or wear such an iconic piece from a much loved classic.

Even queuing was a fun experience. Apart from playing games on iPads, Enforcers (the PAX volunteer force that help make everything run smoothly) were handing out bits and pieces to help us pass the time. While queuing for the Saturday night concert, we all got given brightly coloured pipe cleaners and instructions to "Be creative". This resulted in hats, flowers, Portal-themed wrist bracelets, stick figures fighting, a sniper with gun, and even a helicopter with rotating blades! From pipe cleaners, people!

But of course, PAX is ultimately all about the games. And we got to try loads of them!

Welcome to Serra.
Gears of War 3 is due for release on September 20th, and it had a large presence in the Xbox area. I expected longer lines, but compared to others games on display, the Gears line was tiny. I got to try out the updated Horde 2.0 on Friday and the brand new to the franchise Beast Mode on Saturday.

Horde: My biggest worry about Horde 2.0 was that they had gone and messed with a good thing. Horde is still the best of the endless-wave styles of game modes because it is so clean and simple. It threw out customization in favour of accessibility. Horde 2.0 adds to the basics by bringing in a cash-for-kills system for that can be used to buy stuff during a small window between waves, from ammo to laser defenses and beyond. And it works fantastically! It's fast, fun and doesn't stop the games flow. We got to play waves 8 to 10 allowing us a peek at what surprises the tenth waves hold. I'm not going to spoil it, but after the terrifying horror of seeing your first bloodmount in Gears 2, they've really outdone themselves for Gears 3. It's awesome!

Beast: This is a whole other kettle of fish. Trying Horde, I knew the basics. Waves of alien monsters that I need to kill before they kill me. Beast is a set number of COGs per level and you have a very tight time limit. You start with one minute on the clock and get more for every kill. You can play as a variety of Locust, starting as low as tickers or wretches, and going up from there. I'm not going to tell you what I saw or played as, but you can assume it was fun! The gameplay is very different, and I sucked during my quick trial. This is not Reverse Horde, it requires a totally new set of skills.

The Boardgame: Not on display at the Xbox booth, this was instead being demoed on a different floor, but I've included it here for completions sake. This looked very nice. Fantasy Flight Games were running demos all weekend long and the whole thing looked impressive. I didn't play myself, but I heard lots of good things from people that were trying it out. As expected from an FFG game, the production quality was through the roof. Cards, tokens and figure pieces were beautiful. The figure pieces were especially impressive, and looked like they should be a lot of fun to paint up.

But Gears was only a tiny area in a huge, multilevel convention. I got to see and play games that are coming out as soon as this month and as late as next year.

The Gunstringer is the first retail game from Twisted Pixel, the company behind Comic Jumper and 'Splosion Man. It's a Kinect game that makes clevel use of the technology and, more importantly, it's a load of fun to play. I don't own a Kinect. Yet. There was no reason to before I went to PAX. Now I'm tempted. I might even get one for this alone.

I got up on stage with three others and had a four-player dance-off in front of a large crowd playing Dance Central 2, also for Kinect. I found that it had very good motion tracking, more impressive for being able to track four uncoordinated male players gyrating wildly. I came first, despite never playing any of the dance games before, though that probably says more about how bad the others were than how good I was.

From the ridiculous length of the line all weekend long, it was clear that there was a lot of interest in the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, but I could not have cared less. Not that I have anything against it, I'm just not interested in fantasy games. One of our friends stood in line for 3.5 hours to play the 15 minute demo and got a fuzzy hat for her troubles[3]. At one point while I was talking to her in the line, I looked up at a clip of a dragon in the trailer and jokingly said "Oh. Nice graphics. What's this game?" and 40 angry nerd heads swiveled in my direction.

Last, but by no means least, one of the booths that immediately caught my attention was the TellTale Games Jurassic Park area. Not only did they have a nice small-scale replica of the entrance gates into the park, and fencing with little flashing lights on top, but they had a fan-made reproduction of one of the park jeeps! I was a child all over again standing beside it. Instead of just reading my thoughts on this however, take a break from the text and look at a video blog TellTale Games staff did during the convention. Check out the eejit at the 1:25 mark, and again at the 2:30 mark. Yeesh. Fanboys. They were everywhere at PAX.




PAX wouldn't be PAX without free stuff. We came home with tonnes and tonnes of swag. I think I got 8 t-shirts, of which I only paid for one. Baseball hats, avatar items, lanyards, pins, even a very high quality hoodie! The whole weekend paid for itself in free stuff. Claire and our friends even got themselves free OnLive consoles! FREE. CONSOLES!!![4] Insane.

If we're still here next year we'll be going again, so I'll let people know in case anyone is interested in joining us for a crazy weekend of video games, boardgames, demos, t-shirts, freebies, music, costumes, celebrities and more in 2012! I honestly cannot recommend it enough. It's the best, friendliest, most community orientated convention I've ever been to.

Hopefully you can join us and share in the love that is PAX 2012.

[1]- On Saturday morning I woke up complains of an unusual pain in my right arm. I put it down to sleeping badly in the hotel bed, as I had no recollection of having injured it the day before. It wasn't until later that same day that I realised that the weight of the helmet was causing strain on my arm muscles! I didn't feel it while I was enjoying the convention. It was only once I relaxed that it all hit me!
[2]- The earlier part of this sentence should probably be noted as biased based on the latter part. But even then, AJ was very, very cool.
[3]- She did also get to meet and have her photo taken with Todd Howard while in the queue, which she excitedly told me later in the day. She was much distraught when I shrugged and told her I had no idea who that was. Still, that first 3.5 hours at PAX in a queue was pretty much the high point of her convention, I'm led to believe. 
[4]- The catch of course is that OnLive is a subscription based service, so they're happy to give you the console for free to let you try out the service and hopefully sign up.