I'd originally planned on playing through the GDI campaign of C&C 3 on the PC, then the Nod campaign on the 360.  Unfortunately for my plans, unlike the PC version, on the 360 you have to unlock the Nod campaign by first playing through the GDI campaign.  Ah well.  I figured this was as good a chance as any to get the Achievements for playing the campaigns through on the hardest difficulty and completing every bonus objective.

I'm afraid that in the end, the difficulty of using the 360 controller will prevent me from reaching this goal, but a few missions in it seems manageable.  Really forcing myself to do the optional objectives does put a different slant on the game.  Normally I'm not big on replay through difficulty but since I'm a victim of circumstance here, I might as well make the best of it.

The games with the best replay value are ones where you can really explore different facets of the environment and game mechanics.  Achievements can also provide an interesting structure for alternate goals.  Dead Rising is a great example of this -- playing through the game to get all the "PP" bonus photo stickers is pretty different than trying for a perfect survivor rescue.  Alternate endings by themselves I don't find overly compelling, but since DR has enough structure to compel replay in the first place, the endings are a nice bonus.

Really compelling DLC, like the ones announced for Crackdown today, also help.  They don't encourage replay, per se, but they are going to get me playing the game again..

The Spring Dashboard update for the Xbox 360 launched today (last night?) and one little touch with it I thought was quite nice was a sequence of video shorts you can stream down to explain the new features of it.  The whole idea of feature upgrades coming with their own video introduction really speaks to me of this generation of consoles -- video enabled, transparently downloading, always online.  Sure, the video isn't exactly going to win any awards, but it's well produced and has some kind of interesting (at least to mega-geeks like myself) interviews with some of the folks in the various departments that support the Xbox platform.

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A few nights ago I finally beat GTA: Vice City Stories.  My completionist streak of finishing all the "modern" GTA games continues unabated.  I can't say that I was all that impressed with the ending or how the story wound up.  It is pretty obvious that the "B" team had the Stories development line, and I'm sure they faced a lot of technical challenges getting it on to the PSP that was really no value added at all to me playing it on the PS2 -- in fact, probably the reverse.  But good writing and strong characters don't require any extra technology, they just require good execution, and the execution here just doesn't match up to the originals.  In an absolute sense it's not horrible... but in a strange converse to the Dashboard Update videos, I have such high expectations of quality set by the "real" GTA games that the relative lameness of VCS makes it worse by comparison.

In any event, with VCS taken care of, I'm back to playing San Andreas for my GTA fix, or perhaps Saints Row / Dead Rising / Test Drive Unlimited for a bit of open world immersion Methadone.

Much like my soft spot for the much-maligned full motion video sequence, I have to admit I have quite a fondness for the "quick time event" game mechanic, as so named in the Shenmue series.  Using the same basic mechanic as Dragon's Lair, it turns an ordinary cutscene into a very simple minigame.  Resident Evil 4 and Tomb Raider Legend both used it to decent effect, and most recently I've encountered it a great deal in the game version of Spiderman 3. 

Sure, it's not the deepest of mechanic.  But it takes what would otherwise be a totally non-interactive sequence and give it a little spice.  I'm not looking for deep tactic decisions, I'm looking for a sensation of doing those amazing things that my on-screen avatar is doing.  The visceral thrill is there, even if ultimately the gameplay is about as shallow as it is possible to be.  But just like not all stories need to be King Lear, not all gameplay needs to be Hearts of Iron.

So far they've been tuned quite well in Spiderman 3.  Just tricky enough that I occasionally see the fun failure animations, but never hard enough to really block me.  I can't quite say the same for the combat -- just tonight it took me about 30 tries to get past a boss (a non super hero boss no less!), that was definitely pushing the edge of my frustration factor.

Man, I played a lot of Lord of the Rings Online over the weekend.  Not since my early days of World of Warcraft have I played an MMO quite so much.  Of course, it helps a lot that the QT3 guild is pretty active.  Tom Chick, our fearless leader and 1/2 of "The Entity" that runs QT3, has taken a very active role in being the leader of the guild (aka kinship in LOTRO-parlance).  It is interesting to see him writing about the experience as well -- particularly in his Shoot Club column for the Escapist.  

On the whole I remain quite pleased with LOTRO, as my 15-odd hours playing it over the weekend will attest.  While the early launch was pretty flawless I'm seeing definite signs of strain on the server, especially in the central town of Bree.  The game design of LOTRO has pretty much the entire server's population congregated in one area for commerce-type activities, and I'm not convinced this was a wise choice...

 

I'm excited to see Catan hit Xbox Live Arcade this week.  I admit I haven't had time to play around with it yet but I'm fascinated to see whether boardgames I love can make the jump to the digital format.  With Talisman coming out later in the year I'm certainly optimistic.  It's no replacement for the social and tactile element of really sitting down and playing these games, but it is a lot easier to find a game at any hour, and to not worry about the rules.  Of course, Magic Online is the ultimate example of this principle in effect...

Another huge storm rolled through here tonight.  The roads around my house were practically flooded out, and we had a "party" with the boys in our storm closet.  It's been a particularly wicked spring for storms so far, with a couple of tornados touching down in the greater DFW area. 

I really love the storms here in Texas.  Boston would just sort of be a grey drizzle for weeks at a time, but here the storms are really full of sound and fury!

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Over my recent business travel I've been reading Dreaming in Code, a book I highly recommend for anyone interested in the process of building software.  It's not a very technical book, but that's fine -- the author, Scott Rosenberg, is a talented writer and it is quite an engaging read.  It asks a lot of fundamental questions that weigh heavily on the mind of anyone who writes code for a living, like "why the heck does it take so long to write software anyways?"

One of the more interesting sections in the book is an overview of attempts to change the basic paradigm of coding.  It's a field I haven't paid much attention to and there were some very interesting fragments of ideas there... definitely food for though and investigation.