Odds and ends

I've been a bit of busy game-playing beaver recently, so I have a few things to write about a few games - but not really enough to make a whole update out of each. So here we go with a bit of a selection box...

I finally slogged through to the finish of Call of Duty 3. I say "slogged" since by the end of this I was just bored. It didn't help that the second-to-last mission felt like a much bigger climax than the finale (which has too many places where you can stand and take a breather, and is almost Scooby Doo corridor in its "you chase the Germans this way, then they chase you back that way" location reuse), or that so many of the levels look and feel identical. I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but I'm firmly in the "make it small & sweet" camp of game length - overall I'd say I enjoyed King Kong more than CoD3 simply because each section finished before I started to tire of it.

Actually, I could even say that I enjoyed King Kong more than Half-Life 2 in this respect, but if I published that I think I might get lynched by angry people.

Anyway, I think I'm done with this series in its current form - I never expected to get into a couple of 2nd world war shooters, but unless they come up with something a bit special for the next one I'll give it a miss. I'm not entirely sure what that "something special" would be - maybe flying sections instead of the tank bits, I'm not convinced.

I'm also done with Crackdown, at least until the downloadable content turns up. And hopefully while I'm playing that I'll stumble across the 16 hidden orbs that I have left to find - whoever decided that 500 hidden items across the city was a nice number needs to be hit around their ADHD head (or possibly already has been).

I think Crackdown would also benefit from some cheap end-game content. Fair enough, you can switch the gangs back on, but it's unfocused and you need to form your own fun. It would be easy to make randomly generating encounters to move the player around and give them definite goals.

And finally for this update, I started (and have pretty much stopped) playing Fight Night 3 in the last week. On the one hand, it's good fun, and the controls and graphics both help it feel incredibly visceral. On the other hand, it's insanely repetitive - fights can usually be won with the same tactic, and the career mode consists of just train - fight - train - fight. It would have been nice to have a say in sponsorship deals, pre and post-match interviews to psych-out your opponent, or even just to be able to customise your ring entry routine a little.