Speaking of Burnout Paradise, they just announced that the Party Pack DLC (the first pack you’ll have to pay for) will be released in a couple weeks. I don’t really care about the stuff in that one, but it will be accompanied by yet another free update to the game. This free update will include a bunch of different tweaks, including the ability to restart events. When it comes to supporting your game and listening to your fans, nobody does it better than Criterion right now. I think that Burnout Paradise is the best racing game this generation simply for the amount of support it has gotten after it hit retail.

It never bothered me in Fable (Possibly also because I can just sit and listen to the Fable music, where I didn’t like the Mass Effect music as much). But I do think some of the bugs in Fable were worse. For me though, the whole picture of the game was better with F2, since I couldn’t even maintain my interest in Mass Effect until nearly the end of the game.

I will say, I couldn’t stand Oblivion, at all. Too open, and too boring for me. The main quest line was completely dull, and I really felt far too restricted by the rules of the game. It annoys me when they include an omnipotent law system. You even look at a person wrong in the game (while in a secluded forest on a private island), and here come the guards.

I like Fallout 3 a lot more in comparison. The setting is definitely grim and dark, which sets some people off. But I think it’s a lot of fun. The story seems cool. The skill system is definitely much improved from Oblivion. Perks were a great addition.

I also agree with you that Burnout Paradise is a fantastic game. I especially loved the online play capabilities, even though I rarely got to do more than a couple 2 player games. Still, it was fun trying to top random speed records and such while going through the city.

I’ve gotten so many hundreds of hours out of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. Probably more than any other game this generation, actually. So that’s mostly why they sit at top. Their online multiplayer is virtually flawless. So the stories and single player experiences are really added bonuses.

It sounds like we are flip-flopped in our opinions of Fable 2 and Mass Effect. I have to call you out on the load times thing though. Fable 2’s load times aren’t much better than Mass Effect’s load times, and they seem to happen a bit more frequently to me (although it has been a while since I’ve played ME, so I’d have to do a side by side comparison to be sure). I actually liked the elevators as it kept you in the game environment, and some of the conversations were fun. The Citadel was the only place that got a little overboard with elevators. It seemed like other locations only had a couple elevators, if any at all.

I also thought that, even though a large portion of the side quests in Mass Effect were cookie-cutter, there were still several unique missions in there as well. There are even several side quests that only show up based on your character’s background (ie. being from Earth gets you a few different quests than being from space or the colonies). Though I think the difference between us is that I still enjoyed all the cookie-cutter side missions as well.

Anyway, I just had a really great time with the game, and I loved the universe they set up there (seriously, go through all the codex entries sometime). I also had a great time with Fable 2, just not quite as much by a slim margin.

Talking about these two games makes me want to pick up another RPG to play. If Fallout 3 goes on sale for $40 at Target again, I might just have to pick it up. Oblivion has been tempting me with its $25 price tag on the used game shelf at GameStop, but there’s something that’s holding me back from picking it up.

And now back to my top five 360 games (that I’ve played)….maybe I should write an article on them sometime….

1. Mass Effect
2. Burnout Paradise
3. Assassin’s Creed
4. The Orange Box (it’s hard to beat the Half-Life/Portal/Team Fortress 2 combo)
5. Fable 2

Honorable Mention: Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Civilization Revolution

I do have Bioshock now, but I haven’t played very much of it yet. I’m sure it’ll land high on my list.

I really hope the sequel makes huge strides. But I would compare the level of Mass Effect to something more like Fable (With much better graphics) than Fable II.

Great ending to Mass Effect, overall a blah game for me. Great overall story for Fable II (Especially the beginning, but also at the end), with a solid but flawed game. Neither will finish in my Top 5 360 games. Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Halo 3 is the top 3, and there are several more right there near the top. I’d say that Orange Box would probably be there at #4 with Portal and Team Fortress 2 (Not a big Half Life fan, actually). Beyond that, it may be Gears or Gears 2 (Haven’t even started into the Gears 2 story, as I didn’t want to do it until I could do it with co-op.

Isn’t it great that we can even have a problem squeezing in games into our top 5? :)

The new weapons are also fun. Hal’s Rifle is a Fable-ized version of an assault rifle from Halo, and there’s a cool mage’s sceptre as well. There isn’t a staggering amount of new stuff, but I think they went for quality over quantity for the DLC.

Mass Effect shares a similarity with the recent Prince of Persia game here in that the story becomes much deeper through optional conversations. There is a TON of stuff in Mass Effect that you will miss if you don’t talk to the crew in between missions. I also felt that the “big decision” moments in Mass Effect were pulled off much better than what Fable 2 did. I actually had to sit and think about the impact they would have on my game.

Mass Effect gets the edge for me over Fable 2, but I really loved both games (as the time I spent playing them will attest). I’m not sure what my hour count for Fable 2 is (probably somewhere close to 30 hours), but if I remember correctly, I have put well over 70 hours into Mass Effect.

Here’s hoping both games get stellar sequels. :D

17 Coats,
21 hats,
13 tops,
8 gloves,
19 pants,
16 shoes,
4 masks

May seem like a lot, until you realize that there are two sexes in the game, and clothing for each of them.

The other annoyance came from the fact that you very rarely ever really needed to change weapons, so ~70% of them were completely useless. I don’t think I changed weapons amongst a specific type more than once or twice in the game.

But yeah, I definitely think the game has a huge number of improvements that could put it in a whole new world.

Mass Effect is my favorite 360 game, and I’ll probably get around to reviewing it at some point. I’ve played completely through it twice, and I have another playthrough that I left in progress a while back. I’ve had so many other games to play lately that I haven’t gotten back to it. Mass Effect definitely doesn’t lack in the “epic ending” category.

I think Mass Effect spoiled me.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved getting back into Albion especially since it brought back fond memories of Fable 1. My issues probably stem from how I got into RPGs. In middle school I got into that magical game D&D, that gave me the best of both worlds, the quasi illusion that I could try to do everything (as proved by my DM’s headaches and swearing) while always having a compelling, interesting, dynamic main quest point that we were forced down even if we had to be tricked there. It’s the same reason I could never get into Oblivion, too much development focus on the open endedness without a great story compelling you forward. Bioware, with games like KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect gave a great story that in the open endedness in how you could approach it gave that great feeling of freedom within the main plot without taking away from the side-quests.

Enough of my rambling and back to the game at hand. I enjoyed it for what it was but it still had too many annoying flaws and not enough pro’s to overlook them. The three paths were so limited that there wasn’t really specialization by the end, just what you choose to use. The story was good but not great, and most aspects of the game became repetitively annoying very fast. I liked the game but I don’t think it felt like a full game to me with the shortness of the main story but I’m probably just overcritical of RPG’s. Now I’m going to get back to my 6th time through Mass Effect, I feel like being wow’d.

I kind of see your point about the variety in the clothing, but then again I had well over a hundred different pieces of clothing by the end of the game. Add in several dozen different dyes for new color choices and you get a fair amount of variety. I also found out late in my second playthrough that some of the coats and shirts could be toggled between an “open” and “closed” state. Running around with the Ranger coat’s hood over my head was pretty cool.

If Lionhead was able to make this many improvements between the first and second game, I hope they can continue to improve it for the inevitable Fable 3.

Ultimately for me, I loved the story, but was a bit disappointed by a few things. The outfits weren’t varied enough, the weapons weren’t varied enough, the one-button combat was quite cool, but when everything else lacks varience, this felt a bit flat too. Also, a lot of the issues with people following you around, getting you stuck in your house because they crowd your doors, etc were quite annoying.

Possibly my biggest disappointment was that the co-op really sucks in this game. I’m a huge fan of the idea that co-op makes any game better. Now I always feel like I have to preface that with “if it’s done right”. Overall, it was a sloppy implementation in this case, and it really killed it quickly for me.

I don’t think I died more than once or twice the whole game. So I didn’t find it difficult at all, but it still managed to keep me interested. Ultimately, it was one of my favorite games of the year. But I definitely think there were some better choices out there.