I first downloaded the demo when it was released on a Saturday. I played about 10 minutes of the single player option and decided that it couldn’t hold a candle to Call of Duty 4 and deleted it from my XBox. But then I started hearing buzz around the office about how awesome the multiplayer was. So I re-downloaded it this weekend and played some of the online. And wow.

I’ve never played a Battlefield game before, which may be why I was so impressed. But the large scale combat felt like what I really wanted Halo Big Team Battle to be. Vehicles, changing objectives, 12 on 12 combat, and working with a smaller group of players. Here are some of the key awesome things about the game.

The maps are huge… really big, except the goals are really tight, so you end up using only a small portion of the map at a time, however, the large scale lets you flank and run around to your hearts delight. The bigger maps have vehicles which let you clear the map quickly when needed and really add a new level to the game, since there are certain weapons that are useless against vehicles and certain weapons that are useful only against vehicles. Team work becomes more and more important.

I never thought I’d play a good 12 vs 12 game on a console. There are simply too many problems to overcome. Typically, XBox Live has used player hosting, where one of the players is chosen to host the game and his internet connection becomes crucially important. If this one person has a poor connection or a connection that can’t support all the players, then the whole game suffers. For this reason, most XBox Live games are limited to 16 total players. Also, voice chat is crucial on XBox Live, and when you get on a team with 11 other people, the chat channel would be ridiculous. Bad Company overcomes these challenges in two ways. Firstly, to prevent lag, EA is hosting the servers for the online modes. So your games are hosted on servers with fast connections and enough power to process everything. Secondly, the big twelve person teams are divided up into three squads of four. So you work with your three friends to accomplish the goals with your team. It’s how I already played Call of Duty (muting everyone I didn’t know in the chat), so it feels awesome here.

Finally, destructible environments… some games have this to a minor amount, but Bad Company takes it to the next level. Almost any wall in this game can be destroyed with an explosion or a tank running through it. Coming up to a building with an objective in it from behind? No door back there?? That’s cool, just blast your way in. It feels REALLY GOOD to achieve goals this way. No longer are sniper perches godlike, sniper in a small window that nobody can see? Blast it with an RPG or a grenade from your assault rifles grenade launcher and suddenly that small window is a huge opening.

The game puts a large amount of weight on team work. No one person can do it all, and being in a squad of 4 lets you use each class types skills to the fullest, and you can always spawn with your squad when you respawn, so having a guy who’s only job might be to get inside the enemy base and stay alive isn’t that bad. The game rewards you for all this team work and everyone is useful. It’s really incredible.

After playing the demo for an hour, I went out and bought it. I expected there to be more game types for multiplayer, but sadly there was still just the one, Gold Rush. It’s not bad, and the additional maps each make this game type play a little differently. Basically there are attackers and defenders. The defenders have two crates at their base to defend and the attackers try to destroy those crates by heavily attacking them or planting charges on them. When the attackers blow up two crates, the defenders fall back to another base and the action repeats. The attackers win when all crates are destroyed (usually 8 to 10) and the defenders win when the attackers reinforcements run out. It’s fun and really emphasizes the features present in the game. There is supposed to be another type named Conquest coming out for download soon and I can’t wait.

My recommendation, GO BUY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW!

• Carcassonne
• Catan
• Lost Cities
• Uno
• Ticket To Ride
• Wits And Wagers
• Chessmaster
• Spyglass Boardgames (Chess, Backgammon, Checkers)

They are all awesome, they are all XBL enabled and support the maximum number or players. You really can’t beat it. So if board games are your thing, you should really get on the boat. This is the future!

Here are my rankings.

Single Player:

1. Bioshock – Great story, game play, and enviroment.
2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Intense game play.
3. The Orange Box (HL2, HL2 ep1, HL2 ep2, Portal) – Tons of value, unique game play (Portal), great story (HL2).
4. Rock Band – Awesome game play, engrossing, super fun.
5. Halo 3 – Fun mindless action.
6. Assassin’s Creed – Great action if a bit repetitive, good story.

Multiplayer (XBLive)

1. Halo 3 – Tons of players, great fights, fun with friends, fantastic matchmaking system, ranking, awesome co-op.
2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Great team system, fun in game rewards for doing well.
3. The Orange Box (Team Fortress 2) – Unique team play, not enough players on XBox 360 version.

*Rock Band not included as I never played it online.

Multiplayer (Local Console)

1. Rock Band – Completely engrossing experiences, transcends the living room.
2. Halo 3 – Completely awesome co-op. 4 player split screen works great.

I’m a rhythm gamer, I’ve been playing Dance Dance Revolution for 5+ years, I’ve played every Bemani and Harmonix game ever made. I’ve even mastered the rare treat from Koei in the form of Gitaroo Man. Karaoke has been around since before I was born, and in video game form for a few years at least. There have been many guitar simulators since Harmonix first hit us hard with Guitar Hero, and before that Konami had Guitar Mania in Japan which was roughly the same formula. There have also been drum simulators from Konami in the form of Drum Mania. Drum Mania and Guitar Mania would even link up in the arcade to let you rock out together. But never has it all come together as awesome as this.

Maybe it’s the licensed tracks that are popular enough that you’ve heard them before, maybe it’s knowing that every sound produced is coming from something you or one of your friends is doing, or maybe it’s just the energy presented on screen, probably a combination of all three, it doesn’t matter because after your band gets used to playing it’s instruments and it all comes together, you just zone out and feel like your really on stage. I don’t expect someone just reading this to understand, you really have to try it for yourself.

I came into this a bit jaded. Playing rhythm games as much as I have, the fun is gone. It’s all about hitting every note, getting the timing perfect and getting this highest score. Even when new games came out, like Guitar Hero did 2 years ago, I instantly went into it and wanted to be the best. However, there was something different with Rock Band, when I was behind the drums with my friends playing ‘Say It Ain’t So’ by Weezer, I stopped caring about score, about hitting every note… I just wanted to rock. And rock I did! I rocked so much my neighbor came to tell me and my band to shut up. So we took it down a notch, which wasn’t AS fun, but still freakin awesome.

I’m sure there are gonna be some things to nitpick, this isn’t a review so much as a commentary and right now I’m riding high on the euphoria of my first night rocking out on Rock Band, and hopefully there will be many more to come.

The game puts you in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, an up and coming defense attorney, you must defend the innocent in court. This proves difficult in the face of lying witness, prosecuting attorneys that seem to fabricate evidence out of nowhere, and aloof judges. The game is very story driven, and all the cases have a personal connection to Phoenix, its not just random defense cases.

The writing is incredible and the stories are fantastic. It manages to keep you on the edge of your seat trying to figure out who did what. Its very easy to get engrossed. And the cases make sense, I only had to consult a walk through about once per chapter. The game does a good job of triggering ‘aha’ moments when you figure out what’s going on, then comes the challenge of proving it with evidence to everyone else.

The game has two modes, evidence gathering and court room. In evidence gathering mode, you travel around and try to figure out how to prove your client’s innocence. Once you’ve found all you can find, you hit the courtroom, cross-examining witnesses, objecting to their contradictions, and presenting evidence on your clients behalf. Saying anymore would spoil some of the crazy twists. Suffice to say, you’ll enjoy every minute of it.

And enjoying every minute of it is good, because you’ll only play it once. There is literally no replay value. The game is 100% linear, granted it doesn’t feel that way as you play it, but really, there are no branching paths or alternate solutions. Its about 15 hours long, so not too bad really, but if you can knock out 15 hours of game play in 3 or 4 days, the game is really best suited as a rental unless you want to have it for collection sake, as even a year later, this game will still be the same and you’ll already know the solutions.

The nice thing about this game is that you have to go through and “destroy” the paintings, and you do that by entering the painting, traversing the level inside and defeating the boss. This breaks up the Castle monotony with locations such as towns, forests, deserts, etc. There are a total of 8 paintings to go into total, which makes the game pretty big. While the castle is certainly not linear, the paintings pretty much are, although some have some interesting gimmicks.

The bosses go from ridiculously easy to insanely hard. Because you level up in this game, you can always go kill some more monsters to get stronger then go back and fight a boss again. Also, as you gain some of the super abilities, some of the boss fights that would normally be very difficult using standard attacks, become trivial at the hands of these skills.

And skills are really the name of this game. There are two characters you can switch between, one uses weapons, the other uses magic, and each has about 30 of both. The weapon character uses everything from axes to shurikens to bibles, and each weapon skill gains experience as you use it eventually becoming mastered and dealing more damage. The magic that you learn starts out mastered, but typically has the option to be cast quickly for regular damage, or twice as long for maximum damage. With enemies and bosses being vulnerable to different types of attacks and magics (and some even changing their vulnerabilities midway through the battle), using both characters and a variety of skills is required.

Speaking of both characters, your main character, Jonathan is the weapon user. He is the more mobile of the two, and you will do most of your exploring while controlling him. The second character, Charlotte is a magic user, she is less mobile and her melee attacks are shorter range. Although you start out only controlling only Jonathan, about 5 minutes into the game, you’ll be able to switch back and forth and even have your partner follow you around and help you. You can switch on the fly and even call your partner out to perform a special attack while still fully controlling your main character. Also, you eventually learn several powerful attacks that involve both characters teaming up to deal devastating damage.

The last new thing is quests. A character named Wind will assign tasks to you, you can complete them to earn items, skills, magic, or stat boosts. They involve everything from killing a certain number of enemies to gathering items or discovering certain parts of the castle. They are completely optional, but fun none the less and usually aren’t to daunting as long as you check in regularly you can usually complete them as you progress through the game. Some of the quest involves items you only get once in the game, and it is possible to sell or eat these items (some even seem to be meant to be consume to revive hit points until you receive the quest and realize your mistake), if you do this you will need to restart your game or using the online shop mode to purchase the items from other players.

Overall the game is solid, leveling your weapons and character by killing the same monsters over and over again can become tedious, but is typically rewarding. The game never seems to drag, and all of the tedious tasks can be skipped and the game can be played through for the story alone in about 5 hours. Gathering everything and leveling up your weapons is a big part of the game, and will extend the life to about 10 hours for the first play through, there are also several different challenges after you beat the game, including playing through on hard mode with a level cap or using different characters to play through the game, also there is a boss rush mode which is also online that you can team up with a friend for. Overall, there is no reason to pass this game up if your a fan of the genre; if you plan to just run through the game for the story, it’s probably best suited for rental, but if your the type of gamer that loves to milk every ounce of value out of a game, there is plenty in Castlevania: PoR to justify it’s retail price.