Crackdown (360)

I hadn’t really spent much time in open world games before playing Crackdown. Given that, I have to say that after several hours of play, I love them. The ability to go anywhere and do just about anything is great. I love being able to jump and climb my way up a building only to then jump to another building. Add super strength to that mix and it’s some sort of Hulk parkour adventure. I get the feeling though that trying to find every little ability and hidden orb is going to take up a great deal of my time in the future.

BioShock (PC)

I’d been told this was anywhere from the Best game to the Best-est game “evar”. Needless to say, I was skeptical of BioShock‘s ability to suck me into the world of Rapture and keep me there. You know what? It totally has me. I lost over two hours to it the first time I played it and surfaced only when someone distracted me from the game with questioning.

I find it interesting too that I keep forgetting I should be thinking about how I’m doing things. In most games I try to distance myself from the action and think critically about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. These couple of times I’ve been playing BioShock I’ve been completely unaware of my surroundings and totally lost into a dark and twisted world of undersea machinations.

Eternal Sonata (360)

I’ve been joking with my friends that this game should be called “My First Role Playing Game.”  It’s as if the developers had been given a formula for making a RPG. They then went through and made a game, checking off each item as they added it to the game. Then, and I can only assume that it happened after, they shopped around for someone to help them add a story to their RPG elements. Somehow they came across someone who really loved the life and music of Frédéric Chopin. When I say loved, I mean some hardcore love. Like, borderline fetish love. The developers then wrapped their RPG around a love letter biography to Chopin’s music.

It’s all very disappointing. The game looks fantastic and the composer created some very good mixes of Chopin’s music, but the story is… kinda crazy. The game story is basically contained within the frame story of Chopin on his death bed. While there he hallucinates a livid world where music terms are characters and he himself plays a role in events. Even that would be enough but after each chapter, and they are clearly marked, the game breaks the fourth wall for a bit to tell you about how much they really love Chopin and how his life, you know, sucked despite him being a genius.