Playing Catch-Up

I have a lot of games, a lot of games. Part of the reason that I own so many games is that I absolutely love to play games. The other part is that I have a bad habit of buying games and either not finishing them or never starting them at all. So I decided a couple of weeks ago that I need to go back and finish some of these games. I'm not bothering with games that I don't really care about, just the ones that I genuinely wanted to play all the way through when I bought them.
I thought about listing all of the games that I hadn't finished and/or started in this blog, but to be perfectly honest, I'm too embarrassed to. Let's just say that there's a "bunch" and leave it that.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

So the first game I started with was Battlefield: Bad Company 2. As someone who is an admitted hardcore Modern Warfare 2 player, I was really looking forward to BF:BC2 when it came out, unfortunately my initial impression was not that great. Fortunately my dissatisfaction with BF:BC2 had more to do with my over exposure to Modern Warfare 2 than any glaring problems with the game. I still like MW2 better, but I really appreciate the things that set BF:BC2 apart from MW2. I loved the back-and-forth of the main characters in the campaign mode and the destructability of the environments. I also really like the level where you had to run from house to house to keep from freezing to death, I thought that was a really cool piece of gameplay. In the end I really liked the campaign mode and l've had a lot of fun playing mulitplayer with my one friend that plays it regularly.

Super Street Fighter IV

There's really not that much for me to say about SSFIV since "finishing" a fighting game usually entails nothing more than a quick run-through of the Arcade/Story mode. So yeah, I "beat" the game with Ken and got be there with him and Eliza for the birth of what I assume is their first child. Although I must admit, there was a moment while watching the anime style ending of Ken, Eliza, and the new baby, that I realized just how long I had "known" these characters. I have always used Ken as my primary character in Street Fighter, so I've been looking at those characters for more years than I care to think about. Even Eliza, who's not even a playable character, has become a staple of that series for me. Crazy.

As far as the game itself goes, it's alright. To be honest, I'm not very fond of the graphical style Capcom decided to go with for SFIV. The controls and everything are the to-be-expected perfection of a Street Fighter game, but I personally prefer the graphics in Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. I love how it's basically what you remember, but super high-res so that it doesn't look "sloppy". The new characters are cool, and I love that they brought in charcters from Street Fighter III and Street Fighter Alpha 3, it really gives the game a nice selection. Unfortunately, the frequency to which I play this game will depend solely on how often my best friend Josh comes over to my house.

Dead Space

To be honest, I can't really remember exactly why I never finished Dead Space before now. Back when I bought it I played about 3 or 4 levels in and then shelved it. It wasn't because I didn't like it, but I can't remember exactly why I stopped playing it, maybe I started on something else, who knows. I actually just finished this one last night and although I thought the story wasn't very interesting for my tastes, as an overall package I really enjoyed it. I'm actually thinking about starting a new game+ so I can get the achievement for fully upgrading all of your weapons. I also want to go back and get the "Zero-G Basketball" achievement, my patience wouldn't allow me to get it on my first play through.

Having finished the game I'm definitely interested in checking out the sequel but unfortunately my biggest gripe with the game is that the Necromorphs aren't very interesting enemies, so hopefully Visceral Games can add a little enemy diversity to Dead Space 2.

And that's it so far, I'll post more of these "impression pieces" as I finish more games.