Week in Review - 12/23/02

     Boys and girls its time once again for "The Week in Review" courtesy of Soda. I hope that everyone had a great holiday. My Christmas break has been great so far. I spent most of it in Tennessee doing a little bit of snowboarding. I learned two things about snowboarding. First off, it is an absolute blast. Second off, it freaking hurts. My knees, back and anything else that could possibly be injured are just now starting to recover. Just like every other week many things happened in the world of gaming so here's a rundown.

     The week started with Pickle and myself fighting over what to get over at EBGames. You'd be surprised at how many of my weeks start out that way. After about an hour of trying to convince him to get Animal Crossing he decided on Phantasy Star Online. I'm still scratching my head as to why Sega put in the two-player feature. It's utterly useless as a two-player game. They didn't include the story line at all; basically they turned an RPG into a hack and slash. After Pickle got into the single-player mode he decided that he wanted to go online with this bad boy. I'm not completely convinced that Nintendo even makes the broadband adapter for the GameCube because no one on the damn planet seems to carry this thing. We've been on an epic quest the entire week to try and find one of these things, no luck thus far. If we can ever get our hands on an adapter we'd be more than happy to get a review out for this one.

     Counter-Strike: Condition Zero; the jury's still out on this one. I haven't decided whether or not I'm pissed off about this yet. In my opinion Counter-Strike is one of the best, if not the best, online multiplayer FPS. I don't play it too much anymore, but when I first got into CS my life was consumed. This is one of those games that continues to remain popular as time goes on. The only drawback to Counter-Strike is that it was strictly a multiplayer game and had no single player mode at all. So Condition Zero hopes to swoop in and capture all the old Counter-Strike fans and get them involved in a single-player game. Condition Zero is not going to have a story to it, just a series of 20 or so unconnected missions. Huh? Some missions have a briefing, some don't. I've even heard that some missions are designed to be "sneaker" style. The best part of CS was the mass chaos that ensued whenever a server was packed. Bullets whizzing every which direction, flash bangs blowing up in your face and the constant "Fire in the Hole" are the things I remember best about CS. No one ever had any intention of planting the bomb or rescuing the hostages, you just wanted to score a headshot with the "deagle" from a hundred yards. Now they're telling me that they want to rape 35 to 40 bucks from me for this crap? I'm going to file this one away in the "No chance in hell" drawer. For those of you who have any interest in this whatsoever, it's scheduled for release this spring.

     When I read about THQ's newest twist on their WWE series of games I spat at my computer screen. Crush Hour? Please God tell me you're kidding. First of all this game is set for release in March. Releasing a game for the Cube in March and trying to compete with Zelda sounds like suicide to me. This game's main catch is that instead of another crappy wrestling game that we've come to expect from THQ you are going to drive around in cars. It's a bit of a Twisted Metal meets SmackDown experiment. I think I would rather make sweet lovin' to a hedgehog than ever have to play this worthless garbage. I hope that Def Jam Vendetta kicks the ever-loving crap out of Crush Hour.

     Speaking of the Cube. Earlier I found out that LucasArts has scrapped three projects they had planned. Two of them were still untitled although one was a fighter and another an RPG. The third game cancelled was Pod Racer 2. Although I completely love Star Wars this is not terribly bad news. I don't think I could stomach another crappy Star Wars game. Over the years LucasArts has released crap-game after crap-game trying to convince me that I could become a Jedi if I would just purchase this product. I have a plan for the folks at LucasArts, take the entire budgets and production staffs of these three games and release one good game. Take your time and do it right!

     The good folks at Nintendo have decided to give me a grand birthday present and have set March 24 as the release date for Zelda. So in addition to the usual "Buy Soda an Xbox" fund we will be adding the "Buy Soda a GameCube Fund." Everyone is encouraged to contribute. That's all for now, until next week.

Dec 30, 2002 - 12:00 am | 0 comments
Shane Quast