It's Like Culture Shock, But From Games

I bought the system, along with The Orange Box and Bioshock, which came with a free copy of The Darkness. So being that The Orange Box has 5 games in it, I walked out of the store with 7 games for the price of 2. Sweetness! I then got home and realized that every last one of those 7 games were first person shooters. Funny thing, apart from a couple of James Bond games, I have never really owned any shooter games, mainly because they scare the shit out of me.

First, I played a little bit of Half-Life 2 (a game in The Orange Box). The graphics are amazing in this game! I'm in this city and there's this blue tower that goes up above the clouds, and I zoom in to see that panels of the tower are moving and there are birds flying around it... it looks like I'm watching a real life video of birds flying around a tower. I got a little freaked out by the monsters and so I decided to try another game in The Orange Box called Portal.

Portal is a very fun, puzzle-game. It's a shooter-styled game, but your only weapon creates harmless portals, and the only enemies are androids that sit in one stationary position, so it's not like you could turn around to some scary ass half-dead guy running at you with a knife. There was a funny computerized voice in the game that would tell you about the levels. The only creepy part of the game was towards the end when you were done with the tests and you were trying to escape the building... the computerized voice was eerie with the music. I beat Portal, and now have a goal to get all of the achievements.

That's another super cool thing about Xbox 360 - you create a profile and every game you play there are these things called "achievements" which are tiny goals that you get little badges for. For example, while playing Half-life there's one achievement that you get for obtaining the crowbar - it happens automatically in the story, but they're tiny goals like that, some of which are tedious like Portal's "destroy all 35 video cameras throughout all levels" or they can be fun challenges like Bioshock's "electrocute an enemy who's standing in water." Your profile tracks all of your achievements in one big list for all the games, they're fun side goals.

I started playing Bioshock today, and my god that's a creepy game, but it's very fun. I have only played it for about a half hour, and I already have 4 weapons. The graphics are also amazing in this game, along with a storyline that's extremely intersting - your plan crashes and you find a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean and inside there is a water craft that takes you to an underground city created by a man who wanted to experiment with science without all the hassles of laws, but things went wrong and now these scientific and altered freaks rebelled and you have to help the "good citizens" that remain. I'm sure there's more to it, but so far that's what I've uncovered, lol.

THis is probably a boring blog for most of you, but of all the systems I've owned - which include a lot of systems - I have never had so much fun and been so awed by the graphics in EVERY game within the first day as I have been with the Xbox 360 - I highly recommend it. I can't wait to get an rpg or a puzzle game for it.

Here's a video trailer for Bioshock depicting the city and one of the worst enemies in the game - The Little Sister and The Big Daddy, a small but evil child who is protected by a huge tank of a beast. It also shows how insanely imaginative the weapons are.

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