The United States of Esoterica

Just got back from Best Buy with it. I'll have impressions up later tonight.

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Tired: Dog bites man. Weird: Dogman bites alien.

The commercials brought back bad memories of Brute Force.

Oh man Brute Force was so bad. Khyron I am interested to know what you think.

It still boggles my mind that Brute Force's first week sales were bigger than that of the original Halo.

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Modern Science: Where a crappy answer is better than no answer at all.

Yeah well that is because of the massive marketing hype and the install base that first Halo had provided for it. At that time there weren't many games on the Xbox and Brute Force was being marketed as the 'next' Halo.

Little did we know......I still have the horrible prequel novel I got for free when I bought the game.

Mine is on the way from gamefly, I'm hoping it will get here today. I'd like to veg out on it all weekend.

Gamefly is great, btw. It's Netflix for games.
$16/mo for 1 game @ a time
$23/mo for 2 games @ a time

I had Bioshock for about 6 weeks, played through twice & sent it back. It's great for those games that are more single player, play once or twice & move on.

yeeah i have gamefly also. i like it.

Sorry about the delay on the impression, but I was too busy playing to write about it.

Only about 5 hours in, I'd say it's one of the best sci-fi stories in vidya gamin'. Real hard and heavy kind of story telling.

Imagine what would happen if you took the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Blade Runner...then made a game out of it.

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Tired: Dog bites man. Weird: Dogman bites alien.

Few more impressions after another marathon game session:

-Characters are very 3 dimensional. Main characters can be heroic fighters, for instance, but be low-down xenophobic racists (against 'real' aliens that is, not the illegal kind) in their personal lives.

-Music is epic. Very 80's John Carpenter techno.

-Learning curve is more like a sheer slope. But after 4 or 5 hours you start to get the hang of it.

-Universe is VERY open ended. There are planets suggested to you to help further the main plot, but there's a whole galaxy out there to explore just for the hell of it.

-Combat can be fricken tough. I have died several times already. Unfortunately, when there are a lot of enemies on the screen, the frame rate really take a drop. Also, friendly AI is less than stellar.

-The game itself looks beautiful, but it seems the Xbox is having a hard time keeping up. Plenty of texture pop-ins (similar to in Gears of War) and frame rate issues develop. Though nothing is game-ruining.

-Addictive. I started playing tonight and in the blink of an eye 3.5 hours had passed.

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Tired: Dog bites man. Weird: Dogman bites alien.

OMG, this game is killing me. I've had a couple nights this week where I was up until 1:30-2:00 & then I have to get up for work around 5:30.

I need to finish it and mail it back, otherwise I'll start another game and loose another week or two.