Xbox Gamer

Castle Crashers was released back in August 2008 and yet it still remains popular. This game is a great example of both the high demand for online multiplayer games and the success that the Xbox Live Arcade could bring to lesser known developers. Also, the DLC that was released for it not too long ago might have helped as well as it could have caused some old players to come back and persuade their friends who did not own the game yet, to join them.

If you still haven’t at least played the Castle Crashers trial, I strongly suggest you head over to the Xbox Live marketplace right now and get it as it’s well worth playing. The game seems simple but simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it’s a great thing in this title.  It’s one of the best 2D games out in the Xbox Live Arcade in my opinion. I give props to The Behemoth for coming up such a hit.

Movie games usually get bad reviews as they generally aren’t up to par with what gamers are expecting. Another issue is their price tag, $60 for a game that offers 1/4 of what something like GoW 2 would offer at the same price instead? I don’t think so…

Anyway, I previously talked about Wanted which wasn’t too bad of a movie game based on what I saw in the demo. Another movie game that I feel is worth mentioning is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It actually looks like a potentially good X-Men game. I saw some rather brief but impressive gameplay of it not too long ago. It showed Wolverine taking down a helicopter and it looked both fun/challenging.  This is definitely a title I’ll be keeping my eye on and hopefully a demo will be released. Until then, all I can do is speculate that it might be one of the few decent movie games that have come out recently. At the same time, I’m not expecting it to be an amazing game or some sort of “Bioshock killer”as I highly doubt it will be that but as previously stated, it might be the redemption of movie games if it’s actually worth the MSRP…

As for the movie, it looks good as well but this isn’t a movie blog so it ends there…

I’d like to talk about the following two games that I’ve been playing lately:

Street Fighter IV is a solid 3D fighting game that will definitely please fans and newcomers alike, however unless fighting games are your strong point you might struggle a bit with it. The learning curve is not too generous as it’s quite hard to pull off some of the special moves on a regular 360 controller. While I haven’t played with the fight pad or the arcade stick, I’m pretty sure the game would play a lot smoother using those controllers. Also, don’t be surprised if you get owned while playing ranked matches as some people out there are really good.

As for Call of Duty: World at War, it’s not a new game however, it did recently get some new maps and the one I want to talk about is that new zombie map. It’s definitely worth getting as it adds a great deal of replay value to the zombie mode. I highly recommend that you play it with at least 3 people as it’s quite hard with 2 depending on your luck. I’ve also found that it’s a lot harder to get the ray gun in the new map (I’m not sure if this is accurate though, I’m just speculating based on what I’ve witnessed while playing so far). Overall, I’d recommend SF IV if you’re a Street Fighter fan or if you’re looking for a good fighting game. I’ll also vouch for that new zombie map for CoD: WaW as it’s quite fun and definitely adds more replay value to that game mode. I hope they release another zombie map soon and would be happy if they charged us only for the map thus reducing the cost (400 points or so would be reasonable). A free zombie map would be even more appreciated though

So today I’m going to talk about two things, the first is the first map pack for Call of Duty: World at War which currently costs 800 MS Points. It includes a total of 4 maps, 3 of which are for standard multiplayer modes and one that is exclusively for the “Nazi Zombie” mode. I saw a gameplay video of that new zombie map in action and I will say that I was quite impressed however, I’m not sure if I’ll be purchasing it at the moment since I’m low on funds. As for Xbox.com being down, apparently there was a billing hiccup and this caused some unexpected downtime. Live should be working though, it’s just that the website itself will have some issues such as no forum posting for now etc.

So what does this mean? You probably shouldn’t be expecting any freebies from Microsoft due to this problem as while they did give out a free game a while back when Live was down, it’s probably not going to happen again as this downtime did not affect their Live service, just Xbox.com which is free…

That’s all for now…happy zombie hunting if you do get the map!