Resolution 2013: Play Cheap (but good) Games

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I loaded up on titles from the bargain bin at Gamestop, and had horrifying good luck. Now I'm screwed, because I not only bought the holiday glut of Big New Games, but now I have a ton of overlooked and underloved games as well. I need to take a week off of work just to wade through a few of them.
Now I won't presume to tell you what to buy...if you absolutely have to have the latest hot titles, who am I to talk you out of dropping sixty bucks? But I'm here to testify, there are a lot of good games that never got the credit they deserve, and they are all less than twenty bucks these days.

He plays D&D, too.

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is my dark horse darling ju dour. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of Vin Diesel, and especially his Riddick movies, so I was really worried about even trying this. Movie tie-ins are almost axiomatically shitty, but this poor bastard was languishing in the remaindered rack for only eight bucks, so I figured it was worth a gamble.
Good move, that. The game play is tight, the stealth mechanics are solid, and you by God feel like Riddick when you play this game, sneaking around, dropping down on fools, and generally just kicking ass. Vin Diesel provides the voice talent, and that really adds some gravelly icing to the surprisingly good game-play cake. Sure, it can be over the top, and Riddick's surly baddassery gets a little laughable at times, but those are nitpicking complaints.



Thanks, IGN. I heart your mom.

Some game series are full of hard-core fans, and when you get hard-core fans, you always end up with a black sheep. An outcast. Unloved, just waiting for its chance to shine. So it is with the oft-overlooked Halo title, ODST.  Personally, I like Spartans just as much as the next guy. Or girl. But I've always had a soft spot for the ODST Helljumpers. For the uninitiated, Spartans are surgically enhanced super-soldier, huge badasses in the ultimate kung-fu space death armor. But the ODST are their gritty little brothers, regular guys with bad ass attitudes that take the fight to the enemy without high-tech enhancements. They drop into battle via one-man orbital drop pods, in a blatant rip from Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the awesome book, not the campy movie), and pretty much kick ass like if John Wayne starred in a Quentin Tarantino movie. And Nathan Fillion does voice work for a lead character (and serves as the character model, so it even looks like Mal Reynolds. *sigh*). Halo-roids got all butt-hurt about this one, mainly because there was no Master Chief, and it felt like a Halo 3 DLC pack rather than a stand-alone game. Fair enough. Regardless, it plays well, the story is okay (barring the weird side-story you pick up with comm messages) and you get to kill Covenant with the SMG a lot. One quirk that I truly did hate is the city of New Mombasa, Kenya. The waypoints are remarkably confusing, and you can spend a lot of time wandering around in circles, wondering where your next objective is. Try it in campaign co-op with a friend, it's cheap enough to buy two copies and still be ahead of the game.

Alright, my back hurts and we just opened the champagne (sans Dick Clark, even though he was kind of a creepy lich in his latter days). I want to go out on a limb and find some deep dirt, something most of you probably haven't even heard of: Section 8 Prejudice. It's on Xbox Live for download, cheap. Last I checked, we're talking fifteen bucks. For that price, you get a fun powered armor vs. bad guys game, a lame but playable campaign, a decent competitive mode, and a great horde-style survival mode. Fifteen bucks. Granted, nobody much is playing anymore, but you can fill in with bots. The whole gimmick of the game is this badass powered armor, and you drop in from high-altitude, near-orbit. You pick your drop zone and the animations coming in are wicked cool...then, when you land on/near an enemy and pick 'em off, it's a fine moment indeed. Controlling command posts allows you to build defenses, such as anti-air guns. That pretty much denies the enemy from being able to drop within their radius of fire. Cool strategy. Getting kills gets you points that you can use to air-drop turrets, mech armor, vehicles and other cool stuff. The game really shines with the random objectives that pop up in the middle of a match for big points: protect / kill the HVT, escort / destroy the convoy, recover / defend the junk, or (my favorite) wipe out the whole other team for big points. The 'victim' team has to avoid getting killed for two minutes, while the 'stalker' team tries to wipe them out in that same allotted time. Big fun, cheap price. This is probably the highest value of any of the games I've listed. You get a lot of shit for your fifteen bucks.

Like I said, it's after midnight, so happy New Years, and any of you Mayans out there can kiss my ass. It's 2013, despite three individual doomsday predictions in 2012 alone. Doomsayers be damned, ya'll go have fun with cheap games.