Friday night I headed over to the Hilton Anatole to check out the MLG Pro Circuit. I wouldn’t mind being in a tournament, it’s just my best teammate, Sean, is in Florida. Halo 3 was the big deal here, and it was almost like any other gaming con. One thing I noticed quickly is how many good looking girls are there. Yeah, most of them are working it, but a lot were there as spectators.

I got to watch Halo 3: ODST Firefight mode in action, as well as meet some of the major league gamers that I’m assuming get paid for all this. MLG is a whole other aspect of gaming that I’ve never really looked into but now enjoy quite a bit.

• Adam is headed to MLG Dallas; Bungie will be talking about ODST. Stay tuned for content! #

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Hopefully this is still worth watching…it might be hard to make out, but this was taken from the Dallas MLG. Some of the pros playing with spectators. It honestly didn’t look that entertaining, but I obviously need to check it out before passing on it.

If the video is not working, which for some reason it’s not, here’s a direct link. Embed fail.

I used to like batman, but I honestly disliked the Bale movies even though I’m a huge Bale fan. So how did that fail? I don’t know. You would think Bale plus Batman would equal awesome in my mind, but I guess I genuinely dsliked the films without any bias. Because of the recent Batfilms, my excitment has surely wayned (get it?!?!?). But it was the Arkham Asylum demo that got me back in the seat. Or was it Mark Hamill?

I’m apparently 5% through, though I can tell this game should only get better. My only complaint thus far – and this could be because I’m still at the beginning, you know, with training wheels – is that mission completion is quite linear. Like, to satisfy a movie scene. You do it one way, and that’s it. But again, I hope this is just how the beginning plays.

But to sum it all up, this is a lot of fun. Contender for game of the year.

More to follow, so stay tuned.

126% at the time of this post. Thanks Kryopsis.

Last night I beat Shadow Complex, which came about a lot quicker than I thought. I guess I accidentally ran into the last boss early on, and defeated him. I planned to collect all items first, but that didn’t happen. Overall, the game is pretty easy and I started on hardcore. I’m only missing a couple things which i’ll be grabbing tonight, and I’m at 99% map completion. While it was on the easy side, it’s still easily one of the best games I’ve played this year.

Improvements for sequels (or if other devs jump on this gametype): Remove the questions marks. It makes it about traveling instead of exploring. Bigger map. It seemed big, but if you start traveling you realize it’s not hard to get to where you want quickly. More areas need to be added, and possibly unlockable teleporting to balance the scale.

I’m a huge Metroid fan and enjoyed how the Castlevania series changed. These games are about large areas where you search for items to help you navigate. Shadow Complex, developed by Chair is an XBLA title set out to be the same thing. From what I’ve played, it totally mimics Metroid. I’d prefer hand-drawn 2D graphics, but this will pass. The 3D depth adds shooting enemies that are in the background. It is very fun and totally worth $15. I’d pay more, but don’t tell anyone I said that. The onlything I don’t dig here is the story. I think both metroid and CV have good story/atmospehere, but Shadow Complex lacks both. I’m just in a military instillation. No mystery or feeling of isolation. The game does a good job of keeping you in the dark though, and I never use the optional blue line to find my way. I could go without the the question marks that tell you where a secret is though…I’d prefer to have to figure it out myself. Since Super Metroid, the 2D Metroid games became a hand-holding affair, while Castlevania stayed true to making it impossible to figure shit out.

I’m still going through the game so impressions may change, but I think I’ve played enough to get it. Also, play on Hardcore. I still find that to be pretty easy.

Also, after two weeks of finally playing World at War, I’m up to level 43. I’m having a blast and just can’t wait for MW2.

So I just got transformers 2 from GameFly yesterday. I figured I’d give it a spin even though I’m spending a lot of time on CoD5 for now. I’m a fan of Luxoflux, so I was excited about how it may play. I think it’s fun, honestly. Nothing amazing but for transforming robots I think it does its job. By the way, the R-trigger for transformation is perfect. But, my point here is the graphics. For some reason I remember the first Transformers game having great, shiny, mettalic, robo-graphics. I’m not seeing it here, and it makes it come off a bit cartoony. Anyone else notice this, or is it just me?

I also received Call of Juarez from GameFly this weekend and I’m having a lot of fun with that. The setting coupled with the weapon types make this a fun, yet different FPS experience. I played the first one but it didn’t do much for me. Even though I’m stuck on CoD5 right now, I plan to play through as much CoJ as possible. You get to choose between two characters, each with different abilities. Lassos are the new (old) grappling hooks!

Speaking of CoD5, after downloading Map Pack 3 and finding the iPhone companion app, I’ve been sucked back in. The XP system and weapon variety is really fun, and the maps themselves are well done. My goal is to prestige at least once. I never did in CoD4.

• Headed out to QuakeCon. Stay tuned! #
• About to see Rage public demo. Impressions after. #

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Today at QuakeCon I got to watch the public gameplay demonstration of Rage. There wasn’t too much there, but from what I saw this is what I left feeling like:

It looked like things that have been done before by many other different games. Not bad since that means a lot of gameplay ideas, but not revolutionary. Wolf, Doom, Quake – all revolutionary. It has an open world with areas for FPS gameplay, racing with upgradeable videos, and survival-style game modes. Again, nothing here jumped at me like the Brink video footage did. I like how people cheer at things that have been done many years before. That’s geek elitism for you.

The graphics looked great though. And the demo was apparently running on hardware that wasn’t top-of-the-line, and is to be accessible on many hardware configurations. This I know id is capable of.

What was interesting about the whole thing was during the Q&A. When asked about multiplayer, Tim advised they have nothing to share about multiplayer, that they are focusing on the singleplayer experience. I mean, there has to be multiplayer here, but it might not be the traditional revolutionary id multiplayer.

Videos were removed from YouTube, so these are brought to you by Metacafe.

I shot the following videos today at QuakeCon. They go over some of the character customization options, and give a good look at the art style.

The following video goes over the ideas behind character customization in Brink:

And here is a look at the customization tool:

Part two following soon.

Afterwards, we were told to put away our cameras for the gameplay. But like mentioned in the previous post, it was awesome.