http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/08/exercise-ratings-for-games

I mean this part.

The problem lies elsewhere.

Sure, I waited until the price of this game came down to below $30. After watching the trailers and videos, I decided that it is not worth $60. It turns out I was right, at least for my liking. The whole thing feels like it was made to make quick buck. May be because unlike Microsoft Game Studios, EA may be more greedy.

There is not much of an exploration in ME2. In ME1, you could land on unexplored planets and just drive around. Not in this one.

Customizations are almost crap. Half of what I did in ME1 was customization. OK, it is dressing up. But I am pretty sure a lot of players enjoyed that. Even though they are only armors and the helmet.

There were a lot of different guns and armors in ME1. Me2, not so much. Not even half as much I think.

All these replaced with more missions? Not in my opinion.

There is one difference though. The worlds are more diverse than they were in ME1. ME1 worlds were monotonous. If you have seen one world, then you have seen most, mostly the building construction and people.

People still keep babbling the same thing for years. Sometimes silence is better than repetition.

I also got cheated by Cerberus network. When I clicked on on one downloadable item after logging on to Cerberus Network, it showed this download free. I clicked confirm download and Microsoft points were deducted. That wasn’t nice. I clicked on another and it showed free too. I waited for few seconds and then the Free changed to 560.

If you are like millions of gamers around the globe playing Modern Warfare 2 everyday, well may be less than millions, you tried to download and play the new map pack called stimulus package. But if you tried to get it at the advertised time, you are probably disappointed. It came late and when it came, it wasn’t good enough because patch wasn’t there yet. Then when the patch came, you realized that you have to play types that you don’t like to get to the type you love, or like. Smelled like Gears of War 2 map packs.

Based on my past experience with all these game companies, I decided to skip the stimulus package. I am glad I did.

The game has one of the worst match making in my opinion. That doesn’t mean it IS the worst match making. Lot of people like that fresh meat. Me not. I like to play with people of similar skills. I kind of think that games won’t be able to “detect” people who don’t care. The kind that keep rushing to the same spot and die over and over by a camper or a super skilled player.

I only play team death match express. I used to play the mercenary team death match but the intervals are insanely long. My preference is to start the next match right away saying “match begins in 15 seconds” instead of giving a 15 second interval, then match begin in 8 seconds and then once the game loads another 10 or so seconds. But, express is good enough.

Then there are maps that should never have been, like Derail and Karachi. Again, just my opinion. Call of Duty 2 originally had an option to exclude maps you didn’t like. I loved it and hated the patch that “fixed” it. The frequency at which favorite maps appear is like one in 100. Some days I don’t even see them even though I play 2+ hours.

Another strike against Stimulus Package is the inclusion of the one map I did not like, the overgrown. Crash was a reasonably good one.

Alright, I probably just gave away my play style. I don’t snipe. The only challenge in basic training I never finish is the ghillies in the mist. The total sniper kills out of ~25,000 kills I have right now is less than 10. One of the first challenges I finish is NBK. I love long shots using rifles without a scope.

In the past I have blogged about how Microsoft bungles major game releases on Xbox live. The service goes down with almost every big game release because it couldn’t handle the traffic. If it happens once or twice, I can completely understand. But if it is the same story every time, I will have to call it insanity courtesy of Einstein.

So, am I going to get the stimulus package? May be, but I would wait for things to sort out. I am reading blogs and conversations on the Internet about it. Make it worth that 1200 MS points. As long as I see those two playlists at the bottom, I may not buy it.

Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best shooters out there. There is no doubt about that. It is so good that I put over 300 hours of online play since it was released almost 4 months ago. It is like almost 3 hours of multi player everyday. I have also completed the game on veteran which means I spent even more time on this game. I still continue to play despite a bunch of flaws in the game, environment and how others play it. As of 3/1/2010, I am on level 66 of 3rd Prestige. A really good player would have completed all 10 Prestige levels within that time frame. I do have a reasonably good stats though.

Now lets move on to some criticism. What if someone told you “Give me your money and I will give you something that will constantly annoy you, make you irritable and turn you in to a whining moron”? I am not talking about match.com. It’s the online video gaming experience I am talking about. The funny thing is most people including myself don’t realize that while we are at it. We just drift through that misery. It only hits you if you look back analyze what happened which most people don’t bother to do.

Here are some of the things I noted down while playing. There is more but haven’t noted down them all.

Auto aim doesn’t work for me. It does for some others so well that it will track me when I am running with marathon pro + lightweight pro + commando pro. Even at far distances with just a regular rifle. When I aim at someone, nothing happens. I have auto aim enabled. Then when I really do not want it, it will move the gun away from the target I am currently aiming and shooting because someone else moved close by. Sometimes this happens when the current target and the auto aim target are at different horizontal locations but on the same vertical line. Other times I have no idea why it pulls away my from target.

Developers cannot fix the players. Some don’t care. Some have no skills. Others have bad connections. This game also doesn’t have a good match making logic. Some people should stick to playing solitaire or Mario kart. Almost every girl that plays this game is better than more than half of the guys who plays online. I get the feeling that these guys play it to just brag. The game rewards these people in many ways so they stick around. I have no problem with that. Just lump them together in their own league. Just like Infinity Ward wouldn’t hire anyone inferior in to their team. Personally I prefer not to be playing with people way out of my league. My presence will just annoy them. Sometimes I feel that a lot of experienced players out there are playing just to annoy the hell out of others.

Re-spawn logic is kind of retarded. In most matches, people are cursing the re-spawn logic. Why did I spawn here? One new discovery is that if you have unlimited sprint and move faster perks, the game almost always spawn you far from the action. This must be “fix” for running and slashing kind.

Then I found that not all commandos are equal. Even if you have same perks and guns. The range and accuracy of the guns also vary by player. Some akimbos can stil shoot and kill you from half way across the map.

Some physics are strange in every game from Infinity Ward. You get stuck on the strangest objects. Small and tiny. I keep wondering why I am not able to move. It will turn out that a small piece of rock is blocking me. Other times I will just move over even bigger objects just fine. That is not because of that perk that allows you to climb obstacles faster. What are those things flying around like they are in a zero gravity well? Totally unnatural. They look so big even at large distances. Are these things in the game just to annoy us?

Your Internet connection can greatly affect your game experience. Try watching the kill cam. What you see on your screen while playing is not always what you see in a kill cam. No matter how fast your connection your ISP claims, the latency will ruin your games. This is especially true about cable Internet which seem to have higher latency than say, Verizon FIOS. Your ISP also may be compressing upload data which will add even greater latency. You can verify ISP upload compression at dslreports.com. Note that not all of them will show the ISP upload compression. In my case I saw it when I selected LinkLine. Or is it just throttling? You won’t hear anyone talking about how your ISP is impacting your online game experience than saying get a faster connection. Sure I do have a fast connection that some times shows 25 Mbps download and up to 3Mbps upload. the game shows 4 bars and it still gets laggy and choppy. It’s like the bars on iPhone on AT&T network. Bars and experience do match well.

This other problem is common among most games I played online. There is a short period while the map is being loaded at the beginning of each match. At that time you can shout any homophobic or racial slurs you want and no one would know who shouted it. You would think it is just some southerners who make such comments. Not really. Let me say people with all kinds of accents make such slurs on Xbox live. There is no way to report it without pointing at someone.

These are just random observations I had during the online play. I wasn’t usually noting down them. After not playing for a week due to other priorities I went back and all these things came back to me within a few hours. That is when I decided to note down things on my iPhone so I can blog it.

Another favorite game. Why there is not another one for consoles?

Fallout 3 is one of my all time favorites though.

Stuck in the wall.

Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you loose.

If you remember, a particularly interesting person said a while ago that religion is like pot. Now someone with the same political views says it is video games, the new religion masses believe is the new pot.

He also says video games promote the need for cigarettes, alcohol and drug, which is capitalism, the road to hell. OK, capitalism is all about smoking pot and getting drunk. There is also hell?

Here is the article.

PS: I don’t play games with gang or drug related story as its main theme.

I have uploaded videos of me running solo on wave 40 and 50 on the map “nowhere”. I recorded only wave 40 and 50.