This Week in gaming

So... I've finally got all the achievements in left 4 Dead. Yeah. That was fun. I had for farm zombies for about 6.5 hours today. But I got it done, I can put that on my shelf and never, ever, play it again! I'm incredibly happy to be done and am not going near the game for at least a week, maybe more.

Also, Overlord 2 arrived this week. The game isn't perfect, but it is a lot of fun. Great sense of humour as always and very rewarding. I'm about half way through the story and it is just awesome. My one complaint (other than a couple of quests that were just brutally difficult) is the checkpoint system. Checkpoints are indecently far apart sometimes and without a save anywhere feature (ugh. Why?!) it can be a royal pain. Like restarting a quest from the start because you fucked up on the very last portion. That aside, the game is easily worth every penny I spent.

But, the star of the day, and the week, is Battlefield 1943. Fucking excellence. There are issues, but it's also launch day so I can forgive a lot of those. I'm going to talk about them before I do anything else:
A lot of the in game menues are flat out broken. Specifically related to the Squad system (in game integration with the Party system) . Getting someone invited to you squad is a pain in the ass. They have to be on your friends list to start with (so gods help you if you meet a cool guy in game and want to squad up but not be friends). Then the menu has to decide if it likes you. At one point three of us where all in the same menu trying to invite each other, slamming the invite button, and *nothing* happened.
There are graphical glitches too, I haven't seen them personally, but two of my party members experienced momentary graphical glitches. Meh.
The biggest problem though, is the servers... The devs did not expect the number of players they got and it shows. I'm kind of surprised they weren't expecting a lot of players since Battlefield 1942 was one of the biggest FPS games in the world but hey. They need to get a lot of new servers up ASAP!
Nearly forgot, the matchmaking and team balancing needs a little help: At one point in our game it was 12 vs 6. And a few hours later it was 7 vs 12. And being one of those 7 was pretty shitty.

On the plus side, the game is extremely fun. I played from about 11:30 till just after 4 AM straight. Earned all but 3 achievements. Which, folks, it's an arcade game. Only 200 potential gamerscore. Sorry! And... it's just awesome. The vehicles are fun even if the plane controls are godawful to figure out. Vehicles also default to first person view... not cool but it's a button-press to get to third person.
There are only 3 classes but all of them work very well. Sniping took a few minutes but I got to use it very effectively a couple of times... the better of those two defeinding a base after bombs cleared out all the obstructions in front of me for a good 200-300 meters. Plus, all guns have unlimited ammunition, you just have to reload. Sounds perfect to me. All the action, nothing to take you out of it. Unless of course you don't get in the boat fast enough and have to swim to shore, good luck Phelps!

1943 is a must buy for any Multiplayer FPS fan. It's an absolute blast to play especially with friends.