The Gamer Lounge

Brutal Legend was the demo I finally got around to downloading this morning.  It’s about 2GB so it will take a while to download, but it is totally worth it.  As soon as you load up the demo you notice it’s original.  See the picture above?  That’s the thing’s menu.  When you press start, hands come and open up the record and you see some awesome flame filled heavy metal artwork.  From there on it just gets better and better.

Jack Black does the voice work for your character and there is some genius writing.  This leads to some hilarious scenes and some awesome gory action.  Right before a cursing fit is thrown, the game actually pauses and asks you if you want the curse words to be bleeped out.  Soon after that the game asks if it’s OK to show tons of gore only when “it’s totally awesome”.  After that you are transported into a world based on album art from old heavy metal records and kick some booty.

When I saw the guitar in the game, I figured there would be some long stretch that had Guitar Hero gameplay.  There is a bit of rhythm type gaming, but there is only one in the demo and it’s only a few seconds long.  Not too mention the items that appear after you play the solo are totally awesome.  (I’ll let you see that for yourself)

The only bad thing I can say about it is the art style and graphics make it look like an older game.  It’s a good look, but it just looks like something that came out a few years ago…not two weeks from now.  Nevertheless, I have one more game to add to my Christmas queue.  I highly recommend you check out this demo if you haven’t yet.  It will leave you laughing and rocked away at how brutally good it is!

For anyone who subscribes to the Xbox newsletter, you probably noticed that Fable 2 has now been put up on the marketplace in episodes.  I’ve been wanting to play this for quite some time, but after deciding to get some other games first, I just forgot about it.  Luckily, the first episode is free and offers a surprising amount of playtime.  Depending how much you run around looking for other items, you could easily get two hours out of it.  The game’s quite a bit different than Fable 1, and interacting with people has been improved.  Actually, almost everything has been improved.

I wanted to just get the rest of the episodes, but they are huge!  I still have one of the original 20GB hard drives, and the first episode alone takes up 2GB.  Episode 2 is a little over 4, and I’m unsure how big the other three are.  The only place you can see the size and price ($10/800 points each) for the next episode is in the game when you’ve reached the end of your current episode.  The size isn’t the only problem though.  With four more episodes priced at $10 each, by the time you got the whole game, you’d have dropped $40.  The game can be bought new for $30, and used for around $25.  It should also be noted that you can’t get any achievements until you get episode 2 or the disc.   I think I’m going to go for the disc, but I highly recommend you try out the first episode if you haven’t played the game yet.

This was the first community games I had ever tried on the Xbox 360, so I really wasn’t expecting too much from it.  While 2060 Cyber Racer wasn’t necessarily worse than I expected, it didn’t do a whole lot for my first impression of community games.

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Finally, a batch of demos worth playing is on Xbox LIVE. By that I mean…not sports games! First off, before we get any further, let me just say Castle Crashers is a must play. I’m going to write a review for that soon, but even the demo can show you how sweet the game is. It’s hard to believe that puppy is only an Arcade game.

So we’ve heard about it for a year, I’ve put posts about it on the blog, and talked about it on the podcast. Finally, The Force Unleashed demo is here! Except…I’m not that impressed. Continue reading

Two of the newest demos released on Xbox Live this week were Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit and The Bourne Conspiracy. Are they demos worth playing? You better believe it!

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