havecookieswilltravel asked: I seem to have come into possession of an Xbox 360. ^^; As I haven't done any serious gaming since high school, I seek your recommendations. Since we have not incompatible interests and you seem to know what you're talking about (and you must, if you can get Jo hooked on one).
…ooh. YAY CORRUPTING MORE INNOCENTS.
I mean. Ahem. Yes. I should say first that 1) I’ve never used an Xbox, just a PS3 and computers, so while I assume the vast majority of awesome games (and my favorites) are available for all the major platforms, I can’t say for sure, and 2) I am kind of inexperienced/new to gaming fandom and games in general, so a lot of my existing opinions and experience is based on Calli’s, since she has excellent taste in games, has been playing forever, and introduced me to most of the games I love. So if you want better recommendations, she might be a better person to ask, is what I’m saying.
Well, and then of course there’s the whole fact that tastes differ, obviously, and the reasons I love a particular game might not apply to you…but that’s going to be true anywhere, and I will try to be helpful and say why I like certain games rather than just go with my inclination to be all “RED DEAD REDEMPTION AND FALLOUT AND MASS EFFECT AND PORTAL, THEY ARE AWESOME AND YOU MUST PLAY THEM, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU NORMALLY LIKE,” which…okay, that’s more or less my opinion in general, but I did say I would try to be more helpful than that. >_<
So yes. Those are the ones I would recommend to anybody, because I love them and I think they’ve got enough variety that everyone can find something to enjoy in each one regardless of personal taste. I could go on at some length about exactly why they’re so great, but I’ve already kind of done that with some, and the short version is probably more helpful anyway, so I’ll try to do that.
Red Dead Redemption: Yeah…I’ve talked a lot about why I love this game in my many posts about it (plus more on the gunslinger’s lament, which means I tend to forget what I’ve posted where, but there’s still plenty on my personal Tumblr), so…look back through that tag if you want more. The actually short version: awesome protagonist + a number of awesome (or at least interesting) supporting characters + great writing + giant sandbox in a beautifully realized Old West setting + film-worthy plot + fantastic score + gameplay that’s still fun even if you have almost no experience with shooters + did I mention how freaking pretty the gameworld is and also how awesome John Marston is BECAUSE SERIOUSLY. Also, there’s a DLC storyline about the zombie apocalypse. Basically I love this game to bits. I became a fan just from watching Calli play it, and it ended up being the incentive for me to learn any kind of console gaming in the first place, when before I’d never had a reason to get past the “wow this is difficult and I’m hopeless and I don’t know why I’m doing this” stage. RDR was good enough that it was worth pushing through the frustrating stuff.
Fallout: Well, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, the two most recent games in the series. I would just say the entire series, except the first two Fallout games are ancient and pretty old respectively and I’ve only played part of the first one…so while they’re good games in their own right, they’re not the best introduction to the franchise. Plus I think they’re PC only. Anyway. The entire basic premise is post-nuclear-apocalypse awesome with some nicely satirical dark humor based on attitudes reminiscent of the Cold War era (which drives me a little crazy as history goes because it’s all future stuff, not an alternate history, so like…everything from the Cold War came back a century or so later, including the atomic arms race, isolationist attitudes, and “duck and cover” propaganda? But I love the satirical retro-futuristic aesthetic of it so much I decided not to care), and Fallout 3 has a pretty huge open world you can explore. Since for some reason I love the whole post-apocalyptic-dystopia thing anyway, I’d be fairly content just wandering around the ruins of the Washington D.C. area (a.k.a. the Capitol Wasteland, and yes there are loads of recognizable landmarks—well, what’s left of them), but each game also has a pretty complex and compelling plot. It’s not a perfect RPG as far as storyline-determining decisions go, but it’s pretty good, as is the character customization. Also the combat system manages to marry the styles of old-fashioned turn-based combat with more modern shooters, which I find kind of awesome from a historical point of view on RPGs in general, plus it’s fairly versatile regardless of what you’re used to. You can toggle between first-person and third-person perspectives, too, which I really appreciated (first-person makes me feel…claustrophobic? Plus you’ve got no peripheral vision and no sense of where your body is, which can be a problem). I’ve only played part of Fallout 3 and none of Fallout New Vegas so far, but I imagine New Vegas is just as good, and it has a lot more awesome NPCs who can join your party while Fallout 3 has you mostly wandering around on your own.
Mass Effect: I’ve just played the first part of the first game and none of the second (or the third, obviously, since it’s not out yet), but it’s another awesome action RPG, this time IN SPACE. You play Commander Shepard, who is badass regardless of your customization and gameplay decisions, but you get to decide what kind of badassery that is—and like with all good RPGs, you can make the player character male or female and create pretty much whatever appearance you want. For me, the fact that I can play Shepard as a tough, no-nonsense, more-badass-than-everyone woman is one of the most important things about this game, although obviously that’s not going to be a thing for everyone. (I could complain here about how white-male Shepard is on all the box art and is the most common image associated with the game, but…at least the player does have options.) From what I’ve seen so far, the worldbuilding is complex and layered, with all kinds of fascinating political and economic things playing out in the background of the main plot. Also humans are seen as inexperienced latecomers to interplanetary exploration, trade, and politics, making the player character’s race a little underestimated and marginalized…which is kind of a nice reversal, since human superiority and racism against aliens tends to be more common in SF, as far as I’ve seen.
Portal: Probably everybody knows about this game by now; the first one was kind of a sleeper cult hit, the second got a lot more hype in advance, but they’re both pretty fantastic. They are also fairly tricky puzzle games, and I kind of suck at them because I’m not good at physics puzzles and apparently I have a real hard time thinking three-dimensionally. (I’d blame it on my lack of depth perception, but I’m not sure if that applies in this case.) So I used a lot of walkthroughs for the first game and so far mostly just watched Calli play the second one, because the rather intriguing premise and dark humor in these games is well worth the effort. It’s in the same universe as the Half Life games, so you’ll recognize a few names if you’re familiar with those at all. I don’t really want to spoil things if you haven’t been spoiled, but you’re missing out on a good handful of memes if you haven’t played this game. And definitely start with the first one—the second is a great game in its own right but obviously not the incredibly inventive, so-original-you-know-you’ve-never-played-anything-like-it, one-of-a-kind surprise of the first game (I have a few other issues with Portal 2, things that didn’t really occur to me until afterward, but nothing that would make me not recommend it).
Those are the only games (that aren’t PC-only, anyway—Baldur’s Gate is awesome, for instance, but it’s definitely not available for the Xbox) that I’ve played or seen enough of and loved enough to recommend without any particular qualifiers. I’ve seen enough of a few other games that I can at least talk about them a little, even if they didn’t make me fall wildly and fangirlishly in love:
Uncharted 2: Everybody seems to love this series (I’ve only seen the second one) and I’m…not totally sure why. I suppose I’m spoiled because Calli’s good taste in games meant I started with good writing, strong characterization, very solid voice acting, and plots that actually work, so going from that to anything even slightly less impressive came as something of a disappointment rather than the good ones (or even comparatively less poorly written) being a refreshing surprise. So—Uncharted 2 does a lot with characterization and an overarching plot that’s quite good as far as the standard for video games goes, when the standard is a bit more along the lines of Call of Duty and Halo (I shouldn’t slag on games I haven’t played, I really shouldn’t, I just…don’t think much of mindless shooters that think they’re awesome because they slapped together a tiny bit of plot and some thin characterization that serve as an excuse for the action). It just doesn’t compare to, say, Red Dead Redemption. Mechanically some of it’s just plain annoying, too—it looks like it’s a big gorgeous open world, but actually you don’t get to explore at all because you’re held to one totally linear (but very convoluted, all puzzles in their own right) route to wherever you’re trying to reach, and it’s often hard to figure out where you’re supposed to go…plus you’re so pinned down by gunfire 90% of the time you don’t even have time to experiment or do much more than blindly lunge for the next ledge and hope it’s actually a ledge you can grab instead of some bricks painted in a way that looks an awful lot like a ledge you can grab, in which case you will probably fall to your death. As far as I can tell, it’s a pretty big step up from your standard shooter as far as characterization, plot, and writing go; it’s just that…well, that isn’t saying much. None of that makes it a bad game, either—it’s just not in my list of favorites, and I had no interest in playing it for myself after I watched Calli go through it. You don’t really get to make any decisions to speak of, either, so the replayability value isn’t very high.
…oh right I was at the point where I was trying to be brief. Yes. Well. Briefly, then, or rather attempting to be briefer:
Assassin’s Creed: Another series everybody goes bugnuts over and I’m even less sure why. The mix of futuristic-sci-fi and historical is really interesting (the protagonist is forced to use a really fancy computer simulation to experience certain important things his ancestors did, all of which is part of a much larger arc than the plots that make up the individual games), the cities you explore are beautiful, and you do get to be pretty creative with the free-running and the parkour and the surprise-ninja-assassin-knife-to-the-throat. You can do the kinds of crazy climbing and jumping as in Uncharted 2, but you’ve got enough control over things—most of the time—to be creative about how you approach targets and you’re not essentially having to solve a puzzle every time you just want to get to the next freaking building. That said, I didn’t find the plots that interesting, the writing ranges from mediocre to actually laughable, the main protagonist of the first game is a cardboard cutout who thinks he’s experienced character growth and the guy in AC2 and AC: Brotherhood is kind of a smarmy douche, there are some bits of truly asinine programming (you’re an assassin, so it’s stealth-based, and you’re supposed to do your ninja thing and disappear, which means you’re squishy and very not good at much except the quick stab-and-run that is kind of your trademark, so of course the first game forces you into a number of situations where you absolutely cannot solve things creatively but have to engage in melee combat against a bunch of opponents with better armor and better weapons than you, and you die a lot and curse the developers. The second game’s better this way, so it makes up for that by giving you a supposed skill upgrade halfway through that—at least on the PS3—means you use the exact same button for the contextual commands “jump up from this ledge to the one above me” and “let go,” and as you can imagine the contexts for those commands tend to be very similar), and the arc story is kind of this weird mix of The Da Vinci Code, His Dark Materials, every whacked-out conspiracy theory ever, and the whole “ancient astronauts” idea. Which is unfortunate, because at least at first, the arc story seemed a lot more compelling than the plots of each game.
L.A. Noire: Probably you’ve seen ads for this. It’s the newest by Rockstar, the studio behind Red Dead Redemption and the Grand Theft Auto series, and from what I can tell from having watched the first several cases, it’s no Red Dead Redemption but it’s also not Grand Theft Auto, which is a good thing. You play a police detective in 1940s LA and you get to solve cases, and the motion-capture techniques used to reproduce the actors’ faces and expressions is impressive but kind of over-hyped, especially since the combination of that and less-detailed bodies is straight out of the Uncanny Valley. The writing’s good and most of the characters seem pretty well-defined, even if I’m having a hard time keeping track of everyone, and a number of aspects are nicely evocative of old film noir. Protagonist Cole Phelps is no John Marston, either, but he seems like a pretty good guy and I like him fine.
Bioshock: I actually don’t know all that much about this series except that it’s another one everybody loves, I guess because it’s really good for a shooter? I saw part of it a couple years ago and I find the worldbuilding and overall premise fascinating—everything takes place in a city built beneath the ocean and designed as a perfect place for science and art and whatever, freed from politics and religion and petty morality or some such (the motto of Rapture is “No gods or kings. Only men.”), but because of the era in which it was built and all the crazy shenanigans that happened as stuff inevitably started to go wrong to lead to its current abandoned state, it’s all sort of art-deco-dystopia plus sort-of-haunted insane asylum where things went Very Very Bad. So it’s really creepy and pretty, in other words, and apparently the plot’s decent overall; I know almost nothing about the characters, but mostly I want to play because I like the aesthetic and worldbuilding so much.
Borderlands: It’s a grungy-sci-fi-in-the-slightly-post-apocalyptic-like-desert FPS with RPG elements, if by that you mean customizable armor, weapons with upgrades, some choice of abilities, and a leveling system, rather than any options for significantly customizing your appearance, making actual decisions that affect the storyline or at least your interactions with various characters, a plot that makes any sense, or the ability to play as whatever kind of character you want…which they do. I played the first bit of it and got bored, largely because I just wanted to explore the pretty gameworld and couldn’t because, y’know, it’s a shooter and I kept getting attacked by random monsters. So if you already like shooters in general this is probably a good one since it’s a bit different from the usual. Otherwise skip it.
Obviously there are loads more games with which I have little to no experience, so I can really only say what I’ve heard—Dragon Age is popular, for instance, and it sounds like Dragon Age II has vastly improved gameplay but some really stupid decisions as far as what you’re actually allowed to do and change (since, you know, an RPG should mean you can choose to do things that actually affect the outcome, but no, it’s a crapsack world and you’re going to be wrong NO MATTER WHAT), although in general it seems to be a good series. I also hear good things about some of the Prince of Persia games but I’m not totally sure which ones and I haven’t played any of them. Also apparently The Witcher 2 is a good example of an RPG done right with lots of options to choose from and storyline-affecting decisions to make, but that’s what I’ve heard from one person and I have no personal experience with it. Well, and then there’s the Silent Hill games if you like the creepy stuff—I’ve only seen some of Silent Hill 2, and it’s old so the graphics are kind of crap and the mechanics and voice acting are worse, but it’s very good at establishing an oppressively creepy atmosphere for an actually scary experience rather than just the usual monster-jumps-out-and-gives-you-a-heart-attack type thing. Also I hear the Knights of the Old Republic games are really good RPGs but I haven’t tried them yet and I don’t know if they’re available for anything except PCs. Shadow of the Colossus is a bit old but also fairly original, since it’s essentially composed of several boss fights against freaking giants you have to climb on to kill, without any battles or annoying monsters in between.
So…yeah. Good God but I can ramble. Um…I hope some of that was at least a little useful?
