Not much of a review but a few things I wanted to note for people interested in checking out Dead Island. First, it’s a must to make sure to play using the “Fight Type” Analog and this can be changed in the settings. Dead Island’s melee combat is fantastic and really the combat as a whole is rather satisfying and visceral. This is all amplified by changing this setting away from the default.

Also, I would highly suggest taking a little time and view the Giant Bomb Quick Look on the game before a purchase. It gives a rundown of how weapons and quests work and shows how differently the game came out in comparison to that trailer that everybody knows. Fallout 3/Borderlands/Left 4 Dead/Condemned are the best mash-up comparisons I can come up with.

Speaking of the trailer, the game tries it’s best to live up to that announcement trailer everyone fell in love with but never has the same heart shown with the family in the hotel. There is so much to love with Dead Island but it does ultimately as the game progresses falls flat. The NPC are helpless task givers, the player characters are stereotypical and unsympathetic and the quests are hardly ever more then the escort, kill, or fetch  variety. There are a few quality quests but most are just contextual tasks to give you something to while you kill things (as in most games). Throughout the game it tries to make you care with zombie horror sob stories and telling you what your doing is so important but it’s just not handled well. No gravitas so to speak. This game cries for a character creator rather then having to play as the canned characters.

This game is built to be played co-op and I think almost best playing with strangers in how it relates to the narrative. To get a few quick achievements I popped into a random game with a new character and it was rather fun albeit strange. Not as smooth of a co-op experience as as the best in class. The enemies level with you and there are no difficulty settings or modifiers so even playing solo the game never felt overwhelming. With four people this game could be a cakewalk. Quests are handled Borderlands style.

Dead Island ends up a flawed masterpiece and worth checking out especially the resort chapters though a rental. A sequel with more heart could be powerful.

Personal Statistics: Completed on the Xbox 360 using the “Sam B” character playing “Single Player”.

Overall time played: 32h 46m 09s
Quests completed: 125
Explored zones: 97%
Distance traveled: 180.79

Challenges: 42%
Achievements: 72%

Items modified: 35
Medkits used: 49

Food consumed: 897
Co-players healed: 0
Co-players revived: 0
Deaths: 112

Weapon Type All
Walkers killed: 1956
Infected killed: 529
Humans killed: 277
Floaters killed: 19
Butchers killed: 8
Suiciders killed: 57
Rams killed: 14

The largest take away from this game will be the fantastic “Who Do you Voodoo” intro song everybody should check out and download. Long when I’ve forgotten this game I’ll still be bumpin the song.

HIDE YOUR KIDS GRAB YOUR WIFE BETTER GET OUTTA SIGHT WHO DO YOU VOODOO BITCH

LETS GO

Enough said…

“Nothing like a smoke to remember you’re alive”.
- Sam Gideon DARPA

After dodging death for the trillionth time player character Sam Gideon states this gospel hanging by a thread one handed prior to lighting a cigarette. For potential players that quote sums everything thematically about Vanquish.

Battle.Defeat.Mastery

Vanquish technically has a plot but it’s entirely recommended to be ignored. The game plays as a love letter to Gears of War showing it’s possible to take that type of game and do something different. Everything about Vanquish is Seriously Absurd but also Seriously Fun.

In comparison to Bayonetta (PlatinumGames last title) don’t worry about playing this one with friends around. Vanquish is more popcorn movie then  PG-13 soft-core porn. Vanquish is full of parody, self-seriousness, and meta jokes making everything easy to digest but still keeping the Japanese Madness.

One area where Vanquish makes a clear improvement over Bayonetta is with statistic tracking. The Final Results screen is a work of art. These stats are from my first playthough completed on “Hard” difficulty.

Space Score: 8640
Total Score: 146590
Mission Time: 8:52:00
Cover Usage: 22.13%
Distance Traveled: 65303
Munitions Fired: 69428
Deaths: 143
Confirmed Friendlies KIA: 472
Wounded Friendlies Assisted:26
Confirmed Kills: 1081
Pangloss Statues Destroyed: 16
Developers Destroyed: 75

On the leaderboards as of Tuesday, June 28, 2011 on the Hard difficulty my total score ranked 12,068 out of 16,094 people. The highest score shown is 694230 and the lowest score was -112520. 84 people have finished the God Hard mode, the games highest difficulty.

As the player you fight enemies, kick their ass, all the while maximizing and honing your abilities. Never has a game better named itself based on its definition origin. With no multiplayer this would be a hard pickup to stomach for $60 but Toys R’ Us and Gamestop set MSRP at $20 so Vanquish is a great weekend pickup.

UPDATE: So after work today I ended up finishing Vanquish again. Was mostly planning on picking up a few simple achievements before dinner but decided to try and get the Living Legend Achievement. It’s a piece of cake to earn with a trick but still a blast to get playing on Casual. Ended up skipping all the cut scenes, put on some podcasts on my iPod and blew though the game real quick.

Space Score: 10240
Total Score: 428240
Mission Time: 3:27:03
Cover Usage: 9.86%
Distance Traveled: 31995
Munitions Fired: 26445
Deaths: 0
Confirmed Friendlies KIA: 403
Wounded Friendlies Assisted:20
Confirmed Kills: 1222
Pangloss Statues Destroyed: 27
Developers Destroyed: 78

On the leaderboards for Casual I rank as of Wednesday, June 29, 2011  50th  of 25,230. Highest score was 641590, lowest score was -231410. I love that you can finish this game with a negative score. Watching the credits a second time I caught that apparently Capt Aceveda was a voice actor in Vanquish.

Before proceeding I must first stricken Treyarch with negative energy.

Their entire development studio deserves infected abscess underneath all their rear molars for allowing the amount of grenade spam present though product testing on the Veteran difficulty level.

With that now out of the way it’s a time for intimate reflection. After trudging though the Black Ops campaign on Veteran and hating myself more then ever it appears my largest undertaking was still to come. After taking about a month break from my self inflected plight to defeat every main Call of Duty game on Veteran (don’t believe me?) came an unexpected itch to twist the ties of fate and take another plunge into hell.

Some circles believe  Call of Duty: World at War is the hardest in the series on Veteran difficulty. I can genuinely confirm this game is evil. If you rather have a video representation of what’s to follow watch the following video and return at your own risk.

World at War is brutal and pulls every lazy trick from the book of cheap video game difficulty tactics. We will just start with the obvious and that’s the inappropriate grenade spam. Without a better way to explain it the enemies have no methods to their ways. While fighting for your life in the middle of the most violent war ever your player character will be playing hot potato half the game to get away from raining grenades. This video is the best one I could find that truly shows the amount of grenades the player has to deal with. That ‘clink’ noise of a landing grenade and the grenade indicator seriously were in my nightmares. There are parts in this game where five grenades showed on the indicator. It’s absolutely asinine.

This game has it all. Your enemies have sharpshooter aim and will put you down in a split second and don’t ever miss. Your enemies will respawn right before your eyes. There’s even one enemy that defies every law of warfare. The level Vendetta includes this notorious sniper battle. In Call of Duty games more often then not, even on Veteran, one shot with a sniper rifle will put down your foe. This fight does not follow those rules. You can pop this guy right in the melon first shot and he won’t go down. Apparently “you just grazed him”. This fight is such bullshit on so many degrees. World at War just changes the rules when it wants and I hate it. FYI you HAVE to hit that guy three times.

The absolute worst part of this game is the first checkpoint on the final level Downfall. It’s a repulsive setup. Your team of Russians are storming Reichstag and decide it’s a good idea to run right up the middle with Barry Sanders on 3rd and 28. There are so many guys and the grenade spam is in full effect. They are everywhere high and low/far and wide. With not many people on the planet on the same sanity level as myself I had to resort to the Internet for assistance. For awhile I tried this method but the way he does it is impossible I have no idea how he made it to the line without getting hit. Some people online say to stay back and go to the right, some people say push forward and go to the left.

For anybody looking for a foolproof way to beat Downfall on Veteran I’m going to fully explain what worked for me after millennia of trial, error, and study. The first thing to do is get right to the point before running up the death trap around the corner. Now here is the stupid part, just sit there. No shit just sit there for about 2-3 mins. After enough of the friendly’s have ran up to the line for some reason that turns off the grenade spam that would follow a push forward. Now we need to get the guys up high but you have to do it in order and a specific way

1) Go prone shoot the hardest guy to kill first 1. You can hardly see him but he’s lethal can kill you in a second.
2) Move forward while prone kill the second guy 2 high to the right he’s easy.
3) Sprint towards 3 the furthest spot back to the wall on a very small set of stairs. Take him down quick
4) Move to 4 prone kill the guy middle right he’s easy.
5) Move to 5 prone kill the guy top right he can be hard he will take cover.

Big suggestion to try to get these five as quick as possible. There are about 5-6 guys ground level that will become aggressive with their shots if you take too long. Move forward towards the line. If you waited there shouldn’t be grenade spam and head left. Right has a hard respawning enemy that killed me countless times and enemies behind harder cover. Left has less guys to kill behind easier to attack cover cover using grenades. Using these tips it should make it possible to beat what I would say is the hardest part of the game. This level still has challenges and the final section requires a step one/step two approach and some nimble and brave movements but it’s not too bad in comparison.

The ABSOLUTE shame behind this madness is without question World at War is the best Call of Duty game. After all the hokey world terror and impossible to follow mind games from Modern Warfare and Black Ops, World at War shows the best this series is do is just show you snapshots of conflict. There isn’t really a “story” to World at War but that is what I’ve come to realize this is what Call of Duty does best. Something missing from the newer entries is campaign co-op so that alone makes this game worth having in your game library. Kiefer Sutherland gives one of my favorite video game voice acting performances with Sergeant Roebuck. He really isn’t given much to work with but seriously Kiefer just screaming orders at you for half the game rocks.

World at War on Veteran is reserved only for ones lost in life and does not come recommended at all. This game is so difficult it made me reevaluate everything previous in my adult life. On Hardened World at War excels and is worth ones time. The challenge is a step up from Halo on Heroic but the battle can be won. Much of World at War on Veteran actually wasn’t too bad but the hard parts were truly hard. Many of the levels can be beat taking your time, being nimble, and smartly moving with cover. Moving forward Call of Duty 2 will be next, but when is anybody’s guess.

The horror…the horror…

Just in case everybody thought I was full of shit. More later…

As everybody can see there has been one HUGE change to vanlandw.com. Yesterday after finishing a major milestone I decided to change my banner as a reflection.

It was a long and winding road but Call of Duty World at War has been defeated on the Xbox 360 on Veteran difficulty, by vanlandw.

There will be more on this at a later time after some decompression but I wanted to share a few graphics I made. The symbol for “Veteran”  is brutal and I thought putting a badge somewhere on the site would brighten up the place.

The original of this picture was found on the Call of Duty Wikia submitted by SaintofLosAngelesXD(m) but I wanted to clean it up a bit. Using the original image I made a cleaned up version and a transparent version.

Do with them what you will. You will not survive either way.

Without truly knowing my writing about games has become about evangelism more then anything. Revisiting some of my older posts the unintended interpretation could be viewed much a push to avoid or a push to seek.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West falls under seek.

In a world flooded with more choice then anybody could ever imagine processing in a lifetime I’ve found word of mouth coupled with valued and trusted opinions is the best way to be introduced to something. This can be applied to practically anything: music, restaurants, books, brands, movies, partners and games.

Sure the Metacritic score is mixed but the only source I trust for game reviews scored Enslaved a strong 4/5 star review. One found the main female character to be a ‘selfish, dishonest and irresponsible‘ person. Another described the primary characters bound to a ‘commitment born of mutual dependency, a desired submission‘. Polarizing to say the least.

Enslaved is an experience open to interpretation  along side a guided thrill ride. Something video games can do quite well.

I fully recommend spending $20 and taking a weekend or two away from Call of Duty and play this game instead. Enslaved is very approachable and the in-game performances alone are worth seeing. There are moments in this game that are genuinely fantastic.

“I think relationships are what makes us who we are. It’s relationships that drive us to do amazing, or terrible, things. I think it’s a brilliant subject to explore,”
-Nina Kristensen Ninja Theory

I agree..