Goatmoose

Lots of people are poor like me and can’t afford to buy new video games when they come out. Lots of people have to rely on things like GameFly to supply them with titles. As a result, lots of people are stuck not playing most games until months or years after they come out. Well we’re just as cool as you new game-playing people with your disposable income and fancy hats.

The bummer is that GameFly rarely has anything in stock (see Why GameFly Sucks), so we really have to wait a while to play the good titles. Of the 36 games currently in my queue, the only 3-4 available are the ones nobody wants anymore.

So in brief, let’s take a look at my last few trash rentals and see whether or not they were worth playing. True gamers love even the crap, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate
This game is shorter than Danny DeVito after eating Matt Roloff. I had planned to play Borderlands with a friend on Sunday. In the early afternoon I received a message from him saying he had some things to do and that he’d be back on in a little bit. Since I now had some time to kill, I booted up Wanted. In that “little bit” while waiting for my friend, I beat the entire game. Granted his idea of a “little bit” is about three hours, but still, a three hour game is uber short.

Now, there is a little bit of replay value here if you’re an achievement fiend. The entire game needs re-played on a few other settings, like the hardest difficulty, knife mode, headshot mode and the like. However, I didn’t find the game interesting or fun enough to be bothered with these tasks. It’s one of those enter a room, kill the guys, enter the next room, kill the guys, enter the next room, kill the guys kind of mindless titles that expires its fun factor pretty quickly. If you’re a fan of the movie, you’ll get your rental’s worth out of three hours of bullet-bending massacres, but there’s no greater appeal here.

Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon
There really isn’t a lot of good to say about DAH. The graphics are way crummy, the main character has a terrible Jack Nicholson voice that isn’t funny anymore about nine seconds in, and an endless amount of parody and pop culture humor is supposed to carry an otherwise bleak title. I didn’t even have the desire to finish this one, playing about 3/4 of the way through and running out of tolerance. The missions are uninspired, the story is silly and overall it is a repetitive bit of nonsense. It does have a good many easy achievements, though, so for some it may be worth a few hours of mind-numbing gameplay for the sake of boosting your number.

Otherwise, ew, hate. My least favorite title of late.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
I’m not sure how I ended up with two games in a row that parody the entertainment world, but that’s how it played out. This game, while still quite far from good, is bounds better than Destroy All Humans. It does, however, ultimately not provide much reason to continue playing it after a certain point.

Some games are created well and use jokes and puns to give you a chuckle here and there on top of good gameplay. This game uses jokes and puns as an excuse to have an otherwise bad game. Repetitive enemies, no multiplayer, bad controls and other garbage are joked about in the game, as if the developers though we’d forgive them for making a stupid game if they mocked themselves.

It was a good amount of fun, though. There are some easy achievements and some more difficult ones, which made for a nice blend of things to work towards while playing. Once the story was complete, I had no desire to search for the remaining few and will never again go near the game, but I don’t regret this rental or the handful of hours put into playing.

And that’s it, folks. Coming tomorrow is Rogue Warrior, which I know is just going to be beyond awful. To everyone out there stuck playing games long after they come out, I feel your pain. Maybe someday we’ll have money and can buy new titles. Until then, to all you out there with GameFly’s copies of Red Dead Redemption – return the damn things sometime soon so the rest of us have a chance of playing it before 2011. Thanks