Gaming Goals 2011 - Stepping out of the DCU

Well, DC Universe Online turned out to not be the total distraction that I thought it might be.
It's kind of sad, actually. I spent more time installing it than playing it.
The gameplay pretty much epitomizes everything I think of when I think of MMORPGs. You get a fancy, well produced, high quality opening cutscene, and then... lame gameplay. Go beat up 10 of these constantly respawning enemies over there, then go hold down the "O" button over here. No creativity to the missions, no alternative ways to do missions, and your powers don't really matter, because they don't have any bearing on your objectives whatsoever.
It's really disappointing because the created characters you make are really well done, and well animated (though the power skill tree abilities are mostly lame). This could have been an incredible single player game, if they put effort into mission structure, and animations and perhaps even lipsyncing the mouth movements to the horrible voice acting (instead of the Beaker Muppet-mouth-flap. That's one way to make Superman look ridiculous, good job guys.).
DC Universe Online is an example of why these type of games are horrible outdated. Had they made it a 4-player online co-op game, such as Crackdown 2, it could have been great.

Oh, and the trophies are terrible, too. Really first-year developer stuff.
There is one trophy for winning a race with a platinum time. The only race I did, to beat it I needed about 1:30. Platinum time was 1:00. I did it in about 37 seconds, and it wasn't even a great run. There's a trophy for me.
All other trophies are grinding out levels, and replaying the game over and over. Seriously.
Trophies for hitting level 30 with each of the six trainers. There's six playthroughs right there. As long as you diversify your characters, you can get the other half dozen trophies as you grind your way up to that.
And that's it. 14 total trophies. Good thing I'm not resolving to increase my Trophy... score? Collection? I'm not even sure how it's referred to on the PS3. Oh well. Maybe next year.
I just have to figure out how to cancel my DCU subscription so I'm not charged $15 bucks for another month of this.

Back on the Xbox, I had a great week of gaming.

My gamerscore now stands at 74,290.
That's up over 1500 from last week. More than doubled the 100-a-day average that I'm trying to achieve.
And, perhaps more importantly, I finished 5 games last week!

I'm counting Harm's Way as finished. There's not much to that game. Just a three race set and you're done. I did the races as a gunner, because I didn't care for the driving all that much. And I just played single player. My friends played through it months ago, so I'm behind and didn't have people to play it with anyway.

I also finished Splatterhouse, Split/Second, Battlefield Bad Company and Saint's Row.

Did you know Saint's Row has no achievement for finishing the whole storyline? Might as well stop doing missions after you wipe out the rival games. But I was only one escort mission away from completing all the Activities, so I finished that and got plenty of points that way.

Splatterhouse was a new game I started after I began tracking my goal. The ironic thing is, being a new game, it threw off my total score goal, but I earned much more achievement points by game's end than I did with Split/Second or Bad Company.
I ended Split/Second with exactly 35% of its gamerscore, and Bad Company only gave me 30%.

I also started playing Venetica. I'm really enjoying it. It's a $40 title, so I came into it with lowered expectations, but I've already spent 20 hours in it and I like it quite a bit. It's like a budget Fable. It just doesn't set itself up with such lofty goals, and settles for a normal experience.
The worst thing about this game is everything to do with the dialogue! A lot of lines are bad. Subtitles often don't match the line read. Ambient dialogue will be louder than your conversation. The wrong audio will play during a conversation. Characters emoting will change from line to line as if the performance was cobbled together from greatly varying takes, sometimes seeming like they had different voice actors doing the lines.
The only other really bothersome thing (although the inventory is a bit cumbersome, and your quest list isn't good about updating what you've done... but remember: budget title.) is your shortcuts: how you use your skills and powers. You can have 30 or more powers/abilities, but you only have 5 shortcut slots to assign them for use. If you want to use a variety, you'll be playing in the menu a lot during battles. A power wheel, like in Mass Effect, would have been a great benefit here.
You have 4 types of weapons: Sword, Spear, Hammer (or Axe... apparently they're the same "blunt" class) and your magical Moonblade. You have to learn abilities for each of these separately... including block. And then you have to have the correct block ability assigned to a shortcut for the weapon you're using! There's one dodge button, why couldn't they have made a universal block button?
What they really needed to do was make four separate loadouts, one assigned to each weapon type, so as soon as you switch to a different weapon (switching is made easy, with a button to cycle through them or you can assign the control pad for weapon selection) you'd have usable skills ready to go.
But despite all of its flaws, I really like the game. It has sort of a Beyond Good and Evil vibe.
And I'm over the 35% mark with the achievements already!

I have fallen behind on writing reviews, though. Whoops. I'll catch up after I finish Venetica. I'll just have to write 8 reviews this week while I'm playing LittleBigPlanet2.