Monday, January 29, 2007

360: The Return

So at last my 360 has returned, now sans 3 blinking red lights of death. I took some time out of my busy (Burning) Crusade to take the girl for a spin and try and catch up with some of the games I had missed along the way.

First, I loaded up the Crackdown demo, I had heard entirely too many things about this game for me to not load it up. Crackdown seems to be the middle-ground that joins the sandbox style hero games that have come around (Incredible Hulk, and Spider-Man 2) with the GTA clone. Run around, leap tall buildings, commandeer cars (for the greater good), hurl heavy things at the bad guys, etc. The demo didn't give me much of a feel for the narrative (here's to hoping that there actually is one), but the actual combat and aiming systems are solid, so I think this one is at the very least, a rental.

Speaking of Rentals, Tony Hawk's Project 8 arrived from Gamefly during my 360's hiatus. So far it seems to be your average, run of the mill Tony Hawk experience, albeit with a seamless branching world, but i've yet to see if this will be put to good use. Mechanically, there's one rather large edition, the 'nail the trick' mode, which goes into slight slow motion and zooms in on your feet during kick tricks. while in NtT mode, your analog sticks control your feet and you can use them to kick and spin the board around under you in a technically realistic manner. So far its looking pretty damn good and is a huge improvement over the american wasteland games.

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