Games of the last few months

Since January I have found time to rip through some truly fantastic games, some of which were more of the same, others that tried for something new and many that were plain awesome.

When I look at the amount of time I have invested in many of these experiences it blows my mind. According to tracking on Raptr.com (through Xbox live) I played Assassin's Creed 2 for nearly 40 hours, followed by games like Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect. AC2 literally fought its way into my life, successfully dressing up the repetitive gameplay of the first in new outfits and lending even more conspiracy and confusion to the over-story of Desmond, the Assassins and the Templars. A superior game to the first in almost every way, AC 2 was how I spent most of January.

Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 was literally an afternoon of gamplay, the elusive AAA game that I am thrilled I rented rather than buying new. The single player campaign is a Bruckheimer-esque trip into nonsense overflowing with massive set-pieces and relentless momentum. Watching the online play devolve almost instantly into a hacker's paradise of broken and unbalanced play, racist 12 year old's and an entire lack of fun made me realize the real attraction of this series has become the online, with the single-player a tacked on afterthought that takes the best moments of MW and turns them into bigger and louder sequences, ruining the charm of the original. My disappointment was palpable.

Mass Effect 2 ate my February like a fat kid on a twinkie. Yet another sequel, it fortunately fell into the AC2 camp rather than MW2, with a whopping 40 hours of play. The pop-in and streaming issues of the tech from the first game are alleviated by removing the massive open environments, in exchange for tightly orchestrated corridors backed by unreachable open areas, like matte paintings in a movie. ME2 story is taut and thrilling, marred only by the brutally tedious need to scan and mine minerals from planets. Easily half of the gameplay time is taken up by this numbing task and it would ruin a lesser game.