Thought I'd give my 2 cents on what I've been playing lately.

Red Dead Redemption. Finally finished this and the ending couldn't come soon enough. It sure is pretty. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised to see what Rockstar did without massive sky scrapers and no cars. But at the end of the day, the game gets massively repetitive. Personally, I never liked the GTA games. I thought much of those games were ridiculously gratuitous. I felt like the story in RDR was better, but still wasn't anything particularly special... its not a story so much as a constant homage to the great Westerns. But if you throw the story aside, the gameplay isn't all that compelling either. The selection of guns is low. The pace is fairly slow. And multiplayer, while fun for a time, still has the same shortcomings as it did in GTA IV. Why would you play this multiplayer third person shooter over other ones that have much better gameplay? I suppose if you are a gamescore whore or Achievement junkie, then you would.

Alan Wake. We waited this long for this piece of crap? It is beautifully rendered, but the people animations are weak during the cutscenes (couldn't you at least get the timing of the speech with the movement in their mouths right?). The story is disjointed and appear to be trying too hard. It's not even particularly scary. I remember jumping in my seat for the first Resident Evil... remember when you first saw those mutant dogs crash through the hallway window? You didn't get those moments in Alan Wake. Developers tried to make this into a movie or miniseries. But what is the genre? It isn't a horror movie... it's an action movie with a little supernatural on the side. If RDR was repetitive, then this was uber repetitive. Shine your light on the same frickin' baddies and shoot away. And for collectibles, they come up with collecting (drumroll please)... a friggin' thermos. For real? Unfortunately yes. To make matters worse, it is short and not very replayable.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught DLC. The only thing missing from BF:BC2 was co-op... and now you have it. It plays extremely well. Matchmaking is easy... just like in normal multiplayer (fortunately EA and DICE have done a great job at correcting some of the early matchmaking issues). The AI is smart and balanced. Hooking up with friends to play Onslaught is a blast. It's kind of a way for someone to ease into multiplayer from single-player. I know some will disagree, but the clientele of a typical BFBC2 game seems to be more organized than other MP FPS games. And I've found that when I join public matches of Onslaught, the quality of communication is much higher than some of the Special Ops matches I've had on MW2. I still maintain that BFBC2 is the best FPS on the market and Onslaught just makes it even better.

I'm still working on this game. It's fun, but I agree with the repititive comment. Too much riding around and doing the same tasks time after time after time. It was a cool idea, I had some fun with it, but now I just want to finish the game and be done with it.

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Glad to see you posting in here again Mud...

I haven't had the desire to play BF:BC2 as of late, but I did see this new Onslaught mode that might bring me back for a little while.

Then I bought Mass Effect 2, which should arrive any day now.

Ok, so I finally got to the part where John Marston is reunited with his family in Red Dead Redemption. I figured the game would end there, but now there seems to be all these little boring missions that have nothing to do with the rest of the game's storyline? How much of this stuff is there? I played a few of them, but grew tired of having to do work for the nagging wife.

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