Personal Gaming Thread

[Jason]

We finished the hour-long Gears 3 Aftermath campaign on Christmas Eve and it turned out to be better than the main game. It did a good job of filling in some missing parts of the Gears 3 story. We have officially graduated from Xbox 360-era Gears games.

[Jason]

We started Gears 4 tonight and there's a few things I like right off the bat. First, they went back to the Gears 1, 2 and 3 control scheme.

Second, the splitscreen view shrinks everything, but shows at least 90% of what you'd see in single-player mode. The previous Gears games probably showed about 60% which made it hard to see what was going on around you.

Finally, the graphics are obviously much better than the Xbox 360 games and the Series S easily runs splitscreen at 60fps.

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[Jason]

I completed the Forza Cup in Forza Motorsport 7 this week. Forza Motorsport 8 is definitely my most anticipated next-gen game on any system.

I didn't have a chance to play Gears 4 this past weekend since I was stuck in Atlantic City all weekend for my daughter's volleyball tournament, but I'm hoping to finish it this weekend. Things had really started to pick up when we last stopped playing and I'm anxious to see where it goes.

[Jason]

My son and I finished Gears 4 today. What started out as the weakest Gears game ended up being one of the best. Onto Gears 5...

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[Jason]

I need to convince my older son to let either me or my younger son use his Series S so we don't have to do split-screen for Gears 5. It's tough going back to 30fps (split-screen only), plus I want to be able to really appreciate the graphics at full screen.

[Jason]

This is the first time I've ever gone this long without buying a current year EA Sports game. By now I've usually bought all three (Madden, FIFA , NHL) at discounted prices, but I've passed on every sale so far. I'm not even interested in playing them when they arrive on EA Play in the near future. I think this may be the beginning of the end for me with EA Sports.

[Brad Company]

I tried FIFA 20 and uninstalled it immediately. Madden is comically bad now. Everything is a MTX hustle, the games are a shadow of what they used to be.

[Ted]

I'm the same.  There hasn't been a interesting sports title for me in about 2 or 3 years.  Maybe I've just moved on.

[Jason]

I came close to buying NBA 2K22 since it's currently on sale for $23, but then I remembered how hard those games push VC and decided not to. It's kind of a shame that there's no really no sports games to look forward to anymore.

[Brad Company]

Retro is where it's at for those games.

[Jason]

I may give NBA 2K22 a try. The last basketball game I've played is NBA Live 19. I'm guessing that VC won't matter to me if I'm just playing a standard offline season. I don't play any of that My Player crap.

According to reviews the gameplay is supposed to be much improved and it's a really good looking game. I think I can get $24 worth of enjoyment from it.

[Brad Company]

It would have to have radically reprogrammed AI and a revamped control scheme to be much improved.

[Jason]

The basic offensive and defensive controls match NBA Live, so I can live with that. My problem now is size of the game (122gb). It's getting to be a pain in the ass not being able to fit at least 4 games on the SSD at a time.

[Brad Company]

I'm currently playing R6 Extraction and Hell Let Looose, as well as my usuals. Extraction is a co-op PvE game that's surprisingly well done.

HLL is a different animal entirely, unlike anything else on console. Large scale battles with ultra realism. It's actually difficult to describe a game that instills actual fear. Or makes you walk for 15 minutes before getting domed out of nowhere. Teamwork and smarts are rewarded, anything else is punished severely.
I've uninstalled it twice, only to go back for more. The biggest drawback is the time sink, matches last a long time.

[Jason]

Cyberpunk is now showing as Xbox Series X/S Optimized. CDPR has a live stream later today and will supposedly make the announcement official.