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For the past two days I have been trying to play in public xbox live matches of Gears of War 2. It takes anywhere between 30 seocnds to a minute to find all players and then it starts searching for an opposing team. It takes another minute. Then another minute to start the match. As soon as the match is over, the whole thing is disbanded and you go back to step one of searching for tem. What an inefficient way of organizing online matches. Sometimes even before it completes the first step, it will say that the remote team already restarted and something like that.

I don’t remember if it was like this for the original one. After playing the Call of Duty 4 online, I am spoiled. If there is one developer that learned from mistakes and experience, it is Infinity Ward. It could be better but it is way way better than this. And there are glitches I don’t even want to talk. And the connections are damn slow but I am not sure if Comacast is sabotaging gamers. That is for another post.

We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to still keep our pace,” he added. “But I think whenever I look at what I think are good examples of sci-fi — the War of the Worldsredux that was done by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise is a guy that’s just trying to get back to his family in the middle of an awesome alien invasion. The Transformersfilm, yeah it’s about giant robots and the All-Spark and all that. But it’s also about a boy and his car trying to get the girl of his dreams.”

I liked both movies and the only aspects I hated of those movies surprisingly were what the dude describes here. Wow…

Yes, after fighting that glitch, finally I was able to get past it with little help from co-op buddy. I finished the whole game yesterday. Definitely much easier boss battles than the first one. Or may be I am just used to Gears of War game play now. From what I read on the net, that water monster was the only place that drove people nuts.

After completing the hardcore, I started on insane difficulty and it is a lot more tough. In the previous game hardcore and insane difficulties were pretty close. In this one, insane is as tough as or more than the previous game but hardcore is much easier.

After one day of completing the game, I don’t remember any of the emotional aspects of the game. What a waste of time and effort. The most I remember is the water monster

Horde mode is really fun. Haven’t started on the online multiplayer.

Have you played the game? What are your thoughts?

I am in the middle of Gears of War 2. Act 3 Chapter 6 where the water monster is. Once isnide its mouth, I need to quickly shoot the bluish tentacles and then drop a few grenades inside its throat. To change from gun to grenade I press the DPAD up but it selects the other gun and the it selects gun from right and some times even the pistol. All when I am pressing it in the up direction.

This is not the first time I am frustrated with the D-PAD. The key is not to assign anything critical to such a weaklink. Edit: Now I remember, it was Mass Effect. If you have played it, you may remember how difficult it was select options from that circular thing. It is so frustrating when your experience is inhibited by how well you are skilled in pressing a circular control in a precise location.

As for the game itself, I feel I am playing a buch of games I played already. Many places including this water monster feels like Dead Space. Even the lab experiments and such feels like Dead Space. Then there is this tank riding in snow that feels like the tank riding in Mass Effect.

It is a good game. I pre-ordered it. Worth a preorder? Meh. Best game? Not in my opinion. Also, the emotional stuff added feels just awkward and embarassing. I kind of knew these are not the right kind of people to do such stuff. Emotion in games is hard stuff. For this genre, forget it. Not today.

Oh, and my Xbox 360 chokes in this water place may be because of so much rich environment. Game developers may just have discovered that they reached the limits of xbox 360. As usual, Microsoft is always about poor planning for future. Heck they don’t even plan for server loads for a game. If it happens once or twice I can understand. But when you see that happening with every AAA game, it is pure incompetence. From yesterday I was trying to join online matches and co-op matches for Gears of War 2 on xbox live. I keep getting the message “server is already at its capacity” message. Whatever that means. It may be an “EPIC” problem because I had similar experience with the first Gears of War.