Gears of War: RAAM Killer

The Xbox 360 news is flowin' and I have a stack of stories to publish but I really just want to crow about my Gears of War achievements for this week.

Several weeks ago, Taylor blogged about his Top 10 Xbox 360 Achievements. I don't have anything close to 10 achievements that I find especially noteworthy, just the satisfaction of defeating General RAAM, the end boss of Gears of War on Insane difficulty.

Opinions differ on how difficult it is to beat Insane General RAAM. To put things in perspective, it only took me one or two tries on the two lesser difficulty levels (Casual & Hardcore) to best RAAM. The battle was more of a polite ritual. Truth be told, getting through the various stages on Hardcore was far more challenging than fighting the end boss. And it shouldn't be this way! C'mon, it's the End Boss, the Big Cheese. RAAM crumpled after little more than a handful of shotgun blasts to his ugly mug.

On Insane, my friend and I probably clocked in about twenty attempts, amounting to 60-80 minutes of play time. We cried and cursed. There was much throwing up of our hands and sighing. Then we cursed some more. But we finally pulled through it.

How did we do it? To be frank, I don't think our method can be duplicated with any rate of success. It was just a lot of luck and persistence that got us through. I armed myself with a sniper rifle and shotty, while my friend passed off the shotgun for his trusty Lancer. Upon arrival at the grand showdown, we simply parked our asses at the first block of cover and began pelting away at RAAM's face with sniper fire. As he got closer, we emptied out our supply of grenades on him, to no avail really, since he was protected by the Kryll most of the way.

Then the real fun began. RAAM got to within kissing range and we simply hid. Yes, we stayed cowering behind our cover, which suddenly felt way too small for two fully-armoured manly-men marines. Oh, we also did something else. Blindfire. We blind-fired like there was no tomorrow. Me with the shotgun, and my friend with his Lancer. It was a fantastic game of cat and mouse as RAAM circled around our cover, we quickly hopped over and hunkered back down on the other side. Then we waited for him to point his mottled ol' finger, which signaled the flight of his Kryll entourage, and we unloaded on him. Repeat and rinse. Eventually, the crazy general gave up the ghost and mercifully allowed us to finish our grueling trek through the Insane campaign.

Is this best way to tackle RAAM? Probably not. He would foil our little dance around cover countless times, shooting us while we were halfway over or simply just getting a good angle on us and blowing us away even while we thought we were safely behind cover. Other times, I'd try to cheat and walk around our block of salvation and be torn to bits by the swarm of Kryll. I can't imagine how hard it would be to battle him solo, with the brain-dead AI-controlled Dom watching my back. Uggh.

Well, I just wanted to share that scintillating story with you. I really enjoy the Achievements system for the 360 and beating Gears of War on Insane is the first of my achievements that I am truly proud of.

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Gears of War Insanity

Last night Heero and I finally took the plunge and started a new co-op campaign on Insane difficulty. We managed to slog through the first two Acts before calling it a night.

Here's what I think about Insane difficulty: it's not that bad.

I do feel it is still incredibly challenging. Every single firefight becomes an exercise in maximum intensity, which is makes the game very thrilling to play. I still think Insane difficulty has been hyped up by the gaming critics more than it needed to be. If you've played through on Hardcore, then you are very well-prepared to face the challenges that await in Insane. The transition is much smoother than the shell shock of moving from Casual to Hardcore.

To not sound overly confident, I do realize that I still have to fight through Act 3 and deal with those wretched Lambant Wretches and that infuriating cart ride through the death tunnels. That's the one where you get exploding wretches falling into your ride. Joy. Still, I've learned some basic gameplay principles that should help out anyone thinking of trying their skills on Insane:

• Patience & Positioning: On the lower difficulty settings you really could get by most fights by parking yourself behind one wall and stopping & popping form the same wall until everything was dead. Not so on Insane. Besides having the patience to fully heal when absorbing fire from multiple sources, you really do need to master movement from cover to cover and also the art of disengaging from cover effectively to deal with grubs that rush at you with the shotgun. But above all else, it's having great patience and discipline, so you can effectivley squeeze off short rounds of fire before ducking back down for cover.
• It's the bee's knees: Enemies can take an enormous amount of punishment. You'll find yourself scavenging for ammo like a madman sometimes. Shooting out the knees of your foes is a great way to conserve ammo on your Lancer or shotgun. Once they're out of commission, saunter over for a quick coup de grace curb stomp or switch to your handgun and pump that bent over sucker full of executioner's lead.
• Active Reload: Master it. 'Nuff said.
  

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Crack of Dawn

I suppose it doesn't bode well for new blog when half the entries posted have been about one game. Does it matter that the game happens to be Crackdown, one of my most anticipated titles of '07? Truth be told, my knowledge of this game, along with Gears of War, played a large role in locking down my decision to buy a 360 in the first place. I've been enamoured with anti-social "sandbox" games since the early sprite-based incarnations of Grand Theft Auto. Back when I was enrolled in my easy-as-pie Multimedia Studies program, I even wrote a treatment for a sandbox-styled game for my Interaction Design class (don't worry, it's not nearly as Digipen-cool as it sounds). It was a pretty sweet concept. My gameplay document wasn't terribly fleshed out, but the potential was there. Think game journalism a la Dead Rising, mixed with GTA and Bad Day L.A. sans gang-banging, mass murder and ho-slapping.

But I digress. So there I was, suckered into playing another late weeknight session of Rainbow Six: Vegas. I had finally passed that maddening sequence in the slipway dam; you know, the one involving Jung strutting his computer hacking skills in the shed while half the world's terrorist population descends upon you. I must have played that section 20 times. It took my first attempt to realize Jung gets flanked by 2 sneaky enemies in a garage and the next 19 tries to get a lucky break and not: a) catch an errant grenade, b) not have Michael die on me too early, c) not have Jung catch an errant grenade or bullet or d) all of the frickin' above.

So I finally passed that bloody sequence. I was too relieved and exhausted to celebrate when I saw the magical "Saving Progress" notification on my screen. Thankfully, for the next twenty minutes it was a smooth succession of checkpoint completions, not dieing again until later in the scientist-rescue portion of the mission.

I figured it was time to stop. I had enjoyed a couple beers with a friend earlier and the buzz was still lingering, making me rather sleepy. I checked the clock and saw that it was already 1:35am. Wait a minute, doesn't the Crackdown demo drop at 2:00am? Indeed.

By 2:05, I had the demo streaming down the pipes and crawled into bed, happily thinking about the game and secure in the knowledge it would be waiting for me when I awoke. Waking up today was a bit like waking up on Christmas morning. Bleary-eyed but excited, I fired up the Box and there it was, my precious, my Crackdown demo. It was a hefty file, weighing in at 1.24GB. I was surprised it finished downloading overnight. The Marketplace servers will probably get slammed later this afternoon when all the kiddies get home from school. Meanwhile I'll be sitting pretty enjoying the game. Chawesome...

I played the demo for all of 5 minutes. I already like the feel of controlling your Agent and the graphics, while terribly cartoonish, are very striking and unique. I'm not sure I liked the feel of the driving. I hopped into a squad car and was turned off by the camera control and sluggish turning. Here's hoping that was only characteristic of the particular vehicle I was driving. Another sticking point of course was the total lack of story and cinematics. Yes, watching an introductory gameplay montage is cool but would it have killed Real Time Worlds to add that final bit of polish to their game? Hopefully they did for the final product.

Heero and I have already made a Crackdown appointment for tonight. There's word from Kotaku that the demo has a 30-minute time limit once your Agent reaches Level 2 in any skill. That seriously sucks, but for a open-ended sandbox game like this, it was probably the most sensible option method of implementing a "cut off" point.

Full first impressions of the demo to come.

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