Gaming Tuesday

Achievements

Gamerscore Last Week: 22185
Goal: 22200
Gamerscore Now: 22235

Achievements unlocked

Red Dead Redemption

The Downward Spiral 10G
Six Years In The Making 10G
Judge A Man By The... 30G


Goal for Next Week: 22300
$ for HPA: 11.95

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Red Dead Redemption- Undead Nightmare First Impressions

*Spoiler Alert*














Ok, that should be far enough, Michael.

If you've made it this far, I'm giving you a final warning that there will be a few plot spoilers in this. Nothing major, I don't think. Ok, I'm going to say how Red Dead Redemption ended, which if you haven't beaten the actual game yet, turn back now.



It is nice to be playing as John Marston again. I get that he had to die at the end of the single player, but I much prefer playing as John as opposed to Jack. Speaking of Jack, Abigail and him are turned into zombies right off the start. You hogtie both of them and then go out looking for a cure. You would think lassoing and hogtying zombies would be fun, but it really isn't that much fun. The trains aren't running, so you can't throw them in front of one of them and they make loud annoying noises, so you don't want to carry one around on the back of your horse.

Undead Nightmare is partially what you would expect, but I was pretty surprised by how much of an actual plot there is. It really plays a lot like the single player campaign of RDR played only, you know, they're trying to eat your brains. A lot of NPCs return, like Bonnie and the Marshall in Armadillo, which you do side missions for. You end up doing story missions for good old Nigel Dickens again and Seth, that crazy Treasure hunter.

The zombies themselves are pretty much what you expect zombies to be. Kind of slow, incoherent creepy noises, and easy to drop with a headshot, but not so easy if you don't hit the head. Zombie Animals really are no different than the animals in the regular games. They go down just as easily as in the regular game. I've run into zombie bears, bores, mountain lions, and wolves and none of them are any worse in Undead Nightmare than in the regular campaign. Also as rumored there are Sasquatches in the game, but they're kind of disappointing. In a stranger mission you are supposed to hunt down and kill six of them. They don't even fight you. They just start running when you get around and go down in one or two shots. Then once you've killed five of them you go to the sixth one. It is sitting on the ground crying and it goes to a cut scene where it tells you all about its emotions. That's not what I want from a Sasquatch.

This may be the coolest thing I've found in the game so far. The four horses of the Apocalypse are in the game. That's right there is war, famine, pestilence, and death. I've only found two of them so far and War is a pretty fucking awesome horse. It's on fire and sets zombies on fire when you ram them. Also I'm pretty those horse are immortal, which is good, because if your mortal horse dies it doesn't go away, it comes back as a zombie horse. It will still come to your whistle, but while your riding it will periodically try to take you off the path. That can be very bad when your on a steep cliff.

*Spoiler Alert over*

I'd say if you loved the Red Dead Redemption single player campaign, you'll like this DLC a lot. It definitely requires a different play style, but the structure of the game play is basically the same. It is worth the 800 MS points for sure, if zombies are your thing as well. You have plenty of opportunity to kill loads of the undead in various ways.

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Black Ops Quick-scoping

A lot has been made of a comments Josh Olin, community manager of Treyarch. He called quick-scoping "cheap" and confirmed that it was made nearly impossible in Black Ops. I don't really agree with it being "cheap" or some sort of exploit. If someone only quick-scopes, they end up doing terrible nearly all of the time. I don't know about you guys, but more than one time I've been followed around by some dumb ass with an intervention trying to no scope or quick scope me and failing hard. At first I'm like, 'oh shit, a sniper has a line of sight on me, run' then I start running and keep getting shot at and then I turn around and it's any easy kill.

Quick-scoping didn't need any more fixing than the removal of Sleight of Hand Pro's application to Sniper Rifles, but it seems Treyarch took it a little too far. That seems to be the way it goes though. MW2 allowed quick scoping to be somewhat easy and it became somewhat prevalent. Add to that, the explosion of gameplay videos and montages on Youtube and it seems like a bigger problem than it actually is. So, Treyarch overreacts and probably made the Sniper a non-viable weapon in Black Ops.

I don't even find quick-scoping that annoying. I haven't seen that many killcams where I was quick scoped. In fact, knowing that an enemy is quick-scoping is a bit of a relief, because then I know that 9 times out of ten that player will be an easy kill. Also, I think it's probably 20 or 25 to 1 at least of noob tube deaths to quick-scope deaths. The only time I find myself really annoyed with quick-scopers is when they're on my team in Search and Destroy. It fucking pisses me off to see some asshole going for montage clips with a Sniper instead of effectively playing the objective.

Anyway, here's a video of the guys at Machinima Respawn talking about this issue:



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Thanks for reading and please comment.

-Michael