L has been wanting to get Texas Hold’Em poker for the XBox 360 so that she could play online. One problem with that is that the game costs $10 (800 XBLM points) and a Live subscription is $50/year. Well, we bit the bullet and subscribed. L spent a few hours the other night playing poker online. She really digs the voice chat. Me? I’m not much into chatting. It can be distracting and you often get these punk kids with 1337 names talking about how much school sucks.
So, I decided to check out Gears of War online last night. Everybody has been raving about how good it is. I wasn’t all that impressed with the campaign mode (although co-op makes it fun with a friend), but I figured I’d give it a shot. Yeah, I wasn’t all that impressed with multiplayer, either. Games are often short, it’s too difficult to kill enemies with the normal weapons, and there are times when you swear you chainsawed that guy first, but you’re the one who ends up cut in two. Basically, it’s a frag fest with little strategy: find the big gun and kill as much as possible.
On the other hand, I picked up Conker: Live and Reloaded for the original XBox. I haven’t played online, but went against the AI enemies. That game has some good strategic multiplayer game types. I loved the original and was very happy to see that they made it compatible with the 360 in December.
I’ve been slacking a bit on Oblivion, but haven’t had a good evening to get into it. They announced an expansion that will add somewhere around 30 hours of extra play. If/when I finish the other 100 hours of play in the original, I’ll probably pick that up. One cool part of the expansion is that you’ll be able to shape the world (you go through a gate into a different world) somehow. Sounds good to me.
