Tomorrow's Just a Day Away...

Always a fucking day. Why can't it ever be two. Or three.

I've been sinking ever-so-slightly back into the post-apocalyptical self-distracting regime of gorging on 20+ episodes of whatever I can find in one sitting. It was House Season 1 that took the bait for yesterday. Despite Christopher's recent purchase of Mirror's Edge strutting about in its saucy graphics, I just could not stop watching the horrendously predictable series. Why? Well, the same reason as everyone else; Gregory House himself is a great character.

Each episode you got some dudeslashdudette collapsing someplace, then they get tested on by three doctors who seem to do pretty much all the work in the hospital (stitches, lab tests, breaking into houses, MRI scans, x-rays, injections... whatever), who also spend five minutes per episode streaming off a whole bunch of medical jargon that probably took the actors all week to learn; then they flatline a couple of times because the treatment they were put that was either going to cure them or kill them was starting to kill them; then House does his clinic rounds and amazingly spots precisely what is wrong with everyone the second they walk into the room.

So yeah, it's predictable. Yeah, alongside CSI this will be the TV series that replaces Quincy M.E. and Diagnosis: Murder in the daytime slots in about twenty years... but for now they're good, easy fun. You know it's going to be safe so you watch it for House himself; for his wit and dialogue. Got to admire his equality policy.

But the problem with spending roughly 24 hours watching House is that for the following week your friends will say "I've had this headache for days" or "I wonder what this is. Do you think it's a rash?", and you will immediately wonder just how long will they have left to live?

Scores an A for "All the cool things House says" and "All the time".

Gears of War 2 deserves a mention. Christopher caved and bought the Super Dooper Limited Swimited version, which is totally a different size to the rest of the games on the shelf which seems to be one of few things that triggers some sort of OCD-related anger whenever I look in its direction.

The game! Ah, the game... Well we spent a good amount of alcohol on playing and re-playing through the first Gears of War on co-op mode, so we jumped in at hardcore mode this time around. Mistake? No. The mistake we made was playing the game sober. Seriously; I played the first game so progressively drunk that it was way more than six months of playing before I could say I could ever say I knew where we were going in-game. The game itself? Not as tight as the original. They seem to have planned for two players a bit more, but not with ammo crates. The story is fairly good, but the dialogue is worse. The set-pieces aren't as tight, and there's no more kryll, which was a nice element to the first game that made us play differently. There's too much underground stuff and not enough overground, and the vehicle sections weren't anything special. They just felt like they were trying to emulate Halo. There were too many areas which were far too punishing if you'd forgotten to keep a sniper rifle. Stuff like that, yeah.

But! New achievement system that works wonders and fuels a bit of a competitive element in killing the enemies in certain ways. The Darkness had a similar in-game system that basically tracked stats and rewarded them at certain points. Unfortunately Gears of War 2's are mostly easy to get on a single run through, and there is no stats screen to find anywhere. Everyone loves stats! Stats should be mandatory in all games. There's an achievement for killing 100,000 enemies, and I've got waay less than 1,000 after a single play through the game. It's the Horde mode which will beef up this counter, no doubt.

While the single player (and co-op) campaign is far from awful, it does feel slightly disappointing. Horde mode more than makes up for this. It's basically you and up to four mates (via Live) on a multiplayer map taking on wave after wave of enemies. The first 10 waves get progressively harder due to a shake-up of the enemies you encounter. The first map is largely wretches and drones, but the latter ones are full of boomers/butchers/grinders. With each ten rounds the waves repeat in terms of enemies, only their attributes change; round 11 means the enemies have twice the health and increased accuracy but, luckily for us, damage remained the same. There are 50 rounds in the game and by the last 10-set you'll be facing horrendously strong and evil hordes of enemies. Or at least we predict you will. We're still a long way off.

Scores a B for "Being able to chainsaw a crawling locust in half".

Mirror's Edge is the most recent gamely member of our distracting xbox family. The game is much touted as a refreshing, original concept - and that it is, but it is also one of those "ah man! Imagine if they did this instead" things; the combat is too frustrating and feels like the difficulty was ramped up because the game areas are too small. There are too many lifts, and not really all that much freedom in the gaming world. I suck at the time trial modes, too.

The game feels like a spiritual successor to Portal, only without the cool gun and pads on your feet to stop the pain whenever you lad badly. There is a puzzle element to some of the areas - a necessity for strategy that I think is both underused and, sometimes, poorly executed. The game can be overly harsh when it comes to accuracy, and the enemies can recover from being hit waaay quicker than you can, which leads to many deaths/restarts when facing more than three SWAT dudes.

Scores an I for "I'm going to give this a score when I actually finish it".

So enough of all of this blabbering. Stuff I forgot to talk about; Left 4 Dead Demo, Ghost Town, Saw V, Max Payne, Supernatural, Smallville, Jam, Fable II, One Piece, Music, and Dead Set.