Crunchy Blog: Still Alive

Well we've made it this far, so I dont see any reason to stop now. I dont really have much to say tonight other than 1) Obama's a shoe-in, 2) I got my computer up and running again, 3) fulltilt.com is 100% totally rigged (j/k), and 4) I finally finished Shred Nebula. Damn, for an XBLA arcade game that nobody bought, it was pretty cool. Its no masterpiece, but its a well done Asteroids style 2D space shooter. My final score was almost 7.9 million, which put me in 13th place on the scoreboard out of a 2500 people. Like I said, nobody bought it, which is a shame really because the multiplayer possibilities are superb. But after the epic August on XBLA, people didnt spend the time or MS points to give the game a fair look, and to be honest, the controls really arent that intuitive, but once youve scrambled up the learning curve the ship controls beautifully.

So the word on the street is that Midnight Club L.A., Fable 2, Far Cry 2, Portal Still Alive and Soldner X are freaking sweet while the new Spider Man game, the new Golden Axe, and Wii Music utterly fail to entertain. Im trying to focus on unfinished games I have, like MegaMan9, skate, Metal Gear 4, Super Mario Galaxy, etc., rather than the endless supply of new crap, but its really hard, how can I not at least give Midnight Club a spin? MC:3 Dub was soooo sweet, with insanely epic motorcycle jumps, that part of me thinks its going to be hard for MC:LA to top it, and from the videos the design doesnt seem very jump heavy. I guess there's only one way to find out, and it certainly cant be much worse than Burnout Paradise, which was a nice vacation from Burnout 3 for a couple weeks but had no lasting online appeal: even adding downloadable bikes for free couldnt make the online fun - no laps, night driving - it wasnt even Burnout at that point, just another racing game. Until they find a way to capture the magic of Burnout 3 and implement it in a new racing game, be it the rumored Road Rash reload or a Burnout MMO, Criterion should just work on shooters.

Anyway, the blog should be back in order with regular updates again, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program which is already in progress.