Wow, I’ve been playing some serious variety during the last week:

I got into GTA San Andreas Multiplayer, a mod created for the PC version that turns SA into a multiplayer game (SA:MP as it’s known in the community). After listening to last weeks 1UP Yours podcast (podtrac beware!), Shawn Elliott’s recommendation to check it out led me to do just that. SA:MP is the most impressive 3rd-party mod I’ve ever seen. It’s got pretty impressive network performance, on nearly every server I joined. You can get anywhere up to 200 people in a game at once. During my hundreds of hours with the past GTA titles, I’ve always wondered what this looks like… now I know. And just like any typical online PC game, there are hundreds of servers run by admins with a pool of thousands of players at any given time. Servers contain an enormous range of game types, including deathmatch, racing, stunts, minigames, and the most ridiculous: role playing. People run entire RPG servers, and they’re some of the most popular ones. The admins are the cops, people role play taxi drivers, prostitutes, ANYTHING. Pretty insane. Rockstar could definitely learn something from what’s going on with SA:MP. Just go watch some Youtube clips of gameplay to get a good picture of what this is all about.

After my previous post, I was inspired to reinstall the original Fallout. Not much to be said here, as I’m only about an hour in. I’ve recruited Dogmeat to hang out with me and completed a few minor quests in Shady Sands and Junktown.

Burnout Paradise has been in my 360 for over a week now (except for a brief stint with Bully: Scholarship edition, which I’ll get to in a minute). This game has so much potential it’s ridiculous. With Criterion’s upcoming updates, this game seriously will become the “driving MMO.” I mean, if they added a couple more islands, Crash mode, more cars, bikes and planes, new game types, car customization, this game would be the only place you need to go to get an arcade-style driving experience. Period. There’d still be room for the technical sim driving games like Forza and Gran Turismo, but the arcade driving game market would belong to Criterion. They’ll become the Blizzard of online racing.

Now Bully is a game I need to spend some quality time with. I only played an hour or so into it, but I feel like I want to give it a real commitment this weekend. I hadn’t played anything by Rockstar since San Andreas, and the maturation of their open-world game design from that to Bully is incredible. Bodes well for GTA IV next week.

Wow, I played almost no games through the end of last week. I think I turned on Crackdown on Thursday or Friday, and Corey and I played for a few minutes, but that’s it.

Over the weekend, however, I played a decent amount of stuff. Friday I installed Diablo II and have already finished the first act. Until I started playing it again, I didn’t realize how much I really did play this game back in the day. Grinding through the first few areas took me back: killing Blood Raven, rescuing Deckard Cain, plowing through some catacombs owning skeletons. Aside from the old-school isometric view and spritish graphics, it still holds up amazingly well. Totally worth getting back into, or getting into for the first time if you’ve never played it before.

I’ve now completed 35 of the puzzles in Layton as of last night. I’m lovin’ puzzle after puzzle, with the exception of a handful I’ve run across. I think I’ve determined that my real beef with some of the puzzles is the way that the logic questions are worded. In several of the 40 or so puzzles I’ve discovered, the wording of the question doesn’t describe in enough detail the boundaries inside which you must search for an answer… that is, the rules aren’t well enough defined. I don’t know if this is just poor design, poor translation, or maybe both, but there have been a couple puzzles with appallingly bad questions, forcing me to waste my hint dollars hunting for answers.

I have a tendency to be late to the party with lots of games, too. I finally picked up both Burnout Paradise and Mass Effect from my brother to check out. I popped in Burnout and played for about half an hour yesterday. I’ve read plenty of contentious articles online regarding the open-world format of Paradise. Some folks knocked the openness, claiming they didn’t like not being able to instantly jump back to the start of an event. I can get behind this opinion in certain cases, like someone who’s got 1 event left to complete and has to constantly drive back to the beginning to retry. That would be Frustration City. The omission of the proper Crash mode from previous titles is another divisive issue. Though Criterion replaced it with “Showtime” mode, which I also enjoy, the removal of full-blown puzzley Crash mode is something of a disappointment. On the other side of the fence, these changes to the series (the openness and the new modes) can be an innovative and interesting addition. For instance, I love the ability to define my own route to the finish line of a race. As someone who loves maps (and, by extension, memorizing open-world, in-game maps), taking my own route to the end is exciting and fun. It would add a whole other level of excitement if done during online play. And when you factor in your eventual knowledge of the numerous shortcuts, racing would become even more fun. I also think Road Rage mode is much better suited for the open environment. Returning to the garage for a repair allowed me to rack up 85 takedowns in a single Road Rage event.

I’m looking forward to spending more time in Paradise City, but Mass Effect may call me away later in the week for my epic space journey.