Daily Archive

So. Yeah. Gears of War 2. My take on it?

Inevitable.

We all knew this would come around when Mark Rein announced “Gears of War 4.” “Gears of Four?” No idea.  I will say I enjoyed the teaser trailer, especially when Marcus rammed the chainsaw into the Locust’s back. That was sweet.

However, you all know how I feel about Gears of War. It’s an awesome game hampered by terrible squad AI. Meanwhile the enemy AI is fantastic. Then there’s the story. Or, more appropriately, lack thereof. Relieve these problems and Gears of War 2 has the potential to be an awesome game. Will it be as ground-shattering as Gears 1? Eh, probably not. Then again I felt the same way about Halo 2 and look what that game did. Gears will probably end up being the 360’s Halo. Epic has an advantage, though, in that they are using the same engine this time around, and are probably reusing a lot of resources from Gears and UT3 (which ALSO reused a bunch of resources from Gears). So a November release date doesn’t seem all that insane to me. I definitely think it’s possible. Not only that, it’ll be a lot cheaper to produce than the first one.

Other stuff!

• Castle Crashers: Looks adorable and addictive. Two things that go really well together. Just look at Chuzzle.
• Online Co-Op in Fable 2? So you’re telling me I can jump in on anyone’s single player game and go co-op AND keep the stats I earn? SWEET!
• “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness” this Summer. Praise DivX!
• Lots of Games for Wii fit. Cool. No complaints here.
• Champions Online? Oh HELLZ yes. I can’t wait to see what Cryptic does with their next superhero MMO. I’ll be trying it out the first chance I get. I had quite a bit of fun in City of Villains (was even told that my character had “the best bio ever”)  so this could be a lot of fun. Or it could be exactly the same as City of Heroes/Villains but with better graphics. We’ll see.
• XNA on Zune? I hear it’s difficult enough to program in it for the 360. Programming for the Zune sounds even more tedious.
• 360’s Red-Ringing mid-conference. Hi-larious.
• Mental Gaming. You heard me. Like remember the first episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with The Traveler, and how he uses the power of thought to send the Enterprise to a completely different part of space where everyone’s thoughts are coming true? No, er, me neither.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Day 3 of “There in Spirit - GDC 2008.”