Halo Apathy

Over the last decade of gaming, probably the biggest hole in my gaming knowledge and experience is the Halo series. Not to say that I have zero experience with the series: I’ve regularly heard a lot of Halo discussion on the podcasts I listen to, and have played some Halo 1 multiplayer, Halo 2 single player and Halo 3: ODST co-op and online multiplayer. But each time I’ve played a Halo game, I’ve walked away with a general sense of apathy.

The Top 5 Most Viewed In Third Person Posts of All-Time

Because I write In Third Person solely as a personal outlet of gaming nerdiness, I don’t pay much attention to my analytics. Even if no one in the world were to ever see this blog, I would continue writing in it anyway, just to get these gaming-related thoughts out of my head and onto something a bit more tangible. Well, as tangible as the Internet can be. If you or anyone else decides they want to read my musings, power to you.

And read my musings you have. Sure, my traffic may not rival the Craigslist posting your mom put up to promote your family garage sale, but there are a consistent number of people that frequent my site, according to my numbers. Thank you to everyone that has ever read my blog and a special thanks to everyone who checks in regularly.

Whether you’re a regular reader or just found my blog on a whim, I’m going to present to you the five most popular posts on my site. I was actually kind of surprised by the results. Click through to find out what the hottest content is on In Third Person.

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Pick Up Post: Gameloft Dollarama and an iPad Adventure

I have to hand it to Gameloft and their iDevice pricing strategy. Their aggressive $1 sales have won a lot of good will with me, which I have returned by buying almost a dozen of their games. I have generally found their games to be of relatively good quality for mobile, and their games on sale for $1 are much more in-depth and content-rich than the majority of $1 games available on iTunes.

Hit the break to see what two Gameloft games (and one non-Gameloft adventure) I just picked up. From what I know about these three games, they’re all good buys at regular price, but really are a steal at their sale price.

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I Join The Mile High Club

For a game series I keep saying I have no interest in playing, I’ve done a terrible job of avoiding them. During a rash of cheap game buying, I ended up picking up the every Call of Duty game on the XBOX 360 that I didn’t already own (which was everything but Modern Warfare 2). My first experience was Modern Warfare 2, which has made enough of an impact on me to try out the rest of the series.

It just turns out that I’m working backwards from Modern Warfare 2. I felt that World at War at its best was pretty good, but it oftentimes felt like a knockoff of Modern Warfare 2 and at its worst, infuriated me to the point that I don’t want to play it ever again. I know that World at War was made by the Call of Duty “B-team”, so I was looking forward to playing the Infinity Ward game that first took the world by storm.

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Metacritic and My Video Game Collection

Hate it or love it, review aggregators are becoming an increasingly important service for consumers of just about anything. In the video game space, people like them because it gives them a quick and quantifiable way of knowing what games are good and what games suck. The counterpoint to those people are those who don’t feel that aggregates tell the whole story and put an emphasis on a number rather than the context from which that number is derived from.

I’m not here to choose sides. Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to take my XBOX 360 and Wii game collection, full retail games only, compile all of their Metacritic scores and see what the results say about my game stash. I must preface that this is far from scientific and that my collection has changed since I compiled these numbers.

With that said, lets hit the results.

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Call of Duty: World at War Pushes Me to the Brink

Call of Duty: World at War was a game that, even after Modern Warfare 2 blew my mind, I had no interest in going back for. It had two major hurdles: it was a World War II shooter and it was made by Treyarch, whom I’ve been lead to believe made the “not-so-good” Call of Duty games.

Well, I decided to give World at War a shot when I saw it on sale at a price I couldn’t refuse. Did it earn a Purple Heart, or make me wish I was killed in action? After finishing the solo campaign, I would say a little from column A, a little from column B.

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How I Left Left 4 Dead 2…4 Dead

Last time I wrote about Left 4 Dead 2, I had some very nice things to say about it. Since then, I’ve played it only once or twice. While I still stand by the belief that Left 4 Dead 2 is a good game, I don’t really have any motivation to go back any time soon.

Two things happened that made me fall off the Left 4 Dead 2 hype train: I’ve grown tired of the L4D formula and I’ve gotten a number of other games that have offered a fresher experience to me.

When the original Left 4 Dead came out, I had never played anything like it before. My brother played the hell out of that game. Those characters, special infected and scenarios became iconic. Eventually, I grew tired of it and was excited to see what Left 4 Dead 2 had to offer. While Left 4 Dead 2 does add a lot to spice things up, it’s still Left 4 Dead at it’s core, which I’m pretty much done with at this point.

The other reason I dropped it relatively quickly is that it came out around the time I got a bunch of games that were fresh experiences to me. I tore through Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands and Liberty City Stories, and still have a long way to go in Modern Warfare 2. And now I’m at a point where I’m currently playing other stuff and can’t really fit Left 4 Dead 2 back in the queue.

If you’re still enjoying the zombie apocalypse, power to you. For now, I’ll spend my gaming time elsewhere.

Make It A Blockbuster Night

Blockbuster has had it rough over the last few years. With multiple threats coming from piracy, DVD mailing services like Netflix and direct download options from sources such as iTunes, Things have been so bad, that I’ve seen a number of Blockbuster stores go out of business in and around my area.

I’m not one to rent stuff, but I have been raiding as many Blockbuster stores as I can of late, because they’ve been a great place to buy cheap games. A combination of closing sales as well as clearance deals have helped me flesh out my catalogue. I jumped in on most of these sales fairly late, so I wasn’t able to score games like Modern Warfare 1 for $10 (which I heard a bunch of people did get), but I did get some good stuff (and some not-so-great freebies).

Hit the break to find out what I’ve gotten so far.

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The Perfect Dark You’ve Always Dreamed Of*

I have made it clear that I love the original Perfect Dark and I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. For its time, Perfect Dark had no equal on console, not even Goldeneye (yeah, I said it). Not to say that the experience was perfect, because it definitely wasn’t. Most of the game’s problems came from the fact that it was just a bit ahead of its time. The Nintendo 64 could barely run this game, even with the memory expansion plugged into your console.

For years, I wished that this game would get a fair shake. It never got the love that Goldeneye did, even though Perfect Dark is arguably better. I also wished for a day where the game wasn’t bound by the technical limitations brought forth by the Nintendo 64.

Well, my friends, that day has arrived.

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Mapathy is an Expensive Condition to Cure

For those of you playing Modern Warfare 2 and are looking for some new maps to play on, Infinity Ward supposedly has the cure for you. The Modern Warfare 2 “Stimulus Package” contains 5 maps, two remakes from Modern Warfare 1 and three brand new ones.

I was hyped to get new maps for this game, and until I heard the price, this seemed like a no-brainer to me. But dude, 1200 Microsoft Points for 5 maps? Two of which aren’t even new?

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