Mondaily Update

I've got a
Nokia Lumia 710

This weekend was a busy one, and most of Sunday was taken up with my brothers birthday. I did manage to squeeze in a lot of gaming in the time I had. I even managed to find 30 minutes of time at the birthday celebrations making a little bit of headway in iStunt 2 on my Windows Phone. I'm not too fond of the game, seeing as I'm already over the main gameplay gimmick before I've even completed the first world. This is compounded by the two achievements for collecting all the stars in 1 and 2 worlds, but I'm hoping that if I manage to eventually work my way through the first two worlds with all the starts then I can just bomb through the rest of it and be done. That's wishful thinking for the foreseeable future though, as progress is intermittent and slow.

I managed to finish up Renegade Ops not long after writing about it in the last Fridaily Update found here. Alien rank ended up not being too hard with the right level and change in tactics. I had Armand leveled up to max with all my upgrades in the Tactics category maximising my shield usage. Level 3 ended up being the easiest if you manage to hit the shield every time one of the tanks or SAM sites try to shoot you. The mini-bosses throughout the level can be beaten pretty easily just by driving around them in circles while shooting. That puts a lid on Renegade Ops and be sure to check back tomorrow for the review.

Amy is enjoyable for the first three levels, then descends into frustration.

After beating Renegade Ops I decided to give Amy a whirl. I'd heard a lot of bad things about it but found it to be surprisingly OK.... in the first 3 or 4 levels. Amy can be super annoying throughout the game, running off all the time if you forget to tell her to stay put. You'd think a little girl trying to make it through a world with all these infected-zombie things would stay close to the adult trying to help and protect her. The last 2 levels are a nightmare and pushed the boundaries of my patience. In the second last level they decide to go stealth for the first half and if you get seen it's restart at the last checkpoint, which the game isn't so liberal about handing out. Combined with Amy's penchant for running off and you're fast reaching my frustration limits. Amy turned out to be a short romp, which felt unfinished and the story is left without any conclusion. I think they were planning on making another, but with the way this has turned out I doubt they will. I'll have a review on Thursday.

Red Dead Redemption is an amazing game. One of the best I've played on my Xbox 360.

After beating Amy I decided to revisit Red Dead Redemption. I would say that Red Dead Redemption is one of my favourite games, if not the favourite, I've ever played on my 360. I love the western setting, the atmosphere is amazing. The gameplay is tight and varied, I think I must have played close to 100 hours just in single player exploring and hunting. This is one of the only games I've spent time in just enjoying the atmosphere instead of pushing for the next objective. I've done absolutely everything in single player, so this weekend I revisited the multiplayer side.

Can't we all just get along?

Red Dead Redemption multiplayer is a different experience than that of single player, due to the insistence of everybody playing to just randomly kill everyone and everything in free-roam, instead of playing some death match, can be frustrating. Spawning into any multiplayer game only to be gunned down seconds later is frustrating at the best of times, but when it's completely pointless and it seems the only real reason is to troll people it gets plain annoying. Especially because when you die you drop out of any menu you were in, even if you were trying to jump to an actual game mode, to respawn. It makes it a race against the clock, to try and get to where you want to go before someone decides you deserve a bullet. You don't get anything from killing in free roam, why not play Deathmatch? Team Deathmatch? Or any of the other multiple multiplayer modes that reward you with XP and unlockables for doing what you are doing for nothing in Free Roam.

That's what you get for looking in them there menus!

I'm just trying to enter Co-op Mode,
leave me alone!

The last thing I've got to do in Red Dead is complete the Advanced Coop Missions with a Gold Medal
ranking. I could have sworn I'd already done so, but it never unlocked and I wasn't keeping track properly. Maybe an update or patch wiped my progress? Since then I've kept track and every time I've gold medaled a stage I've written it down. I'm down to one last mission, and if it doesn't unlock I'll be furious. This mode is probably my favourite out of all the multiplayer, which sucks because it seems like I'm in the minority. Either most people have moved on from this game or everyone just wants to run around killing for no reason in Free Roam. Most of the times I've tried to play barely anyone is on, and whoever is on always seems to be impatient and bad at the game. A lot of the Coop Missions require 3 or 4 people to stand a good chance of beating it. It can be done with 2 if you're both on point and really work together, but whenever I pair up with someone they don't want to wait around for another person and they don't want to work together so we end up dead within minutes. It's annoying and factor in the fact that people like or dislike certain missions and flat out refuse to play the ones they don't like and I have one mission left which just may be one they refuse to play and it's almost impossible to get the one you want to play. I hope I complete this someday soon, as I love the game, but relying on selfish randoms to get your last mission done is akin to pissing into the wind.

This updates getting rather long, but I've got one more game to touch on. I started playing through Joy Ride Turbo yesterday. It seems rather short and I have already placed 1st in all the races available. All that's left to do is grind for a bunch of coins and collect all the upgrades and trophies scattered across the freeroam/stunt park sections of the game. I'll write a bit more about Joy Ride Turbo next time because this is getting long.

Renegade Ops review coming tomorrow, check back for that. Leave a comment below and I'll see you Wednesday with another update!