Month: September 2006

Test Drive Unlimited (X360): It has all of the usual types of racing you’d expect, plus various types of delivery missions, but TDU’s real hook is that you can roam around the entire island of Oahu, Hawaii, encounter other Xbox Live players driving around and chat with them, and challenge them to on-the-spot races. You can also use an editor to create your own challenges and post them for other people to beat, and form a club of people. The club feature seems a bit underused, since it’s hard to meet up with specific people and perform purely intra-club challenges, but there’s still a ton of other things to do.

Kameo (X360): This is a pretty decent little platformer, with plenty of okay-what-special-ability-do-I-use-here puzzles. It’s a bit short and easy though (unless you go back for the time attack achievements), so I probably should have rented it instead of buying it…

GTR 2 (PC): I was initially hesitant since the demo for this was pretty much exactly like the original GTR, but the full game does actually add a few new features. There’s the ‘driving school’ tutorials on racing basics, some more 24H events, unlockable smaller custom championships, and a few new tracks and cars. At only $30 for some reason, it was well worth it. Now I just have to get my wheel hooked back up…

Lego Star Wars II (X360): It’s cute and fun, just like the original. What more do you need? :) It feels longer than the original, and there are a handful of new features like additional ‘time attack’ modes, rideable vehicles within the levels, and new things that can be build with gold and orange blocks.

And I’m now at 97% completion in Saints Row, though a bit stuck. Those level 8 drug trafficking missions are just nuts…

Me and my crew rollin’ around town in my pimped-out ride:

I’ve been playing a lot of Saints Row recently, and it’s a pretty decent Grand Theft Auto clone. The storyline isn’t all that great and takes itself a bit too seriously, but they’ve improved on a lot of the gameplay mechanics (driving and shooting stuff feels a lot more natural now), and there’s a ton of stuff to do.

They’ve added some new mission types like ‘insurance fraud’, where you have to throw yourself in front of or ram other vehicles and try to cause accidents with as high a dollar value as you can. It even uses the ragdoll physics model to rate you, based on whether you fly through the windshield or not, how high and far you get tossed…

It still has a few other problems, such as missing motorcycles, which were my favourite way of getting around in GTA:SA, there are no countryside areas, multiplayer is somewhat buggy, exploitable, and laggy (though a patch is on the way for that), there’s frequent screen tearing since they don’t use vsync, and it’s frozen on me a few times now. It’s still fairly fun overall though, and a good way to fill the void until the next GTA, which will hopefully pick up some of the improvements from Saints Row.